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KHARTOUM — The governor of war-torn Sudan's western Darfur region, Mini Minawi, on Sunday called on citizens there to "take up arms", six weeks into the brutal conflict.

Much of the heaviest fighting has raged in the capital Khartoum and in Darfur, near the border with Chad, since the conflict erupted on April 15.

Minawi, a former rebel leader, has voiced support for the national army in its battle against the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.

"There are many who do not wish for the safety or rights of citizens and deliberately sabotage national institutions," he wrote on Twitter.

"I call on all our honourable citizens, the people of Darfur, old and young, men and women, to take up arms to protect their property."

Darfur has already suffered decades of turmoil that has left hundreds of thousands dead, more than 2 million displaced and the region flooded with weapons.

The war there, which began in 2003, saw Sudan's then president Omar Al Bashir unleash the feared Janjaweed militia to crush a rebellion among ethnic minority groups.

The Rapid Support Forces, commanded by Mohamed Hamdan Daglo and now at war with the Sudanese army, traces its origins to the Janjaweed.

Darfur has seen some of the worst of current fighting, with hundreds of civilians killed, markets burned and rampant looting of health and aid facilities.

Tens of thousands of Sudanese have fled across the border into Chad as concerns rise about the militarisation of those who remain.

Sudanese democracy activist and author Raga Makawi said there is "a real risk of people who were in the past part of non-violent movements now considering the right to bear arms in order to protect themselves".

The Small Arms Survey, a Geneva-based research project, calculated there were 6.6 guns for every 100 people in Sudan in 2017.

The United Nations had already warned that civilians were being armed in the fighting before Minawi issued his call to arms.

The army, under chief Abdel Fattah Al Burhan, has also sought to reinforce its ranks. On Friday the defence ministry called on “army pensioners” and reservists to head to command units.

The fighting across Sudan has killed more than 1,800 people, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project.

The United Nations says more than a million people have been displaced within Sudan, in addition to 319,000 who have fled to neighbouring countries.

A one-week ceasefire brokered by the United States and Saudi Arabia and marred by breaches is due to expire Monday night.

CAP NEGRO, Tunisia — Saber Zouani lost his job as a waiter when the COVID pandemic ravaged the Tunisian tourism sector, so he decided to try something new and started a permaculture farm.

Now he grows all the food he needs and has become a pioneer of the style of ecological agriculture that is gaining fans worldwide, including in his North African country.

Many hope it will help Tunisia weather the impacts of climate change and wean it off its reliance on global supply chains, including grain and fertiliser imports from war-torn Ukraine and Russia.

In his western home town of Cap Negro, Zouani, 37, proudly showed off his three-hectare farm, set up to mimic natural ecosystems in line with ideas popularised in the 1970s by Australian ecologists.

Permaculture, as an alternative to industrial agriculture, aims to work in harmony with the environment, keep soil structures intact, and do without artificial inputs such as chemical fertilisers or pesticides.

“No, these are not weeds,” said Zouani, a biotechnology graduate, pointing to nettles and dandelions growing wild all around his rows of onions, peppers and radishes.

When he harvests his vegetables, he said, he puts the excess green matter back onto the soil to slow evaporation — hoping to keep the ground as moist as a forest floor covered with fallen leaves.

‘Create living soil’ 

Such methods are especially useful in Tunisia where an unprecedented drought has parched the countryside and left water reservoirs at dangerously low levels this spring.

At his farm, Zouani captures precious rainwater in a pond and only sparingly waters his plants, which are all grown from his own seeds.

Zouani also keeps cows, sheep, goats and chickens and composts their droppings to create soil enriched with the nitrogen-rich natural fertiliser.

“We need to create living soil, attract earthworms, fungi and all the nutrients for our plants and trees,” said Zouani.

Permaculture, he said, draws on farming methods and wisdoms of centuries past — “returning to our roots, to the traditional methods used by our grandparents”.

Zouani said he earns around 300 dinars ($100) a month from selling farm produce, with enough left over to make him, his brother and their elderly parents self-sufficient.

In two or three years, he hopes to make “a decent income” and turn his farm, named “Om Hnia” in honour of his late grandmother, into an eatery and eventually a rural eco-lodge.

Zouani started off more than two years ago with the help of the Tunisian Association of Permaculture, which gave him initial training and then financial support for basic equipment.

