ADDIS ABABA: East African leaders said they would try and push South Sudan’s warring sides to revive collapsed peace efforts and delay elections currently scheduled for August next year to a more realistic date.
Heads of state meeting in Ethiopia said they would set up a forum where the rivals could discuss ways of restoring a cease-fire more than three years into an ethnically-charged civil war that has plunged districts into famine.
The forum would be set up urgently, leaders from the East African bloc IGAD said, without specifying when or what form it would take.
Fighting broke out at the end of 2013 after President Salva Kiir sacked his rival Riek Machar as vice president, just two years after South Sudan’s independence from Sudan.
After numerous failed peace deals, Kiir and Machar signed a power-sharing pact in August 2015, agreeing to a transitional government and elections.
But that deal stalled and Machar left the country.
IGAD said on Monday their new forum would include “estranged groups” and discuss ways of implementing the peace deal.
The forum would also develop a “revised and realistic timeline and implementation schedule toward a democratic election at the end of the transition period,” IGAD added in a statement.
South Sudan’s new Vice President Taban Deng Gai had asked Monday’s meeting to bar Machar from any future forums. Gai also said elections should go ahead as planned — a position initially backed by Yoweri Museveni, the president of South Sudan’s neighbor Uganda, according to diplomats at the talks.
But the delegates finally decided warring sides would be invited and it would be “too premature” to stage the vote given the current levels of violence, diplomats said.
The war has split the country along ethnic lines, often between Kiir’s Dinka group and Machar’s Nuer. It has also nearly halved oil production and fueled Africa’s biggest cross-border refugee crisis since the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
The UN has said the violence amounts to ethnic cleansing and risks escalating into genocide.
The conflict in South Sudan and its massive population displacements have produced many names synonymous with misery. The latest is Aburoc, a northeastern village where aid workers face the toughest of challenges.
In the space of a few days, this remote settlement in Upper Nile State, close to the Sudanese border, grew by 30,000 as men, women and children fled yet another government offensive.
Few choose to live in Aburoc, a desolate ash-grey landscape of flies and dry rivers. The earth, bone dry now, is “black cotton” a type of soil that turns into a sucking quagmire with the first of the year’s rains.
Yet it was to this flat, tree-dotted land that many of the inhabitants of the town of Kodok fled in late April as government troops attacked their home.
They carried possessions on their backs, children in their arms and fear in their bellies.
“The needs were huge. People were living under the trees,” says Mario Zuazua of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), one of the few aid agencies in Aburoc.
The ICRC dug water wells. There were three manual pumps for the village of a thousand people, a number that proved woefully inadequate for up to 30,000.
With the increased population and lack of clean water, cholera quickly followed.
The charity Doctors Without Borders (known by its French acronym, MSF), deployed an emergency team which at once was working at full tilt, with 40 patients in isolation tents and 30 new suspected cases brought every day.
MSF launched an anti-cholera vaccination campaign targeting 11,000 people which, combined with the ICRC’s efforts to treat water with chlorine, brought an end to the cholera outbreak this month.
The UN also began distributing food last month.
“At the moment the situation is stabilized,” says Nicolas Guiral, field coordinator for MSF.
“But it was tough because it was really in a short time and you are obliged to do with such difficult conditions: one hour of heavy rain here and for the next two days, you have mud everywhere.”
In the meantime, many of those who fled Kodok for Aburoc opted to keep moving, crossing the border into Sudan, the country South Sudan won its independence from six years ago.
There are now around 10,000 displaced people living a precarious existence in Aburoc, in wooden shelters covered with white tarps.
“We are going to stay here,” says Faulino Tipo Deng, one of the leaders of the displaced, who believes that conditions are no better in Sudan and that returning home is not an option.
“We don’t want to go back there for the moment. In Kodok, all the houses and our belongings have been looted. Same thing for our cattle and donkeys,” he says.
“If you go to Kodok, you won’t even find a mattress remaining. Everything has been taken.”
At the beginning of the year, government forces, known as the SPLA, launched a major offensive from the garrison town of Malakal crossing to the western bank of the White Nile and pushing north toward the Sudanese border.
Several towns switched hands, among them Wau-Shilluk, Kodok and Kaka, all part of the centuries-old Shilluk tribal kingdom.
The offensive preceded the rainy season which, because of South Sudan’s lack of basic infrastructure such as paved roads, makes it impossible to transport troops, and reflects government efforts to claw back control of both banks of the Nile, a crucial transport lifeline.
Aburoc was likely spared — and therefore became a squalid refuge — simply because it is not on the river.
