Gambian President Yahya Jammeh.

Gambian President Yahya Jammeh is either lucky or paranoid. After all, it isn&’t often that a head of state lifts the veil on the second plot to overthrow him in less than five years. That&’s what happened last week when Gambia&’s Attorney General announced it was charging ten people, including some top military brass, of treason for planning a coup. Their plan: traffic in drugs and use the proceeds to buy a shipload of guns, hire foreign mercenaries, and launch an attack on Banjul from nearby Guinea Bissau.
To be sure, stranger things have happened in West Africa. But the impressive thing ‹ if you take the government at its word ‹ is that a similar plan to overthrow Jammeh was hatched and foiled in a flurry of arrests before, in 2006. At the time, critics including human rights activists speculated that the coup plot was a self-serving fabrication, allowing Jammeh to consolidate power by purging the military of dissenters and cracking down on press freedoms.
The whole world can go to hell. If I want to ban any newspaper, I will, with good reason, he was quoted as saying after shutting down the leading independent newspaper for its coverage of the 2006 coup plot.
No one has suggested the latest coup plot was a fake, and evidence will be presented in Gambia&’s High Court in Banjul in the comings weeks. What will be the verdict for human rights and democracy?

The infamous gold mines of Eastern Congo.
Former rebels in the Democratic Republic of Congo who now serve in the army are running mafia-style extortion rackets in the mines, campaigners say.
The country has some of the world’s richest mines, which provide minerals to the global electronics industry. Ex-rebels of the CNDP group are said to have gained far greater control of the mines than they did as insurgents.
Campaign group Global Witness says the government and international community have failed to demilitariZe the mines. The ongoing conflict in Eastern Congo, which has claimed some six million lives in a little more than a decade, has long revolved over access to its mineral wealth, not just by DR Congo but also its neighbour Rwanda through its proxy forces.

After last year’s high profile government offensive against one rebel group which controlled many of the mines in Eastern Congo, the military has moved in and transferred power to a competing armed group. A move to integrate rebels from the CNDP – whose leader Laurent Nkunda has been under house arrest in Rwanda since last year – into Congo’s national army has seen them enjoying more control of the country’s mineral wealth than ever before, according to Global Witness investigators. In one mine in South Kivu, civilian miners claimed they were being forced to pay $10 each to the military for permission to spend a night working in the mines.

Researchers say that instead of protecting civilians, the military is taxing them illegally, and subjecting them to abuse. They also claim that high profile international companies are still knowingly sourcing minerals from these militarized mines – a contravention of UN sanctions, which campaigners say are not being enforced.

Muslim men detained at a police station for questioning about the murders that occurred.

