He is a very cunning man. Now that he has been removed from Kenya as Ambassador, he has decided to have a Kenyan woman as a lover so that he uses it to get settled in Kenya in the future. This is the man who loved to terrorise Kenyan politicians when he was ambassador in the country.

If he settles down in Kenya, he may be car-jacked one day because of the bad things he did around the country because he will be a private man with no security to guard him all over the country should he try to roam around as he used to do when he was the ambassador. That time, he had security from his country.

Kenya is rejoicing. He has finally been removed from his post in Kenya. He behaved like a colonialist forgetting that the last Colonialist-Governor left Kenya in 1964 after the British harshly ruled the Kenyan people.

Ranneberger abused his hospitality while in Kenya. President Obama did the Kenyan people a dis-service by allowing him to extend his term when he took over as US president.

Ranneberger will now live in his country where he will miss the media attention he has been having in Kenya. He was all over the country and vocal when he got a chance. He danced with people’s wives during public rallies and was crowned by others as tribal elder. Now he has gone. Kenyan communities who crowned him elder abused the traditional values of the Kenyan people.

Why should an American envoy be crowned and elder of an African community? Or was he buying the titles because it is a fact that he went around dishing out American tax-payers money.

According to the Daily Nation of Kenya; “one-time Labour minister, the late Newton Kulundu, thought Ranneberger was a hypocrite. Kulundu, during a run-in with the envoy, accused the US and the United Kingdom of being the greatest violators of human rights.” “We demand that all violators of human rights, be they Africans or otherwise, be taken to the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Otherwise we are talking about hypocrisy,” said then visibly furious Labour minister.

By Chief editor Korir

BANGLADESH: Chittagong rights violations continue, says UN

Photo: Courtesy of Christian Erni/IWGIA

A Jumma woman in Bangladesh’s CHT

DHAKA, 28 April 2011 (IRIN) – The Chittagong Hill Tracts Peace Accord has yet to be fully implemented, with human rights violations continuing more than a decade after it was signed in December 1997 says the UN.

The accord ended a 25-year low-intensity guerrilla war between 11 indigenous groups (Jumma) and the government and was intended to establish self-governance in this southeastern part of Bangladesh, home to half a million people.

However, a recent study by UN Rapporteur Lars-Anders Baer found an extensive military presence and ongoing land disputes in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) in 2010.

“When the idea of the study was presented to the UN’s Economic and Social Council, the Bangladesh delegation… argued that there were no ‘indigenous’ people in Bangladesh. This was a surprise,” he told IRIN.

Raja Devavish Roy, king of the Chakma Circle, the largest ethnic group in the Jumma, who was also appointed to the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, says a widespread lack of knowledge about the area’s long history of autonomy has resulted in discrimination against its inhabitants.

“In the Chittagong Hill Tracts, all Millennium Development Goals… are well below the national average,” Devavish said.

The study states that “gross human rights violations” continue, including “arbitrary arrests, torture, extra-judicial killings, harassment of rights activists and sexual harassment”.

It recommends that the government formally endorse the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and that the Human Rights Commission of Bangladesh investigate alleged human rights violations.

Displaced

During the insurgency, about 70,000 indigenous people fled Bangladesh and more than 100,000 were internally displaced. The study found that most international refugees had been repatriated and rehabilitated; however, “no practical steps have been taken to rehabilitate the internally displaced persons”.

But State Minister Jatindra Lal Tripura MP, chairman of the Taskforce for Repatriation of Tribal Refugees and the Rehabilitation of Internally Displaced People, insisted: “The current situation is better than the past. At present, there is harmony and peace [in CHT].”

De-militarization

According to the report, a third of Bangladesh’s army is deployed in the CHT, an area that comprises just a tenth of the country’s territory.

Photo: Courtesy of Christian Erni/IWGIA

Over the last 60 years, the Jumma have been driven from their land

“This is an excessive amount, by any standards, especially in a country not participating in a war,” the study says.

The report cites the military presence as the main reason for human rights violations against the local population and says the withdrawal of temporary military camps is “crucial for re-establishing normalcy”.

But how the military factor into establishing and maintaining peace in CHT remains unclear, Baer said. “The government has been open, but a big problem has been gathering relevant information about… the military presence in CHT. The ‘black hole’, so to speak, in my work, is the role of the military establishment in the CHT peace process,” Baer said.

Land rights

According to the study, disputed land rights remain the most important issue, with forced evictions and expropriation of ancestral lands continuing at an “alarming rate”.

The Bangladesh government has long seen the CHT as empty land on to which it can move poor Bengali settlers, with scant regard for the area’s Jumma inhabitants, activists insist.

“The government set up the land commission [to settle land disputes] without due consideration of the opinions of the indigenous community. Therefore, indigenous people feel an unwillingness to cooperate with it,” said National Human Rights Commission chairperson Mizanur Rahman.

The study recommends that the government create a timeline for implementing all remaining provisions of the accord, warning that failure to do so could lead to “renewed political instability and ethnic conflict in the region”.

On 21 April, Survival International – an organization working for the rights of tribal people worldwide – reported that six indigenous Jumma villages were razed to the ground and many Jumma were attacked by Bengali settlers in the CHT.

Violence erupted when Jumma landowners discovered settlers clearing their land and building shelters. A fight ensued that resulted in the death of three settlers. Following this incident, settlers, with the support of the army, burned down more than 90 Jumma houses and at least 20 Jummas were injured, the UK-based group reported.

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source www.irinnews.org

In Brief: Donors pledge support for Zimbabwe’s poorest in 2011

Photo: UNICEF Zimbabwe

Every child in primary school has new text books, say donors

Johannesburg, 27 December 2010 (IRIN) – An informal group of developed countries has pledged to continue to back programmes in Zimbabwe worth more than US$500 million in 2011 to help the poor, but says “serious concerns remain” on the “protection of fundamental rights, the rule of law, governance and respect for agreements”.

President Robert Mugabe is expected to announce a date for national elections in 2011, according to local media, but NGOs and human rights activists fear they could lead to a surge of political violence.

The Herald, the official daily newspaper, reporting on ZANU-PF’s recent annual conference, quoted Mugabe as saying the party was “a fired-up, fuelled and fast-moving train that would crush anything that dares stand in its way.” 

The donor group, which calls itself the Friends of Zimbabwe, said programmes they supported in 2010 helped “Zimbabweans regardless of political persuasion”: Every child in primary school in Zimbabwe now had new text books; some of the water and power networks had been rehabilitated and agricultural inputs had been given to 600,000 households, the statement said.

jk/cb
source www.irinnews.org