Unrest in Kenya as Peace Plan Falters

A woman and child fled Tuesday amid riots in Kibera, a slum in Nairobi. Witnesses said young men lighted fires, clashed with the police and tore up rail tracks. (Karel Prinsloo)
LAMU, Kenya: April 9th. (NY Times) — Riots erupted in Kenya on Tuesday as opposition leaders announced that they were suspending talks with the government over a stalled power sharing agreement. According to witnesses, dozens of young men stormed into the streets of Kibera, a sprawling slum in the capital, Nairobi, lighting bonfires, ripping up railroad tracks and throwing rocks at police officers in a scene reminiscent of the violence that convulsed Kenya in the wake of the Dec. 27 election. “No cabinet, no peace!” the protesters yelled, referring to the cabinet that has yet to be formed because of bitter divisions between the government and the opposition.

The eruption was the first major riot since Feb. 28, when rival politicians signed a power sharing agreement that was billed as the only way to end weeks of bloodshed after the disputed presidential election. The post-election violence killed more than 1,000 people, and drove hundreds of thousands from their homes; most of them are still displaced. Much of the violence flared along ethnic lines and threatened to ruin Kenya’s cherished image as a bastion of stability in a chaotic region. Now, it seems, some of that instability has returned. Riots also broke out in Kisumu, in western Kenya, where witnesses said hundreds of angry opposition supporters blocked the road to the airport and stoned cars. Unruly protests were reported in several other towns. Police officials could not be reached for comment. By the close of business on Tuesday, the Kenyan currency had dropped against the dollar, reflecting the serious damage a few protests can do to an already jittery economy. The problem that set off the disturbances seemed to be the same issue that has bedeviled the reconciliation efforts from the beginning: the division of power. Kenya’s president, Mwai Kibaki, whom opposition leaders and some Western election observers have accused of stealing the vote in December, seems reluctant to grant opposition leaders substantial power.

Under the power sharing accord, Mr. Kibaki and the top opposition leader, Raila Odinga, agreed to form a national unity government in which cabinet positions would be doled out equally. Kofi Annan, the former secretary general of the UN, spent weeks in Kenya building the framework for such a government. But Mr. Kibaki’s side has refused to cede enough powerful ministries, like finance, foreign affairs or internal security, to placate the opposition. It is not clear whether the riots are part of a campaign by opposition supporters to press the government to give up important positions, or if they signal a more serious breakdown in the power sharing agreement. Opposition leaders have denied organizing the protests and said they were spontaneous. Anyang Nyong’o, secretary-general of Mr. Odinga’s party, the Orange Democratic Movement, said it had suspended negotiations until the president’s side “fully recognizes the 50-50 power sharing arrangement and the principle of portfolio balance.” Salim Lone, Mr. Odinga’s spokesman, said that the suspension was meant to be temporary and that Mr. Odinga wanted the talks to resume — but only after each side had sent two emissaries to negotiate about negotiating. “It’s definitely a step back,” Mr. Lone said. “But there is a profound disagreement about the notions of power sharing.”

Mr. Kibaki, meanwhile, has blamed the opposition for confronting him with “preconditions and ultimatums.This matter must come to a close without further delay,” he said in a statement issued Monday. “I invite Odinga to engage constructively so that we can conclude the formation of the new cabinet.” Alfred Mutua, a government spokesman, said Tuesday, “the delay is very simple. Somebody, somewhere is holding Odinga hostage,” he said. “They really want to draw this out.” Mr. Kibaki seems to have the stickiest political calculations to make. His parliamentary coalition is made up of several smaller parties, compared with Mr. Odinga’s movement, which is one political organization and seemingly unified. Diplomats and political scientists here say Mr. Kibaki needs to hand out as many influential cabinet posts as possible to retain political support in Parliament, which is about evenly split between Mr. Kibaki’s and Mr. Odinga’s allies. Mr. Kibaki has pushed for the cabinet to be expanded to 40 ministers, which would be a Kenyan record, from about 35. Mr. Odinga’s party — with many trade organizations — has criticized this, saying that Kenya lacks the money to pay for so many positions, especially when thousands of people still live in tents.
by Jeffrey Gettleman and Kennedy Abwao contributed reporting from Nairobi.
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On the Irish Coast, Reconsidering Energy From the Town Up

A wind turbine dominates the Dundalk Institute of Technology (Steven R. Knowlton)
April 9th. (NY Times) - WHEN the fearsome Cuchulainn was transformed by the rage of battle into a Celtic Incredible Hulk, according to Irish mythology, the warrior’s intensity melted snow for 30 feet around him. That was an impressive generation of alternative energy from this Achilles-like hero so closely associated with Dundalk, but this town on Ireland’s east coast is turning to less ephemeral kinds of power as it tests technologies to reduce the country’s thirst for fossil fuels. The goal is innovation on a local scale, developing clean energy sources and reducing energy demand in a 1.5-square-mile site called a Sustainable Energy Zone. The project is part of a European Union program to encourage pilot projects that can be scaled up to regional or national levels. Dundalk is working with two other towns, in Austria and Switzerland, on a total budget of about $40 million, said Aideen O’Hora, the project manager for Sustainable Energy Ireland, the government agency in charge. But the biggest changes are taking place in Dundalk.

