Rosebell’s blog

I haven't written in a week but it's been a hectic time, too many deadlines and a few family issues to take care of.
This week I got the news that Philip Njaru, a friend and a Cameroonian journalist I met the the just concluded Investigative journalism conference in Lille hammer had stayed in Norway and applied for asylum.

He now lives in an "asylum camp" was he waits authorities to grant him asylum. Njuaru has endured torture in the last six years from the Cameroon government for his reports on corruption. He's stories are moving and it's a shame Africa loses it's most needed asserts till this day- thanx for our authoritarian regimes.

 Even in Norway Philip will need protection, because he is in somuch trouble with his own authorities because of his critical and investigative journalism. His family is still in Cameroon.

This is just a stop Phillip, I hope one day you come back to Cameroon to serve these people.
He's done some interesting investigations you can get his story on. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Njaru

A UNICEF study claims former child soldiers are actually more likely to participate politically and socially than their peers who experienced violence, albeit not as soldiers.

If it's really true then it could give hope to the generation of children in northern Uganda who have never known peace. Some 5000 children who have been rescued from the hands of LRA.
I a just commenting hoping that this is not a UN stunt to make 'us' feel good. But these should also make us more aware if the potential of these children.

And policy makers especially in Uganda now more than ever must put in place policy for rehabilitation of these kids in northern Uganda.

Below is the report.

http://www.rnw.nl/internationaljustice/specials/ChildrenandWar/tswi-080725-child-soldiers

According to UNICEF, the United Nations Children's Fund, over three hundred thousand child soldiers around the world are fighting. These boys and girls under the age of 18 are often kidnapped and forced to commit atrocious acts of violence against civilians. As one may expect, the psychological toll is great for these adolescents. Many are not able to return home after the conflict ends and some develop disorders, making it difficult for them to integrate back into society.

Recent studies show, however, that former child soldiers are actually more likely to participate politically and socially than their peers who experienced violence, albeit not as soldiers. It is a striking discovery. These young people come home from the war, often after having served in roles of authority, and look for ways in peacetime to be politically active and help their local community.

While lasting mental damage has been done to these former soldiers, researchers are encouraged by signs that the teenagers often are able to overcome these traumatic experiences and contribute at home.

Northern Uganda was the site of a particularly vicious civil war where the Lord's Resistance Army kidnapped thousands of children and used them to attack government forces, raid villages and plunder the countryside. The State Were In's Eric Beauchemin talked with some former child soldier survivors who have returned home. One ex-soldier speaks of forced marches, where he and others were used to tote heavy loads across long distances with little rest.

"Some of the abductees were killed on the way. Some would try to escape and when they were caught, they were killed immediately."

Rather quick integration
Stories like these abound in Northern Uganda where fighting has ceased for the time being. It is difficult to understand how children, often as young as nine or ten, could hope to lead functional and productive lives after being exposed to such horrific violence. However, as New York University professor Jeannie Annan explains, she learned from field research in Uganda that former child soldiers are often able to return home and integrate back into a non-violent life rather quickly.

"Many of [the child soldiers] were doing surprising well. I was surprised over and over again at the resilience, not only by the child soldiers, but also by many in the region. I thought this usual sense that all of these children are a lost generation or are broken and can't be repaired didn't seem to be the story that I was seeing all the time."

Civic participation
The role of a home community is often the most important factor as to whether a former child soldier can adapt and become an engaged member of their society in peacetime.

In Uganda, Professor Annan and others noticed that there was a high level of acceptance for former soldiers who renounced violence and wanted to return home. She notes that many of the teenagers crave a return to a life of normalcy.

If the former child soldiers do find a welcoming and nurturing environment when they return home from the war, Professor Annan's research shows that their levels of civic participation, especially politically, are higher than peers who did not fight.

"Those who had been abducted, who had fought or who had played some role with the Lord's Resistance Army were actually more likely to vote, and they were more likely to be some kind of community mobilizer or an elected leader in the community."

