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{Rwandans who were evicted from Tanzania and currently sheltered in Kiyanzi refugee Camp have raised concerns that their children will not be able to return to school due to lack of school fees and many other scholastic materials.}

Of these children, it was noticed that there are some who study in Tanzania and others study in Rwanda; however, both side their parents are living in Kiyanzi refugee Camp after Tanzania decided to expel them out of its territory.

IGIHE Reporter toured Kiyanzi Refugee Camp and found that some children were very sad and lonely while others were taking care of theirs sisters and brothers without hope of returning to school.

It is scheduled that the 2014 academic year will start in January next year.

On condition of anonymity one of the children told our reporter that “We are now getting familiar with the life in refugee camp. We used to have different schedules and parents used to take care of us, we danced and we used to do our home works, but today we do not have hope of returning to school due to lack of school fees and other materials. Today our parents are unable to pay for us”.

These children felt as if they were abandoned. However Rwanda’s Ministry of Disaster Management and Refugee Affairs (MIDIMAR) has announced that there are plans of resettling them and after resettlement the next step will be to help them returning to school.

Through arrangements, small children in the camp are receiving basic education. However, Parents are concerned with those who are in Secondary schools and risk to drop out the school due to financial means.

On another side, Parents are optimistic that UNESCO, UNICEF and many other donors will intervene in this situation.

Meanwhile, those Refugees said they are not hungry thanking the Government of its continuous supports.

Rwanda has been struggling with the resettlement of refugees who were expelled from Tanzania. Through MIDIMAR, refugees are provided with different domestic equipments, food and shelter.

{{angedelavictoire@igihe.com}}

{Heavy gunfire erupted overnight in South Sudan’s capital Juba, embassies and witnesses said, saying the fighting appeared to have broken out in a barracks close to the city centre.
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Statements from the US and British embassies in Juba urged their nationals to avoid unnecessary movements. The US embassy said there were “reports from multiple reliable sources of ongoing security incidents and sporadic gunfire in multiple locations across Juba”.

The British embassy, through its twitter account, advised British nationals to “stay at home and avoid movement unless necessary”.

According to the BBC, heavy gunfire and explosions were heard throughout the night in the capital.

The international airport has also been closed, with Kenya Airways confirming the cancellation of flight KQ 350.

The UN mission in Juba said staff there was under lockdown and that the shooting was continuous.

Media Correspondents say the firing appeared to be focused around military barracks in the city.

Army spokesman Phillip Aguer told residents to “remain in their residences until we establish the actual cause of the shootings”.

South Sudan broke away from Sudan after a referendum in 2011 and decades of conflict. Numerous armed groups remain active in the oil-rich country.

Tensions have been high since President Salva Kiir dismissed his deputy Riek Machar in July in an apparent power struggle.

A Reuters reporter in Juba said the fighting had gone on through the night but intensified in the early morning.

The army spokesman said the military regretted the situation but gave no details of casualties, the Sudan Tribune reports.

The UK and US embassies in Juba also urged their citizens via Twitter to stay indoors and exercise caution.

The US statement to citizens said the embassy had “received reports from multiple reliable sources of ongoing security incidents and sporadic gunfire in multiple locations across Juba”.

Agencies

{With the world’s eyes on South Africa, the devolving crisis happening 5,000 kilometres north in Central African Republic has received relatively little attention.
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Sen. Romeo Dallaire — who watched Rwanda descend into one of worst humanitarian crises of the 20th century while he was head of the UN peacekeeping force in 1993 and 1994 — said the situation in CAR is being overshadowed at this time by the ceremonies and commemorations marking Nelson Mandela‘s passing, similar to how world leaders and media were focused on the celebration of Mandela’s inauguration nearly two decades ago.

“In ’94, I was in a country that was falling into implosion and genocide,” he told Global News. “We had the good news story of Nelson Mandela coming on. So, that sounded better and was less engaging of potential hard decisions, by politicians, by simply acknowledging the positive story.”

He said the world is once again turning a blind eye to an increasingly volatile situation.

Human rights groups have warned for months that what is happening in CAR could devolve into a genocide, as Muslim rebels — who made up the Selaka alliance that helped overthrow the Christian-led government in March of this year — carried out targeted attacks on Christian communities.

