Sierra Leone cancels Christmas ‘to reflect on Ebola’

Sierra Leone said Friday it was banning any public Christmas celebrations as the spiralling caseload of Ebola infections continues to spread alarm.

Soldiers are to be deployed throughout the festive period to force people venturing onto the streets back indoors, the government's Ebola response unit said.

Palo Conteh, head of the department, told reporters in the capital Freetown there would be "no Christmas and New Year celebrations this year".

"We will ensure that everybody remains at home to reflect on Ebola," he said.

"Military personnel will be on the streets at Christmas and the New Year to stop any street celebrations," he said, without saying which areas would be targeted.

While Islam is the dominant religion in Sierra Leone, more than a quarter of the population is Christian and public gatherings and entertainment are common during the holiday period.

Conteh did not give the exact dates of the crackdown or list any exceptions. During previous local and nationwide anti-Ebola curfews, people were allowed out to worship and for "essential business".

Under current emergency regulations, bars and nightspots have already been shut down and public gatherings outlawed but there is no general ban on going outdoors or working.

Sierra Leone, which has overtaken Liberia to become the country worst affected by Ebola, has recorded 1,319 new infections in the last three weeks.

The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Wednesday there were 17,942 cases of the tropical fever across eight countries as of December 7, resulting in 6,388 deaths -- almost all in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Sierra Leone reported 397 new cases during the week ending December 7 -- three times as many as Liberia and Guinea combined, WHO said.

'At their wits' end'

Sources with knowledge of government policy told AFP detailed instructions on the workings of the Christmas curfew would be announced shortly.

The country now counts a total of 7,897 Ebola cases, including 1,768 deaths, according to Wednesday's tally.

A full third of the new cases, or 133 of them, were reported in Freetown, at the heart of the ongoing surge in cases seen in the west of the country.

Sierra Leone has already quarantined around half its population of six million, sealing off districts across the country in a bid to combat the Ebola outbreak.

The government imposed a two-week lockdown on the eastern diamond mining district of Kono on Wednesday after eight cases of Ebola were confirmed in one day.

The WHO's national Ebola coordinator Olu Olushayo said doctors and nurses were "at their wits' end."

In the space of 11 days, two WHO teams buried 87 victims, including a nurse and an ambulance driver enlisted to help dispose of corpses piling up in the local hospital, the agency said.

The government reacted with surprise to the WHO's claims, however, saying Friday they did not tally with reports from the ground and announcing that investigators had been sent to assess the situation in Kono.

Local media said officials at the district's main public hospital in Koidu had also been taken aback by the reports.

Aiah Beyonquee, the leader of the local burial team, told the state-run Sierra Leone Broadcasting Corporation no bodies had been stacked at the hospital.

"On Wednesday we had about 10 alert calls for death cases in the community which we reacted to," he told the broadcaster.

"There were also five deaths in the hospital and all these were buried the same day."

(AFP)

France urges closer African ties to tackle jihadists

French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian has urged African nations to coordinate attempts to tackle the jihadist threat, from southern Libya to Nigeria, warning that mutual distrust is hampering efforts.

"Cooperation must become the rule and no longer the exception," Le Drian said at the two-day International Forum on Peace and Security in Africa, in Senegal's capital Dakar.

"The threat feeds off the absence of borders and their porous nature. Southern Libya is today the most dramatic example," he said, pointing to the presence of Islamic extremist movements driven out of northern Mali by a French military intervention in 2013.

France’s defence minister said the situation in southern Libya was “a source of destabilisation for the whole of the Sahel", referring to the belt of nations on the southern edges of the Sahara.

He said Nigeria’s Boko Haram insurgency, which is spilling into neighbouring countries, was further proof of the need for a regional response to the continent’s crises.

“African troops now make up the majority of peacekeeping forces on the continent,” Le Drian noted, though adding that more coordination was required by countries. “African states have to realise that guaranteeing their own security requires cooperation. Nothing can be done without cooperation,” he told FRANCE 24 at the summit.

Boko Haram ‘a regional problem’

France has made no secret of its frustration at the slow pace of cooperation between African states, whether in tackling jihadist militia in southern Libya or Nigeria’s Boko Haram insurgency.

"We're at a forum in Dakar talking about the need for Africans to collectively take charge of their security and yet it's not happening where there is urgency," Le Drian told reporters.

Five years after the start of its insurgency, Nigeria’s Boko Haram has stepped up attacks across much of the country's north, spilling over its borders into neighbouring Niger and Cameroon.

“The Boko Haram problem is no longer limited to Nigeria,” the United Nations special envoy to the Sahel Region, Hiroute Gebre Selassie, told FRANCE 24. “It is having an impact across the region.”

The leaders of Nigeria, Cameroon, Niger and Chad agreed in Paris in May to flesh out a plan to share intelligence, coordinate action and monitor borders, but there has been little progress since.

French mediation

Regional analysts say Nigeria's neighbours suspect its army is infiltrated by the jihadist movement and cannot be trusted if it crosses borders in hot pursuit of militants, which Abuja wants to do. For its part, Nigeria has accused Chad and Cameroon of not doing enough to stop the rebels.

Le Drian said France would step in to help coordinate a regional taskforce against the Islamist group. While ruling out direct military intervention in Nigeria, France has said it can play a role in easing tensions between its three former colonies and English-speaking Nigeria.

Paris fears Boko Haram could spread northward into the Sahel and beyond Cameroon into the Central African Republic, areas where more than 5,000 French troops are deployed in peacekeeping and counter-terrorism missions.

Le Drian said Paris would provide about a dozen military advisers to join regional counterparts at a command centre in the Chadian capital N'Djamena, 60 km from the Nigerian border.

