CONTENTS: 1 - BURUNDI: FNL rebels 'still recruiting children' 2 - GLOBAL: Beneficiary feedback: thanks but no thanks ? 3 - MALAWI: Budget crisis threatens farm spending 4 - MAURITIUS: No longer forbidden love 5 - SAHEL: Voices from the frontline of climate change 6 - SOMALIA: Dozens killed, thousands displaced in renewed fighting in Mogadishu 7 - SOUTH AFRICA: Suicide scam to scare authorities into action   8 - UGANDA: Christian Nachan: They told me I had to leave because my family was dying 9 - UGANDA: War-mongering against LRA 'ill-advised', warns northern leader 10 - ZAMBIA: Gov't fine tunes treatment programme 11 - ZAMBIA: Rising levels of resentment towards Zimbabweans 1 - BURUNDI: FNL rebels 'still recruiting children' BUJUMBURA, 9 June (IRIN) - Burundi's last active armed opposition group, the Forces nationales de libération (FNL), has continued to recruit children into its ranks despite recent moves to end rebellion, a senior official said. 'Children who have just sat for their national test [primary school examinations] are being recruited by the FNL,' Pascal Nyabenda, governor of Bubanza province said. 'Recruitment is going on in Musigati, Rugazi and Gihanga communes.' FNL spokesman Pasteur Habimana denied that his group was recruiting and using child soldiers. But he admitted, without giving numbers, that the FNL had some children in its camps. 'We have no child soldiers - the children who are with us are those who lost parents during the war,' he told IRIN in the capital, Bujumbura, on 6 June. 'They came to us because they had no other protection.' The FNL, he added, had 'enough combatants and does not need any more'. The group claims to have 15,000 men, but sources in Bujumbura put their strength at no more than 3,000, including hundreds of children. 'We will hand over the children that we have to the relevant authorities as soon as possible,' Habimana added. On 6 May, the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict, Radhika Coomaraswamy, called for the immediate release of all children in the hands of the FNL. Welcoming the release of 232 child soldiers after months of negotiations involving the government, civil society, UN agencies and a faction of the FNL, she said: 'Grave concern remains for the approximately 500 children associated with the FNL of Agathon Rwasa.' The group, according to the Coalition to Stop Child Soldiers, was in 2004 reported to be forcibly recruiting and using children for frontline duties, to transport ammunition, carry the wounded or dead and for intelligence gathering activities. The rebels later recruited from bands of street children in Bujumbura and from schools, according to the Coalition, which cited the case of 48 children recruited in Bururi and Ngozi provinces in April and May 2007. 'Some captured child soldiers said they had been promised cars and other Luxury goods if they enlisted,' the Coalition said in its 2008 report. An estimated 6,000 to 7,000 child soldiers are estimated to have fought alongside the various armed groups over the years of Burundi's conflict. According to the UN, more than 3,500 have been demobilised since 2004. These include child soldiers from the former government's armed forces, militias, and all armed opposition groups - including 500 who were demobilised from the FNL in 2007, and those released in May. Rwasa returned to Bujumbura on 30 May, under intense international pressure, and is expected to urge his supporters to lay down their arms and denounce rebellion. Aid workers say his return should expedite Burundi's peace process. Eo/jb/bn/jm[ENDS] 2 - GLOBAL: Beneficiary feedback: thanks but no thanks ? DAKAR, 9 June (IRIN) - 'Participation', 'rights-_base_d' and 'consultative' are all terms associated with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) as the paradigm for humanitarian aid has shifted from agencies thinking they know best, to trying to put affected people at the heart of their aid responses. But when push comes to shove, and beneficiaries are unhappy with what they receive, do NGOs listen? And if so, how? There is still a huge gap between rhetoric and reality when it comes to beneficiaries actively taking part in informing agencies what their needs are, evaluating if and how they are being met, and how or if projects have changed their lives, said an aid analyst. When things are not going well, often no one hears about it. To some extent NGOs are financially accountable to donors, but on many levels they are forced to regulate themselves or each other, which has led to a panoply of accountability initiatives, codes of conduct and certification schemes, including, the Humanitarian Accountability Project International (HAP-I), which sets a certification standard against seven criteria for evaluating accountability, including monitoring and addressing complaints; the Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance in Humanitarian Action (ALNAP); and the International Sphere Standards, which outline minimal standards in disaster response. Most experts say NGOs have made progress, but they still place far more emphasis on reporting back to donors than they do on evaluating their impact on beneficiaries, particularly when things go wrong, according to John Mitchell, director of ALNAP. The same can be said for UN agencies, all of those consulted told IRIN, but this report focuses primarily on NGOs, which carry out most of the face-to-face work with beneficiaries in emergencies, and draw their legitimacy mainly from accountability to them. Is the donor the client? One of the reasons for the emphasis on donors, said Mitchell, was that NGOs had no choice but to be funding-driven. Agencies collect the vast amount