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	CIAO Focus, July 2001: Conflicts in Africa
	As Europe ends its most recent conflict, the largest land war in the world continues in Africa. The War in the Horn enters its thirteenth month, raising the number of displaced from the Ethiopia-Eritrea conflict to nearly 500,000. In central Africa, the Congo's eleven month civil war has created upwards of 200,000 refugees. Efforts at peace talks are aggravated by the presence of the Rwandan Hutu extremists responsible for the Tutsi genocide of 1994. Sierra Leone appears to have finally reached a conclusion in its eight-year civil war with the announcement of a peace deal on July 7th. But while such an agreement may bring some stability to the region, it will not erase the ongoing rebel atrocities witnessed by human rights groups. With the commencement of peace talks in Sudan, the decades-old civil war appears to have finally exhausted its combatants. Absent Western nation willingness to intervene (the United States' semantic hairsplitting over genocide in Rwanda, to wit) what can be done to create a sustainable peace in these regions? This month, CIAO highlights recent articles on the conflicts in Africa. From CIAO's database: Civic and Ethnic Allegiances: Competing Visions of Nationalist Discourse in the Horn of Africa When Networks Blind: Comparing Different Periods of Transnational Human Rights Activism in Kenya The Pursuit of Justice and Reconciliation: Responding to Genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda Sea of Sand, Land of Water: A Synopsis of some Strategic Developmental issues Confonting the Okavango Delta Outside Links*: Human Rights Watch: Sierra Leone http://hrw.org/doc/?t=africa&c=sierra International Crisis Group: Project on Central Africa http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=1164&l=1 United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs http://ochaonline.un.org/ US Department of State Bureau of African Affairs http://www.state.gov/p/af/ Maps from the University of Texas at Austin http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/africa.html * Outside links are not maintained. For broken outside links, CIAO recommends the Way Back Machine [http://www.archive.org/].