(Akiit.com) More than 1,000 civilians have been killed in a western Ivory Coast town, a Catholic charity said Saturday, adding that the mass killings happened in an area under the control of forces fighting to install the country’s internationally recognized president.

The U.N. military spokesman said he had no information about mass killings in Duekoue, though he confirmed there are nearly 1,000 peacekeepers based there.

Spokesman Patrick Nicholson of the Roman Catholic charity Caritas said workers visited Duekoue on Wednesday and found hundreds of bodies of civilians killed by bullets from small-arms fire and hacked to death with machetes.

He said they estimated that more than 1,000 civilians were killed.

The International Federation of the Red Cross put the death toll at Duekoue at about 800, in separate and independent visits Thursday and Friday.

Nicholson, the Caritas spokesman, said the killings occurred over three days in a neighborhood controlled by fighters loyal to internationally recognized President Alassane Ouattara, though it was not clear who the perpetrators were.

“The massacre took place in the ‘Carrefour’ quarter of town, controlled by pro-Ouattara forces, during clashes on Sunday 27 March to Tuesday 29 March,” Nicholson said. “Caritas does not know who was responsible for the killing, but says a proper investigation must take place to establish the truth.”

He said the victims included many refugees from fighting elsewhere in the country, where rival forces had been battling over a disputed November election.

Caritas’ investigation would indicate that people were killed at close quarters in a small neighborhood of a town of just 50,000 people as pro-Ouattara fighters began a two-pronged assault that brought them swiftly to Abidjan, the commercial capital and seat of power, within days.

// The charges would be a strong blow to the embattled government of Ouattara, who is calling for entrenched incumbent leader Laurent Gbagbo to cede power after losing November’s poll.

Ouattara’s camp denied forces fighting for it were involved in any atrocities including in western Ivory Coast, but did not refer to the latest allegations. Efforts to reach Ouattara’s spokesman Saturday were unsuccessful. He did not respond to calls to his cell phone.

Previously, the United Nations put the death toll at 492 from four months of fighting to install rival leaders following disputed November elections.

Col. Chaib Rais, the U.N. military spokesman, told The Associated Press that nearly 1,000 peacekeepers at Duekoue “are protecting the Catholic Church with more than 10,000 (refugees) inside, and we have military camps in the area.”

But he said “I have no special report of (mass killings). There was fighting two days before, on Sunday, and people were killed, but I cannot confirm those numbers.”

Rais said there was fighting in and around the town on Sunday and Monday, between forces loyal to the rival leaders.

On Monday, fighters loyal to Ouattara said they took Duekoue. But Nicholson said interviews with survivors indicated pro-Ouattara forces had control of Carrefour neighborhood from Sunday.

ICRC spokeswoman Dorothea Krimitsas said “inter-communal violence” erupted there, apparently on Tuesday.

International and Ivorian Red Cross teams visited Duekoue Friday and saw a “huge number of bodies,” estimated at more than 800, she said.

“We think there is a risk that this kind of event can happen again and hope that by calling today again for protection for the civilian population, we hope that such events can be avoided in the future,” Krimitsas told The Associated Press by phone from Geneva.

The area has been a hotbed for conflict between two tribes that support rival leaders vying for power in Ivory Coast, the democratically elected Ouattara and Gbagbo, who refuses to accept his election defeat.

The International Organization of Migration said Friday that tens of thousands of refugees have overcrowded Duekoue and that others who had fled the violence in Duekoue “are now stranded along the route, in fear for their lives.”

It said some of those slaughtered apparently were killed by “mercenaries” from nearby Liberia. Liberian mercenaries have been reported to be fighting for both Gbagbo and Ouattara.

The Roman Catholic bishop for the area, the Right Rev. Gaspard Beby Gneba of Man, said he was called by a priest from Guiglo, a town near Duekoue that also is sheltering refugees. He said the priest told him refugees were dying and that they were burying two people on Saturday.

Gneba said tensions in the area are a mixture of political, ethnic and land rivalry, aggravated by the influx of tens of thousands of new Ivorian refugees and long-established refugees from neighboring Liberia. In January, an unknown number of people were killed in violence in which some homes were torched and others looted, he said.

Gneba said more than 30,000 refugees had flooded the town of about 50,000 since January. Many are being sheltered at the Salesian priests’ Mission of St. Theresa of the Baby Jesus.

“There’s a traumatic humanitarian situation there,” Gneba said. “They need everything: food, medicine, water, sanitation. People have lost everything, houses, clothes, they do not even have a mat to sleep on.”

Rais, the U.N. colonel, said there are nearly 400 peacekeepers based at Guiglo who were doing what they could to help with water and food.

Ouattara’s government, in a general statement Friday responding to allegations of abuses by Amnesty International, blamed any killings on Gbagbo forces acting as they retreated.
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(Akiit.com) JOHANNESBURG — The text message arrives with life-saving discretion: a neutral “see you at the clinic tomorrow” to remind patients to pick up a fresh batch of anti-AIDS drugs.