JOS, Nigeria (AP) ‹ Christians and Muslims once shared their lives together in Nigeria’s fertile central belt, buying each other’s goods in mixed neighborhoods and cultivating each other’s farms across a sun-baked plateau. But growing religious hatred, political and ethnic rivalries, and increasing poverty have led to two outbursts of savage violence already this year. Men, women, children and even babies were butchered, and that harmony seems lost forever. Now, many people carry weapons and man impromptu road blocks, fearful of the military, the police and each other.
Last month’s bloodshed was mostly about revenge: Christian villages near the city of Jos were attacked before dawn, less than two months after Muslims were targeted and a mosque torched. Hundreds had been killed in January, their corpses stuffed into wells and sewage pits.
Survivors of the weekend attack say simple, one-room houses were set ablaze, the flames illuminating villages that have no electricity. Residents, mostly of the minority Berom ethnic group, ran from their burning homes. Assailants with machetes were waiting. Many of those who were cut down were children. At least 200 people died. One 20-year-old man arrested for allegedly taking part in the attacks said his family members died at the hands of rioters in January. Of those who were attacked, he said: There are some people that kill all our parents. We went to avenge what they did to us.”
Nigeria, a nation of 150 million people, is almost evenly split between Sunni Muslims in the north and the predominantly Christian south. The recent bloodshed has been happening in central Nigeria, where dozens of ethnic groups vie for control of the nation’s fertile middle belt.” Jos is a mini-Nigeria. All segments of Nigeria are here,” said state police commissioner Ikechukwu Aduba.
After the January violence, human rights groups said text messages had been sent with the addresses of mosques and churches. Texts also offered instructions on how to dispose of bodies. One read: Kill them before they kill you.” Survivors said the weekend attackers asked people Who are you?” in Fulani, a language used mostly by Muslims, and killed those who did not answer back in Fulani. Aduba, though, said some attackers had been paid by organizers to commit the killings Sunday, but he declined to give any specifics.
National leaders appear to have little control over this region in Africa’s most populous nation. The police and army failed to prevent these horrific massacres. Acting President Goodluck Jonathan promised security forces will bring the city and outlying areas where 1 million people live under control, but many of Jos’ Protestant Christians fear the Muslim-dominated police force and military.
Local youths armed with kitchen knives and machetes have formed self-protection gangs in neighborhoods and scrutinize each passing vehicle.
Sixty kilometers (38 miles) from Jos, in the village of Ku-Got, men armed with machetes, homemade swords, slingshots, and bows and arrows stand guard amid arid cornfields. Barricades made of boulders and cacti manned by frightened locals block many roads. Nigerian security forces rarely, if ever, patrol these areas. They’re usually beyond cell phone range and there’s no electricity.
It’s clear these people are unprotected here. If you have to carry a bow and arrows in your own town, you are unprotected,” said Mark Lipdo, who leads a Christian foundation in Jos.
Despite once working on farms belonging to the Muslim Fulani ethnic group, the Berom people of Ku-Got now look out over the silhouetted mountains and worry that armed Fulani herders will be coming down the ridge. Villagers say they buried two old women killed by Fulani raiders last week. The attackers razed their homes, broke a glass pulpit at the Christian church and destroyed the community’s only satellite television receiver. They want to inherit the land,” said the Rev. Joshua T. Dafom, who preaches at the church. They want to wipe us out to inherit the land to graze their animals.”
Fulani community leader Sale Bayari denied that Fulanis took part in last month’s killings. He says groups of armed Fulanis now guard their herds of cattle rather than watching over their animals alone and unarmed as they once did. The men fear another guerrilla war” against the ethnic group that left many of them dead during the January rioting.
Bayari says they are prepared: My people have an instinct for survival,” he said. Bayari is being sought by police for allegedly inciting the attacks. He spoke to The Associated Press by mobile telephone from a neighboring state.
Plateau state, of which Jos is the capital, has long been known as The Home of Peace and Tourism.” It has unspoiled savannas, wild animals like leopards and hippos, waterfalls and curious rock outcroppings. But the monicker is now a sad irony.
Jos was also once a hub for tin mining, but its economic fortunes have waned in the last decades. Muslims are locked out of stable government jobs because the state views them as settlers, not Christian indigenes.” Christians have a strained relationship with the Hausa-speaking Muslims who run businesses and live in the region. All these tensions boiled over in September 2001 in rioting that killed more than 1,000 people. Mobs of Christian young men roved the streets of Jos, asking people if they were Christian or Muslim. When a person answered Muslim, the mob would attack with knives, machetes and sticks. Another convulsion of violence hit in 2004, in which 700 people were killed. More than 300 residents died during a similar upheaval in 2008.
Now, instead of talk of peace, there is talk of more revenge and of pre-emptive attacks. Plateau state has become a jungle,” Bayari said.

Militants in Nigeria’s oil-producing region are said to be re-arming.

