Kenya Chief Justice Dr.Willy Mutunga In Trouble

I don’t think Willy Mutunga knew what he was getting into when he packed his personal belongings and left his cushy offices at the Ford Foundation in Nairobi early in 2011 to join the Judiciary as Chief Justice and President of the Kenya Supreme Court. If he thought by leaving a relatively safe job at an international Non-Governmental Organisation for the coveted position he would get an easy ride, he must now be having different thoughts. Dr. Mutunga joined the Government at a time when the dignity, the reputation and the respect for the third Branch of Government were at their lowest ebb. Kenyans had lost confidence in the Judiciary. The morale of judges and magistrates was zero. Corruption and nepotism were rampant. Hundreds of cases were pending, and prisoners were languishing in remand prisons because there were no judges to conclude their cases. Bottom line: the Judiciary was no longer a place where citizens could go to find justice. Enter Dr. Willy Mutunga, a political activist, human rights lawyer, pro-democracy crusader and an intellectual per excellence. Conformists took one glimpse at him and saw a stud on his left ear and they went beserk. But Mutunga’s academic and social credentials carried the day. He impressed the majority of Kenyans and received thumbs-up from the international community. Finally, and for the first time, the country had a real reformer at the helm of the Judiciary. That was then. Today, the Chief Justice is so mired in controversies that Kenyans may want to take another look at the man who was detained for almost a year by President Daniel Arap Moi for agitating for political reforms. Soon after taking over, Dr. Mutunga issued a well-documented road map that was to yank the department from years of inertia, ignominy and compunction. But two years down the line, his comprehensive reforms and anti-corruption agenda appear bogged down in mud. From the controversial vetting of judges, to the dispute over the presidential petition ruling, to the Gladys Shollei affair, to claims of death threats made by the Chief Justice himself, things have, as someone once said, become elephant for the soft-spoken former law professor. What all these events prove is that the office of the Chief Justice is hot, and requires a dose of tact, a bucket of diplomacy and a tonne of guts for its occupier to stay sane. At one time when Mutunga was under siege, he took to the social media to make his views known, but he was quickly reminded that his position called for a better method of communication. Considering his age, at 67, Mutunga has a few more years before he retires at 70 years old. That means three more years of hard knocks, controversies, abuses and humiliation. Mutunga’s latest battle with the judges over office space is likely to lead to a showdown that could disrupt the activities of the Judiciary. Appelant judges have refused to move to their new offices at Upper Hill claiming they would be in danger of radiation from nearby communication masts. Although the Commnication Commission of Kenya has said the premises are safe, some judges have reportedly threatened to resign if Mutunga insisted on their relocation. He will need Solomonic wisdom to deal with this one. The Chief Justice is currently on a tour abroad. When he returns another fight will be waiting for him, this time from the floor of the National Assembly. A Member of Parliament has asked the Justice and Legal Affairs Committee to summon the Judicial Service Commission to question its members about Mutunga’s current overseas trip. The MP is questioning not only the rationale of Mutunga and two of his top officials being away at the same time, but he wants Parliament to get answers about his alleged frequent visits overseas. Ndung’u Gethenji, the MP for Tetu cites the present office space stalemate and the issues surrounding the Chief Registrar who was briefly suspended and then recalled to duty by the JSC over matters of precurement, as some of the reasons that should have kept the Chief Justice at home. The Shollei issue is not over A lot more is on the way. Constitutionally, it would be difficult for a committee of the House to summon the JSC to explain anything. The Judiciary and Parliament are parallel bodies with independent powers. The JSC has refused to appear once before, and I see no indication that it will offer itself this time around. And that is my say.

Deputy President Ruto's Ksh.100M jet report delayed

The office of the Auditor General is yet to complete investigations into the government’s controversial leasing of a jet for the Deputy President William Ruto during his West African tour in May this year, on grounds of technicalities. The Auditor General once again failed to give satisfactory reasons for the delay and failure to beat the three week deadline issued by the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee.

Tunisian Education Minister resigns,pressure on government grows

Tunisian Education Minister Salem Labyedh has resigned, the prime minister's spokesman said on Wednesday, as pressure mounted on the Islamist-led government to step down. Protests against the moderate Islamist Ennahda party intensified after last week's killing of a leftist politician, the second to be slain in six months, disrupting a political transition that began when Tunisians toppled an autocratic leader in 2011. Opposition parties, the largest labor union and the secular Ettakatol party, the ruling Ennahda party's junior coalition partner, have all demanded the government's departure. Labyedh, a secular independent, had said he was considering resigning after fellow leftist Mohamed Brahmi was shot dead on Thursday in an assassination the government has pinned on hardline Salafi Islamists. The opposition blames Ennahda. The minister of culture, Mehdi Mabrouk, also told local media he was hoping to convince all ministers to resign. "I hope to see the resignation of all members of the government in the coming days," he told the local Shems radio station. "I hope these will be the last days I spend as the minister of culture." While politicians feud, the army is struggling to contain Islamist militants, who killed eight soldiers on Monday in a mountainous region near the Algerian border in one of the bloodiest attacks on Tunisian troops in decades. A small roadside bomb exploded on Wednesday south of the capital as a police patrol passed, but no injuries or damage were reported. Last Saturday, the day of Brahmi's funeral, the capital Tunis was hit by its first car bomb, but again no one was hurt. "We are facing two choices. Either we confront terrorism together, or we will distract the army and security forces with political battles that are much less dangerous than terrorism," Noureddine Bhiri, the prime minister's spokesman, told a news conference. Ennahda has softened its rejection of opposition demands in the face of increasing pressure. It said on Tuesday it was open to the possibility of a new government, but has firmly rejected the opposition's demands that the transitional Constituent Assembly also be disbanded. The body is just weeks away from completing a draft of a new constitution to be put to a popular referendum. Prime Minister Ali Larayedh will meet the head of the powerful Tunisian General Labor Union on Thursday to discuss the political crisis and a new initiative to deal with the situation, the prime minister's office said. The 600,000-strong union is calling for a compromise that would remove the current government and put a technocratic government in place, but would not dissolve the Assembly.

Egypt says to 'put and end' to Muslim Brotherhood vigils.

Egypt's new rulers declared two Cairo vigils by supporters of the deposed president threats to national security on Wednesday and instructed the interior ministry to "put an end" to them. Thousands of supporters of the Islamist Mohamed Mursi and his Muslim Brotherhood have been staging sit-ins at two locations in the Egyptian capital for the past month, protesting against his overthrow by the army on July 3. The Brotherhood says its supporters will stay put until Mursi is reinstated. At least 80 of them were shot dead by security forces at dawn on Saturday in the second mass killing of Mursi supporters since his overthrow. Wednesday's statement by the cabinet raised the specter of yet more bloodshed. In a televised statement, an interim cabinet installed by the military said the "terrorist acts" and traffic disruption stemming from the protests were no longer acceptable and "represent a threat to Egyptian national security". "The cabinet decided to begin taking all necessary measures to address these dangers and put an end to them, commissioning the interior minister to do all that is necessary regarding this matter within the framework of the constitution and the law," it said. Minutes before the statement, authorities said they had referred the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mohammed Badie, and two other senior movement officials to a court on charges of inciting violence.

Israel,Palestinians deeply divided despite renewed peace talks

Israel and the Palestinians remain far apart over terms of any peace deal, officials from both sides made clear on Wednesday, a day after talks resumed in Washington for the first time in nearly three years. Israel's lead negotiator, Tzipi Livni, said the parties "need to build confidence" after what she called an encouraging start in Washington, and disputed a Palestinian demand to focus first on agreeing the frontiers of an independent state. "The goal is to end the conflict," Livni said on Israel Radio. "It cannot be ended merely by setting a border." Yasser Abed Rabbo, who is close to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, forecast "huge difficulties" for the talks begun after intense diplomacy by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. Abed Rabbo, speaking on Voice of Palestine radio, cited Israeli settlement construction in the occupied West Bank and said any further building there would scupper the negotiations. He was alluding to Israeli media reports that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had cajoled far-right allies to back the talks by pledging to permit more settlement expansion. Kerry has said the negotiators will reconvene in August, aiming to achieve a "final status" deal within nine months. Previous peace talks collapsed in 2010 over settlement building in the West Bank, which Palestinians see as grabbing land they want for a state that would include the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, all territories captured by Israel in 1967. Israel annexed East Jerusalem in a move never recognized internationally. Palestinians want it for their capital. Abed Rabbo said borders, which the Palestinians say must be based on pre-1967 war lines, were "the first issue that must be resolved", countering Israel's demand that all issues, including refugees and Jerusalem, should be tackled simultaneously. "Putting all the dishes on the table at once may be an attempt to undermine the process," Abed Rabbo said. Israeli Finance Minister Yair Lapid defined the ultimate goal of negotiations as the creation of a Palestinian state in "the majority" of the West Bank, but said Israel would keep three large settlement blocs there, as well as East Jerusalem. The Palestinians might eventually accept this "because they will have no choice", the centrist minister said. "What we are looking for is a fair divorce from the Palestinians, so that we can stand on one side of the border and they on the other." Decades of peace negotiations sponsored by the United States, Israel's main ally, have failed to resolve the conflict.

Family of Egypt's Mursi threaten legal action over 'abduction'.