The zone has a bit of everything — an industrial park, a college campus, a high school, a hospital, a hotel, other businesses and two housing developments — in a town of about 30,000 people. The five-year project will be a year old in June, but other initiatives got a head start, and the town of Dundalk is already seeking money for an energy-conscious expansion that could double its size. Some of the current projects are literally high profile. The first thing a visitor spots is a wind turbine 200 feet high that has dominated the campus of the Dundalk Institute of Technology since 2005. It is the inspiration for an even bigger one that will provide power to Xerox in the industrial park. Self-powered streetlights being tested on the campus and in the industrial park also draw curious looks because their small wind turbines and solar panels make them appear as if they are ready for liftoff.

But most of the work is less obvious or is in the planning stage. For example, a wood-fueled system with a gas boiler backup will deliver heat and hot water to many buildings in the zone through underground pipes. And inside the H.J.Heinz plant, which produces frozen dinners for dieters, clever engineering has put the machinery on an energy diet. Energy conservation in the zone means improving the insulation for both new and existing homes. And Sustainable Energy Ireland says that by 2010, renewable energy will account for at least 20 percent of the heat in the zone and at least 20 percent of the electricity used by businesses. That timetable looks overly modest to Lawrence D. Staudt, an American engineer who moved to Ireland in 1985 while working for a Vermont-based wind-power company that went out of business six months later. Mr. Staudt, now the director of the Center for Renewable Energy at the Dundalk Institute of Technology, says Ireland is ideally suited for wind power because of its perch in the northern Atlantic, and he is eager to see it move ahead. The limiting factor is Ireland’s electrical grid, which is being updated. The winds (and wave-power energy potential) are strongest on the western coast, but the country needs some “big pipes” to carry the power to more populous areas, Mr. Staudt explained. “Ireland will become an exporter of green electrons,” he predicted.

The turbine is the largest commercial wind turbine on a college campus, Mr. Staudt said, and it has cut the college’s electricity costs in half. It will pay for itself — the cost was about $2 million — in seven and a half years, he added. The campus center is also studying the self-powered streetlights that are being imported by Horseware, a horse-blanket company in the industrial park. Ciaran Herr, Horseware’s purchasing manager, said he brought some of the lights to the Dundalk plant after seeing them in China. But they have their limits. “The County Council said they were interested in buying them, but I must guarantee 100 percent light at night,” Mr. Herr said. “I can’t do that.” If there were four or five short winter days without wind, the solar energy wouldn’t be enough, and the two small batteries each streetlight has would run dry. So the lights will be best used in places like parks and remote areas, Mr. Herr said, and a power backup might be added. The plan for the zone calls for streetlights like these to be installed in Dundalk’s industrial park.

At Heinz, energy innovation started with recycling and conservation. Then the engineering staff looked for savings in the refrigeration, compressed air and boiler systems. A big chunk of Heinz’s electricity bill comes from freezing the dinners, said Shane Kearney, the chief engineer. The system uses compressed ammonia. “The greater the pressure, the harder it is to pump,” Mr. Kearney said. “We took the pressure down to where the motors didn’t have to work so hard. That took 30 percent off the freezing bill in the first year.” Then utilities workers took a critical look at the compressed-air system used to drive machinery and found that fixing leaks quickly made a big difference in costs. “When we plugged the leaks,” Mr. Kearney said, “we could drop the third compressor. Turned out it was there to keep the leaks happy.” And the second compressor, said Micheal McNally, the utilities supervisor, now has to work only part of the time. Heinz’s boiler-efficiency project stepped onto disputed ground by installing a C.V.E. (calorific value enhancement) system, which produces a pulsed magnetic field around the pipe carrying gas fuel. How this might make the fuel burn more efficiently has not been proved, and many experts contend that it doesn’t work at all. But Mr. McNally said the plant was reaping fuel savings of 4 to 5 percent.

