Finally getting rid of him: Kenya deports Jamaican cleric, again

Jamaican Muslim cleric Sheikh Abdullah al-Faisal has been deported to his native country January 21, 2010. Photo/ FILE

By JILLO KADIDA

Kenya has finally deported radical cleric Abdullah al-Faisal to his native Jamaica, on the second attempt.

He was spirited out of the country on the day he was scheduled to appear in court.

He travelled out of the country aboard a Gulf Stream plane, according to state counsel Edwin Okello.

However, it is was not immediately clear whether the flight was chartered or not. This revelations were made in court during the hearing of a case filed by activist Al Amin Kimathi challenging the deportation of the controversial hate cleric.

Following the revelation that the cleric has been bundled out of the country the court ordered the Attorney-General to furnish details of airline used and air ticket.

The AG has been ordered to also produce further details of who escorted the cleric by January 26.

The court orders were given by High Court Judge Lady Justice Jeanne Gacheche following application by lawyers representing Sheikh al Faisal.

When the case came up for hearing, lawyers representing the cleric informed the court that they don’t intend to proceed with the case unless the state complies with the order requiring them to produce their client in court.

It was after the comments by the lawyers representing the cleric that the state counsel in the case sought to be given 15 minutes adjournment to communicate with police on whereabouts of Sheikh al Faisal.

And 15 minutes later the state counsel surfaced in court with copies of the cleric’s passport and departure declaration form saying he cannot produce him in court as he is already out of the country.

Sheikh al Faisal’s lawyer immediately accused the state of failing to comply with a court order.

The lawyer asked the judge to take the matter seriously as it is a deliberate move to disobey court order which required production of the cleric.

“If he was deported very early in the morning before the case was heard it is understandable but if they deported him afterwards that is deliberate attempt to disobey court order,” said Mr Mureithi.

Earlier in the day, the state said Sheikh al Faisal was involved in persuading young Muslims to assist Somalia militia group al Shabab.

An investigating officer with the Anti-Terrorism Police Unit told the court that Sheikh al- Faisal, during his preaching in Mombasa, encouraged the youths to assist al Shabab.

However, the officer, Mr Charles Ogeto, did not divulge more details on the affidavit he swore in court in support of a case involving the detention of the cleric.

The state was responding to an application seeking to stop it from deporting the cleric.

In the application, Mr Kimathi said the cleric entered the country lawfully and has not breached any laws to warrant detention or deportation.

Mr Kimathi sued immigration Minister Otieno Kajwang’, the Police Commissioner, the commissioner of prisons and the Attorney-General.

The cleric was first arrested by police at Nyali mosque in Mombasa on December 31 and never allowed to see friends, said Mr Kimathi.

The decision to hold the cleric in custody for long, he says, contradicts rights provided for under the constitution and international human rights convention.

The court papers also say that Sheikh al-Faisal was declared a prohibited immigrant without having been accorded the opportunity to be heard.

Sheikh al-Faisal says he was never presented before the immigration department to answer any questions or even show cause why his immigration status as granted to him at the Lunga-Lunga border point should not be revoked.

Sheikh al-Faisal arrived in Kenya on December 24 after travelling through Nigeria, Angola, Mozambique, Swaziland, Malawi and Tanzania.

The case will come up for hearing on January 26.

source.nation.ke

TANZANIA: Floods affect 28,000 in central regions

Photo: Edward Kale/IRIN

Floods damage in East Africa: At least 28,000 people in Tanzania’s central regions of Dodoma and Morogoro are dependent on emergency food and other relief supplies following flooding in the regions – file photo

DAR ES SALAAM,  – At least 28,000 people are dependent on emergency food and other relief supplies in the central Tanzanian regions of Dodoma and Morogoro following floods, which also damaged transport infrastructure, according to officials.

As of 15 January, some 24,860 flood-affected in the Morogoro region had been registered, Morogoro Regional Commissioner, Issa Machibya, told IRIN by telephone on 21 January.

“We are giving food and shelter to the victims. All is going well,” said Machibya.

He said the rains, which have pounded Kilosa District since the last week of December 2009, had affected some 5,867 households. Those affected were initially sheltered in schools and other public facilities; regional authorities later set up 24 camps to accommodate 10,585 of the homeless.

Some 1,146 houses were also extensively damaged by the floods and 4,702 others submerged, according to regional officials.

Tanzania’s Vice-President, Ali Shein, who visited the regions on 20 January, appealed to Tanzanians and the international community to continue assisting the flood-affected.

Photo: IRIN

Earlier this month, Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete warned that the El-Niño-related rains were set to become a major destructive force to the country’s infrastructure.

“Already, in the two weeks of rain since Christmas, the damage to the central railway line and roads in Dodoma and Morogoro regions requires 6.7 billion shillings [about US$4.8 million] to repair and rebuild,” Kikwete said.

