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African Union Declines Action Against Libya

The African Union Peace and Security Council has met to discuss events in Libya, but declined to follow other international bodies in imposing sanctions against the Gaddafi government. The Council also extended the mandate of an Ivory Coast mediation team.

The United Nations and the European Union have slapped sanctions on Libya. The Arab League has suspended Libya’s membership. But when Africa’s highest secruity body discussed the Libya question Monday, it took no action.

Libya is a major funder of the African Union, and has a seat on the 15-member Peace and Security Council, but its ambassador Ali Abdalla Awidan did not take part in the debate. He stood outside the Council chamber, where he declined to comment.

However, in a written statement sent to reporters Saturday, the ambassador condemned the use of excessive force and affirmed the right of the Libyan people to protest peacefully to express their demands.

AU Peace and Security Commissioner Ramtane Lamamra says the Council felt no need to act other than to express support for United Nations Security Council sanctions, which have the force of law under Chapter 7 of the U.N. charter.

“They have exchanged views and thoroughly discussed the evolution of the situation, including new developments represented by the decision made by the UNSC under Chapter 7, and they have decided to continue their consultations,” Lamamra said.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in a speech earlier in the day to the U.N. Human Rights Council, urged the African Union to follow the Arab League’s lead in suspending Libya’s membership. Lamamra said he had not heard about Secretary Clinton’s remarks.

“I’m not aware of that speech. I certainly will take, I will read it with big interest, but for now I have not seen that text and in which context this request has been put,” Lamamra said.

Libya’s ambassador later joined the Council meeting as it voted to extend by one month the mandate of a high-level panel tasked with finding a solution to Ivory Coast’s post-election power struggle.

The panel was supposed to have completed its mission by the end of February. But the job is proving more difficult than expected, as incumbent Laurent Gbagbo refuses to hand over power to Alassane Ouattara, the internationally recognized winner of the November presidential election.

The panel, which includes the presidents of Mauritania, South Africa, Tanzania, Burkina Faso and Chad, is to meet Friday in the Mauritanian capital, Nouakchott.

Commissioner Lamamra said the Peace and Security Council is issuing a fresh appeal for calm during the extended mediation period.

“The council condemns all action from wherever they come from against the civilian population and expresses its serious concern with the deterioration of the security and humanitarian situation in Cote d’Ivoire,” Lamamra said.

The United Nations says post-election violence in Ivory Coast has claimed more than 300 lives.

(Voice of America)

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UN Secretary General Calls for Compliance With Arms Embargo in Côte d’Ivoire

28 February 2011 –Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has called for full compliance with the arms embargo placed on Côte d’Ivoire, in the wake of reports that attack helicopters have been provided to forces loyal to former president Laurent Gbagbo.

“The Secretary-General demands full compliance with the arms embargo and warns both the supplier of this military equipment and Mr. Gbagbo that appropriate action will be taken in response to the violation,” Mr. Ban’s spokesperson said in a statement issued overnight, which noted that the reported delivery of the helicopters and other material could be “a serious violation” of the arms embargo, mandated by the Security Council, which has been in place since 2004.

Côte d’Ivoire has been caught in a political deadlock with growing reports of tension and violence – between rival groups as well as on UN peacekeepers – since Mr. Gbagbo refused to leave office after he was defeated by opposition leader Alassane Ouattara in a presidential election held last November.

The spokesperson’s statement added that the violation of the embargo has been brought to the attention of the Security Council committee charged with the responsibility for sanctions against Côte d’Ivoire.

Speaking to the press today, Mr. Ban’s spokesperson said that the UN peacekeeping mission in the West African country – the UN Operation in Cote d’Ivoire (UNOCI) – reported that a flight carrying some of the helicopter parts landed at the capital, Yamoussoukro. A team made up of members of the group of experts and an UNOCI officer travelled to the city’s airport but was unable to verify the information and was forced to withdraw when they were fired upon by armed elements.

