In this week's edition of the Emerging Powers News Round-Up, read a comprehensive list of news stories and opinion pieces related to China, India and other emerging powers...

'Iman Tari,' a voice calls forward. Tari, a stout woman wearing a black burqa and white headscarf, rises from her seat. A young man in his late 20s stands up beside her and supports her as she walks. Her feet step slowly and steadily across the cement floor to a table laden with microphones and earpieces. Tari inches closer to the microphone and begins her testimony to the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission, TJRC, established by Parliament in 2008 to investigate the gross human rights violations and other historical injustices in Kenya committed between 12 December 1963 and 28 February 2008. The TJRC spent 32 days in April and May holding hearings in the Eastern and North Eastern provinces.

The four-day Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) meeting of ministers responsible for gender and women’s affairs ended in Windhoek on Thursday, 2 June. Issues on the agenda included the SADC regional gender programme and review of progress made by member states towards promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment. Progress made in the signing and ratification of the SADC protocol on gender and development was also on the agenda. Thus far 13 member states have signed the protocol, while seven have deposited their instruments of ratification with the SADC Secretariat.

Farm Radio Weekly is aimed at broadcasters but the feature and news stories are relevant to anyone interested in agricultural development in Africa. The stories are written ready to be read out on radio. They deliberately focus on small-scale farmers, looking at how their lives and livelihoods are affected by innovation and change. Anyone interested can sign up online:
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The University of Oxford is pleased to announce five scholarships for candidates from African
Commonwealth countries to study for the part-time Masters in International Human Rights Law, starting September 2012. The Master’s degree in International Human Rights Law is offered jointly by the Department for Continuing Education and the Faculty of Law. It is taught over 22 months and consists of two periods of distance learning and two residential sessions in Oxford. The degree programme is designed in particular for lawyers and other human rights advocates who wish to pursue advanced studies in international human rights law but may need to do so alongside work or family responsibilities.

Western Sahara’s eighth Sahara International Film Festival (known as FiSahara), the world's most remote film festival, took place in early May this year deep in the Algerian desert. The festival is located in a refugee camp 130 miles from the nearest town in the Algeria desert and aims to offer entertainment and educational opportunities to the refugees as well as raise awareness of a forgotten humanitarian crisis. The refugees are Saharawi’s from Western Sahara - occupied unlawfully by Morocco in 1976 - and an estimated 165,000 of them have lived in four camps for over three decades.

Police in Nigeria freed 32 teen girls from an alleged 'baby factory' used to feed the region's exploding sex trade and human trafficking markets, authorities said. Cops in the southern Nigerian city of Aba raided the clinic, known as The Cross Foundation, Monday after receiving a tip that the owner was harboring pregnant girls and selling their babies, Nigeria's Daily Champion newspaper reported.

AFRICA: SOCIO-POLITICAL UPHEAVALS AND HOPES FOR POLITICAL FREEDOMS
Group for Research and Initiative for the Liberation of Africa (GRILA)

Several major events occurred at the beginning of 2011 on the African continent, particularly from a global perspective. Already weakened by its unfavourable historical insertion into the world system, Africa has endured, in the past two most recent decades, the pangs of the implementation of neoliberal austerity measures, the plundering of resources and the logic of the privatisation of war. The continent is now more than ever at a crossroads because of the failure of the neoliberal model, the crisis of capitalism and the exhaustion of the neocolonial mode of growth.

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2011: ARAB SPRING?
Samir Amin

The year 2011 started with a series of crashing explosions of anger of the Arab people. Will this Arab spring start the second phase of ‘the awakening of the Arab world’? Or, will these revolts trample and finally fall through – as was the case of the first phase of this awakening evoked in my book ‘the awakening of the South’? In the first hypothesis, the developments of the Arab world will necessarily fit in the movement of going beyond capitalism/imperialism on a worldwide scale. The failure to do so would maintain the Arab world in its current status at the periphery of domination, prohibiting it from playing an active role in shaping the world.

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EGYPT AND THE STRATEGY OF THE UNITED STATES: THE PAKISTANI MODEL
Part 3: 2011: Arab spring?
Samir Amin

The three powers which dominated the Middle Eastern scene during the entire period of decline (1967–2011) are the United States – the master of the system – Saudi Arabia and Israel. Three close allies. The three share the same obsession for the emergence of a democratic Egypt. Because a democratic Egypt could only be a social anti-imperialist which would keep its distance with regard to globalised liberalism and would condemn Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states to insignificance, while reanimating the solidarity of the Arab people and demanding the recognition of the Palestinian state by Israel.

