Morocco King on holiday as people consider revolt

Discontent is ample in Morocco, the poorest, least developed North African nation, and many are inspired by developments in Egypt. Meanwhile, Morocco's King Mohammed VI rests in his French luxury chalet.

Morocco so far has been spared from larger protesting groups as those in Tunisia and Egypt, much thanks to the King's quick reversal of boosting prices for basic foods. The same move proved a good assurance for authorities in neighbouring Algeria.

But discontent is very widespread in Morocco. Despite an economic boom over the last years and some careful reforms ordered by King Mohammed VI - most prominently regarding gender equality and education - Morocco remains the poorest country in North Africa, with least employment opportunities and the lowest literacy rate.

The King, claiming to descend from the Prophet Mohammed, has an almost divine role in Morocco. Very few dare to criticise him, even in the mildest form.

Among the Arab majority, loyalty to the King is great, while the government - appointed by the King - and age-old ruling "Makhzen" class - controlling the administration, police, army and much of business - are the popular focus of hatred. In the streets of Casablanca, it is often said that the King is honest and wants to rule the country well, but the Makhzen is corrupting everything.

Minorities, however, to a wider degree dare to blame the King for their mischief. This includes large parts of the indigenous and disadvantaged Berber people. Estimates of the Berber population wary from 20 to 60 percent of the Moroccan total, with official estimates being the lowest. Unemployment is highest among Berber youths, of which many view the Arab King as a foreign imposer.

A growing Islamist movement in Morocco, which faces the same repression as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, also is loosening its loyalty to the King, which they see as a marionette of US and Israeli interests. Moroccan Islamists however are split in their view of the monarchy.

Moroccan youths are still struggling with poor education and employment possibilities. Official unemployment figures are only set at between 9 and 10 percent - although believed to be much higher - while the youth unemployment rate is set as closer to 20 percent, officially. Great masses, now mostly barred from migrating to Europe, are building up a similar rage as youths in Tunisia and Egypt.

As the tourist market in all North Africa now is crumbling - many travellers fear Morocco could be next - the kingdom's greatest growth and employment sector could soon be strongly impacted. A sudden growth in unemployment due to falling tourist arrivals could spark revolt.

The most united resistance to the King is found in occupied Western Sahara, where the indigenous Saharawis are denied most basic human rights. Rebellion is almost continuous in Western Sahara, with the population only waiting for a situation when troops must be pulled out of the territory to fight a rebellion in Morocco-proper.

A revolution attempt in Morocco therefore could catch the kingdom's extensive police and military forces fighting at very many fronts at the same time. Unlike Egypt and Tunisia, urban protests would probably be quickly followed by rural Berber uprisings and a Saharawi attempt to oust the Moroccan occupiers.

Some few events have already occurred. At least four Moroccans have so far set themselves on fire in an attempt to spark unrests similar to Tunisia. Minor protest marches have been held.

But the population majority is watching what is happening in Egypt, which due to its large armed forces is more comparable to Morocco than Tunisia. If the people succeed in Egypt, many will be encouraged to try the same in Morocco.

King in his chalet in France
Meanwhile, the 47-year-old King seems assured that the situation in Morocco is in firm control. There are confirmed reports that Mohammed VI on Friday arrived at the private Paris airport Le Bourget in his luxury jet.

From Le Bourget, he was driven to his extensive private property in Betz, 70 kilometres north-east of Paris. The luxury chalet, often referred to as a palace, on a 70 hectares property, was bought by his father, King Hassan II, in the 1970s and is only one among a large list of luxury palaces owned privately by the Moroccan King.

The King's luxury spending is not reported by the Moroccan press, which is heavily censored on all issues regarding the King and his family.

According to reports from the Moroccan newspaper 'Hespress' and Spanish Morocco specialist Ignacio Cembrero, Mohammed VI was accompanied on his trip to France by "a delegation of high officials from the security and military forces." Mr Cembrero says he has information that "the situation in the Maghreb since the fall of [Tunisian Dictator Zine] Ben Ali" was to be discussed together with officials from the King's allied French government.

