A UN-recognized World Heritage Site housing the burial grounds of the kings of Buganda was gutted by fire outside Uganda's capital of Kampala March 15, sparking fears of renewed tension between the government and ethnic Baganda. Police were deployed to the site in Kasubi, a suburb of the capital, as stones were thrown at firefighters arriving to tackle the blaze.

Sudan's security forces arrested a Somali insurgent leader while he was attempting to cross the border to Eritrea, the Somali news website Mareeg Online reported March 14 from Mogadishu. Muse Abdi Arale, defense secretary for the Hizbul Islam group, was reportedly arrested while trying to enter in Eritrea with money embezzled from the rebel group. Sheikh Hassan Mahdi, a senior official from Hizbul Islam, confirmed this version of events to Mareeg Online.

Government troops—the FARDC—in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) are to blame for much of the epidemic of sexual violence in the east of the country, according to US and UN reports detailing war crimes and possible crimes against humanity by various groups there. FARDC is trying to rout the Forces démocratiques de libération du Rwanda (FDLR) and the Ugandan Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) from the Kivu region and Oriental province in eastern Congo, but operations have been criticized for their impact on civilians.

The US State Department's annual human rights report, released this week, charges that Ethiopia is holding several hundred political prisoners, including the leader of one of the country's largest opposition parties. The 2009 report says Birtukan Mideksa, president of Ethiopia's opposition Unity for Democracy and Justice party, was held in solitary confinement for the first six months of the year despite a court ruling that it violated her constitutional rights.

In its annual human rights country report, released March 11, the US State Department accuses Eritrea of systematically abusing human rights, as well as sponsoring terrorism in the Horn of Africa region, and acting as a source and conduit for arms to insurgents in Somalia. The report charges the Asmara government oversaw unlawful killings by its security forces last year; used arbitrary arrests, beatings and torture against opposition supporters; and severely restricted freedom of speech, the press, assembly, association and religion. Throughout 2009, "consistent and systemic gross human rights violations persisted unabated at the government's behest," the report said.

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan unsealed an indictment March 8 accusing a suspect brought to the US from Nigeria, Mohamed Ibrahim Ahmed, of conspiring to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization—al-Shabab, the main insurgent army in Somalia. Ahmed, 35 of Eritrea, is also charged with providing that support, conspiring to receive training from a foreign terrorist organization, and receiving the training.

Hundreds were again killed over the weekend in ethnic violence around the city of Jos, in central Nigeria's Plateau State, with corpses dumped into hastily dug mass graves. Christian members of Plateau's leading ethnic group, the Beromas, were apparently by Muslim Fulani herdsmen, who swept into their villages, putting homes to the torch and attacking the residents with rifles and machetes as they fled. In a telephone interview with Britain's Channel 4 News , the Rev. Benjamin Kwashi, Anglican archbishop of Jos, said the attackers were "people who knew what to do and were trained on how to do it."

Togo's main opposition leader March 7 rejected the results of a presidential poll handing a second term to incumbent Faure Gnassingbe, as hundreds of activists rallied in the capital Lome to demand justice and police responded with tear gas. Gnassingbe was returned to office in the March 4 election, defeating his main rival Jean-Pierre Fabre who took 33%, according to official results. "I have never wanted to use violence, but if I am stolen from, I will not give up the fight," warned Fabre. "We are going to stage protests, we are not going to take this lying down." (AFP, March 6; AFP, March 7)