of information, including from beneficiaries, at the beginning - assessment stage - of an intervention, and put fewer resources into collecting feedback during and after, and it is the financial imperative that drives this, he told IRIN. So many unforeseen external variables can affect a response - politics, price fluctuations, security - that it is often easier to excuse away the bad, and emphasise the good, particularly where donors are concerned, said one agency staff member; others said there were all sorts of other reasons why more feedback was not encouraged. Why is feedback so hard to organise? A major constraint is that emergencies demand speed. In fast-changing situations, assessing the impact of a programme over time was complicated, time-consuming and expensive said Mitchell, and NGOs did not necessarily prioritise this over other activities. It is very difficult for agencies that parachute in and are in a hurry to get operations started as quickly as possible; they lack the understanding to appreciate the social context and don't have the time to discuss the situation in depth, Mitchell pointed out. There are also cultural barriers. In a study by HAP-I, 'To complain or not to complain: still the question', conducted in emergency-affected areas of Kenya, Namibia and Thailand, researchers found that communities in Namibia and Kenya would complain at will, while refugees on the Thai-Myanmar border felt they would 'lose face' if they did so. So we had to redesign our feedback so that the Karen refugees [on the Thai-Myanmar border] didn't have to _frame_ it in terms of 'complaining' per se, said Katharina Samara, regulatory services director at HAP-I. Feedback systems have often been cast in Western moulds, which do not necessarily translate globally. Christian Boehm, adviser with the Danish Refugee Council's (DRC) programme and policy support unit, told IRIN: We set up a complaints box system in Chechnya, which worked well because they are literate and en_title_ments-focused, but it fell flat in Uganda, where people cannot read or write and had no idea what they could expect from an aid response. And complaints threaten agency staff. When the NGO, CARE International, set up complaints mechanisms during their Peru earthquake response, staff were reluctant to support it, fearing they might lose their jobs if beneficiaries complained about them or their projects. Complaining about aid worker misconduct When it comes to complaining about the misconduct of aid workers themselves - for instance, if they are directly involved in sexually exploiting and abusing beneficiaries - NGOs often underestimate the difficulty these people may have in coming forward, according to HAP-I's Samara. It's amazing that we ask people about the most egregious failures of accountability they may have ever encountered - such as sexual violence and abuse - when they're uncomfortable even telling us they don't like the food we're distributing, or if an aid worker has been rude to them, she said. In a study by Save the Children, 'No one to turn to', (ARTICLE _link_) it became clear that victims were reluctant to complain about the abuses taking place because they feared losing future aid, they did not want to create problems for their fellow beneficiaries or be seen as trouble-makers, and they were scared of retaliation. Because of such concerns, indirect complaints mechanisms often work more effectively than direct ones, as the Danish Refugee Council's Boehm learned in Uganda. When we formalised our complaints system there, the complaints stopped coming in altogether, so we had to shift our strategy to make it more indirect, he said. Encouraging beneficiaries to complain Some NGOs are already fairly adept at putting beneficiary-feedback centre-stage. CARE International has been working on the issue for years and has set up response mechanisms in a number of emergencies, including Cambodia and Peru; it is now working on toughening the standards. After the 2007 earthquake in Peru, CARE set up a free complaints telephone line for villagers, advertising it on radio, leaflets and posters, and in workshops. It received 300 complaints over a period of four months. Families who have received tents from CARE are on my land, said one recorded telephone call. After verifying that the land was private, CARE helped negotiate an agreement. We cannot sleep at night because delinquents are damaging the tents, said another caller, so the NGO convened a meeting with community leaders to agree on security measures. The NGO developed a better programme as a result. Strengthening our accountability in Peru enabled us to reach populations we may not have reached, and resolve problems we may not have otherwise been aware of, its lessons-learned document commented. The Danish Refugee Council is currently developing culturally-specific complaints mechanisms in Iraq, Chechnya and Uganda that include text messaging, free phone lines, community feedback sessions, and complaints boxes, among other mechanisms. NGOs and their UN counterparts may still have a long way to go, but many are showing a willingness to improve their accountability to beneficiaries: 23 have signed up to work with HAP-I to do so; two NGOs - the Danish Refugee Council and the Senegalese NGO, OFADEC - have already achieved the HAP-I certification standard; three more - Mercy Malaysia, DanChurchAid and Tearfund - are on their way to doing so. Broadening the scope Save the Children is expanding the idea, using complaints about sexual violations as its starting point, to call for umbrella complaints mechanisms to be set up across agencies, NGOs and the UN to encourage accountability. It is calling for UN