World

An agreement has been struck which could mean the adoption of a ceasefire in the violence-torn east of DR Congo as soon as late Friday, Angola’s Foreign Minister Tete Antonio has said.

The Democratic Republic of Congo’s President Felix Tshisekedi had been meeting Rwandan Foreign Minister Vincent Biruta in Luanda on Wednesday as tensions soared between the neighbours amid bloody militia violence on their border.  

Eastern DRC has witnessed fierce fighting in recent months between Congolese troops and the M23 rebel group.

An agreement was reached for an “immediate ceasefire” in the DRC at 6:00 pm (1600 GMT) Friday, Tete said after the talks. 

The parties also agreed to demand “the immediate withdrawal of M23 rebels from the occupied areas”, he added.  

The clashes have triggered a diplomatic row, with the DRC accusing Rwanda of aiding the rebels, something that its far smaller neighbour denies.

The East African Community (EAC), of which Rwanda is a member, has also vowed to deploy a joint force to quell the violence.

Kenyan soldiers arrived in the DRC earlier this month and Uganda says it will shortly deploy around 1,000 troops. 

The EAC’s chair, Burundian President Evariste Ndayishimiye, and former Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta — the EAC’s “facilitator” in efforts to restore peace and security in the mineral-rich region — were also in Luanda.

Rwandan President Paul Kagame was not in attendance at the talks for reasons that were not immediately clear. 

Ahead of the talks, the UN Security Council members called for a halt to fighting, for the M23 to withdraw from occupied areas and for the end to “all external support to non-state armed actors, including the M23.”

The M23, a largely Congolese Tutsi militia, has seized swathes of territory across North Kivu province, edging towards the region’s main city of Goma.

The DRC and Rwanda agreed to a de-escalation plan in July, but clashes resumed the very next day.

On Tuesday, Kinshasa said it would not sit down for talks with M23 rebels until the group withdrew from the areas it controlled.  

The M23 first leapt to prominence 10 years ago when it captured Goma, before being driven out and going to ground. 

It re-emerged late last year, claiming the DRC had failed to honour a pledge to integrate its fighters into the army, among other grievances.

Rwanda, denying the DRC’s charges against it, accuses Kinshasa of colluding with the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) — a former Rwandan Hutu rebel group that was established in the DRC after the 1994 genocide.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was set to address an urgent meeting of the UN Security Council Wednesday, as Russian strikes left the country’s energy system in tatters.

“Murder of civilians, ruining of civilian infrastructure are acts of terror. Ukraine keeps demanding a resolute response of international community to these crimes,” Zelensky said in a tweet.

He will address the emergency debate — requested by Kyiv and due to start at 4:00 pm (2100 GMT) in New York — via video-link, diplomats told AFP.

The Ukrainian energy system has been torn apart and millions have been subjected to long periods without electricity after weeks of Russian bombardments, with the World Health Organization (WHO) warning the country’s priority this winter would be “survival”.

The Ukrainian military said Russian forces had fired around 70 cruise missiles at targets across the country on Wednesday and also deployed attack drones.

The Russian strikes caused widespread blackouts in neighbouring Moldova.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said the latest Russian salvo was a response to a decision by the European Parliament to recognise Russia as a “state sponsor of terrorism” over its nine-month invasion of Ukraine, and its call for the 27-nation EU to follow.

“Being unable to win in a fair fight with the Ukrainian army, Russia wages a cowardly war of terror against civilians,” Kuleba said, urging Kyiv’s Western backers to supply more air defence systems.

The strikes on Wednesday piled pressure on the Ukrainian grid, disrupting power supplies in southern and eastern regions, with water and electricity cuts in the capital Kyiv and elsewhere.

– Burnt out cars, corpses –

“Three people were killed as a result of today’s rocket attacks on the capital. Among them is a 17-year-old girl,” Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko wrote on Telegram, adding that 11 residents were injured.

AFP reporters at the scene of one strike in Kyiv saw the burnt out remains of two cars and the bodies of two people killed in the blast.