Salaam to all my Muslim friends. It's Eid and am at work but thats the life of a journalist. I wanted to share my article published by IWPR about the War crimes court in Kampala. It's a scrutiny of the court.

http://www.iwpr.net/?p=acr&s=f&o=346910&apc_state=henh ICC  - Africa Update

It was last Saturday as I handed in to the the independent editor my las story of the week. I saw this breaking news that South Africa president Thabo Mbeki had resigned. It was a bit shocking but having followed event it wasn't much.

SO I had to write a brief analysis of the resignation. My first point of reference was that was good thing for South Africa. And it reflected the level of democracy that is absent in other beloved African countries.

Then my mind raced fast, that the man was actually on way to New York for the UN general assembly and I wondered what Robert Mugabe was thinking of . this is a man who was left him to lead Zimbabwe into a crisis and also helped the two Zimbabwean parties reached a late deal.

But back in South Africa Mbeki had a hazy legacy left behind. A man who had his own way of approaching the HIV/AIDS pand

I_mbeki_kili

He was acccused of political interference to try and bring his rival Zuma down through lofty charges. But was it in any other African country Mbeki would have succeeded in bringing Zuma down and emerging as the real hero.

Then it would be almost unimaginable for a party for instance the NRM in Uganda to take a decision to call on the president to resign.

With all his faults, I have one thing about Mbeki that is unforgotable. That speech - I AM AN AFRICAN.
Here it is:

On an occasion such as this, we should, perhaps, start from the beginning.

So, let me begin.

I am an African.

I owe my being to the hills and the valleys, the mountains and the glades, the rivers, the deserts, the trees, the flowers, the seas and the ever-changing seasons that define the face of our native land.

My body has frozen in our frosts and in our latter day snows. It has thawed in the warmth of our sunshine and melted in the heat of the midday sun. The crack and the rumble of the summer thunders, lashed by startling lightening, have been a cause both of trembling and of hope.

The fragrances of nature have been as pleasant to us as the sight of the wild blooms of the citizens of the veld.

The dramatic shapes of the Drakensberg, the soil-coloured waters of the Lekoa, iGqili noThukela, and the sands of the Kgalagadi, have all been panels of the set on the natural stage on which we act out the foolish deeds of the theatre of our day.

At times, and in fear, I have wondered whether I should concede equal citizenship of our country to the leopard and the lion, the elephant and the springbok, the hyena, the black mamba and the pestilential mosquito.

A human presence among all these, a feature on the face of our native land thus defined, I know that none dare challenge me when I say - I am an African!

I owe my being to the Khoi and the San whose desolate souls haunt the great expanses of the beautiful Cape - they who fell victim to the most merciless genocide our native land has ever seen, they who were the first to lose their lives in the struggle to defend our freedom and dependence and they who, as a people, perished in the result.

Today, as a country, we keep an audible silence about these ancestors of the generations that live, fearful to admit the horror of a former deed, seeking to obliterate from our memories a cruel occurrence which, in its remembering, should teach us not and never to be inhuman again.

I am formed of the migrants who left Europe to find a new home on our native land. Whatever their own actions, they remain still, part of me.

In my veins courses the blood of the Malay slaves who came from the East. Their proud dignity informs my bearing, their culture a part of my essence. The stripes they bore on their bodies from the lash of the slave master are a reminder embossed on my consciousness of what should not be done.

I am the grandchild of the warrior men and women that Hintsa and Sekhukhune led, the patriots that Cetshwayo and Mphephu took to battle, the soldiers Moshoeshoe and Ngungunyane taught never to dishonour the cause of freedom.

My mind and my knowledge of myself is formed by the victories that are the jewels in our African crown, the victories we earned from Isandhlwana to Khartoum, as Ethiopians and as the Ashanti of Ghana, as the Berbers of the desert.

I am the grandchild who lays fresh flowers on the Boer graves at St Helena and the Bahamas, who sees in the mind's eye and suffers the suffering of a simple peasant folk, death, concentration camps, destroyed homesteads, a dream in ruins.

I am the child of Nongqause. I am he who made it possible to trade in the world markets in diamonds, in gold, in the same food for which my stomach yearns.