There is more work to do. For example, the heat drawn from the refrigeration apparatus could be used to heat water for cleaning, but the generation of the heat and the cleaning of the plant take place at different times of the day, and the storage of warm water could lead to bacterial growth — unacceptable in a food plant. Still, Mr. McNally thinks a way may be found to do it safely. Heinz is in the Finnabair Industrial Park, which is named after a daughter of Cuchulainn’s rival, Queen Medb. It is an appropriate name — one tale says Finnabair died of shame because of all the men’s lives wasted for her sake. For the engineers, technicians and managers in the industrial park and the Sustainable Energy Zone that includes it, waste is still the problem.
By KAREN FREEMAN for The New York Times
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China Rejects Bid by UN Rights Boss for April Visit

GENEVA, April 10 (Reuters the Guardian) - China has turned down a request by U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour to visit Tibet this month to look into anti-Chinese protests in which at least 19 people died, her spokesman said on Thursday. "The Chinese authorities came back to her... and said it wouldn't be convenient at this time," spokesman Rupert Colville told Reuters. "However they said she would be welcome to make a visit at a later date that would be mutually convenient," he said. Arbour made the request two weeks ago following widespread unrest and reports of killings and mass arrests in the Himalayan region.

The Tibetan protests and Chinese crackdown in Tibet have fuelled protests along the Olympic torch relay route through London, Paris and San Francisco ahead of the summer Olympic games hosted by Beijing in August. Arbour, a former U.N. war crimes prosecutor and Canadian Supreme Court judge, had sought to go to Tibet around mid-April to evaluate the situation after a series of protests by Buddhist monks and rioting in Lhasa on March 14, he said.

China says 19 people died in the violence, but aides to the Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled spiritual leader, say some 140 people died in the unrest across Tibet and nearby provinces with large Tibetan populations. Separately, six U.N. human rights investigators called on China to show restraint and allow journalists and independent experts access to Tibet and nearby regions hit by violence. More than 570 Tibetan monks, including some children, were arrested in late March following raids by security forces on monasteries in Ngaba and Dzoge counties in Tibet, they said in a joint statement issued on Thursday. The U.N. investigators have global mandates to probe allegations of torture, killings, arbitrary detentions, minority issues, as well as curbs on freedom of opinion and expression, and on freedom of religion. They report to the U.N. Human Rights Council, the top U.N. rights forum whose 47 member states include China.

The U.N. investigators said China had organised several fact-finding delegations to visit Tibet but that these were no substitute for granting access to U.N. experts. Arbour, who has announced she will leave office at the end of her four-year term on June 30, previously visited China in September 2005. She said at the time she was "guardedly optimistic" China was making progress on human rights but brushed off Beijing's standard line that every nation should protect rights in its own way -- stressing that international standards had to be met.
By Stephanie Nebehay (Editing by Jonathan Lynn and Jon Boyle)
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Catholic Church Proposes Annan to Mediate Crisis

Archbishop Buti Tlhagale OMI of Johannesburg
PRETORIA, Sth. Africa: April 11, 2008 (CISA) -Ahead of a meeting of regional heads of state on Saturday, the Catholic Church in Southern Africa accused President Robert Mugabe’s government of impunity and lack of respect for the democratic process following delayed release of presidential results of the recent election. The Church called for international mediation to end the political stalemate that has engulfed Zimbabwe since elections on March 29. Presidential results have not been declared two weeks after the polls.Regional leaders will meet in Lusaka, Zambia, over the crisis. Archbishop Buti Tlhagale OMI, president of the Southern African Catholic Bishops Conference, said on Thursday that the Zimbabwean situation had become a matter of regional, continental and international concern. “As President of the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference and on behalf of the Catholic Community in Southern Africa, I call on the leaders of the Southern African Development Community and the African Union to act swiftly to diffuse this tension by mandating a mediator of sufficient international repute, such as Kofi Annan, to ensure a solution that is acceptable to all Zimbabweans.” Archbishop Tlhagale urged South African President Thabo Mbeki, regional and other African leaders “to use all of their influence and skill to intervene for the release of the Zimbabwean election results.”

The delay in releasing the results amounted to impunity and lack of respect for the democratic process, the archbishop said. “The postponement of the release of the results has only fuelled tension and fear in Zimbabwe. The credibility of a peaceful vote has been undermined by this delay and the posturing by political parties. This time of uncertainty has created an opportunity for lawlessness.”

As SADC prepare for an emergency meeting regarding the crisis in Zimbabwe, Amnesty International expressed serious concern at reports of post-election violence targeting perceived supporters of opposition parties. The organisation called on the police to end political violence and investigate any allegations of police and army involvement in some of the incidents. According to information received by Amnesty, incidents of post-election violence are widespread - suggesting the existence of coordinated retribution against known and suspected opposition supporters.