Ukrainian police told local media that six people were killed across the country.

Russia has systematically targeted Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, causing severe damage to around half of the country’s power facilities.

The WHO has cautioned that winter will be “life-threatening” for millions of people as a result.

Lviv mayor Andriy Sadovyi said half of the western city was without electricity, but that scheduled outages were continuing.

Neighbouring Moldova said it was suffering widespread blackouts caused by the barrage and its EU-friendly president, Maia Sandu, accused Russia of leaving her country “in the dark”.

Ukraine’s nuclear energy operator Energoatom said Wednesday’s strikes had disconnected all three nuclear power plants still under Ukrainian control from the grid and forced the plant in Zaporizhzhia — controlled by Russian forces — to be powered by back-up generators.

 In Zaporizhzhia earlier on Wednesday, Russian strikes smashed into a hospital in the city of Vilniansk, killing a newborn baby in the maternity ward.

– ‘Grief fills our hearts’

Emergency services said a woman and doctor also in the building had survived, as official footage showed workers wearing protective helmets trying to dig out a man trapped waist-deep in rubble.

“Grief fills our hearts,” said Oleksandr Starukh, the head of the Zaporizhzhia region, in the wake of the attack.

Vilniansk is around 45 kilometres (28 miles) from the frontline, and was targeted in Russian strikes last week that killed 10 people.

Moscow claimed to have annexed Zaporizhzhia alongside three other Ukraine regions last month despite not having full control of the territory.

The fresh strikes were only the latest to hit Ukrainian medical facilities since Russia invaded on February 24.

The WHO has warned that attacks on the energy grid are causing severe disruptions at Ukrainian hospitals.

An infamous attack last March on a hospital in the war-battered coastal city of Mariupol left at least three dead in an attack widely condemned by Ukraine and its allies, which Moscow insisted was “staged”.

In the Kharkiv region, Russian strikes on a residential building and a clinic left two people dead, the governor said.

– ‘Attacks and atrocities’ –

The WHO has recorded more than 700 attacks on Ukraine’s health facilities since Russia’s invasion began, it said this week.

The move by European legislators to recognise Russia as a “state sponsor of terrorism” is a symbolic political step with no legal consequences.

Kyiv has for months called on the international community to declare Russia a “terrorist state,” and the Strasbourg parliament’s decision will likely anger Moscow.

The resolution approved by EU lawmakers said the “deliberate attacks and atrocities carried out by the Russian Federation against the civilian population of Ukraine… and other serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law amount to acts of terror.” 

Ukraine praised the decision, with Zelensky calling for Russia to be “held accountable in order to end its long-standing policy of terrorism in Ukraine and across the globe.”

Separately, Ukraine’s security service announced it had seized “pro-Russian literature” and cash, and interrogated dozens during raids on several Orthodox monasteries that spurred a backlash from the Kremlin.

The SBU said it had probed 850 people including Russian and Ukrainian citizens.

A record high of nearly 40 million children around the world missed a measles vaccine dose in 2021, according to a new report Wednesday that found immunization levels had failed to rebound from disruptions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

The research, which was jointly published by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said the decline was a major setback in eliminating the deadly disease.

WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus noted the irony in the fact that  while vaccines against Covid were developed and deployed in record time, routine immunization programs were badly impacted, leaving millions at risk.

“Getting immunization programs back on track is absolutely critical. Behind every statistic in this report is a child at risk of a preventable disease,” he said in a statement.

According to the report, 25 million children missed their first dose while 14.7 million missed their second.

Measles is almost entirely preventable through vaccination.

But because it is so contagious, an estimated 95 percent of a population needs to be vaccinated with two or more doses in order to create herd immunity to achieve and maintain elimination.

In 2021, only 81 percent of children globally received their first dose and 71 percent received their second.

It was the lowest global coverage rate of the first dose since 2008.

The five countries with the highest number of infants who did not receive their first dose were Nigeria, India, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia and Indonesia.