The family of Egypt's ousted Islamist president, Mohamed Mursi, said on Monday it would take legal action against the army for abducting him. Mursi has been held at an undisclosed military facility since the army deposed him on July 3 and suspended the constitution in the wake of huge street protests against his one-year rule. The army says Mursi is being held for his own safety. His detention and the arrests of numerous senior members of his Muslim Brotherhood have fuelled fears of a broad crackdown against a group banned during Hosni Mubarak's 30 years of autocratic rule, until he was toppled by street protests in 2011. "There is no legal or constitutional basis ... for detaining someone not accused of a crime for his own safety," Mursi's son, Osama, told a news conference. He said the family would take immediate legal action "inside Egypt and at an international level" against Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the army commander and defense minister who played a central role in forcing Mursi from office. The Muslim Brotherhood accuses the army of orchestrating a coup that has triggered violent clashes and exposed deep fissures in the Arab world's most populous nation, a strategic hinge between the Middle East and North Africa. The Brotherhood says it has had no contact with Mursi since he was overthrown, and that it believes he has not had access to a lawyer. Osama said the family had also not been able to contact him and had no information on the state of his health or where he was being held. "WILL OF THE PEOPLE" He described Mursi's removal as "nothing less than the abduction of the will of the people and the entire nation". Mursi's supporters are maintaining a round-the-clock vigil in a Cairo suburb, now in its third week. They say they will stay put until Mursi is returned to office. A few thousand of his supporters protested outside the High Court in central Cairo on Monday. The military has installed an interim cabinet and promised a new election under a constitution now being amended to replace one drafted last year by a body dominated by Islamists and approved despite objections from Christians and liberals. Egypt's public prosecutor's office launched a criminal investigation against Mursi on July 13, saying it was examining complaints including spying and inciting violence. It did not specify who had filed the complaints. No formal charges have been announced. Mursi's daughter, Shaimaa, told the news conference that the family held the army responsible for his safety. Heba Morayef, Egypt director of Human Rights Watch, said that, without a detention order from the prosecutor's office, there were no grounds to hold Mursi without charge beyond a maximum 48 hours. "(Mursi's)arrest and that of his advisers is completely illegal," Morayef said. Gamal Abdel Salem, a doctor who spoke alongside the Mursi family, said Mursi suffered from diabetes, and that a doctors' union had asked for access to him

The wonks who sold Washington on South Sudan.