Victims of political violence were reportedly pulled from buses and assaulted at their homes in rural areas, townships and farms.Violence has been reported in Harare, Mashonaland East, Midlands, Matabeleland North and Manicaland provinces.
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Crackdown in Zimbabwe Intensifies

A woman whose hut had been burned down my militants linked to the ruling party recovered a pot and surveyed the damage in Centenary, Zimbabwe, on Friday. (Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi)

JOHANNESBURG, April 12th. (NY Times) — A day before southern Africa’s leaders hold an emergency session on Zimbabwe's disputed election, the government of the beleaguered nation appeared to tighten its control on Friday, banning political rallies, continuing its crackdown on the opposition and arresting the lawyer of its chief rival, Morgan Tsvangirai. The Movement for Democratic Change, Mr. Tsvangirai’s party, said Friday that more than 1,000 of its supporters had been attacked or arrested since the voting took place on March 29, fueling a growing chorus of international criticism of President Robert Mugabe's handling of the elections. Sean McCormack, a State Department spokesman, called upon the Mugabe government “to cease using the tactics and violence and intimidation against those citizens who only want to peacefully exercise their political rights.” In an interview, Mr. Tsvangirai, who independent monitors say may have won an outright majority in the election, reiterated his party’s decision to boycott a runoff against Mr. Mugabe. But he left an opening, saying he would reconsider if African leaders guaranteed the fairness of the tally in the first round and the security of his supporters during a runoff. “There could be a runoff if it’s organized credibly,” he said.

But it is not clear he has a negotiating partner. Zimbabwe’s state-run newspaper, The Herald, said Friday that Mr. Mugabe would not attend Saturday’s emergency meeting of heads of state in Lusaka, Zambia. Instead, four officials in his government will go in his place, though his secretary for foreign affairs, Joey Bimha, told The Herald that the meeting was “unnecessary” because the election commission was still tabulating votes. It has been two weeks since Zimbabweans went to the polls, but election officials have yet to announce the outcome of the presidential race, in which Mr. Mugabe, in power for 28 years, is believed to have trailed by a substantial margin. The long delay, the ban on political rallies, the arrests of election officials on vote-tampering charges and the arrest of Mr. Tsvangirai’s lawyer have intensified the opposition’s assertion that neither the government nor the military has any intention of relinquishing power. Mr. Tsvangirai charged again on Friday that “a de facto coup” was unfolding. Nelson Chamisa, a spokesman for Mr. Tsvangirai’s party, said a campaign of intimidation “on a massive scale” was under way, particularly in areas where Mr. Mugabe did not do well in the elections. “They’re almost turning those into war zones,” he said

The scale of the attacks could not be independently verified, but Amnesty International reported Thursday that it had “information about widespread incidents of post-election violence, suggesting the existence of coordinated retribution against known and suspected opposition supporters.” The Zimbabwean police told The Herald that political rallies had been banned until the election results were released, because the country was in a “sensitive” period, and that only those trying to “ignite violence countrywide” would organize them. The police said they had banned an opposition rally in particular because the party’s members were “spoiling for a fight.” Beyond that, Mr. Tsvangirai’s lawyer, Innocent Chagonda, was held by the police on Friday after authorities seized a helicopter that was meant to ferry Mr. Tsvangirai around during the elections, said Nqobizitha Mlilo, another opposition spokesman. Mr. Tsvangirai has set off on a round of international diplomacy before Saturday’s gathering of heads of state and met Thursday with President Thabo Mbeki of Sth. Africa.

After maintaining that the world needed to wait patiently for Zimbabwe to learn the election’s outcome, officials in Mr. Mbeki’s government, often criticized for not pushing Mr. Mugabe hard enough to change his autocratic ways, said the results should be released quickly. But Mr. Tsvangirai said those results were now too tainted to be the basis for a runoff. “Last night, I put it to him that it was no longer a reasonable expectation because Mugabe had massaged the result,” he said. Mr. Tsvangirai’s party has said he won 50.3 percent of the vote, based on its tallies of results posted at some 9,000 polling stations. The Zimbabwe Election Support Network, a coalition of nonprofit groups, surveyed a sample of polling stations and said Mr. Tsvangirai had won between 47 and 51.8 percent of the vote.
Celia W. Dugger reported from Johannesburg
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A Costly Thirst

April 3rd. (Financial Times) - Slum-dwellers in Dar es Salaam pay the equivalent of £4 ($8, €5) for 1,000 litres of water, bought over time and by the canister. In the same Tanzanian city, wealthier households connected to the municipal supply receive that amount for just 17p. In the UK, the same volume of tap water costs 81p and in the US it is as low as 34p. Figures from other countries confirm the evidence: it is generally the poorest who pay most for what is one of the most essential of all natural resources. Water is in short supply for a large proportion of the world’s people: about 1bn lack access to clean water and 2.6bn have no sanitation. An estimated 5,000 children die every day from water-related disease, according to WaterAid, the London-based charity. If the number of people lacking safe drinking water were halved, at a cost of about $10bn, the world would benefit by $38bn in annual economic growth, according to the United Nations Development Programme. Disputes over water rights can, the UNDP argues, lead to conflicts – such as in Darfur. Yet, as each shower of rain serves to remind, water is just about the most renewable natural resource. The problem is its distribution – not only the climatological patterns that leave some places parched while others flood but also the way societies manage their water resources.