No WHO region has achieved and sustained measles elimination, and the virus can quickly spread across borders. 

Since 2016, ten countries that had previously eliminated measles experienced outbreaks and reestablished transmission.

Measles is characterized by high fever and a telltale rash — though part of what makes it so dangerous is that it can be contagious for days before the rash emerges.

Complications can include pneumonia and swelling of the brain, which can cause permanent disability.

Between 1 and 3 in every thousand children die from respiratory and neurologic complications.

Scotland’s leader vowed Wednesday to turn the next UK general election into a de facto vote on independence, after judges blocked her bid to hold a new referendum without London’s approval.

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said the ruling by the Supreme Court in London exposed the “myth” that Scotland could voluntarily leave the United Kingdom.

The unanimous ruling torpedoed the Scottish nationalist government’s push to hold a second plebiscite next October — nearly a decade after Scots narrowly opted to remain in a pre-Brexit UK.

Sturgeon, who leads the Scottish National Party (SNP), said she respected the ruling, but accused Westminster of showing “contempt” for Scotland’s democratic will.

The SNP-led government will now look to use the UK election due by early 2025 as a “de facto referendum” on separating after more than 300 years, Sturgeon told a news conference.

“We must and we will find another democratic, lawful and constitutional means by which the Scottish people can express their will. In my view, that can only be an election,” she added.

Outside the court, David Simpson, 70, who first voted for the SNP in 1970, said he was still hopeful of achieving independence in the future.

“This is not the end of the road,” he told AFP. “There is nothing impossible.”

In Edinburgh, campaigners holding a Saltire flag emblazoned with the words “Scottish not British” said their voices had been stifled.

“Nobody is letting us have our say,” said Gerard Clarke, 74.

Protester David Turner said the rejection would only strengthen support for going it alone.

“They might try to stop it but it’s now a one-way path to independence,” he added.

Campaigners, however, were met with anti-independence supporters at a rally outside the Scottish parliament waving placards including one reading: “We want to stay in the UK.”

In the UK parliament in London, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called the ruling “clear and definitive” and called for politicians north and south of the border to work together.

SNP leaders were scornful, arguing Sunak lacked a democratic mandate of his own after he was made prime minister only via the votes of Tory MPs.

– ‘Mandate’ –

The Supreme Court’s Scottish president, Robert Reed, said the power to call a referendum was “reserved” to the UK parliament under Scotland’s devolution settlement.

Therefore “the Scottish parliament does not have the power to legislate for a referendum on Scottish independence”, Reed said.

Sturgeon’s SNP-led government in Edinburgh wanted to hold a vote next October on the question: “Should Scotland be an independent country?”

The UK government, which oversees constitutional affairs for the whole country, has repeatedly refused to give Edinburgh the power to hold a referendum.

It considers that the last one — in 2014, when 55 percent of Scots rejected independence — settled the question for a generation.

But Sturgeon and her party say there is now an “indisputable mandate” for another independence referendum, particularly in light of the UK’s departure from the European Union.

Most voters in Scotland opposed Brexit. 

Scotland’s last parliamentary election returned a majority of pro-independence lawmakers for the first time.

Opinion polls, however, indicate only a slight lead for those in favour of a split.

– Scotland not Kosovo –

Lawyers for the Scottish government wanted a ruling on the rights of the devolved parliament in Edinburgh if London continued to block an independence referendum.

The Scottish government was seeking to create its own legal framework for another referendum, arguing that the “right to self-determination is a fundamental and inalienable right”.

But the Supreme Court rejected international comparisons raised by the SNP, which had likened Scotland to Quebec or Kosovo.

Reed said international law on self-determination only applied to former colonies, or where a people is oppressed by military occupation, or when a defined group is denied its political and civil rights.

None of that applied to Scotland, he added.

He also rejected the SNP’s argument that a referendum would only be “advisory” and not legally binding.

Any such vote would carry “important political consequences” regardless of its legal status, the judge said.

