The June 18 New York Times features a front-page above-the-fold story by Jeffrey Gettleman, "In Ethiopian Desert, Fear and Cries of Army Brutality"—the first significant account in the "newspaper of record" of the forgotten war on the Ogaden people (which apppears proudly on the Ogaden Online website). The lead photo features dread-locked rifle-toting guerillas of the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF), with whom Gettleman trudged across the desert, in an area closed to outsiders by Ethiopian government decree. He visited war-ravaged villages where residents told him account after harrowing account of government troops burning homes, killing and abducting residents, and engaging in wholesale rape and torture with impunity.

A suspected suicide blast in the middle of a Nairobi street June 11 has left at least one dead and dozens injured. The blast occurred during rush hour near the Ambassadeur Hotel in the city's packed central business district. It shattered shop windows and damaged a nearby bus. Kenyan anti-terrorism police are investigating the attack, with suspicions pointing to either Islamist Somali militants or the local Mungiki cult, which has been the subject of a crackdown in recent weeks. The blast took place blocks from where a bomb killed more than 200 at the US embassy in 1998. It appears to be Kenya's first terrorist attack since 15 were killed in a blast aat an Israeli-owned hotel in Mombasa in 2002. (Reuters, June 11)

The rights group Global Witness charges in a new report that cocoa profits fueled the brutal civil war in Ivory Coast just as diamonds did in Liberia, with both the government and rebels profiting from the trade. The study finds that 30% of the government's military costs during one six-month period were funded by cocoa proceeds, while rebels have reaped some $30 million per year from cocoa since 2004. Global Witness wants companies exporting cocoa to make public the origin of the beans. The industry is resistant. "Tracing or labelling individual beans is, as a practical matter, impossible," said Susan Smith, spokeswoman for the Chocolate Manufacturers Association, a trade group that includes Nestle and Hershey's.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), publisher of the journal Science, has teamed up with Amnesty International for a project to monitor the Darfur conflict by satellite. From Medical News Today, June 10:

A pioneering AAAS program that provides technical expertise to human rights groups is helping Amnesty International USA with a new online effort to monitor threatened settlements in the war-torn Darfur region of Sudan and provide evidence of destroyed villages.

Former Liberian president Charles Taylor refused to attend the opening of his trial at The Hague for war crimes both in his own country and Sierra Leone, where he is accused of supporting a brutal guerilla movement. In a letter, read by attorney Karim Khan, Taylor said: "I am driven to conclude that I will not receive a fair trial before the Special Court at this time and I must decline to attend hearings... I cannot take part in this charade that does injustice to the people of Liberia and the people of Sierra Leone."

A militant Islamist group, the Mujahedeen Youth Movement, has claimed responsibility for a suicide attack against the home of Somali Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi at the weekend, which killed five soldiers and two civilians. Several hours after the announcement, a would-be suicide bomber was shot dead by Ethiopian soldiers at the Ethiopian forces' headquarters in Mogadishu. [Reuters, June 4]

Police stormed impoversihed Nairobi neighborhoods June 4 in search of Mungiki militants accused in a string of beheadings—killing 22 suspects and arresting 100 in overnight gun-battles. The raids came after two police officers were shot dead in the Kenyan capital's Mathare district. The Mungiki cult is suspected in the deaths of at least 18 people in the past three months, including 10 found mutilated or beheaded since May. The latest beheadings were overnight, the same time as the Nairobi gunbattles, in Muranga, 40 miles north of the capital.

A telling story in the June 2 New York Times, "Advocacy Group's Publicity Campaign on Darfur Angers Relief Organizations," reveals a rift between the Save Darfur Coalition and the aid agencies actually on the ground in Darfur. Save Darfur takes a hard line, calling for UN intervention, which has prompted the Sudanese regime to turn up the heat on aid workers. This is a real dilemma. Are the Save Darfur folks naive do-gooders—or, worse, cynical exploiters of the Darfur genocide with hidden agendas—who are (even if unwittingly) actually making things worse by interfering with relief efforts? Or are the relief organizations being coopted by the Sudan regime and (even if unwittingly) allowing the genocide to continue by opposing intervention? Via the exile-based Sudan Tribune, links and emphasis added: