Day: October 11, 2021

Some days, all Tsimamorekm Aly eats is sugary water. He’s happy if there’s a handful of rice. But with six young kids and a wife to support, he often goes without.

This is the fourth year that drought has devastated Aly’s home in southern Madagascar. Now more than one million people, or two out of five residents, of his Grand Sud region require emergency food aid in what the United Nations is calling a “climate change famine.”

“In previous years there was rain, a lot of rain. I grew sweet potatoes and I had a lot of money… I even got married because I was rich,” said Aly, 44.

“Things have changed,” he said, standing on an expanse of ochre dirt where the only green to be seen is tall, spiky cacti.

Climate change is battering the Indian Ocean island and several U.N. agencies have warned in the past few months of a “climate change famine” here.

“The situation in the south of the country is really worrying,” said Alice Rahmoun, a spokeswoman with the United Nations’ World Food Programme in Madagascar. “I visited several districts… and heard from families how the changing climate has driven them to hunger.”

Rainfall patterns in Madagascar are growing more erratic — they’ve been below average for nearly six years, said researchers at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

“In some villages, the last proper rain was three years ago, in others, eight years ago or even 10 years ago,” said Rahmoun. “Fields are bare, seeds do not sprout and there is no food.”

Temperatures in southern Africa are rising at double the global rate, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says. Cyclones, already more frequent in Madagascar than any other African country, are likely getting stronger as the earth warms, the U.S. government says.

Conflict has been a central cause of famine and hunger in countries such as Ethiopia, South Sudan, Somalia and Yemen, when fighting stopped people moving to find food. But Madagascar is at peace.

“Climate change strongly impacts and strongly accentuates the famine in Madagascar,” President Andry Rajoelina said while visiting the worst-affected areas earlier this month. “Madagascar is a victim of climate change.”

The country produces less than 0.01% of global carbon dioxide emissions, the World Carbon Project says.

Half a million children are expected to be acutely malnourished in southern Madagascar, 110,000 severely so, the U.N. Children’s Fund says, causing developmental delays, disease and death.

Nutriset, a French company that produces emergency food Plumpy’Nut, opened a plant in southern Madagascar last week. It aims to annually produce 600 tones of therapeutic fortified food made of peanuts, sugar and milk for malnourished children.

The Malagasy government is also giving parcels of land to some families fleeing the worst-hit areas. Two hundred families received land with chickens and goats, which are more drought-resilient than cows. They were also encouraged to plant cassava, which is more drought-resilient than maize.

“It’s a natural disaster,” said Aly. “May God help us.”

Source: Voice of America

A trial on the assassination of Burkina Faso’s former president, Thomas Sankara, begins Monday, more than three decades after he and 13 others were killed in a 1987 coup. Former President Blaise Compaore, the main defendant in the trial, who lives in exile in Ivory Coast, will not be present at the military court in Ouagadougou.

Sankara is still considered a national hero in Burkina Faso.

Alouna Traore is the lone survivor of an attack that killed former Sankara and 12 others in October 1987. Traore, Sankara’s legal adviser, remembers the day of the assassination.

He says the president got up, adjusted the tracksuit he was wearing and told the other meeting attendees that he was the one the attackers were looking for. He went out the same door he came in. He walked out of the room with his hands up and headed outside, carrying no weapon.

Sankara was a popular figure whose influence was felt across West Africa and beyond.

“He came to be known by some people as the Che Guevara of West Africa… with a big focus on grassroots issues, so really focusing on the well-being of ordinary people,” said Paul Melly, an analyst at Chatham House, a U.K. policy institute.

Fourteen defendants stand accused of carrying out the assassination or conspiring to, including former top-ranking military officials and former politicians.

Compaore was ousted in a coup in 2014 after 27 years of rule and has been in exile in Ivory Coast ever since. His lawyers denounced the trial as “political” last week.

A previous trial for the Sankara assassination was held under Compaore’s rule, but that judgment was dismissed as politicized and invalid by the transitional government after Compaore was ousted.

Prosper Farama is one of the lawyers for the Sankara family. He expects the trial to last four months and says the Sankara family lawyers have amassed irrefutable evidence implicating the defendants.

He says there are many witnesses who will be heard from the military, civilians, politicians of the time. … For example, the driver who drove the commandos to the execution, is alive and able to give clear testimony, according to Farama.

Maitre Mathieu Some is representing one of the defendants, Gilbert Diendere.

He thinks the trial is being held in a context that makes the work of judges difficult, a context in which there are prejudices. He says people have already made up their minds about who carried out the assassination, which jeopardizes the presumption of innocence — the main principle of a fair trial, as far as he is concerned.

Nonetheless, the trial has gripped the country. Traore as well as the families of those killed hope to receive justice 34 years later.

Source: Voice of America

Two soldiers were killed when their motorcycles ran over a homemade bomb in southeast Burkina Faso on Monday, the latest attack in a region previously spared the jihadist violence of the north.

The West African country has faced increasingly frequent and deadly attacks by jihadists forces linked to the Islamic State group or al-Qaida since 2015.

The violence has killed around 2,000 people and forced 1.4 million to flee their homes.

A security source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the two soldiers “were victims of an IED (improvised explosive device) attack” in the town of Farakorosso in the Cascades region.

Another security source said that the victims were “a pair of soldiers whose motorbike exploded on a mine.”

Attacks with homemade explosive devices have ramped up since 2018 in Burkina Faso, killing nearly 300 civilians and soldiers, according to an AFP count. Such attacks are often waged in tandem with ambushes.

Also in the Cascades region, two soldiers were killed by an IED near the town of Larabin on October 2.

Two days later in the north, 14 soldiers were killed in an attack on a military detachment in Yirgou, the defense ministry said.

Source: Voice of America