washington — The U.S. Treasury Department’s top international official spoke with Zambia’s finance minister Wednesday and discussed Zambia’s debt restructuring and its response to a recent cholera outbreak, the U.S. Treasury Department said. 

Zambia faces a major cholera outbreak that has killed at least 333 people since October, with over 8,000 cumulative cholera cases during this period, according to the website of the U.S. Embassy in Zambia. 

Jay Shambaugh, treasury undersecretary for international affairs, reiterated the U.S. government’s “commitment to partner with Zambia” to end the outbreak when he spoke to Zambian Finance Minister Situmbeko Musokotwane, according to the Treasury Department. 

Zambia, one of Africa’s largest copper producers, also defaulted on its debts three years ago during the COVID-19 pandemic, and its restructuring efforts have been beset by delays. 

Shambaugh “welcomed Zambia’s performance to date under its Internation Monetary Fund program and encouraged continued progress on the remaining economic reforms,” the Treasury Department said. 

In a major setback for Zambia, its official creditors, which include China and members of the Paris Club of creditor nations, rejected a preliminary restructuring deal in November. 

The IMF’s board in December approved an immediate $187 million loan payout to Zambia and said the country was revising a restructuring proposal for $3 billion of bonds that official creditors had rejected in November. 

“They discussed Zambia’s ongoing debt restructuring under the Common Framework and efforts to finalize negotiations with all remaining creditors,” the Treasury Department said in a statement Wednesday. 

Debtor countries are meant to agree to comparable restructuring deals with official and commercial creditors under the G20’s Common Framework process, which was established in 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Zambia said earlier this month that it aimed to agree on key conditions for debt relief no later than the first quarter of 2024.
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When enjoying a fine perfume, one might not be aware that one of its main ingredients comes from the remote Comoros Islands in the Indian Ocean. It is ylang-ylang oil, and the people who produce flower oil are asking for a larger share of the profits, as Ruud Elmendorp reports from the Comoros capital, Moroni.
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washington — The White House sees national security concerns in a recent agreement giving Ethiopia leasing rights to the Red Sea coastline in Somalia’s breakaway Somaliland region, administration officials said Tuesday. But experts questioned Washington’s commitment and ability to quell tensions in the volatile region. 

The two parties inked the deal on January 1. At the time, Ethiopian government spokesman Redwan Hussien said the deal also “paves the way for accessing a leased military base on [the] Red Sea.” 

John Kirby, director of strategic communications for the National Security Council, told VOA that Washington was working with partners in the region — including the African Union and the eight-member Intergovernmental Authority on Development trade bloc — to push against the nonbinding memorandum of understanding, which Somalia’s government, headquartered in Mogadishu, sees as illegitimate. 

“We’re certainly troubled,” Kirby said, adding: “As we’ve said many, many times, we support Somalia’s sovereignty, their territorial integrity, and it’s got to be respected.” 

Situation could embolden militants, says official

Somaliland, the fragile nation’s breakaway province, has long claimed autonomy and governs from the city of Hargeisa. It has sought recognition since 1991, but the African Union’s official policy opposes changes to colonially drawn borders.  

The situation poses a national security concern, Kirby said, in that it could embolden Islamist al-Shabab militants that have long been the main antagonist in Somalia’s brutal civil war. 

“What we’re particularly concerned about is this [Memorandum of Understanding] inked recently between Ethiopia and Somaliland threatens to disrupt the fight that Somalis, Africans and regional international partners, including us, are waging against Al-Shabab,” he said. “Al-Shabab remains a viable terrorist threat in the region, without question. We don’t believe that the region can afford any more conflict.” 

“It’s a dangerous path,” Somalia’s former foreign minister and former ambassador to the U.S., Ahmed Isse Awad, told VOA. “The sister nations have gone to war twice in the last 50 years. 

“We thought we recovered from that conflict and bad history,” he added, speaking to VOA from the northeastern city of Garowe. “And as of late, we were working towards a great Horn of Africa cooperation and openness to each other. But now, this misguided step by Ethiopia endangers all of that and takes us back to the days of conflict and violent confrontation. It risks the whole region and the security of the region.” 

And, he said, while the U.S., “had a respected voice in the international arena,” its staunch support of Israel has changed that. 

“They don’t have the same leverage, I feel, because of the way America is conducting its foreign policy,” he said. “It’s losing some of its moral voice.” 

Ethiopia seeks to be naval power

Analysts say it’s logical that landlocked Ethiopia would seek sea access to serve the needs of its rapidly growing population. 

