Africa one word will do to describe it: chaotic. (News in Brief: Vatican).

Angola--Angola's peace agreement was signed on April 4, 2002. following the assassination of UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi. On the first anniversary of the agreement between the government and UNITA guerrillas, Angolan bishops appealed to the people to rebuild the country and resolve the plight of refugees. There are more than a million refugees sheltered in camps, many of them lacking food, medical care, and schooling, the bishops said. Angola has about 14 million inhabitants, of whom 47% are Catholic.

Burundi--The Papal Nuncio, Archbishop Michael Courtney, was shocked that the massacre of possibly a thousand civilians on September 9 caused little international outcry. The Catholic Church and other media appeared to be virtually alone in reporting the scope of the killings.

The government blamed the deaths on guerrillas with the Forces for the Defence of Democracy. Sources consulted by the Catholic agency Misna gave a different story; they said that the army's responsibility for what happened was undeniable, and the killing took place after the guerrillas had withdrawn from the area. Most of the victims were killed in cold blood.

Central African Republic--Following the March 15, 2003, coup by former Chief of Staff Francois Bozizze, who ousted President Ante-Felix Patasse, the bishops in the republic condemned the coup and declared that only national dialogue could extricate the country from its cycle of violence. They deplored the violence and summary executions which have given the country an image of a real jungle, where armed men do everything they wish to the civilian population.

The whole of the Capuchin mission for example, was looted. "After the violence of the last few weeks," a Capuchin spokesman said, "we are slowly moving back to normality. . . .Stability is returning, except for the town of Bokaranga where most of the people are still hiding in the bush, chased by bandits."

In Bangui, the capital, church structures were looted; the interdiocesan centre for missionaries who work in the forest was sacked. The missionary sisters, French and African, who ran it luckily escaped unhurt.

Congo--In his very powerful story The Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad described the Congo as a dark region on the world's map where unspeakable atrocities could take place. Today, ethnic strife and civil war have battered the Congo and reportedly taken the lives of more than three million people since 1998.

Kitoga, spokeswoman for the Mater Misericordiae children's centre, says that the infants who come into their care have witnessed atrocities as bad as any Conrad described--the killing of their parents, people being buried alive, or themselves raped at a very early age. Rape is used as a weapon of war, she said; in Eastern Congo, men with AIDS are used, and rape has become a biological weapon.

Those responsible include members of the Rwandan Tutsi army; the Jutu army scattered in Eastern Congolese camps; survivors of the late dictator Mobutu Sese Deko's army; and Congolese who rebelled after the Rwandans arrived and carried out massacres.

Peace talks among a number of the warring factions led to an agreement signed in South Africa in December 2002, but the Catholic bishops of Congo protested on February 26, 3003, that the agreements have not been respected and the end of the war is nowhere in sight. "We find it inadmissable," they said, "that the Democratic Republic of the Congo serves as a field of battle for the rendering of accounts of foreign armies. . . ."

On April 16, UN investigators reported that hundreds had been slaughtered in a killing spree in Eastern Congo. A spokesman for the UN mission said that the attack started with a whistle blast and lasted between five and eight hours. It took place in the Catholic parish of Drodro and fourteen surrounding villages in Ituri, in Northeastern Congo. At least 966 people were killed, the UN said. Congolese rebel leader Thomas Lubanga accused Ugandan troops and allied Congolese tribal fighters of carrying Out the slaughter.

On April 9, the Holy Father appealed to the world not to forget about the massacres and summary executions in Africa. He appealed to the politicians in charge, as well as to all men of good will, to commit themselves to putting an end to the violence. He said that "every effort at reconciliation among the Congolese, Ugandan, and Rwandan peoples must be encouraged, as well as similar efforts that are underway in Burundi and in the Sudan, with the hope that, from these efforts, peace which is so desired can flower."

The New-York-based International Rescue Committee has said that the conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has taken more lives than any other conflict since the Second World War. Most victims have died from malnutrition and treatable diseases. But a Congolese chief from a village near Drodro said, "They slaughtered my people, slit their throats and slashed many on the head; people were killed like cows."

George Rapp, president of the IRC, said that as many as 3.3 million people have died in the more than four years of the conflict; it is "a humanitarian catastrophe of horrid and shocking proportions." Yet, it has received scant attention from the media.

Kenya--Church leaders are protesting the promotion of the Sharia, or Islamic law, in a new constitution being imposed by the country's dictatorial government next year. They argue that the constitution could be divisive for the Kenyan population, rather than uniting people as a proper secular constitution should do. But Muslim leaders want to follow the example of Nigeria, where certain regions are exclusively governed by Islamic law.

