The temporary truce signed on Thursday by South Sudanese politicians may have halted hostilities that, according to United Nations and humanitarian estimates, have resulted in the deaths of more than 10,000 people ”“ and displaced half a million more ”“since fighting began in December, but a sustainable peace remains far off, diplomats and experts say. “The country can fall apart; it’s sort of half unglued now. Even if there’s a ceasefire, who knows if that’s going to stick as it doesn’t resolve any the underlining problems,” said Tom McDonald, who worked on Sudan issues as U.S. ambassador to Zimbabwe during the Clinton presidency. “A lot is at stake because we have invested time and diplomatic capital and lots of money there to stand up this country.”

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Through US Africa Command (AFRICOM), US Special Operations Command, Africa (SOCAFRICA), and the Office of Security Cooperation in the US Embassy in Abuja, the United States will be helping stand up the NASOC by providing training and a limited amount of equipment.

From the information I have, it sounds like NASOC will have a force up North to deal with Boko Haram, a force in the South to deal with security in the Niger Delta, a headquarters force to focus on hostage rescue, and an expeditionary force for external use ”“ perhaps to contribute specialized capabilities for peacekeeping operations.

Unfortunately, I don’t know the precise size of NASOC or of its component forces.

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Twenty years ago, in 1994, democracy finally came to South Africa, the wealthiest and most powerful nation of sub-Saharan Africa. Most South Africans would agree that the subsequent years have been difficult, and levels of violence and poverty remain intolerably high. But the turn to majority rule was a massive political and moral achievement, to which Christian churches contributed mightily.

Beginning in the 1960s the antiapartheid cause featured centrally in Christian debates worldwide over political activism and the legitimacy of armed resistance to tyranny. Anglican archbishop Desmond Tutu became perhaps the best-known face of the antiapartheid movement.

Obviously, the churches that struggled against apartheid did so from a sense of religious obligation and not with any thought of advancing their own power or influence. But with 20 years of political freedom behind us, what can we say about the religious consequences of the revolution? Who were the winners and losers? And has religious radicalism faded from political life?

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South Sudan’s government and rebels have signed a ceasefire agreement after talks in Ethiopia.

Under the deal, signed in a hotel in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, the fighting is due to come to an end within 24 hours.

In the past week, government forces have recaptured the two main cities under rebel control.

More than 500,000 people have been forced from their homes during the month-long conflict.

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The Anglican Bishop of Enugu, Rt. Rev. Emmanuel Chukwuma, yesterday, expressed dismay over the threat by the Northern Elders Forum, NEF, to drag the immediate past Chief of Army Staff, Lt. Gen. Azubuike Ihejirika before the International Criminal Court, ICC, in Hague for alleged extra-judicial killings of some northerners.

He warned that the move could lead to a major crisis that would threaten the nation’s corporate existence. Bishop Chukwuma, who addressed a press conference in Enugu, said any attempt at persecuting the former COAS on account of the actions that were taken while he was in office would be resisted by the Igbos, urging the northern leaders to be well guided and advised.

He said Igbo would resist any attempt to humiliate the respected military officer who had succeeded in checkmating the activities of northern insurgents and their sponsors. His words: “Northern elders should be warned or they will set up inter-tribal war in Nigeria. Is it because Ihejirika is an Igbo man.

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When President Goodluck Jonathan announced new leaders for the defense department, the army, the navy and the air force on Thursday, he did not give a reason. But political consultant Fabian Ihekweme said it appears the president is trying a different approach to the security crisis.

“You may recall a few days ago that a new anti-terrorist outfit has been created out of the Nigerian military. So it is the same new strategy being developed by the president to tackle the Boko Haram menace,” said Hekweme.

Human Rights Watch said 40 people were killed and 50 were injured Tuesday when a car bomb exploded outside a post office in Maiduguri, the original home of the Islamist militant group known as Boko Haram.

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In recent months, Central and Southern Africa have seen an increase in the number of people publicly claiming to be Jesus Christ. Just within the past few weeks, there have been at least four people from Central Africa and Southern Africa claiming to be the Messiah.

However, this phenomenon is not unique to Africa alone. Last year a man in Australia, Allan John Miller claimed he was Jesus Christ and that his partner, Mary Luck was in fact, Mary Magdalene. Australia’s Cult Awareness and Information Centre and the Anglican and Catholic churches were concerned that the couple were “attracting vulnerable people searching for meaning in life.”

