AT least 22 schoolchildren have reportedly been shot dead in a brutal raid on a remote village in northeastern Kenya.
A total of 66 were killed in what is believed to be the country’s worst-ever single episode of inter-clan violence, a local politician said.Bonaya Godana, the member of parliament for North Horr district in which the attack took place, said that 56 villagers, most of them young children and their mothers, had been killed in yesterday’s raid on Turbi village.
Police said earlier that 10 of the attackers had also been killed.
Advertisement:Mr Godana, a former Kenyan foreign minister who was touring the scene of the brutal attack, said many of the victims had been shot dead while preparing to go to school.
“As of this morning, 56 of our people have been confirmed dead and of them are 22 schoolchildren, and most of them died in their school uniforms,” he said, adding that 10 schoolchildren were among those seriously wounded in the attack.
ICG has another report out, this one on terrorism in the Sahel (Mali, Niger, Chad, Mauritania, etc) region of North Africa. The issue of North African (and particularly Algerian) terrorism has been one that I’ve been interested in for quite some time now and apparently some of my previous posts on the subject apparently helped to inspire a chapter in Richard Miniter’s Shadow War, which I now shamelessly promote.
In contrast to some of my problems with the ICG report on Iranian influence on Iraq, in which I think the conclusions of the report ignored some of the evidence presented within it (elements of the IRCG are supporting Sadr and Ansar al-Islam, but there’s no proof that Iran is backing the insurgency - huh?), but all in all I think that this one is pretty good. Thankfully, the issue of North African terrorism has yet to be politicized the way that anything to do with Iraq (and to a lesser extent Iran) have been over the last couple years. I’m going through the information rather the recommendations contained in the report since I’m more interested in the information rather than the ICG recommendations, which are fairly easily accessible in summarized form on their website.
With all that in mind, let us begin, shall we?
The UN yesterday gave prosecutors at the international criminal court the evidence it had gathered of the atrocities in Darfur, as a preliminary step to possible war crimes prosecutions.Documents gathered last year by a UN commission were driven overnight from Geneva to the court in The Hague, in the Netherlands.
At UN headquarters in New York yesterday, the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, handed the chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, a sealed envelope holding a list of 51 people the commission recommends should stand trial.
UN officials have said the list includes Sudan government officials, rebels, and Janjaweed militia.
Mr Moreno-Ocampo said that he would analyse the material, assess the alleged crimes and the admissibility of the cases. He urged those with information on Darfur to provide it to his office. “We all have a common task - to protect life, ending the culture of impunity,” he said.