Destitute and desperate flooding to Chad
5:00AM Saturday February 24, 2007
By Steve Bloomfield
Hundreds of people like this child from the poverty-stricken Central African Republic are flooding into neighbouring Chad each week, ending up in camps for displaced people. Photo / Reuters
CHAD - solitary metal signpost indicates the point where the Central African Republic meets Chad. There is nothing on either side of this endless stretch of dirt highway to indicate any difference between one desperately poor central African state and the other.
But the relief that travellers feel when they pass the Frontiere Tchad sign - sponsored by a local brewery - is palpable.
With the family's entire belongings strapped to the back of three donkeys, Fadimatou Fanta and her four sons skirt around the collapsed bridge and scrabble up the embankment to safety. They have walked for seven days and hundreds like them are arriving in Bekoninga every week.
It is a pattern repeated across the frontier between the Central African Republic (CAR) and Chad.
That so many people are desperate to leave the republic, the sixth poorest country in the world, and go to Chad, the seventh poorest, indicates the level of the crisis engulfing this forgotten corner of the world.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/2/story.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10425486
Former first lady of Rwanda still struggles with French refugee official
5:00AM Saturday February 24, 2007
By Alex Duval Smith
FRANCE - The woman regarded by many as an architect of genocide is on the verge of tears. Agathe Habyarimana has been driven to despair by a prosaic reality of everyday life in France. Stateless, without so much as an ID card to show at the post office, an alleged mastermind of the Rwandan massacres is living an administrative nightmare.
"I am so disappointed. I thought this was the land of asylum and human rights," she said after learning last Thursday that, 13 years after France's military saved her life, its refugee officials have turned her down on appeal.
In a rare interview in her Paris lawyer's office, Habyarimana, 64, flanked by four of her sons, pre-empts questions: "It's all lies. I deny the lot."
Glued to her chair, her hands on her lap, she avoids the word "genocide" to describe the killing of 800,000 Rwandans in 1994, stumbling over her syllables to say a mumbled "jonocide".
Her 21 years as first lady ended on April 6, 1994, when the jet carrying her husband, President Juvenal Habyarimana, was shot down over the capital, Kigali.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/2/story.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10425467