ARTICLE 19 is very concerned by apparent efforts by the G8, led by French President Nicholas Sarkozy, to impose tighter controls of the Internet. ARTICLE 19 once again calls on all states, including G8 member states, not to violate their freedom of expression obligations by imposing unjustifiable restrictions on the Internet. They should instead follow the recommendations in the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to freedom expression’s new report, which emphasise the applicability of international human right standards to the Internet.

A group of Mauritanian media professionals and bloggers last week announced the creation of a new club aimed at protecting journalists' rights. The club, whose vision is inspired by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, seeks 'to encourage journalists to write about topics on human rights in their press reports', according to its founding statement released 22 May.

As South Sudan prepares to become officially independent in July, Reporters Without Borders says it is appalled by recent developments affecting press freedom and appeals in particular to the new country’s president, Salva Kiir Mayardit, to release the Darfuri journalist Mohammed Arku without delay. Employed by Sudan Radio Service, Arku was arrested by South Sudan’s security services in Wau on 11 May for taking photos without government permission, although the area where he was arrested is not a militarised one.

Viva Palestina Arabia is organising a seven-day summer university in Beirut, Lebabon, at the end of July with internationally known academics, writers, political figures and activists to discuss the unfolding revolutionary events in the Middle East and what they mean for Palestine and the international solidarity movement.

A wide-ranging group of civil society organisations from around the globe has sent a letter to World Bank president Robert Zoellick urging him to open up the proposed Energy Strategy to another round of consultations. 'The Energy Sector Strategy has the potential to serve as a blueprint for low carbon, low impact clean energy scale up, while addressing the need of energy poor populations, which is an area of significant expertise and interest for a number of civil society organizations. Given that the
Energy Sector Strategy document will be significantly changed from the Approach Paper that previously underwent consultation, we believe it would be a mistake to not post the full Energy Sector Strategy document for consultation.'

Moroccan anti-riot police have broken up a series of protests recently, drawing international criticism. The European Commission on Monday 30 May expressed concern at 'the violence used during the demonstrations'. 'We call for restraint in the use of force and respect of fundamental freedoms. Freedom of assembly is a democratic right,' spokesperson Natasha Butler said. The demonstrations, organised by the youth-led February 20 Movement, took place in 40 cities and left dozens wounded in Casablanca and Tangier.

Egyptian officials are warning that the country, just emerging from a popular uprising that ousted the regime of former President Hosni Mubarak, could be facing a major economic crisis with lagging international aid and foreign investment. General Mahmoud Nassr, a member of the Supreme Military Council, which is running the country’s interim government, told an economic conference in Cairo last week that foreign direct investment (FDI) has come to a standstill while Western rating agencies race to downgrade the country’s sovereign credit rating. The poverty rate has also worsened to 70 per cent, Nassr added.

The South African government has announced the closure of the only refugee reception centre in Johannesburg, amid warnings that this will have a serious impact on the thousands of refugees flocking across the border every week. 'It is unacceptable that poor and marginalised refugees will have to travel to Pretoria, at great personal cost, to receive permit extensions and other services,' said Sicel’mpilo Shange-Buthane, the Director of the Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in South Africa.

North and south Sudan have agreed to set up a demilitarised zone along their shared border, as the south moves closer to independence. The announcement, made by the African Union (AU) on Tuesday, comes 10 days after the north seized the disputed Abyei region, prompting tens of thousands of people to flee. Alex de Waal, an AU adviser who has facilitated negotiations on security issues between Sudan's north and south regions, said the parties agreed to the move on Monday during talks in Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa.

The Group for Research and Initiative for the Liberation of Africa (GRILA), an organisation consisting of researchers and activists, issued a statement on the situation in Africa on African Liberation Day, 25 May 2011. The statement calls on the peoples of Africa and its diaspora to ramp up resistance, both locally and globally, and to unite on the basis of internationalism and Pan-Africanism.

ARTICLE 19 has called on the East African Community (EAC) to hold a special session on Uganda to discuss the country’s ongoing grave human right violations, including frequent attacks on freedom of expression. 'ARTICLE 19 believes that the seriousness of the current situation requires the East African Legislative Assembly to immediately convene a special session to address attacks on journalists, human rights defenders and the media in the country. During May 2011 alone, at least nine people have died in Uganda following brutal attacks by state security agents, and many more were injured, including journalists.'

A leaked cable that has sparked a row between Britain and Malawi could give rise to rural hunger in the impoverished southern African nation. That is the upshot of the spiralling row that has seen Britain suspend aid including its support for a support for a highly successful seed and fertiliser programme in Malawi - and the government in Malawi stick to its guns despite the possible consequences for its people. The row, which we have been reporting on, stems from a leaked diplomatic cable that described Malawian President Bingu wa Mutharika as 'autocratic and intolerant of criticism'.