But with the rains about to begin in earnest aid workers are hoping for a period of peace, but preparing for the seasonal challenge of malaria, the risk of resurgent cholera and the danger that competing crises and funding shortfalls might threaten life-saving interventions, including food deliveries.
“I know it’s difficult because there are so many emergencies everywhere in the country,” says Guiral. “But here we are still talking about 10,000 people.”
Africa leaders push South Sudan sides to revive peace bid, delay vote
Africa leaders push South Sudan sides to revive peace bid, delay vote
Japan’s military needs more women. But it’s still failing on harassment.
- Calls to root out harassment and increase the number of servicewomen come as aging Japan faces rising threats from China, North Korea and Russia and navigates the burdensome legacy of its wartime past
TOKYO: As Japan embarks on a major military build-up, it’s struggling to fill its ranks with the women that its forces need and its policymakers have pledged to recruit. Following a wave of sexual harassment cases, the number of women applying to join the Self-Defense Forces (SDF) decreased by 12 percent in the year ending March 2023, after several years of steady growth. Some victims have said an entrenched culture of harassment could deter women from signing up.
But nine months after the defense ministry pledged to take drastic measures, it has no plans to take action on a key recommendation issued by an independent panel of experts — implementing a national system for reviewing anti-harassment training standards — according to two ministry officials responsible for training.
The government-appointed panel had identified in a report published in August that the military’s superficial harassment education — which made only limited mention of sexual harassment — and a lack of centralized oversight of such training were contributing factors to cultural problems within the institution.
The head of the panel, Makoto Tadaki, said some training sessions — one of which Reuters attended — were at odds with the gravity of the situation.
A servicewoman who is suing the government over an alleged sexual harassment incident also said in an interview that the education she received over the past 10 years was ineffective.
Calls to root out harassment and increase the number of servicewomen come as aging Japan faces rising threats from China, North Korea and Russia and navigates the burdensome legacy of its wartime past.
Women make up just 9 percent of military personnel in Japan, compared to 17 percent in the United States, Tokyo’s key security ally.
The SDF referred Reuters’ questions to the defense ministry, which said in an emailed response that harassment “must never be allowed, as it destroys mutual trust between service members and undermines their strength.”
The ministry said it had hosted harassment prevention lectures by external experts since 2023, made sessions more discussion-based and planned to invite specialists to review its training this year.
It did not respond to questions on whether it would implement the panel’s recommendation to centralize oversight of training. After ex-soldier Rina Gonoi went public with allegations of sexual assault in 2022, the defense ministry conducted a survey that year that uncovered more than 170 alleged sexual harassment incidents in the SDF. Another alleged victim was an Okinawa-based servicewoman who accused a senior of making lewd remarks toward her in 2013. She was then publicly named in harassment training materials distributed to her colleagues in 2014, she told Reuters. The alleged perpetrator was not identified in the materials.
Reuters does not name alleged victims of sexual harassment. Her allegations were corroborated with documents in the lawsuit she filed last year, after she said she exhausted an internal complaints process.
HAPHAZARD TRAINING
The defense ministry offers an annual online module on general harassment. It also provides training materials to officers for in-person sessions, but doesn’t offer training on delivering harassment education and doesn’t track how or when the officers carry out harassment training, the two defense officials said.
The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter, justified the existing system as offering flexibility to commanders.
The six experts concluded in their review that existing training amounted to “generic, superficial statements” that were “not effective in helping people apply the training in the real world.”
In April, Reuters attended a harassment prevention course delivered by an external instructor to over 100 mid-ranking military officers at a base on the outskirts of Tokyo.
Instructor Keiko Yoshimoto presented harassment as a communication issue and focused discussions on generational differences and how they played out in preferences for types of cars and flavours of crisps.
“Generational differences make it hard for people to communicate,” she said, adding that people should understand the basics of communication before they could deal with specifics around sexual harassment.
Law professor Tadaki, who separately witnessed part of Yoshimoto’s session, said it “did not feel like the sort of training you would expect against a backdrop of there being so many cases of harassment surfacing.”
He added that it would likely take more time to increase oversight over the quality of training.
Two months after the panel issued its report, local media reported that a sailor had in 2022 been ordered against her will to meet a superior that she had accused of sexual harassment. She later quit the SDF.
Gonoi and the Okinawa-based servicewoman have criticized the system as inadequate.
“People would say ‘everyone put up with that kind of behavior, it was normal back in our time,’ – but these issues are being passed down to my generation because nothing was done to stop it,” the servicewoman told Reuters in March.
