Month: April 2023

A Moroccan doctor and his assistant were arrested Thursday for attempting to perform an abortion on a 15-year-old girl, a practice that is illegal in Morocco, police sources told Africanewsguru.com.

The arrest took place in a private clinic in Meknes (north of the country) by agents of the anti-gang brigade of the local police headquarters, according to the same source.

The doctor and his assistant, aged 71 and 64 respectively, were taken into custody, it said.

The teenager and her mother, as well as a woman of their entourage who accompanied them, were placed at the disposal of the judicial investigation, the police source added, without further details.

“A 15-year-old girl trying to end a pregnancy in decent sanitary conditions When will this charade end?”, the feminist collective “Hors-la-Loi”, which campaigns for the decriminalization of abortion and the protection of individual freedoms in Morocco, protested on Facebook.

“What do they want, that the 15-year-old girl keeps the child? Or that her mother take her to a quack? Or that she ends up committing suicide?” denounced on Twitter Narjis Benazzou, an activist of the collective.

In the kingdom, a woman who has an abortion is punishable by six months to two years in prison, and those who performed the abortion by one to five years in prison.

The only exception is in cases of danger to the mother’s health.

Some 600 to 800 clandestine abortions are said to be performed every day in Morocco, according to associations campaigning for its legalization.

In 2015, the country engaged in a wide-ranging debate on the “urgency” of relaxing its legislation in the face of the scourge of clandestine abortions, which are sometimes performed in disastrous health conditions.

An official commission recommended that abortion be authorized in “certain cases of force majeure”, notably in cases of rape or serious foetal malformations.

But no law has yet been passed to endorse these recommendations, which were strongly supported by women’s rights activists.

11 female opposition lawmakers have been arrested in Uganda during a protest over what they allege is police brutality.

The legislators took to the streets Thursday to voice their dissatisfaction over what they are calling a violation of the rights of women and a threat to their lives, which they say also violates the Constitution.

Scuffles erupted between the women and police as the legislators tried to make their way to the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

“Susan Mugabi was beaten, was tear-gassed,” she said. “There were bullets fired. Her sister was beaten, and fondled by police officers. Almost undressed her. Her mother was also arrested ahead of the celebrations. Her father was locked in the house. So, all these violations.” One of the lawmakers, Joyce Bagala, detailed some of the women’s grievances.

According to local media reports, Police officials were not readily available for comment. They were meeting with the speaker of parliament at the central police station where the legislators were being held.

The female opposition legislators are asking for parliament and the internal affairs ministry to acknowledge that the actions of security officers in blocking Women’s Day celebrations were illegal, irrational, and an affront to the right to associate and assemble.

A Moroccan diplomatic source said Friday that two Moroccan cyclists have been missing for several days on the border between Burkina Faso and Niger.

The two men, Abderrahmane Serhani (65) and Driss Fatihi (37), have not been heard from since they entered Burkina Faso from Côte d’Ivoire and headed across the border to Niger, the source said.

They had left Morocco on January 19. One of them posted a video on his Facebook account on March 29, in which he claimed to be heading to Burkina.

The Moroccan embassy in Burkina is in “close coordination” with the Burkinabe authorities to find the two cyclists, the MAP news agency reported.

The north of Burkina Faso has been plagued since 2015 by a spiral of jihadist violence that has left more than 10,000 people dead — civilians and soldiers — according to NGOs, and some two million displaced.

The regional EACRF force created in 2022 to halt the advance of the armed group M23 in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo has since December recovered some of the rebel strongholds. But on the ground, the rebels are still there.

In November, Kenya, Uganda, Burundi and South Sudan – two countries where the armies are accused of possible war crimes and crimes against humanity – were asked by the Congolese authorities to deploy several thousand men to liberate areas conquered by the M23 over the past year.

According to independent UN experts, Rwanda – which has denied this – has also fought, alone or alongside the M23, the Congolese army and armed groups to control towns and strategic axes.