On Monday, some media reports identified Belarus as the source of the helicopters and equipment. In a statement posted on the website of the country’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations, in New York, the spokesperson from Belarus’ foreign ministry denied the reports, noting that “the Republic of Belarus has always regarded UN Security Council’s decisions very responsibly.”

In the statement issued overnight, Mr. Ban’s spokesperson said the Secretary-General has asked UNOCI to monitor the situation closely and to take all necessary action, within its mandate, to ensure that the delivered equipment is not prepared for use.

Last week, the Secretary-General reiterated his deep concern over the deteriorating situation in Côte d’Ivoire. Last year’s election was meant to be the culmination of efforts to reunify the country, which was split by civil war in 2002 into a government-controlled south and a rebel-held north.

UN News Service
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Hillary Clinton: U.S. Stands Ready To Aid Libya Protesters

Hillary Clinton

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration stands ready to offer “any type of assistance” to Libyans seeking to oust Muammar Gaddafi, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Sunday, adding a warning to other African nations not to let mercenaries go to the aid of the longtime dictator.

Clinton made no mention of any U.S. military assistance in her remarks to reporters before flying to Geneva for talks with diplomats from Russia, the European Union and other powers eager to present a united anti-Gaddafi front.

Shortly before she left, two senators urged the administration to help arm a provisional government in Libya, where Gaddafi is in the midst of the desperate and increasingly violent bid to retain power.

Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Joseph Lieberman, a Connecticut independent, also called for the United States and its allies to enforce a no-fly zone over Libya to prevent the military from again firing on civilian protesters from the air.

The White House had no immediate comment on their recommendations.

Clinton spoke to reporters one day after President Barack Obama branded Gaddafi an illegitimate ruler who must leave power immediately. “We want him to leave and we want him to end his regime and call off the mercenaries and those troops that remain loyal to him,” she said. “How he manages that is obviously up to him and to his family.”

The U.N. Security Council voted last Saturday to impose new penalties against the Gaddafi government, in power since 1969 in the oil-rich nation along Africa’s Mediterranean Coast.

“We are just at the beginning of what will follow Gaddafi. … But we’ve been reaching out to many different Libyans who are attempting to organize in the east and as the revolution moves westward there as well,” Clinton said. “I think it’s way too soon to tell how this is going to play out, but we’re going to be ready and prepared to offer any kind of assistance that anyone wishes to have from the United States.”

Efforts are under way to form a provisional government in the eastern part of the country where the rebellion began at midmonth.

The U.S., Clinton said, is threatening more measures against Gaddafi’s government, but did not say what they were or when they might be announced.

Addressing the rulers of unnamed neighboring countries, she said: “You must stop mercenaries, you must stop those who may be going to Libya either at the behest or opportunistically to engage in violence or other criminal acts. And we will be working closely with those neighboring countries to ensure that they do so.

The African fighters that Gaddafi is allegedly using against protesters come from several nations.

Clinton’s remarks did not go as far as those of McCain or Lieberman.

“Libyan pilots aren’t going to fly if there is a no-fly zone and we could get air assets there to ensure it,” McCain said. But he added, “I’m not ready to use ground forces or further intervention than that.”

He said the U.S. should “recognize some provisional government that they are trying to set already up in the eastern part of Libya, help them with material assistance, make sure that every one of the mercenaries know that any acts they commit they will find themselves in front a war crimes tribunal. Get tough.”

Lieberman spoke in similar terms, urging “tangible support, (a) no-fly zone, recognition of the revolutionary government, the citizens government and support for them with both humanitarian assistance and I would provide them with arms.”

He likened the situation in Libya to the events in the Balkans in the 1990s when he said the U.S. “intervened to stop a genocide against Bosnians. And the first we did was to provide them the arms to defend themselves. That’s what I think we ought to do in Libya.”

McCain and Lieberman spoke on CNN’s “State of the Union” from Egypt, where a largely peaceful popular uprising recently toppled President Hosni Mubarak from power after a reign of nearly three decades.