“The Bab al-Mandab Strait is becoming an increasingly contested chokepoint,” said Michael Walsh, a senior fellow in the Africa program at the U.S.-based Foreign Policy Research Institute. Addis Ababa, he said, clearly wants to safeguard Ethiopia’s supply chains by avoiding reliance on ports in the tiny coastal nation of Djibouti, which is affected by conflict in Yemen. 

And, he said, “the Abiy Ahmed administration has a desire to reestablish Ethiopia as a naval power. It recognizes that there is a regional naval power vacuum. This would provide a way to not only quickly project near-shore military power and influence across the region. It would provide a long-term pathway to becoming a regional naval hegemon.”  

Cameron Hudson, who researches Africa at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that may be more than Ethiopia can handle.  

“[Ethiopia] doesn’t have, I think, a full understanding of the degree that it will also be responsible for its own security and the general security, contributing to the general security, of the Red Sea,” he said. “So, it comes with a great responsibility that I’m not quite sure Ethiopia has fully thought through or appreciates.”  

He also questioned whether Washington’s actions show it “isn’t something that Washington has taken particularly seriously.” 

“Washington has done virtually nothing to try to put the pieces back together in the Horn of Africa,” said Hudson. 

“In my mind, Washington views the stakes in the Horn of Africa probably as too low and as not rising to the level of national security interest, where we would take meaningful high-level external action to avoid a worst-case scenario,” he said. “I think the quintessential example of this is we actually have a special envoy for the Horn of Africa, who has not been to the region in over a month.” 
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nairobi, kenya — Kenya has embarked on its biggest rhino relocation project and began the difficult work Tuesday of tracking, darting and moving 21 of the critically endangered beasts, which can each weigh over a ton, to a new home.

A previous attempt at moving rhinos in the East African nation was a disaster in 2018, as all 11 of the animals died.

The latest project experienced early troubles. A rhino targeted for moving was successfully hit with a tranquilizer dart shot from a helicopter but ended up in a creek. Veterinarians and rangers held the rhino’s head above water with a rope to save it while a tranquilizer reversal drug took effect, and the rhino was released.

Wildlife officials have stressed that the challenging project will take time, likely weeks.

The black rhinos are a mix of males and females and are being moved from three conservation parks to the private Loisaba Conservancy in central Kenya, the Kenya Wildlife Service said. They are being moved because there are too many in the three parks, and they need more space to roam and hopefully, to breed.

Rhinos are generally solitary animals and are at their happiest in large territories.

Kenya has had relative success in reviving its black rhino population, which dipped below 300 in the mid-1980s because of poaching, raising fears that the animals might be wiped out in a country famous for its wildlife.

Kenya now has nearly 1,000 black rhinos, according to the wildlife service. That’s the third biggest black rhino population in the world behind South Africa and Namibia.

There are just 6,487 wild rhinos left in the world, according to rhino conservation charity Save the Rhino, all of them in Africa.

Kenyan authorities say they have relocated more than 150 rhinos in the last decade.

Six years ago, Kenya relocated 11 rhinos from the capital, Nairobi, to another sanctuary in the south of the country. All died soon after arriving at the sanctuary. Ten of them died from stress, dehydration and starvation intensified by salt poisoning as they struggled to adjust to saltier water in their new home, investigations found. The other rhino was attacked by a lion.

Some of the 21 rhinos in the latest relocation are being transferred from Nairobi National Park and will make a 300-kilometer (186-mile) trip in the back of a truck to Loisaba. Others will come from parks closer to Loisaba.

The moving of the rhinos to Loisaba is poignant, given the region was once home to a healthy black rhino population before they were wiped out in that area 50 years ago, said Loisaba Conservancy CEO Tom Silvester.

Kenyan wildlife authorities say the country is aiming to grow its black rhino population to about 2,000, which they believe would be the ideal number considering the space available for them in national and private parks.
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Kampala, Uganda — The summit of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) got underway this week in Uganda’s capital, Kampala, where delegations from Somalia and the Palestinian people are lobbying members for support. While the Palestinians are calling on members to find a way to end the conflict in Gaza, Somalia says it needs support to maintain its territorial integrity.

Ninety-three out of 120 NAM nations are represented in Kampala for the 19th summit of the movement. 

For the plenary session that began Monday, Arab nations made clear that Gaza must be the focus of the meeting.

Delegates said the NAM summit must find the right language to address what they called “the violent and savage aggression by the state of Israel in perpetuating a genocide” in Gaza.

A delegate from Mauritius said the summit must make a political declaration on the war, which broke out October 7 after the Palestinian militant group Hamas attacked Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking about 240 hostage, 105 of whom were released in November. Israel’s military response reportedly has killed more than 24,000 Palestinians.