She added that the harassment training she has since received was often poorly conducted and that more centralized oversight was needed: “Rather than trying to make a point about sexual harassment, (officers) pick materials that are easy to teach, something that will fit into the time they have.”
FEAR OF COMPLAINTS
The defense ministry officials said that training on sexual harassment largely takes place within a broader anti-harassment curriculum. At the two-hour training session attended by Reuters, about two minutes were dedicated to sexual harassment.
When Reuters asked about sexual harassment incidents during interviews with the officials, as well as two senior uniformed officers, they responded by speaking about general harassment.
The officials said it was challenging to give standardised training on harassment because service members in high-stress environments may give orders in a direct way that is unusual in other circumstances.
The two officers said there were concerns within the military that too much focus on harassment could create operational issues and one suggested it might lead to unfair complaints.
The defense ministry said in a statement that it does not tolerate abuse and that its training aims to ensure commanders do not “hesitate to give necessary guidance on the job because they are concerned about harassment.”
Tadaki, the professor, said Japan could learn from other militaries.
“The US, UK, and France have a much clearer focus on preventing harassment from its root causes so its prevention program is structured around improving the internal climate and culture of its organization,” he said.
Pro-Palestinian protests dwindle to tiny numbers and subtle defiant acts at US college graduations
- Israel has killed nearly 35,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry
NEW YORK: A tiny contingent of Duke University graduates opposed pro-Israel comedian Jerry Seinfeld speaking at their commencement in North Carolina Sunday, with about 30 of the 7,000 students leaving their seats and chanting “free Palestine” amid a mix of boos and cheers.
Some waved the red, green, black and white Palestinian flag. Seinfeld, whose namesake sitcom was one of the most popular in US television history, was there to receive an honorary doctorate from the university.
The stand-up turned actor, who stars in the new Netflix movie “Unfrosted,” has publicly supported Israel since it invaded Gaza to dismantle Hamas after the organization attacked the country and killed some 1,200 people in southern Israel on Oct. 7. The ensuing war has killed nearly 35,000 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which doesn’t distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Students at campuses across the US responded this spring by setting up encampments and calling for their schools to cut ties with Israel and businesses that support it. Students and others on campuses whom law enforcement authorities have identified as outside agitators have taken part in the protests from Columbia University in New York City to UCLA.
A few dozen pro-Palestinian protesters tried to block access to Sunday evening’s commencement for Southern California’s Pomona College. After demonstrators set up an encampment last week on the campus’ ceremony stage, the small liberal arts school moved the event 30 miles (48 km) from Claremont to the Shrine Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles. Tickets were required to attend the event, which the school said would include additional security measures.
In April, police wearing riot gear arrested 19 protesters who had occupied the president’s office at the college with about 1,700 undergraduates. Demonstrator Anwar Mohmed, a 21-year-old Pomona senior, said the school has repeatedly ignored calls to consider divesting its endowment funds from corporations tied to Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
“We’ve been time and time again ignored by the institution,” Mohmed said outside the Shrine on Sunday. “So today we have to say, it’s not business as usual.”
At the University of California, Berkeley, on Saturday, a small group of pro-Palestinian demonstrators waved flags and chanted during commencement and were escorted to the back of the stadium, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. There were no major counterprotests, but some attendees voiced frustration.
“I feel like they’re ruining it for those of us who paid for tickets and came to show our pride for our graduates,” said Annie Ramos, whose daughter is a student. “There’s a time and a place, and this is not it.”
The small student protest Sunday at Duke’s graduation in Durham, North Carolina, was emblematic of campus events across the US Sunday after weeks of student protests roiled US campuses in recent weeks and resulted in nearly 2,900 arrests at 57 colleges and universities.
This weekend’s commencement events remained largely peaceful.
At Emerson College in Boston, some students took off their graduation robes and left them on stage. Others emblazoned “free Palestine” on their mortar boards. One woman, staring at a camera broadcasting a livestream to the public, unzipped her robe to show a kaffiyeh, the black and white checkered scarf commonly worn by Palestinians, and flashed a watermelon painted on her hand. Both are symbols of solidarity with those living in the occupied territories.
Others displayed messages for a camera situated on stage, but the livestream quickly shifted to a different view, preventing them from being seen for long. Chants during some of the speeches were difficult to decipher.
Protests at Columbia University, where student uprisings inspired others at campuses across the country, led the school to cancel its main graduation ceremony in favor of smaller gatherings.
The University of Southern California told its valedictorian, who publicly backed Palestinians, that she could not deliver her keynote speech at its graduation ceremony because of security concerns. It later canceled its main graduation ceremony.