It was one of numerous rebellions across Northern Africa and the Middle East in recent months, all of them far less violent than the events in Libya, where Gaddafi has used his military and foreign mercenaries to try and crush a revolt and has threatened to begin arming Libyans who support his rule.

The rebellion began Feb. 15 in Benghazi, where a member of the city council said on Sunday that an ex-justice minister was appointed to lead a provisional government for cities under rebel control.

McCain and Lieberman also said Obama was slow to react to Gaddafi’s brutal response to the protests. The administration has said the president did not want to risk any attack on Americans who had been trying to leave the country, and waited until a ferry loaded with evacuees reached Malta after spending two days in the harbor at Tripoli, the capital, because of bad weather.

“The British prime minister and the French president and others were not hesitant and they have citizens in that country,” said McCain, who also appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Lieberman said he understood why the administration hesitated, but added, “I wish we had spoken out much more clearly and early against the Gaddafi regime.”

AP/The Huffington Post BRADLEY KLAPPER

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Ghana: Eastern Region takes steps to reduce HIV/AIDS prevalence rate

Koforidua, Feb. 27, GNA – The Eastern Regional AIDs Committee is to organize HIV Counseling and Testing on May Day at the Jacksons Park to enable workers to know their statuses.

This is to help to reduce the HIV prevalence rate in the region of about 4.2 per cent, the highest in the country.

This came to light at a review and planning meeting by the Committee at Koforidua on Friday to strategize on the measures to take to help to further reduce the rate.

The region used to have a prevalence of over six per cent.

The Committee also planned to reorganize the quarterly review meeting with the district focal persons.

Speaking to the Ghana News Agency, the Regional HIV/AIDs Focal Person, Mr Kwame Oppong-Ntim, said during the year, the Committee would also hold meetings with organizations running various HIV/AIDs programmes in the region to monitor what they were doing.

He said, the members of the Committee would also visit institutions such as the prisons and orphanages in the region to find out what measures were being taken to help to reduce the HIV infections.

GNA

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Is Kenyan African Silicon Valley?

CHRISTINE MUNGAI

Kenya is on the brink of becoming Africa’s ICT hub due to the continued growth in Internet and mobile technology use in East Africa’s biggest economy with investors flooding the country.

The recent Kenya Economic Update report by the World Bank states that over the last decade, ICT has outperformed all others sectors in Kenya, growing at an average of 20 per cent annually.

“The benefits of ICT are starting to be felt in other sectors, and have contributed to the conditions for the country to reach an economic tipping point,” the report says.

The report reveals that Kenya has opened 2011 with renewed and stronger than expected growth on the back of a new constitution, strong macro-economic policies, and a favourable regional environment.

Over the past three decades, Kenya has experienced only two short periods of economic growth that exceeded five per cent and was sustained for at least three consecutive years: 1986-88 and 2004-2007.

This has raised the question: Is Kenya on the verge of experiencing another growth spurt? Will it last longer and go deeper than the previous two episodes?

The World Bank researchers envision that this could indeed be the case, as the uptake of ICT throughout the economy could provide the impetus required for high and sustained growth.

Today, Kenya has the largest mobile money platform in the world. An estimated 15 million mobile phone users were using mobile money by the end of 2010, the equivalent of three out of every four adult Kenyans.

In East Africa, Internet access in recent years has recorded a significant growth.

The World Bank estimates that in 2004, there were 1.65 million active Internet users in the region.

By 2007, the number had increased to 4.78 million, and by 2010 the number of regular users had jumped to 6.78 million, a penetration rate of about 5.1 per cent of the population.

The introduction of data enabled smartphones, which allow internet access through mobile phones has boosted this area hugely.

Kenya’s active Internet usage stands at 8.7 per cent of the population, the highest in the region, compared with Uganda (7.9 per cent), Rwanda (3.1 per cent), Tanzania (1.2 per cent) and Burundi (0.8 per cent).

Paul Odhiambo, CEO of a Nairobi-based ICT consultancy firm, says that creating demand for locally developed software will provide a much needed stimulus for growth of the sector.