In the mid-1980s, a small band of policy wonks began convening for lunch in the back corner of a dimly lit Italian bistro in the U.S. capital. After ordering beers, they would get down to business: how to win independence for southern Sudan, a war-torn place most American politicians had never heard of. They called themselves the Council and gave each other clannish nicknames: the Emperor, the Deputy Emperor, the Spear Carrier. The unlikely fellowship included an Ethiopian refugee to America, an English-lit professor and a former Carter administration official who once sported a ponytail. The Council is little known in Washington or in Africa itself. But its quiet cajoling over nearly three decades helped South Sudan win its independence one year ago this week. Across successive U.S. administrations, they smoothed the path of southern Sudanese rebels in Washington, influenced legislation in Congress, and used their positions to shape foreign policy in favor of Sudan's southern rebels, often with scant regard for U.S. government protocol. "We never controlled anything, but we always did try to influence things in the way we thought most benefited the people of South Sudan," said Roger Winter, now an honorary adviser to the South Sudan government and one of the group's original members, who dubbed himself the Spear Carrier. The story of the Council has not been told before. For a Reuters series chronicling the first year in the life of South Sudan, the group's main members spoke for the first time about how they came together and what they tried to achieve. They pinpointed key moments when peace could have slipped away. Some expressed disappointment at the compromises America made to broker the creation of South Sudan. One idea shines through: Independence was far from inevitable. "I actually think it was a miracle we got something," said Winter. Nationhood has many midwives. South Sudan is primarily the creation of its own people. It was southern Sudanese leaders who fought for autonomy, and more than two million southern Sudanese who paid for that freedom with their lives. President George W. Bush, who set out to end Africa's longest-running civil war, also played a big role, as did modern-day abolitionists, religious groups, human rights organizations and members of the U.S. Congress. But the most persistent outside force in the creation of the world's newest state was the tightly knit group, never numbering more than seven people, which in the era before email began gathering regularly at Otello, a restaurant near Washington's DuPont Circle. A CHARISMATIC REBEL In 1978, Brian D'Silva, a young student in agricultural economics, began pursuing a doctorate at Iowa State University. There, he studied alongside an intensely charismatic southern Sudanese man named John Garang, who had begun dreaming of a democratic Sudan. After graduation, D'Silva went with Garang to Sudan to teach at the University of Khartoum. An uneasy peace held between Sudan's predominantly Arab Islamic north and largely Christian south. The divide stemmed from colonial times, when Britain encouraged Christian missionaries to evangelize the south. The British considered splitting the country in two, but ultimately handed a unified Sudan to a small Arab elite in Khartoum, who tried to impose Islamic law throughout the country. A 1972 agreement had given southerners semi-autonomy. That fragile deal began unraveling in 1979 after Chevron discovered oil in the south; the north did not want to lose control over the newly found riches. D'Silva returned to the United States in 1980 to work for the U.S. Agency for International Development. Three years later, his old schoolmate Garang, a conscript in the Sudanese army, led a mutiny of southern Sudanese soldiers. His group would become the Sudan Peoples' Liberation Movement (SPLM), which led the fight for southern autonomy. Roger Winter visited Sudan in 1981 for a non-governmental outfit called the U.S. Committee for Refugees. Upon his return, the former Carter administration official sought out Sudanese who were based in Washington. Key among them was respected legal scholar Francis Deng, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center. "A man with a ponytail came to see me," recalled Deng, who is now the U.N. Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide. Deng hails from Abyei, a fertile area straddling north and south Sudan. He thought Winter must be some "wealthy hippie-type" who wanted to give money to the rebels. When Winter explained that the best he could do was disseminate information, Deng suggested that the American public needed first-hand accounts of people affected by the war. He called a cousin in the rebel movement to ensure that on future visits, Winter would have access to all the so-called liberated areas - the parts of Sudan held by the rebels - where he could gather direct testimony on the impact of the war. By the mid-1980s, these three future Council members - D'Silva, Deng and Winter - were working in the United States as proxies for John Garang. Over six feet tall and more than 200 pounds, the rebel leader had a laugh - and a personality - that filled a room. "You meet Dr. John, you get converted," said Winter, who first met Garang in 1986. The three men quickly discovered the size of the task ahead of them. In 1987, D'Silva tried to bring a delegation from the SPLM to meet officials in Washington. But standard procedure at Foggy Bottom was to maintain relations with the recognized Sudanese government in Khartoum and ignore the rebel movement. D'Silva received a phone call from an official instructing him that no meetings should be arranged on any government-owned or -leased property. ENTER "THE EMPEROR" According to Deng, many in Washington associated the rebels with the Soviet-backed government in neighboring Ethiopia, leaving the SPLM on the wrong side of the Cold War. "It took a lot of hard work to remove the prejudice against John Garang," Deng said. As D'Silva, Winter and Deng tried to get the southern rebels through doors in Washington, a wayward college graduate in search of a cause was traveling in the Horn of Africa. By the early 1990s, John Prendergast had decided his calling was to help win better U.S. policies for Africa. At the time, the circle of people in Washington who cared about the Horn of Africa was small. Prendergast soon ran into Winter, and the pair began briefing journalists, urging them to cover the conflict and putting them in contact with the rebels. Human rights campaigning was very different from today. The idea of Western groups advocating in a coordinated way on behalf of foreign causes - as they had during the British-led anti-slavery campaigns in Belgian Congo more than a century before - had only recently been rekindled by the likes of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. For the few Americans who had heard of Sudan at all, "the south was a black hole," said Winter, the refugee-rights organizer. It was about this time that the Council's future Emperor made his entrance. Ted Dagne was a 14-year-old Ethiopian in 1974 when a Soviet-backed military junta seized power. Dagne's older sister, a student leader, was among the first to be executed by the new government. "After that, there was a (target) on our family," said Dagne, drawing a cross in the air. By the time Dagne was 16, both he and his older brother had been imprisoned and tortured. Dagne was subsequently released, but his brother was executed and Dagne's own prospects for survival looked slim. One morning he donned his sister's T-shirt and his brother's jeans and shoes, keepsakes for an unknown future, and told his parents he was going out for groceries. It was the last time he saw them. With the help of a Somali man who pretended to be his father, Dagne crossed the border into Somalia. Eventually he reached Djibouti, and subsequently joined a generation of people fleeing communist lands who were granted asylum in the United States. Dagne got through college by working two jobs - answering phones from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. and an afternoon shift at a Lincoln Memorial souvenir kiosk. By 1989 he had earned a masters degree, acquired U.S. citizenship and was working on African affairs at the Congressional Research Service, the non-partisan policy-analysis arm of the U.S. legislature. AN EYE-OPENING VISIT That year, Winter took two members of Congress to meet Garang on one of his visits to rebel-held areas of Sudan. The trip had a big impact. One of the visitors, Viriginia Republican Frank Wolf, said he still remembers a question put to him by a Dinka woman named Rebecca. "She said to me, ‘Why is it that you people in the West are very interested in the whales but no one seems to be interested in us?'" he recalled. "It was an eye-opener, and I became very sympathetic toward the southerners." After that, D'Silva, Deng, and Winter finally managed to get a delegation led by Garang on an official visit to Washington. Wanting to ensure the group from his homeland made a good impression, Manute Bol, the 7-foot, 7-inch sensation for the Golden State Warriors basketball team, offered to hire a limousine to take Garang's delegation to Capitol Hill. Winter told them this was a bad idea. "I explained to them, you can't go to the Capitol building in this and then go in and talk about starving people!" Winter recalled. The visitors switched to an old bus that blew out gobs of black smoke as it sputtered to Congress. It was on that visit to Washington that Dagne met Garang for the first time. More than any other member of the Council, Dagne formed an intense friendship with the rebel leader. There were periods in the years ahead in which they spoke by phone every day, Dagne says. By the early 1990s, the group's work was starting to pay off. Dagne was seconded from the Congressional Research Service to the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Africa, where he began to build allies for the southern Sudanese cause. Congressional staffers are supposed to be neutral, but it was an open secret that Dagne's allegiance lay with the southerners. "Ted was very suspicious of the Sudan government, and so I became very suspicious," said former Democratic Senator Harry Johnston, who headed the subcommittee. "I pushed the envelope quite a lot," Dagne acknowledges. In 1993, for instance, Dagne drafted a congressional resolution stating that southern Sudanese had the right to self-determination. He passed his draft to Johnston, who reviewed it and then presented it to his colleagues in Congress. The resolution was not binding, but it passed unanimously. It was the first time any part of the U.S. government had recognized the right of the southerners to determine their own relationship to the Sudanese government. By the mid-nineties, five men - Dagne, Deng, D'Silva, Prendergast and Winter - were meeting regularly at Otello's. Prendergast had been nicknamed the Council Member in Waiting because he liked to challenge the Emperor. Deng was referred to as the Diplomat, marking him as the least strident of the group. D'Silva, the most serious among them, went without a nickname. The group was united by a respect for Garang. The men acknowledge that his SPLM fighters committed horrific crimes during the war, and say they often had highly critical conversations with Garang. But they say they never doubted that they backed the right side. "You have these well-trained guys in Khartoum who are murderers and never keep an agreement," said Winter. "How do you treat them equally?" MODERN-DAY ABOLITIONISTS Crises in Somalia and Rwanda were absorbing most of America's attention in Africa. But the southern Sudanese cause soon got a boost from an unlikely quarter. In 1995, Christian Solidarity International initiated a controversial program in Sudan called slave redemption. The Zurich-based human-rights organization began paying slave traders for the freedom of southerners captured in raids by government-backed militias from the north. Christian Solidarity took journalists and pastors from the black evangelical community along on their missions, and stories of modern-day slavery filtered into church congregations and the U.S. media. The group drew fire for fueling a market for slavery, but it had a big impact in the United States. American schoolchildren began raising money to free slaves, and members of Congress started getting letters from their constituents. "Americans are divided on just about every issue imaginable, but we are an abolitionist nation," said Charles Jacobs, founder of the American Anti-Slavery Group, which led the U.S.-based outcry. Dagne's network of southern Sudan allies in Congress solidified. He organized trips into SPLM-held areas for bipartisan delegations, including Tennessee Republican Sen. Bill Frist and the late New Jersey Democratic Rep. Donald Payne. Seeing the human impact of the war firsthand, the lawmakers grew as skeptical of Khartoum as the Council was. For Frist, a surgeon, a key moment was seeing personnel at a field hospital in southern Sudan having to flee a government bombing raid to nearby caves during the middle of an operation. "Why, I asked myself?" Frist recalled. "No answer except the government in Khartoum's goal to create terror." For meaningful change, however, the executive branch needed to get on board. This was tough as long as the State Department focused on maintaining a working relationship with Khartoum. In 1993, though, the United States linked a car bomb at the World Trade Center in New York to Osama bin Laden, a Saudi Islamic fundamentalist living in Sudan. Khartoum was added to the State Department list of state sponsors of terrorism. A chance encounter at a Princeton University conference on Somalia provided the Council its next break. Among the speakers was Susan Rice, a young Rhodes Scholar who was gaining influence in the State Department as the senior director of African affairs. Rice and Dagne took the train back to Washington together, talking U.S. policy on Africa for the four-hour journey. Rice soon became an informal member of the Council, dropping in occasionally for lunches at Otello. Rice, currently the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., declined to comment for this article. Prendergast, who also met Rice at the conference, applied to work for her. In his job interview, he says, he told her that Khartoum was "too deformed to be reformed," a view that had long been espoused by the southern rebels. Rice hired him. A LITERARY POLEMICIST Rice successfully urged the Clinton administration to place comprehensive sanctions on Sudan, prohibiting any U.S. individual or corporation from doing business there. This shift brought the official U.S. position closer to the Council's. By the late 1990s, Washington was not just providing humanitarian assistance to the southern Sudanese. It was also giving leadership missions and training, as well as $20 million of surplus military equipment to Uganda, Ethiopia and Eritrea, who all supported the southern rebels. Prendergast said the idea was to help states in the region to change the regime. "It was up to them, not us," he said in an interview. But the regime was hard to shift. Thanks to a pipeline built by the Chinese linking the southern oil fields to the Red Sea, Sudan began exporting oil in 1999. Now Khartoum had a new source of revenue to fund its fighting. The Council's Deputy Emperor, Eric Reeves, joined in 2001. Reeves was a professor of English literature at Smith, a small college in Western Massachusetts. He had no background in Sudan. But after reading about the humanitarian conditions in the south and attending a lecture Winter gave at the college, Reeves became the Council's most prolific writer. He published hundreds of opinion pieces and blogged detailed reports brimming with moral outrage against Khartoum. When George W. Bush took office in 2001, Rice and Prendergast left the State Department and joined think tanks. That left only USAID policy adviser D'Silva and congressional researcher Dagne on the inside track. Suddenly, though, the Council's cause became a White House cause. On the second day of his presidency, Bush directed senior staff to focus on bringing an end to the war in Sudan. Bush declined to comment on what drove him to home in on Sudan. But a pillar of his support base, evangelical Christians, was imploring him to take up the cause. They had long been concerned about the persecution of Christians in southern Sudan. One influential evangelical, the Rev. Franklin Graham, recalls pushing the future president to focus on Sudan during a breakfast meeting they had in Florida two days before the presidential election. At the urging of religious groups, Bush also appointed former senator and Episcopalian minister John Danforth to be his envoy, tasking him with helping to unlock ongoing negotiations between north and south. Evangelical groups suddenly found journalists turning up on the doorstep. "People wanted to hear what we wanted to say," said Deborah Fikes, spokeswoman for the Midland Ministerial Alliance, based in Bush's hometown of Midland, Texas. Fikes started working with the Sudan embassy and went to Khartoum to meet those in the government she believed were moderates. That didn't impress the Council, who accused her of naiveté. "She didn't know what the hell she was doing," said Reeves. Fikes dismisses the criticism. "I didn't have a career or an agenda. When you look at Christ, he was misunderstood," she said. "DAMNED IF WE DO?" After his time in the Carter administration, Winter had vowed never to work in government again, preferring the less bureaucratic non-government sector. But USAID Administrator Andrew Natsios convinced him that Bush was going to make peace in Sudan a priority. Winter agreed to return to government. With his new role as an adviser to Danforth, the Council was back at the center of Sudan policy. As with Dagne, it was an open secret that Winter was biased. Danforth says he asked for Winter's help because of his detailed knowledge. Winter himself felt tension with many of the diplomats he was now working alongside. "The State Department was used to working with Khartoum," Winter said. Progress came that summer, when Khartoum's chargé d'affaires in Washington, Ahmed Khidir, flew to Danforth's home in St Louis, Missouri. Khidir had just one question, Danforth recalls: "Are we damned if we do and damned if we don't?" In other words, if Khartoum agreed to peace, would it still be a pariah to the U.S. government? The answer mattered. Ever since the rulers in Khartoum had taken power in a 1989 coup, their ability to maintain control depended greatly on patronage networks. Because the United States had effectively black-listed Sudan, Khartoum had to rely on loans from non-Western nations and revenue from the south's oil fields to fund these networks. To sign a pact in which they risked losing the oil-rich south, northern leaders needed an alternative source of income. Normalizing relations with Washington would be a sure pathway back to the international financial system. After consulting with Bush, Danforth told Khidir that Washington looked forward to normalizing ties. "That was an important message," Danforth said in an interview. Khidir couldn't be reached for comment. The biggest breakthrough, however, came not as the result of diplomacy or advocacy, but of Al Qaeda's attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001. When Bush told the world that Washington would "pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism," the U.S. relationship with Khartoum changed overnight. Sudan had expelled Al Qaeda leader bin Laden in 1996, but it worried it might be a U.S. target. Washington suddenly found itself with enormous leverage over Khartoum, which the Bush administration used to push for a peace agreement. Almost all the key issues that would end up in a landmark 2005 peace deal between Khartoum and the SPLM were agreed in the first five months of 2002. Most surprisingly, Khartoum agreed to let the southerners hold a referendum on whether to remain part of Sudan. THE COUNCIL, CLOONEY & CONGRESS By 2003, though, progress stalled. Reports of U.S. overstretch in Iraq and Afghanistan diminished Khartoum's fears of becoming a future military target. And the U.S. government approach to Khartoum started to fracture. The CIA had issued glowing reports about Sudan's cooperation in the "War on Terror" and supported Bush's promise of normalized relations. On the other hand, events in Sudan took on a life of their own. As it became clear that southerners were getting a new deal, people in Darfur, in west Sudan, wanted one, too. The civil war had been framed as a north-south or Muslim-Christian conflict. The truth was that southerners were far from the only group suffering under Khartoum. Other marginalized groups included the religiously diverse populace of the Nuba Mountains and mixed northern-southern populations in the Blue Nile and Abyei. As the Darfuri rebellion escalated, Khartoum moved to crush it. The Council immediately saw the parallels between Khartoum's response and previous atrocities in the south. But shifting the U.S. focus to Darfur could jeopardize the peace agreement for the south. Dagne consulted Garang, who encouraged him to introduce the Darfuri cause to the U.S. lawmakers backing the southerners. The Council stepped in; over the coming years they would be among the most crucial actors in cementing the previously unknown Darfur region in the imagination of the American public. Prendergast, at the time working at an independent research group, became a key player in the founding of the Save Darfur movement. He spent weeks at a time talking about Darfur on college campuses and working with actor George Clooney, who became an advocate for the cause. Reeves and Rice, then a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, wrote op-ed pieces. At USAID, Winter and D'Silva organized visits for State Department officials so they could see the violence firsthand. And after interviewing Darfuri refugees, Dagne worked with Rep. Payne on a resolution calling the atrocities genocide. Dagne was by now an expert at getting his congressional allies to insert pro-southern provisions into sure-to-pass bills on unrelated topics. Using this approach he had succeeded in exempting rebel-held areas of southern Sudan from U.S. sanctions. His Darfur genocide resolution, though, needed no such maneuver. Growing public outrage ensured it passed the House and Senate unanimously. PEACE - AND A BLOW In January 2005, as fighting in Darfur continued, Khartoum finally concluded a Comprehensive Peace Agreement with the south. Garang invited Dagne and Winter to dinner at his home in Nairobi, Kenya, to celebrate. Seven months later, the south Sudanese leader died in a helicopter crash. Garang's death was a huge blow to the south Sudanese project, but the Council rallied around his successor. Salva Kiir, who had spent his career on the battlefield, is as understated as Garang was garrulous. Before Kiir's first meeting with Bush, the Council gathered in his Washington hotel suite for an informal briefing, just as they had been doing since Garang's first visit to Capitol Hill. After the peace pact was signed, Winter retired from government. D'Silva remained at USAID and Dagne at the Congressional Research Service, while Prendergast founded his own advocacy organization. Rice, after Obama won office, joined the new administration as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. But the momentum ebbed as fractures opened up in the new administration. Retired Air Force General Scott Gration, the president's new envoy to Sudan, wanted closer engagement with Khartoum. Gration didn't respond to requests for comment. But in interviews in 2009, he argued that without resetting the relationship, Khartoum had no incentive to let the southerners vote on independence. He thought that making sure the independence referendum happened on time should be the overriding objective. Rice maintained vocal skepticism, believing that Khartoum's treatment of troubled areas outside the south, like Darfur, warranted continuing condemnation. A lengthy and acrimonious policy review ran through late 2009. In the end, it recommended that Darfur, north-south peace, and counter-terrorism cooperation should all be given equal priority. But disagreement around the details meant there was no consensus on how to pursue all three objectives. The first 18 months of Obama's term slipped away in a bureaucratic stalemate. Finally, in the summer of 2010, Obama called his Sudan team into the Oval Office. The president said he would not allow a return to bloodshed between north and south, according to Denis McDonough, chief of staff at the National Security Council at the time. SHOWDOWN WITH BIDEN Momentum returned. Vice President Joe Biden, due in South Africa for the World Cup, was tasked with urging leaders across Africa that the independence referendum must go ahead. Some African countries feared that southern independence would establish a precedent for secessionist movements in their own states. Meanwhile, Sudanese preparations for the referendum had stalled. Khartoum and Juba couldn't agree on the makeup of a steering group handling the logistics of the vote, and Khartoum was dragging its feet in releasing funds promised for the poll. The south had been urging Washington to push Khartoum to fulfill its promises. At a meeting in Nairobi, Biden told Kiir the South Sudanese themselves had to make sure the vote happened. "‘I don't care about what Khartoum is or is not doing,'" he said, according to Cameron Hudson, who attended as a member of the National Security Council. "‘We can't want this more than you.'" Kiir's office declined to comment on the meeting. Throughout the fall of 2010, the National Security Council's McDonough chaired meetings of a dozen Sudan policymakers every evening, often to midnight. They debated what incentives to offer Khartoum in exchange for letting the south go. One important call was over what the north needed to do to trigger these incentives: Was holding the referendum enough? Or should the rewards be tied to the completion of other outstanding issues, such as border demarcation and oil flow? Ultimately, the group concluded that they could not force the parties to agree on anything beyond holding the referendum. The U.S. decided to push for the vote to go ahead as scheduled. It began on January 9, 2011. The final tally showed that 98.8 percent of voters chose independence for southern Sudan. Speaking before the U.N. Security Council six months later, on the day South Sudan joined the world community, Rice promised that the United States would remain a "steadfast friend." Washington pledged $370.8 million in aid for the new country in the six months following independence alone. OFF TO JUBA The unresolved diplomatic issues have come back to haunt the region. In January, Kiir shut down the southern oil industry, accusing Khartoum of having stolen 1.7 million barrels of South Sudan's oil from a cross-border pipeline. Khartoum said it only confiscated what it was owed in pipeline fees. Other unfinished business - the border, and the fate of regions such as Abyei and the Nuba Mountains - has sparked new violence. Still, the current U.S. envoy to Sudan, Princeton Lyman, argues that even in hindsight, it was right for the U.S. to push for the referendum to be held on time. Members of the Council have mixed views on the legacy of the peace agreement. Prendergast, Deng and Reeves - none of whom were in government when the agreement was created - are pessimistic, believing that other troubled areas in Sudan should have been more seriously attended to. D'Silva wonders whether the agreement would have been better implemented had Garang survived. Winter and Dagne - who were closest to the creation of the final pact - are more sanguine, saying the independence of the south alone justifies the agreement. Previously, the north-south clash was a domestic dispute which the world could ignore. Now it is a conflict between two states, and the south has its own army to defend itself. "All the other issues are minor once you have your sovereignty," Dagne said. One evening in January, Dagne headed to Dulles International Airport outside Washington to catch a flight to Juba. He had left his Congress job and was off to take up a role as special adviser to South Sudan's President Kiir. Leaving behind his family and a secure U.S. government position, he was returning to the continent he left 31 years earlier. On his iPhone, Dagne carries a recording of a message Garang left him less than 24 hours before he died. "Hi, Nephew, this is Uncle," it begins. Dagne scrolled through farewell messages from Council members. "South Sudan could not be more fortunate," wrote Reeves. "I salute you… you are…the Emperor.