agencies and NGOs to set up joint grievance mechanisms on sexual abuse and exploitation perpetrated by aid workers, with a global watchdog to ensure that individual agencies follow up on each complaint. This could go wider, to discuss any kind of grievance ... this should be standard as part of every humanitarian response, said Corinna Csaky, Save the Children's protection advocacy adviser. Going beyond complaints But listening to complaints is just the start. A stand-alone system is not going to lead to a good accountability system. You need to be able to follow up on the complaints, Baker told IRIN. Before you put in a complaints structure, you need a strong communications system in place, so people know what they are supposed to be receiving, and know to complain when they don't receive it. This can be a burden. In Chechnya, one in two refugees was complaining that the food wasn't good enough, the tents weren't good enough, the boots were the wrong size - it was very burdensome to process all of these complaints, said Boehm. And it costs. While donors are increasingly pushing for better accountability and quality programming in agencies and for themselves (GHD _link_), they are not always willing to fund feedback mechanisms, Mitchell noted. However, they are starting to incorporate the accountability principle more centrally in their own guidelines and assessments. The European Commission's humanitarian funding body, ECHO, now includes beneficiary accountability in its risk assessment guidelines to auditors, and accountability features in the 2007 NGO humanitarian funding guidelines of DFID, the UK development agency. Some donors, like the Danish development agency, DANIDA, are willing to create separate funding streams for beneficiary complaints. Donors are starting to learn from experience that unless you put in good accountability systems, you're wasting their money, Baker pointed out. Yes, it costs, he added, but my question is not, 'What is the cost?' but, 'What is the cost-benefit?' My sense is: if you invest adequately in quality and accountability, then you'll always get a good return. aj/bp/he [ENDS] 3 - MALAWI: Budget crisis threatens farm spending BLANTYRE, 9 June (IRIN) - Another year, another budget crisis in Malawi: the opposition is once again flexing its muscle by threatening to block the passing of the treasury vote. It is the fourth consecutive year the tactic has been used, and at risk once more are government spending programmes, including its subsidised fertiliser scheme, intended to shore up production by small-scale farmers. President Bingu wa Mutharika has given legislators until 20 June, the end of the financial year, to pass the budget. If they don't, I will continue governing up to next year [the date for general elections], he told a public rally in the commercial capital, Blantyre, on Saturday. Billy Banda, executive director of Malawi Watch, a human rights advocacy group, has warned that any postponement in passing the budget would delay the government's purchase of inputs needed by farmers before the start of the planting season. Rejecting the budget means rejecting innocent people who have nothing to do with party politics. All they are waiting for is to be ensured of a cheap bag of fertiliser. Malawians must wake up and tell these politicians off if we are to produce [a surplus], he remarked. Malawi's agriculture has turned a corner since 2005, when drought left close to five million people in need of food aid. Last year Malawi managed to produce a maize surplus of over 1 million tonnes. Several analysts point to cheap fertiliser as key to that success, and this year finance minister Goodall Gondwe wants to spend US$8 million on the subsidy programme. Budget brinkmanship dates to 2005 when Mutharika dumped his political sponsor, the then ruling United Democratic Front (UDF), to form his own Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) after winning general elections earlier that year. With the support of 60 former UDF colleagues who crossed the floor contravening Section 65 of the constitution, Mutharika formed a minority government pledging to root out corruption. The annual blocking of the budget has been the opposition's revenge. The UDF and Malawi Congress Party insist that the renegade MPs need a fresh mandate to be seated; the DPP argues that holding 60 by-elections would be a waste of money with national polls around the corner. Bakili Muluzi, UDF national chairman and former president of Malawi, has accused the government of ignoring the constitution. Muluzi, under house arrest on treason charges since last month, has urged MPs not to give into government intimidation. Several retired and serving army and police officers have also been arrested this year and released on bail. Church leaders, led by Roman Catholic Archbishop Tarcizious Ziyaye, are mediating between the government and the opposition, but their efforts have not generated much optimism in the media: 'Mediation meet stalls', 'Opposition, govt stick to their guns' and 'Clergy want house to adjourn' have been some of the recent headlines. Andrew Kumbatira, head of the civil society Malawi Economic Justice Network, said media speculation was only worsening the climate. It is wrong to start predicting that the MPs will not pass the budget because that is not the picture at hand ... I am so optimistic this budget will be approved much easier than was the case last year. According to Undule Mwakasungura, executive director of the Centre for Human Rights and Rehabilitation, a political solution must be found involving party leaders, because they literally tell MPs what to do once they are in the National Assembly - all