The question is how to put a fair price on water. In some of the same countries where poor people lack access to clean water, others waste the resource because their supply is subsidised by the government or is otherwise priced so low that they have no incentive to save it. This is hardly a problem confined to the developing world. Farmers in Spain are estimated to pay a price for water that is only about 2 per cent of its real cost. Rice and wheat farmers in California’s central valley use one-fifth of the state’s water but the low prices they pay represent a yearly subsidy estimated at $416m for 2006. “Water is absolutely not fairly priced or realistically priced. Therefore people are using water as if it is a resource that will be free of charge forever. That is the reason we are running out of water,” says Peter Brabeck-Letmathe (pictured below), chief executive of Nestlé, the foods group. He warns of an impending crisis in which business will struggle to find the water they need and will be forced to pay much higher prices for it, if more is not done to conserve the resource and distribute it more rationally.

The only answer, argues Mr Brabeck-Letmathe, is to bring market forces to bear. Water must be fairly and realistically priced, in order to ensure it is not wasted. “That is how to move forward,” he says. His company is involved in the issue as part of efforts to present itself as a good citizen in the face of a 30-year-long boycott of its products by consumers who disapprove of Nestlé’s record of promoting powdered baby milk in the developing world. Mixing the infant formula with contaminated water led to numerous deaths that could have been avoided if mothers breast-fed instead, activists allege. The company says it now complies with an international code on marketing such products. One of the most damaging effects of the failure to price water fairly is the global trade in “virtual water” – that is, water used in the production of food or manufactured goods. Some countries that are poor in water nevertheless send it abroad in the form of agricultural and industrial exports.

Australia exports more “virtual water” than any other country, through shipments of wheat and other crops. Its farmers have suffered a seven-year drought, only now showing signs of easing. As a result, they are the most efficient agricultural users of water in the world. Experts wonder, however, whether it makes sense for such an arid country to engage so much in growing irrigation-intensive crops for export. The trade in “virtual water” goes largely unnoticed by consumers of the processed goods. But the price of many goods sold around the world shows that the water that went into their production was very cheap. A pair of jeans that sells for a few pounds uses up to 11,000 litres of water, according to Waterwise, a UK not-for-profit organisation. A hamburger that sells for less than a dollar requires more than 2,400 litres of water to produce. Agricultural users of water are often heavily subsidised, whether directly or indirectly, making the water for farmers “vastly underpriced”, says Andrew Hudson, leader of the water governance programme at the UNDP. This is contributing to serious problems: the UN organisation estimates that in parts of India, ground-water tables are falling by more than a metre a year, jeopardising future agricultural production.

Other businesses may also have their water supply subsidised or may be granted extraction rights that give them cheap or even free access to water sources. The UNDP concludes: “When it comes to water management, the world has been indulging in an activity analogous to a reckless and unsustainable credit-financed spending spree. Countries have been using far more water than they have, as defined by the rate of replenishment.” This recklessness is storing up problems for the future, when the world’s population is forecast to rise to 9bn by 2050 from nearly 6.7bn today. How can water be fairly priced? Many non-governmental organisations want water to be recognised as a basic human right and are suspicious of schemes that raise the price of water. Henry Northover, head of policy at Water­Aid, adds that in some developing countries, poor governance structures hamper attempts to price water: “The success of using pricing as a form of regulating supply is a function of the robustness of institutions and effectiveness of policy regimes.” Mr Hudson believes that water can be better priced if certain conditions are met first: “You need to have mechanisms that provide for the basic human need of 20 litres of water a day [for drinking, cooking and washing]. For that, governments need to apply subsidies in an appropriate fashion and build local access to water.”

Most governments regulate the price of water but, because of the “perverse subsidies”, that often does not result in sensible water pricing. So Mr Brabeck-Letmathe has an alternative idea: water trading. He compares the concept to carbon trading, which has put a price on emitting carbon dioxide in Europe. Under a so-called cap-and-trade mechanism, a limit is imposed on how much carbon companies can emit and allows them to trade their quotas with one another. A similar system with water would mean that businesses and farmers would be granted the right to use a certain amount of water. If they want to use more than their quota, they must buy the rights from other companies or farmers in the trading system. This idea is not new, he says – desert dwellers in Oman have been trading with each other the right to water supplies for thousands of years. More recently, in Nestlé’s native Switzerland, a system has come to exist in some areas where farmers each have a right to take a certain amount from irrigation channels and, depending on the crops they grow, might decide to take less water in return for payment from a neighbour who wants to take more. Fred Krupp, president of Environmental Defense Fund, a US charity, is an enthusiastic supporter of the idea. He told a meeting at Davos in January: “Appropriately designed and applied, a market-based tool such as cap-and-trade can be just as much a solution to our water crisis as it is for global warming.”