The myth of the 1,400 year Sunni-Shia war.

During the period of European rule over Rwanda, the Belgian colonial administrators of the territory accomplished an extraordinary feat in their subjugation of the local population - the deliberate manufacture of new ethnic divisions. By formulating ethnic categorisations based on subjective judgments of Rwandans' height and skin colour, the Belgians sought to keep the Rwandan people at odds with one another and subservient to them. Entirely fabricated histories and genealogies were concocted for the "Hutu" and "Tutsi" peoples, although these terms themselves had been taken from the dustbin of Rwandan history and had had little effective meaning for hundreds of years. This strategy of divide-and-conquer eventually resulted in the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, a bloodbath which shocked the conscience of the world and claimed the lives of roughly 800,000 people. Hutus and Tutsis, themselves only recently fabricated identities, had come to believe in a false narrative in which they had been in opposition to one another since the dawn of time. Today it is increasingly common to hear talk of the existence of a "1,400 Year War" between Sunni and Shia Muslims. In this narrative, the sectarian violence of today is simply the continuation of an ancient religious conflict rooted in events which transpired in the 7th century. While some Muslims themselves have recently bought into this worldview, it would suffice to say that such beliefs represent not only a misreading of history but a complete and utter fabrication of it. While there are distinct theological differences between Sunnis and Shias, the claim that these two groups have been in a perpetual state of war and animosity throughout their existence is an absurd falsehood. The conflict now brewing between certain Sunni and Shia political factions in the Middle East today has little or nothing to do with religious differences and everything to do with modern identity politics. Just as in Rwanda, Western powers and their local allies have sought to exacerbate these false divisions in order to perpetuate conflict and maintain a Middle East which is at once thoroughly divided and incapable of asserting itself. False continuities Analyses of the roots of sectarian conflict in the Middle East tend to look at the historical schism between Sunnis and Shias as the original driving factor behind present-day tensions. In this reading of events, the 680AD Battle of Karbala in which the descendants of the Prophet Muhammad (who are particularly revered by Shia Muslims) were killed was merely the first battle in a long and continuous sectarian conflict which today is being played out in Syria, Lebanon and other countries throughout the Middle East. Head to Head - What is wrong with Islam today? As described by the Saudi writer Abdullah Hamiddadin, this explanation of contemporary events is as absurd as explaining modern tensions between Turkey and the EU as being rooted in the ancient conflict between King Charles and the Empress of Byzantium. Positing that present-day political rivalries can be explained by examining ninth-century conflicts between European powers is transparent nonsense. However, the same logic is readily applied to conflicts within the Muslim world. Indeed, while modern political factions often make reference to theological differences, the usage of symbolism and rhetoric which draws upon the distant past (a tactic employed by political opportunists around the world) is very different than the existence of an actual continuity between ancient history and the present. However, thanks to the efforts of well-funded religious demagogues - themselves either ignorant of history or cynical manipulators of it - this patently ridiculous explanation of world events is gaining some purchase even among Muslims themselves. Remembering history in the Middle East For those who would seek to shamelessly fabricate a historical narrative in order to serve their venal political interests, it is worth restating some basic realities about the nature of sectarian relationships in the Middle East. While over a millennium of cohabitation the various religious communities of the region have experienced identifiable ups-and-downs in their relations, the overall narrative between them is vastly more of pluralism, tolerance and accommodation than of hard-wired conflict and animosity. For centuries, Sunnis and Shias (as well as Christians, Jews and other religious groups) have lived closely intertwined with one another to a degree without parallel elsewhere in the world. Even where they have exerted power through distinct political structures, the argument that this has equated to conflict does not stand up to even a cursory analysis. While the Sunni Ottoman Empire and Shia Safavid Empire experienced their share of conflict, they also lived peaceably alongside one another for hundreds of years, even considering it shameful to engage in conflict with one another as Muslim powers. Furthermore, despite seething protestations to the contrary from zealots of all types, "sects" have hardly been separately self-contained entities over history. Shia and Sunni Muslim scholars have long engaged in dialogue and influenced the religious thought of one another for centuries, blurring the already largely superficial distinctions between the two communities. As a legacy of this, today the greatest seat of learning in Sunni Islam also teaches Shia theology as an integrated school of thought. Modern Dark Ages The contrast between this history and the unconscionably brutal wars of religion which for centuries ravaged Europe could not be starker. When describing tensions between factions in the Middle East today, Western analysts (and increasingly, many Muslims) tend to view events through a historical lens which is derived from a distinctly Western experience of intractable religious conflict. Indeed, far from being ancient history, Europe's dark obsession with religious hatred reached its nadir mere decades ago in the form of the Holocaust - perhaps the ultimate religious "pogrom" against the long-oppressed Jewish population of the continent. For every sectarian terrorist group or militia, there are countless ordinary Shia and Sunni Muslims around the world who have risked their lives to protect their co-religionists. In recent decades however this dynamic has been largely reversed. Europe has taken great strides in enshrining tolerance, while the Middle East's once unrivalled religious pluralism has degraded to the point where even co-religionists of marginally-different sects are now often violently at odds with one another. European leaders now regularly lecture their counterparts in the Middle East on the need to protect the rights of minorities; something which may be tolerable today but which would have been thought unconscionable throughout most of history. While contemporary Muslim societies have regressed to the point where Europeans can now claim moral authority to lecture them on religious diversity, looking at history it should be noted that the periods of greatest religious tolerance within Islam have historically corresponded with the peaks of political power among Muslim empires. The lesson contained herein is something which modern leaders and religious figures - many of whom are disdainful at best towards minorities - ignore at their great peril. A dangerous myth Those who ignorantly claim that progress can be attained through the enforcement of strict ideological purity should take heed of the past and resist the temptation towards religious chauvinism. The conflict which some claim exists today between Sunni and Shia Muslims is a product of very recent global events; blowback from the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the petro-dollar fuelled global rise of Wahhabi reactionaries. It is decidedly not the continuation of any "1,400 year war" between Sunnis and Shias but is driven instead by the very modern phenomena of identity politics. Factions on both sides have created false histories for their own political benefit and have manufactured symbols and rituals which draw upon ancient history but are in fact entirely modern creations. Furthermore, Western military powers have sought to amplify these divisions to generate internecine conflicts within Muslim societies and engineer a bloodbath which will be to their own benefit. While neoconservatives practically salivate in anticipation of Muslims committing mass-fratricide against one another, away from the political sphere ordinary people continue to live with the deeply engrained sense of tolerance that has traditionally characterised the once-global civilisation of Islam. For every sectarian terrorist group or militia, there are countless ordinary Shia and Sunni Muslims around the world who have risked their lives to protect their co-religionists as well as the religious minorities within their societies. For every story which discards the nuances of todays' conflicts and casts them as part of a narrative of spiralling sectarian violence, there are others which point resolutely in the opposite direction. In the words of an 80-year old Pakistani farmer, a man older than his own country: "I've witnessed this Shia-Sunni brotherhood from my childhood, you can say from the day I was born." In Rwanda a people who came to believe a false history about themselves ended up being driven towards madness and self-destruction. Today, the Rwandan government has done away with the artificial colonial categorisations of "Hutu" and "Tutsi" and has formally recognised all Rwandan citizens as being of one ethnicity. Similarly, it is incumbent upon Muslims to reject crude myths about a 1,400 year sectarian war between themselves and to recognise the dangerous folly of such beliefs. Indeed, the simple truth is that if such a war existed Sunnis and Shias would not have been intermarrying and living in the same neighbourhoods up to the 21st century. Furthermore, were they truly enemies, millions of people of both sects would have stopped peacefully converging on the annual Hajj pilgrimage many centuries ago. If Islam is to continue as a constructive social phenomenon it is important that these traditional relationships and ways of life are not destroyed by modern ideologies masquerading as historical truths.