News from King Mohammed VI's stay at his luxury chalet in Betz has still not reached Moroccans and could cause further indignation.

Moroccans are following the developments in Tunisia and Egypt with great interest. The human rights, democracy and social conditions in the country are not very different from the revolutionising countries.

Source: Africa online

http://www.africanonlinenews.com/en/articles/37175

George Clooney's "anti-genocide paparazzi" seems to be dominating nearly every transmission coming out of south Sudan this week. Clooney, along with the Enough Project, Harvard researchers, and some of his wealthier Hollywood friends, have hired satellites to monitor troop movements along the north-south border, particularly the oil-rich region of Abyei. Clooney, active for years in the Save Darfur movement, has also become something of a celebrity spokesperson for the independence referendum. Naturally, the international humanitarian blogosphere's snark brigade is out in force.

Laurenist: "If you're anything like George Clooney, you lounge around on your yacht off the coast of Italy thinking up ways to save Africa."

Texas in Africa: "While John Prendergast, George Clooney, and other advocates who don't speak a word of Arabic have been raising fears about violence for months … the likelihood that a genocide or war will break out immediately seems to me to be slim to none."

Wronging Rights: "Clooney has described it as 'the best use of his celebrity.' Kinda just seems like he's trying to recruit a mercenary for Ocean's Fourteen."

Troubling as this morning's border violence is, there seems to be good reason for skepticism about the satellite project. The imagery the satellites provide isn't all that clear, showing about 8 square miles per computer-screen pixel, making it difficult to figure out just what's going on on the ground. That level of imprecision can be dangerous when trying to assign guilt or innocence in crimes against humanity. There's also the question of how much of a deterrent this type of monitoring really is. Laurenist again:

In 2007, Amnesty International and the American Association for the Advancement of Science launched "Eyes on Darfur," a satellite project that monitored developments on the ground in Darfur. As you'll recall, mere months later, Darfur was saved after millions of people updated their Facebook statuses with a link to blurry photos of sand.

But what about Clooney's presence itself? The actor's use of the paparazzi and basketball as analogies for horrific human rights violations might be grating to those who study these issues seriously, but isn't it worthwhile to bring attention to an often overlooked conflict? Here's UN Dispatch's Mark Leon Goldberg:

I know some people (cough, cough, Bill Easterly, cough, cough) have hangups about celebrity activism.  But does anyone really think that Sudan's upcoming referendum would be covered on a National Sunday morning broadcast without George Clooney's handsome face to greet viewers?

(Interestingly, Bono-basher-in-chief William Easterly doesn't appear to have weighed in yet.)

Clooney has his own words for the haters:

"I'm sick of it," he said. "If your cynicism means you stand on the sidelines and throw stones, I'm fine, I can take it. I could give a damn what you think. We're trying to save some lives. If you're cynical enough not to understand that, then get off your ass and do something. If you're angry at me, go do it yourself. Find another cause — I don't care. We're working, and we're going forward."

This kind of "at least I'm doing something" rhetoric drives development scholars absolutely bonkers and for good reason. But for now at least, it's hard to see how Clooney's presence as a cheerleader is really hurting. Once the referendum is over however, I hope he heads back to Lake Como. In international negotiations, a certain degree of obscurity can often be just as helpful as the media spotlight. Making a new country is a messy business anywhere, and in Southern Sudan, it's going to involve some very ugly compromises. (I wonder, for instance, what Clooney thinks about the Southern Sudanese government expelling Darfuri rebels in what seemed to be a conciliatory gesture to Khartoum.)

In the difficult weeks and months ahead, Southern Sudan will certainly need international help, but it should come from people with a slightly more extensive background in the situation. Most of all, it's probably not helpful for celebrities and the media to promote a narrative of the Juba government as the "good Sudan." Even in the best-case scenario, it's bound to be shattered pretty quickly.