More than 415,000 people, or 10 per cent of the population, have been internally displaced and 68,000 more have fled to neighbouring countries.

Months of murder, maiming and destruction of villages prompted human rights groups and the United Nations’ Special Adviser for the Prevention of Genocide, to warn the situation could worsen to the point of genocide.

Dallaire said the crisis in CAR may not be a genocide — it has now fallen into sectarian violence — but that shouldn’t matter.

“Some people will try to use the argument that if we use the term genocide that will call up people to respond,” he said. “I think when we talk about mass atrocities and massive abuse of human rights you’re in the same scale as genocide.”

Regardless, Dallaire said using the word genocide in association with CAR hasn’t done much to move the international community to act.

He said the measure that was put in place to prevent another Rwanda — the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) initiative agreed to by all UN members in 2005 — are not being adhered to.

Dallaire said it points to the international community not allowing the UN to function “effectively.”

“The way they structure UN missions, which are dedicated to a mandate within a country, there doesn’t seem to be a mechanism to pull all of these forces together to respond to a crisis in another one,” he said pointing to UN missions currently in CAR’s neighbouring countries of Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan and Sudan’s Darfur region.

Jerome Bernard, associate spokesperson for the Secretary-General of United Nations, said the Security Council “definitely” did act by resolving last week to give the African Union and France a peacekeeping mandate in the CAR.

“They decided to authorize this African-led mission [International Support Mission in the Central African Republic or MISCA] supported by the French troops,” Bernard said Thursday. “And then they requested [to] the Secretary-General of the UN to work and evaluate the situation and report [to him] in three months.”

He said it’s too early to decide if a more formal peacekeeping mission could be formed.

“This is something that has to be decided in the future. We’re not there yet,” he said, adding it’s up to the Security Council to decide if MISCA could be transformed into a UN peacekeeping operation.
Bernard said questions about how and when a peacekeeping mission could be authorized should be referred to the Security Council’s member nations.

Dallaire told Global News he questions “what criteria the Security Council, and most importantly the Permanent 5, are using” to decide when a situation is bad enough to an intervention.

Dallaire said mass atrocities and massive abuses of human rights fall under R2P, even if the term genocide does not apply, and that should have led the world to act sooner.

“Going from mass killings to genocide is only a step, it’s a sort of redefinition of a catastrophic failure that’s ongoing,” he explained.

According to the United Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted 65 years ago this week, an atrocity can be deemed a genocide when acts are committed “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”

Those acts include: “killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

Dallaire is particularly concerned about the use of children by both Muslim rebels and Christian militias — known as “anti-balaka” or “anti-machete” — in the CAR crisis.

“You’ve got at least 6,000 child soldiers and that number is growing,” he said. Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International have both raised the warning flag about children being recruited into the conflict, with HRW’s Emergency Director Peter Bouckaert tweeting this photo on Wednesday.

Dallaire explained that that does compare to Rwanda, “where they took a youth moment of the extremist party and ultimately turned it into a militia — the Interahamwe — which perpetrated most of the killings.”

“When a country is imploding and they go and use youths as principal weapons of war it becomes very difficult to control and you wind up with mass atrocities and potentially — potentially — genocide.”

“The danger is that this polarization has taken place along religious lines, which has never really happened in the past and that people are self-arming themselves and carrying out back and forth attacks against each other,” said Kyle Matthews, the Senior Deputy Director of the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies.

“There always has been tensions between the Christian majority and the Muslim minority in Central African Republic, but it was only really in the start of this year when the ex-Selaka rebels started carrying out these atrocities against the Christians that this sectarian divide just kinda really exploded.”

An international intervention in the crisis has come as violence in the landlocked nation reached a dangerous new level.

France approved a 1,200-troop increase in the country, up from 400. The African Union has committed to sending 3,600 new soldiers to the country, in an attempt to bring stability to the country and disarm rebels and militias. The United Kingdom and United States have provided some logistical support to the French and AU deployments, respectively.