Rival groups in Egypt reject transition plan.

The Muslim Brotherhood has rejected a transition timetable set out by the military-backed interim president Adly Mansour, as the National Salvation Front, Egypt's main opposition bloc, denounced a decree which invests the new leader with extensive powers. The rejection from rival groups in Egypt came on Tuesday, as the transitional administration named the Prime Minister as Hazem el-Beblawi and appointed liberal opposition chief and Nobel Peace laureate Mohamed ElBaradei as vice president for foreign relations. Essam el-Erian, a senior Brotherhood figure and deputy head of its Freedom and Justice Party, the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, dismissed the transition timetable on Tuesday, saying it would take Egypt "back to zero". "The cowards are not sleeping, but Egypt will not surrender," he said. "The people created their constitution with their votes," el-Eiran wrote on his Facebook page, referring to the constitution that Islamists pushed to finalisation and then was passed in a national referendum during former President Mohamed Morsi's year in office. Egypt's interim administration published a timetable for a transition to a new democratic government hours after the army shot dead scores of people outside the elite Republican Guards' headquarters in Cairo on Monday. The plan includes holding parliamentary elections by 2014, after which a date will be announced for a presidential ballot. The country will have five months to amend the current draft constitution, suspended following Morsi's removal last week, ratify it in a referendum, and then hold parliamentary elections, according to the text of the 33-article decree published online. The process will take no more than 210 days, according to the decree, meaning elections will be by February at the latest. "The National Salvation Front announces its rejection of the constitutional decree," the group said in a statement. The NSF complained of a lack of consultation before the charter was adopted. "We call for it to be amended and will propose our own amendments to the president," the group added. Earlier, the grassroots Tamarod campaign, which organised the mass protests that led to Morsi's overthrow, also complained it had not been consulted on the transition plan. Tamarod spokesman Mahmud Badr said the movement would itself make proposals for changes to the blueprint. For its part, the US cautiously welcomed the plan. "We are encouraged the interim government has laid out a plan for the path forward," State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki told a daily briefing. "The details of a path back to a democratically elected civilian government are for the Egyptian people to decide," she added. Military issues warning The Egyptian military on Tuesday issued a statement defending the legitimacy of the interim government,. Defense Minister Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi warned against anyone who would put "the homeland at the people in jeopardy" and any attempt to disrupt the country's "difficult and complex" transition. Elsewhere, Egypt's prosecutor general on Tuesday began investigating 650 people suspected of involvement in violence on Monday, although it is not clear who, exactly, is under investigation. Meanwhile, one of the leading critics of Morsi's government, the United Arab Emirates, has pledged $3bn in loans and grants to Egypt's new government. The Gulf state alleges that Islamist groups backed by the Muslim Brotherhood have sought to topple its Western-backed ruling system. Saudi Arabia also approved a $5bn aid package to Egypt, which is to include $2bn in central bank deposits, $2bn in in energy products and $1bn in cash.

Egypt's Brotherhood rejects cabinet offer.

The Muslim Brotherhood has rejected an offer to join Egypt's transitional cabinet, as new interim Prime Minister Hazem el-Beblawi announced he would start work on forming an interim government once he meets with liberal leaders. Beblawi told the Reuters news agency on Wednesday that he accepted that it would be difficult to win the unanimous support of Egyptians for his new government. "Of course we respect the public opinion and we try to comply with the expectation of the people, but there is always a time of choice, there is more than one alternative, you cannot satisfy all of the people," he said. Meanwhile, Egypt's main liberal coalition, the National Salvation Front, withdrew its earlier statement rejecting the transition plan for interim rule and issued a statement containing milder criticism, Reuters said. Beblawi, a liberal economist and former finance minister, was named the new prime minister on Tuesday. Liberal opposition chief and Nobel Peace laureate Mohamed ElBaradei was also named vice president and head of foreign relations. The appointments were followed by an announcement that ministerial posts in the new government would be offered to members of the Freedom and Justice Party, the Muslim Brotherhood's political arm, and to the Nour Party. Al Jazeera's Rawya Rageh, reporting from Cairo, said that some of the opposition groups like Tamarrod said that they were not consulted, and that the plans for the interim government was a rushed political process done in the dark. Political 'manoeuvring' The administration moves come almost a week after the military overthrew President Mohamed Morsi and chose chief justice Adly Mansour to head the Arab world's most populous country. ElBaradei was initially tipped to lead the cabinet but his nomination was rejected by the Nour party. The head of the party added that it was still studying ElBaradei's appointment as vice president. Beblawi now faces the daunting task of trying to reunite a deeply divided country and rescue its battered economy. Shortly after the Islamist parties made their statements, Egypt's army chief went on state media to say that the military will not accept political "manoeuvring". Defence Minister Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi said that "the future of the nation is too important and sacred for maneuvers or hindrance, whatever the justifications". The blueprint unveiled by Mansour is intended to replace the controversial Islamist-drafted constitution which he suspended following last week's coup. A committee will be set up to make final improvements to the draft before it is put to a referendum. Parliamentary elections will then follow within three months and Mansour will announce a date for a presidential election once the new parliament has convened. Beblawi and ElBaradei Both Beblawi and ElBaradei are well-known on Egypt's political scene. Beblawi, 76, studied in Cairo and Paris, where he obtained a doctorate in economics. Egypt in turmoil as rivals reject interim leader's plan. During his long career, he worked in public and private institutions, both at home and abroad, including as head of Egypt's Export Development Bank between 1983 and 1995. He has also taught at several universities around the world and has written numerous books and articles on finance in Arabic, French and English. Beblawi was appointed as deputy prime minister and finance minister in the "Revolution Cabinet" after a popular uprising saw the ousting of long-time President Hosni Mubarak. Egypt's military council rejected Beblawi's resignation in October of 2011, when he quit in protest over deadly clashes that left at least 26 people dead. ElBaradei, who has the backing of the June 30 Front - an amalgam of several groups opposing Morsi - is widely respected in Egypt and has received the country's highest honour, the Nile Shas, in 2006. The former director of the UN nuclear watchdog agency, 71, has had a long career on the international scene. ElBaradei served as an Egyptian diplomat to the UN and later as an aide to Egypt's foreign minister. He was the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency for nearly 12 years. He and the IAEA shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005. ElBaradei was tipped to be the new deputy prime minister last week, but Egyptian media later negated the reports.

US Bin Laden raid was an act of war,report says.

