http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/48660/story.htm
SENEGAL: June 6, 2008
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(Additional reporting by Mathieu Bonkoungou in Ouagadougou and Tiemoko Diallo in Bamako; Editing by Giles Elgood)
Story by Pascal Fletcher
DAKAR - Climate change, fighting over water and land, trafficking in drugs, arms and migrants, and the grievances of nomadic Tuaregs have created a "lethal cocktail" threatening Africa's Sahel belt, a top UN official said.
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Since last year, insurgencies have flared among the Tuareg communities of northern Mali and Niger, stirring up an already volatile region where millions face grinding poverty as drought and the Sahara desert degrade their environment. Its name derived from the Arabic "sahil" meaning shore, the Sahel is a belt of largely barren sand and rock that runs from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea and separates Africa's vast Sahara desert from the more fertile lands to the south.
"There is no place where there is such a well-deserved need for international assistance, in my view, as these poorest countries on earth," said Jan Egeland, a special adviser on conflict resolution to the United Nations Secretary-General.
In Mali, Egeland visited dried-up lakes and watercourses and met Tuareg community leaders who complained of being neglected by their own nation and the world community and of feeling that their nomadic, pastoralist way of life was under threat.
With arms and drugs smugglers channelling large quantities of weapons into the Sahel, these grievances have fuelled the latest Tuareg revolt in Mali, in which nomadic fighters have attacked army camps and columns in the northeast Kidal region.
"These grievances connected to the worsened environment, on top of a sense of being marginalised ... feeling threatened as pastoralists, all of that may play up to young people feeling that 'no, I don't want more dialogue, I want to fight because dialogue brings nothing'" Egeland said.
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