Hunt for Joseph Kony, elusive African warlord, is halted 
Ugandan and American troops have suspended their joint hunt for war crimes suspect Joseph Kony and his Lord's Resistance Army, delivering a major setback to efforts to capture a notorious warlord accused of abducting tens of thousands of children. The Ugandan military and the U.S. State Department separately announced Wednesday that they had temporarily halted the search because of political turmoil in the Central African Republic, where Kony and his deputies are thought to be hiding. The Washington Post

US Offers $5 Million Reward for African War Crimes Suspects
The United States is offering up to $5 million for information leading to the arrest of Ugandan rebel leader Joseph Kony and three other African war crimes suspects. Kony and his top aides Okot Odhiambo and Dominic Ongwen were added to the U.S. War Crimes Rewards Program on Wednesday. Also added was Sylvestre Mudacumura, leader of the Rwandan rebel group FDLR, based in eastern Congo. VOA

More Work to Bring War Criminals to Justice (by John Kerry -U.S. Secretary of State)
Imagine for a moment that you are a child growing up in central Africa. Instead of sleeping at home with your family each night, you take shelter with dozens of other children. You hope you'll find safety in numbers. You pray that you will not be pulled out of your bed and abducted in the night by an armed militia -- conscripted into a life of violence, forced to brutalize your own family members, used as a sex slave, condemned to a life on the run from the authorities. It's a living nightmare -- but thanks in part to last year's Kony video about the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), it's a reality that millions of Americans now know that for almost twenty years has tormented and terrorized children across Uganda, the DRC, the Central African Republic, and South Sudan. The Huffington Post

Stop the Tweets: Egypt's president doesn't find Jon Stewart funny
Note to American diplomats: Jon Stewart does not translate well. The U.S. Embassy in Cairo briefly shut down its Twitter feed on Wednesday and removed a tweet that linked to Stewart's monologue from "The Daily Show." Stewart had ridiculed Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood-backed government Monday for arresting an Egyptian satirist instead of focusing on the country's spreading crime problem. Comedian Bassam Youssef is well known in Egypt for tweaking the devout and often stern Islamists who took charge following the fall of dictator Hosni Mubarak. The Washington Post

Kenya Following Sudan Tactics to Undermine ICC
The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) obliges states parties to cooperate with the Court in regards to its investigations and prosecutions. It is perhaps not too surprising then that Sudan, which never ratified the Rome Statute, has not cooperated with the Court's investigation in Darfur. What is novel is that Kenya-which joined the ICC in 2005-is now practicing its own form of non-cooperation that in many ways mirrors that of Sudan. African Argument

Making the Arms Trade Treaty work in practice is the real challenge for Africa
[...] The immediate future of the ATT, in the case of Africa, is to find answers to the question on implementation. Each African state will have to evaluate what resources it has available and then determine what resources are needed to implement the treaty. Several states have been developing capacity on reporting on other treaties and instruments such as the United Nations Programme of Action (UNPoA) and the International Tracing Instrument. These instruments impact on different areas of conventional arms, and small arms and light weapons. ISS

Johnnie Carson retires as top US envoy for Africa
Ambassador Johnnie Carson, the head of the State Department's Africa Bureau, formally retired on March 29, ending a 44-year career that included service as Washington's envoy to Nairobi from 1999 to 2003. Soon after taking office in 2009, President Barack Obama appointed Ambassador Carson as Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs. The East African

African leaders refuse to recognise CAR rebel chief as president
African leaders on Wednesday refused to recognise the rebel chief Michel Djotodia as president of the Central African Republic, calling instead for a transitional president to be elected. France 24

Analysis: Dying for South African Foreign Policy
President Zuma was not a very happy man at the memorial service for the 13 South African soldiers killed in the Central African Republic. He reacted angrily to reports that there ulterior motives to South Africa's deployment of troops to the CAR. Daily Maverick

South Africa's Military Adventurism: A Dangerous Shift in Foreign Policy
The role of the military in Africa has morphed from the established model of supporting strongmen, to that of projecting economic power and influence. This has recently been placed in sharp focus by the questionable intervention of South African National Defence Force (SANDF) troops in the Central African Republic (CAR). The opacity around South Africa's presence in the CAR has been tragically emphasised by the statistically unsatisfactory outcome of 13 dead and 26 declared injured from a contingent of only 200 troops. Explanations from South African political leadership regarding this purportedly bilateral deployment are unconvincing and inadequate. SACSIS

M23, one year on
[...] Although clashes between M23 and FARDC have subsided, "North Kivu remains highly insecure due to the proliferation of weapons, sporadic fighting between armed groups and the army, and inter-community tensions," according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). OCHA notes that since the beginning of the M23 rebellion, more than half a million people have been driven from their homes in North Kivu. The figure accounts for more than half of the 914,000 displaced people in the province. Tens of thousands more fled to refugee camps in Rwanda and Uganda. IRIN

Jihadists target Maghreb expats
Authorities in the Netherlands raised the country's terrorism alert level last month, citing concerns over the radicalisation of young people and jihadists traveling to and from Syria. The news also set off alarm bells in the country's expatriate Moroccan community, where extremist groups have taken aim at recruiting youths for jihad. Experts fear these newly radicalised Moroccan expatriates could end up exporting salafist ideology back home, threatening Maghreb security. Magharebia