I come of those who were transported from India and China, whose being resided in the fact, solely, that they were able to provide physical labour, who taught me that we could both be at home and be foreign, who taught me that human existence itself demanded that freedom was a necessary condition for that human existence.

Being part of all these people, and in the knowledge that none dare contest that assertion, I shall claim that - I am an African.

I have seen our country torn asunder as these, all of whom are my people, engaged one another in a titanic battle, the one redress a wrong that had been caused by one to another and the other, to defend the indefensible.

I have seen what happens when one person has superiority of force over another, when the stronger appropriate to themselves the prerogative even to annul the injunction that God created all men and women in His image.

I know what if signifies when race and colour are used to determine who is human and who, sub-human.

I have seen the destruction of all sense of self-esteem, the consequent striving to be what one is not, simply to acquire some of the benefits which those who had improved themselves as masters had ensured that they enjoy.

I have experience of the situation in which race and colour is used to enrich some and impoverish the rest.

I have seen the corruption of minds and souls in the pursuit of an ignoble effort to perpetrate a veritable crime against humanity.

I have seen concrete expression of the denial of the dignity of a human being emanating from the conscious, systemic and systematic oppressive and repressive activities of other human beings.

There the victims parade with no mask to hide the brutish reality - the beggars, the prostitutes, the street children, those who seek solace in substance abuse, those who have to steal to assuage hunger, those who have to lose their sanity because to be sane is to invite pain.

Perhaps the worst among these, who are my people, are those who have learnt to kill for a wage. To these the extent of death is directly proportional to their personal welfare.

And so, like pawns in the service of demented souls, they kill in furtherance of the political violence in KwaZulu-Natal. They murder the innocent in the taxi wars.

They kill slowly or quickly in order to make profits from the illegal trade in narcotics. They are available for hire when husband wants to murder wife and wife, husband.

Among us prowl the products of our immoral and amoral past - killers who have no sense of the worth of human life, rapists who have absolute disdain for the women of our country, animals who would seek to benefit from the vulnerability of the children, the disabled and the old, the rapacious who brook no obstacle in their quest for self-enrichment.

All this I know and know to be true because I am an African!

Because of that, I am also able to state this fundamental truth that I am born of a people who are heroes and heroines.

I am born of a people who would not tolerate oppression.

I am of a nation that would not allow that fear of death, torture, imprisonment, exile or persecution should result in the perpetuation of injustice.

The great masses who are our mother and father will not permit that the behaviour of the few results in the description of our country and people as barbaric.

Patient because history is on their side, these masses do not despair because today the weather is bad. Nor do they turn triumphalist when, tomorrow, the sun shines.

Whatever the circumstances they have lived through and because of that experience, they are determined to define for themselves who they are and who they should be.

We are assembled here today to mark their victory in acquiring and exercising their right to formulate their own definition of what it means to be African.

The constitution whose adoption we celebrate constitutes and unequivocal statement that we refuse to accept that our Africanness shall be defined by our race, colour, gender of historical origins.

It is a firm assertion made by ourselves that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white.

It gives concrete expression to the sentiment we share as Africans, and will defend to the death, that the people shall govern.

It recognises the fact that the dignity of the individual is both an objective which society must pursue, and is a goal which cannot be separated from the material well-being of that individual.

It seeks to create the situation in which all our people shall be free from fear, including the fear of the oppression of one national group by another, the fear of the disempowerment of one social echelon by another, the fear of the use of state power to deny anybody their fundamental human rights and the fear of tyranny.

It aims to open the doors so that those who were disadvantaged can assume their place in society as equals with their fellow human beings without regard to colour, race, gender, age or geographic dispersal.

It provides the opportunity to enable each one and all to state their views, promote them, strive for their implementation in the process of governance without fear that a contrary view will be met with repression.

It creates a law-governed society which shall be inimical to arbitrary rule.

It enables the resolution of conflicts by peaceful means rather than resort to force.

It rejoices in the diversity of our people and creates the space for all of us voluntarily to define ourselves as one people.