this at the expense of the poor. The budget logjam could also impact on the 2009 elections, which Muluzi - who in 1994 became Malawi's first democratically elected president, but has been forced to fight corruption allegations - intends to contest. Elections can only be free and fair if preparations are done in ample time. For instance, there will need to be civic education throughout Malawi and that cannot be done in just a few weeks. It will need months, said Malawi Watch's Banda. jk/oa/tdm [ENDS] 4 - MAURITIUS: No longer forbidden love PORT LOUIS, 9 June (IRIN) - Last year, Camille Liu's * future was looking good. He had met a woman - a perfect match - while working in Mozambique as an electrician. They fell in love, decided to move to his home country - Mauritius, get married and have children. But when Anna Magurra * arrived on the tropical Indian Ocean island, ready to accept her fiancé's proposal, a few bureaucratic issues stood in the way of their marriage - one of them was an HIV test. Anne's test results came back positive. I was shocked, devastated, incredibly sad and terrified, Liu related. A few days later officials told them they would not be allowed to marry and that Anne had to leave the country within days. According to Mauritian law, they could not get married as all foreigners who want to get married to Mauritians must test for HIV and if they are HIV positive, they are deported to their countries of origin. Earlier this year, however, the government amended the legislation, and the couple can now get married. Fighting to get married Sitting in a café in the capital, Port Louis, Liu, a Mauritian-Chinese in his mid-30s looks happy and relaxed for a man about to get married this week. After the big shock I got myself together, he told IRIN/PlusNews. I promised her I would fight and do everything to marry her and help her to stay with me in Mauritius. Liu approached Dhiren Moher, an AIDS activist, and one of the few people in the country who have publicly disclosed their HIV positive status. Moher then launched a campaign to get the government to change its discriminatory policies. But the fight is not over yet. Mauritius still has laws which prohibit HIV-positive foreigners from getting a work permit, and Moher is now calling for the state to change this law. Meanwhile, Camille and Anna will marry this week in a small ceremony, attended by their closest family members, who have been supportive of the couple's battle. I loved her so much I would do anything for her. I am happy today, he added. Neighbours and other people do not know about their situation. Stigma and discrimination are widespread in the country, and very few people are open about their status. We want to keep this secret so that our life will be a little bit easier, Camille said. The Indian Ocean island nation has an estimated HIV prevalence rate of 1.8 percent, but the country's rising drug problem puts many more people at risk. Drug abuse accounts for 92 percent of new HIV infections in Mauritius, up from just 14 percent in 2002. Such laws as the one forbidding [people] to marry HIV-positive foreigners are not helping to solve the AIDS problem at all, said Nicolas Ritter, an activist with local AIDS activist group PILS (Prevention, Intervention, Lutte contre le SIDA). This law discriminated people and deprive them of their most basic rights, Ritter, who is also one of the first people in Mauritius to publicly disclose his status, told IRIN/PlusNews. One should rather concentrate on fighting the drug problem and help people with HIV and AIDS. * Not their real names. Nr/kn [ENDS] 5 - SAHEL: Voices from the frontline of climate change TIMBUKTU, 9 June (IRIN) - People living in the Sahelian band of West Africa are among those worst affected by shifting patterns of rainfall and desertification in the world, the UN says. IRIN asked five people near Timbuktu in northern Mali what climate change means for them, and these are their replies. Hama Abacrinne, teacher, Bintagoungou village: We don't talk about climate change here, we talk about how we are lacking water and food. There is so little water and the community cannot support everyone. The nomads left long ago mostly to go to Mopti. Some stayed but either their herds got smaller or they just settled in villages. Lactib, animal herder, near Goundam: I came to this region with my animals looking for water and food for them. Look, how small and weak they are. These days I either find water and no food, or food and no water, rarely both. This area is not good now - I will stay for two months and then move on. I don't know if I will come back. Mohamed Elamud, farmer, near Bintagoungou village: All I want to have is water. I grow zucchini's but they are dry, withered, not good to eat and hard to sell. The corn is impossible now. Without water it's going to be hopeless. I won't leave though - I think it must get better. Fatimata, mother, Bintagoungou village: The rain doesn't come often now and the canals are empty. We have to pump all the water we use and carry it every day. Sometimes even the pump doesn't give us any water. All the villages around here are the same and we are all threatened by it. Boubacar Bankaro, farmer, Issafaye village: The problems we have here are hunger and poverty. The river used to flow all year right past the village, giving us very fertile land. For the last 10 years we have had less and less water to grow food and now sometimes even to drink. Read more climate change stories at IRIN's In-depth page - Gathering Storm - the humanitarian impact of climate change http://www.irinnews.org/IndepthMain.aspx?IndepthId=73&ReportId=78246 nr/vj [ENDS] 6 - SOMALIA: Dozens