“If the government passed similar policy as was passed regarding local content on television—that a certain percentage of ICT solutions in government institutions must be home grown—this will go a long way in developing our local ICT talent.”

Mr Odhiambo says the region needs to develop confidence in its own human sources.

“What we need is to believe in our ability to make this sector really take off, and deliberately create demand for local solutions. We must invest in our own,” he says.

Those that actually need the Internet the most are the very poor people,” says Dr Bitange Ndemo, Permanent Secretary in the Kenya Ministry of Information and Communication.

He believes that the government should step in and make ICT infrastructure an open access platform, just like the road network. “This is the only way prices will come down.”

Last June, Kenya’s telecommunications regulator slashed the licence fee for third-generation (3G) mobile Internet services by 60 percent to $10 million to raise penetration, and announced that it would not charge for an upgrade to 4G.

The wider applications of ICT are starting to reshape the structure of the economy, especially in the financial sector.

In 2010, this sector benefited from a number of innovations, including Equity Bank and Safaricom’s M-Kesho, a joint venture allowing mobile phone users to earn interest on their mobile phone-based savings accounts.

In agriculture, for instance, an SMS platform is used to disseminate information on commodity prices allowing farmers to make better decisions regarding their produce.

The platform also allows disease tracking and consultation to enable communities isolated from healthcare infrastructure to diagnose and treat diseases.

Civil society organisations have also effectively used mobile technology to monitor social unrest and human-rights violations, mobilise voters and disseminate election results, and even track the management of local budgets.

All this is not without challenges. Last December, for instance, a number of fibre optic cables that run around Nairobi were dug up in the middle of the night and severed, causing communication blackouts.

The attacks were blamed by many on digital turf wars between rival firms, keen to seize any advantage in the emerging broadband market.

Others blamed disgruntled employees.

CHRISTINE MUNGAI, The East African

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South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya are Top Three in Science in Africa

 

Gatonye Gathura

Nairobi — Kenya is ranked third in the production of new scientific knowledge on the continent.

 However, this is not enough to propel the country into a knowledge-based economy or out of poverty, says the 2010 Science Report to be launched in Nairobi on Friday morning.

Kenya was among the top three publishers of scientific publications from sub-Saharan Africa between 2005-09.

The country also rates highly in the application for patents with the US Patents Office and is third on the continent in Internet access after Sudan and Zimbabwe.

But a close scrutiny of the scores shows little cause to celebrate. While Kenya made 24 patent applications within the study period, the Unesco report shows South Africa as having acquired 465 patents.

South Africa publishes almost half of all scientific articles in the sub-continent, followed by Nigeria (11 per cent) and Kenya (six per cent).

This low performance in science and technology is blamed on poor university education, little investment in the sector and increasing cases of brain drain.

To check on brain drain, Kenya has been encouraged to borrow from Fifa, the world football governing organisation, which allows players in foreign countries to appear for their countries for national duty.

What is now being referred to as the “fifarisation” of brains was mooted in Nairobi in March.

Entitled by law

In such an arrangement, a Kenyan scientist or researcher working abroad would be entitled by law to return home to undertake a certain assignment of national importance.

“Once their mission was accomplished, they would return to their working stations.

“In this way, a team of medical professionals working in the US and Europe, for instance, travel home once in a while to share their knowledge and skills,” says the report.

A look at the subjects local researchers are publishing, the report reveals a narrow spectrum of study areas making the country a net importer of skills in the science industry.

“In Kenya, the life sciences, which include clinical medicine, biology and biomedical research represented as much as 93 per cent of scientific articles in 2008, compared to four per cent for earth and space sciences.

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Vaccine-Delivering Nanoparticles May Help Fight HIV, Malaria

Engineers at MIT have come up with a new type of nanoparticle that could safely and effectively deliver vaccines for diseases such as HIV and malaria.

The new particles consist of concentric fatty spheres that can carry synthetic versions of proteins normally produced by viruses. These synthetic particles elicit a strong immune response – comparable to that produced by live virus vaccines – but should be much safer, says Darrell Irvine, author of the paper and an associate professor of materials science and engineering and biological engineering.

