{jcomments on}OMAR, AGNEWS, BXL, le 07 février 2010 – www1.voanews.com- February 07, 2010–A U.S. Congressional report has shed new light on massive infusions of suspect money into the United States by people in the inner circles of power in the impoverished African oil-producing countries of Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria and Angola.
RWANDA
UGANDA
Uganda: Anti-Gay Bill is Unjust, Says Obama
7 February 2010/Daily Nation/allafrica.com
Nairobi — US President Barack Obama criticised the controversial anti-gay Bill that is being considered by Uganda’s parliament.
Speaking during his appearance on Thursday at the National Prayer Breakfast, Obama said: “It is unconscionable to target gays or lesbians for who they are. The measure being considered in Uganda is odious.”
The organisation that sponsors the breakfast, the Fellowship Foundation, has been associated with efforts to pass the bill, according to ethics group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).
The law would punish sexual activity between persons of the same sex with long jail terms or death.
The bill, currently before the Uganda parliament, was sponsored by the Ndorwa West MP, David Bahati, from President Museveni’s ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM).
It proposes the death penalty for homosexual acts. The bill also extends the existing penalty of life imprisonment for anal intercourse to all other same-sex behaviour.
The bill has ignited international condemnation from around the world. “We may disagree about gay marriage, but surely we can agree that it is unconscionable to target gays and lesbians for who they are,” said Obama.
TANZANIA:
CONGO RDC :
KENYA :
ANGOLA :
US Congressional Report Cites Loopholes in Anti-Money Laundering Legislation
Nico Colombant / www1.voanews.com/ 07 February 2010
| Washington
A U.S. Congressional report has shed new light on massive infusions of suspect money into the United States by people in the inner circles of power in the impoverished African oil-producing countries of Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria and Angola.
The more than 300-page report follows two years of investigations into how lawyers, lobbyists, real estate agents and others in the United States have helped hide the existence of hundreds-of-millions of dollars coming from people in or close to power in African oil-producing nations, where despite oil wealth, endemic poverty persists. The report does not accuse those cited of breaking any U.S. laws.
In 2001, the U.S. Congress passed the Patriot Act, which included anti-money laundering regulations pertaining to financial institutions, but the report says there are loopholes that have allowed suspicious funds to be funneled into the United States.
The report cites individuals, including the wife of former Nigerian Vice-President Atiku Abubakar, American Jennifer Douglas. She is alleged to have helped bring $40 million in suspect funds into the United States. The report says that, at one point, the Wachovia Bank failed to identify her as a so-called “politically exposed person” who might be moving illicit cash.
The son of Equatorial Guinea’s president, Teodore Nguema Obiang Mangue, is alleged to have brought in more than $100 million with the help of several U.S. lawyers. The report says they set up shell companies with names such as Sweet Pink, with no employees, to move money around.
The report also says the late long-time president of Gabon, Omar Bongo, and his son, Ali, who is now president, paid millions to hire an American lobbyist, Jeffrey Birrell, to help secure the purchases of military transport aircraft and armored vehicles.
At a recent hearing presenting the report, the chairman of the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Senator Carl Levin, underlined the importance of stopping the flow of laundered money from a local and global perspective. “Corruption is a cancer, which corodes the rule of law, undermines economic development and eats away at the fabric of civil society. In extreme cases, corruption can destabilize communities and lead to failed states, lawlessness and terrorism. If you want to credibly lead efforts to stop illegal money abroad, we have got to stop it here at home, as well,” he said.
Several American lawyers invited to testify declined to do so. Some have rejected allegations of any wrongdoing through previous statements.
African leaders and their relatives who have faced these types of inquiries in France before have denied any money moved out of their countries was transferred illegally.
Wiecher Mandemaker, the director of anti-money laundering at HSBC Bank USA, did testify. The Congressional report looked into his bank’s dealing with the Bongo family as well as with Angola’s central bank. He answered a question asked by the subcommittee’s Republican ranking member, Senator Tom Coburn. “We will take a close look at this report. If we believe there are opportunities to improve on our activities, I am sure that we will do so and quite frankly, Senator, we are not perfect, but I do believe that we are one of the leading institutions, especially when it comes to identifying appropriate anti-money laundering practices, not doing business with individuals that we should not be doing business with, and I am quite proud to be a part of that institution,” he said.
Senator Coburn said, because others had refused to testify, the investigation needed to be pursued. He also praised Senator Levin for pushing for tougher anti-money laundering legislation. “(There is) much to be found in the future about what has been going on in the past. I congratulate you. I think you are well on the way with your bill that you are introducing, which I hope we can work out, and that I can co-sponsor. I think we are there. I think maybe we need a little more balance in terms of not inhibiting regular trade, but I look forward to working with you on that,” he said.