In any event, the Southern Sudanese themselves seem pretty nonplussed about Danny Ocean's presence in their midst:

"Who is that man talking?" a Sudanese journalist asked, gesturing to a white man with a group of reporters around him. When told it was George Clooney, a movie star, the Sudanese journalist looked confused and walked away.

 http://www.npr.org/2011/01/11/132832275/foreign-policy-clooneys-presence-not-helping-sudan

The new scramble for Africa, not oil… ARABLE LAND

By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

SOUMOUNI, Mali — The half-dozen strangers who descended on this remote West African village brought its hand-to-mouth farmers alarming news: their humble fields, tilled from one generation to the next, were now controlled by Libya’s leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, and the farmers would all have to leave.

“They told us this would be the last rainy season for us to cultivate our fields; after that, they will level all the houses and take the land,” said Mama Keita, 73, the leader of this village veiled behind dense, thorny scrubland. “We were told that Qaddafi owns this land.”

Across Africa and the developing world, a new global land rush is gobbling up large expanses of arable land. Despite their ageless traditions, stunned villagers are discovering that African governments typically own their land and have been leasing it, often at bargain prices, to private investors and foreign governments for decades to come.

Organizations like the United Nations and the World Bank say the practice, if done equitably, could help feed the growing global population by introducing large-scale commercial farming to places without it.

But others condemn the deals as neocolonial land grabs that destroy villages, uproot tens of thousands of farmers and create a volatile mass of landless poor. Making matters worse, they contend, much of the food is bound for wealthier nations.

“The food security of the country concerned must be first and foremost in everybody’s mind,” said Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary general, now working on the issue of African agriculture. “Otherwise it is straightforward exploitation and it won’t work. We have seen a scramble for Africa before. I don’t think we want to see a second scramble of that kind.”

A World Bank study released in September tallied farmland deals covering at least 110 million acres — the size of California and West Virginia combined — announced during the first 11 months of 2009 alone. More than 70 percent of those deals were for land in Africa, with Sudan, Mozambique and Ethiopia among those nations transferring millions of acres to investors.

Before 2008, the global average for such deals was less than 10 million acres per year, the report said. But the food crisis that spring, which set off riots in at least a dozen countries, prompted the spree. The prospect of future scarcity attracted both wealthy governments lacking the arable land needed to feed their own people and hedge funds drawn to a dwindling commodity.

“You see interest in land acquisition continuing at a very high level,” said Klaus Deininger, the World Bank economist who wrote the report, taking many figures from a Web siterun by Grain, an advocacy organization, because governments would not reveal the agreements. “Clearly, this is not over.”

The report, while generally supportive of the investments, detailed mixed results. Foreign aid for agriculture has dwindled from about 20 percent of all aid in 1980 to about 5 percent now, creating a need for other investment to bolster production.

But many investments appear to be pure speculation that leaves land fallow, the report found. Farmers have been displaced without compensation, land has been leased well below value, those evicted end up encroaching on parkland and the new ventures have created far fewer jobs than promised, it said.

The breathtaking scope of some deals galvanizes opponents. In Madagascar, a deal that would have handed over almost half the country’s arable land to a South Korean conglomerate helped crystallize opposition to an already unpopular president and contributed to his overthrow in 2009.

People have been pushed off land in countries like Ethiopia, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia and Zambia. It is not even uncommon for investors to arrive on land that was supposedly empty. In Mozambique, one investment company discovered an entire village with its own post office on what had been described as vacant land, said Olivier De Schutter, the United Nations food rapporteur.

In Mali, about three million acres along the Niger River and its inland delta are controlled by a state-run trust called the Office du Niger. In nearly 80 years, only 200,000 acres of the land have been irrigated, so the government considers new investors a boon.

“Even if you gave the population there the land, they do not have the means to develop it, nor does the state,” said Abou Sow, the executive director of Office du Niger.