The SNP ran in the 2021 Scottish parliamentary elections on a promise to hold a legally valid referendum after the Covid crisis subsided. 

“As long as there is breath in my body, I refuse to give up on the basic principle of democracy,” Sturgeon said, announcing the SNP will hold a special conference in the New Year to prepare its independence push.

Ecuador has become an unlikely hub for the global drug trade, flooding the world with Colombian cocaine while bloodshed rages between a complex tapestry of local gangs backed by Mexican and European mafia.

“The cocaine that leaves Ecuador’s ports goes to the whole world, mainly the United States and Europe, but also Asia and Australia,” said Chris Dalby, an investigator with organized crime think tank Insight Crime.

Ecuador is not known to have large plantations of drug crops, laboratories for refining cocaine, or major drug cartels. 

Instead, it has become a staging ground for foreign mafia, upping the stakes for local gangs who are brutally killing each other as they jockey for valuable alliances and control of drug routes.

In September, the United States listed Ecuador among the top 22 drug-producing or transit countries in the world.

Geography and corruption are among the main reasons that one of Latin America’s smaller countries has evolved into a hotspot of transnational organized crime.

Ecuador borders the world’s two largest cocaine producers, Colombia and Peru, who produce 1,400 and 400 tonnes of the drug respectively, according to UN estimates.

Its major Guayaquil port, from where most of the drugs are shipped abroad — often in containers of bananas or in legal shipments by front companies — is seen as having weaker controls.

– History with Colombian guerrillas  –

Ecuador is “a natural exit point for Colombian cocaine,” Dalby told AFP.

This is largely because it has long been a haven for Colombian armed groups, such as the Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas.

Before a 2016 peace deal that led to its demobilization, FARC controlled Colombia’s coca-growing areas for decades and acted as a go-between for farmers and drug traffickers. 

Ecuadoran gangs would move the drugs “from the border to various ports,” said Dalby.

However, in recent years patterns of criminal activity in the region have changed, the International Crisis Group (ICG) said earlier this month.

Cocaine production has boomed in Colombia, where dissident FARC rebels who did not lay down arms have started to produce cocaine in the south, and move it into Ecuador by “river or by road” themselves, said Dalby.

According to the ICG, Ecuador’s move to dollarize its economy in 2000, and weak financial controls, also made it a “hotspot for laundering illicit profits.”

According to a UN report, Ecuador was home to the third-highest number of cocaine seizures in 2020, with Colombia in first place, followed by the United States.

– Global mafia operation –

So who else has a finger in the pie?

A study by the Colombian Observatory of Organized Crime (OCCO) said that Ecuadoran criminal groups had also forged alliances with powerful families who control drug crops in Peru.

A network of rivers link Peru with southern Ecuador, easing the smuggling of goods and people.  

Mexico’s powerful Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels also operate in Ecuador. There is also an increased presence of Balkan mafia in the country.

The Mexican and Balkan cartels have alliances with Colombian armed groups who organize the transport of drugs to Ecuador.

Mathew Charles, who authored the OCCO study, told AFP there had been a “fragmentation” of the drug business between buyers and sellers.

Before, Italy’s feared ‘Ndrangheta mafia strongly influenced the Colombian drug business.

The foreign mafia have forged alliances with local gangs such as the Chone Killers, the Choneros, Aguilas, Latin Kings or Los Lobos.

– Prison HQ –

The battle for control among local gangs plays out in Ecuador’s prisons, mainly in Guayaquil.

In the city’s main prison complex, Guayas 1, each of the 12 blocks is controlled by a different gang.

Since last year, almost 400 inmates have died in several cities, most of them in Guayaquil, which has also been hit by car bombs and shocking scenes of bodies dangling from bridges.

According to OCCO, the war has been made bloodier by the fact that Mexican gangs often pay their local counterparts for their services with weapons rather than cash.

The mafia groups bribe the police, military, and prosecutors, and have turned to the kind of vicious violence typically seen in Colombia, Mexico, and other countries, where high-level officials targeting them, are killed.