Author: Publisher

{‘’If economics are not okay, the Community will be shaky,’’ he said in a special address to the National Parliament in the capital Dodoma yesterday.}

He added that politics can come after working with economics.

“We want a federation built on a firm foundation which is well-planned, otherwise its survival will be dubious,” he said.

President Kikwete was apparently reacting to recent development of meetings of Presidents of Uganda, Kenya and Rwanda on railway infrastructure, port and pipeline projects among them, distancing Tanzania and Burundi Presidents—both active members of EAC– from the sessions.

The Tanzanian leader reaffirmed his country’s commitment to the EAC but stated would follow the gradual integration processes as stipulated in the Treaty signed in 1999 –Customs Union, Common Market, Monetary Union and eventually the EA Political Federation.

Tanzania, he assured, was not contemplating leaving the 14-year-old EAC and would continue to engage the other four partner states on the sober need of integrating through agreed pillars.

The Community has so far created the Customs Union and the Common Market and an agreement to achieve the Monetary Union is expected to be signed later this month.

He considered that Tanzania’s different position on issues of land, immigration and movement of labour might not be in good taste with the Partners and possible reasons of his country’s so called ‘’ sudden isolation’’.

‘’We want a strong and progressive EAC that benefits all its citizens’’, Mr Kikwete stressed, underlining that his country would not wish to see the repeat of the 1977 when the old EAC collapsed mainly because of divergent political and ideological differences.

Kikwete had met his counterparts from Uganda and Kenya in South Africa on the sidelines of the SADC-Great Lakes Initiative meeting early this week on the Democratic Republic of Congo crisis. However, not details have been divulged of their closed-door talks.

East African News Agency

{The government of the Democratic Republic of Congo and the defeated M23 rebels will Monday sign a peace deal, Uganda said, adding that it will not send the fleeing insurgents back across the border.}

The M23 on Tuesday ended its 18-month insurgency after a resounding defeat at the hands of the armed forces of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Since then the majority of its fighters have fled across the border into Uganda.

“The agreement is ready and we are expecting everybody to return Monday to sign it,” Ugandan government spokesman Ofwono Opondo told AFP of the deal.

“The agreement will detail how each case will be handled. There are those that are under US and UN sanctions, those who want to be reintegrated in the army, and those who simply want to go home,” Opondo said.

The peace talks, which started in December, had made little headway until the DRC army started to get the upper hand militarily in recent weeks.

One of the major stumbling blocks had been the fate of around 100 M23 officers who have taken part in a series of rebellions over the past 15 years and that Kinshasa did not want to see reincorporated into its army.

Opondo said that the United Nations and the African Union, which backed the peace process, would attend Monday’s ceremony.

He also confirmed that the military chief of the March 23 Movement, a group formed 18 months ago, and which both Rwanda and Uganda have been accused of backing, is on Ugandan terrirtory.

“Yes, Sultani Makenga is with us,” he told AFP, refusing to reveal the rebel chief’s whereabouts.

Uganda will not hand over M23 rebels who fled after being defeated, the spokesman for the army and the defence ministry said.

“They are not prisoners; they are soldiers running away from a war so we are receiving them and helping them because it is our responsibility,” Colonel Paddy Ankunda told AFP, adding that Uganda had also welcomed fleeing soldiers from the DRC’s national army earlier in the year.

AFP

{7 November 2013 – In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where the United Nations has been supporting efforts to end armed violence, protect civilians and spur economic investment and political stability, the Organization is also fighting an environmental battle to save great apes, the region’s iconic local totem and a key link in its rich biodiversity.}

“In years past, the fear was always that armed conflict would damage great apes and wipe out wildlife,” said Douglas Cress, Programme Coordinator at the Great Apes Survival Partnership (GRASP), led by the UN Environmental Programme (UNEP) and the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

Mr. Cress stressed the mixed blessing of the DRC’s rich endowment of resources. “In terms of natural resources, it is one of the most potentially lucrative regions in all of Africa,” he told the UN News Centre from Nairobi, Kenya, where he is based. DRC has rich reserves of timber, gold, tantalum – used in cell phones and computers, and now potentially also oil and other resources. In terms of natural resources, it is one of the most potentially lucrative regions in all of Africa.

