Chronicle 2004: The unreported year

January
Algeria Police destroy evidence of a mass grave discovered by human rights activists in Reizane province, thought to contain 200 victims of state-armed militias in the mid-1990s.

February
Zimbabwe The Daily News, the last independent newspaper, ceases publication after the Supreme Court confirms that all media outlets must have a government licence.
Kenya Some 200 traditional practitioners give up female genital mutilation after attending seminars held by NGOs to mark Women’s Day.

MARCH
Nigeria The polio immunization drive run by WHO and UNICEF is hampered by rumours that vaccines are laced with anti-fertility drugs. Conspiracy theories abound that it is part of a US plot to make Muslims infertile.
South Africa Police fire stun grenades at people protesting water privatization in Gauteng; 46 adults and 6 children are arrested under apartheid-era legislation which gives the police power to ban protests.
Congo Rebel soldiers attack military bases and TV stations but are contained by loyalist troops.

APRIL
South Africa The ANC wins its biggest election victory with just under 70 per cent of the votes. It controls all provinces bar KwaZulu-Natal.
Angola The Government still rejects GM food aid, mainly from the US, due to the potential danger. The UN warns that two million could go hungry.
Algeria President Bouteflika becomes the first leader to be returned to power in a democratic election since independence. His 83 per cent of the vote rewards his role in ending the country’s civil war.
Zanzibar A law is passed outlawing homosexuality in this autonomous region of Tanzania, with up to 25 years’ imprisonment for gays.

MAY
Zimbabwe President Mugabe orders a UN crop assessment team to leave, blocking preparations to provide food aid, possibly fearing that production shortfalls caused by the Government’s land seizures would be exposed.
Chad A mutiny by soldiers ends in surrender. Despite protests, Parliament removes the two-term limit on presidential office, allowing President Deby to stand again in 2006.

JUNE
Rwanda A Rwandan court jails former President Pasteur Bizimungu for 15 years for embezzlement and fomenting ethnic division.
Equatorial Guinea Evidence emerges of a plot by foreign mercen-
aries to kill the President and overthrow the Government of the oil-rich state.

JULY
West Africa The largest polio epidemic in recent years spreads across central and western Africa, jeopardizing hopes of eradicating the disease by the end of the year.
Kenya The Masai launch a campaign to win the return of ancestral territory in Lakipia, owned by white farmers since a 1904 treaty with the colonial British which expires this year.
Sierra Leone The huge UN repatriation programme ends as the last of 280,000 refugees return home.

AUGUST
Sudan The armed forces claim a UN resolution giving the Government 30 days to disarm the Janjaweed militias in Darfur is a ‘declaration of war’.
South Africa The New National Party, the party that built apartheid, merges with its historic nemesis, the ruling ANC.
Somalia Crowds in Mogadishu celebrate the formation of the country’s first parliament in 13 years, on a power-sharing model agreed by delegates of the many warring clans.
West Africa Crops are ravaged in the region's biggest plague of locusts for 15 years.

SEPTEMBER
Nigeria Rebel leader Dokubo Asari enters talks with President Obasanjo after his group’s threats push world oil prices to a record level. The rebels demand ‘resource control and self-determination’ for the Ijaw of the Niger Delta, in return for laying down arms.
Africa A report by four humanitarian agencies accuses the IMF and World Bank of undermining the fight against HIV/AIDS through their rigid policies.

OCTOBER
Kenya Wangari Maathai, founder of a women’s movement that planted more than 30 million trees in 20 countries to stop soil erosion, is the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
Somalia Ethiopian-backed warlord Abdullahi Yusuf is elected President by delegates meeting in Kenya.
Western Sahara Saharawi activists stage protests in southern Morocco and occupied Western Sahara, aiming to create an ‘Intifada’. South Africa officially recognizes Western Sahara, enraging Morocco.
Libya The EU ends 12 years of sanctions in response to Tripoli’s abandonment of plans to develop weapons of mass destruction.
Zimbabwe Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai is acquitted of treason charges.

NOVEMBER
Africa The WTO agrees to focus on cotton after Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad and Mali claim subsidies in the US and EU cost them many times more than they receive in aid.
Côte d’ivoire President Gbagbo ends the 18-month ceasefire with strikes on rebel-held towns, but 9 French soldiers are killed. France retaliates, destroying Ivorian planes and helicopters. Riots break out in protest.

DECEMBER
Sudan The 31 December UN deadline for a peace deal between the Government and the SPLA rebels looms with issues still unresolved.

Out of Africa (below). It is not that African news goes entirely unreported, just that the few stories that emerge tend to reinforce stereotypes or take place in a country with a colonial connection. The reporting of the humanitarian crisis in Darfur, west Sudan, during 2004 was hugely welcome, not least because it focused attention on the complicity of the Sudanese Government in genocidal attacks by militias on the people of the region. But amid the concentration on Darfur, the plight of the people of southern Sudan, a few hundred kilometres distant, was almost completely forgotten. The civil war here between the Government and the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army is supposed to be in a quiescent phase, with a peace process well under way. But tell that to the little girl below, who is looking up at a World Food Programme plane dropping food aid parcels by parachute. She has been displaced along with her family from their village by the River Nile in Shilluk, Popwojo. Displaced by what? By government-backed militias which burned villages, stole cattle and forced local people to flee. The same sad story – but one which does not fit the narrow frame of the Western news agenda.

Photo: Sven Torfinn / Panos

Under the net (below). The girl behind the mosquito net has an even sadder story to tell. She is at a reception centre in Gulu, northern Uganda, for children who have been abducted by the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). The LRA claims that it is aiming to install a government based on the biblical Ten Commandments but is notorious for relying on the kidnapping and terrorizing of children to replenish its armed forces. Girls taken captive by the LRA are routinely raped and/or forced to act as sexual slaves to rebel commanders. The Ugandan Government of Yoweri Museveni regularly boasts that its military will wipe out the LRA – something it has manifestly failed to do over the last 16 years. But in May the British-based NGO Christian Aid condemned the Government’s manipulation of the War on Terror, which has led to an intensification of the conflict in the north and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people.

Photo: Sven Torfinn / Panos

I can see clearly now (below). One thing is for sure: the small, positive stories out of Africa will rarely be told. The photo below shows an Eritrean man being tested for spectacles provided by a Scandinavian NGO called Vision for All which asks its supporters to donate their surplus pairs of glasses. Teams of student opticians then visit rural villages, setting up eye clinics and matching people’s needs to the available equipment.

Photo: Tim Dirven / Panos