The military threat from abroad is at last diminishing. Tension with Uganda is subsiding in the wake of the most recent meeting between President Paul Kagame and President...

Peace hopes are rising again after the 19-20 January talks at the Hague between President Domitien Ndayizéyé and Agathon Rwasa, leader of the only militia still fighting, the...

The Bujumbura government and the international donors in the Forum for Burundi may have put the cart before the horse. In Brussels on 13-14 January, they put together...

Belgian-based Groupe George Forrest has energetically rejected reports by a United Nations panel of experts and international human rights groups criticising its mining operations in Congo-Kinshasa as exploitative...

In 1984 BBC journalist Michael Buerk made a powerful television film of Ethiopia's 'biblical famine'. In an anniversary film this month, Buerk concluded things had not improved ­...

Khartoum's surprise announcement of a month's break in the peace talks worries Washington. It had expected a peace deal for President George Bush to celebrate in his State...

On the night of 11 December, while President Mwai Kibaki was preparing to celebrate 40 years of Kenya's Independence, his Minister for Public Works, Raila Amolo Odinga, was...

Coalition ministers have unhindered access to President Mwai Kibaki and latitude to make decisions. Ex-President Daniel arap Moi would sometimes reverse ministerial decisions via national radio and (with...

Armed opposition is on the rise again, as anti-government militias train in Sudan and politicians grow restless in N'djamena. The unrest puts at risk not only the ailing...

Ibn Omer Youssef Idriss, a Sudanese businessman, was shot dead at point blank range outside Chad's Foreign Ministry on 25 September. Six weeks later, on 6 November, four...