    Militants in Nigeria’s oil-producing region detonated two car bombs earlier this week near a government building where officials were discussing an amnesty deal, showing their resolve to resume attacks after an agreement to bring peace and economic benefits to the area unraveled. Two people were injured and windows were blown out of the meeting room in an attack that was heard on live TV. The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, or MEND, warned that the bombings in Warri are part of a new wave of attacks coming to Delta state, which remains deeply impoverished despite its oil wealth. Œ’The deceit of endless dialogue and conferences will no longer be tolerated,” the group said in a statement e-mailed to reporters just before the attack.
    The bombings did not immediately affect global oil prices, which in the past have risen after pipelines and oil companies operating in Nigeria were attacked. MEND’s attacks last year cut Nigeria’s oil production by roughly 1 million barrels a day, allowing Angola to surge ahead as Africa’s top oil producer.
    MEND e-mailed a statement to reporters Monday minutes before the bombing, urging that the government building and nearby facilities be evacuated. Just before the bombs went off, Delta state spokesman Linus Chima told The Associated Press that Œ’there is nothing to worry about at all.”
    On the live broadcast carried by African Independent Television, a Nigerian satellite channel, an explosion could be heard, halting a speaker in mid-sentence. A man’s voice then urged those inside to remain calm. Footage broadcast later showed flames and smoke rising from a nearby roadway. Witnesses said the blasts blew out windows in the meeting room, where three state governors and a federal minister had gathered.
    Œ’I think it was a deliberate attempt to sabotage the peace talks,” Chima said afterward. He said two people were hurt but did not identify them.
    A government-sponsored amnesty deal to offer cash payments to militants foundered in recent months in the absence of President Umaru Yar’Adua, who pushed for the deal last year but has not been running the country since late November due to illness. Vice President Goodluck Jonathan, who is from the Delta, is the acting president but hasn’t pacified the militants. Œ’They obviously feel time has run out and they needed to launch a new string of attacks,” said Kissy Agyeman-Togobo, a political analyst with IHS Global Insight.
    In a brief statement, a spokesman for Jonathan said the acting president believes that Œ’the problems in the region, being human- and development-related, are such that require time to be addressed.”
    The militants have used car bombs before. In April 2006, MEND claimed responsibility for attacks on an army barracks and an oil refinery during which two people were killed. It also detonated a car bomb outside a state governor’s office in December 2006.

Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi shown at last year’s African Union meeting.

ABUJA (Reuters) – Nigeria has recalled its ambassador to Libya and questioned whether the north African country is sponsoring violence after Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi said Nigeria should split along religious lines.
The Nigerian Foreign Ministry said it had recalled Ambassador Isah Mohammed for urgent consultations after Gaddafi’s comments, which come as Nigeria tries to contain violent clashes between Muslim and Christian gangs which have killed hundreds of people around the central city of Jos.
    The Nigerian parliament meanwhile passed a motion late on Thursday urging the government to order an investigation by the African Union into whether Libya was supplying infiltrators to destabilise the country. The insensitive and oftentimes irresponsible utterances of Colonel Gaddafi, his theatrics and grandstanding at every auspicious occasion have become too numerous to recount. These have diminished his status and credibility as a leader to be taken seriously, the Nigerian Foreign Ministry said. His comments on the crisis in Jos, Plateau state, are most unacceptable and unbecoming of any leader who claims to advocate and champion the cause of African integration and unity.
    Gaddafi said in a speech to students this week that the Jos crisis was a deep conflict of religious nature and suggested splitting Nigeria along religious lines would stop bloodshed and burning of places of worship, according to a regional news service. He praised the example of India and Pakistan, where he said partition had saved many lives. He also stated that: It’s became clear… that Nigeria does not consist of two parts, The Yoruba people in the west and south demand independence, while the Igbo people live in the east and south. It’s became clear that the Ijaw people demand independence and the [Hausa] people in the north call for the establishment of the [Hausa] state.
    Gaddafi, who was until recently the head of the African Union, has frequently stirred controversy in his dealings with sub-Saharan Africa. He has long championed a United States of Africa but many south of the Sahara question his ambitions, saying his vision of a unified continent includes him being in charge of it.

The infamous murderer and criminal mastermind, Charles Taylor of Liberia, at his criminal trial in The Hague, Netherlands, last year.