History itself is witness to countless other Jesus Christ claimants most of whom have been dismissed as mentally unstable or disillusioned and in worse circumstances mobbed and beaten. Still many of them have and continue to attract a good number of followers.

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The Netherlands nudged past France and Switzerland as the country with the most nutritious, plentiful and healthy food, while the United States and Japan failed to make it into the top 20, a new ranking released by Oxfam showed.

Chad came in last on the list of 125 nations, behind Ethiopia and Angola, in the food index released on Tuesday by the international development organisation.

“The Netherlands have created a good market that enables people to get enough to eat. Prices are relatively low and stable and the type of food people are eating is balanced,” said Deborah Hardoon, a senior researcher at Oxfam who compiled the results.

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The Diocese of Namibia of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa made history yesterday when it admitted its first celibate nuns during a ceremony held at the Onekwaya West Mission Station in the Ohangwena Region.

The church’s secretary and treasurer, Father Lukas Kaluwapa Katenda, said three young Namibian women took their vows of celibacy, poverty and obedience as Sisters of the Order of the Good Samaritan, a new religious order in the Anglican Church of Southern Africa.

“This is the first in the history of the Anglican Church in Namibia,” he said.

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A car bomb has exploded in the north-eastern Nigerian city of Maiduguri, killing at least 17 people.

The Islamist group Boko Haram said it carried out the attack. A suspect has been arrested, the military says.

The bomb went off near a market, sending up a large plume of smoke. People were seen fleeing the scene covered in blood.

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For the past month, South Sudan has been engulfed in an expanding civil war. Unlike Sudan, where the Satellite Sentinel Project pioneered its work (and with a few exceptions) South Sudan’s government has been allowing both journalists and humanitarians to operate around the country, even as violence spreads.

As a result, harrowing videos, interviews, and photographs documenting the crisis have been emerging for weeks.

The United Nations estimates that over 395,000 people have been displaced by violence, 352,000 internally, of which 60,000 have sought shelter at UN compounds around the country. Another 43,000 are refugees in neighboring countries including Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda, with an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 people from South Sudan arriving daily in Uganda alone.

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Is the Central African Republic the world’s next Rwanda? That’s the question some are beginning to ask about a crisis that has been going on for most of this year but has only just burst through into the mainstream international mass media.

Warlords ruling the countryside by terror, a government that is almost toothless and the collapse of institutions have forced 0.4 million people to flee their homes and left a million dependent on aid.

And now reports of Muslim and Christian communities engaged in inter-communal violence have sparked concern about a slide into religious conflict. The “G-word” — genocide — has even been floated as a real risk by some observers.

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South Sudan risks losing hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. aid if its government and rebel leaders do not end a wave of violence in the fledgling democracy formed with Washington’s strong support, U.S. officials said on Thursday.

Three weeks of fighting, often along ethnic lines, is ringing alarm bells in Washington over the prospect that the conflict could spiral into full-blown civil war, spawning atrocities or making South Sudan the world’s next failed state.

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ITV News has found evidence that children are being targeted in one of Africa’s bloodiest civil wars.

Many have suffered horrific injuries, as violence in the Central African Republic sinks to what the United Nations calls a “vicious new low”.

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In what looks like another reprisal attack, Boko Haram insurgents yesterday attacked Kayamula village of Konduga local government area of Borno State. They killed nine people, while several residents received gunshot injuries.

Kayamula village is located on the outskirts of Maiduguri metropolis, a distance of about 10 kilometres away from Maiduguri Giwa military barracks where several members of the Boko Haram sect were arrested and detained by security operatives.

LEADERSHIP gathered from reliable sources that the insurgents invaded the village about 2am and opened fire on residents using AK-49 rifles and explosive devices, a situation that led to the killing of nine innocent people and injuring of several others.

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Interviewer: I’d just like to bring you a comment regarding northern Nigeria and the presence of Boko Haram. . . ”˜How can Nigeria become an economic powerhouse when Boko Haram are busy causing calamities on its people.’ How much of it is a deterrent to Nigeria’s prospects of becoming this economic superpower?