Riyadh Mansour, the Palestinian ambassador to the United Nations, said he does not expect any country to disagree with calling for a cease-fire and humanitarian assistance for the 2.3 million Palestinians displaced from their homes.   

“We are not asking for anything other than standing with us against this aggression,” he said. “We are facing a massive calamity. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration from us to expect support from our brothers and sisters from the movement.” 

Uganda recently took over chairmanship of the Non-Aligned Movement from Azerbaijan.

Vincent Bagiire, the permanent secretary at the Ugandan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, says the agenda for the plenary session will be decided by consensus.

“We have not subjected the matter of Palestine and Gaza to whether it should be the major topic that we discuss,” he said. “So, Uganda will focus on creating cohesion within the movement to ensure that we can work together as a movement for the good of humanity.”

Delegates from Somalia are calling for the 120-state movement to support its territorial integrity and sovereignty.

Early this month, Ethiopia signed an agreement with Somaliland, a breakaway region from Somalia, giving Ethiopia access to the sea. In return, Ethiopia would consider recognizing Somaliland as an independent country.

Hamza Adan Haadow, permanent secretary in the Somali Ministry of Foreign Affairs, says the agreement “violates our rights, our integrity and our unity.” “So, that’s why we are pushing, and we believe that the peace that we had will continue if the Non-Alignment Movement stands with us,” he added.

Both the Somali and Palestinian representatives have five days to convince delegates to prioritize their concerns and come up with resolutions before heads of state fly to Uganda for the summit at the end of this week.
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Goma, DRC — Felix Tshisekedi is set to be inaugurated for a new term as president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, after the constitutional court confirmed his victory in last month’s election. In the eastern part of the country, residents hope he will focus his attention on bringing peace and security to the volatile region. 

Bashinge Esperance is a war-displaced woman who fled a month ago from Masisi territory, where the armed forces of the Democratic Republic of Congo are fighting the rebel group M23. 

Esperance is a widow, her husband having been killed by the rebels while working in his field. She says she hopes that Tshisekedi, in his second term, will focus on bringing peace to the region. 

She says that the president, who will soon be sworn in, should be stronger to bring peace, because in the camp where she lives, she says she is suffering and would like to return to her village. 

Esperance sews to support herself and her 4-year-old child. She is pregnant and expecting a baby in about a month.

She says doesn’t want to give birth in the displaced persons’ camp because life is so difficult; she’d like to give birth in her village. She says that if peace were to return, the DRC could be even better and the people would live better. 

The same hope was expressed by Sadiki Willy, a displaced person who has been living in the Kanyaruchinya camp, north of the city of Goma, for over 10 months. He hopes the president will show concern for the difficult living conditions of the displaced in the camps.

He says that the first thing the president should focus on in his second term is peace, and that he should care about the war-displaced and do his best to get them back home. He says they used to live better at home, in their houses, but here they live in dilapidated shacks with no security. 

The DRC already has a record number of internally displaced people. In October 2023, the number was estimated at 5.6 million, with most living in the eastern provinces of North Kivu, South Kivu, Ituri and Tanganyika. 

Rebel groups have fought the government and each other in eastern Congo for decades, battling for political dominance and control of the region’s rich mines.

Congolese law professor Tresor Makunya has some ideas about how these armed conflicts could be resolved. 

“The Congolese government has mainly relied on the U.N. and a few regional organizations such as the East African Community to resolve conflicts and security problems in eastern DRC … instead of strengthening its own armed forces,” he said. “The government has also relied on bilateral military agreements with, for example, Burundi Rwanda and Uganda. I believe that the national army needs to be enhanced, and that it can be enhanced in a number of ways. Firstly, we need to increase [the] military budget and ensure that it is used wisely and appropriately. Finally, we need to ensure that military personnel and soldiers involved in wrongdoing are held to account.” 

Tshisekedi’s swearing-in ceremony will take place January 20 in Kinshasa, the Congolese capital.
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NAKIVALE, Uganda — Enock Twagirayesu was seeking sanctuary when he and his family fled violence in Burundi, and they found it in Uganda, the small East African nation that has absorbed thousands of refugees from unsettled neighbors. 

Twagirayesu’s family has grown from two children when they arrived more than a decade ago to eight now, a boon for the family but also a marker of the immense pressure the Nakivale Refugee Settlement has put on the landscape near the Tanzania border. 

What was wide forest cover two decades ago is now mostly gone, cut down for cooking fuel. When Twagirayesu saw women digging up roots to burn a few years ago, he knew it was time to act. 

