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(Reuters) - French forces have freed a Dutch man held hostage in Mali since 2011 by al Qaeda's north African arm, the French defense ministry said.

It said Sjaak Rijke, who was kidnapped in Timbuktu in November 2011, was freed on Monday during a special operation and had been transferred "safe and sound" to a temporary base in Tessalit, north-east Mali.

French forces had also killed two militants and captured two others during fighting that took place during the early morning operation, said Lieutenant Colonel Michel Sabatier, a spokesman for Barkhane, the French counter-insurgency operation in the region.

Dutch Foreign Minister Bert Koenders said Rijke was in good condition considering the circumstances and receiving medical treatment under Dutch supervision.

"The liberation of Mr Rijke underscores France's staunch determination to fight armed terrorist groups in the Sahel region as part of the Barkhane operation," the French ministry said in a statement.

In November Rijke's captors, the al Qaeda-affiliated AQIM group, issued a video of him along with French national Serge Lazarevic.

Lazarevic, held captive in the Sahara for three years, was released the following month in exchange for four Islamist militants with ties to al Qaeda in north Africa.

France launched an intervention against al Qaeda-linked militants in its former colony Mali in January 2013.

It has since created Barkhane, a 3,000-strong counter-insurgency force to track down Islamist militants, including AQIM, across a band of the Sahara desert stretching across five countries from Chad in the east to Mauritania in the west.

Dutch troops have been deployed in Mali as part of security and peacekeeping missions under the aegis of the United Nations.

 

 

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06.Apr.2015

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The Kenyan air force has launched air strikes on two camps operated by the Islamist group al Shabaab in Somalia, the army said Monday, in the first major military response to last week’s massacre at a Kenyan university.

Warplanes attacked the two al Shabaab positions, in the Gedo region of Somalia close to the Kenyan border, on Sunday afternoon and early Monday morning, said Col. David Obonyo of the Kenyan military,

"The two targets were hit and taken out, the two camps are destroyed,” he said.

Gunmen from the al Qaeda-aligned al Shabaab killed 148 people on Thursday when they stormed the Garissa University College campus, some 200 km (120 miles) from the Somali border.

Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta had vowed harsh measures against the militants in response.

However, the air strikes were “part of continuing operations, not just in response to Garissa”, said Obonyo.

Kenya has struggled to stop the flow of al Shabaab militants and weapons across its porous 700 km border with Somalia.

The country has troops in Somalia as part of an African Union force to attack al Shabaab and shore up the beleaguered Somali government.

African Union troops, including those from Kenya, carried out arrests and seized ammunitions in a militant camp in Gondodowe last August.

Al Shabaab, which has killed more than 400 people in Kenya since April 2013, has said Thursday’s attack on Garissa University College was a reprisal for Kenya sending troops into Somalia.

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(Reuters) - Surveying the charred ruins of the northern Nigerian town of Malam Fatori, which Chadian troops and his own soldiers from Niger liberated from Boko Haram last week, Colonel Toumba Mohamed paused to reflect on Nigeria's landmark election.

As the two nations' forces poured into the border town on Tuesday, driving out the Islamist fighters, Nigeria's election commission was announcing the victory of opposition candidate Muhammadu Buhari.

"We hope that finally the armies of Chad and Niger will be able to fight Boko Haram side by side with the Nigerian army," said Toumba, who expects to see changes when Buhari, a former general and Muslim from the north, is sworn in.

Boko Haram's six-year insurgency in northern Nigeria, and incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan's failure to decisively counter the threat, were a key issue in the Nigerian election.

Gains by the Islamist movement, which is seeking to carve a caliphate out of Nigeria's northeast, even forced a poll delay as a regional force launched an offensive to drive them back.

But it has been Chad's battle-hardened troops, and not Nigeria's, that have led in the offensive, expelling Boko Haram from the major towns in the north in just a matter of weeks.

Malam Fatori - seized by Boko Haram in November in fighting that sent hundreds of Nigerian troops stationed there fleeing into Niger - was one of the group's last border footholds.

The fall of the town marked the end of the first phase of regional action, General Seyni Garba, Niger's army chief of staff, told private Niger television station Ténéré.

"The second phase is to secure the whole of the conquered territory with mopping up operations everywhere that Boko Haram can be found. We need to be able to secure the whole of the Lake Chad basin," he said on Sunday.

Buhari has called Nigeria's reliance on neighboring armies a disgrace and has vowed to restore the territorial integrity of Africa's most populous nation. There is still work to be done.

 

Boko Haram set Malam Fatori on fire before withdrawing to the former Nigerian army camp outside of town to dig in and fight. In clashes on Wednesday, 170 militants were killed, while nine Chadian soldiers died and another 16 were wounded.

"Boko Haram no longer has a stronghold. But they are still a threat that must be cleaned up," General Seyni Garba, the head of Niger's army, said during a visit to Malam Fatori on Friday.

To date, problems of communication and coordination have stymied military cooperation between Nigeria and its neighbors.

But it has also struggled to overcome distrust between armies that have not always fought on the same side. Chad occupied parts of Nigeria's north in the 1980s. Chad army chief General Brahim Seid Mahamat said on Friday times have changed.

