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The United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan has sent a team to Lebanon to verify Syria's assertion that it has withdrawn all its forces from the country. A farewell ceremony was held at a border town in the Bekka valley earlier in the day, but there have been reports that Syrian intelligence agents have merely redeployed south of Beirut. Mr. Annan said both the Syrian and Lebanese governments had denied this. From the UN headquarters in New York. Susanna Price reports.
The Secretary General's report made it clear it was too early to state definitively that Syria had withdrawn all its troops from Lebanon. However, Mr. Annan said Syria's government has sent him a letter saying it had fulfilled that commitment. Mr. Annan said that according to the Lebanese and Syrian governments, assertions that Syrian military intelligence has taken up new position south of Beirut were untrue. A UN team has just gone to Lebanon to verify the withdrawal of all Syrian troops, military assets and intelligence.
The United Nations refugee agency the UNHCR says it is alarmed by evidence that pro-government militias in the western Sudanese region of Darfur appear to have renewed their campaign of burning villages to prevent former residents from returning home. A UNHCR official said that if similar attacks continued, many of the two million displaced people may never be able to return, and Darfur's social and demographic structure will have changed for ever. Imaging Fox reports from Geneva.
Staff from the UN refugee agency visited a village near Masteri in western Darfur and found it in ashes. Local people told them the two hundred families who once lived there had fled the Janjaweed militias a year ago. Last week they said, the militia returned and set fire to the village. The refugee agency says that in October and November of last year, around 55 abandoned villages near Masteri were burned to the ground. Now it seems the burning has started up again.
President Vladimir Putin is in Cairo on the first top level Russian visit to Egypt for forty years. Mr. Putin's talks with President Hosny Mubarak are expected to focus on the Middle East peace process. Russia is one of the four sponsors of the peace plan known as the road map which it's hoped will eventually lead to stable and independent Israeli and Palestinian states living side by side.
Opposition activists in Togo have vowed not to give up their protests after the ruling party candidate Faure Gnassingb was declared the winner of Sunday's presidential elections. Crowds of opposition supporters took to the streets of the capital Lome earlier in the day setting up burning barricades, stoning cars,and attacking anyone they thought was associated with the ruling party. The main opposition leader Gilchrist Olympio appealed to his supporters not to provoke the security forces. From Lome Elizabeth Blant reports.
Nothing will convince the opposition that the election wasn't stolen from them that their candidate Bob-Akitani wasn't the true winner. They complained of almost every known form of election rigging, the corrupt electoral rule, difficulties in getting voters' cards, and then on the day vote buying, stuffed ballot boxes, multiple voting and eventually the theft and destruction of ballot boxes in known opposition areas. But a team of observers from the west African regional organization ECOWAS said that despite some problems this hadn't affected the overall credibility of the election.
The chief UN war crimes prosecutor for the former Yugoslavia has said Croatia is still not cooperating enough in the hunt for a major war crime suspect, a key requirement for Croatia to start talks to join the European Union. Speaking after talks with the EU the prosecutor Carla del Ponte said that the suspect general Ante Gotovina was within the reach of the Croatian authorities, but he's still not been extradited to the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague.
As you know, that is only for Croatia one issue left to transfer Ante Gotovina to The Hague. All our information that we received are that he is still in Croatia and so Gotovina is on the reach of the Croatian authority.
With just over a week to go before the British general election, the opposition conservative party has stepped up its attack on the integrity of the Prime Minister Tony Blair. It's launched a hard-hitting poster campaign branding him a liar over his justification for invading Iraq. If he's prepared to lie to take us to war, the poster says, he is prepared to lie to win an election. Mr. Blair has rejected accusations he lied and he accused his political opponents of ignoring the real issues facing Britain. |
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