Some parts of Africa may well have the most beautyful landscapes on earth. This is a picture from Rwanda. Rwanda in peace. Each of the mountains in the background climb higher than 4000 metres.

EU force chief in Chad warns ready to fight aggressors

NDJAMENA, 19 March 2008: The commander of the European Union force in Chad and the Central African Republic warned Wednesday that his troops will hit back at the first hint of attack.
French General Jean-Philippe Ganascia, who will eventually count 2,100 compatriots within the 3,700-strong deployment from 14 nations by May, is the commander on the ground of the force known as EUFOR.

He gave a press conference in Ndjamena two days after the EUFOR reached initial operational capacity, marking the start of a 12-month United Nations Security Council mandate.

"All physical or meaningful threats will draw a reaction from our side," Ganascia said.

"The rules governing the limits of how we can react are those set down by the UN," he said, referring to a September 2007 resolution which authorises "all necessary measures."

As of Monday, 1,750 troops were stationed in the area, the vast majority of them French, with Swedish and Finnish soldiers guarding a command centre in the Chadian capital Ndjamena.

A network of mini-bases in the east of Chad stretching right to the Sudanese border includes a functioning Italian hospital and an Irish-manned frontier outpost.

The mission's duty is to protect refugees in both countries from Sudan's conflict-wracked western Darfur region across their border, as well as Chadians and CAR villagers displaced by internal strife. They total more than 450,000 people.

Irish General Pat Nash leads the force from its headquarters just outside Paris.

Deployment was initially held up by difficulties raising the necessary ground and air power from EU nations.

A further delay was caused by a Chadian rebel assault on Ndjamena on February 2-3, which led to fierce fighting in the capital before a fractious alliance was repelled by government troops with French logistical support.

Even before its mandate officially began, a French EUFOR sergeant was fatally shot when his patrol vehicle accidentally crossed into Sudan and Sudanese forces "opened fire without warning", according to the French military.

Sudan last week said it wanted EU peacekeepers to pay tens of thousands of dollars in compensation for four nomads killed in the recovery of the body of the dead French soldier when a grenade exploded. (AFP)

They are still there, the genocidaires of 1994, hiding in the bush and waiting for another chance to kill people. Shall we believe that Kabila is not able to disarm them?

DRC-Rwanda: Kinshasa unable to disarm FDLR rebels

KINSHASA, 17 March 2008 (IRIN) - The deadline for Rwandan Hutu fighters in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to voluntarily disarm has expired without guns being handed in, because Kinshasa lacks the capacity to resolve the problem, analysts said.

The 15 January ultimatum was issued to the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) by the DRC government. It was based on an accord reached in November 2007 in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, between Rwanda and the Kinshasa government.
According to the DRC Defence Minister, Chikez Diemu, the period 1 January to 15 March should have been sufficient to persuade the FDLR fighters to lay down their arms and be repatriated if they so wished.

"After the deadline, we will be obliged to disarm them by force," the minister said.
Alan Doss, special representative of the UN Secretary-General and head of the UN Mission in the DRC (MONUC), however, said the awareness-raising period should be extended. "We agreed that awareness-raising among the FDLR should be pursued even if the initial initiatives failed to produce the expected results," he said.
That agreement was apparently reached at the recent meeting of representatives of the parties concerned in Brussels as part of the follow-up procedures after the Nairobi joint communiqué.

"The 15 March (deadline) was unrealistic given the complexity of the issues and the (preoccupation with) the Goma conference, which ended up with the agreement between Congolese armed groups and the government on a ceasefire," said David Munier, the International Crisis Group's head of research for central Africa.
"It is preferable, for the moment, that the work of awareness-raising be pursued and that all paths of dialogue be exhausted, including those aimed at a dialogue being entered into by the Rwandan government and Rwandan refugees in Congo who are not being sought on charges of involvement in the 1994 genocide," he added.
Philippe Biyoya, professor of political sciences at the Protestant University of Kinshasa, told IRIN: "The Congolese government does not have the means to disarm, by itself, either by persuasion or force, the Rwandan Hutu combatants; it would not be able to unless it had sufficient UN support."

The DRC government, he added, was well aware of this, which is why it had asked the Rwandan authorities to put together the necessary conditions to free up political space for the Hutus and accept a prior inter-Congolese dialogue.
A UN Security Council resolution of 13 March, which called on the combatants to disarm "without further delay and without prior conditions demanded of the Congolese authorities and MONUC", noted that the UN would provide the necessary support to the DRC to achieve FDLR disarmament.
The Security Council also called on the FDLR to immediately stop recruiting and using children, to free all the children associated with them and stop gender-based violence.
Intervention
Lt-Col Jean-Paul Dietrich, MONUC's military spokesman, said the force would be ready to support the DRC army. "The military option is the last resort, but it is necessary to continue with diplomacy and prepare military intervention which could happen any day but not as soon as tomorrow," Dietrich added.
MONUC, he added, had prepared sites for welcoming combatants who disarm, but these were relatively few.

Doss explained: "The Security Council envisages the adoption of sanctions against FDLR leaders who refuse to cooperate in implementing the Nairobi communiqué."
The FDLR, estimated to number more than 6,000, of whom 30 percent are Congolese, continues to operate on DRC soil. The group consists of a variety of armed Hutu groups, many of them remnants of the militias that carried out Rwanda's 1994 genocide.
The fighters have been involved in sporadic clashes with armed groups in eastern DRC, despite the cessation of hostilities agreement signed in January by the Congolese combatants.

