Category: Health

LIBREVILLE— Gabon’s defense ministry has said the United Nations will withdraw the country’s 450-strong peacekeeping contingent from the Central African Republic (CAR) over sexual abuse allegations.

“In recent weeks, exceptionally serious acts that go against military ethics and the honor of the armed forces, committed by certain elements in the Gabonese battalions have been reported,” the ministry said in a statement.

One of the world’s poorest countries, CAR has been chronically unstable since it gained independence from France in 1960.

It is currently suffering from the aftermath of a brutal civil conflict that erupted in 2013 after a coup against then-President Francois Bozize.

MINUSCA was deployed by the UN in April 2014 to end the conflict pitting the Seleka coalition of armed groups that overthrew Bozize against militias supporting him.

The conflict has dramatically reduced in intensity but MINUSCA has 15,000 personnel in the country, of whom 14,000 are in uniform.

Their main mission is to protect civilians.

Allegations of sexual crimes involving peacekeepers have been recurrent, and while some contingents have been withdrawn in the past, no investigations have resulted in convictions to date, at least publicly.

If the “alleged facts are proven, the perpetrators will be brought before the military courts and judged with extreme rigor”, Gabon’s defense ministry said.

“Gabon has always demanded irreproachable and exemplary behavior from its army, both on its territory and abroad,” it added.

In early 2017, judges in France decided not to bring charges against French soldiers accused of having sexually abused minors while on a peacekeeping mission in the CAR. Following an investigation, the prosecutor dropped the case saying there was not enough evidence to charge the soldiers allegedly involved.

The UN has struggled for years with allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse by UN peacekeepers around the world.

Since 2010, it has posted 822 such allegations on its website.

By nationality, the peacekeepers with the most allegations against them since 2015 have been Cameroon, with 44 cases, South Africa (37), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (32), Gabon (31), and the Republic of the Congo (26).

In March 2018, Gabon said it planned to withdraw its contingent because the conflict was abating.

However, three months later, at the behest of the CAR’s President Faustin-Archange Touadera, his Gabonese counterpart Ali Bongo Ondimba said the contingent would stay on.

Source: NAM NEWS NETWORK

GENEVA— The World Health Organization (WHO) and its partners have said they hope to provide Africa with about 30 percent of the COVID-19 vaccines the continent needs by February, badly missing the 60 percent vaccination coverage goal that African leaders had once hoped for this year.

Out of 5.7 billion doses of coronavirus vaccines administered around the world so far, only 2 percent have been in Africa.

The African Union accused manufacturers of COVID-19 shots of denying African countries a fair chance to buy them and urged manufacturing countries – in particular India to lift export restrictions on vaccines and their components.

“Those manufacturers know very well that they never gave us proper access,” Strive Masiyiwa, AU Special Envoy for COVID-19, told a WHO briefing from Geneva. “We could have handled this very differently.”

But the companies that manufacture the vaccines including Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna have shown no indications they are eager to switch their current tactics, which involve appealing to rich countries and their regulators to authorize booster shots.

Masiyiwa stressed that, in aiming to vaccinate 60 percent of its population, the African Union and its partners had expected to buy half the doses needed, while half were expected to come as donations through the COVAX program, backed by the WHO and the GAVI global vaccine alliance.

“We want access to purchase,” he said.

GAVI CEO Seth Berkley said his organization had been counting on supplies from India the world’s largest vaccine manufacturing center at the start of the outbreak but had received no doses from India since March when India imposed export restrictions.

Masiyiwa added: “The suppliers over the last eight to nine months have made it clear that the biggest challenge they face is export restrictions.”

He urged the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to begin working on a standby pandemic readiness fund to help poorer nations buy vaccines in the future, instead of having to rely on a sharing facility like COVAX – which has so far managed to provide only 260 million doses.

“Vaccine sharing is good but we shouldn’t have to be relying on vaccine sharing, particularly when we can come to the table with structures in place and say we also want to buy,” he said.