The free texts from South Africa’s largest HIV treatment site are part of a push in Africa to boost health by targeting the continent’s 624 million mobile phone subscribers.

“I check my cellphone all the time — I think that’s why it [the drug regimen] is working so well,” said patient Emily Moletsane, 40, in a queue at Johannesburg’s Themba Lethu clinic which averages more than 450 people a day.

About 10,000 people have opted for the txtAlert reminders, which have proven a stunning success. Missed appointments at the centre from 15 percent fell from in mid-2007 to just four percent today.

“When I started seeing this, I was also impressed,” said medical manager Thapelo Maotoe.

Africa is poor in landlines and hospital beds but rich in cellphones, which is why mobile health — mHealth — offers opportunities for providing care at a low cost, say experts.

In west Africa, 2,200 doctors in Ghana and all of Liberia’s 143 doctors have signed on to anti-poverty group Africa Aid’s MDNet network, allowing then to call or text other physicians for free. In Ghana, a national directory helps find the number to call.

Ghanian paediatrician Frank Serebour recently used the system to find a specialist in the capital Accra for emergency surgery on a newborn baby who had been brought to his hospital in Kumasi, 270 kilometres (170 miles) away.

“All I did was pick up the directory, found the relevant specialist, arrangements were made and when the ambulance arrived they were waiting for the patient,” he said.

More than 2.5 million calls have been made so far on the network, which partners with major mobile operators.

“I wish it could be duplicated in every African country. If only they could hook up every single health worker — nurse, midwife — onto the system,” said Serebour.

With the value of the mHealth sector estimated at up to 60 billion dollars, mHealth companies are on the rise, said Adele Waugaman, who manages a partnership between the UN Foundation and Vodafone.

“The opportunities for mHealth in Africa are nearly limitless. The continent carries a disproportionate share of the world’s disease burden, and some of the lowest per capita doctor to patient ratios,” she said.

“Mobile phones are now being looked to as a tool to help overcome some of these entrenched global health challenges.”

Seventeen years after being torn apart by genocide, Rwanda is trailblazing the use of technology to overcome challenges in a country with one doctor for every 18,000 people.

“These tools solve problems specific to developing countries, such as a lack of specialists and specialized services in rural areas that are only be available in urban areas,” Rwanda’s eHealth coordinator, Richard Gakuba, told AFP.

“Investment is still needed because this technology does not come cheaply and we still face infrastructure challenges.”

One project is TRACnet, developed by American firm Voxiva, which tracks HIV data but also sends reminders for reports to be filed, monitors drug stocks and delivers test results.

Diagnosis of HIV in babies has been slashed from four months to two weeks.
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(Akiit.com) I’m not buying the romanticism of sharing the pain of “fellow Africans.” But that doesn’t prevent me from sympathizing with their struggle.

John McWhorter is not buying the romanticism of sharing the pain of “fellow Africans.” But that doesn’t prevent him from sympathizing with their struggle.

Only now am I becoming able to make peace with something that has nagged at me lately: I don’t think of the protesters in Egypt as my brothers and sisters.

There, I said it.

I am heartened daily by their victories. If someone asked me to help in some way, I would do all I could. But I do not see the people in those streets as “my people.”

Some would say that I am supposed to. But here’s why I, at least, am no longer feeling a pang of guilt when I see photos of Tahrir Square and do not see the faces as comrades of mine.

Reason 1: We are to perceive the Egyptians as fellow “Africans,” but designating people as culturally united simply because they share a landmass is dicey. Imagine the newspaper headline “Asians Found Adrift on Raft.” We would be properly horrified at Chinese, Vietnamese and Sri Lankans being lumped together as one entity. Calling an Egyptian, a Senegalese and a Malagasy all one thing suffers from a similar problem. Spontaneously, most of us process Egypt as culturally a part of the Middle East — because it is.

Oh, but “black” Egypt was the source of the ancient Greeks’ intellectual legacy? Well, for one thing, it wasn’t (try here or here). And besides, the arrival of Islam in the seventh century made Egypt a culturally and demographically distinct place from the land of the pharaohs.

And the problem only gets worse when you really think about what it means to treat an Egyptian, a Senegalese, a Malagasy and a black man from Detroit all as one thing. Black Americans are descended from Africans, but my, it’s been a while, hasn’t it?

Some passages stick with you. In The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, Randall Robinson described the media’s downplaying of a pipeline explosion in Nigeria and despaired, “We don’t know what happened to us and no one will tell us.” “Us,” says this black American writer from Virginia. It struck me: I am to sense the plight of Nigerians as immediately as I do the plight of black schoolchildren in Oakland, Calif.

My circle of empathy certainly has room for Nigerians and other people I don’t know and have not lived among or even near. But I cannot pretend that they occupy the same inner circle of my empathy as do the people I have spent my life knowing — any more than a woman in Lagos is expected to be as starkly committed to what happens in Atlanta as she is to what happens in her own country.