killed, thousands displaced in renewed fighting in Mogadishu NAIROBI, 9 June (IRIN) - An estimated 100 people were killed and thousands fled their homes in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, over the weekend following renewed fighting between Ethiopian troops and insurgents, local sources told IRIN. Another 200 people were reportedly wounded in the clashes, which started on 19 April, hospital sources said. Sunday [8 June] was the most intense, with the three main hospitals recording over 100 injured, a medical source reported. The numbers, he said, reflect only those who made it to city hospitals in Madina [in the south], Keysaney [in the north] and Dayniile [northwest]. There was so much shelling that no one was able to pick up the dead or take the injured to hospital, the source said. Our rough estimate is that close to 50 have died and over 200 are injured. However, he cautioned, the real number of dead and injured may not be known for days because many people could not access hospitals, while many were buried where they died, he added. He said many of those brought to hospital were women and children. He added, In Madina hospital, we have a woman and her four children aged between 18 months and eight years, with shrapnel wounds. The mother is a very critical condition. The fighting was mostly concentrated in the districts of Wardigley in the south, and Yaqshid in north Mogadishu, according to a local journalist. He said Bakara market, the country's largest open air market, was hardest hit. More than 40 shells landed in the market and the area around it. The fighting started when combined Ethiopian and Somali government forces moved into areas in Yaqshid and Wardigley and tried to establish control, said the journalist. That is when the two sides clashed, and it has continued through Sunday, he added. An estimated 2.6 million Somalis need assistance. The figure is expected to reach 3.5 million by the end of the year if the humanitarian situation does not improve, according to the UN. The fighting between Ethiopian-backed Somali forces and insurgents has forced up to one million Somalis to flee their homes, while an estimated 6,500 civilians have been killed since 2007. The escalation in the fighting at the weekend comes as UN sponsored peace talks were held between Somalia's Transitional Federal Government (TFG) and an Eritrea-_base_d opposition alliance in Djibouti; they made no progress. Representatives of Somalia's civil society said they were talking to both sides to break the deadlock. We are appealing to both sides to show flexibility in order to resolve their differences, Asha Sahur, a member of the civil society, told IRIN. Sahur said the weekend fighting in Mogadishu called for an added urgency in their deliberations . She said that their colleagues were reporting that thousands were displaced and many more were trapped in their homes and could not even go out to buy basic essentials . Many of the newly displaced were people who had returned from camps outside the city or had been previously displaced within the city. Sahur called on both sides to think about the suffering of their people and put a stop to this . A government official, who requested anonymity, said the fighting was regrettable but said the government forces were trying to establish control over those parts of the city. It came at the wrong time [when talks are going on in Djibouti], he said. The fighting reportedly subsided on 9 June, with public transport resuming for the first time in three days in the affected areas. ah/jm[ENDS] 7 - SOUTH AFRICA: Suicide scam to scare authorities into action   JOHANNESBURG, 9 June (IRIN) - Residents of Soetwater Camp, a shelter on the outskirts of Cape Town, have threatened to commit suicide in an attempt to draw attention to dire conditions in the camp and a growing feeling of neglect and inaction at the hands of authorities and aid agencies. Soetwater, 30 km south of Cape Town, has become home to over 4,000 foreign nationals displaced by South Africa's recent wave of xenophobic violence. Local media reported that about 100 people, mainly Somali nationals unhappy with their treatment at Soetwater Camp, had threatened to walk into the sea to drown themselves and said four people were already feared dead. But according to the South African National Sea Rescue Institute (NSRI), which had deployed three boats to search the waters on June 8, the rumors proved false. The incident turned out to be a non-incident - we were on standby following the groups allegations [that four were already missing] and the threat that they wanted to commit suicide in the water, NSRI spokesman, Craig Lambinon, told IRIN. According to media reports, one man had jumped into the water to demonstrate how other Somali's had disappeared. But, Lambinon said, there was no evidence to suggest anyone was missing. Nowhere to go The aggrieved group allegedly claimed they would rather die than go back to their home country or stay in South Africa under current circumstances. In a statement released on June 8 by the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), a South African activist group, called for the immediate closing of the Soetwater Camp where a tradgedy was unfolding because the settlement fell far below international humanitarian standards. There is enormous dissatisfaction at the camp. The conditions are awful: it is cold and insufficiently sheltered - Both the [Western Cape] province and civil society have condemned these camps, the statement said. A meeting with UN officials on June 7 at the camp reportedly fueled the incident. Displaced refugees had several meetings with a representative of the United Nations