The bill is intended to further curb the use of American institutions by foreign officials found to be corrupt, as well as set up new rules to increase corporate transparency.
SOUTH AFRICA:
South African president apologizes for fathering illegitimate child
February 7, 2010/CNN
Johannesburg, South Africa (CNN) — South Africa’s president has apologized for fathering a child out of wedlock after his admission prompted an outcry from critics who said he was undermining the nation’s health campaign.
“I deeply regret the pain that I have caused to my family, the ANC, the Alliance and South Africans in general,” President Jacob Zuma said in a statement Saturday. “The matter, though private, has … put a lot of pressure on my family and my organization, the African National Congress.”
Zuma is a member of the Zulu culture, which practices polygamy. He has three wives and 19 children, according to his Web site.
Last week, the president confirmed that he had a relationship with a woman who gave birth to his child.
“I reiterate that I took responsibility for my actions towards the family concerned and the child,” he said.
Polygamy is legal in South Africa, but remains a contentious subject. Zuma has faced criticism from opponents who say the practice is out of step with modern times and unfair to women.
He vowed to focus on a commitment to fight HIV/AIDS in the country, which has one of the highest rates in the world
South Africa’s date with destiny
By Mike Hanna in Africa /blogs.aljazeera.net /February 7th, 2010
The image that stuck with me that bright February morning was never filmed or photographed.
A pair of white police officers were watching a video feed from parliament just over the cobble-stoned street from where they were standing: FW De Klerk’s face filled the screen and I heard the words “unconditionally free Nelson Mandela” – the more senior officer shook his head miserably and said to the man next to him – “dit is die einde van ons volk”: it is the end of our people.
The De Klerk government had retained a tradition established by that of PW Botha, De Klerk’s predecessor.
Advance draft
At the opening of parliament in February each year, the international media representatives in South Africa would be herded into a large conference room over the road from parliament and given an advance draft of the president’s speech.
The downside, though, was that the doors were locked and no one was allowed to leave until the speech had been concluded.
This year though, 1990, I had arrived a few minutes late – and De Klerk had already begun speaking as I walked into the conference room.
Someone put the speech in my hand and, as I scanned the first page, it was clear this address was going to change history.
Morning news
I simply walked back out of the door straight to a public telephone that I knew was just outside.
I called the desk in London where the morning news show was on air and told them what De Klerk was about to say in the next few minutes.
While I listened impatiently to the inevitable argument in the London gallery as to when to take me live, I watched and overheard the two police officers whose whole world order had just changed.
For them it was a disaster; for the majority of the country’s people, it was the moment that had been longed for.
Critical point
I didn’t hear the anchor’s question, just a voice in the telephone yelling “cue Mike cue”: “The president of South Africa FW De Klerk has just announced that Nelson Mandela is to be released from prison in coming days.
“The ANC leader is at present being held at a prison an hour’s drive away from the parliament that De Klerk is at the moment addressing.
“He has been in prison for close to three decades. The most critical point though is that De Klerk has also announced the unbanning of the African National Congress and its armed wing Umkhonto we Sizwe, as well as the South African Communist Party.
“The speech heralds quite literally, the beginning of the end of white minority rule in South Africa”.
‘The whole way’
The parliamentarians come streaming out of the building a few metres away and I and saw my cameraman was already there filming.
I joined him and stopped the then minister of information, Stoffel Van Der Merwe, who was smiling broadly.
“What has just happened?” I asked him.
“You never thought we would do it,” he told me. “We’ve gone the whole way.”
It was one of the very few times I had agreed with anything he had said in the years I had known him.
Virtually unthinkable
Ever since Walter Sisulu and seven other senior ANC leaders had been released a few months before, there was little doubt that Mandela would be next.
But the idea that a National Party government would also declare the ANC legal, along with its armed wing and the Communist Party, was virtually unthinkable.
In fact, the self-same information minister had told me a week before in an interview that to unban the ANC would be political suicide for the De Klerk government.
The years ahead proved to be exactly that. And ultimately it was not the release of Nelson Mandela that marked the beginning of the march to democracy: it was the simultaneous decision to unban his and other political movements as well that created the climate in which real negotiation could begin.
AFRICA / AU :
SOMALIA: Islamist insurgents pour into Mogadishu
Somalilandpress/ 7 February 2010
NAIROBI (Somalilandpress) — An influx of fighters from Islamist insurgents have filled the streets of the capital of the wartorn nation of Somalia as the government announces fresh offensive against Islamist rebel, residents and witnesses told Somalilandpress.
A local journalist has said on conditions of anonymity that heavily armed Al-Shabab fighters arriving from the town of Baidoa have filled the streets of Mogadishu on Friday and Saturday in an attempt to hold their positions.
The journalist also said hundreds of Somali government forces have been deployed into the front line areas currently under control of Islamist insurgents.