However, the fight for possession of these resources, as well as land and political power, is a major cause of conflict with rebels such as, most recently, the March 23rd Movement (M23) , the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and other armed groups that have emerged from the area or entered from neighbouring countries.

That conflict, in turn, endangers the natural environment. “All natural resources suffer tremendously during conflict. But it’s not always a certainty that your wildlife would be exploited to death, often it’s just exploited,” Mr. Cress added.

It is to stave off extreme degradation of the DRC’s precious resources – so important for the future of the country and for the Earth – that the UN and its partners are working with international law enforcement, Governments and local communities to save magnificent wildlife and their habitat.

The forests of the DRC represent half of the total area of tropical rainforest in Africa, providing shelter for great apes, such as the mountain gorilla and the bonobo, as well as the okapi and elephant, among other mammals and countless species of magnificent birds and reptiles.

“You fly over the area and it’s just green for three hours,” Mr. Cress said.

The rich biodiversity led to five natural sites in the country – Garamba, Kahuzi-Biega, Okapi, Salonga, and Virunga – being designated between 1979 and 1996 to the UNESCO World Heritage List, and since then, with nearly all species of animals declining in the DRC, to the List of World Heritage in Danger.

The dangers come from traditional conservation threats – deforestation, mining and bush-meat hunting, but are also fuelled by armed conflict, leaving hundreds of thousands of people homeless, and forcing them to survive in internally displaced persons (IDP) camps and on the scarce natural resources, along with corruption and the lack of rule of law resulting from the ongoing conflict.

{{Monetizing great apes}}

The Virunga Mountains and the gorillas that migrate through them – among the great apes the UN-partnership is striving to save –fall geographically in the DRC, Rwanda, and Uganda.

The countries, each of which has had its share of violent turmoil, have worked out a tripartite agreement to share the revenues from the tourists eager to explore the primate habitat.

The DRC has wanted to imitate the multi-million ecotourism industry developed in Rwanda and to a lesser extent in Uganda, but its instability is a hindrance. There are reports of rebels acting like forest rangers and taking tourists into the mountains, but recurrent fighting makes the area inaccessible to most would-be visitors.

“That eastern DR Congo strip that passes through Goma that everyone’s been fighting over is so tricky because of the Virunga Mountains right there,” he noted, referring to intense struggle between the M23 and the national forces known by their French acronym, FARDC, on the periphery of what is Africa’s oldest park. “That’s the stronghold of mountain gorillas and yet it’s the prime territory that everyone wants a piece of.”

In addition to instability which cuts off access for tourists, it also prevents rangers and researchers from tracking families of the gorillas to check on their health and safety.

“The first time I saw a gorilla was in 1986 in the DRC, then Zaire. There’s nothing like it, just takes your breath away,” Mr. Cress recalled: “The grace of something so powerful allowing you into its world, even if just for an hour…it’s spellbinding.”

At least 100 gorillas have been killed in Africa through illegal trade since 2005, part of the more than 22,200 estimated great apes lost from the wild during that time, according to GRASP figures based on confiscation records, international trade databases, law enforcement reports and arrival rates from sanctuaries and rehabilitation centres.

These figures are just the tip of the iceberg. At least 2,972 great apes are lost from the wild each year, according to the ‘Stolen Apes: The Illicit Trade in Chimpanzees, Gorillas, Bonobos and Orangutans’ report.

Gorillas illegally sold to a zoo in Malaysia in 2002 reportedly went for $400,000 each, according to the report. Orangutans can fetch $1,000, and live chimpanzees sold at $50 can be marked up by the middleman as much as 400 per cent by the time they are resold.

African great apes – chimpanzees, gorillas and bonobos – are listed on Appendix I of the CITES convention on international trade of endangered species. Appendix I lists the highly endangered species at risk of extinction and prohibits any commercial international trade of these species.

Jane Goodall, a UN Messenger of Peace, whose eponymous institute is part of the GRASP network, has for decades advocated for conservation of the region’s habitats.

