DEMOCRACY NOW

LATEST:

Grab the widget  Tech Dreams

Latest on Democracy

Botswana deports 13 000 Zimbabweans

Wednesday, July 29, 2009



By GETRUDE GUMEDE


ZIMBABWE – PLUMTREE – The Botswana government has between April and June this year deported over 13 000 Zimbabweans from that country, The Zimbabwe Telegraph reports.

The acting Regional Immigration Officer, Plumtree, Mr Hebet Mudzvova said relations with the Tswana were “fairly deplorable”.

“There are reports of these people using the military to control queues at their side of the border. Some Zimbabwean who are deported are telling us horrific stories of their treatment at the hands of that country’s law enforcement agents. They speak of people being beaten up with sjamboks which is against International Human Rights,” said Mr Mudzvova.

He said deportations are massive with two days this month having been an exception with nine trucks bringing in deportees on a single day.

He said on the average four trucks a day bring in deportees and noted that the deportations increase when there is a public holiday in Botswana.

On 18 July nine trucks, seven from Gaborone and two from Selibe Pikwe while nine came in on 20 July all from Gaborone all brought in deportees.

Mr Mudzvova could not be drawn to say how many people were deported on the two days.

According to statistics made available by Immigration authorities a total of 6 463 people were deported in April with 4 228 males, 1 999 women and 236 children.

In May the figure went down to 3 128 and of this total 87 were children.

In June 3 707 people were deported, 2 390 being male, 1 159 female and 97 children.

After going through Immigration formalities the deportees are referred to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), which then screens the deportees before giving them assistance to travel back to the districts of origin.

Source: The Zimbabwe Telegraph

Read more...

Mauritania and the African Union; All is rather easily forgiven


CAIRO

From The Economist print edition

A coup-maker becomes a civilian president


ALMOST a year after General Muhammad Ould Abdelaziz took power at the head of a military junta, he has stripped off his uniform and got himself elected as Mauritania’s civilian president. Various governments and international bodies, led by the African Union (AU), at first denounced his coup. Now they seem likely to welcome Mauritania fully back into the community of democracies.

Mr Abdelaziz won nearly 53% of the votes cast in the first round of an election on July 18th, forgoing the need for a run-off. His main rival, Messaoud Ould Boulkheir, who had been the parliament’s speaker, strongly opposing last year’s coup, got only 16%, ahead of three other candidates. He called Mr Abdelaziz’s victory an “electoral coup d’état” and said there had been massive fraud. But observers from the AU, the Arab League (of which Mauritania is a member) and the International Francophone Organisation endorsed the result.

Once Mauritania’s Constitutional Court approves, the old regime in new clothes under the original coup-maker is expected to repair its relations with the AU, the European Union (EU) and the United States, as well as the World Bank and the IMF. All these governments and bodies will argue that, thanks to the poll, they have not, in fact, endorsed a coup.

Mauritania has had a chequered history. One of the world’s poorest countries, it has been plagued by drought, locusts, and a lot of military coups. Maaouya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya ran the show from 1984-2005. In 2007 the country held its first fully democratic presidential poll. But a year later its current leader seized power from Sidi Muhammad Ould Sheikh Abdellahi, who had been recognised as the country’s legitimate leader after a genuine election victory only a year before.

As a result, development aid and a number of trade deals had been frozen and Mauritania’s membership of the AU suspended. General Abdelaziz, as he then was, found himself facing threats of sanctions from the AU and the EU unless “constitutional order” returned. Despite Libya’s and Qatar’s mediating efforts, the main opposition rejected the general’s proposal for a fresh election. In the end, Senegal’s president, Abdoulaye Wade, brokered a deal. Mr Abdellahi formally resigned, a transitional unity government briefly took shape, and the coup-maker got his democratic mandate. But it is not yet clear if ordinary Mauritanians think they have got a decent deal.

Source:The Economist

Read more...

Guinea-Bissau holds run-off vote

Tuesday, July 28, 2009


Youths relax near an election poster for Malam Bacai Sanha, candidate for the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) on June 27, 2009 in Bissau
Ruling party candidate Malam Bacai Sanha is seen as the front-runner

Guinea-Bissau has held a run-off vote to replace President Joao Bernardo Vieira, who was assassinated in March.