The Hague — The windows of Fatou Bensouda’s office high up in the International Criminal Court’s headquarters here offer her a sweeping view of orderly Dutch flatlands. But her attention is turned to her native Africa, on the chaos and killing at the heart of the court’s first atrocities cases. Fatou Bensouda is preparing prosecutions of African warlords. Mrs. Bensouda, a 45-year-old Gambian with an open and easy manner, is one of the court’s top officials. She is the deputy to the chief prosecutor, and is in charge of trials concerning war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.
    All of the cases set to be taken up by the five-year-old court so far involve Africa, and the people she hopes to try include a list of warlords from four nations, leaders who were most prominent in Africa’s recent conflagrations, some of which continue today.
    The Darfur region of Sudan looms large on that agenda, because on Tuesday the prosecution plans to file its first criminal charges linked to the conflict between the Sudanese government and the rebel fighters. The prosecution will disclose the names of several senior figures it believes to be among those most responsible for Darfur’s devastating bloodshed and human disaster. Other names are expected to follow. The arrest of the Sudanese suspects is not certain. Court officials said Sudan, while insisting it was cooperating, had done its best to obstruct the court’s investigations, ordered by the United Nations Security Council two years ago.
    In one of the newly outfitted courtrooms, though, Mrs. Bensouda has already met one of the warlords on her list. Thomas Lubanga, a Congolese citizen and once a powerful militia leader, has been charged with conscripting and abusing children, some as young as 10, during the fighting in the country’s Ituri region. He is the only suspect in the court’s custody, and his trial, expected later this year, will be the first since the tribunal opened for business in 2002.
    Besides Darfur, other cases under investigation involve the civil war in Congo and conflicts in Uganda and the Central African Republic, which have caused tens of thousands of deaths and created millions of refugees. Requests for the investigations, except in the case of Darfur, came from the countries themselves, but that has not prevented concern among Africans that their continent is the new court’s principal target. Mrs. Bensouda calmly dismisses that notion. This court does not intend to focus only on Africans; it will prove that in the future, she said. But at the moment, Africa clearly presents the gravest situations. This is also our court. It is not imposed on us ‹ we want to believe in it, she continued, pointing out that of the 104 nations who are now full members of the court, among the first to sign on were numerous African states. Some larger nations, including China, Russia and the United States, which distrust the court’s powers, are not members.

Mrs. Bensouda’s country, Gambia, has mostly escaped the kind of serious violence on which her career now focuses. But it was her revolt against widespread injustice that drew her to the law from an early age.

I was not suffering, but around me there were many victims of violence and crime, often women, who had no means to defend themselves, she said. One of her uncles, a judge, had a deep influence on me.

Today, Mrs. Bensouda is a prosecutor who, over the course of a career that now spans two decades, has gained wide experience, rising to become her country’s minister of justice and a senior prosecutor at the United Nations tribunal dealing with the Rwandan genocide in the 1990s.

She has long worked for gaining more legal protection for women, by having laws changed at home, and by emphasizing large-scale sexual abuse of women during conflicts.

It was her past as an advocate for women’s legal rights that led many women’s groups to applaud her election to the International Court ‹ and now, more recently, to criticize her, along with the broader prosecution strategy in Mr. Lubanga’s case.

Human rights advocates have said the Congolese trial has been far too narrow in its scope, focusing only on charges of conscription of children by Mr. Lubanga, rather than addressing the worst crimes of the militia under his command.

Last year, eight human rights groups, known for their support for the court, wrote an open letter to the chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, deploring that two years of investigations had not produced a broader range of charges. It was well known, the letter said, that Mr. Lubanga, leader of the Union of Congolese Patriots, a violent militia, has committed numerous other serious crimes, including murder, torture and sexual violence.

In a meeting with the prosecutor, some human rights activists said that prosecuting only child conscription, which war victims do not regard as serious as the many killings, rapes and mutilations, sent the wrong signal to victims.

Yes, we have been criticized, Mrs. Bensouda said, but we believe that the problem of child soldiers is very, very serious. Some are turned into killers, others are used as sex slaves. It is affecting a whole generation of children who are very difficult to reintegrate into society. Fighting is often all they know. It’s a problem in many places, and we want to highlight this here.