He reiterated a demand for patent waivers on vaccines, saying that Africa wanted to set up its own manufacturing capacity.

Tedros called last week for a “moratorium” on the use of boosters in healthy populations until the end of the year. Countries including Israel, France, and Germany have already started dispensing third doses to certain groups.

In the US, the FDA is going to publicly debate the topic of boosters this week. In an opinion piece on Monday, two top FDA officials and senior WHO scientists wrote in the Lancet that the average person does not need a booster shot.

To date, fewer than 4 percent of Africans have been fully immunized and most of the vaccine doses administered around the world have been given in just 10 rich countries.

COVAX is set to fall nearly 30 percent short of its previous goal of two billion shots this year. GAVI and the WHO have blamed the shortfall on a range of factors including export restrictions on the Serum Institute of India (SII).

Source: NAM NEWS NETWORK

France’s president announced the death of Islamic State in the Greater Sahara’s leader late Wednesday, calling Adnan Abu Walid al-Sahrawi’s killing “a major success” for the French military after more than eight years fighting extremists in the Sahel.

French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted that al-Sahrawi “was neutralized by French forces” but gave no further details. It was not announced where al-Sahrawi was killed, though the Islamic State group is active along the border between Mali and Niger.

“The nation is thinking tonight of all its heroes who died for France in the Sahel in the Serval and Barkhane operations, of the bereaved families, of all of its wounded,” Macron tweeted. “Their sacrifice is not in vain.”

Rumors of the militant leader’s death had circulated for weeks in Mali, though authorities in the region had not confirmed it. It was not immediately possible to independently verify the claim or to know how the remains had been identified.

“This is a decisive blow against this terrorist group,” French Defense Minister Florence Parly tweeted. “Our fight continues.”

Al-Sahrawi had claimed responsibility for a 2017 attack in Niger that killed four U.S. military personnel and four people with Niger’s military. His group also has abducted foreigners in the Sahel and is believed to still be holding American Jeffrey Woodke, who was abducted from his home in Niger in 2016.

The extremist leader was born in the disputed territory of Western Sahara and later joined the Polisario Front. After spending time in Algeria, he made his way to northern Mali where he became an important figure in the group known as MUJAO that controlled the major northern town of Gao in 2012.

A French-led military operation the following year ousted Islamic extremists from power in Gao and other northern cities, though those elements later regrouped and again carried out attacks.

The Malian group MUJAO was loyal to the regional al-Qaida affiliate. But in 2015, al-Sahrawi released an audio message pledging allegiance to the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria.

The French military has been fighting Islamic extremists in the Sahel region where France was once the colonial power since the 2013 intervention in northern Mali. It recently announced, though, that it would be reducing its military presence in the region, with plans to withdraw 2,000 troops by early next year.

News of al-Sahrawi’s death comes as France’s global fight against the Islamic State organization is making headlines in Paris. The key defendant in the 2015 Paris attacks trial said Wednesday that those coordinated killings were in retaliation for French airstrikes on the Islamic State group, calling the deaths of 130 innocent people “nothing personal” as he acknowledged his role for the first time.

Source: Voice of America

Authors of the Cluster Munition Monitor 2021 report say great progress toward the elimination of these lethal weapons has been made since the Cluster Ban Treaty came into force in 2010.

The Monitor finds there has been no new use of cluster munitions by any of the 110 states that has joined the treaty, nor by the 13 states that have signed but not yet ratified it.

The report says the remaining problems lie with countries that remain outside the convention.

The most notable use of cluster munitions last year was by non-member states Armenia and Azerbaijan during their war over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh. The Monitor records 107 casualties from cluster munition attacks in Azerbaijan, the most in any country last year.

Syria has continuously used cluster munitions since 2012.

Human Rights Watch arms advocacy director Mary Wareham says use of the weapons in 2020 was greatly reduced compared to previous years.

She says another visible example of the treaty’s success is in the destruction of stockpiles.