As an African, this is an achievement of which I am proud, proud without reservation and proud without any feeling of conceit.

Our sense of elevation at this moment also derives from the fact that this magnificent product is the unique creation of African hands and African minds.

Bit it is also constitutes a tribute to our loss of vanity that we could, despite the temptation to treat ourselves as an exceptional fragment of humanity, draw on the accumulated experience and wisdom of all humankind, to define for ourselves what we want to be.

Together with the best in the world, we too are prone to pettiness, petulance, selfishness and short-sightedness.

But it seems to have happened that we looked at ourselves and said the time had come that we make a super-human effort to be other than human, to respond to the call to create for ourselves a glorious future, to remind ourselves of the Latin saying: Gloria est consequenda - Glory must be sought after!

Today it feels good to be an African.

It feels good that I can stand here as a South African and as a foot soldier of a titanic African army, the African National Congress, to say to all the parties represented here, to the millions who made an input into the processes we are concluding, to our outstanding compatriots who have presided over the birth of our founding document, to the negotiators who pitted their wits one against the other, to the unseen stars who shone unseen as the management and administration of the Constitutional Assembly, the advisers, experts and publicists, to the mass communication media, to our friends across the globe - congratulations and well done!

I am an African.

I am born of the peoples of the continent of Africa.

The pain of the violent conflict that the peoples of Liberia, Somalia, the Sudan, Burundi and Algeria is a pain I also bear.

The dismal shame of poverty, suffering and human degradation of my continent is a blight that we share.

The blight on our happiness that derives from this and from our drift to the periphery of the ordering of human affairs leaves us in a persistent shadow of despair.

This is a savage road to which nobody should be condemned.

This thing that we have done today, in this small corner of a great continent that has contributed so decisively to the evolution of humanity says that Africa reaffirms that she is continuing her rise from the ashes.

Whatever the setbacks of the moment, nothing can stop us now!
Whatever the difficulties, Africa shall be at peace!
However improbable it may sound to the sceptics, Africa will prosper!

Whoever we may be, whatever our immediate interest, however much we carry baggage from our past, however much we have been caught by the fashion of cynicism and loss of faith in the capacity of the people, let us err today and say - nothing can stop us now!

Thank you

Stories out today that Pyongyang could rsume it's nuclear ambitions and the White House is disappointed. Iran is being urged to stop it's nuclear plants. And who are 'threatened' America, Isreal and other super powers.
Africa has no single nuclear plant and if we were to anayse who faces the most threat it's it's this continent. We may no expose the fact that Africa will do anything for the superpowers becuase after all they are super but the fact that if it went against that it's doomed.
In the end African countries have tended to move back en forth, from communism, capitalism, and the 'democratisation' gospel to please these powers.

But I kind of believe if North Korea and Iran and other countries which wanted to have nuclear power could do so , so that at one time this talk ends.

It's the countries that have these plants that are most afriad becuse they know how lethal they can be. So who decides if  u can have weapons or not. I beleive some of the careless ventures the US has taken in the last decade are becuase they have the military might.SO when the US lies that Saddam has WMD and it turns out he didn't why worry about those that accept they have the weapons? Lets have more nuclear plants may be the world will be more stable.

ttp://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/sep/25/korea.nuclear

Stories out today that Pyongyang could rsume it's nuclear ambitions and the White House is disappointed. Iran is being urged to stop it's nuclear plants. And who are 'threatened' America, Isreal and other super powers.
Africa has no single nuclear plant and if we were to anayse who faces the most threat it's it's this continent. We may no expose the fact that Africa will do anything for the superpowers becuase after all they are super but the fact that if it went against that it's doomed.
In the end African countries have tended to move back en forth, from communism, capitalism, and the 'democratisation' gospel to please these powers.

But I kind of believe if North Korea and Iran and other countries which wanted to have nuclear power could do so , so that at one time this talk ends.