{{Fighting environmental crimes}}

Meanwhile, in northern DRC, alleged involvement in elephant poaching and ivory smuggling of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a Ugandan-based rebel group notorious for kidnapping children to fill its ranks, led the UN Security Council last December to call for an investigation.

“The historic call reinforces concerns about the links between illicit wildlife trafficking and the regional security in Africa,” John Scanlon, Secretary-General of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) said after the Council action.
In mid-May, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told the 15-member Council that armed groups in the area are employing increasingly sophisticated weapons to execute wildlife in the area.

“Poaching and its potential linkages to other criminal, even terrorist activities, constitute a grave menace to sustainable peace and security,” Mr. Ban said at the historic meeting.

Mr. Cress said the Secretary-General raised wildlife crime to a global level with his statement to the Security Council, “That voice, that global advocacy, that platform is one of the most important things that the UN provides.”

In addition to discussing environmental concerns in conflict and post-conflict areas, the Security Council is now intent on incorporating protection of natural resources and engagement with local communities into UN peacekeeping mandates such as MONUSCO’s which was extended for a year in June.

The General Assembly might also get involved. In a meeting last week with its current President, John Ashe, Mr. Cress proposed efforts to establish a UN International Day on Great Apes by 2014.

Meanwhile, this week, UNEP and INTERPOL are holding a joint conference in Nairobi on international environmental compliance and enforcement directed at individuals, such as the rebels operating in DRC, who are decommissioned soldiers trained in military tactics with access to sophisticated weaponry.

The overriding message from the conference seems to be – there is a gap in needed resources.

“We’re underfunded,” Mr. Cress said. “The bad guys are smart and getting smarter. And we are lagging behind. Until we think the way they do, with the resources and the technology and the tools that they have, we are never going to catch up.”

Strengthening state institutions

“The number one thing is getting law and order back,” Mr. Refisch stressed when asked about the best way to safeguard natural resources.

“There are rules and legislation, but they are not enforced. There are also many beneficiaries of the corruption,” he noted, describing a circle where illegal revenues from natural resources go to buy more weapons which yield more power which yields a need for more exploitation of resources.

The DRC has one of the highest number of artisanal miners without provisions in national law for regulation and without a regulatory framework for resource extraction

Mr. Refisch stressed that people are not willing to invest in their communities out of fear that they will lose it to armed groups.

“People are not willing to invest and just wait for aid. It’s a very dangerous cycle which really undermines development,” he noted.

Along with more investment, he also highlighted the need for more national pressure from within the country to develop a proper regulatory framework for resource extraction, and greater consumer knowledge in the consumer countries of where products originate, how they got there and whether the production is sustainable or not.

“It’s not about saving that great ape, or elephant, or saving that rosewood,” Mr. Cress said. “You begin to not only lose your natural resources, you begin to strip away revenue from host country. All that illegal ivory is not coming back to the Government. It’s being stolen. It promotes instability. You have Governments which are being held up at gunpoint, really.”

{{Strengthening state institutions}}

“The number one thing is getting law and order back,” Mr. Refisch stressed when asked about the best way to safeguard natural resources.

“There are rules and legislation, but they are not enforced. There are also many beneficiaries of the corruption,” he noted, describing a circle where illegal revenues from natural resources go to buy more weapons which yield more power which yields a need for more exploitation of resources.

The DRC has one of the highest number of artisanal miners without provisions in national law for regulation and without a regulatory framework for resource extraction

Mr. Refisch stressed that people are not willing to invest in their communities out of fear that they will lose it to armed groups.

“People are not willing to invest and just wait for aid. It’s a very dangerous cycle which really undermines development,” he noted.

Along with more investment, he also highlighted the need for more national pressure from within the country to develop a proper regulatory framework for resource extraction, and greater consumer knowledge in the consumer countries of where products originate, how they got there and whether the production is sustainable or not.

“It’s not about saving that great ape, or elephant, or saving that rosewood,” Mr. Cress said. “You begin to not only lose your natural resources, you begin to strip away revenue from host country. All that illegal ivory is not coming back to the Government. It’s being stolen. It promotes instability. You have Governments which are being held up at gunpoint, really.”

Source: UN