He listed countries whose governments or private sectors have already made investments or expressed interest: China and South Africa in sugar cane; Libya and Saudi Arabia in rice; and Canada, Belgium, France, South Korea, India, the Netherlands and multinational organizations like the West African Development Bank.

In all, Mr. Sow said about 60 deals covered at least 600,000 acres in Mali, although some organizations said more than 1.5 million acres had been committed. He argued that the bulk of the investors were Malians growing food for the domestic market. But he acknowledged that outside investors like the Libyans, who are leasing 250,000 acres here, are expected to ship their rice, beef and other agricultural products home.

“What advantage would they gain by investing in Mali if they could not even take their own production?” Mr. Sow said.

As with many of the deals, the money Mali might earn from the leases remains murky. The agreement signed with the Libyans grants them the land for at least 50 years simply in exchange for developing it.

“The Libyans want to produce rice for Libyans, not for Malians,” said Mamadou Goita, the director of a nonprofit research organization in Mali. He and other opponents contend that the government is privatizing a scarce national resource without improving the domestic food supply, and that politics, not economics, are driving events because Mali wants to improve ties with Libya and others.

The huge tracts granted to private investors are many years from production. But officials noted that Libya already spent more than $50 million building a 24-mile canal and road, constructed by a Chinese company, benefiting local villages.

Every farmer affected, Mr. Sow added, including as many as 20,000 affected by the Libyan project, will receive compensation. “If they lose a single tree, we will pay them the value of that tree,” he said.

But anger and distrust run high. In a rally last month, hundreds of farmers demanded that the government halt such deals until they get a voice. Several said that they had been beaten and jailed by soldiers, but that they were ready to die to keep their land.

“The famine will start very soon,” shouted Ibrahima Coulibaly, the head of the coordinating committee for farmer organizations in Mali. “If people do not stand up for their rights, they will lose everything!”

“Ante!” members of the crowd shouted in Bamanankan, the local language. “We refuse!”

Kassoum Denon, the regional head for the Office du Niger, accused the Malian opponents of being paid by Western groups that are ideologically opposed to large-scale farming.

“We are responsible for developing Mali,” he said. “If the civil society does not agree with the way we are doing it, they can go jump in a lake.”

The looming problem, experts noted, is that Mali remains an agrarian society. Kicking farmers off the land with no alternative livelihood risks flooding the capital, Bamako, with unemployed, rootless people who could become a political problem.

“The land is a natural resource that 70 percent of the population uses to survive,” said Kalfa Sanogo, an economist at the United Nations Development Program in Mali. “You cannot just push 70 percent of the population off the land, nor can you say they can just become agriculture workers.” In a different approach, a $224 million American projectwill help about 800 Malian farmers each acquire title to 12 acres of newly cleared land, protecting them against being kicked off.

Jon C. Anderson, the project director, argued that no country has developed economically with a large percentage of its population on farms. Small farmers with titles will either succeed or have to sell the land to finance another life, he said, though critics have said villagers will still be displaced.

“We want a revolutionized relationship between the farmer and the state, one where the farmer is more in charge,” Mr. Anderson said.

Soumouni sits about 20 miles from the nearest road, with wandering cattle herders in their distinctive pointed straw hats offering directions like, “Bear right at the termite mound with the hole in it.”

Sekou Traoré, 69, a village elder, was dumbfounded when government officials said last year that Libya now controlled his land and began measuring the fields. He had always considered it his own, passed down from grandfather to father to son.

“All we want before they break our houses and take our fields is for them to show us the new houses where we will live, and the new fields where we will work,” he said at the rally last month.

“We are all so afraid,” he said of the village’s 2,229 residents. “We will be the victims of this situation, we are sure of that.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/22/world/africa/22mali.html?_r=1&ref=africa

Senegal turns to Islam to stop begging by child 'disciples'

Senegal is increasingly turning to Islamic texts and the powerful sway of religious leaders to prevent thousands of children being sent to beg by their Koranic teachers in the name of religion.