At Depaul University in Chicago, graduation is more than a month away. But as the academic year closes, school leaders said they had reached an “impasse” with the school’s pro-Palestinian protesters, leaving the future of their encampment on the Chicago campus unclear.
The student-led DePaul Divestment Coalition, which is calling on the university to divest from economic interests tied to Israel, set up the encampment nearly two weeks ago. The group alleged university officials walked away from talks and tried to force students into signing an agreement, according to a student statement late Saturday.
Nigerian troops and village vigilantes rescue kidnapped university students
- Troops aided by local vigilantes rescued the kidnap victims after a shootout with their abductors in Kogi state, says government spokesman
- Kidnapping has become elucrative criminal activity in Nigeria’s northwest, where roving have seize mostly young ones and demand ransom money from their relatives
MAIDUGURI, Nigeria: Nigerian security forces have rescued students kidnapped from a university in northern Kogi state, along with other victims held by the abductors, the army and state government said on Sunday.
Kogi information commissioner Kingsley Femi Fanwo said security forces were involved in a shootout with the armed gang that carried out Thursday’s abduction at Confluence University of Science and Technology.
The state had enlisted the help of local hunters who know the Kogi terrain, and a security agent and hunter were wounded.
The Nigerian army said in a separate statement that troops, other security agencies and local vigilantes were involved in “a fierce firefight” with the kidnappers.
“The superior firepower of the troops led to the kidnappers abandoning nine of the kidnapped students, who were subsequently rescued,” the army said.
Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu has ruled out the payment of ransoms for the abducted schoolchildren. He instead directed security agencies to urgently rescue the children and “in the process to ensure that not a dime is paid for ransom.”
The victims were among more than 100 people kidnapped by gunmen during Friday night raids on three villages in northwest Nigeria, in the latest abduction of villagers in a region blighted by widespread insecurity.
Kidnapping has become endemic in Nigeria’s northwest as roving gangs of armed men abduct people from villages, highways and schools, and demand ransom money from their relatives.
AlHajji Bala, head of a district in the Birnin-Magaji local government area of Zamfara, said gunmen attacked the villages of Gora, Madomawa and Jambuzu and that 38 men and 67 women and children were missing.
“But the number of people abducted could be more than that,” he said.
Zamfara is a hotspot for kidnapping gangs who carry out attacks and retreat into forests where they have set up camps. The Nigerian military has bombed some of the camps but attacks continue.
Yezid Abubakar, Zamfara police spokesperson, could not immediately be reached for comment.
Aminu Aliyu Asha, the Madomawa village head, said gunmen arrived in his village on motorbikes and shot sporadically before kidnapping several people.
“The abduction breaches the peace agreement between us and bandits. In February this year, we made several ransom payments in order to stop them from attacking our territory,” said Asha.
Nusa Sani said his two brothers were among those abducted, while another resident, Garba Kira, added that among the abducted were 15 passengers in a lorry that was passing through the villages.
Mass kidnappings were first carried out by jihadist group Boko Haram when they seized more than 200 students a decade ago, but the practice has been adopted by armed gangs with no known ideological affiliation and has grown as Nigerians grapple with economic hardship.
Putin removes defense minister Shoigu
- That included when Wagner paramilitary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin launched a bloody insurrection last year calling for Shoigu’s removal
MOSCOW: Russian President Vladimir Putin on Sunday moved to replace defense minister Sergei Shoigu in a major shake-up to Russia’s military leadership more than two years into its Ukraine offensive.
Putin proposed economist Andrey Belousov as Shoigu’s replacement, according to a list of the ministerial nominations published by the Federation Council, Russia’s upper house of parliament.
The move comes at a key time in the conflict with Russian troops advancing in eastern Ukraine and having just launched a major new ground operation against the northeastern Kharkiv region.
Despite a string of military setbacks in the first year of the campaign — including the failure to capture the Ukrainian capital Kyiv and retreats from the Kharkiv and southern Kherson regions — Putin had stood by Shoigu until now.
That included when Wagner paramilitary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin launched a bloody insurrection last year calling for Shoigu’s removal.
Explaining the timing of the decision, the Kremlin on Sunday said it needed the defense ministry to stay “innovative.”
“The defense ministry must be absolutely open to innovation, to the introduction of all advanced ideas, to the creation of conditions for economic competitiveness,” state media quoted Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov as saying in a briefing on the appointments.
“The battlefield is won by whoever is more open to innovation,” Peskov said.
“That is likely why the president has settled on the candidacy of Andrey Belousov,” he added.
Belousov, who has no military background, has been one of Putin’s most influential economic advisers over the last decade.
