Report: Annan's Room Bugged, 100 Million Affected by Kenyan Violence

[At right: the Rift Valley in Kenya.]

Until the recently disputed elections and ensuring street violence, Kenya held special status on the African continent. The vital role it played in providing stability is all the more evident now that Nairobi and the Rift Valley are embroiled in violent political conflict.

Former Secretary-General Kofi Annan has so far headed the peace negotiations, but a report from South Africa's Independent Newspapers claims that the ranking diplomat's hotel room has been bugged and the peace talks are now "in tatters." Annan's security aides uncovered the spy device. No word on who might have planted it.

At the same time, a substantial report from IRIN explains that, because of the disruptions in Nairobi, more than 100 million people—that is a third of the population of the entire US—could be affected in Sudan, Uganda, Burundi, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Considering the thin lifelines staving off conflict in some of these places, that the Rift Valley makes up a 6,000-kilometer fissure in the earth's crust may soon serve as a chilling metaphor.

From the IRIN report:

Southern Sudan, Uganda, Burundi, Rwanda and the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have experienced shortages of fuel and other essential supplies because of insecurity along the Kenyan section of the Northern Corridor, one of the most important transport routes in Africa. It runs from the Kenyan port of Mombasa westwards through Uganda and the Great Lakes.

Among aid agencies, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) faces the greatest challenge, feeding seven million vulnerable people in East Africa and the Great Lakes.

"WFP is extremely concerned because Kenya is not just supplying Kenya. It's supplying much of east and central Africa, both with commercial trade and food and also humanitarian assistance. It's a very worrying problem," WFP spokesman Peter Smerdon told IRIN.

"We need to feed seven million people every month and that includes 250,000 [internally displaced by the post-election violence] in Kenya on top of our normal caseload. We need a continuous supply line.

"If the roads are closed for a week or two weeks, then we get into real problems. We might have to start postponing food distributions. You could see people [going] hungry if the road network is knocked out for weeks," he said.

Covering more than 1,400km, the Northern Corridor is the largest in Africa, used by 4,000 light vehicles, 1,250 trucks and 400 buses per day. It carries more than 10 million tonnes of cargo a year.

WFP moves more than 1,000 tonnes of food out of Mombasa every day of the year, according to Alistair Cook, the logistics co-ordinator. "WFP has to keep the corridor in operation or else we will lose hundreds of thousands of refugees through starvation," he said.

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China Abets, Arms Sudanese Regime [J. Peter Pham]

Today my weekly “Strategic Interests” column for the World Defense Review examines the close relationship between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Sudanese regime responsible for the situation in Darfur that former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has characterized as “the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.”

Arguing that “while Beijing’s ties to Sudan are predicated upon a complex series of political and economic considerations, it is nonetheless true that without mainland China, it is rather unlikely that President Umar Hassan al-Bashir would be in any position to pose much of a threat to Darfuris, South Sudanese, or any other of the peoples long-oppressed by his Arab-dominated Islamist regime,” the article goes on to detail the economic, political, and military links between the PRC and its African partner. Notwithstanding the claims of some U.S. officials that China has been “constructive” in its engagement with Sudan, some Sudanese have a very different interpretation of the relationship. Abdel Aziz el-Nur Asher, commander of the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), one of the Darfuri rebel forces, for example, declared recently that “China is complicit in the genocide being carried out in Darfur and the Chinese are here to protect their oil interests in Kordofan”—an understandable charge given that Beijing has become Khartoum’s largest arms supplier, selling or trading for oil a full array of goods from ammunition for 122 mm howitzers to armored trucks to T-59 tanks to Shenyang J-8 single-seat fighters and F-7 supersonic fighter jets, all of which the regime has turned on Sudan’s peoples.

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The list of suspects, compiled from independent investigations into the post-election crisis, almost certainly includes cabinet ministers from the PNU and ODM political parties, which sit on opposite sides of the coalition government. Ocampo's submission followed a request from the judges for additional information linking individuals and state policy to the violence.