But Jamie Skinner, principal researcher at the International Institute for Environment and Development, says there are legal and political obstacles to water trading. He points to Spain, where farmers do not own the water and therefore could not trade it without disentangling water rights from land rights, which is tricky. He adds that for water trading to work, “some degree of privatisation of the resource is needed, which has proved politically difficult or distasteful in many contexts”. Mr Krupp acknowledges that there would be legal and governance problems and vested interests to be overcome – particularly the farming lobby, as agriculture receives the best treatment almost all over the world when it comes to water rights and pays less for its water than any other industry. He says: “There is no question that we have much to do to ensure that water trading occurs in a way that is cost-effective and prevents undue windfalls. We also need to ensure that water transfers don’t hurt rural communities, low-income populations or the environment. An effective system of cap-and-trade for water will require lots of metering and enforcement.” But he insists: “Those issues are very manageable and we and others are already working on them.”

Other differences exist that would hamper imposing a cap-and-trade system on water as has been done with carbon. The trade in carbon is virtual: companies swap permits to emit the greenhouse gas rather than transferring actual tonnages of it. But water is heavy and difficult to transport across long distances. “It is not fungible, it is not deliverable,” says Edward Kerschner, chief investment strategist at Citi Global Wealth Management. The only world shipments of any significance are of bottled water, which is an expensive product often regarded as environmentally unsound. So any trade in water could take place only within small regions, such as areas that share a source. The examples of Switzerland and a few others show that local systems for water trading can be developed, provided the governance is there to ensure that the trading is conducted fairly and there is the political will to press ahead. Whether water trading catches on or not, Mr Brabeck-Letmathe believes one thing is certain: businesses should brace themselves for more expensive water, the use of which would also be more highly regulated. He says: “We will have to pay more for our water – and it is correct that we should.” Many businesses would prefer a system of water trading to having their charges arbitrarily raised by water companies or bureaucrats, he argues. As Mr Krupp concludes: “What relevance does all this have to the business community? A secure water future, including healthy river systems, contributes to a healthy business climate. Markets and conservation are the most cost-effective alternatives for getting to that secure water future.” For the poor who pay disproportionately high amounts for their water, fairer pricing could not come soon enough.
By Fiona Harvey, Environment Correspondent
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Darfur Violence May Be Worse, Despite UN Efforts

UNITED NATIONS: April 5th: (Reuters) - The violence against civilians in Sudan's Darfur region may be worsening, despite seven U.N. Security Council resolutions and four years of efforts to end it, the United Nations chief said on Friday. "Four years ago this week, the Security Council first took up the issue of Darfur," Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a statement. "The situation remains grim today, as then, if not worse. Violence targeting civilians, including women and girls, continues at alarming levels with no accountability or end in sight" and Kartoum and the rebels have yet to "lay down their arms and commit to a peaceful settlement," he said. "A peacekeeping operation can only be effective when there is a peace to keep."

Ban's comments came after the U.S. presidential envoy for Darfur, Richard Williamson, sent him a letter urging him to speed up deployment of peacekeepers to Darfur and ensure that at least 3,600 new soldiers and police are there by June. Only some 9,000 of the planned 26,000 U.N.-African Union peacekeepers have been deployed to Darfur. Western governments have blamed Khartoum for the slow progress, saying it has delayed approval of the composition of the force and set up unnecessary obstacles. U.N. peacekeeping officials also complain of a lack of helicopters needed to move troops around Darfur, which is roughly the size of France. Some diplomats say neither The United States nor Russia has put enough pressure on China to influence Khartoum to stop trying to delay the deployment.

In an interview with Reuters on Thursday, Williamson said these problems should not be used as "excuses" for delaying deployment and urged the United Nations to act with urgency. Washington has not offered troops or helicopters but has pledged some $500 million to build camps and train and equip the mostly African Darfur mission, known as UNAMID. Ban made it clear the Security Council's action on Darfur over the years has done little to stem the violence. "Although the Security Council has adopted seven resolutions related to Darfur since 2004, the conflict and suffering of the people of Darfur continue," Ban said. "As a result of ongoing attacks by armed forces and groups, more than 100,000 civilians have been forced to flee from violence this year alone, at a rate of 1,000 per day."

International experts estimate around 2.5 million people have been displaced and 200,000 have died in five years of violence in Darfur which Washington calls genocide. Khartoum denies genocide and puts the death toll at 9,000. Separately, Ban told the Security Council in a new report that UNAMID urgently needed more helicopters if it was to be effective on the ground. However, he said he was accelerating the deployment of troops to Darfur, beginning with Egyptian and Ethiopian units. Following their deployment, troops will arrive from Thailand and Nepal, Ban said. The deployment of non-African troops in Darfur has been sensitive for Khartoum, which insists UNAMID must be "predominantly" African.