In Kibumba, Rumangabo and Bunagana (rebel strongholds north of Goma, the capital of North Kivu), EACRF officers were seen smiling at rebel leaders who were supposed to have been dismissed.

“They will kill me”

From April 18 to 21, a press trip involving Africanewsguru.com was organized by the EACRF to so-called “liberated” localities. Despite restrictions, some inhabitants were able to be interviewed.

“If they (the rebels) hear what I have to say, they will kill me,” said a worried shopkeeper in Bunagana, a border post between the DRC and Uganda that was officially recaptured from the M23 on March 31 by the Ugandan army.

“The M23 are still there! The arrival of the EACRF soldiers has not changed anything, I am still paying taxes to the M23,” he complained, saying that on the Congolese side, the border is still held by the rebels.

Pointing to a hilltop, other residents exclaim, “You see there, that’s an M23 position!”

Despite promises from the EACRF, vehicle traffic has still not resumed on the 100-km road to Goma, except for a few trucks and motorcycles.

“The M23s still patrol this road every day,” said a shopkeeper on the side of the Nationale 2, which is supposed to be under the control of Ugandan troops, about 20 km west of Bunagana.

”Truthful discussion”

On April 17, at a press conference in Goma, the EACRF chief of staff, Kenyan General Jeff Nyagah, welcomed the ceasefire, which would have “improved the withdrawal of M23 from the areas it occupied.”

But four days later in Kinshasa, in the Council of Ministers, the new Minister of Defense, Jean-Pierre Bemba contradicted him.

Since mid-April, a “reinforcement of several positions by RDF/M23 terrorists” (Rwandan army/M23) has been noted. The movements spotted “presage attacks” against the Congolese army, he said.

According to Jean-Pierre Bemba, “the rebel M23/RDF attacked a patrol of Burundian elements” of the EACRF on April 15, about 30 kilometers west of Goma.

On April 12, armed men claiming to be “patriot fighters” carried out an attack in the village of Kibumba near Goma, which was immediately denounced by M23 leader Bertrand Bisimwa. On Twitter, he denounced a violation of the cease-fire and an attack by “the coalition of the Kinshasa government” against his troops.

Since late December, however, the regional force has regularly claimed to have replaced the rebels in the area. After the April 12 attack, it claimed to have “successfully repelled” a “local armed group. There was no mention of an M23 presence in Kibumba.

While the rebels and Rwandan army troops seem to have abandoned a few emblematic localities since the beginning of April – such as the village of Kishishe, where the UN accuses them of having massacred at least 171 civilians in November – their territorial hold on the area does not seem to have changed much.

In North Kivu, more than a million people remain displaced after fleeing the M23 and the Rwandan army. And Kinshasa is now calling for a “truthful discussion” to clarify the role of the regional force.

Security operations continued in the French Indian Ocean island of Mayotte on Thursday as part of its ongoing operation to expel illegal migrants, with police clashing with young people overnight.

“We are continuing to secure Mayotte, especially in the neighbourhoods where we have gangs of delinquents,” said Prefect Thierry Suquet said at a press briefing on Thursday morning.

France recently launched “Operation Wuambushu” or “Take Back”, deploying some 1,800 members of the security forces to remove illegal migrants who have settled in slums on the island, most of them from neighbouring Comoros.

The operation is purportedly as part of its fight against delinquency and unsanitary housing. Crime is rampant on the island which is France’s poorest department.

Only half the estimated 350,000 people living on the island are French nationals. Most of the others are illegal migrants from the neighbouring Republic of Comoros, made up of Grande Comore, Mohéli, and Anjouan islands, which chose independence from France in a 1974 referendum.

But one young anonymous migrant says the delinquency is not only about Comorans.

“Of course, it’s young people who were born to families from the Comoros. But by being born in France, they have the nationality, they are French. So it’s a mixture, and to come and accuse the Comoros directly, I don’t agree with that,” he said.