at the TAC and AIDS Law Project offices in Cape Town. One of these meetings broke down. Unconfirmed reports indicate that the latest crisis is a consequence of this, the TAC statement said. According to Yusuf Hassan Abdi, spokesman for the UN High Commission For Refugees (UNHCR), a rumor had gone round that the UN would start registering people for resettlement in a third country - like the United States, UK, Australia or Canada. This was a major pull factor, drawing large numbers of Somali refugees to Soetwater. Abdi estimated that the camp now accommodated some 1,800 Somali's. But, Abdi said, given recent events and the large number of refugees and asylum seekers affected, resettlement can not be a priority at this point in time. He added: There was no attempted suicide at all - they [the Somalis] used this to get attention. Abdi acknowledged that Soetwater fell far below accepted minimum standards and said that authorities would move to resettle its inhabitants. But fear and loss of all their property meant most would be reluctant to reintegrate into South African society. According to Abdi one refugee representative he spoke to said: you can make [the camp] a five star hotel - we are not interested. tdm/go/oa [ENDS] 8 - UGANDA: Christian Nachan: They told me I had to leave because my family was dying KOTIDO, 9 June (IRIN) - Christian Nachan was forced to leave her manyatta, a small group of mud huts that make up a homestead in the remote region of Karamoja in northeastern Ugandan, when her husband, his second wife and two of her children died. After discovering she was HIV-positive, she started a new life in the town of Kotido. Three years ago, my husband died. Also my co-wife [his second wife] died and two of my children. In the village they started beating me and saying that because my family is dying I must leave the village. I left in the evening hours and slept in a bush nearby, and then went to town the next day and looked for a place to stay. In Abim [district in Karamoja], I found small work washing and cleaning and fetching water for people. My husband's brother came to find me and marry me. I moved to Kotido with him; he is sick too. I hear news of the village, and the children say, 'Why don't you return?' But the people of the manyatta are not willing to receive me back. People in town, they say, 'This weak one! What's wrong with you?' But now they see strength coming to me. I am learning how and when to take [antiretroviral] drugs and so I am not so sick. The main problem is hunger - when you are taking drugs on an empty stomach you are vomiting and having dizziness. After I saw other people improve, I thought, 'Let me look for that life so I will also become somebody'. Now I am two months pregnant. I will come here to take drugs during the labour and to take care of the child. In my mind I'm thinking maybe I will deliver a child who is HIV-positive and I am having fear that the child will develop this sickness like me. But if I follow what they are telling me at the centre maybe the child will not be sick. gg/kr [ENDS] 9 - UGANDA: War-mongering against LRA 'ill-advised', warns northern leader KAMPALA, 9 June (IRIN) - The northern Uganda peace process should still be given a chance despite signals that talks between the government and the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) have virtually collapsed, a key political leader in the region said. Our view is that until the chief mediator [Southern Sudan Vice President Riek Machar] comes up to declare the talks dead, and until they get a report from the Secession of Hostilities Monitoring Committee, war-mongering is ill-advised, said Norbert Mao, chairman of Gulu District, which was the epicentre of decades of conflict. Mao, one of the northern leaders who has been at the centre of talks to end fighting between the Ugandan government and the LRA, urged both parties to restrain themselves and give the peace process a chance. Hundreds of thousands of displaced northerners, taking advantage of relative peace in the region since talks began in 2007, have returned to their homes from camps. Addressing the Ugandan parliament on 5 June, President Yoweri Museveni said his army was ready to flush the LRA out of its _base_s in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) if the Congolese government and the UN gave his country the go-ahead. I can assure all of you Ugandans that [LRA leader Joseph] Kony cannot disturb the peace in northern Uganda given the nature of professionalism of the Uganda Peoples Defence Forces (UPDF). We now have sophisticated equipment and are ready to respond, the president said. Since Kony is in Congo, it is now the responsibility of [DRC President Joseph] Kabila and the UN to call on us, he told the legislators. In case Congo asks for our assistance, we are ready and prepared to go and destroy him. Mao said leaders in northern Uganda feared that trigger-happy elements in the Ugandan government have had the upper-hand but this would not help build peace here. For sure the majority of the fighters in the LRA want to come back home, but the ICC [International Criminal Court] warrants against their leaders are keeping them hostage, he told IRIN on 9 June. The ICC is not helping Uganda at all. The Rome-_base_d court has prepared charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and indicted five top LRA leaders. But the charges have become a sticking point in the peace talks, with LRA leaders demanding that they be dropped before their fighters can renounce war. Our view in northern Uganda is that the [UN] Security Council should suspend the indictments and see how the alternative justice works. We are sure this will