President Barack Obama says 50 U.S. troops have deployed to the African country of Chad to help evacuate U.S. citizens and embassy personnel from the neighboring Central African Republic‘s capital of Bangui in the face of rebel advances toward the city.
Source: Fox News – Politics
Security concerns deepened in the capital of Central African Republic on Friday after the U.S. ambassador and his diplomatic team were evacuated out of the country by plane overnight amid fears rebels could try to take the capital.
U.S. officials said about 40 people were evacuated on an U.S. Air Force plane bound for Kenya. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the details of the operation.
The evacuation came after President Francois Bozize on Thursday urgently called on former colonial ruler France and other foreign powers to help his government fend off rebels who are quickly seizing territory and approaching the capital.
The U.N.’s most powerful body condemned the recent violence and expressed concern about the developments.
“The members of the Security Council reiterate their demand that the armed groups immediately cease hostilities, withdraw from captured cities and cease any further advance towards the city of Bangui,” the statement said.
Central African Republic has a history of violent change in government. The current president himself came to power nearly a decade ago in the wake of a rebellion in this resource-rich yet deeply poor country.
Speaking to crowds in Bangui, a city of some 600,000, Bozize pleaded with foreign powers to do what they could. He pointed in particular to France, Central African Republic‘s former colonial ruler. About 200 French soldiers are already in the country, providing technical support and helping to train the local army, according to the French defense ministry.
“France has the means to stop (the rebels) but unfortunately they have done nothing for us until now,” Bozize said.
French President Francois Hollande said Thursday that France wants to protect its interests in Central African Republic and not Bozize’s government. The comments came a day after dozens of protesters, angry about a lack of help against rebel forces, threw rocks at the French Embassy in Bangui and stole a French flag.
Paris is encouraging peace talks between the government and the rebels, with the French Foreign Ministry noting in a statement that negotiations are due to “begin shortly in Libreville (Gabon).” But it was not immediately clear if any dates have been set for those talks.
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius spoke via phone with Bozize, asking the president to take responsibility for the safety of French nationals and diplomatic missions in Central African Republic.
Bozize’s government earlier reached out to longtime ally Chad, which pledged to send 2,000 troops to bolster Central African Republic‘s own forces.
This landlocked nation of some 4.4 million people has suffered decades of army revolts, coups and rebellions since gaining independence in 1960 and remains one of the poorest countries in the world.
The rebels behind the most recent instability signed a 2007 peace accord allowing them to join the regular army, but insurgent leaders say the deal wasn’t fully implemented. The rebel forces have seized at least 10 towns across the sparsely populated north of the country, and residents in the capital now fear the insurgents could attack at any time, despite assurances by rebel leaders that they are willing to engage in dialogue instead of attacking Bangui.
The rebels have claimed that their actions are justified in light of the “thirst for justice, for peace, for security and for economic development of the people of Central African Republic.”
Despite Central African Republic‘s wealth of gold, diamonds, timber and uranium, the government remains perpetually cash-strapped. Filip Hilgert, a researcher with Belgium-based International Peace Information Service, said rebel groups are unhappy because they feel the government doesn’t invest in their areas.
“The main thing they say is that the north of the country, and especially in their case the northeast, has always been neglected by the central government in all ways,” he said.
The rebels also are demanding that the government make payments to ex-combatants, suggesting that their motives may also be for personal financial gain.
Source: Fox World News
Rebels in Central African Republic have taken another town despite pressure to halt their advance.
The rebel coalition on Tuesday seized the town of Kaga-Bandoro, located about 385 kilometers (240 miles) from the capital, Bangui. The move comes just days after they gained control of the key town of Bambari.
Telephone lines were cut in Kaga-Bandoro, but a resident of a nearby community reported seeing the rebels’ vehicles crossing the town on Tuesday.
The rebels have now gained control of about 10 towns. They say they want to renegotiate past peace deals with the government of this desperately poor African nation.
President Francois Bozize‘s government has sought military help from neighboring Chad.
Source: Fox World News
On the day of their son’s surgery, the family woke before dawn. They saddled their horses and set out across the 12-mile-long carpet of sand to the nearest town, where they hoped the reputed doctor would cure their frail, feverish baby.
The neighboring town, almost as poor and isolated as their own, hosts a foreign-run emergency clinic for malnourished children. But that’s not where the family headed.