The DRC and Rwanda agree they will not support rebels who seek to undermine the authority of either state, military commanders of both countries said.
"We are committed not to support the FDLR, and Rwanda, for its part, has pledged not to support Laurent Nkunda's group, the CNDP (Congrès National pour la Défense du peuple)," said general Dieudonne Kayembe, the chief general of DRC's armed forces.
He was speaking after meeting his Rwandan counterpart James Kaberebe in Goma over the weekend.
Kaberebe denied that Rwanda has supported the CNDP, saying allegations to the contrary were just rumours. "Dialogue can resolve any problems that may arise in relation to the FDLR," he said.

For all his mistakes on Rwanda in 1994, this time Kofi Annan has done it right. There is no other living politician who would have the knowledge and the skills to achieve this result:

African Genocide Averted

By ROGER COHEN
Published: March 3, 2008
NAIROBI, Keny

For Kofi Annan, the Kenyan peace negotiations began in a Geneva hospital.
The former UN secretary general was on his way to the airport on Jan. 15 when a fever obliged him to turn around. Doctors wanted him hospitalized for 10 days, ''so negotiations for my release after five days began right there.'' He used the time to place calls to U.S., European and African leaders.

His message, he told me, was clear: ''I said we have to make sure there's just one mediation process. Otherwise you have the protagonists trying to bottom shop, looking elsewhere if they don't like what you're offering. You get diplomatic tourism and that's no good.''

Kenya was burning. Kenya, the stable East African country from which international officials had fanned out to confront crises in Somalia, Rwanda and Darfur. Kenya, impossible mosaic of some 40 tribes that somehow held. That Kenya, 45 years after independence, was fissuring.

Annan, arriving on Jan 22, had one obsession: ''We can't let this happen to Kenya.'' Not after the one million dead between Rwanda and Darfur. Not after his UN tenure produced agreement at the world summit of 2005 on ''R2P'' the global ''responsibility to protect'' citizens in states whose own governments prove unable to do so.

''Kenya had been the safe haven in a tumultuous region and suddenly Kenya itself was going,'' Annan said. ''And when you have ethnic violence, if you don't mediate quickly, you get a hopeless situation.''

Yes, ethnic killing erupts like milk boiling up. Within weeks of the disputed Dec. 27 election, several hundred dead had pushed several hundred thousand people into flight. A single tribal murder is a huge dispersal multiplier: one dead, one thousand on the move. The math of national decomposition is implacable.
Luos killing Kikuyus. Kikuyus murdering in revenge. Kalenjins getting in the mix. Everywhere, ethnic lines being drawn in blood and ashes.

We've seen this movie once too often since the Cold War ended.
My colleague Jeffrey Gettleman, who has chronicled the Kenyan crisis with immense authority, speaks of ''Annan Zen.'' Annan needed that imperturbability. The atmosphere between the Kenyan president, Mwai Kibaki, who had been declared the narrow winner of a demonstrably rigged election, and Raila Odinga, the opposition leader who felt robbed, was ''very icy,'' Annan said.

A little over a month later, the remarkable power-sharing outcome can, I believe, serve as a model: Call it the Nairobi paradigm or Annan's R2P marker.
A regional organization, in this case the African Union, takes the lead in providing a mandate for swift preventive action. The UN Security Council issues a supportive statement. American power is used, not in sledgehammer mode, but with well-timed discretion. Intervention is choreographed by a single authoritative figure prepared to stay five weeks for peace.

Five weeks! Shades of Kissinger in the Middle East. I see Annan's persistence as a reminder of how shallow Bush administration peace pursuits have been, with the exception of Christopher Hill's North Korean labors.

Annan focused first on halting the killing because ''nobody could say I am not for stopping violence.'' He listened to calls for ''reruns, recounts,'' but knew ''bad decisions get people killed.'' He endured harangues from Martha Karua, the justice minister, who said she was ''breathless'' at how Annan was ''encouraging violence and lack of respect for the rule of law'' by demanding power sharing with Odinga.
Kibaki's team kept saying, ''We won it fair and square,'' as Odinga's countered, ''You stole it fair and square.'' Kibaki, a Kikuyu, talked of ''accommodating'' the opposition; Odinga, a Luo, bridled. If pushed, he would form ''an alternative government.''

''It took a while to convince them that there was no way either side could run the country without the other, that it was a perfect political gridlock,'' Annan told me.
He got a German official to explain grand coalitions. He got Jakaya Kikwete, the Tanzanian leader, to talk about how presidents and prime ministers work together. He was helped by President George W. Bush declaring during his recent African visit that ''there ought to be a power sharing agreement.''

Kibaki's foreign minister retorted that Kenya would not be ''given conditions by foreign states'' — the old anti-imperialist thing. But this was international intervention of another kind. The pressure cornered Kibaki. He ceded, empowering Odinga as a prime minister with authority anchored by constitutional change.
''When we talk of intervention, people think of the military,'' Annan said. ''But under R2P, force is a last resort. Political and diplomatic intervention is the first mechanism. And I think we've seen a successful example of its application.''
Some will quibble over technicalities, but Kenya kindled the somnolent spirit of R2P. We've also seen American might in subtler guise: listening better, applying soft power. That's another reason what happened in Nairobi matters so much.