Latest Updates

Hours before the first-round results of the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s presidential elections were to be announced in Kinshasa on 20 August 2006, violence erupted between troops loyal to Vice President Jean-Pierre Bemba and those loyal to the incumbent, Joseph Kabila, providing dramatic proof of the fragility of the electoral process.

The peace talks in Juba between the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and the Ugandan government have made surprising progress, with a formal cessation of hostilities agreement signed on 26 August.

Prime Minister Charles Konan Banny has been unable to implement the roadmap that was to have secured for Côte d’Ivoire a democratically legitimated government. As happened a year ago, there will be no presidential election on the date (currently 31 October 2006) mandated by the UN Security Council.

No part of Indonesia generates as much distorted reporting as Papua, the western half of New Guinea that has been home to an independence movement since the 1960s.

The North Korea nuclear negotiations have stalled, and the prospects for future progress are dim.

Southern Serbia’s Albanian-majority Presevo Valley is a still incomplete Balkan success story. Since international and Serbian government diplomacy resolved an ethnic Albanian insurgency in 2001, donors and Belgrade have invested significant resources to undo a legacy of human rights violations and improve the economy.

The Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA) signed under African Union (AU) auspices on 5 May 2006 between Sudan’s government and the faction of the insurgent Sudan Liberation Army led by Minni Arkou Minawi (SLA/MM) is a first step toward ending the violence but strong, coordinated action is needed if it is to take hold.

When the third round of the normalisation talks concludes in July 2006, India and Pakistan will be no closer than when they began the process in February 2004 to resolving differences, including over Kashmir.

With scheduled presidential elections less than eighteen months away, Zimbabwe faces the prospect of greater insecurity and violence. The economy’s free fall has deepened public anger, and the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) party wants to avoid a popular vote by using the legislature it controls to establish a “transitional presidency” and appoint a successor to Robert Mugabe, who has said he will retire.

Although there are some shoals still to be navigated, the narrow pro-independence victory in Montenegro’s 21 May 2006 referendum should, on balance, increase rather than diminish stability in the western Balkans.