Africa

Eastern Africa continues to be the origin of most African refugees, with the region producing more than five million displaced people in 2020, a new report by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) has revealed.

Terrorism, armed conflict and extreme weather events such as floods, cyclones, droughts, storms and locust outbreaks have damaged livelihoods across the Horn of Africa and the Great Lakes region, resulting in large displacements of people.

In November 2020, the Moroccan government sent its military to the Guerguerat area, a buffer zone between the territory claimed by the Kingdom of Morocco and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR). The Guerguerat border post is at the very southern edge of Western Sahara along the road that goes to Mauritania. The presence of Moroccan troops “in the Buffer Strip in the Guerguerat area” violated the 1991 ceasefire agreed upon by the Moroccan monarchy and the Polisario Front of the Sahrawi. That ceasefire deal was crafted with the assumption that the United Nations would hold a referendum in Western Sahara to decide on its fate; no such referendum has been held, and the region has existed in stasis for three decades now.

L’envoyé spécial du secrétaire général des Nations unies pour le Sahara occidental, Staffan de Mistura, a terminé le 19 janvier sa tournée dans la région pour tenter de relancer le dialogue entre les parties prenantes du conflit. Le bilan de ces échanges est mitigé, tant les protagonistes algérien et marocain campent sur leur position.

Quatre Tunisiens, dont une fillette, ont péri et sept autres sont portés disparus après le naufrage d’une embarcation de migrants au large de la grande ville tunisienne de Sfax (centre-est), a appris vendredi l’AFP auprès des garde-côtes.

“L’embarcation partie des côtes tunisiennes a coulé dans la nuit de mercredi à jeudi, devant les îles de Kerkennah”, situées au large de Sfax, la deuxième ville du pays, a indiqué à l’AFP Houssem Eddine Jebabli, porte-parole de la garde nationale.

Le président tunisien Kais Saied s’est insurgé contre les manifestations qui ont eu lieu dans le pays. Il a répété son engagement à garantir l’égalité de tous devant la loi en recevant le ministre de l’Intérieur Taoufik Charfeddine.

Plusieurs personnes étaient dans les rues de Tunis la semaine dernière, une manifestation qui avait été interdite par les autorités dans le cadre des restrictions contre le Covid-19.

The “Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership Program” has done more harm than good and wasted taxpayer dollars.

On March 24, the “Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership Program Act” was approved by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The bill, introduced for the third time, would give a firmer legal foundation to the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership. The TSCTP is an executive branch program co-led by the State Department, the United States Agency for International Development, and the Department of Defense. For the bill’s proponents, making TSCTP more accountable to Congress would enhance its effectiveness in addressing violence in West Africa. A better idea, however, would be to scrap this ineffective program, repurpose the money, and challenge the flawed thinking behind the program itself.

Many analyses of Tunisia post July 25 have concentrated on assessing President Kais Saied’s reshaping of the political system in terms of where they place Tunisia in a binary classification system of “democracy” or “authoritarianism/dictatorship.” Some of these transitology studies are slightly more nuanced, inserting a linearity or hybridity to the assessment schema. More critical analysts have pushed back against U.S. political scientists’ focus on procedural democracy. Rather than attempting to more accurately slot Tunisia into the “democracy transition” or “regime type” framework, this paper assesses the post-July 25 political system with reference to the legacy of Tunisia’s own revolution of 2010-11.

Maps have long played a crucial, symbolic role in the dispute over the Western Sahara. For years, because most world maps available elsewhere show the international border that separates Morocco from its coveted territory to the south, those that were sold in Morocco had to be separately manufactured for the domestic market, affecting everything from globes and atlases to toy puzzles and address books.

The migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers were camping out near the building in the Libyan capital, Tripoli.

Libyan security forces dispersed and arrested migrants outside of a community center in Tripoli, rights groups said today.

The migrants had been conducting a sit-in outside of the United Nations-affiliated center when Libyan police dispersed them “with force” and conducted arrests last night, the Belaady Organization for Human Rights, a Libyan nongovernmental organization (NGO), said on Facebook.

Les États d’Afrique de l’Ouest ont adopté dimanche 9 janvier des sanctions «très dures» en raison du non-respect par la junte au pouvoir au Mali de l’échéance de février pour des élections ramenant les civils à la tête du pays
Sanctions supplémentaires :

1 retrait des ambassadeurs de tous les états membres de la cedeao au Mali

2 fermeture des frontières entre le mali et la cedeao