Day: September 27, 2021

PARIS— France will double the number of vaccine doses it will send to poorer countries to 120 million, President Emmanuel Macron pledged, in a video broadcast during the Global Citizen concert in Paris.

“The injustice is that in other continents, obviously, vaccination is very late…,” he said. “We have to go faster, stronger.

“France pledges to double the number of doses it is giving,” he added. “We will pass from 60 million to 120 million doses offered.”

On Wednesday, the United States announced that it would be doubling its donation of vaccine doses, bringing its total contribution to 1.1 billion.

President Joe Biden described the pandemic as an “all-hands-on-deck crisis”, adding “we need other high income countries to deliver on their own ambitions”.

The European Union has committed to distributing 500 million doses.

And China’s President Xi Jingping, in a video message broadcast to the UN on Tuesday, pledged a total of two billion doses by the end of the year, repeating a figure already given by the Chinese authorities.

It was not made clear how many of those would be sold and how many donated.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the World Health Organization, has repeatedly denounced the injustice of the massive imbalance in the distribution of vaccine doses in rich and poor countries.

“I will not stay silent when the companies and countries that control the global supply of vaccines think the world’s poor should be satisfied with leftovers,” he said earlier this month.

African leaders pleaded for the chance to buy vaccine doses for their people during a meeting of the African Union earlier this month.

According to a tally drawn from official sources, Africa’s 53 countries, with a population of more than 1.3 billion people, has had a total of 10 vaccine doses per 100 people.

In contrast, the United States and Canada, with a population of just over 368 million people, has had 120 doses per hundred people.

Source: NAM NEWS NETWORK

At least 37 villagers were killed in Nigeria’s north during an attack on a remote village on Sunday, according to witnesses.

The attack in the Kaura council area in the restive Kaduna state was blamed on a prolonged religious crisis between Hausa-Fulani residents, who mostly reside in the northern part of the state, and the Christians who are concentrated in the south.

Residents and health workers at the hospitals where corpses and the injured were taken told The Associated Press that assailants arrived at the Madamai village in large numbers with guns and machetes on Sunday evening.

A police spokesman in Kaduna said he has not been briefed about the incident in the area known as a violence hotspot. In August, five people were killed and some houses were burned down during a similar violence outbreak in Kaura.

On Sunday, “37 people were killed; 35 dead bodies (were) discovered in the village, two (died) in the hospital,” said Derek Christopher, a local nurse at the General Hospital Kafanchan. He said the initial death toll was 30 as of Sunday night.

Those injured were given urgent medical attention before being referred to the Bingham University Teaching Hospital in Plateau state, which is about 115 kilometers (70 miles) away from the village.

At the hospital in Plateau, Sunday Eze said he narrowly escaped after being shot by the assailants.

“They shot me on my hand,” he said, and, when asked how many the gunmen were, added ruefully: “They were plenty; these people.”

Another resident who is overseeing care for those injured said that the attackers were Fulani herdsmen, referring to herders from the Fulani tribe who have been clashing with the predominantly Christian communities in southern Kaduna for many years.

“We have gunshots and we have machete cuts,” said Cecilia Simon, a resident doctor. “In the hospital here, we are six (that arrived from the village). This thing is not our fault; maybe it is the fault of the government.”

In Nigeria’s middle belt and central regions, deadly clashes between local communities and Fulani herdsmen continue in a cycle of violence that has defied measures introduced by authorities including the deployment of thousands of security operatives to restore peace.

Security operatives deployed to violence hotspots usually leave those areas once their special security operation is over, leaving the remote communities yet again with an inadequate security presence.

Arrests are rarely carried out, and in Kaduna state, authorities have been accused of failing to act on the reports of government panels set up to investigate the crisis.

Source: Voice of America

KIGALI— A former Rwandan army colonel convicted for his role in the massacre of some 800,000 people in the 1994 genocide has died in Mali, where he was in prison.

Théoneste Bagosora, 80, was a senior figure in Rwanda’s ministry of defence at the time of the killings.

A UN-backed criminal tribunal sentenced him to life in prison, but this was later reduced to 35 years.

His son Achille said he died at a hospital in Bamako, where he was being treated for heart issues.

Around 800,000 people – mostly from the Tutsi ethnic group – were killed in 100 days during the genocide.

The massacres began after a plane carrying Rwanda’s then-President Juvenal Habyarimana was shot down on April 6, 1994, killing everyone on board.

Bagosora was arrested two years later in Cameroon, where he had fled to after Paul Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front seized power.

In 2008, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda found him guilty of crimes against humanity, and for orchestrating the murder of several political figures, including Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana.

At his trial, Bagosora maintained he was a victim of propaganda by Rwanda’s current Tutsi-dominated government.

Canadian General Romeo Dallaire, head of the UN’s peacekeeping force during the genocide, described Bagosora as the “kingpin” behind the killings, and alleged that the former colonel had threatened to kill him.

Bagosora was initially sentenced to life imprisonment, but three years later some charges were overturned and his term was reduced to 35 years.

Earlier this year he was denied a request for early release, and was due to finish his sentence at the age of 89.

He was serving his sentence in Mali’s Koulikoro prison, along with many others convicted for roles in the Rwandan genocide.

Source: NAM NEWS NETWORK

Theoneste Bagosora, a former Rwandan army colonel regarded as the architect of the 1994 genocide in which more than 800,000 ethnic Tutsi and Hutus who tried to protect them were killed, died in a hospital in Mali on Saturday.

The 80-year-old Bagosora was serving a 35-year sentence after being found guilty of crimes against humanity by the then-International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

Known as a hardliner within the party of Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, Bagosora was appointed cabinet director in the defense ministry in 1993 and took control of military and political affairs in the country.

Bagosora was accused of taking over the affairs of state after Habyarimana was killed when his plane was shot down in 1994 and ordering the massacre of Tutsi.

After the genocide, Bagosora fled into exile in Cameroon. He was arrested there in 1996 and flown to face trial in Tanzania in 1997.

His trial began in 2002 and lasted until 2007.

Bagosora was sentenced to life in prison in 2008 but that sentence was reduced on appeal.

Source: Voice of America