The unilateral decision by the US to launch a military operation to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden on Pakistani territory constituted "an act of war", a Pakistani government investigation has found. The report of the Abbottabad Commission, which investigated the circumstances around the raid and how the al-Qaeda leader came to live in the country for nine years without apparently being detected, was exclusively released on Monday. The report of the commission, formed in June 2011 to probe the circumstances around the killing of bin Laden by US forces in a unilateral raid on the Pakistani city of Abbottabad, had earlier been suppressed by the Pakistani government. The raid illustrated Washington's "contemptuous disregard of Pakistan’s sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity in the arrogant certainty of […] unmatched military might", the report concluded in its "Findings" section. In the same section, the report also details the "comprehensive failure of Pakistan to detect the presence of Bin Laden on its territory for almost a decade". The report draws on testimony from more than 200 witnesses, including members of Bin Laden's family, Pakistan's then spy chief, senior ministers in the government and officials at every level of the military, bureaucracy and security services. Scathing report The commission's 336-page report is scathing, holding both the government and the military responsible for "gross incompetence" leading to "collective failures" that allowed both Bin Laden to escape detection, and the US to be able to violate Pakistani sovereignty by carrying out an attack on its soil without the knowledge of the military or the government. View the Abbottabad Commission report It singles out the military for particular criticism on this front, citing an "overall policy bankruptcy" amongst both the political and military leadership, when it came to securing the country’s western border against possible violations of Pakistani territory or airspace. The commission’s investigators were told by the Pakistani Air Force that low-level radars were on "peacetime deployment", and hence were not active on the western border with Afghanistan. It is through this lack of radar coverage, and the fact that the US forces carried out the raid in stealth helicopters, flying fast and low, they were told, that the US SEAL team was able to evade detection. Pakistani Air Force jets were only scrambled in response to the threat after US forces had already left Pakistani airspace, after having spent approximately three hours in Pakistani territory and airspace. It concluded that Pakistan’s defence policy was "outdated" and reactive, with major policy documents not having been updated since 2004 (the Defence Policy) and 2007 (the Joint Strategic Directive). The two documents designate India as being the only country to be considered "hostile" to Pakistan. "There was no pro-active anticipatory policy or policy planning," the report says, in detailing how the Pakistani military apparently had no contingency plans in place to respond to a unilateral US raid. It also noted that such a raid had been alluded to in public statements by senior US officials. "Is it official or unofficial defence policy not to attempt to defend the country if threatened or even attacked by a military superpower like the US?" the report asks several top military officials, including the chief of the air force and the director-general of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). 'Too weak' Lieutenant-General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, then director general of the ISI, moreover, told the commission that Pakistan had become "too weak" and dependent on Washington to take necessary actions to defend itself against US policies, according to the report. Spotlight Al Jazeera's exclusive coverage of the leaked Bin Laden files "We are a very weak state and also a very scared state," Pasha told the commission. He said that the case of Bin Laden was one "not so much of specific individual or institutional failure, but [one of] collective and systemic failure". Pasha went on to allege that Pakistani society was "deeply penetrated" by US intelligence and other services, quoting a US intelligence officer as having told him: "You are so cheap … we can buy you with a visa, with a visit to the US, even with a dinner … we can buy anyone." The report also makes detailed allegations against Hussain Haqqani, the former Pakistani ambassador to the US, regarding the procurement of an extensive number of visas, without proper authorisation, for US nationals. Haqqani denied these charges both to Al Jazeera and to the commission in his written testimony. The commission also found, based on testimony from officials from the ISI, that Pakistani intelligence had effectively closed the book on the hunt for Bin Laden after the CIA stopped sharing information on his possible whereabouts in 2005. The ISI was provided with four telephone numbers in 2010 related to the hunt for Bin Laden, but they were not told the significance of the numbers. The commission concludes that the ISI was "paralyzed by the CIA’s lack of cooperation", and should have been able to track the al-Qaeda leader on its own territory more effectively. The report also details "culpable negligence and incompetence at almost all levels of government" in both the violation of sovereignty constituted by Bin Laden’s stay in the country for nine years, and the US raid that killed him in 2011.

Zuma sacks three ministers in reshuffle.

South African President Jacob Zuma has reshuffled his cabinet for a fourth time, sacking three ministers, including a former anti-apartheid activist and a critic of his administration. Tokyo Sexwale, who has been human settlement minister, was fired on Tuesday along with embattled communications minister Dina Pule and the minister of traditional affairs, Richard Baloyi. The reshuffle, announced less than a year before Zuma seeks re-election for another five-year term, followed Sexwale's criticism of the president's stewardship of the economy, Africa's largest. Sexwale, a wealthy businessman, was jailed on the Robben Island like Nelson Mandela, the country's first black president and an anti-apartheid icon. The businessman was among a group of senior African National Congress (ANC) members looking to replace Zuma last year. However, Zuma is almost assured of being the party's presidential candidate in 2014 after winning an ANC leadership contest in December. Analysts say he has high chances of winning the 2014 election given his ruling ANC's stranglehold over politics but international credit agencies have downgraded South Africa in the last year, citing his ineffectual leadership among other long-term risks. Shady deals One of the dismissed ministers has been facing allegations of being involved in shady deals. Pule stands accused of giving preferential treatment to a firm run by her then-boyfriend - a charge she denies. The ministers of energy and transport swapped portfolios while the much-maligned basic education minister, Angie Motshekga, at the centre of scandal in which textbooks went undelivered for months to a province, kept her post. Many ANC veterans feel Zuma has steered Mandela's former liberation movement away from its idealistic beginnings and into a morass of graft, cronyism and a culture of self-enrichment. Mandela, now 94 years old, has spent a month in hospital battling a lung infection that has left him in critical condition. South Africa was mired in recession when Zuma came to power, but since then has struggled to pick up to pre-2008 growth rates of around 5 percent. Since the ANC assumed power after the end of apartheid in 1994, the government has built hundreds of thousands of houses and provided basic service to millions of poor blacks left by the wayside during white-minority rule. But festering labour strife in the mining sector, a poor education system and a rigid jobs market have been eroding South Africa's economic competitiveness.

Egypt Nour Party accepts ex-finance minister as interim PM.

Egypt's Nour Party, the country's second-biggest Islamist group after the Muslim Brotherhood, said on Tuesday it would accept the choice of former finance minister Samir Radwan as interim prime minister. Nour Party spokesman Nader Bakkar said the party would accept Radwan because he met the party's criteria that he be a “technocrat” economist and have previous experience in government administration. Senior political sources said on Monday that Radwan had emerged as the favorite for the post. The military-backed transitional administration is keen to win Nour's support for a new government to show it is acceptable to Islamists after the army toppled the Brotherhood's Mohamed Mursi last week. “We asked for a technocrat economist ... a neutral guy,”Bakkar told me on phone. Nour had said last week it would not accept former U.N. diplomat Mohamed ElBaradei as interim prime minister, deepening the turmoil surrounding the transition. Egypt's main shares index rose 1.7 percent after Nour said it would accept Radwan. Nour, an ultra-conservative Islamist party, said on Monday it was pulling out of negotiations over the new government in response to the killing of at least 51 pro-Mursi protesters at the Republican Guard barracks in Cairo. Bakkar said the party still had influence on the process” through some channels.” He said Nour was now focusing on working with other political forces to form a “wisdom committee” to get the country out of its crisis. Asked whether he thought Radwan was likely to be appointed prime minister, Bakkar said: “I think it is a strong possibility.”

Analysis:Sudan's Bashir plays to hardliners to stem secession debate.

When Sudan's President Omar Hassan al-Bashir returned a few weeks ago from a summit in Ethiopia with his South Sudanese counterpart and former civil war foe, many people here expected him to talk of peace. Instead, the 69-year-old ruler donned his officer's uniform, waved his trademark walking stick and - once again - threatened to cut off South Sudanese oil exports through Sudan, something the northern country's battered economy can ill afford. The International Criminal Court-indicted leader faces a succession debate at home and his rhetoric was aimed less at the South, an uneasy neighbor since it split from the north in 2011, and more at hard-line Islamists and army officers in his own circles, analysts say. This weekend, thousands of Sudanese demanded that Bashir step down in the biggest opposition rally for years. But the biggest threat to his rule might come from dissent within the army and Islamists, the backbone of his power since he seized control in a 1989 coup. Nobody in the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) has declared himself a contender, but speculation over who could run the vast African country after Bashir has increased since he indicated he might quit before 2015 elections. Diplomats say Bashir's family has been asking him to make good on that suggestion following his throat surgery last year. Officials insist he is completely fit but he has cut down on speeches and public events. Any handover would be complicated by Bashir's indictment at the ICC for war crimes in Sudan's Darfur region, where the government and the Janjaweed militia have been battling rebel groups from the minority non-Arab population since 2003. Analysts say he would be anxious to ensure a successor would not turn him over to The Hague to improve relations with the West. "He would want a hardliner as successor to make sure there won't be any concession with the ICC," said Magdi El Gizouli, a political analyst and author of the "Still Sudan" blog. Bashir is no stranger to challenges. In his 24 years in power, he has weathered protests, multiple armed revolts, U.S. trade sanctions, the loss of vital oil to South Sudan and, more recently, a coup attempt by disgruntled officers and Islamists. While Western powers shun contact with Bashir due to the ICC Darfur charges, they worry his exit might lead to instability in one of Africa's biggest countries at a time when Islamist militants are fighting French troops in Mali and roam across sub-Saharan borders. With its porous borders to Chad, Egypt, the Central African Republic and Libya, awash with arms from the 2001 overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi, an unstable Sudan could be a major security headache. Alarm bells rang when unconfirmed reports emerged that some Mali fighters fleeing French troops had arrived in lawless Darfur in February, despite Sudan's denial. "No doubt many horrible things happen in Sudan, but a Sudan without Bashir could be chaos," said a European diplomat. "You could have a link between Islamists here and in Mali." ARMY IS POWER BROKER NCP officials have played down Bashir's comments, with several calling on him to run again, fearing his exit might split the party, or indeed the country, which is dominated by three Arab tribes. Others want him to stay to safeguard their business interests. "We will accept nobody else but you," Abu Majzoub, a senior NCP official told Bashir during a party meeting two weeks ago. The president himself kept his options open at the event, declaring in a speech - one of his longest since undergoing surgery - that only a special NCP conference, expected for next year, would decide on the next candidate. But newspaper columnist Mekki El Mograbi said it was too late to stop a succession debate. Middle-aged NCP cadres have been privately complaining that key positions in the government and state firms have been held for decades by the same old men. They point to senior figures like Oil Minister Awad al-Jaz, who is on his second term in that post and has been rotated though various top jobs since the 1989 coup. "Young people inside the NCP think it is time to take over power," said Mekki, an NCP member. "They want young people present in all government positions." Some technocrats close to the NCP also feel the ICC charges stand in the way of better ties with the West as Sudan hopes for investment to realize its mineral and agricultural potential. In a first public rift, senior NCP official Ghazi Salah ad-Din said in April the constitution banned Bashir from running again. The NCP promptly removed him as head of its parliamentary caucus. To keep critics at bay Bashir cannot lose the loyalty of the army, a power broker in a country famous for coups. By accusing South Sudan of backing Sudanese rebels he is playing to the feelings of hardliners in the army and also radical Islamists for whom the old civil war foe to the south is a natural enemy, analysts and diplomats in Khartoum say. Some officers were enraged by a rebel attack on central Sudan in April, and dismayed by the army's struggle to seize back territory. Bashir has since changed the army leadership under the banner of regular retirement, which offered him the chance to promote ambitious young officers and make a new start fighting rebels. COUP RISK Aly Verjee, senior researcher at the Rift Valley Institute, said Bashir had still the support of many in the army and NCP but the risk was that disgruntled officers might team up with Islamists who feel he has given up the religious values of his 1989 coup. That risk was exposed when authorities unveiled in November a coup plot involving a former spy chief and 12 officers. One of them was a senior Islamist army officer, who is revered as a hero fighting southern "infidels" during the long civil war. "The question is not whether anti-Bashir sentiment exists, but how deep it runs, how permanent it is, and how many of the leadership are sympathetic to such views," said Verjee. The government has been at pains not to give any clues who might succeed Bashir one day. When Japan held an African summit in June it left Sudan to choose its representative as Tokyo could not host Bashir due to the ICC charges. First Vice President Ali Osman Taha would have been the top-ranking alternative, but Khartoum only sent a state finance minister. "It looked odd to have a junior minister sitting next to several African leaders, but I think they didn't want to send Taha since he's seen as a succession candidate," said a diplomat. Taha would be the preferred candidate of many Western diplomats who hope his more moderate views might open a new page in relations. But as a former judge and lawyer it remains to be seen whether he would have the backing of the army. "Bashir might think Taha is too soft and could make concessions with the ICC," said El Gizouli. Another possible contender is presidential assistant Nafie Ali Nafie, a hardliner with security ties. He has been visiting European countries such as Norway, Sweden or Russia in recent months, which some see as a hint of higher ambitions.