The west African country has come under fire from human rightsgroups over the rising phenomenon, as poverty leads more and more parents to send children off to Koranic schools where some are exploited by unscrupulous marabouts.

At a conference seeking to find a solution to Senegal's problem of child-begging on Wednesday, Islamologist Abdou Aziz Kebe of the University Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar argued that solutions lay with theMuslim faith.

"Child protection is not the prerogative of the Western world against an Islamic world which does not concern itself with its children. Muslims have produced texts on this question," he said.

As an example Kebe quoted the 1981 universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights which states: "Each child has the right to be looked after and properly raised by its parents. It is forbidden to employ children..."

The conference was organised by the Canadian embassy and Dakar-based human rights group RADDHO.

"As soon as we denounce begging (by children), we get accused of tapping into Western ideology. But it is possible to draw from human rights texts within Islam ... it is a paradigm shift," said RADDHO president Alioune Tine.

According to a study by the World Bank, UNICEF and International Labour Office (ILO) some 7,800 children were begging on the streets of Dakar in 2007.

In April 2010 Human Rights Watch published a report saying at least 50,000 boys known as talibes (disciples), some as young as four years old, are "forced to beg on Senegal's streets for long hours, seven days a week, by often brutally abusive teachers, known as marabouts."

"The streets of our cities are overrun with children of all ages, all nationalities, barefoot, in rags, braving the cold with a penny in hand, to the benefit of shady adults hiding under the mantle of Koranic teacher," Senegal's Human Rights Minister Zandi Gaye told the conference.

Battling this one comes up against strong tradition in a country where rural families have long chosen a child to study Islam and the Koran under a marabout. Even President Abdoulaye Wade followed this path.

The marabout would be known to parents and the village and young disciples would sometimes be required to ask neighbours for mostly food to better understand poverty and humility.

But today children claim if they do not bring between 750 and 1000 CFA (one euro fifty cents) to their marabouts they face beatings and other forms of abuse.

To combat this phenomenon in a country where 90 percent of the population is Muslim, religious leaders are being regularly put to use in the state media to denounce it.

In a first for the country in September 2010 six Senegalese Koranic teachers and one from Guinea Bissau were convicted for sending children to the streets to beg, and given suspended sentences.

"Religious actors have often been ignored when it comes to street children. Now they have developed relevant initiatives" with the introduction of modern Islamic schools," said Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba Diaw, a leader of the Partnership for the Withdrawal and Rehabilitation of Street Children.

Mamadou Gueye from the Collective of Koranic Schools in Senegal notes that "the problem of begging (children) can not be resolved without the involvement of Koranic teachers" who need assistance from government and NGOs to keep their disciples off the street.

However, lawmaker Imam Mbaye Niang says it is "impossible to support all the Koranic schools ... and the solution is to integrate Koranic education into the national education system."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110114/lf_afp/senegalreligionislamchildren;_ylt=AuYhzPzOtbCXMMNacUUlo4aGOrgF;_ylu=X3oDMTNxaXR1ZzVkBGFzc2V0Ay9zL2FmcC8yMDExMDExNC9sZl9hZnAvc2VuZWdhbHJlbGlnaW9uaXNsYW1jaGlsZHJlbgRjY29kZQNnbXBjZWJuYmUEY3BvcwMyBHBvcwMyBHNlYwN5bl90b3Bfc3RvcmllcwRzbGsDc2VuZWdhbHR1cm5z

Sudan referendum... know some background !

As Sudanese vote this week on staying as one nation or becoming two, my mind goes back to when civil war broke out in Nigeria in 1967. I recall that when Biafra was announced, I leapt in celebration at the novelty of suddenly being a citizen of a new country under a new flag and with a bearded man at the head of state. What my young mind could not fathom, and did not question, were the reasons for the emergence of the new nation. What were the announced reasons and what were the unspoken ones?

Before we could settle to savour the change expected from the split, things took a different turn. The war drums sounded, and bullets began to fly. Streams of refugees flooded through our village and soon enough, we were on the move. I still recall seeing starving kids, rotting corpses by the roadside, and I can hear the screams of young ladies who were captured and forcibly married by rampaging troops.

