AFRICANEWS
Views and news on peace, justice and reconciliation in Africa
June 2001
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War and Peace
Africa/USAA Saudi man convicted of the 1998 bombing of the United States embassy in Kenya has been sentenced to life in prison. Mohamed Rashed Daoud Al-Owhali had faced the death penalty for his part in the bombing, but a jury in New York was unable to reach a unanimous decision that he should be executed. Al-'Owhali had admitted to playing a part in the Nairobi bombing, which killed 213 people. He was one of four alleged followers of Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden convicted last month of conspiring to kill Americans in the simultaneous bombings of the Kenyan and Tanzanian embassies in which a total of 224 people were killed. The jury had deliberated over his sentencing for five days. On 11 June, they sent out a note asking for instructions if they were unable to agree that he should receive the death penalty. They were instructed that they could simply indicate that there had been no agreement and the defendant would be automatically sentenced to life. Al-'Owhali had faced the death penalty under a federal law which allows prosecutors to seek execution in terrorist murder cases. The jurors said there were "mitigating factors". They were worried it would make him a martyr. They felt it would not help the victims. (Source: BBC News)AlgeriaIn the port town of Bejaia, in the Kabylie region of Algeria, the windows of the state-run radio station, the offices of Air Algerie and the mairie are burnt out and the windows smashed. The town's population is about 150,000 but 30,000 of them, most middle-aged and well-dressed, gather in Mediterranean sunshine in front of the town theatre. These are the fonctionnaires, the municipal workers, organised in phalanxes by stewards wearing black armbands, and they have come to add their voice to the anger of their fellow citizens in unprecedented display of civil resistance to the military regime that has, in effect, run Algeria since independence. In seven weeks of clashes triggered by the death in custody of a Kabyle youth, up to 80 have been killed by paramilitary gendarmes. Since then the resistance has taken on a more civil facade of almost daily protests in Bejaia, Tizi Ouzou, the main town in Kabylie, and Algiers, the capital. Among the demonstrators in Bejaia is the mayor, Chebati Rachid, a member of the opposition Front des Forces Socialistes, a Kabyle party that most analysts view as the only independent opposition party in Algeria. "We are exercising our legitimate rights as citizens," he said. "We are here to call for a democratic and constitutional solution to our problems and for an inquiry into why and how these people were killed." Mr Rachid said he had made representations to the local commander of the gendarmerie but had received only assurances that the killings were being investigated. Gendarmes had been placed under investigation but none had been put on trial. (Source: Financial Times)Congo (RDC)On 12 June, Human Rights Watch said that residents of the eastern Congolese town of Beni are caught in the crossfire of week-long violent clashes between two competing rebel factions, with many civilians killed and injured. Beni is the administrative capital of parts of northeastern Congo occupied by Uganda and nominally controlled by the Ugandan-backed rebel Front for the Liberation of Congo (FLC). The clashes have erupted between opposing factions of the Army for the Liberation of Congo (ALC), those loyal to the FLC's leader Jean-Pierre Bemba, and those loyal to Mbusa Nyamwisi, a local rebel leader who had left the town soon after joining forces with the FLC. (Source: HRW)
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