JW: If I may say so, I think the problem with that comment is that it’s looking at a map with too small a scale. Northern Nigeria is a very very long way from Lagos, and a very long way from the Middle Belt. And we’re talking not northern Nigeria but north-eastern Nigeria in particular. North-western is an ethnically, and in many ways religiously, slightly different kettle of fish, and so is the south-west and the south, south where the oil is, is yet another area, and Lagos is its own city state in a very powerful way. So, yes it is a very serious problem. Any area where there’s war and killing is an absolute tragedy. And the attacks on the Christian population there are very severe, the attacks on Muslim leaders are very severe, and on government figures. But, it is not holding back the south. If you look at most of Nigeria, the south of Nigeria in particular, as an independent country it is growing at a rate that defies description. The economy there is more vigorous than one can describe.

– See more at: http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/5222/transcript-archbishop-justins-bbc-world-service-interview-on-nigeria-with#sthash.Kbrq0uJt.dpuf

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The Archbishop of Canterbury has urged the Anglican Communion to pray and advocate for an end to the intense fighting which has overtaken large regions of South Sudan in recent days.

Over 500 people are feared dead in South Sudan’s capital, Juba, where fighting first broke out. The violence has since spread, particularly affecting Jonglei, Unity and Upper Nile States.

Archbishop Justin wrote to Anglican primates and moderators… [yesterday] at the request of Archbishop Daniel Deng Yak, Archbishop of the Episcopal Church of South Sudan and Sudan.

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Archbishop Daniel Deng Bul has written to the Archbishop of Canterbury and called on the Anglican Communion to help communities in South Sudan respond to those displaced by the widespread violence that is continuing in the nation.

With fighting continuing in South Sudan, Most Reverend Dr Daniel Deng, Archbishop of the Episcopal Church of South Sudan and Sudan has written a letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury.

He calls for sustained prayer, for advocacy on an immediate peace process and for humanitarian support from across the Anglican Communion.

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The return of South Sudan’s Lost Boys for the birth of this new nation was perhaps the perfect symbol of its hope for a new beginning. Many are American citizens who came back to vote in the 2011 referendum that split off this country from Sudan, with which it fought for decades. Others returned to try to provide the next generation of South Sudanese children with a better country than the one they were born into.

Now, many of these Lost Boys, who had already escaped the violence in their homeland but found themselves inexorably drawn back, are trying to survive the crisis that is threatening to tear their new country apart. Lost, found and lost again, Mr. Atem says that many of his comrades are now trapped in a dangerous and shaky South Sudan.

Some have not made it out alive.

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South Sudanese government officials and representatives of rebel groups agreed to face-to-face talks on a monitored ceasefire, with artillery fire in Juba’s government district underlining the risk of all-out civil war.

The warring parties assured mediators they will strive to reach a political solution to the conflict that began in mid-December, Ethiopian envoy Seyoum Mesfin told reporters in Addis Ababa on Saturday.

There have been continued clashes between President Salva Kiir’s SPLA government forces and rebels loyal to former vice president Riek Machar centred around the strategically located town of Bor. As delegates smiled in a luxury hotel in Ethiopia, heavy explosions from artillery fire were heard in a Juba district where most ministries, the presidential palace and the parliament are located.

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Face-to-face peace talks between warring parties in South Sudan were stalled Saturday, government officials and rebel delegations said, dashing hopes of a swift end to the bloodshed.

Representatives of President Salva Kiir’s government and rebels loyal to his former vice president, Riek Machar, began preliminary negotiations through mediators in neighboring Ethiopia on Friday. The talks are seen as a step toward ending the violence that has killed at least 1,000 people, driven tens of thousands from their homes and threatens to plunge the world’s newest country into civil war.

But a cease-fire appeared to be a long way off Saturday as government and rebel delegations in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, reported that direct talks in the Sheraton Hotel had been delayed as the two parties work through the mediators to set a negotiating agenda.

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“I’m not making missionaries heroes,” said Richard H. Elphick, a historian at Wesleyan University in Connecticut and the author of “The Equality of Believers,” a book about Protestant missionaries in South Africa. “Missionaries and other white Christians were alarmed by the idea that the equality of all people before God means they should be equal in public life. But the equality of believers is an idea they dropped into South Africa. And it was constantly reinforced in the schools. And that made it a dangerous idea.”

Olufemi Taiwo offered a similarly nuanced endorsement, and he did so from two perspectives: as the product of a mission education in his native Nigeria and as a Cornell University professor with expertise in African studies.

“Under colonialism, there’s a tension between the missions and the colonial authorities,” said Dr. Taiwo, author of the 2010 book “How Colonialism Preempted Modernity in Africa.” “There was a missionary idea that black people could be modern. And most churches cannot come out and say some people are not human. So you might have a patronizing attitude, but if you don’t think Africans can benefit from education, why would you set up schools?”