The doctor they chose treats patients behind a mud wall. His operating room is the sand lot that serves as his front yard. His operating table is a plastic mat lying on the dirt. His surgical tools include a screwdriver. And his remedy for malnourished children is the removal, without antiseptic or anesthesia, of their teeth and epiglottis.
That day, three other children were brought to the same traditional doctor, their parents paying up to $6 for a visit, or more than a week’s earnings. Not even a mile away, the UNICEF-funded clinic by contrast admitted just one child for its free service, delivered by trained medical professionals.
The 4:1 ratio that you see in this sandy courtyard on just one day in just one town is a microcosm of what is happening all over Chad, and it helps to explain why, despite an enormous, international intervention, malnutrition continues to soar to scandalous levels throughout the Sahel.
The world poured more than $1 billion into the band of countries just south of Africa‘s vast Sahara Desert to address hunger this year alone, according to a United Nations database. A third of that money went to Chad, where 15 percent of children are acutely malnourished, says a report by aid group Save the Children. That’s among the highest rates in Africa.
There are now 32 clinics equipped with the latest technology to halt starvation, most within a few hours’ walk of affected families. If a child makes it to one of these centers in time, the chance of survival is remarkably high.
Yet acute malnutrition is only getting worse in the Sahel, where every year, cemeteries fill up with the bodies of children who wasted away within walking distance of help.
In 2010, 55,000 children were treated for the most acute form of malnutrition in Chad. In 2011, it was 65,000. The expected caseload for 2012 is 127,300, according to the report published in June. Overall, in the eight countries in the Sahel, the number of admissions has doubled in just three years.
One reason is that families simply do not take advantage of the safety net created for them, and cling instead to traditions that can end up killing rather than healing their children.
“We try to tell them the consequences. That these are not good treatments. That if the child has diarrhea, he should go to the hospital,” says Laurent Blague, director of child protection at Chad‘s Ministry of Social Welfare. “Unfortunately, this is tradition.”
______
Eight-month-old Abdallah Lamine had been sick for a month, but it wasn’t until he started vomiting that his parents made the trip to the medicine man, Haki Hassane.
The mother rode a red horse, carrying her baby’s hot body in her lap. She could feel the fever consuming him even through her clothes.
The remedy the healer prescribes for malnourished children is the removal of the epiglottis, the tiny ball of flesh that hangs from the back of the throat, which he says “gets in the way of the food.” For fever, he prescribes the removal of the child’s teeth.
In baby Abdallah’s case he prescribed both. He grabbed the baby by one arm, placed him on the mat and pinned him down. As the child began to shriek, he dug the unwashed screwdriver into the baby’s pink gums, until four tiny teeth popped out.
The healer wiped down the holes in the child’s mouth with a corner of a ratty blanket, stained with the blood of the other children he’d treated that day. Then he handed the petrified, whimpering toddler to his stone-faced mother.
Tooth extraction and the removal of the epiglottis is common in this part of Chad. Elsewhere, the treatment for diarrhea is burning the child’s anus with a rod heated over a fire. Other treatments include draining the “bad blood,” a procedure recommended when children’s bodies swell, a sign of severe malnutrition.
Similar practices prevailed in Europe and America as late as the 18th century. The advances in world medicine since have made their way to Chad in the form of internationally-run clinics, but they continue to be seen as foreign. More than half of Chad‘s people still use traditional healers, according to a survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life in 2010, whose remedies can be effective for some ailments.
Malnutrition is not one of them. Already malnourished children who have their epiglottis cut can’t eat for at least a week, says health official Blague. When the child does eat, the open wound often gets infected. This worsens the malnutrition.
Because the infection can last several weeks, families believe their baby has simply contracted a different ailment. Chad‘s government has never addressed these harmful practices. The issue remains extremely sensitive, in part because the healers claim their gift came from Allah and in part because many local officials were submitted to such practices themselves when they were children, aid workers say.
Hassane says in 30 years of practice, he’s never fielded any complaints from parents whose children became sicker.
“If a child has fever or diarrhea, once he opens his mouth, I can instantly tell. If I put my finger on his gum and feel it, I can tell if it’s due to his bad teeth. Once we take out this bad tooth, the diarrhea stops,” Hassane says. “And if the child gets sick again, it’s because he had some other illnesses in his system.”
