Rwanda

Southern Sudan in hunger crisis NAIROBI, Kenya - More than 80 percent of people living in a conflict zone in Sudan's southern region are eating only one meal a day, compared with 10 percent one year ago, a U.S. advocacy group said Thursday, citing research collected from a region where aid groups aren't allowed to operate. The Enough Project warned that hunger is increasing to dangerous levels in the Sudanese state of South Kordofan. A study carried out by an aid group showed that girls are suffering the worst.

PARIS HILTON's charity mission to Rwanda is off. "Due to the restructuring of the Playing for Good Foundation, the philanthropic trip to Rwanda that the foundation had previously planned with Paris has been postponed," the children's charity said yesterday in a statement. Finally some good news for Rwanda. Billboard.com reports that rapper Foxy Brown's 76-day stint in solitary confinement is due to a misundertanding. It always is. According to her manager, Chaz Williams, Foxy's refusal to take a drug test was due to a hearing problem - just like Gary Collins' refusal to take a Breathalyzer test when he was pulled over Tuesday night.

How smug ought we Americans be, in the guise of humanitarian concerns, as we gawk at the human tragedies of the Rwandans? Let's not forget that when 17th century Europe began to suffer its own population pressures, more than 70 million victims fled Europe's class-induced structural scarcities, religious and cultural intolerance and inequitable land distribution policies. In seeking refuge in the Americas, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand, these Europeans launched their own resource wars, aimed at removing the native peoples from the most productive agricultural lands.

KINSHASA, Congo - Congo's president accused Rwanda of backing a new rebellion in Congo's east and called their support an "open secret. " President Joseph Kabila spoke to journalists late Saturday in a rare appearance and said that the government would investigate accusations that Uganda may also be backing the M23 rebellion in the east, though the country said it was not involved. The uprising has brought the worst violence in years to the already volatile Congo. It has forced more than 260,000 people from their homes in the last three months.

Gratifying as it was to learn French troops had rescued 35 nuns and eight schoolgirls from militias of the Hutu government in Rwanda, veteran Africa- watchers had to be struck with a deeply disturbing sense of deja vu. The mercy mission was carried out by a force crossing Lake Kivu into western Rwanda from a military base the French were allowed to set up in the border town of Goma in neighboring Zaire. The sense of having seen this before derived from events just 17 months earlier, when, French Marines crossed the Congo River from the neighboring Republic of Congo to rescue 400 French nationals from marauding government troops in Zaire.

There is no Sunday worship service at the red-brick church here, because the sanctuary and the churchyard are full of rotting bodies. Many of the town's houses are blackened shells. Others sit empty, their owners either dead or in refugee camps. But there are signs of life returning, however slowly, to this town that four months ago was home to about 50,000 people, with a reputation as a Tutsi bastion that opposed the Hutu government. Shops and stores along the dusty main road are beginning to reopen, although they have few wares and fewer customers.

For all of the hyperbolic use of such terms as genocide and Holocaust to describe Bosnia, the worst violence on earth today is occurring in Rwanda. Unlike Bosnia, where the combatants are fighting over 4 or 6 or 9 percent more territory, in Rwanda the issue is not territory but existence. This is a tribal war of extermination, of mass murder at a Hitlerian rate. Between 200,000 and 400,000 have been massacred in seven weeks - as many as have died in all two years of the Bosnian civil war. Yet Bosnia has a vocal, articulate constituency.

It tears at the heart to look at the gruesome photographs from Rwanda, where 20,000 people have died in tribal warfare in only a few days. Patients slaughtered in their hospital beds. Nearly 1,200 people, half of them children, hacked to death in a church. Gangs with machetes and knives roaming the streets of the capital, Kigali, murdering for no apparent reason. The presence of 2,300 United Nations peace-keeping troops who were monitoring an earlier cease-fire, along with a few hundred Belgian and French soldiers, has led some observers to ask whether there is anything the world community can do to stop the mayhem.

News travels fast across the lush mountains of this tiny East African nation. So hours after the ethnic massacre began two months ago in Rwanda, Claver and Esperance Karegire began planning how to protect their children. The Rwandan border is just two hours north, and the Karegires were afraid that the war between ethnic Tutsis and Hutus would spread to Burundi. And for good reason. Burundi is the mirror image of Rwanda - a tiny, impoverished nation where Tutsi-Hutu hatred runs deep.

