7, December 2018
Amnesty censures South Sudan over rising number of executions 0
Amnesty International has denounced a rise in the use of the death sentence in South Sudan, urging the world’s youngest nation to “stop signing execution orders.” The London-based rights group said in a statement on Friday that seven people were executed this year, including one who was a child when convicted of murder. It said 342 other people were on death row.
“The world’s youngest nation has embraced this outdated, inhuman practice and is executing people, even children, at a time when the rest of the world is abandoning this abhorrent punishment,” Joan Nyanyuki, Amnesty’s regional director, said in the statement.
“The president of South Sudan must stop signing execution orders and end this obvious violation of the right to life,” she added. Juba, however, denied the report, saying no one had been executed in the country since 2011 and a moratorium had been placed on the practice since 2013.
Presidency spokesman Ateny Wek Ateny said the capital punishment remained on the statute books, adding, “If you kill a person, you will be executed.”
South Sudan, the youngest country in Africa, is suffering from a bloody civil war, whose history goes back to President Salva Kiir accusing his former deputy Riek Machar and current rebel leader of plotting a coup. In September, Kiir signed a peace agreement with rebel factions in the Ethiopia to end the civil war.
However, UN rights investigators said on Friday that all sides in the conflict continue to recruit fighters despite the September accord which stipulates that the warring parties stop recruitment, whether voluntary or forced, as a permanent truce takes hold.
“There is a worrying trend, that there is some recruitment going on,” Barney Afako, a member of the UN’s Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan, said at the end of a four-day visit to the country.
Yasmin Sooka, the chairperson of the commission, said the new recruitment “is on all sides” of South Sudan’s conflict.
The exact motivation behind the recruitment is still unclear, but Afako said it might be “tactical” so that militant groups can argue for a greater share of government demobilization programs, or it might be “preparation to return to conflict.” According to the report, fighting has stopped since the deal was signed in September.
Source: Presstv
8, December 2018
Biya’s Creation Of A Disarmament Committee Amid Skepticism 0
Cameroon says it has created a committee to disarm and reintegrate hundreds of separatist fighters and Boko Haram terrorists who put down their weapons. But analysts say the committee has a long road ahead in English-speaking regions, where fighting between the government and separatists has intensified.
Ngoran Nora read the names of 30 people whose homes were set on fire before she escaped Thursday from the northwest town of Kumbo. She told her community members in Yaounde that the military killed at least 15 people in the villages of Meluf, Kikaikom, Mbveh and Tooy over two days after gunmen engaged them in battle.
She said soldiers might have targeted people they suspect collaborate with separatists, or did not inform them about the fighters’ presence in the villages.
The violence comes less than a week after President Paul Biya created a national committee for the disarmament, demobilization and reintegration of former Boko Haram fighters in the far north and former separatist fighters in northwest and southwest regions.
The government said the committee was created to assist hundreds of former fighters who heeded Biya’s call to drop their guns and be pardoned, or killed by the military.
Joseph Motaze, political analyst with the Cameroon-based Center for the Rehabilitation of Former Fighters, said the committee is a good first step. But he suggested that Biya should reduce the military’s presence in the northwest and southwest regions to show he is ready to make peace.
He said it is imperative for the government to start negotiating with armed groups in the restive English-speaking regions and immediately drop the idea of using war as a solution to the crisis.
He added that the fighters are becoming violent to a point where they are kidnapping and killing people who do not share their views, and taking administrators hostage to make the area totally ungovernable.
The armed groups want to form an independent English-speaking state. The majority of Cameroon’s population speaks French.
Francis Fai Yengo, a retired civil administrator appointed to head the disarmament committee, said he will need the support of everyone to be able to succeed.
He said he has to set to work immediately because the task ahead of him is enormous.
He called on all Cameroonians to propose ideas and contribute to the peace initiative so that all of the youths who have taken up weapons can make wise decisions to emerge from the bushes and live like peaceful citizens in their own country — Cameroon.
The separatist war has killed more than 1,200 people, according to the government.
Source: VOA