“We know that at least 1.5 million cluster munitions and more than 178 million submunitions have been destroyed from stocks today,” said Wareham. “That goes to show that this convention is truly lifesaving because every single one of those explosive submunitions could take a life or a limb.”

Globally, the monitor has recorded at least 360 new cluster munition casualties in 2020, caused either from attacks or explosive remnants. The editor of the Monitor, Loren Persi, says children are the main victims of these weapons, which kill and maim civilians indiscriminately.

“Almost half of all casualties, 44 percent are children. About a quarter of casualties were women and girls,” said Persi. “But what we found in 2020 was that women and girls were far less likely to survive their incident with cluster munitions. This is something of concern that we will have to look into as more data becomes available.”

The report says many of the 16 countries outside the convention reserve the right to keep making cluster munitions, even though they currently are not doing so.

Authors of the report say they are concerned that China and Russia are actively researching, testing, and developing new types of cluster munitions.

China, Russia and the United States have not joined the convention. The three countries are among the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council.

Source: Voice of America

DJIBOUTI— Ismail Omar Guelleh, the Djiboutian president has been reported ill but the Minister of Foreign Affairs says it is as a result of fatigue and not as bad as it is being made to seem.

“President Ismail Omar Guelleh is fine. All informations circulating about his health situation is far from the reality. His is having a few days off and undergoing medical check up due to lack of rest for he did not leave the country during the whole summer,” Minister Mahmoud Ali Youssef tweeted.

“President Guelleh is going to resume his work in a few days time : there is no particular worry to have,” he added in a follow-up tweet.

The 74-year-old has been in office since 1999, making him one of the longest-serving presidents on the continent.

He won re-election for a fifth consecutive term in office during the last presidential in April 2021 by winning by more than 98% of the vote.

He was largely expected to win given that his main opponent was a largely unknown businessman, Zakaria Ismail Farah.

This time around it is most likely his last chance to be head of state before becoming ineligible — as per an age limit based on a 2010 constitutional reform.

Source: NAM NEWS NETWORK

ABUJA— Nigeria is seeing one of its worst cholera outbreaks in years, with more than 2,300 people dying from suspected cases as the West African nation struggles to deal with its impact alongside the coronavirus pandemic.

A total of 69,925 suspected cholera infections had been recorded as of Sept 5 in 25 out of the country’s 36 states and the capital Abuja, according to the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control.

At least 2,323 people have died linked to the disease so far in 2021, the centre said, and there are concerns total figures may also be an undercount given that many affected communities are in hard to reach areas.

Children between the ages of 5 and 14 are also the most affected age group in this current health crisis, which has a case fatality ratio of 3.3%, more than double that of the coronavirus’ 1.3% in Nigeria.

Nigeria is still facing a third wave of the pandemic mainly driven by the delta variant, and authorities are intensifying efforts to vaccinate a population among whom less than 1% have received both doses of a COVID-19 shot.

States in Nigeria’s north where flooding and poor sanitation increase the risk of transmission are the hardest hit by the resurgence in cholera infections.

All the 19 states in the northern region account for 98% of the total suspected cases.

Cholera is endemic and seasonal in Africa’s most populous country, where only 14% of the 200 million population have access to safely managed drinking water supply services.

According to government data from 2020, open defecation is still practised by at least 30% of residents in 14 states.

The country continues to detect cases of yellow fever, lassa fever, measles and other infectious diseases, which have become annual outbreaks.

And officials say the experience from those health crises has helped Nigeria to prepare for the worst.

Engineer Michael Oludare, an Oyo-based water scientist, said it is “very important” for authorities to look into the causes of cholera and provide basic water and sanitation facilities.

According to Oludare, the poor, women, children and internally displaced persons are among “those that will have problems when it comes to cholera.”

The government data from a study supported by UNICEF found that 157 million Nigerians are of the SDG (Sustainable Development Goals) sanitation target as of December 2019, with access to safely managed sanitation services nationwide at only 21%.

Source: NAM NEWS NETWORK