"We came here to help our brother country. When they come to take control of the towns we've liberated, we'll leave."

 

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FED up with immovable African presidents and political dynasties, campaigners across the continent are joining forces to “turn the page” on leaders who see power as an end in itself.

As Nigeria marked its first ever democratic change of power following national elections, a report published this week by the Tournons La Page (Turn the Page) campaign group highlighted just how unusual incumbent Goodluck Jonathan’s decision to concede defeat was.

According to the report, 88% of Togolese and 87% of people in Gabon have only known one ruling family.

Incumbents have been defeated in Africa before, much the same way Muhammadu Buhari routed Jonathan, but over the last 50 years it has happened just 18 times on mainland Africa, and seven times in the small island nations who generally tend to be outliers in most of their politics.

N’dour and Mbembe sign

Burkina Faso dictator Blaise Compaore was driven out by his people last October after 27 years of rule while President Paul Biya of Cameroon and his Congolese counterpart Denis Sassou Nguesso have each accumulated more than thirty years in power.

Elsewhere on the continent,  Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe has been president for 38 years; Angola’s José Eduardo dos Santos for 36; Equatorial Guinea’s Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo for 33; and Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni for 29.

Cameroon’s democracy hunters may well be casting envious glances over the border to Nigeria where Muhammadu Buhari scored a narrow electoral victory over Jonathan in the country’s March 28 poll.

With a raft of upcoming elections in mind, the regional appeal to turn the page was launched late last year by NGOs in 30 African and European countries and signed by prominent African figures including Senegalese singer Youssou N’dour and Cameroonian historian Achille Mbembe.

The call for change harks back to the multi-party politics which began to emerge in the 1990s.

Twenty years on the campaigners are seeking to energise ordinary people and make a round of elections throughout Africa over the next couple of years result in an end to the dynasties.

“We realised that Congolese civil society was becoming more amorphous… and was not playing its role,” said Jean-Chrysostome Kijana, head of the New Dynamic of Civil Society group founded in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2013.

The ‘dictators union’ 

He was in Paris for a conference organised by “Turn the Page”, at which he spoke alongside campaigners from Cameroon, Congo Gabon and Togo.

New movements are springing up and inspiring each other; “Enough is Enough” in Senegal and the “Citizens’ Broom” in Burkina Faso were trailblazers, recently joined by similar groups in Chad and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

The fall of Compaore in Burkina Faso and the proposal by Senegal’s President Macky Sall to reduce his own mandate by two years have fuelled hopes that public mobilisation elsewhere can bring about change.

“We have to understand, in Africa too, that we are able to offer an example, and that power is not an end in itself,” Sall said last month as he made his announcement.

His move followed a plea by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to African leaders gathered for an annual summit in January not to cling to power and to respect the wishes of their people.

“We are in communication with Citizen’s Broom in Burkina. We share our experiences,” said Kijana.

“I think we can make many links between African civil groups and that will send a message to the ‘dictators’ union’,” said Brigitte Ameganvi of the Synergie Togo group.

 Social networks 

“Each country has its own people and each organises in its own way,” said Marc Ona, a Gabonese participant at the Paris event.

“We’ve got the smartphones, the social networks, it’s impossible to block the flow of information today.”

But despite the exchange of ideas and experiences by linked-up civil groups across the continent, they are not yet in a position to take concrete action.

In the central African nation of Burundi, ahead of elections in May and June, civil groups and local media say they are paying the price for campaigning against President Pierre Nkurunziza’s bid to defy a two-term limit and stay in power for another five years.

There are allegations of widespread harassment and threats of violence, and even talk of a hit-list containing the names of opposition figures, civil society activists and journalists ahead of parliamentary polls in May and the presidential election in June.

Bob Rugurika, director of the popular independent African Public Radio (RPA), is among those who have been arrested, picked up in January after implicating intelligence officials in the recent murders of Italian nuns.

In the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo President Joseph Kabila is suspected by the opposition of seeking to hang on to power at the end of his second term in late 2016.

US President Barack Obama this week urged him to respect his country’s constitution.

Protests against a draft revision of the electoral law were bloodily repressed in January. This was followed by an Internet shutdown and the blocking of social network sites.

In mid-March, 30 Congolese activists, along with others from Senegal and Burkina Faso, were arrested for taking part in a meeting in Kinshasa on democracy and good governance.

 ‘Dinosaurs’ 

“This is the behaviour of dictators and thugs”, said rapper Serge Bambara, known as Smockey, a founding figure of the Citizens’ Broom movement.

“We talk about the Arab Spring. Now we must speak of the African Harmattan (a hot dry wind from west Africa) because it’s time for the prevailing wind to move the people,” he added.

In his sights is President Kabila, but also Chad’s Idriss Deby who came to power by force in 1990 and Cameroon’s Paul Biya, all of whom he described as “dinosaurs.”

The African activists’ conference in Paris is also intended to nudge the international community, which he sees as often too complacent against African potentates.

“As African citizens, we want to see pressure and even sanctions” from the international community, “because things have to change,” said Kijana.

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06.Apr.2015

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