Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) government forces have been killing civilians in an insurgency-hit region, prompting the latest influx of refugees into northern Zambia, a senior U.N. official said, citing accounts of asylum seekers.

Zambia fears a looming humanitarian crisis after more than 6,000 refugees fleeing turmoil in the DRC entered its territory in one month.

Pierrine Aylara, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) chief representative in Zambia, told Reuters that the latest asylum seekers had said they were fleeing Congolese government forces.

“It is the government of the DRC that is said to be persecuting its own people by killing, maiming and torching houses, as well as committing rape and looting food stored in granaries,” Aylara said.

​Thousands dead, million flee

Thousands of people have been killed and more than 1 million forced to flee their homes in the DRC’s eastern Kasai region since the start of an insurrection nearly a year ago by the Kamuina Nsapu militia. Kamuina Nsapu is demanding the withdrawal of military forces from Kasai.

But U.N. monitors noted in a report that the conflict has shifted away from an insurrection of a specific community toward a wider upheaval far beyond its initial confines.

A rebel group known as Elema was fighting the government mainly with machetes, bows and arrows in Congo’s Haut Katanga and Tanganyika provinces, Aylara said.

“The group is not targeting civilians and aims to protect them, but is rather targeting government soldiers, the police as well as government establishments,” she said.

Threat to Kabila

The insurgency poses the worst threat yet to the rule of DRC President Joseph Kabila. His refusal to step down at the end of his constitutional mandate last December prompted a wave of killings and lawlessness across the vast central African nation.

“In turn, government soldiers have become increasingly brutal to the civilian population as they are unable to tell who does and does not belong to this (rebel) group,” Aylara said.

DRC government forces were fighting alongside a tribe known as the Abatembo and targeting the Luba and Tabwa tribes who were believed to be sympathetic to the Elema rebels, she said.

Southern African leaders plan to appoint a retired African president to oversee a process aimed at bringing about free and all-inclusive elections in the DRC to help heal the tensions that have caused internal strife and the refugee crisis.

 
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An Egyptian ultraconservative Muslim preacher hears on his car radio news of the death of Michael Jackson, the pop singer he idolized in his teens, and he becomes so distraught he crashes his car.

 

The news of the passing of the King of Pop is the start of a crisis of conscience for Sheikh Khalid Hani, the main character of the movie Sheikh Jackson, Egypt’s first feature film to focus on the religious movement known as Salafis, followers of one of the strictest interpretations of Islam.

 

It follows Sheikh Hani, a Salafi, as his love for Michael Jackson throws him onto a bumpy journey to discover his own identity, mirroring how Egypt’s conservative society is torn between its Islamic and Arab traditions and Western culture in an age when television, telecommunications and social media bring together people and cultures from all corners of the world.

Humanity and identity

 

“I no longer cry while I am praying. That means my faith is faltering,” Hani confides to a female psychiatrist in one scene. Crying while praying, he explains, reflects his fear of God.

 

The film goes beyond examining Salafis, says the director, Amr Salama. 

“It’s about humanity. … It tells you that one’s identity is not a single dimension or an unchangeable thing,” he told The Associated Press just days before Sheikh Jackson premiered in the Toronto Film Festival earlier this month. 

 

It’s a journey Salama has some experience in: He was a huge Jackson fan in his teens and then became Salafi during his university years, before moving away from the movement. 

 

What is Salafism?

Salafism is one of the most closed, uncompromising visions of Islam. Its doctrine is primarily built around what its followers believe is emulation of the actions the Prophet Muhammad. They are easily recognized by their chest-long beards and robes that reach to just below the knees. They shun music, film and dance and outside influences seen as decadent. Salafi women wear the all-covering niqab, including veils over their faces.

 

Followers view life as a little more than a transitional phase and are contemptuous of worldly pleasures. Immortality in heaven is their chief goal.

When Hani goes to the psychiatrist, whom he thought by her ambiguous name was a man, he asks her to put on a headscarf during their sessions. She refuses, and throughout their talk, he can’t look at her. When she asks him the last thing that made him feel alive, his response comes from Salafi doctrine: “I bought my shroud and wrote my will.” He occasionally sleeps under his bed, convinced that it is the closest thing to being inside a grave, thus a reminder of his mortality.

Connection to Jackson

But Jackson’s death revives in Hani the obsession with the singer he had in his teens, when he imitated the star’s look and dance moves. It earned him the nickname “Jackson,” but also the disapproval of his macho father.

 

“He is effeminate,” the father says of Jackson. But Hani’s mother whispers to him, “He is the world’s best singer. But keep that as our little secret.” When the mother dies young, Hani’s father turns into a serial womanizer and becomes violent, beating Hani for imitating his idol.

 

When the adult Hani discovers his own daughter, at age 6 or 7, watching videos of Beyonce, he tears out the Wifi and denounces “dancing to the devil’s tune.”

 

Delicate territory

The film, which is to be released in Egyptian cinemas later this month and which Egypt has put forward as a candidate for a best foreign film Oscar nomination, goes into delicate territory. 

 

Thousands of Islamists have been jailed under the government of President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, who was elected after leading the ouster of the Muslim Brotherhood in 2013 and who has faced a fierce militant insurgency. Depicting Islamists with even a hint of positivity can bring questions from authorities and security agencies.