In the same way, I cannot honestly process the Egyptians as “us.” I doubt that most black Americans can, and I’m not sure there is anything wrong with that …

… or is there? Others remind us that Egypt was once a hub of anti-colonialism in the name of struggling peoples worldwide. There was an intoxicating sense of potential in the idea of all the world’s peoples who are struggling under the colonialist yoke banding together to bring on a new day.

Another passage that sticks with me: Maya Angelou, in the fourth installment of her autobiography series, The Heart of a Woman, being whisked into Cairo in a cab with her son at the height of the pan-Third World ideology. Maya and Guy are so elated to be there that they look out the windows and just laugh and laugh. I love that scene — and instances of black Americans of that era regularly lending support to people of color resisting oppression. Another good scene: Adam Clayton Powell Jr. at the Third World Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955, schooling pro-colonialist reporters on how the oppression in places like India was as unforgivable as what was then happening in the American South (he describes it best in this book).
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(Akiit.com) Amid two weeks of protests and labor strikes in Egypt, President Hosni Mubarak has finally resigned and the military now has taken control. Thousands of Egyptians are celebrating in the streets and the Egyptian Army is reportedly going to dismiss the rest of the cabinet.

Some black writers have suggested African-Americans don’t have a special responsibility to pay attention to Egypt’s political turmoil because Egyptians aren’t culturally or politically connected with us. I disagree. While Egypt is culturally more part of the Middle East than Africa, Egyptians are a genetically a mix of Arab/Berber and sub-Saharan African. They are also drawing some inspiration and tactical ideas from the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S.

More importantly, Egypt is one of Africa’s most populous nations. As one of the “Next Eleven” emerging economies, it’s also a regional economic powerhouse. Now that Mubarak has been deposed, the fallout could have domino-like ramifications throughout Africa. Many of the issues playing out in North Africa are also happening elsewhere on the continent, including the West African region.

Last year, Africa surpassed the one billion population mark. The continent has the world’s fastest growing youth population, and almost two-thirds of unemployed Africans are under the age of 25. Thus, authoritarian sub-Saharan leaders are also on a ticking time bomb. Quite a few sub-Saharan African leaders have been in power for 20 years or more. Corruption costs Africa more than $300 billion a year, which is six times higher than the foreign aid that it annually receives. Africa’s youth are growing less tolerant of scenarios where they suffer while leaders entrusted with national treasuries choose to plunder them. They increasingly look West and East, and wonder why their countries can’t have economic prosperity, genuine democratic rule, and human rights as well.

Andrew Mwenda is a Ugandan journalist who often challenges Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni’s policies, even to the point of going to jail on sedition charges (Uganda’s courts later ruled in his favor). Mwenda writes in his newspaper Independent that the factors which led to Tunisian President Ben Ali’s downfall — increasingly educated and tech-savvy youth population, coupled with high unemployment and insufficient economic growth to meet educated youth’s rising aspirations — face Uganda’s 25-year ruler:

As Tunisians celebrated the downfall of Ben Ali, Daily Monitor of January 19 reported that Uganda is producing 400,000 graduates from tertiary institutions every year. Only 20,000 are getting jobs in the public sector. Even counting the private and informal sectors, Uganda is unlikely to be creating more than 150,000 jobs every year. Over the next five years, this country may have more than a million unemployed graduates,” he writes. “These unemployed graduates are not going to sit around and passively watch the kinds of institutionalised corruption, incompetence and nepotism that we see in Uganda. They will begin to question the existing political order.
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(Akiit.com) The All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (A-APRP) is hosting the 52nd Anniversary of African Liberation Day
Between May 21, 2010 to May 31, 2010 at the following locations:

Africa: Guinea Bissau, Ghana, Gambia, Senegal, Kenya, Zimbabwe
Europe: London
Caribbean: St. Thomas
Canada: Toronto
U.S.A.: Southern Region-Atlanta; Midwest Region-Illinois;
Northeast Region-Washington DC; Western Region-California

On behalf of the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (A-APRP) and its women’s wing, the All-African Women’s Revolutionary Union (A-AWRU), we are issuing this press release to announce the commemoration of African Liberation Day (ALD), 2010.

African Liberation Day was first observed In 1958 on the occasion of the First Conference of Independent African States held in Accra, Ghana. At that time, the 15th of April was declared Africa Freedom Day, “...to symbolize the determination of the people of Africa to free themselves from foreign domination and exploitation”. Later in 1963, upon the founding of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), 31 Heads of African states declared May 25th as African Liberation Day. This important, historic event has been observed and institutionalized in various places worldwide, every year since its inception.

African Liberation Day provides a forum for us to become more aware of the history and current reality of Africa, and the world. It is a chance to hear directly from women, men and youth who are on the frontline of struggle for Pan-Africanism, and other struggles for justice. It allows us to engage interactively with others who are dedicated and committed to the creation of Pan-Africanism.

The program will feature dynamic panel presentations, cultural performances, solidarity statements, vendors, food, leaflets and a rare opportunity to build and strengthen the international Pan-African network of organizations.
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