The group’s “Plant Your Farm” project aims to create 50 micro-farms over five years, of which around 30 are already up and running, said its president Rim Mathlouthi.

‘Bring back biodiversity’ 

The goal, Mathlouthi said, is to “demonstrate to the authorities and other farmers that permaculture is a profitable and efficient agricultural system which brings back biodiversity when the soil is depleted from ploughing and chemical inputs”.

She said the initiative, with funding from Switzerland and others, even covers Tunisia’s sun-baked arid regions and aims to entice jobless young people to cultivate abandoned family land.

It also hopes to help change a model “where the Tunisian farmer loses money because he is constantly spending, for a very small yield, on seeds, fertilisers and pesticides”, said Mathlouthi.

Permaculture also aims to help Tunisia adapt to the searing drought that has badly impacted a farm sector centred on wheat, barley and other water-intensive cereals.

“Crises such as water stress or the Ukraine war are opportunities to promote solutions such as agro-ecology and permaculture,” said Mathlouthi.

To help Tunisia’s new eco-farmers sell their organic produce and spread the word on permaculture, the association has promoted farmers’ markets and created a “citizen food” label.

Families flocked to a recent workshop at a school in the northern city of Bizerte, where they learnt green farming techniques and sampled their tasty produce.

“These are healthy products,” enthused father-of-three Salem Laghouati, 44. “It’s important to know what you’re eating.”

Maissa Haddad, a 49-year-old schoolteacher, said she was proud to be “educating children on permaculture” and teaching them that it is “beneficial for our planet and our lifestyle”.

MOGADISHU — Somalia’s government and federal member states said on Sunday that direct universal suffrage would be introduced with local elections set for June 2024.

The move follows a pledge by President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud in March to end a complex indirect system in place since 1969.

“The basic principles should be that the election of the Federal Somali Republic must be one that gives the public the opportunity to cast their votes democratically in a one-person, one-vote system,” the government said after reaching an agreement with state leaders.

The reform aims to “encourage the multiparty political system” that is independent and “corruption free”, it added.

“We have decided to take the decision-making back to the people so that the voice of the Somali citizen becomes valuable in the matters pertaining to their future,” said President Mohamud to journalists on Sunday.

“We need to move out of the fear we are trapped in for 20 to 30 years and move to having a democratic election in this country: a one-person, one-vote election for both federal and federal member states levels,” he added.

Somalia is struggling to emerge from decades of conflict and chaos while battling a bloody Islamist insurgency and natural disasters including a punishing drought that has left millions facing hunger.

“I see this political agreement as a step forward,” said one future voter, Abdulkadir Abdirahman Yusuf.

The country has not had one-person, one-vote elections nationwide since 1969, when the dictator Siad Barre seized power.

Instead, clan affiliations have been the organising principle of Somali politics, with influential roles such as speaker, prime minister and president divided among the main groups.

State legislatures and clan delegates also pick lawmakers for the national parliament, who in turn choose the president.

But rivalries between the clans have resulted in decades of strife and political wrangling, which in recent years have been exploited by the Al Shabaab militants aligned with Al Qaeda.

‘Bright future’ 

On Thursday, Somalia held its first elections by universal suffrage since 1969, in a local ballot in the semi-autonomous state of Puntland.

Direct voting has also been held in Puntland’s neighbour Somaliland, which declared independence in 1991 but has never been recognised internationally.

The African Union and several neighbouring governments hailed a “historic” vote.

“The partners believe that Puntland’s experience with direct elections has the potential to inform and inspire the expansion of democracy across Somalia, at all levels of government,” they said in a statement.

The agreement for nationwide universal suffrage was reached after four days of meetings by the National Consultative Forum, which included Mohamud, Prime Minister Hamza Abdi Barre and federal state leaders.

But Puntland’s state president Said Abdullahi Deni did not attend the meeting.

The agreement also calls for the implementation of a single presidential ticket in which voters would choose a president and vice-president, effectively quashing the prime minister post.

It still has to be approved by parliament.

“In the past, a small group of people used to elect our leaders in closed door rooms, that we should accept whether we like it or not,” said Mohamed Ali Abdi.

“If people are given the opportunity to elect their leaders, then they can hold those officials accountable.”

Mohamud was elected in May 2022 after a protracted political crisis that arose after the federal government and regional states failed to agree on a mechanism to pick a president.

“Politics is not about dominance, it is about organisation of ideas and therefore, the clan politics is not relevant to the Somali national politics,” Mohamud said when unveiling his pledge for universal suffrage in March.