According to a United Nations report, after the Congolese conflict more than 18,000 children were released from armed groups and thousands more escaped on their own in the past two years. Worldwide, as many as a quarter-million young children are forced to serve in wars, by some estimates.

Torture, rape and other sexual offenses, she said, were very much part of the other investigations before the court. As for Mr. Lubanga, she added, for now he will be tried for child conscription because that is where we had the best evidence at the time we issued charges.

Large portions of Somalia’ capital, Mogadishu, are presently in the control of the Al Shabab militants (above), who have chopped off heads, banned music and brought a harsh and alien version of Islam to the country.

MOGADISHU, Somalia ‹ The Somali government is preparing a major offensive to take back this capital block by crumbling block, and it takes just a listen to the low growl of a small surveillance plane circling in the night sky overhead to know who is surreptitiously backing that effort. Forces of the transitional government in Somalia control only a part of the capital, Mogadishu. It’s the Americans, said Gen. Mohamed Gelle Kahiye, the new chief of Somalia’s military, who said he recently shared plans about coming military operations with American advisers. They’re helping us.
    That American assistance could be crucial to the effort by Somalia’s government to finally reassert its control over the capital and bring a semblance of order to a country that has been steeped in anarchy for two decades. For the Americans, it is part of a counterterrorism strategy to deny a haven to Al Qaeda, which has found sanctuary for years in Somalia’s chaos and has helped turn this country into a magnet for jihadists from around the world.
    The United States is increasingly concerned about the link between Somalia and Yemen, a growing extremist hot spot, with fighters going back and forth across the Red Sea in what one Somali watcher described as an Al Qaeda exchange program. But it seems there has been a genuine shift in Somali policy, too, and the Americans have absorbed a Somali truth that eluded them for nearly 20 years: If Somalia is going to be stabilized, it is going to take Somalis. This is not an American offensive, said Johnnie Carson, the assistant secretary of state for Africa. The U.S. military is not on the ground in Somalia. Full stop. He added, There are limits to outside engagement, and there has to be an enormous amount of local buy-in for this work.
    Most of the American military assistance to the Somali government has been focused on training, or has been channeled through African Union peacekeepers. But that could change. An American official in Washington, who said he was not authorized to speak publicly, predicted that American covert forces would get involved if the offensive, which could begin in a few weeks, dislodged Qaeda terrorists. What you’re likely to see is airstrikes and Special Ops moving in, hitting and getting out, the official said.
    Over the past several months, American advisers have helped supervise the training of the Somali forces to be deployed in the offensive, though American officials said that this was part of a continuing program to build the capacity of the Somali military, and that there has been no increase in military aid for the coming operations. The Americans have provided covert training to Somali intelligence officers, logistical support to the peacekeepers, fuel for the maneuvers, surveillance information about insurgent positions and money for bullets and guns.
    Washington is also using its heft as the biggest supplier of humanitarian aid to Somalia to encourage private aid agencies to move quickly into newly liberated areas and deliver services like food and medicine to the beleaguered Somali people in an effort to make the government more popular. Whenever Somalia has hit a turning point in the past, the United States has been there, sometimes openly, sometimes not.
    In 1992, shortly after the central government imploded, Marines stormed ashore to help feed starving Somalis. In early 2006, when an Islamist alliance was poised to sweep the country, the C.I.A. teamed up with warlords to stop them, and when that backfired, the American military covertly supported an Ethiopian invasion. Last summer, when Somalia’s transitional government was nearly toppled by insurgents linked to Al Qaeda, the American government hastily shipped in millions of dollars of weapons.
    Since then, the insurgents’ imperative to retake the capital, and eventually other parts of the country, has grown, American officials say, as Al Qaeda has even considered relocating some of its leaders from Pakistan to here. American officials said several high-ranking Qaeda agents were still active in Somalia, including Fazul Abdullah Mohamed, one of the suspected bombers of the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, who is now believed to be building bombs for the Islamist insurgent group known as Al Shabab.
    The Somali government has tried limited offensives before and has failed, leaving much of the country in the hands of Al Shabab, who have chopped off heads, banned music and brought a harsh and alien version of Islam to Somalia. But officials say that this offensive, or at least the preparations for it, feels different. First, the government has the advantage of numbers, about 6,000 to 10,000 freshly trained troops, compared with about 5,000 on the side of Al Shabab and its allies. In the past six months, Somalia has farmed out young men to Djibouti, Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya and even Sudan for military instruction and most are now back in the capital, waiting to fight. There are also about 5,000 Ugandan and Burundian peacekeepers, with 1,700 more on their way, and they are expected to play a vital role in backing up advancing Somali forces. The government is also better armed and equipped. Parked in neat rows behind Villa Somalia, the president’s hilltop villa in the center of Mogadishu, are newly painted military trucks, tanks, armored personnel carriers and dozens of technicals, pickup trucks with their windshields sawed off and a cannon riveted on the back of each one. The government also recently bought 10 Chevrolet ambulances. There seems to be a qualitative difference, too. Somalia’s forces are now led by General Gelle, a colonel in Somalia’s army decades ago who most recently was an assistant manager at a McDonald’s in Germany. He is known among Somali war veterans as one of the best Somali officers still alive.
    Many Somalia observers are confident that the offensive will push back Al Shabab. The question is what will happen afterward. To take you need force, to hold you need discipline, said Ahmed Abdisalam, a deputy prime minister in the last Somali government. What’s going to guarantee those troops don’t turn on the population?