The explosion heard in the skies over Kigali at 9:40 on the night of April 6 caused no great alarm. The capital had been tense for weeks, and the sounds of grenades and rifle fire hardly made anyone flinch anymore. "Nothing to worry about. Probably just thunder," Phillippe Lambiliotte, a Belgian businessman, reassured his wife. The night was thick with humidity and heat and more silent than usual. Lambiliotte remembers hearing a dog bark. He went to sleep wondering if someone was moving around in the dark.

Rebels won't leave Congo city GOMA, Congo - Rebels who are believed to be backed by Rwanda once again postponed their departure from Congo's key eastern city of Goma on Friday, defying an international ultimatum for the second time. The delay raises the possibility that the M23 rebels don't intend to leave the city they seized last week, giving credence to a U.N. expert report that says neighboring Rwanda is using the rebels as a proxy to annex territory in mineral-rich eastern Congo.

A young woman of wrenlike delicacy stood onstage at the Agnes Irwin School in Bryn Mawr and told a harrowing story that the girls in the room, smart though they were, could not grasp. In 1994, when Francine Mugueni was 4, her parents and six siblings were slaughtered in the Rwandan genocide, in which nearly a million people were killed in 100 days. Left behind to mourn and bury the bodies were mostly women and orphans like Mugueni and her 14-year-old sister. To have money to survive, they dropped out of school and cleaned offices.

KINSHASA, Congo - Congo's president accused Rwanda of backing a new rebellion in Congo's east and called their support an "open secret. " President Joseph Kabila spoke to journalists late Saturday in a rare appearance and said that the government would investigate accusations that Uganda may also be backing the M23 rebellion in the east, though the country said it was not involved. The uprising has brought the worst violence in years to the already volatile Congo. It has forced more than 260,000 people from their homes in the last three months.

KINSHASA, Congo - The leaders of Congo and Rwanda have agreed in principle to back a neutral international armed force to combat Congo's newest rebellion and other fighters terrorizing civilians in the country's mineral-rich east, and the African Union said it could help by sending soldiers. Congo state television said leaders of the two countries met Sunday in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia - their first meeting since accusations, backed by a U.N. report, that Rwanda had helped create and arm M23 rebels.

Walter Reich is the Yitzhak Rabin Memorial Professor of International Affairs, Ethics, and Human Behavior at George Washington University, and a former director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum The United States needs stronger mechanisms to help it prevent and respond to genocide and other atrocities. President Obama agrees, and he has ordered an interagency review aimed at creating an intragovernmental Atrocities Prevention Board to warn of impending atrocities and recommend ways to prevent them.

Steven Spielberg, the master storyteller whose films Amistad, Empire of the Sun, and Schindler's List underscore the triumph of freedom over tyranny, will receive the 2009 Liberty Medal on Oct. 8 at the National Constitution Center. The award, along with a check for $100,000, will be presented by former President Bill Clinton, chairman of the Philadelphia center as well as a prior medal recipient, a longtime Spielberg friend, and a partner in activism. The annual award, marking its 20th anniversary, honors those who strive to secure liberty for those without it. Previous winners of the medal include South African President Nelson Mandela, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, and U2 singer and social activist Bono.

Daniel Cooper was steering his bike up into the lush hills of northwestern Rwanda, taking in the scene's beauty, when he realized he wasn't riding alone. Someone was behind the Chicago-area stock trader, pedaling hard and gaining ground on the long rocky incline. Soon villagers were lining the road, cheery wildly, and Cooper was locked in an impromptu race. He had the clear advantage - clad in sleek lycra, riding a lightweight aluminum, full-suspension mountain bike. His competition, a local in rubber boots, rode an ancient steel clunker from China that had spindles for pedals - with 50 pounds of potatoes strapped on the back.

PARIS HILTON's charity mission to Rwanda is off. "Due to the restructuring of the Playing for Good Foundation, the philanthropic trip to Rwanda that the foundation had previously planned with Paris has been postponed," the children's charity said yesterday in a statement. Finally some good news for Rwanda. Billboard.com reports that rapper Foxy Brown's 76-day stint in solitary confinement is due to a misundertanding. It always is. According to her manager, Chaz Williams, Foxy's refusal to take a drug test was due to a hearing problem - just like Gary Collins' refusal to take a Breathalyzer test when he was pulled over Tuesday night.