NAIROBI, Kenya — Somalia’s embattled transitional President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed was slated on Wednesday to nominate a successor to interim Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi, who quit last month during a spike in insurgent violence in the capital of Mogadishu that claimed hundreds of lives. The new prime minister faces a daunting task — holding together a fragile and unpopular government (based for security reasons in the northern town of Baidoa) while organizing security forces to fight alongside Ethiopian troops that have occupied Mogadishu since routing the hard line Islamic Courts regime last December. Local press reports indicate that former [...]
LONDON — From the air, eastern Democratic Republic of Congo looks like paradise on earth, a palette of rich, red earth, rolling green hills and crystal-blue lakes under a panoramic sky that seems to stretch on forever. But on the ground, the grim reality of one of the world’s most volatile and perennially ignored regions shocks, with its morass of frightened civilians, bellicose and well-armed fighters and an intractable conflict that threatens to boil over again into war. If that occurs, it will boost an already tragically bloody decade’s death toll, estimated at more than four million people, vastly higher. [...]
Editor’s Note: In March, Kurt Pelda, Africa Bureau Chief of the Swiss daily the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ), traveled to eastern Chad on the border with the Sudanese crisis region of Darfur: a trip that was documented in a diary published in English on World Politics Review and that would see him eventually turning back from the border due to inadequate security conditions. In late October, Pelda returned to the region and crossed the border into Darfur, where he accompanied a Darfur rebel group. The diary of his trip was published on the NZZ Online in German, and World Politics [...]