“I can see a bright future for this country.”

Mohamud is Somalia’s first president to win a second term, after being in office from 2012 to 2017.

He has vowed to confront myriad problems and bring relief to citizens weary of violence by Al Shabaab terrorists, surging inflation and a worsening drought that threatens to drive millions into famine.

NEW YORK — United Nations chief Antonio Guterres said he was "shocked" by a letter from Sudanese army chief Abdel Fattah Al Burhan, reportedly requesting the replacement of special envoy Volker Perthes amid a brutal war with paramilitaries.

Guterres "is proud of the work done by Volker Perthes and reaffirms his full confidence in his Special Representative", a statement from UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said late Friday.

"The secretary-general is shocked by the letter he received from General Al-Burhan," currently at war with his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, who commands the powerful paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.

The rival forces are currently in the fifth day of a one-week ceasefire brokered by the US and Saudi Arabia, during which they have repeatedly accused each other of truce violations.

Neither the army nor the UN have released official copies of Burhan’s letter, which reportedly requested the dismissal of Perthes as Guterres’ envoy to Sudan.

It is the latest in a series of moves by Burhan, who last week officially sacked Daglo as his deputy in the ruling sovereign council, pooled hardline military supporters into his inner circle and is now seeking to reinforce army ranks.

Sudan’s defence ministry on Friday called on “army pensioners... as well as all those capable of bearing arms” to head to their nearest military command unit and “arm themselves in order to protect themselves”, their families and their neighbours.

A statement later in the day walked back the call to just army “reservists” and “pensioners”.

Perthes and the UN mission in Sudan have been the target of several protests by thousands of military and Islamist supporters who have repeatedly accused Perthes of “foreign intervention” and demanded his dismissal.

Similar protests have taken place in the eastern city of Port Sudan since the war started on April 15.

The fighting across Sudan has killed more than 1,800 people, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project.

The United Nations says more than a million people have been displaced within Sudan, in addition to 300,000 who have fled to neighbouring countries.

Perthes is currently in New York, where he briefed the Security Council on the situation in Sudan earlier this week.

There is no information on when he is due back in Sudan, where authorities have not given out visas to foreign nationals since the war started.

MOGADISHU — Al Shabaab fighters raided an African Union military base housing Ugandan troops in Somalia on Friday, triggering a fierce gun battle.

It was not immediately known if there were any casualties in the attack, which was claimed by the Al Qaeda-linked jihadist group.

A car laden with explosives was driven into the base in Bulo Marer, 120 kilometres southwest of the capital Mogadishu, leading to a gunfight, local residents and a Somali military commander told AFP.

Pro-government forces backed by the AU force known as ATMIS launched an offensive last August against 

Al Shabaab, which has been waging an insurgency in the fragile Horn of Africa nation for more than 15 years.

ATMIS said the Bulo Marer camp came under attack at 5am (0200 GMT) by Al Shabaab militants “using Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Devices and suicide bombers”.

“Reinforcements from ATMIS’ Aviation Unit and allies managed to destroy weapons in possession of the withdrawing Al Shabaab militants,” it said in a statement.

The attack targeted Ugandan soldiers stationed in Somalia as part of ATMIS, Uganda Peoples’ Defence Forces spokesman Felix Kulayigye said in a statement, adding that the military was “cross checking” details.

The 20,000-strong ATMIS force has a more offensive remit than its predecessor known as AMISOM.

The force is drawn from Uganda, Burundi, Djibouti, Ethiopia and Kenya, with troops deployed in southern and central Somalia.

Its goal is to hand over security responsibilities to Somalia’s army and police by 2024.

Al Shabaab claimed via its communication channels that it had overrun the base and that it had inflicted a large number of casualties.

But Somali military commander Mohamed Yerow Hassan said the attackers had been repelled and the “situation is back to normal now”.

“The terrorists were forced to retreat and flee,” Hassan told AFP by telephone.

Al Shabaab is known to exaggerate claims of battlefield gains in propaganda, while the governments of nations contributing troops to the AU force rarely confirm casualties.

Attacks on army bases in isolated parts of Somalia are difficult to independently verify.

Condemning the attack, the United States underlined its commitment to “Somali and African Union partners” while commending “the bravery and sacrifice” of those on the ground, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said.

ATMIS said that “everything is being done to bring the situation under control”.