More than 500 people were killed late last week, when anti-balaka fighters clashed with Muslims in the capital Bangui just as first wave of French and troops headed to the country under a United Nations-backed mandate.

Since arriving in CAR, two French troops have been killed and video emerged of a seemingly unprepared African peacekeeping contingent opening fire and shooting one of their own soldiers.

But Agence France Presse reported Wednesday French military officers said soldiers had managed to disarm the many of the groups responsible for last week’s violence within the first 24 hours of arriving in Bangui.

Rather than Rwanda, Matthews compares the situation to Somalia in the 1990s or more recently Mali, where the governments were ousted and security spiralled out of control.

“If you look at people huddled around churches seeking protection, of people taking arms and hacking each other to death in the capital city, these are thing(s) that happened in Rwanda.

“We haven’t seen any of the killing take place at the rate that we saw in Rwanda,” he said.

He said the Seleka rebel alliance leader and self-imposed Interim President Michel Djotodia “has no control whatsoever,” since overthrowing former President Francois Bozize in March. Djotodia even admitted in a recent interview that he only controlled his soldiers. “The men I can’t control are not my men,” he told Al Jazeera.

“There might be someone on paper, but in reality the government is not functioning and law and order has completely been taken into the hands of individual citizens who are arming themselves to the teeth,” Matthews said.

Global News

{Thirty sub-Saharan African countries appear to have accelerated progress towards meeting the millennium development goals (MDGs) over the past three years, according to analysis from anti-poverty group ONE, which aims to up-end perceptions of the region as wholly off track.}

Rwanda, Ethiopia, Malawi, Ghana and Uganda are among sub-Saharan Africa’s top performers in this year’s MDG progress index, released on Wednesday as part of ONE’s flagship Data report.

The index, developed by ONE’s global policy director Ben Leo while he was at the Center for Global Development thinktank, compares countries’ observed progress on eight MDG indicators with estimates of what would be required for them to achieve the targets.

Countries are allocated scores on each target (1 for on track, 0.5 for partially on track and 0 for off track), which are added to get a total score. A total score of 8.0 means a country is on track to meet all the targets in the index.

{{Key findings from the 2013 index include}}:

• The Maldives has displaced Cambodia as the top-performing country, on track to meet all of the core MDG targets included in the index. Cambodia’s score dropped from 8.0 last year to 7.0.

• Some African countries have seen particularly sharp increases in their overall scores – Rwanda, for example, has moved from three to six, and is now tied with China.

• Since 2010, 49 poor countries have improved their overall MDG scores, 17 have declined and 10 have stayed the same. This reflects “a general trend of accelerated progress, albeit with remaining pockets of lagging performance”, says the report.

• Thirty countries in sub-Saharan Africa appear to have accelerated progress in the past three years. At the same time some countries with very large populations, such as Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo, are failing in many areas and slowing regional progress.

Leo said he designed the index to combat frustrating “broad brush portrayals” of MDG progress or lack thereof, with reports using regional aggregates and statements like “sub-Saharan Africa is woefully off track”. This masks the achievements of individual countries, he says, whose stories need to be teased out to understand why some have seen greater gains than others – and identify where the greatest needs remain.

For a study that relies heavily on country-level data, ONE’s report is strikingly upfront about information gaps and its methodology section is replete with caveats. “Year-to-year volatility in country performance can be significant due to a variety of factors, such as data quality, budgetary cycles and exogenous shocks,” it notes. “The time lag for the reporting of ‘current’ data – in some cases several years, or even a decade – also limits the accuracy of the results.”

“Simply put, it is difficult to definitively discern whether year-to-year differences are driven by concrete performance changes, measurement error (e.g. data noise) or some combination of the two.”

A high-level panel set up by UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon will report this week on its vision for what should succeed the MDGs.

Leo says discussions around what should succeed the MDGs must hone in on the importance of increasing statistical capacity and getting baseline data. He hopes attention on a post-2015 development framework does not detract from efforts to meet current goals, however.

“We’re not done; we have two and a half years and that’s a lot of time to focus all available firepower … to achieve the maximum result,” he said. “We’re seeing tremendous progress – the trendlines are absolutely clear – so it would be really a missed opportunity if all the attention shifted.”