Angola

Since Namibia’s independence in 1990, the long-running civil war in neighbouring Angola has produced a steady southward flow of refugees. Most of them have been settled at Osire, Namibia’s largest refugee camp, located on a former White-owned farm in the central part of the country. Under the auspices of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), the population of Osire had swollen to over 20,000.

The Namibian government, with Angolan consent, is in the process of choosing a site on the Kunene River, the border between Namibia and Angola, to build a new hydroelectric dam.

As South Africa moves haltingly toward some form fo majority rule and its 40,000 refugees return home, prospects for genuine development are good.

Behind the Headlines: Violence, Land, and People in a Changing Southern. Africa

The Hagahai are a recently contacted group of seminomadic hunter-horticulturalists living in the fringe highlands of Madang Province in Papua New Guinea. Although occasional explorers and miners probably walked through their territory in the Schrader Mountains as early as the 1930s and several attempts were made to census them during the 1970s, the Hagahai effectively remained hidden from mission and government influence until the 1980s.

The two CSQ issues on militarization and indigenous peoples are intended to acquaint our readers with the important role militarization plays in the lives of even the most isolated tribal groups. The articles contained in these issues focus mostly on the consequences of shooting wars and on the increasing number of groups involved in them, directly or indirectly. This increasingly militarized world also affects the lives of indigenous peoples in a number of other important ways.

The UN Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities has for some years carried an agenda item on the threat to peace resulting from gross violations of human rights.

FOR more than thirty years, the Amuesha Indian community of Miraflores (Oxapampa, Peru) has provided young girls as servants to neighboring haciendas and the homes of the region's lumber barons. During the past ten years, as the demand for servants in the urban areas has grown, more and more Amuesha girls have been taken to Lima to work in middle class homes.

There are probably more refugees in the world today than at any other time in modern history. Nearly half of the world's 10 to 13 million refugees are scattered throughout the African continent.

WHAT IS REFUGEE?

According to the 1951 Geneva Convention a refugee is any person who:

GENEVA - The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) should not make loans to Shell's giant energy project off Russia's Pacific coast without more measures to protect the environment, WWF said on Friday.

The conservation group said ice and poor weather around the proposed Sakhalin oil and gas operation would make it nearly impossible to clean up any spills for half of the year, placing marine life at risk in the case of an accident.