Moussa Mahamat Ali, the chief of the healers in the town of Mao, the regional capital, claims that all the children who have come to him have been cured of malnutrition.
“If the child is sick … he has yellow hair, he doesn’t eat, he’s skinny, it’s because of the bad teeth,” says the 75-year-old Ali. “This is a treatment for malnutrition. No one has ever told me that this is bad.”
______
By the time children do turn up at the United Nations-funded centers, they have already been through hell. Nearly every week, health workers here admit dangerously emaciated children with a foamy substance coming out of their mouths.
Malnutrition is the underlying cause for the deaths of 2.6 million children every year, according to a study published in the scientific journal, The Lancet. That’s a third of the global total for children’s deaths.
At the feeding center in the town of Mao, run by the French aid group Action Against Hunger, a mother has come in carrying a bundle in her arms. When she pulls back the sheet, the health workers gasp. It looks like she has brought in a skeleton.
The best predictor for the severity of malnutrition is the circumference of a child’s upper arm, the World Health Organization has found over years of responding to famines in Africa. Less than 115 millimeters indicates the child is at risk of imminent death.
This child’s arms measure just 80 millimeters around. She weighs 5.2 kilograms (11.4 pounds), slightly more than a healthy newborn. She is 3 years old.
It takes a moment for the health workers to realize that the little girl, Fatime, has been admitted before.
Fatime’s short history is a litany of the well-meant customs that get in the way of a child’s health, and possibly even her life.
She was born underweight. Women in Chad, including her mother, are discouraged from eating during pregnancy, in the hope that a small child will be easier to deliver.
Fatime’s mother stopped breastfeeding her when she became pregnant with her youngest child. She was told that pregnancy tainted her milk and could poison the child still nursing.
Zara Seid, the mother, collected the bitter chaff left over when women pound millet into flour, mixed it with water and painted it on her breasts. The bitter taste repelled the toddler, and she was weaned overnight.
Yet in a place where food is hard to come by, it meant that Fatime began her precipitous fall into undernourishment.
Malnutrition and disease work in a deadly cycle, and soon Fatime got sick with diarrhea and a fever. The lack of a proper diet weakens the immune system and makes childhood diseases more severe. The sick child then loses more weight, making recovery more difficult.
More than a year ago, Fatime’s mother brought her into the clinic.
Like many African women, though, her mother needed permission from her husband to leave her family and stay away. And she knew he was starting to get impatient.
Over the pleas of the health workers, she left the clinic only a week after she got there. And upon the advice of villagers, she went to the traditional healer, a one-day visit instead of a three-week hospital stay.
The medicine man diagnosed the child’s illness as the result of her baby teeth. He heated a blade in the fire and pulled them out.
“I thought this would bring back my daughter’s health, so I took heart from that, even if it was hard to see her in pain,” says Seid. “After we took out the bad teeth, it seemed like she was getting better. … Then she got seriously worse.”
It took the death of Fatime’s baby cousin from malnutrition for her father to finally give her mother the permission to make a second, 1.5-hour journey to the clinic.
By the time Fatime made it to the clinic the second time, she didn’t look much bigger than a fetus. Zara Seid kept her daughter wrapped in a cloth, as if embarrassed to show her body, the frightening sight of a child on the knife’s edge of starvation.
Her head is bald except for a few tufts of hair. Her mouth is infected with lesions, and stained purple with the antifungal wash the nurses use daily. When she tries to drink formula, she coughs until her tiny, doll-like chest heaves.
Her legs are insect-like, unable to hold her up. They dangle, lifeless. Her arms are no bigger than a shower rod.
Flies are attracted to her, as if she is already dead. They land on her face and crawl in and out of the corners of her eyes.
_________
These mistakes lead here, to a set of humps in the sand. There’s a burial ground in every village in this part of Chad, including in Djiguere, where Fatime’s cousin lies under the newest hump of sand.
The big mounds are where the adults are buried. But the majority of the piles in the cemetery are small. Some are no larger than a loaf of bread.
Fatime may or may not make it. In the week since she arrived at the feeding center, she’s gained 200 grams (7 ounces).
At home in the village, her father, Mahamat Ibrahim, says he has no regrets about having had his daughter’s teeth extracted. Bad teeth are to blame for a child not growing, he says.