Retaliatory attacks 

Last year, Somalia’s President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud launched an “all-out war” on the militants, rallying Somalis to help flush out members of the extremist group he described as “bedbugs”.

In recent months, the army and militias known as “macawisley” have retaken swathes of territory in the centre of the troubled country in an operation backed by ATMIS and US air strikes.

The US Africa Command on Monday said it had carried out a strike the weekend before in Jilib in Somalia’s south, and that initial assessments indicated no civilians were harmed.

Despite the gains by the pro-government forces, the militants have continued to strike with lethal force against civilian and military targets.

In the deadliest Al Shabaab attack since the offensive was launched, 121 people were killed in October in two car bomb blasts at the education ministry in Mogadishu.

In a report to the UN Security Council in February, UN chief Antonio Guterres said that 2022 was the deadliest year for civilians in Somalia since 2017, largely as a result of Al Shabaab attacks.

ISTANBUL — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan pays homage on Saturday to his executed Islamic predecessor in an attempt to rally his conservative base on the eve of a historic runoff vote.

Erdogan's visit to Istanbul's Adnan Menderes mausoleum takes him back to the man he cited when he called early polls for May 14 in a bid to ease his way to an unprecedented third decade of rule.

Menderes was tried and hanged one year after the military staged a coup in 1960 to put Turkey back on a more secular course.

Erdogan survived a putsch attempt against his own Islamic-rooted government in 2016.

The 69-year-old told his followers in January that he wanted to continue Menderes's fight for religious rights and nationalist causes in the officially secular but overwhelmingly Muslim republic of 85 million people.

Erdogan paid a similarly symbolic visit to Istanbul's iconic Hagia Sophia mosque on the eve of the first round.

His conversion of the ancient seat of eastern Christianity into a mosque in 2020 further elevated his hero status among poorer and more rural voters who have helped keep him in power since 2003.

Erdogan ended up beating secular opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu by nearly five percentage points two weeks ago.

But his failure to top the 50-per cent threshold set up Turkey's first election runoff and underscored the gradual ebbing of support for its longest-serving leader.

'They are afraid' 

Kilicdaroglu has focused his campaign on more immediate concerns as he tries to come from behind and bring back power to the secular party that ruled Turkey for most of the 20th century.

He used a late-night TV interview on Friday to accuse Erdogan's government of unfairly blocking his mass text messages to voters.

"They are afraid of us," the 74-year-old former civil servant said.

The episode highlights what opposition supporters, many of them liberal secularists who live in big cities such as Istanbul and Izmir, have been saying for years.

While Turkey’s polls were judged to be free on election day, observers say they were hardly fair.

“These were competitive but still limited elections,” the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) election observer mission’s chief Michael Georg Link said after the first round.

“The criminalisation of some political forces, including the detention of several opposition politicians, prevented full political pluralism and impeded individuals’ rights to run in the elections,” Link said.

‘Creating fake news’ 

Erdogan’s first decade in power was distinguished by strong economic growth and warm relations with Western powers that elevated his global status and domestic support.

His second began with a corruption scandal and soon descended into a political crackdown and years of economic turmoil that erased many of the early gains.

Erdogan’s consolidation of power included a near-complete monopolisation of the media by the government and its business allies.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) estimated that Erdogan received 60 times as much airtime on the TRT Haber state broadcaster as Kilicdaroglu in April.

“They have taken over all the institutions,” Kilicdaroglu said in his television interview. “We have to rebuild this state.”

Erdogan used his own TV interview on Friday to attack Western coverage of the election.

“Western media have channelled all their attention to us. They are more interested in the elections in Turkey than in their own countries,” Erdogan said. “But they are always creating fake news.”

Economic peril 

The vote is being accompanied by growing alarm about the fate of Turkey’s beleaguered lira and the stability of its banks.

Erdogan forced the central bank to follow through on his unconventional theory that lower interest rates bring down inflation.

The exact opposite has occurred.

Turkey’s annual inflation rate touched 85 per cent last year while the lira entered a brief freefall.

The lira has been holding remarkably steady during the campaign period, a sign that the government is ploughing vast sums into market interventions.

The central bank’s net foreign currency holdings, a key measure of financial health, have dropped into negative territory for the first time since 2002.

Economists feel that Erdogan’s government will need to reverse course and sharply raise rates or stop supporting the lira if it wants to avoid a full-fledged crisis after the vote.

