Musings From Abroad

WFP announces ‘scale-up’ of food supplies to Sudan

Published

2 weeks ago

November 27, 2024

A World Food Programme spokeswoman has revealed that more than 700 trucks are en route to famine-stricken regions of Sudan as part of a significant expansion after approval from the Sudanese government.

Since April 2023, the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces have been engaged in combat, resulting in widespread sickness and severe starvation throughout the nation. The army is accused of causing bureaucratic delays, while the RSF is accused of obstructing assistance supplies via stealing.

“In total, the trucks will carry about 17,500 tons of food assistance, enough to feed 1.5 million people for one month,” WFP Sudan spokesperson Leni Kinzli told a press briefing in Geneva.

“We’ve received around 700 clearances from the government in Sudan, from the Humanitarian Aid Commission, to start to move and transport assistance to some of these hard-to-reach areas,” she added, saying the start of the dry season was another factor enabling the scale-up.

According to her, the WFP fleet will be prominently marked in the hopes of facilitating access. A portion of the food is meant for 14 famine-affected or famine-at-risk regions of the nation, including the Darfur region’s Zamzam camp.

Crowds of people who had resorted to eating crushed peanut shells that are often fed to animals cheered when the first meal came there on Friday, according to Kinzli.

According to her, a second convoy for the camp is presently around 300 kilometres (186 miles) distant.

Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the leader of Sudan’s sovereign council, announced Monday that he would permit U.N. agencies to use the airports in El Obeid, Kadugli, and Damazine—all of which are under army control and cut off from the fighting—as humanitarian centres to help with supplies.

Related Topics:Featured Food Supply Sudan WFP

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Musings From Abroad

French army begins Chad pullout

Published

2 days ago

December 10, 2024

Ifeoluwa Dada

Just two weeks after local authorities said they were terminating their defence collaboration, the French army announced that jets deployed in the capital N’Djamena had returned home on Tuesday, marking the beginning of France’s military departure from Chad.

The government of Chad, a crucial Western partner in the war against Islamic jihadists in the area, unexpectedly terminated its defence cooperation treaty with France on November 28, a decision that caught French authorities off guard.

It is still unclear how the evacuation will be executed and if any French forces will remain in the central African country at all, even after the first Mirage aircraft returned to their base in eastern France on Tuesday.

“It marks the beginning of the return of French equipment stationed in N’Djamena,” Army spokesperson Colonel Guillaume Vernet said.

Due to anti-French sentiment and military takeovers in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, France has already withdrawn its troops from those West African nations.

Decades of French military participation in the Sahel area came to an end with the departure from Chad, and more recently, French military operations against Islamist extremists in the region were discontinued.

There are still around 1,000 French soldiers in Chad. Vernet stated that it would still take several weeks for the two nations to establish a schedule for reducing its activities.

Musings From Abroad

Court documents show Meta contractor overlooked Ethiopia rebel threats to moderators

Published

2 days ago

December 10, 2024

Ifeoluwa Dada

New evidence cited by Reuters suggests that a contractor employed by Facebook’s parent company, Meta, overlooked threats against content moderators by Ethiopian rebels during a case contesting the removal of dozens of moderators in Kenya.

Last year, 185 content moderators sued Meta and two contractors for losing their positions with Sama, a Kenyan business that moderated Facebook material, for seeking to form a union.

After Facebook switched contractors, they were barred from applying for the same jobs at Majorel.

Foxglove, a British non-profit helping Ethiopian moderators, submitted court filings on Dec. 4 alleging that Sama ignored their accusations that OLA rebels had targeted them for deleting their videos.

In the petition obtained by Reuters, the moderators said Sama accused them “of creating a false account and manufacturing” the threatening messages before agreeing to a probe and transferring one of the rebels’ officially named moderators to a safe house.

In his statement, Moderator Abdikadir Alio Guyo said that OLA had threatened “content moderators who were constantly pulling down their graphic Facebook Posts.”

“They told us to stop removing their content from Facebook or else we would face dire consequences,” he said, adding that his supervisor dismissed his concerns.
In his declaration, another moderator, Hamza Diba Tubi, stated that OLA sent him a message with the names and addresses of both himself and his coworkers.

“Since I received that threatening message, I have lived in so much fear of even visiting my family members in Ethiopia,” he said.

After peace negotiations in Tanzania in 2023 failed to end a decades-old conflict, the government of Oromiya, Ethiopia’s biggest province, accused OLA rebels of killing “many civilians” in assaults.