Ban's spokeswoman Marie Okabe said Khartoum had officially approved the deployment of the Thai and Nepalese troops, though Sudan's U.N. envoy indicated Khartoum could be hesitating. "We will exhaust all possibilities for troops from Africa," Sudan's U.N. Ambassador Abdalmahmoud Abdalhaleem told Reuters. "After that we will consider others, with the consultation and approval of the government."
By Louis Charbonneau
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Rival Resists Runoff Election in Zimbabwe

The opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai said Saturday that he was the winner of Zimbabwe’s presidential election in March. (Alexander Joe/Agence France-Presse)
JOHANNESBURG: April 6th. (NY Times) — The Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai on Saturday insisted that he had won the presidential election outright and that no runoff vote would be needed. He also warned that the governing party was readying a campaign of violence against his supporters to hang on to power. Mr. Tsvangirai (pronounced CHANG-guh-rye) promised safety to President Roberet Mugabe, 84, if he stepped aside. But early Sunday, the government-run Sunday Mail newspaper reported that Mr. Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party, referring to “errors” in the tally, had asked for a recount in the election. The party also called on the election commission to “defer the announcement of the presidential election result,” the newspaper said on its Web site.

Mr. Tsvangirai’s call for Mr. Mugabe to enter talks aimed at a peaceful, democratic transition had already seemed unlikely to find a warm reception from ZANU-PF. On Friday it said Mr. Mugabe would take part in a runoff if neither he nor Mr. Tsvangirai, 56, won a majority. The opposition and Mr. Mugabe’s party are jockeying for political position as the country and the world wait with consternation for Zimbabwean election officials to announce the outcome of a presidential election held last Saturday, a race that by the opposition’s count gave Mr. Tsvangirai a bare majority, though an independent projection of results found him well ahead but short of a majority. Lawyers for Mr. Tsvangirai’s party, Movement for Democratic Change, tried Saturday to force the Electoral Commission to release the official tally through a petition to the High Court. A hearing is expected on Sunday. When the lawyers approached the court in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital, on Saturday morning, to file the lawsuit, armed police officers briefly blocked them from entering, Reuters reported. “We can’t go in,” an opposition lawyer, Alec Muchadehama, told journalists. “They are threatening to shoot. They say no one enters the court.”

A growing chorus that includes Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain and Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary general, has appealed for a speedy release of the vote count. But on Saturday, President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, perhaps the most important international player in Zimbabwe’s electoral drama, counseled patience after meeting Mr. Brown in London, news agencies reported. “I think there is time to wait,” said Mr. Mbeki, who was appointed by a regional bloc of nations to mediate in Zimbabwe but has been accused by Mr. Tsvangirai of favoring Mr. Mugabe. “Let’s see the outcome of the election results.” The governing party, which has led the country into a ruinous economic decline, lost its majority in the lower house of Parliament in last week’s election for the first time since the country’s independence from white rule in 1980, but is now demanding a recount for 16 seats, apparently in a bid to reclaim control.

Mr. Tsvangirai, who was beaten by the police in a crackdown on the opposition last year, warned at a news conference in Harare that Mr. Mugabe’s party would resort to violent intimidation of his supporters during a runoff. He expressed reservations about participating in a runoff, though he stopped short of threatening a boycott. He said the party was mobilizing youth militias and veterans of the independence struggle to carry out a campaign he described as a war against the people. The party, which confiscated large, commercial farms of white farmers, helping lead to the economy’s collapse, is stoking fears that an opposition government would take land given to blacks and return it to whites. Much of the land was given to Mr. Mugabe’s cronies, Zimbabwe analysts say. A state-run newspaper, The Herald, said Saturday that white farmers were returning “in droves,” threatening to reclaim their land, a charge Roy Bennett, the opposition party’s treasurer, called “absolute nonsense.” There are signs that Mr. Mugabe’s party is tightening its grip on the country. The police blocked the main roads leading into Harare’s center on Saturday, and were searching vehicles.