“If Kilicdaroglu were to win, he would immediately establish a more austere monetary policy than that of Erdogan,” Moneyfarm investment house’s Giorgio Broggi said.

SAQQARA, Egypt — Archaeologists in Egypt have unearthed two human and animal embalming workshops, as well as two tombs, discovered in the Saqqara necropolis south of Cairo, the government said on Saturday.

The vast burial site, at the ancient Egyptian capital Memphis, is a UNESCO World Heritage site and home to more than a dozen pyramids, animal graves and old Coptic Christian monasteries.

Mostafa Waziri, head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, told reporters the embalming workshops, where humans and animals were mummified, “date back to the 30th dynasty” which reigned around 2,400 years ago.

Researchers “found several rooms equipped with stony beds where the deceased lay down for mummification”, Egypt’s tourism and antiquities ministry said.

Each bed ended in gutters to facilitate the mummification process, with a collection of clay pots nearby to hold entrails and organs, as well as a collection of instruments and ritual vessels.

Early studies of the other workshop suggest it was used for the “mummification of sacred animals”.

The discovery also includes the tombs of two priests dating back to the 24th and 14th centuries BC, respectively.

The first belonged to Ne Hesut Ba, who served the fifth dynasty as the head of scribes and priest of the gods Horus and Maat.

The tomb walls are decorated with depictions of “daily life, agriculture and hunting scenes”, said Mohamed Youssef, director of the Saqqara archaeological site.

The second tomb, that of a priest named Men Kheber, was carved in rock and features depictions of the deceased himself on the tomb walls, as well as in a 1-metre-long alabaster statue, Youssef told reporters.

Egypt has unveiled a string of major archaeological discoveries in recent years.

Critics say the flurry of excavations has prioritised finds shown to grab media attention over hard academic research.

The discoveries have been a key component of Egypt’s attempts to revive its vital tourism industry amid a severe economic crisis.

The government recently launched a strategy “aiming for a rapid increase in inbound tourism” at a rate of 25-30 per cent a year, Tourism and Antiquities Minister Ahmed Issa said at the site on Saturday.

Egypt aims to draw in 30 million tourists a year by 2028, up from 13 million before the Covid pandemic.

The crowning jewel of the government’s strategy is the long-delayed inauguration of the Grand Egyptian Museum at the foot of the pyramids in Giza.

TRIPOLI — Libya’s Tripoli-based government on Saturday carried out a fresh round of drone strikes in Zawiya, in the country’s west, as part of an operation against smuggling networks, local media reported.

The strikes come after the eastern-based parliament in the divided country on Thurdsay accused the Tripoli-based government of hitting the home of one of its legislators.

“Air strikes were carried out on Saturday by drones targeting and destroying tanker trucks carrying smuggled fuel,” the Libya Al Ahrar television channel said.

Another site was hit “near the Bir Al Ghanam bridge” in Zawiya, 45 kilometres west of Tripoli on the Mediterranean coast, the broadcaster added.

Several other explosions were heard across the city’s west early on Saturday, according to residents who spoke to AFP by telephone.

Official comment has not yet been offered by the UN-recognised government in Tripoli.

Thursday’s strikes also targeted sites around Al Maya, a small port between Zawiya and the capital that has seen repeated clashes between rival militias in recent weeks.

On Thursday, the defence ministry said it had carried out “accurate and targeted air strikes against the caches of traffickers of fuels, narcotics and human beings” around Zawiya.

The strikes had been ordered by interim Prime Minister Abdulhamid Ddeibah, the ministry added.

Libya was plunged into chaos after a NATO-backed uprising toppled and killed strongman Muammar Qadhafi in 2011, with armed groups exploiting the situation to fund their activities through fuel smuggling and the trafficking of migrants.

The North African country, which is awash with weapons, is split between the nominally interim Tripoli-based government in the west, and another in the east backed by military strongman Khalifa Haftar.

On Friday, Libya’s eastern parliament denounced Thursday’s “attack” on the home of Zawiya legislator Ali Bouzribah.

Bouzribah, an opponent of Ddeibah, also condemned the strikes on Libyan television.

The strikes “illustrate the urgent need for the reunification of Libya”, the UN’s Support Mission in Libya said on Friday.

“UNSMIL reminds all involved in the incidents in Zawiya that any law enforcement measures should respect relevant national and international laws. Protection of civilians should remain paramount,” it added.