On Tuesday, a French court ruling halted the controversial expulsion of migrants from at least one neighbourhood near the capital at the last minute, saying the action had no legal foundation and threatened public liberties.

While the local administration said it would appeal, people in the area celebrated. Many of the illegal migrants have lived part or, in some cases all of their lives on the French island.

“I am afraid, because being repatriated to the Comoros is something that will really hurt me and I will be disoriented,” said a young migrant.

“I can’t say that I don’t know anyone, because my mother is there, but I don’t know the Comoran culture itself, and I don’t know how people live there, I don’t know how to speak.”

France says it plans to expel the illegal migrants to Anjouan, the closest Comorian island to Mayotte.

But Moroni last week said it would not accept people expelled under the plan that has triggered tensions between the two countries.

The Nigerian government has announced that it will take the first step towards the creation of a new state of the nation’s military in the coming years, according to a new report released by the Nigerian Ministry of Defence on Wednesday.

The military unit was on patrol Monday in the village of Laayi, near the town of Damasak (not far from the border with Niger), when their vehicle exploded on contact with an improvised explosive device, Babakura Kolo, head of one of the local militias working with the government in the fight against jihadist groups, told Africanewsguru.com.

The attack left five people dead, according to Kolo, who presumed it was carried out by the Islamic State in West Africa (Iswap) group.

The previous night, jihadists attacked Laayi, kidnapping four residents including a local chief, and planted the explosive device when they retreated from the area, he said.

Details of the attack and its toll were confirmed by a second militia leader, Ibrahim Liman.

No immediate comment could be obtained from the army.

A jihadist insurgency has been raging for 14 years in northeastern Nigeria, where the Boko Haram and Iswap groups control swathes of the country and are ramping up attacks, a major challenge to newly elected President Bola Tinubu.

Last month, three soldiers were killed in a bomb blast targeting a military truck near the town of Banki, near the border with Cameroon. Four soldiers and seven civilians were also injured.

Fighting between the two rival jihadist factions has increased in recent months as the army has stepped up its offensive against the groups.

Since the start of the Boko Haram rebellion in 2009, the conflict has left more than 40,000 people dead and two million displaced in Nigeria, according to the UN. The violence has since spread to neighboring Niger, Chad, and Cameroon.

Sudanese and foreigners streamed out of the capital of Khartoum and other battle zones, as fighting Tuesday shook a new three-day truce brokered by the United States and Saudi Arabia.

Millions of Sudanese trapped in their homes since violence began April 15, between forces loyal to the country’s top two generals.

Civilian life has come to a standstill as tens of thousands of heavily armed fighters from the military and its rival, the Rapid Support Forces, battle it out in densely populated residential areas.

Footage captured by The Associated Press in Khartoum showed empty streets, and smoke rising on the horizon of the city.

Over 420 people, including at least 273 civilians, have been killed and over 3,700 wounded since the fighting began.

The military has appeared to have the upper hand in fighting in Khartoum but the RSF still controls many districts in the capital and the neighboring city of Omdurman, and has several large strongholds around the country.

A series of short cease-fires the past week have either failed outright or brought only intermittent lulls in the fighting that has raged between forces loyal to the country’s two top generals since April 15.

The lulls have been enough for dramatic evacuations of hundreds of foreigners by air and land, which continued Tuesday.

But they have brought no relief to millions of Sudanese caught in the crossfire, struggling to find food, shelter and medical care as explosions, gunfire and looters wreck their neighbourhoods.

In a country where a third of the population of 46 million already needed humanitarian assistance, multiple aid agencies have had to suspend operations and dozens of hospitals have been forced to shut down.

The U.N. refugee agency said it was gearing up for potentially tens of thousands of people fleeing into neighboring countries.

Calls for negotiations to end the crisis in Africa’s third-largest nation have been ignored.

For many Sudanese, the departure of diplomats, aid workers and other foreigners and the closure of embassies are terrifying signs that international powers expect the mayhem to only worsen.