The government has also cracked down on foreign journalists, who have been covering the election without accreditation. On Thursday, the police arrested Barry Bearak, a correspondent in the Johannesburg bureau of The New York Times, on charges related to covering the election without official permission from the government. He was still being held in a Harare jail on Saturday. Mr. Tsvangirai’s party ran large advertisements in major South African newspapers on Saturday calling on Zimbabwe’s neighbors and other countries to support its efforts to unseat Mr. Mugabe. “At this stage, we offer the hand of peace to the current regime, and will recognize and respect their rights, if the transition is expedited without further ado, but this offer will not remain open indefinitely,” the advertisement said.
By Celia Dugger
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Displaced Kenyans Live in Limbo as Aid Lags After Election Strife

Clinton Masheti, 8, was left behind when his parents fled post-election violence last December. Now he lives in a children’s home in Nairobi. (Guillaume Bonn)
NAIROBI, Kenya: April 6th. (NY Times) — Clinton Masheti, 8 years old and all alone, sits on a wooden bench rolling snakes out of clay. When the men came and started burning down houses in his village, his parents ran away — without him. He now lives in the Nairobi Children’s Home, a place with cheery paintings on the wall and lots of blank little faces. He is among thousands of children lost or abandoned during the fighting that followed Kenya’s disputed election in December. If Clinton’s parents are not found by August, he will be put up for adoption. “My father was a farmer,” he said. That seemed to be all he knew. In another part of town not far away, Jane Wanjiru has been living in muddy uncertainty since January. She and about 200 other displaced people are camping just up the road from one of Nairobi’s fanciest malls. Their tents and clotheslines are curious sights so close to the Mercedes-Benzes and mansions, a reminder in case anyone here needs one that the issue of displaced people is not isolated to the Rift Valley, where most of the election-related bloodshed was, but has crept into the capital, Nairobi. Still, very little has been done about it. More than 300,000 people remain homeless, living in camps or staying temporarily with relatives, but top politicians have been preoccupied with haggling over cabinet posts and forming a coalition government.

Officials recently announced that the new government would include 40 ministries, a Kenyan record, and many people fear that the money for salaries, cars and staff for the bloated cabinet will eat into what the displaced people need. Donors have pledged millions of dollars to build homes and resettle people, but most of that is in limbo. And now it is the rainy season. Nearly every day, the skies crack open and the water gushes down. Tents collapse, latrines overflow, firewood gets soggy, food goes uncooked and diseases like malaria and the flu flourish. Many of the displaced people are farmers, and the same rains they would have prayed for, had they not been violently driven off their land, are now a curse. Three women in a camp recently died from exposure to the cold and 5-month-old twins from pneumonia. “The rains are my biggest fear,” said Naomi Shaban, Kenya’s minister of special programs, who oversees the displaced persons camps. “These people are living in tents, and these are not just showers, they are heavy rains. There is a lot of contamination, with children playing in the water. We anticipate health problems.”

Many displaced people in this nation of 37 million are worried about how long they can survive and feel abandoned by their government. Ms. Wanjiru, who voted for Mwai Kibaki, Kenya’s president, said she did not support him — or any other politician — anymore. “All we get are words,” she said. She spends her days washing the few clothes she has and sitting in a cracked plastic chair watching the cars go by. A mother of six with a seventh on the way, she said she did not even have the bus fare to go into town or check out the mall. “I lost everything,” she said. Ms. Shaban defended the president, saying he was very concerned about the plight of the displaced people and that helping them is a post-election priority. She said the government had already spent $11 million on food and medicine since January, though the distribution of supplies was sometimes delayed, because some of the people hanging around the displaced persons camps were “impostors” and it took time to verify who the real victims were.

The Kenyan government is asking donor nations, including the United States, to provide nearly $500 million to resettle people and rebuild the tens of thousands of burned down homes, businesses, public utilities and schools. After the disputed election, supporters of the government and of the leading opposition party raged against each other. More than 1,000 people were killed, many quite brutally, and much of the fighting was along ethnic lines. Ms. Shaban, like many other government officials, insisted that most of the displaced people would eventually go home. “As the healing process goes on, more and more want to go back,” she said. But many people are scared. Hundreds of thousands have already resettled in areas where their ethnic group dominates, because that is seen as the only way to guarantee safety. Just a few days ago, in late March, leaflets were circulated in several Rift Valley towns telling Kikuyus, Mr. Kibaki’s ethnic group, that if they returned, they would be killed. “People are still bitter,” said Florence Muia, a Catholic nun who works with displaced people. “They have seen this violence before, and this time they are saying never again.” Many of the displaced children, traumatized into near silence, simply have nothing to return to.

Naomi and Joseph Nganga were abandoned by their father after a mob burned down their house in the Rift Valley and their mother died from a stomach sickness in a displaced persons camp. They are sister and brother, 9 and 10 years old, and live in the children’s home with about 80 others, including: Clinton, who speaks in whispers; a 3-year-old whom workers call Baby Joshua because they do not have any more information about him; and a cheerful 16-year-old named Millicent who has a baby of her own. The boys wear V-neck sweaters and the girls plaid dresses. They play in bare concrete rooms and drink plastic mugs of tea for a snack. When asked if he wanted to stay in the children’s home in Nairobi or go back to his village, Joseph’s voice dropped to a mumble. “I just want to go to school,” he said. His sister nodded next to him and then looked down at her cracked leather shoes.
by Jeffrey Gettleman
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