reassure the LRA to further pursue the peace process. The Rome Statute allows that, Mao, who is also a lawyer, explained, referring to the instrument that sets out the ICC's rules of procedure. The situation has, however, been complicated by reports that the LRA killed 21 people including women and children as well as fighters of the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), in an attack in Southern Sudan on 5 June. Uganda government spokesman Capt. Chris Magezi said the LRA attacked the SPLA and civilians in Nabanga, near the Sudan-DRC border, where LRA fighters were expected to assemble if the talks had succeeded. The attack was near the assembly area and 21 people including women, children and SPLA fighters were killed, he said. He denied reports that the attack followed another jointly carried out by the SPLA and the Ugandan army on the LRA _base_s. The LRA has been making that accusation but they are just trying to cover up many things they have been doing lately, he added. Our nearest position is over 1,000 km away in Koboko [northwestern Uganda]. Echoing Museveni's call, he added: The UPDF is ready to help in jointly fighting the LRA through sharing intelligence with both the SPLA and the Congolese army. Should they also need our active participation, we are also ready. But the government chief negotiator and interior minister Ruhakana Rugunda who had just met the UN envoy to the region, former Mozambican president Joachim Chissano, said that the government was still committed to the peace process and that it awaited a report from the mediators to make a proper assessment of the process and decide the way forward . In any case negotiations were completed and what remained was appending signatures on the final agreement, he said. Related stories Vm/eo/jm[ENDS] 10 - ZAMBIA: Gov't fine tunes treatment programme LUSAKA, 9 June (IRIN) - The Zambian government has begun treating people living with HIV earlier, a move intended to reduce deaths and medical complications resulting from the disease. According to national antiretroviral (ARV) treatment coordinator Dr Albert Mwanga, the state was now making ARVs available when people had reached a CD4 count [which indicates the strength of the immune system] of 350, and had moved away from earlier guidelines that recommended a CD4 count of 200. Deciding on when to start a patient on ARV drugs is usually _base_d on a combination of CD4 cell count test results and HIV disease progression, which the World Health Organisation (WHO) has defined according to four clinical stages, with stage four being AIDS. We decided to move away from the ... protocols _base_d on the lessons learnt in the field that showed that clients who start when their immunity is low had a lower recovery rate, Mwanga told IRIN/PlusNews. Mwanga said research has shown that people who start treatment early respond better to the medication and are less likely to develop AIDS-related illnesses. This has led the United States, the United Kingdom and a number of countries in Africa to change their treatment guidelines. The WHO revised its guidelines in 2003 to recommend that a patient who has reached stage three of the disease and has a CD4 count of less than 350 should begin treatment. The new eligibility criteria include pregnant women found to HIV positive. This means that once an expectant mother is found to be positive and her CD4 count is 350 or below, she needs to commence treatment, Mwanga noted. The move is one of the latest measures introduced under the revised treatment protocol. Another change is the introduction of a new treatment regimen for all new patients enrolled after September 2007. The advantage of the new regimen is that clients take it once daily and it has few side effects, Dr Mwanga said. Dr Marimba Chiko, a medical superintendent in the Lusaka district, told IRIN/PlusNews that the guidelines were now slowly being implemented. We have not enrolled as many people as we would want on the new regimen due to insufficient supply of one of the three drugs - Truvada. We however have been informed that the stocks are now in and we are hopeful that we will enrol more, Chiko said. Mwanga said 156,753 people were on ART by December 2007. These include clients from public, private, military and mission hospitals across the country. Zambia has an estimated adult HIV infection rate of 14 percent. Pc/kn [ENDS] 11 - ZAMBIA: Rising levels of resentment towards Zimbabweans LUSAKA , 9 June (IRIN) - Zimbabweans seeking greener pastures in neighbouring Zambia - and an escape from the election violence wracking the country - are becoming increasingly concerned at the rising levels of contempt directed against them since widespread xenophobic attacks in South Africa last month. We are being treated with a lot of indignation. Everywhere we go, we are being treated like lesser human beings; it's like as long as you are a Zimbabwean woman in Zambia, then you are a prostitute [sex worker], which is not the case, Patience Ndhlobvu, a Zimbabwean cross-border trader in the Zambian capital Lusaka, told IRIN. I personally take strong exception to that; this is not fair, it's not a situation of our own making . Zambians have been very good to us, but it's like things are changing [now]. Everyone is suddenly saying bad things about us. Just the other day, someone called me a prostitute as I was selling my products [sweets, chocolates and biscuits] in town. South Africa boast the continent's largest economy and is a first choice destination for Zimbabweans seeking to escape the more than 80 percent unemployment rate and an inflation rate unofficially estimated at more than one million percent. However, recent attacks