ABECHE, Chad — As the world marked U.N. World Refugee Day June 20, a new humanitarian emergency was quietly brewing next door to a far more widely known crisis. In southern Chad, just a few hundred miles from camps housing a quarter-million Darfuri refugees, some 60,000 displaced persons from Central African Republic, having fled a growing civil conflict in their own country, have been moved to a cluster of new U.N. camps. The Central Africans’ plight is widely overlooked as a result of the intense focus on the five-year-old civil war in Sudan’s Darfur region and the hundreds of thousands [...]
One of the major objectives of President Bush’s trip to Europe last week was to secure additional international support for the war in Afghanistan. Although European governments generally reaffirmed — and in several cases announced slight increases in — their military and economic commitments to the beleaguered Afghan government of Hamid Karzai, which remains entangled in a protracted insurgency with the Taliban, their declared level of support appears to fall short of that needed to allow the Afghan government to consolidate its control of the country. The members of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) continue to reaffirm their commitment [...]
FORMER CONGO OFFICIAL ARRESTED ON ICC WARRANT — Belgian authorities arrested former Democratic Republic of the Congo Vice President Jean-Pierre Bemba May 24 on an International Criminal Court warrant. Bemba is charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity for the actions of troops under his command in the neighboring Central African Republic in 2002-2003. Bemba’s subordinates were responsible for mass rape and torture, according to human rights groups. The 45-year-old has conceded the events took place but argues he is not responsible because he did not specifically order his troops to commit the abuses. Human rights advocates have called [...]
