DUNGU, Democratic Republic of Congo — The report must have caused a furor when it reached the Kinshasa headquarters of the U.N. peacekeeping force in Congo: Last week, residents of Duru, a town of several thousand residents in Congo’s inaccessible northeast, told peacekeepers at a nearby U.N. base that the Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army rebel group had just attacked and abducted several people. Indian army Lt. Gen. Chander Prakash, the new commander of the roughly 20,000-strong U.N. force, was apparently so disturbed that he personally led a reconnaissance mission to the affected community, flying a thousand miles across some of [...]
Last week’s brazen kidnapping of seven foreigners, including five Frenchmen, by al-Qaida-linked militants in a uranium mining town in Niger has increased pressure on both France and the European Union to become more militarily involved in the region’s fight against jihadists. The kidnapping threatens France’s major source of uranium for its nuclear power plants, calls into question the practice by some European governments of paying ransoms to free hostages, and throws down the gauntlet for the EU in its counterterrorism efforts. In response to the abductions, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner and seven of his European counterparts urged EU foreign [...]
VAVUNIYA, Sri Lanka — Sri Lanka’s tourism authorities would like the world to think of their country as an idyllic retreat, or as the writer Anton Chekhov described it during his 1890 visit, a “Paradise on Earth — an exotic fairy tale setting.” That’s why the ever-present military checkpoints and machine-gun-toting soldiers that dot the capital never make it into the television commercials urging Europeans to visit this beautiful Indian Ocean island. The advertisements also steer clear of the island’s northern region and this town, Vavuniya. It is the gateway to the area formerly controlled by the separatist Liberation Tigers [...]