“We saw that in the days to come, when the trees are finished, we will also be finished,” he said. “Because if there are no trees to be used for cooking even the people cannot survive.” 

He and two other refugees began planting trees in 2016, and Twagirayesu, who had sewn for a living back home, turned out to have a gift for mobilizing people. That early group quickly grew, and he now leads the Nakivale Green Environment Association to carry out what Twagirayesu calls the urgent business of reforesting. 

“A tree is not like beans or maize, which you plant and tomorrow you will get something to eat. Planting trees is challenging,” he said. 

Deforestation is a national issue in Uganda, where most people use firewood for cooking, trees are often cut to make charcoal for export and some forests fall to illegal logging. The country has lost 13% of its tree cover since 2000, according to Global Forest Watch. 

Nakivale, sparsely populated by locals, is one of the few territories in Uganda that could accommodate many refugees. More than 180,000 live there now, with regular new arrivals. 

They come from neighboring countries such as Congo, where sporadic violence means an influx of arrivals heading toward Nakivale. There are Rwandan refugees still living in Nakivale who first arrived there shortly after the 1994 genocide. After the refugees are registered, they are allocated small plots of land upon which they can build homes and plant gardens. 

Nsamizi Training Institute for Social Development, a local organization, is supporting the tree-planting activities of Twagirayesu and others. The institute’s yearly goal is to plant 300,000 trees, with about 3 million planted in recent years, said Cleous Bwambale, who oversees monitoring and evaluation for the institute. 

On one recent afternoon, a group of refugees were busy planting thousands of pine seedlings on the rocky, steep side of a hill facing the Kabahinda Primary School. In scorching heat, they attacked solid ground with pickaxes and hoes before carefully tucking the seedlings into the earth. Nearly all the workers have children enrolled at the government-owned but donor-supported school. 

Deputy Headteacher Racheal Kekirunga said heavy rains in the valley bring the school to a standstill as stormwater races down the hill and runs through the yard, forcing teachers and students to stay inside. 

“We hope that when we plant these trees it will help us to reduce on the running water that could affect our school, and our school gardens,” Kekirunga said. “Especially our learning and teaching. When the rain is too heavy, you must wait until it reduces and then you go to class.” 

The Nsamizi institute, serving as an implementing partner in Nakivale for the U.N. refugee agency, collaborates with mobilizers like Twagirayesu in four parts of the 185-square-kilometer (71-square-mile) settlement, according to the U.N. refugee agency. 

The institute encourages refugees with small cash payments for specific work done, maps out plans to reforest specific blocks of land and provides seedlings. 

Twagirayesu said his group has planted at least 460,000 trees in Nakivale, creating woodlots of varying sizes and ages. They include pine, acacia and even bamboo. That success has come despite fears among some in the settlement that the authorities, wanting to protect mature woodlots, one day might force the refugees to go back home. 

“We got a problem because some people were saying that when they plant trees, they will be chased away,” he said. “Teaching people to plant trees also became a war. But right now, after they saw us continue to plant trees, saw us getting firewood, they began to appreciate our work.” 

Twagirayesu said that while he isn’t done yet as a tree planter, “when we are walking in the places where we planted trees, we feel much happiness.” 
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Moroni — Voting was under way in Comoros on Sunday in an election widely expected to hand a fourth five-year term to President Azali Assoumani, who faces five opponents in a vote some opposition leaders have boycotted.

The polls opened across the Indian Ocean archipelago at 8 a.m. (0500 GMT) for the 338,940 registered voters out of its 800,000 population. Voting ends at 6 p.m.

Comoros has experienced around 20 coups or attempted coups since winning independence from France in 1975 and is a major source of irregular migration to the nearby French island of Mayotte.

Some opposition leaders have called for a boycott, accusing the election commission of favoring the ruling party. The commission denies this, saying the process will be transparent.

“I am delighted with this anchoring of democracy in our country,” Assoumani told reporters after voting in his home town of Mitsoudjé, adding that he hoped for victory in the first round.

The former army officer first came to power in a coup in 1999. He has since won three elections and has served as the chair of the African Union for the past year.

He won the 2019 election with 60% of the vote, breaching the 50% mark required to avoid a run-off. Critics say since then his government has cracked down on dissent, an accusation it denies.

Assoumani’s opponents include a former interior minister and Salim Issa, a medical doctor and flagbearer for Juwa, former president Ahmed Abdallah Sambi’s party.

“We welcome the conduct of the vote. We hope that everything will continue calmly,” Issa wrote on social media from Foumbouni, his hometown in the south of the Comoros.

