From Africa Recovery, Vol.15 #4, December 2001, Watch page

SIERRA LEONE
Paris Club cancels $72 mn in debt

Amid other international efforts to help Sierra Leone recover from a decade-long civil war, the Paris Club of official bilateral creditor nations agreed in October to cancel about $72 mn of the West African country's foreign debt, estimated in 1999 at around $888 mn. Sierra Leone is one of the 41 countries potentially eligible for debt relief under the heavily indebted poor countries (HIPC) initiative of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, but it is not yet up for formal consideration.

The Paris Club deal will therefore bring some needed financial relief over the next few years. According to Paris Club analysts, the agreement will reduce from $180 mn to $45 mn the amount of debt servicing Sierra Leone will need to pay its public creditors between 1 October 2001 and 30 September 2004. Other portions of the debt were rescheduled over repayment periods of up to 40 years.

POLIO
Vaccination campaign marks progress toward eradication

Thanks to an aggressive, continent-wide campaign to eradicate polio, only 147 cases were recorded in Africa in 2000, Mr. Olusegun Babaniyi of the Africa regional office of the World Health Organization (WHO) told a meeting of polio specialists in Ethiopia in early December. This compares with 2,198 cases in 1995, when the first national immunization days were conducted in Africa. During 2001, some 86 million children were immunized against the disease in West and Central Africa, and only 46 cases had been recorded in the continent by November.

Those figures may be incomplete, however. Just a few days after the conference, five new suspected cases were identified in Ethiopia. Moreover, the number of recorded cases probably understates the incidence of the disease, given the limited surveillance capacity of most African health systems. Since polio can easily spread from one country to another, total eradication is essential, to prevent small pockets from again developing into a major scourge that paralyzes thousands of children each year.

Dr. Bruce Aylward, the global coordinator for the WHO's polio eradication initiative, told the meeting that the campaign is experiencing some difficulties due to insufficient political commitment by governments and inadequate financing. Of the $1 bn needed for the vaccination efforts in 2002, Mr. Aylward said, donors have so far pledged only some $600 mn.

LUMUMBA
Belgian commission admits 'moral responsibility'

More than four decades after the January 1961 assassination of Congo's first president, Mr. Patrice Lumumba, a Belgian parliamentary commission of inquiry has concluded that former Belgian ministers bear a "moral responsibility" for the killing. "We need to show Africans that we are prepared to look clearly at what we did in their countries," explained Mr. Geert Versnick, the commission chairman. "We lecture them about human rights and good government and the rule of law. And they ask us: 'What did you do here?'"

The mystery of Mr. Lumumba's assassination has long been a source of controversy within Africa. The precise identity of the assassins has never been established, although it is generally known that he was killed by secessionist leaders in the then breakaway province of Katanga (now Shaba). Coming at a time of civil war in which various foreign military forces were involved and the UN was carrying out a difficult peacekeeping mission, many Africans believe there also was some role by Western intelligence agencies.

The commission's final report concluded that there is no documentary or eyewitness evidence that the Belgian government or any of its members "gave the orders to physically eliminate Lumumba." However, it did find that King Baudouin knew of plans by Mr. Lumumba's opponents to assassinate him and that some Belgian officers had witnessed the killing.

Somalia on the precipice Somalia is a "forgotten emergency," says UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator Randolph Kent. In 2001, donors contributed barely a fifth of needed emergency assistance. UN agencies acknowledge that although the humanitarian situation will worsen in 2002, their overall request for relief aid has been scaled back from $130 mn to $83.7 mn, "in recognition that the political environment is not yet conducive for a significant injection of transitional and recovery funding," notes a press release from Mr. Kent's office. Somalia's current tragedy has in fact been worsened by the political fallout of the Afghanistan crisis. The US government has maintained that companies involved in transferring remittances to Somalia from Somalis living abroad may have links to "terror networks," and has sought to shut them down. Such remittances may have brought in between $500 mn and $700 mn a year, a sum which has now been cut in half. Mr. Kent, at a briefing at UN headquarters in New York, noted that this hardship has come on top of several others: a serious drought that has left nearly 800,000 Somalis in desperate need of food relief, the onset of hyper-inflation over the past year, and a ban on livestock exports to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states because of fear of infection from Rift Valley Fever, cutting off another $300-400 mn in export earnings. Photo: ©UNHCR / E.Dagnino Previously, Somalia had been slowly recovering from a decade of civil war, with the establishment of a fragile transitional government in Mogadishu and clear signs of economic recovery, financed largely by remittances and investments by Somalis in the diaspora. Now, however, because of its combined difficulties, "Somalia is on the precipice of potential and total economic collapse," Mr. Kent emphasized. Even though UN officials in Somalia have not so far detected any significant signs of "radicalism," such a collapse could provide conditions in which it may emerge. In addition to urging donors to respond favourably to the UN's emergency aid appeal, Mr. Kent recommended relatively simple and inexpensive steps to strengthen Somali banking institutions, in order to improve transparency and the ability to monitor cash transfers. The resumption of remittances could go a long way toward helping many Somalis survive.

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