We see the great mobilisations by the peoples of Southern Sudan for a split and when the result of the referendum is announced, we can bet that the result is like a dream long foretold.

There are many reasons why the South should be eager to drift away. Indices of development from the country are severely skewed against the region. Reports have it that over 80 per cent of the inhabitants of Southern Sudan have no sanitation facilities.

While almost 70 per cent of the people living in Khartoum, River Nile, and Gezira states have access to pipe borne water, the people in the south depend on boreholes and rudimentary water wells. They and those in the Darfur area depend largely on food aid for survival on account of the dislocation of the agricultural sector by entrenched violent conflict.

Certainly, all will agree that oil is a major factor in the political fortunes of Nigeria. We may squabble and bicker under the cover of ethnic or regional differences, but beneath the surface, the struggle is over who controls the massive oil and gas resources and revenues of the land. The struggle for power at the centre was set the moment a unitary system of government was decreed in 1966 and has since coloured the sort of federal system that the nation runs on.

Oil is a principal factor in the current political situation in Sudan. Exploration activities started in the 1960s by AGIP, the Italian oil company, which found natural gas in the Red Sea. The American oil giant, Chevron, followed suit but never revealed what they found, according to reports.

Like Nigeria, like Sudan

As time went on, a number of Chinese and Asian companies jumped in and finally oil was produced from the Muglad Oil Basin, Blocks 2 and 4. Sudan is divided into 17 oil concession blocks with SUDAPET, the government owned company, working in joint partnership with the various Asian and European oil companies.

As aptly captured by a Sudanese academic in a recent Oilwatch Africa meeting, "Sudanese oil has been developed against the background of war, international sanctions, and political isolation. It has been developed at a time of imposing demand by emerging economies like India and China and a time of unprecedented soaring prices of both food and oil and the controversial use of agricultural crops as a source of bio-energy."

Quite like Nigeria, oil produces over 75 per cent of the foreign exchange earnings of Sudan. Other production sectors have equally been almost completely neglected. Before oil, over 50 per cent of Sudan's revenues came from the agriculture sector, contributed 95 per cent of the export earnings, and employed a high percentage of the total labour force in the country.

With oil as a major economic factor, and seeing that the bulk comes from the South, developments nevertheless eluded the region. An example can be seen in the first refinery which was sited about 70 Km north of Khartoum. Crude export pipelines runs northward and amount to about 5326 km in length.

The reality is that with the available infrastructure, the South cannot export its oil except through the North. In addition, as the date of possible separation drew nearer, new oil blocks that transverse northern and southern areas were being allocated.

Oil companies operating in Sudan are exempted from paying taxes. The contracts were mostly negotiated when the price of an oil barrel of oil was less than 20 US dollars. Surely, the companies operating here could not hope for a better space for reckless exploitation and incredibly high profit margins. Added to this is the fact that the regulatory regime is largely non-existent and even the conduct of environmental impact assessments are selective.

With Sudan having about five billion barrels of oil in reserves and currently exporting billions of dollars worth of oil per year, it must be painful for Khartoum to let the oil rich South go. About 80 per cent of Sudan's oil exports come from the southern states. Only 50 per cent of revenue accruing from oil goes to the South, a factor that undoubtedly stokes the embers of discontent in the area.

As the peoples of Sudan vote for the emergence of a new Southern nation, dreams of the desperately poor and those traumatised by war and cruelties will run high. Children who never experienced peaceful environments will be marvelling at great possibilities. Oil has certainly greased the engines of exploitation, oppression and war in Sudan. It is oiling the machines of separation today. What will it lubricate next?

