Congo’s Peace Negotiations Fall Through

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The most prominent events this week: the fighting in Eastern Congo Peace talks also pass, Military Council Mali The generals and a French citizen are arrested for a conspiracy to destabilize the alleged stability, and a toxic spill in a Zambian copper mine It may be much worse than previously mentioned.

Violations of a mountain in the Congo

Despite the cessation of the ceasefire in Qatar and the contesting peace agreement in the United States, the fighting has intensified in recent weeks in the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, where more than 100 armed groups compete to control the vast metal deposits.

Earlier this month, the Rwandian -backed M23 rebels launched an attack around the city of Mamalba in the province of South Kivu, which violated the ceasefire in Doha in mid -July. The M23 and the congo also agreed to secure a permanent peace agreement by August 18, but the deadline was missed on Monday when the M23 moved away from the talks, accusing the Congolese government of continuous attacks against the lands that the group seized.

Meanwhile, another rebel group, ADF, began a series of attacks last week that killed more than 50 people in the northern Kevu province in the eastern Congo. ADF also took at least 100 hostages and burned and tino homes.

ADF is a Ugandan rebel group that has appeared in the mid -1990s due to local grievances against Prime Minister Uri Museini for a long time. Amid pressure from the Ugandan army in 2001, the group fled to North Kivu, and in 2018, he agreed with the Islamic State.

ADF attacks multiplied by multi -faceted challenges to the East Congo. Fighting in the area rapidly escalated at the beginning of this year, when the M23 rebels launched a major attack after a period of relative lack of activity. The group seized large areas of land this year, including Guma and Bocavo, the largest city in the East Congo.

Since control, a climate of fear and bad revenge among the local population, said Tigiri Chaguta, the regional director of international amnesty in East and South Africa. The media informed the media and United Nations experts of human rights violations, the “horrific” sexual violence of M23 and other parties in the conflict. According to the United Nations, children constitute approximately 40 percent of the survivors of violence Sexual and sexual.

The peace agreement signed by the Congo and Rwanda in Washington in June did little to reduce the fighting. More than 300 people were killed by M23, with the help of members of the Rwandan army, between 9 and 21 July in North Kivu, according to the accounts received by the United Nations Human Rights Office.

Representative spokesman for Congolese Army Silvan Icing recently said in a statement that M23 launched “almost daily attacks.” Meanwhile, M23 spokesman Lawrence Kanoka Kinshasa accused “the widespread offensive military maneuvers” last week.

“Until now, there has been little change in the dynamics of the conflict on the ground, and there is no realistic plan to dismantle the group of rebels backed by Rwanda M23.” Foreign policy Earlier this month.

Meanwhile, the Ugandan forces expanded their mark in northern Kivu, noting security concerns from ADF. But the United Nations report recently claimed that Uganda also benefits from the illegal mineral trade in the Congo.

Security experts suggest that all actors participating in the fighting must be responsible for organizing violence against civilians in the Congo. The latest attacks emphasize the fact that a long -term peace plan must include more than just a few parties in the conflict.

next week

Wednesday, August 20, to Friday, August 22: The Tokyo International Development Conference will be held in Yokohama, Japan.

Thursday, August 21: The United Nations Security Council discusses the task of supporting the United Nations in Libya and sanctions against the country.

Monday, August 25: Health ministers for the 75th session of the World Health Organization for Africa, which was held in Lusaka, Zambia.

What we watch

Mali plot. Military Military Command said on Thursday that it had arrested many people, including financial army generals and a French citizen, allegedly planning to destabilize the government.

The authorities claimed that the French citizen, Yan Vizelier, was working on behalf of the French intelligence service, and that “the marginal elements of the Financial Armed Security Forces” were detained to try to “destabilize the institutions of the Republic.” The French Foreign Ministry said the allegations against Vezilier “are unfounded” and that he is a worker at the embassy in Bamako, the capital of Mali.

The arrests come shortly after the interim president’s granting to Mali, General Asimi Joaita-who seized power in the 2020 coup-a five-year term in July, “several times according to necessity” without the elections. The Military Council also suspended the political parties in May, despite the promises to return the country to civil rule by March 2024.

Trump refugee cover. The Trump administration is considering the maximum acceptance of the refugees of 40,000 people next year, with about 30,000 of those openings for South Africa whites, according to a Reuters report based on an internal email and interviews with two unknown US officials.

On his first day in January, US President Donald Trump arrested the country’s admission program. Since then, his administration has offered a position for the white fruits on the basis of the alleged “racist persecution” in South Africa – the country’s government denies.

The Zambia River is not safe. Six months after acid spill on a Chinese -owned copper mine in Zambia, an independent review found that the disaster issued about 30 times of toxic sludge more than 50,000 tons that the company and the Zambia government were reported.

The spill occurred when a waste dam collapsed in part in a Sino-Meetals Leach, a company affiliated with China China Nonfrouuss Mining Corp. (Sino-Meetals questioned the Drizit methodology and has ended its contract with the company.)

About 60 percent of 20 million people live in Zambia in the Kafeam River basin, and the river provides drinking water to about 5 million people, including the residents of the capital, Lusaka.

The disaster may be one of the worst environmental disasters in the global mining industry so far. According to Bloomberg, Michael Gonzalez, the American ambassador to Zambia, wrote in an email on August 6 to the employees that the disaster appears to be sixth in history.

Municipal elections Libya. Libyan voted in the local elections on Saturday in areas controlled by the unrecognized government in Tripoli. The election date was set in 63 municipalities, but opinion polls were suspended in 11 of them, and most of them are areas in the east subject to a competition management controlled by the strong military man, Khalifa Haftar.

In addition, premeditated burning attack on Friday before the elections destroyed electoral documents in the northwestern city of Zawa and the nearby Al -Gharbi coast, which led to the postponement of the elections in seven additional municipalities until August 23.

“These criminal attacks aim to deprive Libyans of their right to choose their representatives,” said Abdul Hakim Al -Shab, a member of the Board of Directors of the Electoral Commission in Libya.

This week in infrastructure

Last week, the Nigerian government, Nigeria and China Liankai Investment in Petroleum announced that it is scheduled to start building a high -speed rail network of 2500 miles. The project will connect Lagos to the port of Harkort via Abuja and Kano, and it will take to build an estimated three years.

The first phase of the $ 60 billion project is funded by the Asian Investment Bank, which is supported by China. The project also includes the conversion of some diesel trains in Nigeria to run on LNG.

What we read

The Sudanese war moved by the foreigner. in continent , Isa Dafallah argued that more than two years of civil war has turned Sudan into “a mixture of overlapping military, administrative and economic areas, as local dynamics intersect with regional interests and financial necessities.”

The United Arab Emirates and Egypt have heavy classes in particular in the conflict. “Before the war, most Sudanese gold was exported to the United Arab Emirates,” he wrote Dafallah. But “the data shows that in 2024, 100 % of the declared gold exports of Sudan went to Egypt.”

The language of strength. in GuardianExcerpt from the late Kenyan author Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o, which was recently published, End linguistic colonialism and other revolutionary ideasIt explores the importance of preserving African languages amid “unequal power relations between languages”.

“Difficulty in the Irish situation, where even after independence, intellectuals express themselves more fluent in the language of imperial conquest than languages of their country, exist in every post -colonial position,” he writes NGũGĩ. “In the case of Africa, until you hear the identity of the described continent in terms of Eurovonte: Anglovon, Francophone and Lucovon.”