Prometheus 6   

Liberia chaos as leader returns

Fears of a violent power struggle following the indictment of President Charles Taylor of Liberia by a United Nations-backed war crimes tribunal have caused panic in the capital, Monrovia.

… Prosecutors called on Ghana to arrest Mr Taylor - where the Liberian leader was on a rare trip on Wednesday - but this was not heeded and he flew back to Monrovia shortly afterwards.

He had been attending peace talks with Liberian rebels in Ghana.

… The BBC's West Africa correspondent, Paul Welsh, says the indictment was drawn up secretly three months ago, and prosecutors timed the announcement of the charges of war crimes carefully to coincide with Charles Taylor's trip out of his own country.

But instead of arresting President Taylor, the government flew him home in one of their own official jets.

Diplomats in Ghana say they believe that the government decided the future of the Liberian peace talks was more important than trying the Liberian president.

Zimbabwe activist 'dies from torture'

Zimbabwe's main opposition group says that one of its members has died after being tortured by police officials and soldiers.

Tichaona Kaguru was taken away from the house of a Movement for Democratic Change councillor in Harare, beaten and died while waiting for an ambulance, the MDC says.

… [Mr Mugabe] also said that the use of force against opposition marchers had been unavoidable even though "we don't want to make our people suffer".

"It's sad when we are forced as government... to have to use tear gas against our youth, who are being misled," he told South African television.

"But we have to do it in the interest of peace and security."

Central Africa backs coup leader

General Francois Bozize has been recognised as the head of the Central African Republic by the leaders of neighbouring countries.

Mr Bozize seized power on 15 March while President Ange-Felix Patasse was out of the country.

The African Union has said that it will no longer accept military coups and those who seize power will not be invited to its meetings.

However, Mr Bozize was officially invited to the summit of the Central African Economic and Monetary Union (Cemac) meeting in Gabon, which ended on Tuesday.

Viewpoint: G8 fails to deliver

Patrick Nicholson, spokesperson for British aid agency Cafod, gives his perspective on what was achieved at the G8 summit in Evian.

It is hard to be positive about the G8 summit in Evian.

The French hosts had promised the summit would concentrate on tackling poverty. Britain had also pledged to make Africa its priority.

African countries were looking for progress on greater development assistance, on trade reform and on debt reduction.

All three are needed to achieve the Millennium Development Goals of halving the number of people living on less than a dollar a day in Africa by 2015.

But African countries cannot feel any closer to meeting those goals now than they were before the summit began.

African growth 'set to improve'

Africa should experience modest economic growth in 2003 - but only if the developed countries can get their act together and the droughts ravaging southern Africa ease, the African Development Bank believes.

In its annual African Development Report, released during its annual conference in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, the Bank said that the economies of African nations should expand about 3.6% on average this year.

The predicted performance would comfortably outstrip last year's 2.8% growth, and benefits from the relatively quick end to the US-led war on Iraq.

But it remains way below the 7% generally accepted as necessary to make a serious dent in the poverty endured by most of the continent's citizens, and meet the United Nations' goal of halving the number of people living in poverty by the year 2015.

African debt relief 'not enough'

A group of African leaders who were guests at the summit of the G8 major powers have criticised their hosts' performance on debt relief for poor countries, most of them in Africa.

After a working dinner in the French alpine resort of Evian, one African leader said the debt relief initiative run by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank had delivered too little too late and had little impact.

The debt relief scheme for the poorest countries has been running for more than six years.

It is often criticised for delivering insufficient debt relief too slowly to too few countries.