This has exacerbated deadly violence between Muslims and Christians. Oddly, the new constitution relaxes the laws on abortion and same-sex "marriages"--in spite of opposition from both Muslim and Christian clerics. Ten percent of Kenya's 30 million people are Muslim, 45 percent Protestant, 33 percent Catholic; and 12 percent profess animism.

In April 2003, a Kenyan priest, Father Martin Macharia Njoroge, died in a Nairobi hospital from gunshot wounds suffered in an attack a week earlier. Bandits shot him four times at close range, and he was left lying on the ground until found by a good Samaritan who took him to a hospital A few days previously the Kenyan government opened an inquiry into the death of Father John Anthony Kaiser, an American-born Mill Hill missionary known for his work with the poor.

Nigeria--It is the most populous country in the continent, with about 120 million people. Half of them are Christian, with about 25 million Catholics. A plenary meeting of the country's bishops in March 2003 had the theme "Seeking the Way of Peace."

Archbishop Felix Alaba Job of Ibadan said that the sad situation of Nigeria and the world, along with scandals, tribal conflicts, violence, terror, poverty, and bad governance compel the children of the light to desire and seek the way of peace. Social harmony is a key challenge for Nigeria, with 250 ethnic groups and three main religions, Christianity, Islam, and animism. The president of the bishops' conference, Archbishop John Onaiyekan, said that all Catholics entering politics should be guided by the Church's teaching on the pursuit of justice and the common good.

In the past ten years, ten thousand people have been killed in ethnic and religious violence. The government has failed to curb the rise of militants and vigilantes. In the predominantly Muslim Northern states, Sharia law has been imposed and it has unleashed bitter clashes between Muslims and Christians.

In November 2002, a newspaper article suggesting that Mohammed might have chosen a wife from the contestants in the Miss World beauty contest in Nigeria, caused riots, stabbings, burning and looting: at least 215 people were killed; 1100 were wounded and 11,000 lost their homes. A witness said he saw a crowd stab a man and then burn him alive by hanging a tire filled with gasoline around his neck. The case of a young Muslim mother being condemned to death by stoning for adultery caused an international outcry.

The bishops declared that the date of the country's presidential elections--the first since a civilian government came to power in 1999-was unacceptable because it clashed with Easter celebrations, but the electoral commission rejected their complaint.

Archbishop Onaiyekan issued a booklet entitled Thy Kingdom Come: Democracy and Politics in Nigeria Today to encourage his fellow citizens to take up their civic responsibility and participate fully in the decisions that determine his country's living conditions. In an introduction he wrote, "When Nigeria became an independent nation in October 1960, we were full of enthusiasm and great hopes for the future. We all had great dreams of Nigeria. It is now well over 40 years and we are still dreaming." People in positions of public trust, he said, still seem to behave with the mentality of military dictators. In the event, the elections of April 20, 2003, came off with little of the feared violence. President Olusegun Obasanjo, a Southern Christian, received over sixty percent of the votes, and was returned to office. The opposition charges, however, that there were irregularities in the election, and international observers confirm that this was the case.

It seems obvious that Nigerian Catholics have the benefit of wise leadership by their hierarchy. Among other initiatives it has plans for the establishment of a Catholic university, which will help to elevate the national educational standard.

Sudan--On April 9,2003, the Sudan Catholic Bishops' Conference called for the renewal of the mandate of the UN's Special Rapporteur on Human Rights. The presence of a UN envoy is necessary, they said, because "military action of armed groups supported by the Khartoum regime continued to violate the lives and safety of villages in the oil-rich areas in recent months." The primary victims of violence so far, they said, are civilians, "who in the thousands have fled the violence."

An International Crisis Group reported on February 10 that eyewitness accounts of the December/January offensive confirmed that government tactics included the abduction of women and children, gang rapes, ground assaults supported by helicopter gun ships, and burning of villages.

So much for the claims of Talisman, a Canadian oil company, over a period of years, that its presence in Sudan was helping to bring civilized values to this benighted regime.

Zimbabwe--In a pastoral letter issued shortly before Easter 2003, Zimbabwe's Catholic bishops attacked corruption in both public and private sectors and the politicization of food distribution by government and ruling party officials. "People's lives are at stake and the nation cannot afford to entertain the politicization of food, while people are starving," they said.

A month before, Archbishop Pius Ncube of Bulawayo was questioned by national intelligence agency officers after leading a prayer service for victims of torture and violence. "It was a peace service," he said, "where about a dozen victims told of how they were tortured in training camps." One woman, Deborah Moyo, who has a 5-month-old baby and is HIV positive, both the result of rape, told of how she was forced to train as a foot soldier of the ruling ZANU-PF. The archbishop said that the government tries to pretend that things in Zimbabwe are normal and peaceful, and not as bad as they are portrayed internationally. As he showed, they are far worse (Source: various publications).