Sambi is now behind bars after being sentenced to life in prison in 2022 for high treason related to accusations of corruption. Political protests have been repeatedly banned for security reasons.

Comoros changed its constitution in June 2018 to remove a requirement that the presidency rotate among its three main islands every five years. This allowed Assoumani to seek re-election.

The opposition leaders calling for a boycott and their supporters have wanted the armed forces barred from involvement in the elections and the unconditional release of Sambi and other political prisoners.

Provisional results are expected on Friday, according to the election commission.
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KINSHASA, DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO — The U.N. peacekeeping mission in Democratic Republic of Congo, which helped in the fight against rebels for more than two decades before being asked by the Congolese government to leave, will complete its withdrawal from the Central African nation by the end of 2024, the mission said Saturday.

A three-phased withdrawal of the 15,000-member force will begin in the South Kivu province, where at least 2,000 security personnel will leave by the end of April in the first phase, according to Bintou Keita, head of the mission known as MONUSCO. After that, forces in the North Kivu and Ituri provinces will leave.

“After 25 years of presence, MONUSCO will definitively leave the DRC no later than the end of 2024,” Keita said at a media briefing in the Congolese capital of Kinshasa. The end of the mission will not be “the end of the United Nations” in the country, she said.

The U.N. and Congolese officials worked together to produce a disengagement plan for “a progressive, responsible, honorable and exemplary withdrawal of MONUSCO,” Congolese Foreign Minister Christophe Lutundula said.

Mechanisms have been set for “the gradual transfer of tasks from MONUSCO to Congolese government,” Lutundula said.

The MONUSCO force arrived in Congo in 2010 after taking over from an earlier U.N. peacekeeping mission to protect civilians and humanitarian personnel and to support the Congolese government in its stabilization and peace consolidation efforts.

However, frustrated Congolese say that no one is protecting them from rebel attacks, leading to protests of the U.N. mission and others that have at times turned deadly.

Over the years of its existence, eastern Congo continues to be ravaged by more than 120 armed groups seeking a share of the region’s resources such as gold and trying to protect their communities, some of them quietly backed by Congo’s neighbors. The violence is occasioned by rampant mass killings and has displaced nearly 7 million people.

The Congolese government — which has just been reelected in a disputed vote — requested the U.N. mission to leave the country after claiming the security collaboration “has proved its limits in a context of permanent war, without the longed-for peace being restored to eastern Congo.”

The government has also directed an East African regional force, deployed last year to help end the fighting, to leave the country for similar reasons.
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Nairobi, Kenya — 2023 was a consequential year for human rights suppression and wartime atrocities, especially in the Horn of Africa, according to a new report by Human Rights Watch published Thursday. The rights group blames regional blocs and the international community for not doing enough to protect civilians.

Governments in the Horn of Africa dealt with large-scale humanitarian crises in 2023. With no checks on abuses in Sudan and Ethiopia, civilians withstood the worst of atrocities committed in the name of war, the report by Human Rights Watch says.

“We … saw blatant flouting of very basic laws of war, human rights laws, by governments,” said Laetitia Bader, deputy director in the Africa division at the rights group.

In Sudan, a war that broke out last April between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces has killed thousands and displaced millions of civilians, sparking a humanitarian crisis.

The report says the warring parties repeatedly used heavy weapons in densely populated areas and that instead of treating this crisis as a priority, influential governments and regional bodies have pursued short-term gains at the expense of rights-driven solutions.

“Time and time again, we saw how there was limited diplomatic willingness at the regional level but also at the international level to really press for a sort of accountability, which is needed to end these cycles of impunity,” Bader said.

Several countries, including the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, tried to broker cease-fires in Sudan but weren’t successful.

In Ethiopia, after parties to the conflict in the northern part of the country signed a cessation of hostilities agreement in late 2022 — which Bader says resulted in improvement in the human rights and humanitarian situation in parts of Tigray — the limited international efforts to promote meaningful accountability and an end to abuses quickly dissipated, the report says.

“Over the last six months in particular, we’ve seen a deteriorating rights situation and fighting in the Amhara region,” Bader said. “And again, we’ve seen the impact on the civilian community. We’ve documented extrajudicial killings, sexual violence, but also the devastating impact that this ongoing cycle of fighting is having on civilians’ ability to access basic care.”

Fighting erupted in Tigray in late 2020 after the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) attacked army bases across the region. The attacks initially overwhelmed the federal military, which later mounted a counteroffensive alongside Eritrean soldiers and forces from the neighboring region of Amhara.

In 2021 alone, 5.1 million Ethiopians became internally displaced, a record for the most people internally displaced in any country in any single year at the time, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.
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