South Sudan suspends radio station for criticising government.

South Sudan suspended a Catholic radio station after it investigated the suspicious death of a prisoner, reporters and human rights activists said, the latest crackdown on media in the young republic. Journalists in South Sudan, which seceded from Sudan in 2011, often complain of harassment and arbitrary detention by the security forces, a loose conglomeration of former militias from decades of civil war with Khartoum. The government of the central Lakes state ordered the Good News Radio station on Friday to stop broadcasting for three days for "criticising the government", said Fernando Colombo, the administrator of the Catholic diocese that owns the station. He did not elaborate but reporters and human rights activists said the station had annoyed the government by questioning the official line on the death of a civilian in jail, among other critical reports. "The Lakes state government is intimidating the media, harassing media personnel and trying to malign those who are speaking against the abuses of human rights," said Biel Boutrous Biel, head of the South Sudan Human Rights Society for Advocacy. The regional government, which is headed by an interim military governor, could not be reached. Last month, New York-based Human Rights Watch accused the army of having detained 130 civilians without charge in Lakes state since February. Good News Radio went back on air on Monday evening but was playing only music. Former acting director Peter Mapuor Makur said reporters were afraid to return to work. South Sudan, a staunch U.S. ally, is a country without media law where the government is made up mostly of former guerilla commanders who dislike scrutiny. This year, South Sudan slipped 13 places to 124 out of 179 countries on a press freedom index compiled by the media watchdog Reporters Without Borders

Egypt:Elections do not make a democracy.

An election is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for democracy. That’s the takeaway from the continuing upheaval in Egypt. Last year, Mohamed Mursi became Egypt’s first freely elected president. Mursi won with 51.7 percent of the vote — slightly more than the 51.1 percent that Barack Obama won in 2012. Mursi was the candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organization that had been banned and persecuted in Egypt for 60 years. Mursi’s overthrow last week put the United States on the spot. Could Washington support the removal of a democratically elected government, even one we did not like? The Mursi government may have been elected, but there are other requirements for a democracy. A democratic government has to guarantee minority rights. It has to accept the opposition as legitimate. It has to be willing to abide by the rules. And the truest test of a democracy: The government has to give up power if it is defeated at the polls. The Mursi government failed all those tests except the last one. That’s because it was only in power for a year and got removed by the military before it could stand for re-election. In that one year, however, Mursi asserted near-unlimited power over the country. He appointed Islamic radicals to key positions. He rammed through a new constitution that enshrined the principles of Islamic law. He arrested opponents and allowed attacks on religious minorities. He neglected the failing economy. He angered the military by calling for Egyptian intervention in Ethiopia and Syria. Friday, the Republican chairman and ranking Democratic member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee issued a joint statement saying, “Real democracy requires inclusiveness, compromise, respect for human and minority rights and a commitment to the rule of law. Mursi and his inner circle did not embrace any of those principles and instead chose to consolidate power and rule by fiat.” Egypt has always been a secular country. But a majority of its voters are religious and, given a chance to compete in free elections, they will elect an Islamist government. That has happened in other Arab and Muslim countries as well – for example, Tunisia, Turkey, Iran. In 2006, Palestinians in Gaza elected a Hamas government allied with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. Islamist governments usually infuriate the secular population and antagonize the military — which is what happened in Egypt. Tensions are also high in Turkey, where a relatively moderate Islamic government faces large-scale protests by the secular population. The point is, elections sometimes produce unsavory results. The classic example: the German parliamentary elections of July and November 1932, which made the Nazis Germany’s largest party. As a result, Adolf Hitler became chancellor in 1933. Mursi is no Hitler, but the Muslim Brotherhood is a paranoid and fanatical movement whose long-term commitment to democracy is much in doubt. To radical Islamists, elections are a way to gain power. They are enraged because the results of Egypt’s 2012 election have been nullified. “Didn’t we do what they asked?” an Islamist voter told The New York Times, “We don’t believe in democracy to begin with. It’s not part of our ideology. But we accepted it. We followed them, and then this is what they do?” An Islamist in Libya had this complaint: “Do you think I can sell [democracy] to the people any more? I have been saying all along, ‘If you want to build Shariah law, come to elections.’ Now they will just say, ‘Look at Egypt,’ and you don’t need to say anything else.” To many Islamists, the United States has been exposed as hypocritical. We promote democracy, but we will not stand by a democratically elected government when it is threatened. Many believe that Washington was complicit in Mursi’s overthrow. The Obama administration reportedly tried to broker a compromise that Mursi was unwilling to accept. At the same time, secular Egyptians complain that Washington did not criticize Mursi’s undemocratic regime. To them, it proves that Washington is interested only in stability, not democracy. Didn’t the United States support the corrupt regime of deposed Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak all those years? More than any other recent event, the overthrow of the Mursi government in Egypt highlights a conflict between the form and the substance of democracy. “Why is it just ballot boxes?” a human-rights activist asked. “Are ballot boxes the only forms of democratic expression when the rulers fail the people?” We Americans nurture the pothole theory of democracy. We like to believe that, if a radical government is elected, it will quickly learn that it has to moderate and serve the needs of the people in order to stay in power: It has to fill the potholes and keep the lights on. But to many Islamic radicals, the ballot is just an alternative to the bullet as a way to gain power. They are ready to abandon democracy if the military and the West won’t allow them to stay in power. There was a frightening sight in Egypt last week. Thousands of Mursi supporters rallied under the black flag of jihad and chanted, “No more elections after today!” But democracy means a lot more than holding elections. That’s something they have to learn. We just learned it in Egypt.

Turkey condemns Cairo shooting,calls it massacre.

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu condemned the Cairo shooting in which at least 42 people died on Monday, describing the incident as a "massacre" and calling for the start of a normalization process. Islamist protesters angered by president Mohamed Mursi's overthrow said the killings occurred when they were fired on outside Republican Guard headquarters. The military blamed the bloodshed on a "terrorist group" that tried to storm the compound and said at least one soldier was killed and 40 hurt. "I strongly condemn the massacre that took place in Egypt at morning prayer in the name of the fundamental human values which we have been advocating," Davutoglu said on Twitter. He called for the start of a political normalization process that respects the national will of Egyptians. Turkey's government has Islamist roots like Mursi's Muslim Brotherhood. Davutoglu last week denounced the Egyptian army's removal of Mursi after days of mass unrest against his rule "a military coup" and said this was "unacceptable".

Cars seized from Equatorial Guinea president's son reap 2.8 million euros.

From Bugatti and Bentley to Ferrari, Porsche and Maserati, nine luxury cars seized from the son of Equatorial Guinea's president as part of a money-laundering investigation fetched 2.8 million euros ($3.6 million) at an auction in Paris on Monday. Teodorin Obiang, the son of President Teodoro Obiang and apotential successor, is second vice-president of the small oil-rich African state and is wanted in France on charges he embezzled public funds to buy real estate in Paris. He denies wrongdoing and says he earned the money in legitimate business. The cars, seized by French judges in September 2011, drew a crowd of about 100 potential buyers, mostly male, to the prestigious Drouot auction house, with other bids coming over the phone or online. The auction was ordered by a state collection agency that can use the proceeds to indemnify victims. Dating from 2004 to 2010, the cars with leather interiors and spotless paint work appeared infrequently used, with very little mileage, providing a glimpse into Obiang's lavish lifestyle in Paris and abroad. "I'm delighted, it went really well. We met our target - it's a judicial process and we're trying to recover as much money as possible," auctioneer Damien Libert said. ($1 = 0.7792 euros)

South African police arrest five for botched circumcision deaths.

