Africa

For a decade, gold exploitation, legal or illegal and official or informal, has known a speedy expansion throughout the Sahel. Its actors are numerous and range from Canadian and Russian multinationals to small informal local operators. Financial incomes and especially jobs creations, even dangerous ones, are considerable for all: private companies, governments and small operators as well as their equipment suppliers often from Middle East. More than other industrial activities, gold mining in the Sahel has a confirmed impact on the health of workers and on the environment. This is especially true of its informal activities. The wells, dug to reach the ore as well as the use of mercury to separate gold from the rock, are mortal and lasting dangers for all: people and nature. For many observers this informal gold exploitation has obvious links with radical groups. Faced with multiple international controls on financial transfers, they therefore have found sources of a local, sustainable and unrestrained funding. Thus, destabilizing the formal local gold exploitation gives them more space and freedom to access local sources of revenues far from the many national and international controls or surveillances of money transfer. The recent murderous evasion of four terrorists from Nouakchott main civilian prison, already a privilege, is a latest power demonstration of these groups various and powerful networks in the Sahel. The paper below, on gold mining in Burkina Faso, shows the importance of this mineral precious but not only for governments and private companies. – Ahmedou Ould Abdallah, President, centre4s.org

Nouakchott — Obvious, that very complex question is now more frequently raised than ever before. It calls for an answer. Ten years of wars – with international forces support – deaths, injuries, displacements and budgets in billions of dollars, have not reduced terrorists presence or expansion. Isn’t it then time to change – analysis, strategy and combat – to openly ask, experts and especially the victims, that is to say the populations?

Chili peppers, fake medicine, fuel, gold, guns, humans, and more are being trafficked via millennia-old trade routes crisscrossing the Sahel, and the UN and partners are trying out new, collaborative ways to thwart those attempting the illegal practice, a growing problem in this fragile African region.

Rapid Support Forces claim to have captured 700 soldiers at base during new battles in and around capital

Airstrikes and artillery fire shook much of Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, and its neighbouring cities on Tuesday as fighting between the country’s warring factions intensified sharply.

Egypt fears that a prolonged conflict in Sudan, a major market for its exports, will add to its economic hardships.

The outbreak of clashes between the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary group came as bad news for Egypt’s economy, already struggling under severe pressure over the past year.

Airstrikes and artillery fire intensified sharply across Sudan’s capital early on Tuesday, residents said, as the army sought to defend key bases from paramilitary rivals it has been fighting for more than a month.

The airstrikes, explosions and clashes could be heard in the south of Khartoum, and there was heavy shelling across the River Nile in parts of the adjoining cities of Bahri and Omdurman, witnesses said.

Thousands of Sudanese refugees fleeing the conflict in Sudan are expected to arrive in Ethiopia, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) announced.

It anticipates the arrival of up to 130,000 refugees, including 100,000 Ethiopians and the remainder being foreign nationals.