The defence minister offered French help in launching a regional force of 2,800 soldiers to tackle Boko Haram that was pledged in July but has yet to see the light of day. "They need organisational, structural, command and inter-operational help,” he said. “France is offering to do that.”

(FRANCE 24 with Reuters)

Suicide Bombing Thwarted in Nigeria

Members of a local militia in Nigeria say they disarmed a would-be suicide bomber on her way to the marketplace in the city of Maiduguri in Borno state. The action earlier this week thwarted a second attack in two days on the site.

Members of the Nigeria Vigilante Group told reporters they stopped a young woman at a roadblock who was hiding explosives beneath her veil.

The militant group Boko Haram has been using young women more and more as suicide bombers.

On Monday, witnesses in Maiduguri said two explosions ripped through the crowded market where two female suicide bombers had killed dozens a week ago. Witnesses say at least five people were killed in the Monday attack.

Also Monday, residents of Damaturu, the capital of Yobe state, said suspected Boko Haram militants attacked a police facility in the city.

The French news agency reports more than 150 people were killed in Monday's fighting in Damaturu. A senior rescue official said at least 115 bodies were brought to the local morgue after the attack. Six soldiers were reported among the dead. A spokesman for Nigeria's federal police said 38 police officers were killed in the attack.

Yobe state is the site of some of the most brutal Boko Haram attacks, including the slaughter of college and high school students, as well as the recent bombing of the government secondary school in Potiskum.

Boko Haram has been blamed for thousands of deaths during its five-year insurgency in Nigeria. It has seized towns in Borno and Adamawa states for what it calls a caliphate to be ruled under strict Islamic law.

Somalia's troubles come south

IN the small hours of December 2nd gunmen snuck up on a group of sleeping quarry workers in Mandera country, close to Kenya’s border with Somalia. They were rounded up and made to lie face-down on the ground. Thirty-four of the men, who make a pitiful living mining and breaking stones, were executed with a bullet to the head; two were beheaded; all were non-Muslims.

Ten days earlier in the same remote part of Kenya gunmen flagged down an early-morning bus. Each passenger was asked to recite a verse from the Koran and to respond to a Muslim greeting. Those who failed were shot in the head. Twenty-eight people, many of them teachers going home for the Christmas holidays, were killed. The Shabab, a militant Somali group affiliated with al-Qaeda which is strengthening its foothold in Kenya, said it carried out both massacres.

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The attacks underscore Kenya’s state of dire insecurity and its inability to come to grips with the Shabab, either in the countryside or in key cities. The militant group had already struck the capital in an assault on the Westgate Mall in which at least 67 people were killed in September 2013. But this was merely the most prominent of at least 136 terror attacks that have taken place since 2011, when Kenyan soldiers were sent into Somalia to help push back the Shabab. Most have been small-scale—a grenade tossed at a bus stop or a volley of bullets fired into a church—but the group’s ability to mount more complex attacks seems to be improving.

The Shabab’s focus has shifted somewhat from Somalia, where it has lost control of towns to Kenyan and other forces operating under an African Union banner and where some of its leaders have been killed in American air or drone strikes. In Kenya it is seeking to drive a wedge between already divided Christian and Muslim communities. At Westgate the four gunmen made patchy efforts to separate Muslims and non-Muslims, and in the end killed many of both.

Ebola brings Guinea, Sierra Leone to brink of recession

Latest update : 2014-12-02

The World Bank said Tuesday that the fallout from the deadly Ebola pandemic will push Guinea and Sierra Leone into recession next year.

With the disease still not under control in West Africa, the cost to the two countries plus less-impacted Liberia of shuttered businesses and curtailed investment will run "well over" $2 billion in 2014-2015, the Bank said in a new report.

Governments in the three countries, where most of the nearly 6,000 deaths from the Ebola outbreak have occurred, have already seen their finances hit to the tune of around $500 million this year.

That has forced cutbacks to official spending for investment and services, on top of pullbacks by foreign investors and visitors frightened by the spread of the virus.

"The epidemic is not yet under control. Containment, combined with a full-fledged financial recovery effort to restart business activity and bring back investors, are now both therefore urgently needed for the region to improve on the downbeat forecasts," the Bank said.

Explosion strikes near airport in Somali capital

At least three people were killed on Wednesday after a car bomb targeting a United Nations convoy exploded near the airport in Somalia’s capital Mogadishu.

“The car bomb hit near the front gate of the Mogadishu airport. Several people, including an army officer, (were) killed after he tried to stop the vehicle,” said Kasim Ahmed Roble, a police spokesman.

None of the victims were UN staff members, but the attack damaged two vehicles in the convoy, according to UN spokesman Aleem Siddique.

Shortly after the explosion, the Somali Islamist militant group al Shabaab claimed responsibility for the attack. 

Militants kill 36 non-Muslims in northern Kenya

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Soldiers of Kenyan Defence Forces look over the bodies of some 36 Kenyans as they lie at a... Read more

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — The heavily armed Somali men roused the sleeping quarry workers in the dead of night.

As in previous such attacks, the gunmen singled out the non-Muslims by asking them to recite the Islamic creed. Then they killed 36 of them — most with a gunshot to the back of the head, according to a survivor who hid nearby during the slaughter.

The Islamic militant group al-Shabab claimed responsibility for the methodical massacre in northern Kenya early Tuesday — 10 days after a similar attack on a bus that killed 28 — and it prompted President Uhuru Kenyatta to shake up his national security team amid public outrage over the continuing violence.

"I know we are all under a lot of pressure, but I appeal to each one of us: This is not a time to be cowed by the enemy," Kenyatta said in a nationally televised address.

"This is a war we must win," he said. "We will not flinch or relent in the war against terrorism in our country and our region."