These are questions we must mull over, but a bigger question is over the implication of continued fragmentation for Africa as a whole. At a time when the continent should be coming together and erasing the arbitrary boundary lines drawn by colonialist adventurers, we continue to fragment. Certainly, this cannot be the only way to overcome poor and parasitic governance.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS 

Venue swap benefits wanted president of Sudan

An African president wanted for genocide was expected for a weekend summit, but as the International Criminal Court asked Kenya to arrest him the venue was switched to a country beyond the court's reach, officials said on Wednesday.

The summit is now to take place in Ethiopia, which doesn't recognize the International Criminal Court. Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, the wanted man, visited Ethiopia in April 2009 soon after he was first indicted by the ICC. The change of summit venue raises questions about whether regional leaders have the will to bring al-Bashir to justice for atrocities committed in Darfur, in western Sudan. The weekend meeting held by the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, or IGAD, brings together the leaders of six East African nations to discuss two referenda in Sudan in January that could see the southern part of Africa's biggest country break away. There are fears that if the referenda are postponed, a civil war could re-ignite in Sudan.

The ICC, based in The Hague, Netherlands, on Tuesday made public a request to Kenya to arrest al-Bashir if he enters the country. Kenya is a signatory to the statute forming the ICC and is obligated to arrest al-Bashir if he is in Kenya, even though it failed to do so when he arrived in August for a ceremony to adopt Kenya's new constitution. Yufnalis Okubo, IGAD's acting director of peace and security, said the organization had initially planned to hold the summit in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, but that as of Tuesday the venue was changed to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia's capital. "It's not a big deal," he said, adding he did not know why the venue was changed. But the change happened as controversy grew around the possibility of al-Bashir's presence in Kenya.
 
Last week, African rights organizations asked Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki to clearly state that al-Bashir would be arrested if he visited. The ICC did not immediately return a call seeking comment. When Kenyan authorities did not arrest al-Bashir in August, they were heavily criticized, including in a statement by President Barack Obama.
 
The refusal to arrest al-Bashir raises doubts about Kenya's willingness to hand over top Kenyan officials expected to soon be charged by the ICC for postelection violence that left more than 1,000 people dead in 2007-08.  The ICC has no police force and relies on member states to arrest suspects. Al-Bashir refuses to recognize the court's authority and has vowed to never turn himself in. Darfur's ethnic African rebels rose up in 2003, accusing Sudan's Arab-dominated central government of neglect and discrimination. U.N. officials estimated 300,000 people died and 2.7 million were displaced. Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan and Uganda are members of IGAD. Eritrea suspended its membership in 2007. (Sapa-AP)

Adapted from:
Mmegi Online: Venue swap benefits wanted president of Sudan

Absa Capital to Start First Gold Exchange Traded Funds in Nigeria, Kenya

Absa Capital, a unit of South Africa’s Absa Group Ltd., said it may start the first gold- backed exchange-traded funds in Kenya and Nigeria.
“Absa Capital is in talks with the Nigerian Stock Exchange to potentially secondary list our NewGold exchange-traded fund,” Vladimir Nedeljkovic, the Johannesburg-based investment bank’s principal for ETFs and index products, said today. He is in Kenya to discuss starting the ETF in the East African nation.
NewGold, which has its main listing on South Africa’s JSE Ltd., is the largest gold ETF in Africa’s biggest economy, with more than $2 billion in assets. Earlier this year, Absa Capital, listed NewGold on the Botswana Stock Exchange.
Absa, South Africa’s largest retail bank and which is controlled by Barclays Plc, wants to expand in the continent to boost earnings. Absa Capital, which was launched in 2005 after the U.K. bank bought a stake in the lender, contributed more than one-fifth of Absa’s profit in the first half to June 2010.
In Nigeria, the NewGold ETF will develop the nation’s capital markets by improving liquidity on the bourse and bringing another asset class to the West African market, helping investors to “diversify their exposures,” Nedeljkovic said. “Our discussions with the NSE are in very early stages and we cannot provide any timing.”
ETFs trade like stocks, allowing investors access to commodities like gold and platinum without taking physical delivery of them.

Adapted from:
Bloomberg: Absa Capital to Start First Gold Exchange...