Somali president Sharif Sheikh Ahmed has confirmed that his government was ready to mount a fresh offensive against the rebel mostly in the capital Mogadishu.
He added that his troops were ready to take strategic towns in southern Somalia including Baidoa, Kismayu and Merka, curently under the control of Al-Shabaab and Hisbul-Islam.
A large number of African Union troops have approached Merka and Baraawe ports assisting the Somali government, Press TV based in Iran reported.
There are 5000 AU troops in the country mainly from Uganda and Burundi, the Somali government has repeatedly requested at least 8000 in order to flash-out the rebels.
The reporter has confirmed to Somalilandpress that civilians have fled their homes in Mogadishu’s southern districts of Hodan, Wardhigley and Howl-Wadag.
Some of the civilians are reported to have fled to Elsha, 15 Km (9 miles) southwest of Mogadishu where at least one-quarter of a million Somalis are already based, displaced by the war.
Al-Shabab hardliners, who openly admitted their links with Al-Qaeda control most of southern Somalia while the weak Somali government backed by Western countries are confined to small pockets of the country.
The fighting in Somalia has killed over 19,000 Somalis since 2007 and has further displaced 1.5 million people inside the country while another 560,000 civilians have registered as refugees in neighboring countries. Somalia is one of the world’s worst humanitarian emergencies and was ranked the most corrupted country in 2009.
The Horn of Africa nation has not had an effective government since warlords overthrew longtime dictator Maj. General Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991.
Picture: Hard-line Islamist Al Shabab fighters conduct military exercise in northern Mogadishu’s Suqaholaha neighborhood, Somalia, Friday Jan. 1, 2010. The group’s senior official said the young fighters have recently completed training to join what they said to be a global war against the enemy of Allah. (AP Photo/ Farah Abdi Warsameh)
By Muhyadin Ahmed Roble
Nairobi – Kenya
UN /ONU :
Somalia Accuses Eritrea of Continuing to Arm Rebels
By Shafi’i Mohyaddin Abokar/newsblaze.com/ February 07, 2010
Somalia’s transitional federal government on Thursday accused Eritrea of continuing to arm Islamist rebels fighting in the country despite last month’s UN sanctions against it.
Information Minister Sheik Dahir Mahmud Guelleh said in a press conference in Mogadishu that his government has evidence showing the Eritrean government is still giving arms and ammunition to Islamist rebel groups fighting Somali government and AU peacekeepers in Mogadishu.
“Al shabab gets assistance including arms, ammunition, money and other military equipment from Eritrea which is helping the destabilization in the horn of Africa region” the Somali information minister stated.
“Eritrea’s military assistance to Somali Islamist rebels is imported in the port city of Kismayo which has also an international airport” the minister added during his press conference in Mogadishu.
He said that Al-Qaida and Eritrea are fueling the crisis in Somalia where hundreds of foreign fighters belonging to Al-Qaida are fighting with the assistance of the Somali Alqaeda-inspired group Al shabab.
“We are calling on the world governments to help the United Nations to strengthen the arms embargo on Eritrea to compel it to stop assisting terrorists fighting the Somali government” he said.
Last month, the 15-member Security Council of the United Nations unanimously voted for a resolution which imposed sanctions on Eritrea including an arms embargo, a travel ban on its leaders and freezing Eritrean assets throughout the world.
The minister asked the International community to help the Somali government defeat terrorists and establish law and order in the war-devastated country where more than half a million people, mainly civilians, were killed since the 1991 downfall of the former military rule of the late dictator General Mohamed Siyad Barre.
USA :
Liberian dictactor’s son ordered to pay £14m compensation to torture victims’
Chuckie’ Taylor is said to have laughed as prisons were beaten and raped by his ‘Demon Forces’ paramilitaries
Tracy McVeigh, Chief reporter The Observer/ www.guardian.co.uk/ Sunday 7 February 2010
The American-born son of former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor has been ordered to pay more than £14m in compensation to five people tortured during the West African country’s civil war.
A judge in the US made the order a year after the same Miami court sentenced Charles McArthur Emmanuel Taylor, known as Chuckie, to 97 years in prison for his role in one of Africa’s bloodiest chapters; he was the first person to be convicted by a federal court of committing offences outside the US.
The 32-year-old led the notorious Anti-Terrorist Unit, a band of pro-government paramilitaries nicknamed the Demon Forces who carried out murder and torture during his father’s presidency from 1997 to 2003.
Witnesses at his criminal trial in 2008 spoke of hearing him laugh as prisoners were abused and how the Anti-Terrorist Unit “did things like beating people to death, burying them alive, rape – the most horrible kind of war crimes”.
His father, also Charles Taylor, is currently on trial at the Hague facing 11 counts of crimes against humanity. The former warlord’s regime was accused of involvement in murder, rape, gun running and diamond smuggling in both Liberia and neighbouring Sierra Leone. The trial – in which Taylor denies all the charges – has been going on since June 2007.