The Next Target In Al Qaeda's African Recruitment Campaign
Across the border from Mali, the former French colony of Mauritania is prime territory for Islamist leaders, as poverty and radical preachers lay the groundwork for Jihad. Worldcrunch - Die Welt

MUJAO leader says Belmokhtar is alive
The leader of the al Qaeda-linked Movement for Tawhid [Unity] and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO) has contradicted reports that wanted jihadist military commander Mokhtar Belmokhtar was killed in Mali in early March. A spokesman for Belmokhtar's unit also denied he was killed. Belmokhtar, who is said to have direct communications with al Qaeda emir Ayman al Zawahiri, was reported to have been killed during a joint French and Chadian military operation in a mountainous region in northern Mali. The Long War Journal

UN concern over Tuaregs, Arabs targeted in Mali
The United Nations on Wednesday expressed concern over continuing violence against ethnic Tuaregs and Arabs in Mali, citing evidence of new rights abuses against the two communities. UN Under Secretary for Political Affairs Jeffrey Feltman said that while "arbitrary acts of violence" against Tuaregs and Arabs had recently slowed, "there is still a risk of reprisal against members of these communities." AFP

Behind the Success of Political Islam
It's been over two years since the beginning of protests that led to the fall of authoritarian regimes across North Africa and the Middle East, and the Arab Spring is not what most observers hoped for. Egypt is in shambles, a nasty civil war rages in Syria, and political Islam is on the rise throughout the region. It looks as if the Arab revolutions will end up replacing bad governance and authoritarianism of secular dictators with bad governance and authoritarianism of would-be theocrats. Worrying as it is, could the rise of political Islamism in places such as Egypt, Tunisia or Algeria have been avoided? Should the West have been tougher with the Muslim Brotherhood or the Salafists? Or perhaps more accommodating? The National Interest

Libya Fights Increased Drug Trafficking
In Libya, a dose of LSD or the painkiller tramadol costs 78 cents, and a joint of cannabis is 7.80 dollars. Here, drugs are affordable to the poor for a simple reason. "Slashing prices is a way to create demand and open up a market," a Western diplomat tells IPS in Tripoli, the capital. "Prices will go up when enough people are hooked," the diplomat, who works on defence and security, adds. IPS

Somalia: Mogadishu to Baidoa road 'reopened'
The main road from Somalia's capital, Mogadishu, to the strategic south-western city of Baidoa has been totally recaptured from Islamist militants, African Union (AU) troops have said. It is the first time the cities have been linked in more than two years. The AU is helping a new UN-backed government regain territory from al-Qaeda-aligned insurgents. The al-Shabab group has been forced out of main towns but still controls most villages and rural areas. BBC

Whither The Hunter-Killers? USAF Ponders Post-Afghan Glut of Reapers, Predators
A handful of unarmed MQ-1 Predators are flying from a new base in Niamey, Niger. They're part of the effort to help France tamp down civil war in Mali, but the deployment also says a lot about the future of the U.S. Air Force's huge and still growing fleet of medium-sized unmanned aircraft. On the one hand, the work in Mali shows that the signature weapon of the U.S. war in Afghanistan is outlasting that conflict. On the other, the detachment is a tiny fraction of the Predator/Reaper fleet - and just where are the rest of them going to go? It's a question that has been buzzing around the Pentagon and across the Air Force. Defense News

How the UN Covered Up a Cholera Epidemic in Zimbabwe
[...] On February 26th, a UN tribunal in Johannesburg determined that Georges Tadonki, the head of the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Zimbabwe in 2008, had been wrongfully fired from the UN after he attempted to warn headquarters of an oncoming cholera epidemic, whose severity was compounded by the ongoing electoral violence. He was fired after Agostinho Zacarias, then the UN's country chief in Zimbabwe and currently the UN Development Program's Resident Coordinator in South Africa, decided that his own closeness with ZANU-PF overrode his responsibility to the UN's missions and values. The Atlantic

China Estimated to Dramatically Underreport Its Overseas Fishing Catch
It is a whopper of a catch, in more ways than one: China is under-reporting its overseas fishing catch by more than an order of magnitude, according to a study published on 23 March. The problem is particularly acute in the rich fisheries of West Africa, where a lack of transparency in reporting is threatening efforts to evaluate the ecological health of the waters. "We can't assess the state of the oceans without knowing what's being taken out of them," says Daniel Pauly, a fisheries scientist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, who led the study. The unreported catch is crippling the artisanal fisheries that help to feed West African populations, he says. Scientific American

Should China Keep Its "Africa Dreams" to Itself?
[...] An interesting characteristic of Xi's term, which will no doubt be studied ad nauseam within CCP circles, has been its instant international exportability. During his first trip abroad, for example, Xi gave a speech in Tanzania laying out his idea of "Africa Dream," which entailed, among other things, "unity and achieving development through rejuvenation." In the same speech Xi also spoke of a "world dream" that was aimed at achieving "enduring peace and common prosperity" The degree to which such a term might take hold in foreign countries should not be underestimated, especially in Africa, where China has been engaged in a charm offensive for over a decade. Terms such as "win-win" and "harmonious relations" have already been drawn on extensively by African leaders in recent years. The Diplomat