Such particles could help scientists develop vaccines against cancer as well as infectious diseases. In collaboration with scientists at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, Irvine and his students are now testing the nanoparticles’ ability to deliver an experimental malaria vaccine in mice.

Vaccines protect the body by exposing it to an infectious agent that primes the immune system to respond quickly when it encounters the pathogen again. In many cases, such as with the polio and smallpox vaccines, a dead or disabled form of the virus is used. Other vaccines, such as the diphtheria vaccine, consist of a synthetic version of a protein or other molecule normally made by the pathogen.

When designing a vaccine, scientists try to provoke at least one of the human body’s two major players in the immune response: T cells, which attack body cells that have been infected with a pathogen; or B cells, which secrete antibodies that target viruses or bacteria present in the blood and other body fluids.

For diseases in which the pathogen tends to stay inside cells, such as HIV, a strong response from a type of T cell known as “killer” T cell is required. The best way to provoke these cells into action is to use a killed or disabled virus, but that cannot be done with HIV because it’s difficult to render the virus harmless.

To get around the danger of using live viruses, scientists are working on synthetic vaccines for HIV and other viral infections such as hepatitis B. However, these vaccines, while safer, do not elicit a very strong T cell response.

Importantly, the particles also elicit a strong antibody response. Niren Murthy, associate professor at Georgia Institute of Technology, says the new particles represent “a fairly large advance,” though he says that more experiments are needed to show that they can elicit an immune response against human disease, in human subjects. “There’s definitely enough potential to be worth exploring it with more sophisticated and expensive experiments,” he says.

The work has been described in the Feb. 20 issue of Nature Materials. (ANI)

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Amnesty Reports on Ivory Coast Abuses

Selah Hennessy, VOA

Human rights abuses have been committed by forces loyal to the incumbent leader of Ivory Coast Laurent Gbagbo and by forces loyal to his rival Alassane Ouattara, an Amnesty International investigation reported Tuesday.

Gaetan Mootoo is one of the Amnesty researchers who went to Ivory Coast to investigate human rights abuses there. The team stayed for four weeks.  “Human rights violations are being committed by both the security forces loyal to Laurent Gbagbo and by the Forces Nouvelles, an armed opposition group which is supporting Alassane Ouattara,” Mootoo said.

Alassane Ouattara is internationally recognized as the winner of the November election but Laurent Gbagbo, who has been president since the year 2000, is refusing to step down.

The Amnesty research has found that forces loyal to Mr. Gbagbo have committed extrajudicial executions, rape, and used excessive force. Amnesty says a number of people have also disappeared after being arrested.

But Amnesty says the Forces Nouvelles, former rebels loyal to Mr. Outtara, have also been responsible for abuses.

Mootoo says they received credible testimonies of rape, arbitrary detention, and ill treatment by members of the Forces Nouvelles in the western region it controls. He says African leaders who arrived in Ivory Coast Monday in order to try to mediate the situation need to address violations on both sides of the political divide.

“What we would like the African Union to do is to put Human Rights on the agenda of both parties so that they are aware of what is happening in that country,” Mootoo said.

Rinaldo Depagne is a senior West Africa analyst with the International Crisis Group. He’s based in Dakar, Senegal.  He says Amnesty International should make a clear distinction between abuses carried out by either side. “It’s very important to highlight the abuse on both sides,” he said. “But it is also very important not to put them in the current circumstances on the same level because they are not.”

He says Mr. Gbagbo is carrying out what he calls a “real strategy of terror”. On Monday Ivorian troops broke up demonstrations calling for Mr. Gbagbo to step down – according to witnesses several people were killed.

Depagne says the situation in the West is specific to that region.  Human Rights Groups, including New York-based Human Rights Watch, say the far western regions of Ivory Coast are characterized by a breakdown of the rule of law and that assaults, rapes, and robbery are regularly carried out with impunity.

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