“Chuckie” Taylor was the result of a teenage romance when the former president was at college in Boston, Massachusetts, and lived in Florida with his mother until he was a teenager when he went to live with his father in Liberia. He was first arrested on a fake passport charge at Miami airport in 2006 but later indicted under the 12-year-old anti-torture law, the first time it had been used.
This latest civil case heard that five Liberians had testified before the court that they had been tortured and abused by the Anti-Terrorist Unit.
They described being held in jungle pits filled chest-high with water, being exposed to electric shocks to the genitals and other body parts and witnessing the killing of others by Taylor’s men.
At the end of the civil trial last week, Taylor, who is currently in prison in Illinois, dismissed the torture allegations as deceptive propaganda.
However, human rights groups have welcomed this latest ruling against him. They say it is a move that might serve as a warning to others who commit similar abuses that they will be held accountable for their actions.
A spokesman for United States immigration and customs enforcement said that it was a “clear message the US would not be a safe haven for human rights violators”.
8 killed in fighting in Somalia’s capital
The Associated Press/Feb. 7, 2010
At least eight civilians, including a woman and 4-year-old child, were killed when insurgents and government soldiers pounded each other’s positions with mortars in the Somali capital overnight, a witness said Monday.
Osman Guled said he and other elders on Monday removed the bodies from the rubble of their homes in northern Mogadishu to prepare them for burial. Guled said the fighting lasted 1 1/2 hours on Sunday evening.
“Most of the artillery fire hit houses,” Guled said.
Ahmed Daud Dahir, a commander with the presidential guard, said the insurgents lobbed more than six mortars at the presidential palace but no one there was wounded. President Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed was not in the palace during the attack because he is neighboring Ethiopia for an African Union leaders meeting.
Dahir said government soldiers retaliated, hitting exactly where insurgents had fired their mortars. Insurgents have attacked the presidential palace several times in the past three years, but usually there is not much damage and no one is injured.
Ali Muse, the head of Mogadishu’s ambulance services, said that they took 55 people wounded in the fighting to hospitals Monday morning. Muse said they could go out Sunday night to help the wounded because it was not safe.
On Friday, the largest insurgent group, al-Shabab, launched multiple attacks on government and African Union bases sparking the heaviest fighting in a day for months in Mogadishu. As many as 19 people were killed during that episode of fighting.
Al-Shabab said it launched the attacks to pre-empt an anticipated government offensive, with the backing of the African Union, to push the group and its allies out of Mogadishu. Al-Shabab, which the U.S. State Department has designated a terrorist organization, controls much of Mogadishu as well as most of southern Somalia. The State Department also believes al-Shabab has links with al-Qaida.
The group has been trying to overthrow Ahmed’s fragile, Western-backed government. Ahmed, a former co-leader of the Islamic insurgency, has been unable to diffuse the insurgency and faces divisions within his own ranks.
His government is the latest attempt to have an effective central government take root since Somalia’s last such government in 1991. That is the year warlords overthrew longtime dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, then turned on each other and plunged Somalia into chaos and anarchy.
CANADA :
AUSTRALIA :
EUROPE :
EU backs IPCC report
07 February 2010/www.asianage.com
NEW DELHI, Feb. 6: The European Union has come out in support of the controversy-ridden Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), chaired by Indian scientist Rajendra K Pachauri. It said that the row over misleading data cannot be the basis to challenge an IPCC document.
“We fully support the IPCC report,” Ms Teresa Ribera, Spain’s secretary of state for Climate Change and the president of EU council of environment ministers, said at a joint press conference with Belgian minister of climate and energy Paul Magnette here on Saturday. The IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report has drawn flak for suggesting that the Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035 due to global warming.
However, Ms Ribera conceded that adequate “quality control” of information is required for a scientific report of this nature. She followed it up by saying that her country and the EU are ready to offer their expertise in updating the methodology of the IPCC report.
“I personally wrote a letter to the chair of IPCC offering help to update and help improve these kinds of controls,” she said.
Asked about reports about attempts to move the climate talks to a forum other than the United Nations, Ms Ribera said any informal inputs were always welcome but they should not as a substitute to the process. However, she favoured informal talks among a group of nations such as the Brazil, South Africa, India, China (Basic) bloc. “Some times dialogue is simpler in smaller groups,” she said.
Ms Ribera maintained that the United Nations is the best forum to address climate change but she welcomed suggestions from informal groups such as Basic (Brazil, South Africa, India, China) as “some times dialogue is simpler in smaller groups”.
AGE CORRESPONDENT
CHINA :
INDIA :
BRASIL:
EN BREF, CE 07 février 2010 … AGNEWS / OMAR, BXL,07/02/2010
