Rwanda's pledge of troops to protect civilians in Darfur should encourage other countries to press Sudan to accept more African Union troops to stop the killing there, Human Rights Watch said on Monday.
The 154 Rwandan troops deployed on Sunday to protect African Union cease-fire monitors, and this weekend Nigerian troops will join them.
"The Rwandan government deserves praise for deploying troops to Darfur and pledging to protect civilians," said Georgette Gagnon, deputy director of Human Rights Watch's Africa division.
"Now the international community should increase pressure on Sudan to accept peacekeepers with a mandate for protecting civilians, and it should provide the support that's urgently needed for this mission," Gagnon said.
Khartoum has resisted the idea, although Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Ismail said on Saturday that his government might agree "if the African Union convinces us of the importance of a peacekeeping force."
The UN Security Council last month gave Sudan a stern warning to rein in state-sponsored Arab Janjaweed militias accused of committing atrocities in Darfur by Aug. 29.
The UN estimates that up to 50,000 people have been killed since Sudan's armed forces and the militias cracked down on non-Arab minorities supporting the rebels.
Well over 1 million more people have fled their homes, with up to 200,000 seeking refuge in neighboring Chad.
Human Rights Watch reported last week that Khartoum has allowed the militias to rape, assault and loot civilians, and to drive more people from their homes.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
Eleven people, including a former minister, were arrested in Serbia on Friday over a train station disaster in which 16 people died. The concrete canopy of the newly renovated station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 in a disaster widely blamed on corruption and poor oversight. It sparked a wave of student-led protests and led to the resignation of then-Serbian prime minister Milos Vucevic and the fall of his government. The public prosecutor’s office in Novi Sad opened an investigation into the accident and deaths. In February, the public prosecutor’s office for organized crime opened another probe into
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RSS