The poll pits two former heads of state against each other - Malam Bacai Sanha, seen as the favourite, and Kumba Yala.

Guinea-Bissau has a history of coups and its people say they are tired of broken promises and violence, a BBC correspondent reports.

President Vieira was killed in March in apparent revenge for the death of the head of the army in a bomb blast.

Mr Vieira led Guinea-Bissau for most of the period after independence from Portugal in 1974 - serving as president for a total of 23 years between 1980 and 2009.

There were no reported incidents of violence during Sunday's voting, and turnout among the 600,000 registered voters was estimated to be similar to the first round at around 60%.

'Time has come'

BBC map

The first round of polling on 28 June saw Mr Sanha win nearly 40% of ballots, 10% more than Mr Yala, the AFP news agency reports.

When the two faced off in 2000, Mr Yala emerged as the winner.

In their final campaign rallies, both men repeated promises to bring peace and stability to the country.

Mr Sanha, who served as interim president from 1999-2000, is the candidate of the ruling PAIGC, the party of the 1970s struggle against Portuguese colonial rule.

This is the third time he has stood for president, having been defeated once by Koumba Yala and in 2005 by Mr Vieira.

His motto is "Hora Tchica" - meaning "the time has come".

Yala election poster
Koumba Yala oversaw a period of economic crisis

Mr Yala, who was overthrown in a 2003 coup, is the leader of the opposition PRS.

Many Bissau-Guineans hold him responsible for changing the political and economic course of the country for the worse, the BBC's Luis Cardador says.

During Mr Yala's presidency, the IMF and the World Bank suspended aid to the country after accusations of mismanagement and a string of sackings in the government.

But he is believed to have wide support within the military.

Our correspondent says in past elections, voting has largely gone along ethnic or religious lines, but many people are now so fed up with the situation that this seems to be changing.

Guinea-Bissau is cash-starved and heavily dependent on just one product - the cashew nut.

In recent years it has become a major transit point in drug smuggling between South America and Europe.

BBC

Read more...

Republic of Congo Votes for President, Amid Calls for Boycott

Thursday, July 23, 2009

Associated Press

BRAZZAVILLE, Republic of Congo – Voters cast their ballots Sunday in a presidential poll in the Republic of Congo, amid opposition calls for a boycott and accusations of fictitious voting lists.

Longtime President Denis Sassou-Nguesso faces 12 opponents but six of them -- including main challenger Mathias Dzon -- have called for voters in the tiny, oil-rich nation to stay home.

Polls in the capital opened at 7 a.m. Voter turnout appeared thin early Sunday morning in the capital, but election officials said they hoped activity would increase before polls closed at 6 p.m. local time.

"It is still too early to hope for a great multitude of voters," said Antoine Ngatse, chief of a polling station in a northern district of Brazzaville.

Mr. Sassou-Nguesso claimed power in 1979 after a coup and ruled until a 1992 election defeat. He seized power again in 1997 with help from Angolan troops. In 2002, he rewrote the constitution to give more power to the presidency and was re-elected.

Opposition members held a rally in the capital Friday with an estimated 4,000 attendees, where voters were told:

"Don't vote, stay at home." Opposition leaders said the country's voting lists were full of errors, the same accusation they made in 2007 during parliamentary elections.

But the Catholic church, the country's leading Christian denomination, has urged Republic of Congo's 4 million citizens to vote. Archbishop of Brazzaville Monseigneur Anatole Milandou encouraged voters last week to head to the polls Sunday instead of going to church, adding that the faithful could instead attend Mass on Saturday.

Maurice Gangoue, a worker for a human rights group named after the assassinated president of Burkina Faso, Thomas Sankara, said rifts and infighting among the opposition didn't allow the opposition to present a single front to challenge the president.

Despite opposition scrutiny, some residents said the president remains popular. Marie Alphonse, who teaches at the university Marien Ngouabi de Brazzaville, acknowledged the existence of "small errors" in the voting lists but said that former opposition leaders' support for the president made his case stronger.

Another victory would vault Mr. Sassou-Nguesso into an elite group of three-decade rulers in Africa. Other long-standing rulers include Angola's Jose Eduardo dos Santos, Equatorial Guinea's Teodoro Obiang, who both took power in 1979, and Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, who has ruled since 1980.