The money, he said, would be raised through the re-allocation of government funds. “This means many of our development plans will have to be postponed or foregone to enable us respond to emergencies.

“We are at a loss [as to] how many more times [we] shall we have to do this if the rains persist at this pace until the end of the rain[y] season at the end of May,” said Kikwete.

jk/mw source.irinnews

VIETNAM: Life-threatening landmine scavenging on the increase

Photo: Courtesy Mines Advisory Group

A 500lb bomb found at a construction site in Quang Ninh District, Quang Binh Province. Millions of tonnes of ordnance were dropped on Vietnam between 1964 and 1973. It is estimated that up to one third of these ordnance did not detonate

DONG HA,  – Nguyen Luong Quy was planting a tree on a coffee plantation on the outskirts of Buon Ma Thout, the largest city in Vietnam’s Central Highlands in 2000, when his shovel hit a hard metal object.

“There was a big explosion and I must have been knocked unconscious,” the 37-year-old farmer told IRIN. “I woke up in hospital and at first I thought I was dead because everything was white.”

Although his left arm was blown off, Quy survived the blast, caused by a bomblet – one of millions of cluster bombs dropped by American forces between 1964 and 1973.

But despite his first-hand experience of the dangers of unexploded ordnance (UXO), like many poor Vietnamese, Quy continues to scavenge for the metal contained in cluster bomblets and other unexploded munitions.

According to a 2009 study by the Vietnamese Ministry of Defense’s Technology Center for Bomb and Mine Disposal (BOMICEN) and the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, more than 35 percent of the land in six central provinces – including Nghean, Ha Tinh, Quang Binh, Quang Tri, Thua Thien Hue and Quang Ngai – is contaminated with UXO.

Since the end of the war in 1975, 10,529 people have been killed and 12,231 injured by UXO in the overwhelmingly rural provinces.

Quang Tri and Quang Binh, on either side of the former demilitarised zone that divided communist North Vietnam from the US-backed southern regime, are the worst affected.

But while 28 percent of the UXO victims were farming at the time of their accident, 34 percent were actively searching for scrap metal, many driven by poverty, the same study revealed.

According to the Vietnamese government, 12 percent of the population lives below the national rural poverty line of just under US$11 per person per month, and around $14 per person per month in urban areas.

Life-threatening business

Thousands of poor Vietnamese continue to make a living or supplement their income by using metal detectors to locate unexploded bombs, and then trying to defuse them before selling them on to metal scrap dealers.

It is an extremely dangerous business, however. Although landmines can be deactivated by trained professionals, the cluster bomblets that contain the most valuable metals are impossible to defuse safely.

The global financial downturn has made matters worse, say NGOs. “Scrap metal provides a decent and immediate income without needing any qualifications or investment,” notes Tran Hong Chi from Clear Path International (CPI), an UXO victim assistance charity in Dong Ha, the provincial capital of Quang Tri.

“It’s not just farmers or the jobless who need the money. In July, a teacher was killed while digging up a bomb during his summer vacation. He had a good job and should have known about the risks.”

At the same time, the global economic slowdown is straining the budgets of the NGOs involved in mine clearance.

Chi says this year will be tough for CPI because it lost two key donors in 2009. The same goes for Mines Advisory Group (MAG), one of the main mine-clearance NGOs in Vietnam. Its Vietnam division, which had a budget of $3 million for 2009, lost half its donors last year.

But according to Jimmy Roodt, MAG’s country manager in Vietnam, the economic downturn is just part of the problem.

Vietnam is growing fast and, in terms of value for money, there is no country where you could have a greater impact from investing in mine clearance than here.

Mine strategy

A number of donors remain unhappy that Vietnam, unlike neighbouring Cambodia, has yet to adopt a national mine action strategy.

In Vietnam, the UXO issue is largely the domain of the military. Though the government is now working on a national strategy document, Roodt believes this will not be finalized for several years.

Nguyen Thi Thanh An, a childhood injury prevention specialist with the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Hanoi, who also sits on Vietnam’s informal UXO working group, agreed: “Without a national centre like they have in Cambodia, there’s no central casualty database to measure morbidity and mortality so we don’t have reliable data to demonstrate to donors how bad the problem is.”

She added that Vietnam would also attract more donors if it signed up to the international treaties prohibiting the use of landmines and cluster munitions – including the 1997 Ottawa Convention.

At the current pace, Phan Duc Tuan, deputy head of the army’s Military Engineering Command, said it would take 300 years and more than $10 billion to clear Vietnam of bombs, shells and mines.

However, said Roodt: “It’s not about clearing every inch but about reducing threat levels.”

“Vietnam,” he added, “is growing fast and, in terms of value for money, there is no country where you could have a greater impact from investing in mine clearance than here.”

bb/ds/ey/mw source.irinnews