It's the countries that have these plants that are most afriad becuse they know how lethal they can be. So who decides if  u can have weapons or not. I beleive some of the careless ventures the US has taken in the last decade are becuase they have the military might.SO when the US lies that Saddam has WMD and it turns out he didn't why worry about those that accept they have the weapons? Lets have more nuclear plants may be the world will be more stable.

ttp://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/sep/25/korea.nuclear

Solomon Adebayor is s reporter for the Abuja based Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria. We met at the Global Investigative journalism conference in Lillehammer, Norway.

We had sensation on challenges facing African Investigative journalist and he summed it up in this radio story.

FORUM---

The Global investigative journalism conference in Norway ended on September 14th with lots of lessons to learn from. I was first of all touched by Sami Elhaj's story. This is a Sudanese  Aljazeera Cameraman who was detained by the US at Guantanamo for 6 years -not out of mistaken identity but with hope that Sami could be their link to the world's most wanted man Osam Bin laden. On the day Sami was arrested near the Pakistani border, Aljazeera had broadcast an interview of Bin Laden and the US soldiers were out to get the cameraman that had filmed the interview hoping he had a clue of the whereabouts of Bin Laden and Sami was the sacrificial lamb, according to Sami.

He didn' t know he was in Guantanamo until like a year. He was able to talk to a lawyer after four years in detention. But what is more important is that Sami didn't despair. He used his time in jail  well, talking to fellow inmates. I spoke to Sami and when I said I was from Uganda, he said told me about two Ugandan boys who were confined with him at Guantanamo- most likely their parents have no idea where they were. Sami became a good contact for lawyers to expose what really went on in Guantanamo. The tortures, the inhuman treatment and shameless acts by the US soldiers.
"Their aim was to make you lose your dignity. They knew my point of weakness.-my son," said Elhaj. They  knew I could do anything to save my son and they used that.

In one troubling case was one Afghan man who was confined with his child. Apparently he was arrested while on the way to hospital where he was taking his sick son.

Elhaj's story never saw the light in western media and let's face it he was a 'nobody' to their audience but isn't one of the roles of media shaping public opinion?

Now Sami is the producer for a new program on Aljazeera, Liberties and Human Rights affairs which will cover the globe. Today Aljazeera is not allowed to broadcast in America. Yes, every media has it's short comings but freedom of press comes at a cost and I don't think the cost is equal or rivals that of the absence of that freedom.

Aljazeera no doubt has changed the world's view of the Arab world. At least everyday for us who can watch Aljazeera on our TV screens see the daily struggles people go through.
It's not the picture that most western media painted the middle east or even Africa. From Aljazeera we seen struggles of all human beings. it's beginning and the coverage of the Iraqi war may not have pleased the Americans ( government) but hey, it's called a war  and we don't expect it to be easy or pleasing.
The American troops have twice bombed Aljazeera buildings and two Aljazeera journalists have been killed one of them I remember Tarrik who was  killed in Baghdad. All this done by a nation that calls itself a democracy or even civilised.
For me one lesson from Aljazeera is, it has shaped opinion both in and outside Middle East . And until Africa has it's own media machinery that shows the  world that  we are not just a world of hunger, disease and despair, Africa will continue to seen as that- at least in the minds of many outside Africa.

Take for instance, I met a friend from East Timor (Gil) at this conference and he told me he had seen a little bit of your country from this movie. Before he could name it, I said the Last King of Scotland and that's what he knew about.
 If there was a good African TV channel that broadcast around the Globe may be he would know that Uganda is one of the largest sweet potatoes growers in the world (even if we don't export it) or may be he would know that Uganda specifically Tororo is in the book of records as having the most thunderstorms and lightening strikes in the worldwide, seeing them on an average of 251 days per year. Then I stop and think oh, may be if these strikes killed people then Uganda would be know -again for the negative reason.

So from all the stories and lessons, Sami's story for me was outstanding and hope that we will continue to deliver the truth no matter what.

And of course big ups to Sonali Samarasinghe whose work  to reveal misuse of power and corruption in Sri Lanka made her the second winner of the Global Shining Light Award.

U.S. adds African rebel leader to terrorist list