 

Still, while some Salafis have been jailed in the crackdown, the government has tolerated parts of the movement, in part because some Salafi political parties lined up behind el-Sissi after the Brotherhood’s ouster. 

 

Salafism has been the fastest growing Islamist movement in Egypt for the past decade, and it covers a spectrum. Some Salafis are relatively engaged with other parts of society, often as successful businessmen; some separate themselves to avoid sinful influences; others denounce society outright as “kafir,” or non-believing. A militant fringe embraces jihad against “infidels” and tyrants. 

 

The film risks a backlash from the public, either by viewers who see as it as too sympathetic to Islamists or, from the other side, as mocking religious beliefs. 

 

“I have neither glorified nor dissed the Salafis,” Salama said. “They are just human beings like us.”

 

Touching moments

That extends to depictions of Salafi family that almost never show up in films. Hani’s wife understands his turmoil after Jackson’s death. At one point, Hani tells her he loves her because she loves God more than she loves him.

 

In a scene many parents could sympathize with, their young daughter watches her parents with disapproving bemusement as they drive her to school, joyously singing a religious hymn they heard on the day they met. Embarrassed, she asks her father to drop her off far from the school gate.

 

The movie builds Salama’s reputation as a director willing to take on some of Egypt’s thorniest issues. His 2014 Excuse My French dealt with the forms of subtle discrimination that Egypt’s minority Christians face, while the 2011 Asmaa portrayed the social stigma endured by those who are HIV positive.

 

Still, neither of the previous films was a box office hit, despite critical acclaim. Sheikh Jackson is unlikely to fare better in a country where comedies and action movies the only sure winners. 

 
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The same institution responsible for the failures in Kenya’s August’s presidential poll is expected to organize a fresh vote in fewer than five weeks. Briefing reporters Friday, the attorney general sought to stave off fears of an impending constitutional crisis.

Kenya’s opposition has given the director of public prosecutions three days to file charges against electoral commission officials accused of bungling the August presidential vote. The results of that poll were nullified by the Supreme Court.

Opposition member of parliament Godfrey Osotsi said his party cannot allow the same officials to conduct the rerun election, now scheduled for October 26.

“We are going to provide evidence from our ICT people and from our lawyers to support our case because this election cannot be free if those individuals are still going to preside over a fresh election,” he said.

This kind of demand has legal experts worried about a constitutional crisis if the electoral commission fails to hold the new election within the required 60 days of the Supreme Court’s September 1 ruling.

Attorney General Githu Muigai said Friday there will be no crisis.

“Even in the unlikely event that for whatever reason the election wasn’t held on the 60th day, that does not delegitimize the constitutional order of the day,” he said. “And in many countries, there have been various methods of expanding the time within which something is to be done.”

Some legal professionals argue that if the October 31 deadline is missed, President Uhuru Kenyatta will have to make way for a caretaker administration.

Muigai disagrees.

“To establish any form of government other than compliance with this constitution is declared by the constitution unlawful,” he said. “There is no government known to the constitution of Kenya called a transitional government or a caretaker government or any other form of government other than what is defined in this constitution.”

Kenyans are divided over the court’s decision to throw out the presidential results.The court said electronically transmitted results released by the electoral commission were neither transparent nor verifiable, as required by law.

The ruling Jubilee Party says the court failed to consider the voters and the final result, which showed Kenyatta winning by 1.4 million votes.

Constitutional expert Nelson Havi said the court focused on the electoral process.

“What the constitution wanted to achieve was to have a very simplistic process where the common man would be in a position to understand how a determination as to who won the election was arrived at,” he said. “It was meant to be a simple and a straightforward [way] everybody would understand.”

The voiding of the presidential vote has sparked appeals for the courts to nullify other results from the August general elections.More than 300 lawsuits have been filed so far, mostly by candidates who lost their bid for office.
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Scientists are warning that the Horn of Africa may have to endure another dry season and more food insecurity because of weather patterns in the Pacific Ocean.

In mid-August, water temperatures in the east central Pacific began to dip below average, increasing the chances that the weather phenomenon known as La Nina could develop in the Northern Hemisphere.

Climatologists who met in Washington earlier this month say for the Horn of Africa, there is a 55 to 60 percent chance that rainfall in October, November, and December will be negatively affected.

The region suffered below average rainfall during the last three months of 2016 and again in March, April and May of 2017, reducing crop production. The resulting food shortage and a rise in prices left some 18 million people across Ethiopia, Somalia, and Kenya in a situation of “acute food insecurity,” according to the U.S. Agency for International Development.

“We are all concerned that the combination of La Nina conditions in the eastern Pacific and warm conditions in the western Pacific could result in yet another poor rain season in the areas that have already food insecurity — eastern Ethiopia and Somalia, in particular, and probably eastern Kenya,” said Chris Funk, research director of the Climate Hazards Group, an organization that tracks weather patterns and food production throughout the world in an interview with VOA’s Horn of Africa service..

If that happens, he said the region will have gone without good rains for more than 18 months.

 

“If we had a third drought, that would actually make things potentially worse than what we experienced in 2011 and 2012,” he said.

That drought, one of the worst in recent African history, killed an estimated 260,000 people in the Horn.

Funk warns La Nina could also bring more rain and possible flooding to Southern Africa, which suffered a severe drought when La Nina’s opposite phenomenon, El Nino, occurred in 2015. East Africa got higher than normal rainfall that year.

“There is kind of a flip between those two,” Funk said.
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