In May, a French judge called for an investigation into Mr. Sassou-Nguesso and two other African leaders on charges of money laundering and other alleged crimes linked to their wealth in France. The probe follows a complaint by Transparency International France, an association that tracks corruption, against Messrs. Sassou-Nguesso and Obiang of Equatorial Guinea. Gabon's Omar Bongo was also named in the probe but he has since died

Read more...

Ghana Visit Highlights Scarce Stability in Africa


Rebecca Blackwell/Associated Press

On Thursday, Ibrahim Kojo, a street vendor in Accra, hawked U.S. flags imprinted with President Obama's face.

Published: July 10, 2009

NIAMEY, Niger — Amid the fever of excitement over President Obama’s first visit to sub-Saharan Africa since taking office, the debate over why he chose Ghana has been almost as prevalent as the many bars, stores and barbershops bearing his name across the region.

The New York Times

Few African nations have had the political stability of Ghana.

Was it a not-so-subtle snub of Kenya, his father’s homeland? Even more broadly, was he giving short shrift to other African governments and citizens by visiting a single country on such a diverse continent?

Mr. Obama says he chose Ghana to “highlight” its adherence to democratic principles and institutions, ensuring the kind of stability that brings prosperity. “This isn’t just some abstract notion that we’re trying to impose on Africa,” he told AllAfrica.com. He added: “The African continent is a place of extraordinary promise as well as challenges. We’re not going to be able to fulfill those promises unless we see better governance.”

With that as his objective, a harsh reality emerged: Mr. Obama did not have too many options. From one end of the continent to the other, the sort of peaceful, transparent election that Ghana held last December is still an exception rather than the norm, analysts said. The same is true for the country’s comparatively well-managed economy.

“The choice was, in fact, quite limited,” said Philippe Hugon, an Africa expert at the Institut de Relations Internationales et Stratégiques in Paris. “It wasn’t huge.”

Countries like Botswana, Namibia and South Africa have consistently received better-than-average global scores for their governance in recent years, according to rankings based on World Bank research.

But a cartoon in this week’s Jeune Afrique, the French magazine widely followed on the continent, seemed to sum up Mr. Obama’s dilemma: John Atta-Mills, Ghana’s president, is depicted holding back the door of a hut labeled “West Africa” from which blood, a grenade and explosions with the names of various countries in the region are bursting.

The list of exploding countries, unstable countries, corrupt countries, is long. Military coups still break out with regularity, as in Guinea and Mauritania within the last year. Journalists in a number of countries continue to be killed, jailed, tortured, forced into exile or otherwise muzzled. A day after Mr. Obama’s visit to Ghana, the Congo Republic will hold elections that have already been attacked as flawed, after the country’s constitutional court recently rejected the candidacies of opponents to incumbent Denis Sassou-Nguesso, leaving the president as a heavy favorite.

Mr. Obama seemed to acknowledge as much in his interview, saying that the democratic progress in recent years had been accompanied by “some backsliding.” He even singled out Kenya as a worrisome example, noting the political paralysis that had plagued the country since its bout of postelection violence last year.

Despite the obvious wincing such criticism may cause, many Kenyans not only seem to understand Mr. Obama’s choice to visit Ghana, but endorse it. Kenyans often follow politics like a sport, so it was not uncommon to hear them in recent weeks describing Mr. Obama’s choice as a savvy one, insulating him from any accusations that he was favoring his father’s country.

That said, the gulf separating the West and many African leaders on fundamental issues like human rights was on display just last week. The African Union announced that it would refuse to cooperate with the International Criminal Court in its attempt to prosecute the Sudanese president, Omar Hassan Al-Bashir, for crimes against humanity, over the mass killings in Darfur. Even Mr. Atta-Mills was reported to back the refusal as “best for Africa.”

Human rights groups denounced the decision, as did some African leaders on Friday, when a smaller African Union panel headed by South Africa’s former president, Thabo Mbeki, backed the court’s indictment and called on the accused to appear in court, news agencies reported.