President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the first elected female head of state in Africa, has announced plans to run for re-election in 2010.

MONROVIA, LIBERIA ‹ When she pleaded for her life, as taunting rebel soldiers vowed to bury her alive, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, now the Liberian president, remembers defending herself with her most basic strength: You can’t do this. To this day, she is not sure why they spared her, but since she was jailed in a coup uprising in 1980 and later watched Liberia shattered in a bloody 14-year civil war, Mrs. Sirleaf has turned to mothers and women for popular support and to rebuild a country that essentially failed. Women hold six of the top positions in her cabinet of 22 ‹ the Foreign, Commerce, Justice, Agriculture, Sports and Gender ministries. Mrs. Sirleaf is assertive about why they rose in the government of the first woman democratically elected to lead an African state.
    Women have stronger commitment. They work harder. They’re honest, and the experience justifies it, Mrs. Sirleaf, 71, said in an interview in the Foreign Ministry building where she maintains her office. In every time and every place I’ve worked, wherever there has been a scandal, wherever there has been indication of impropriety, it’s always been men.
    As Mrs. Sirleaf prepares to run for re-election next year, she is not free from controversy. While the United Nations peacekeeping force in Liberia is winding down, she faces pressure from the nation’s truth and reconciliation commission, which urged that she and dozens of others be banned for 30 years from holding public office for their roles in the war. She has conceded that she gave $10,000 while abroad in the late 1980s to a rebel group led by Charles Taylor, then a warlord, but for humanitarian services.
    In Liberia, she contends, men are more tempted by corruption. In an African context, men have too much of an extended family. They have too many obligations outside their families and homes, so the demands on them are harder and more intense.
    At the outset of her election campaign in 2005, Mrs. Sirleaf took on corruption as Public Enemy Number One. She has since had to confront cold reality in a nation of 3.5 million people who struggle with an 85 percent unemployment rate, where 60 percent of the population is under 25 years old.
    Mrs. Sirleaf, a Harvard-trained economist, established a structure for combating graft with an anti-corruption commission and a code of conduct for public servants. The rules ended up snaring two government ministers, including her close relative, A.B. Johnson, who resigned last month as internal affairs minister in a scandal over spending of a community development fund. She said she was personally betrayed by those former ministers but that Liberia was still overcoming the corruption of values through war and survival. People sought public positions because they could engage in extortion for small services rendered, she said. What we have done is to expose it.
    Mrs. Sirleaf says she is running for re-election to achieve ambitions that stalled with the global economic crisis. I want to be sure I leave a legacy behind and I made a difference, she said.