South African police have arrested five people on suspicion of murder for botched circumcisions that led to the deaths of about 30 boys in coming-of-age rituals in the rural Eastern Cape province, a police spokeswoman said on Monday. Police were also investigating suspected assault, gross bodily harm and unlawful circumcisions that left 300 others injured across the province over the last week, police spokeswoman Sibongile Soci said. Every year in South Africa, boys aged 10 to 15 from several of the country's tribal groups are circumcised in traditional "initiation rituals". The ceremonies usually take place over a number of weeks in remote rural areas. Deaths are mainly caused by blood loss or infection from circumcisions poorly performed by traditional practitioners. The ruling African National Congress called the deaths and injuries "tragic" and said the government must act immediately. "Authorities can no longer pay lip service to dealing with this disaster that afflicts our nation during the traditional initiation season," it said in a statement. In May, more than 20 youths died in the northern Mpumalanga province, prompting rare cross-party calls for reform of a practice ingrained in local culture.

U.N. urged to consider drones,gunships for South Sudan mission.

The United Nations should consider deploying surveillance drones and helicopter gunships in South Sudan because peacekeepers are struggling to protect civilians from violence and rights abuses, the U.N. special envoy to South Sudan said on Monday. Hilde Johnson told the U.N. Security Council that after a U.N. civilian helicopter was shot down in December, new safety procedures and a lack of military helicopters - the peacekeepers have only three - had slowed the mission's ability to respond. Johnson said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon had outlined several options to boost the South Sudan mission in a report to the 15-member Security Council, including surveillance drones, helicopter gunships and more cargo and riverine transport capabilities. "I urge the council to take urgent action to support the mission in filling these critical resource and capability gaps," Johnson told the Security Council in a video link briefing. South Sudan will mark two years of independence from Sudan on Tuesday and Johnson said that while most parts of the country remained stable, fighting between South Sudanese troops and armed groups in the eastern state of Jonglei was of "deep concern." Tens of thousands of people have fled their homes because of the violence and Johnson said there had been rights violations by both armed groups and national security authorities. On April 9, gunmen ambushed and killed five U.N. peacekeepers and seven civilian staff in Jonglei. The U.N. mission has fewer than 6,900 troops to cover a country the size of France that has barely 300 km (200 miles) of paved roads. Seasonal rains have turned the region into a swamp, severing road access. Johnson said "critical resource and capability gaps" had caused a mobility crisis for the peacekeepers that particularly affected operations in high-risk areas such as Jonglei. "This is having a particularly detrimental effect on the mission's ability to implement its protection of civilians' mandate," she said. "Effective protection is only possible through being present in those communities most at risk." The Security Council is due to renew the mandate of the U.N. mission in South Sudan later this month, and a senior council envoy said that peacekeepers should focus more on protecting civilians "rather than on spreading out across the country and doing infrastructure projects and nation building." DRONES FOR CONGO, IVORY COAST FIRST The envoy, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said deployment of unmanned surveillance drones would be useful, but that was unlikely to happen until next year and was dependent on the success of a pilot program in Democratic Republic of Congo. In his report, Ban also said surveillance drones should only be considered after the Congo program had been evaluated. The U.N. mission in Congo is due to begin using surveillance drones in August to monitor the thickly forested and remote eastern border with Rwanda and Uganda. Congo has been battling a year-long insurgency by M23 rebels. U.N. experts accused Rwanda of sending troops and weapons across the border to support the M23 last year. Rwanda denies the accusation. The United Nations has also set aside money to deploy surveillance drones eventually in Ivory Coast to monitor its border with Liberia following a recommendation by Ban and a request from the west African country. Western Ivory Coast has been the target of deadly raids blamed on supporters of former president Laurent Gbagbo, who was ousted in a civil war in 2011 after he rejected the election victory of rival Alassane Ouattara. While Gbagbo is in The Hague charged with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court, many of his top political and military allies are living in exile in neighboring West African nations.

South Sudan's 'midwives' attack Kiir over corruption and abuses.

A group of U.S. activists who helped to bring about South Sudan's secession have blasted the government of Africa's newest nation in an open letter for allowing "shocking" human rights abuses and corruption to undermine stability. Two years ago, the oil producer won independence from Sudan under a 2005 peace deal that ended one of Africa's longest civil wars, helped by a group of U.S. activists who lobbied the United States to press Khartoum to let the south hold an independence referendum. The group, often known as South Sudan's "wonks" or "midwives", still wield influence with U.S. policymakers, and have long shielded South Sudan from rising criticism over human rights violations. But an open letter to President Salva Kiir distributed by email, they said they could no longer be silent about violence by security forces against civilians, critics of the government and journalists. "We joined you in your fight against these very abuses by the Khartoum regime for many years. We cannot turn a blind eye when yesterday's victims become today's perpetrators," said the activists, who include former U.S. State Department official John Prendergast and professor Eric Reeves. "This violence is shocking and has included rape, murder, theft and destruction of property." While normal South Sudanese had no access to hospitals or schools, people stealing public funds had sent their children to private schools abroad or to get the world's best medical service. "In a remarkably short period of time, the name of your country has become synonymous with corruption," the letter said. Kiir last month suspended two ministers over alleged fraud but critics say such measures are mere window-dressing to address rising criticism from donors. Kiir also wrote last year to 75 current and former officials to ask them to return $4 billion in stolen public money, but diplomats say this has not been backed up by any prosecutions.

EU condemns 'horrific murder' in Nigeria

The European Union has condemned the "horrific murder by terrorists" of dozens of people, mostly students, in an attack on a secondary school in Nigeria. The attack, blamed on the rebel group Boko Haram, happened on Saturday at a school in Mamudo, Yobe, one of three states where the government declared a state of emergency in May in a push to rein in the group. "I condemn in the strongest possible terms the horrific murder by terrorists of some 30 innocent children and a teacher early on Saturday morning in a school in Mamudo town in northeastern Nigeria," Catherine Ashton, the EU foreign policy chief, said on Sunday in a statement. Ashton promised Nigerians her "solidarity and determination to help them bring security, peace and reconciliation to the north", and called for those responsible to be brought to justice. Survivors of the dawn attack said gunmen rounded up students and staff at the school in Nigeria's restive northeast and placed them in a dormitory before throwing explosives inside and opening fire. A hospital official in nearby Potiskum said 42 people were killed. A spokesman for Nigeria's military, which often underplays casualty figures, said 20 students and one teacher were killed. Boko Haram, which means "Western education is a sin", has killed hundreds of students in attacks on schools in the region in recent months. Nigeria launched a major offensive against Boko Haram on May 15, battling anti-government fighters in the states of Adamawa, Yobe and Borno. The ongoing offensive has forced thousands of Nigerians from their homes into refuge in neighbouring countries of Niger and Cameroon. Schools closed Meanwhile, Yobe state has ordered the closure of all secondary schools after the massacre Saturday's massacre. Ibrahim Gaidam, the state's governor, "directed that all secondary schools in the state be closed down from Monday 8th July 2013 until a new academic session begins in September," a government statement said. The order came amid reports that soldiers involved in a shootout with fighters who were given refuge in one Nigerian village hut took revenge on the community by setting ablaze about 10 homes, according to refugees who fled to neighbouring Niger. Their stories indicate a pattern of Nigerian security forces punishing entire communities, including innocent civilians. Refugees spoke to an Associated Press reporter on a trip with Nigerian officials who are pleading with them to return home, visiting thousands who have fled across borders to escape an Islamic uprising and a military crackdown. Deputy governor Zannah Mustapha of Borno state visited Niger on Saturday, days after visiting more than 20,000 refugees in Cameroon. Mustapha promised "adequate security" would be provided to ensure their safety from further attacks in their northeastern hometown of Mallam Fatori. The refugees, among 6,240 recorded in Niger, indicated they are as scared of the Islamic extremists as they are of the soldiers who are supposed to protect them.

At least 11 dead as ship held by pirates sink off Somalia

At least four foreign crew members and seven Somali pirates died when a cargo ship that the pirates were holding to ransom off the Somali coast sank on Sunday, and 13 others were missing, a pirate who works with the gang said. The Malaysian-owned MV Albedo cargo vessel and its crew were hijacked 900 miles off Somalia on Nov. 26, 2010 while sailing from the United Arab Emirates to Kenya. "The ship has been gradually sinking for almost a week, but it sank totally last night," the pirate said on Monday by telephone from Haradheere, Somalia's main pirate base. "We have confirmed that four foreign (crew) and seven pirates died. We are missing 13 in total," said the pirate, who gave his name as Hussein. "We had no boats to save them." The Albedo had 23 crew from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Iran when it was seized. Hussein said the captain had died earlier and four of the crew had previously been taken off the ship. With four dead, this would leave 14 to be accounted for, and it was not clear why there was a discrepancy with the pirates' figures. The EU Naval Force, a European Union anti-piracy unit that protects merchant shipping off the Horn of Africa, said the whereabouts of 15 crew were still unclear. "EU Naval Force can confirm that the Malaysian flagged motor vessel MV Albedo, held by armed pirates at an anchorage close to the Somali coast, has sunk in rough seas," a statement on the force's website said. "An EU Naval Force warship and Maritime Patrol Aircraft have closed the sea area and are carrying out a search and rescue operation to search for any survivors. The whereabouts of the 15 crew members from MV Albedo is still to be confirmed." Some hostages are held on land while pirates demand ransoms from ship owners, with some kept onboard to maintain the ships. The number of attacks by Somali pirates has fallen over the last two years due to increased naval patrols and the presence of well-armed security teams on ships. The local administration said the Albedo had been the last ship held off Haradheere, because it had convinced many pirates to quit the business and given them training in legal trades. But piracy emanating from the lawless Horn of Africa may still cost the world economy about $18 billion a year, the World Bank said in a report in April.