UK defense minister Grant Shapps said the Ukraine conflict had left more than 355,000 Russian soldier casualties under Shoigu’s watch as well as “mass civilian suffering.”
“Russia needs a Defense Minister who would undo that disastrous legacy” and end the conflict, “but all they’ll get is another of Putin’s puppets,” he wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
Shoigu, 68, was appointed Russian defense minister in 2012 and has had a decades-long political career of unmatched longevity in post-Soviet Russia.
His presence at the center of power in Moscow predates that of Putin himself.
Prior to Russia launching its full-scale military campaign on Ukraine in February 2022, he was seen as one of Putin’s most trusted lieutenants.
The pair were regularly photographed on macho nature retreats in the Siberian wilderness, hunting and fishing together.
In one famous snap from 2017 shared by the Kremlin, they are sitting bare-chested under the sun on a beach by a lake.
On Sunday, Putin simultaneously issued decrees naming Shoigu as the new secretary of the Security Council, replacing his longstanding ally Nikolai Patrushev.
The Kremlin also said Valery Gerasimov, the Chief of the General Staff, would stay in post overseeing daily military operations in Ukraine.
Along with Shoigu, Gerasimov had been targeted by a hardcore group of influential pro-offensive military bloggers for Moscow’s perceived military failures.
Prigozhin, who marched on Moscow calling for the pair’s removal, died in an unexplained plane crash weeks after his aborted mutiny.
Putin is constitutionally required to name a new set of government ministers — or reappoint existing ones — following his victory in a March election devoid of opposition.
Lawmakers in Russia’s rubber-stamp parliament need to approve the president’s nominations, which they are set to do over the coming days.
The future of Patrushev, an arch-hawk who is sometimes seen as a possible successor to Putin, was unclear.
There was no immediate high-level reaction to the shake-up in Ukraine.
The changes come at a crucial time in the conflict, which had been showing signs of a stalemate for months.
Putin casts the fight against Ukraine as a near-existential battle for his country, calling it just one front of a “hybrid war” between Russia and the West.
India vote to resume with Kashmir poised to oppose Modi
- Modi remains popular across much of India and his Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is widely expected to win the poll when it concludes early next month
SRINAGAR, India: India’s six-week election is set to resume Monday including in Kashmir, where voters are expected to show their discontent with dramatic changes in the disputed territory under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government.
Modi remains popular across much of India and his Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is widely expected to win the poll when it concludes early next month.
But his government’s snap decision in 2019 to bring Kashmir under direct rule by New Delhi — and the drastic security clampdown that accompanied it — have been deeply resented among the region’s residents, who will be voting for the first time since the move.
“What we’re telling voters now is that you have to make your voice heard,” said former chief minister Omar Abdullah, whose National Conference party is campaigning for the restoration of Kashmir’s former semi-autonomy.
“The point of view that we want people to send out is that what happened... is not acceptable to them,” he told AFP.
Kashmir has been divided between India and Pakistan since their independence in 1947. Both claim it in full and have fought two wars over control of the Himalayan region.
Rebel groups opposed to Indian rule have waged an insurgency since 1989 on the side of the frontier controlled by New Delhi, demanding either independence or a merger with Pakistan.
The conflict has killed tens of thousands of soldiers, rebels and civilians in the decades since, including a spate of firefights between suspected rebels and security forces in the past month.
Violence has dwindled since the Indian portion of the territory was brought under direct rule five years ago, a move that saw the mass arrest of local political leaders and a months-long telecommunications blackout to forestall expected protests.
Modi’s government says its canceling of Kashmir’s special status has brought “peace and development,” and it has consistently claimed the move was supported by Kashmiris.
But his party has not fielded any candidates in the Kashmir valley for the first time since 1996, and experts say the BJP would have been roundly defeated if it had.
“They would lose, simple as that,” political analyst and historian Sidiq Wahid told AFP last week.
The BJP has appealed to voters to instead support smaller and newly created parties that have publicly aligned with Modi’s policies.
But voters are expected to back one of two established Kashmiri political parties calling for the Modi government’s changes to be reversed.
India’s election is conducted in seven phases over six weeks to ease the immense logistical burden of staging the democratic exercise in the world’s most populous country.
More than 968 million people are eligible to vote in India’s election, with the final round of polling on June 1 and results expected three days later.
Turnout so far has declined significantly from the last national poll in 2019, according to election commission figures.
Analysts have blamed widespread expectations that Modi will easily win a third term and hotter-than-average temperatures heading into the summer.
India’s weather bureau has forecast more hot spells in May and the election commission formed a taskforce last month to review the impact of heat and humidity before each round of voting.