Despite the various rejections of the court, Mr. Obama’s top adviser for Africa, Michelle Gavin, praised for the African Union, telling reporters that it “has really been sort of forging ahead, commenting much more strongly than in the past on unconstitutional transfers of power.”

Yet some of the recent evidence from the continent only partly supports Ms. Gavin’s point. African leaders, for instance, flocked to the funeral of the recently deceased president of Gabon, Omar Bongo, lavishing praise and benedictions on a long-ruling autocrat widely seen in the West as having stolen his country’s oil wealth on the way to becoming immensely rich himself, while his country remained impoverished.

This region’s recent history underscores the extent to which Ghana is now an odd man out on the continent, after its own long history of dictatorship and coups: The election in December was extremely close, there was no violence, and the loser, the candidate of the party that had been in power, Nana Akufo-Addo, accepted his defeat without fuss.

Mr. Obama is expected to meet with Mr. Atta-Mills on Saturday, then deliver a speech to the country’s Parliament, after which he will visit Cape Coast Castle, a former slave trading post. And while his speech is meant for that audience, it will also be about his administration’s hopes to engage with the continent, including the responsibilities of both parties.

“It’s a big picture sort of framing of the way the president sees this relationship going forward,” Ms. Gavin said. “It’s definitely not a sort of laundry list of sets of programs.”

Peter Baker contributed reporting from L’Aquila, Italy.


Read more...

Doubt cast on Mauritania results

Sunday, July 19, 2009


Many Mauritanians are hoping that the first post-coup election will bring stability to the country [AFP]

Opposition candidates in Mauritania's presidential election have rejected early results showing an army general leading with 52.2 per cent of the vote.

The four politicians denounced the poll while supporters of General Ould Abdel Aziz celebrated the expected victory of their candidate on the streets of the capital Nouakchott on Saturday night.

The candidates said in a statement: "We firmly reject these prefabricated results, [and] we call on the international community to put in place an enquiry to shed some light on the electoral process."

Ould Boulkheir, one of the candidates, said: "The results which are starting to come out show that it is an electoral charade which is trying to legitimise the coup."

If the results are confirmed, Abdel Aziz - who led coup last year and resigned from the army to contest the elections - will become president without the need for a runoff.

Populist promises

Abdel Aziz deposed Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi as president in August, provoking international criticism.

He has promised cuts in food and fuel prices that are likely to endear him to Mauritanians, 40 per cent of whom live under the poverty line.

In depth

Mauritania at a crossroads
A 'road map' for Mauritania
Mauritania's coup in the making
Inside Story: Mauritania's political puzzle

Abdel Aziz's closest challenger is Messaoud Ould Boulkheir, parliamentary speaker and candidate of an anti-coup front, with 16.63 per cent of votes, the government figures show.

In third place is Ahmed Ould Daddah, the head of the main opposition party, with 13.89 per cent.

The electoral commission said voter turnout was at 61 per cent.

Saturday's elections are intended to restore constitutional democracy to this arid but potentially oil-rich country in northwest Africa.

Some 1.2 million of the nation's three million people were eligible to vote in the polls, which were monitored by international observers from the African Union, the Arab League and the association of Francophone countries.

The election had been put off for a month in order to end an opposition boycott.

Source:Al Jazeera and agencies


Read more...

Congo election results in court

Saturday, July 18, 2009

Brazzaville - An opposition presidential candidate on Friday asked Congo's constitutional court to throw out last weekend's vote that saw President Denis Sassou Nguesso re-elected in a landslide.

"I have just filed the appeal signed by Mr (Mathias) Dzon to ask for the cancellation" of the election, said Herve Ambroise Malonga, a lawyer for Dzon.

He said the complaint was based on allegations of ballot box stuffing, among other reasons.

Also on Friday, four candidates, including Dzon, held a news conference to denounce the vote results as being cooked up in the "laboratories of power".

Dzon, a 62-year-old former finance minister, had been seen as Sassou Nguesso's main rival but took a mere 2.3% of the votes.

He and five other candidates had called for a boycott of the election after allegations that the electoral list had been grossly overinflated.

Sassou Nguesso, who returned to power after civil war in 1997 and has run the Congo for a total of a quarter century, won Sunday's poll with 78.6% of the vote.

- SAPA

Read more...

Ghana Pundit News