by South Africans against foreign nationals, that has according to South African police killed 62 people and displaced tens of thousands, has seen an influx of about 25,000 Zimbabweans from South Africa to Zambia according to the Red Cross, more than double the number already thought to be in the country. Levy Mwanawasa, Zambia's president and chairman of the regional body the Southern Africa Development Community, has reportedly said the country did not have the capacity to host any more foreign nationals or refugees, as it was developing its former refugee camps into specialist institutions such as skills training centres. Zambia was one of the regions main host countries for refugees fleeing the Great Lakes conflicts and the Angolan civil war during the 1990s. At its peak, Zambia was host to about 300,000 refugees, a number that has since fallen to about 113,000 following the repatriations of Rwandese, Congolese and Angolan nationals. Mike Mulongoti, Zambia's information minister and chief government spokesperson, said there was a concern Zimbabwe's presidential run-off elections on 27 June could precipitate an increase in the migration of Zimbabweans to neighbouring states. Rising tensions between neighbours Zimbabweans first went to the polls on 29 March, and while there was no clear winner in the presidential ballot, Zimbabwe's ruling ZANU-PF government lost its majority in parliament for the first time since independence from Britain in 1980. President Robert Mugabe polled fewer votes than Movement for Democratic Change presidential challenger Morgan Tsvangirai, who failed to achieve the 50 percent plus one ballot required to negate a second round of voting. Since the 29 March poll there has been widespread reports of political violence that has killed at least 60 people, according to the MDC. We are continuously being inconvenienced as a people of Zambia, Mulongoti told IRIN. We can't continue to deny that there's something wrong going on there [in Zimbabwe] because their people are now coming on our soil in thousands. They [Zimbabweans] are all over the place. Zambia's diplomatic relations with Zimbabwe have become strained recently after Mwanawasa convened a heads of states extraordinary SADC summit ahead of the March 29 election. Mugabe refused to attend the Lusaka meeting and his government launched vitriolic attacks against Zambia, along with Botswana and Tanzania, for doing the bidding of Britain, in a campaign for speedy regime change in Zimbabwe . Mugabe and his government maintain that the MDC is a front for the imperial interests of Britain and the US, a charge the MDC deny and cite their popularity as a consequence of ZANU-PF's mismanagement of the economy. As the government of Zambia, we take strong exception to the Zimbabwean government's recent unwarranted attacks on us in the media. How long are we going to tolerate this? How long are we going to host these people? We did it during the struggle for freedom. We thought after that we had solved the problem, and now they can look after themselves. [But] what we are seeing now is in fact, an influx of more people; there's so much influx of Zimbabwean people. Why are they running out of their own country? Mulongoti said. Lee Habasonda, executive director of the regional good governance and human rights watchdog, the Southern African Centre for Constructive Resolution of Disputes [SACCORD], told IRIN South Africa's xenophobic attacks, which appear to target Zimbabweans more than others, others could spread to other countries if Zimbabwe's economic meltdown was not addressed. Zimbabweans resented in the region The thing is, it's not just here in Zambia where Zimbabweans are being resented, even in Botswana, even in Mozambique, and even in Malawi the situation is the same. We have a lot of them coming to do businesses in unacceptable fields such as in the sex trade. This is unhealthy for the region, it's likely to worsen the HIV/AIDS record of the region, Habasonda said. Both Zambia and Zimbabwe have high rates of HIV/AIDS, in Zimbabwe about 20.1 percent of people aged between 15 and 49 are HIV positive, while in Zambia latest statistics released by the government earlier this month put the infection rate at similar levels for the same age-band. In April 2008, Zambian immigration officials deported about 60 Zimbabwean suspected sex workers from Livingstone, the country's tourism capital. The Immigration Department is attempting to curb the influx of Zimbabwean immigrants through Zambia's Southern Province border posts of Chirundu, Kazungula and Kariba, but it's difficult to completely clamp down on these illegal immigrants because they don't require any visas to enter Zambia. Some of them come with a day's permit as visitors but never go back, an immigration official, who declined to be identified, told IRIN. On average, we are having over 200 Zimbabweans crossing into Zambia every day, he said. Analysts said the knock-on effect of Zimbabwe's malaise was having a serious impact on its neighbour and if the situation deteriorated further, Zambia was unlikely to remain untouched. We are all keenly watching the situation in Zimbabwe. Whatever happens in Zimbabwe has a bearing on Zambia, Neo Simutanyi, a senior political science lecturer at the University of Zambia, told IRIN. Clearly, the people of Zimbabwe want change, but chances of a free and fair election run-off are very slim. What we foresee taking place in Zimbabwe is a possible military coup or armed rebellion if the ruling ZANU-PF goes through, which will be very bad for Zambia and the region as a whole. nm/go/oa [ENDS] Š IRIN. All rights reserved. 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