“This is something that everyone here knows,” he says. “It’s only the doctors at these foreign hospitals that don’t know this. And that’s why we avoid taking our children there.”
His youngest child is five months old. In a few weeks, her baby teeth will start coming in.
If she falls sick, he plans to take her to the healer to yank them out.
Source: Fox World News
The al-Qaida-linked group that controls much of northern Mali and other rebels agreed Friday to cease hostilities in the areas they control, a day after the United Nations backed a regional plan to oust the Islamists from power in a military intervention next year.
Ansar Dine, which controls the northern cities of Timbuktu and Kidal, and a secular rebel group known as the NMLA made the concessions following talks in neighboring Algeria.
The two groups vowed “to refrain from all actions that would cause confrontation and hostilities in the areas that they control.”
They also vowed to work to free hostages in northern Mali, where al-Qaida’s North Africa branch has made millions of dollars through ransoms and is currently holding seven French nationals captive.
The U.N.’s most powerful body on Thursday authorized an African-led force, but made no mention of size and set no timeline for military action.
U.N. peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous said recently he does not expect a military operation to begin until September or October of next year.
Ansar Dine had previously met with government representatives in talks that were facilitated by the government of Burkina Faso. As a result, other militants in the north have sought to join Ansar Dine recently including members of the secular NMLA group.
Malians living under the grip of al-Qaida-linked militants expressed dismay Friday that it could be nearly a year before a regional military intervention to oust the Islamists from power.
“We want rapid military action to liberate our cities,” said Alphadi Cisse, who lives in Timbuktu. “There is no school, there is no work and no money. We are fed up with this situation.”
The mayor of Timbuktu, which is controlled by the Islamist group Ansar Dine, has described conditions there as “a living hell.” The al-Qaida-linked militants have imposed their version of strict Islamic law known as Shariah.
They have stoned to death a couple accused of adultery, hacked off the hands of thieves and have recruited children as young as 12 into their ranks. Heavily armed men also have attacked bars that sell alcohol, and banned men and women from socializing in the streets.
The turmoil has decimated the economy of Timbuktu, once a thriving tourist town.
Thursday’s resolution adopted unanimously by the U.N. Security Council welcomes troop contributions pledged by the West African regional bloc ECOWAS and calls on member states, including from the neighboring Sahel region, to contribute troops to the mission.
Council diplomats say the best-trained African troops in desert warfare are from Chad, Mauritania and Niger.
The resolution stressed that there must be a two-track plan — political and military — to reunify the country, which has been in turmoil since a coup in March. Islamist groups were able to take hold of northern Mali, an area the size of Texas, after the March coup created a power vacuum.
Coup members created new political turmoil earlier this month when they arrested the country’s prime minister and forced him to resign — a move that raised new concerns about the ability of the Malian military help regain control of the north.
The U.N. resolution also emphasizes that further military planning is needed before a force could be sent and it asks Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to “confirm in advance the council’s satisfaction with the planned military offensive operation.”
France’s U.N. Ambassador Gerard Araud told reporters Thursday that it’s premature to say when the military operation will take place because African and Malian troops must be trained and much depends on the political process and the country’s extreme weather.
Northerners in Mali say the longer the world waits, the more entrenched the militants are becoming.
Hamadada Toure, a teacher from the city of Gao, urged the international community to follow through swiftly on its pledges to help free the north.
“If the resolution is not acted upon to chase the Islamists out of towns, all the comings and goings of diplomats and the mobilization of the international community are a bluff,” he said from southern Mali where he sought refuge earlier this year.
___
Associated Press writers Aomar Ouali in Algiers, Algeria and Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report.
Source: Fox World News
Soldiers from neighboring Chad are now helping the government of Central African Republic fight a rapidly advancing rebel movement.
Thierry Zamby, a spokesman for the defense minister said Wednesday that the Chadian troops will help to retake the towns that have fallen to the rebels in recent days.
Some 2,000 Chadian soldiers arrived Tuesday in the Central African Republic after a trio of rebel groups pushed ahead and took the central mining town of Bria, the fifth town to fall into rebel hands in their two-week-old offensive.
The rebels are demanding that the government re-negotiate the terms of past peace accords, in what is being described as one of the biggest threats to the government of President Francois Bozize.
This troubled nation of 4.5 million has weathered numerous coups, as well as repeated rebellions.
Source: Fox World News