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International Christian Concern (ICC) has learned that twelve Christians were brutally murdered by suspected Boko Haram militants in northern Nigeria over the weekend. According to reports, these Christians were killed in two attacks on separate Christian villages in Nigeria’s Muslim majority state of Borno.

The first attack took place on Saturday, December 28, in the Christian village of Tashan-Alede where eight people attending a wedding celebration were killed when militants connected with Boko Haram opened fire on the Christians gathered. According to the Christian Broadcasting Network, “One attack took place at a pre-wedding bachelor party. Suspected fighters from Boko Haram opened fire on the group, killing eight people.”

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Almighty God, who didst rescue Samuel Ajayi Crowther from slavery, sent him to preach the Good News of Jesus Christ to his people in Nigeria, and made him the first bishop from the people of West Africa: Grant that those who follow in his steps may reap what he has sown and find abundant help for the harvest; through him who took upon himself the form of a slave that we might be free, the same Jesus Christ; who livest and reignest with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

While this feels very different from soft-toned American evangelical Christianity, which emphasizes God’s loving mercy rather than God’s judgment, spiritual warfare is deeply embedded in the evangelical tradition. The post-1960s charismatic revival in the United States, sometimes called “Third Wave” Christianity (classical Pentecostalism was the first wave and charismatic Catholicism the second), introduced the idea that all Christians interact with supernatural forces daily. That included demons.

In fact, I found American books on dealing with demons in all the bookstores of the African charismatic churches I visited. In one church where I stood looking at the shelf of demon manuals, a helpful clerk leaned over to fish one off for me. She chose an American one. “Here,” she said as she handed me Larry Huch’s “Free at Last,” “this one is good.”

In many American evangelical churches, people will tell you that demons are real, but they do not treat them as particularly salient.

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As many participate in religious celebrations at this time of the year, our country, the Central African Republic, remains on the brink of religious warfare. In a place that most of the world struggles to find on a map, more than 2 million people, nearly half of the nation’s population, are in desperate need of aid. As we write, approximately 40,000 people without shelter or toilets are crammed into the airport compound in the capital, Bangui. In just the past week in Bangui, hundreds have been killed, including patients dragged out of hospitals and executed. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has said that he is “gravely concerned about the imminent danger of mass atrocities.” We fear that without a wider international response, our country will succumb to darkness .

As the most senior faith leaders of our country’s Christian and Muslim communities, respectively, we recognize our responsibility to help define a path away from violence. Our colleagues, priests and imams alike, have paid the ultimate price for taking on their own part of this responsibility, and we fear the worst is yet to come.

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Speaking exclusively to PREMIUM TIMES at his Abeokuta residence on Wednesday morning, shortly before he headed out to church for Christmas service, the retired primate of the Anglican Church said the gunmen pounced on him and his driver as he was leaving this foundation’s office along the Lagos-Ibadan expressway.

He said the four-men gang blocked his car, and pulled him and his driver out at gun point. One of the bandits then took over the steering wheel while another member pinned down the cleric and his driver at the back.

Two other gang members followed behind in a Toyota Primera car they brought for the operation.

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The UN has renewed its call for rival forces in South Sudan to lay down their arms and says it expects the first UN reinforcements to arrive in 48 hours.

The plea came as South Sudan’s President Salva Kiir met the leaders of neighbouring Kenya and Ethiopia in an effort to defuse the conflict.

Government officials say a number of oil wells are now in rebel hands.

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New evidence is emerging of alleged ethnic killings committed during more than a week of fighting in South Sudan.

The violence follows a power struggle between President Salva Kiir, a Dinka, and his Nuer ex-deputy Riek Machar.

A reporter in the capital, Juba, quoted witnesses as saying more than 200 people, mostly from the Nuer ethnic group, were shot by security forces.

Another man in Juba said gunmen from the majority Dinka ethnic group were shooting people in Nuer areas.

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South Sudan’s government said on Sunday rebels had seized the capital of a key oil-producing region and fears grew of all-out ethnic civil war in the world’s newest country.

The U.N. announced it was trying to rush more peacekeeping forces to landlocked, impoverished South Sudan as foreign powers urged both sides to stop fighting, fearing for the stability of an already fragile region of Africa.

The South Sudan government said on its Twitter account it was no longer in control of Bentiu, the capital of Unity State.

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