The US as usual criticized the firing of up to two short-range missiles and urged Pyongyang to focus on its nuclear disarmament, something it agreed in last February but has yet to begin implemented. Japan on the other hand said that the latest tests were unlikely to pose an immediate threat and it had no plans to heighten its alert against North Korea.

The communist state fired two missiles into the Yellow Sea on 7 June, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. They are believed to be ground-to-ship or ship-to-ship missiles with a range of some 100 kilometers. All landed in North Korean waters. This missile launch was the second in as many weeks, a concern for South Korea. North Korea however said that all this is designed to protect the nation itself.

Jong Dok-ki, vice chairman of the North’s Council of National Reconciliation stated that the test was part of normal military exercises and nothing more. He feels, there was no reason for it to raise any alarm. A communist land where time stands still, North Korea is one of the world’s most bizarre countries.

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, commonly termed as North Korea, is an East Asian country situated on the northern half of the Korean Peninsula. Its capital is Pyongyang. Its northern border is shared mostly with China, although 18.3 km is shared with Russia along the Tumen River, in the far northeast corner of the country. To the south, it is bordered by South Korea, with which it formed one nation until the division following World War II.

Since the cease fire of the Korean War in 1953, the North Korean government has been at odds with the United States, Japan and South Korea with whom it remains technically at war. The fall of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 resulted in a devastating drop in aid to North Korea from Russia, although China continues to provide substantial assistance. North Korea continues to have strong ties with its socialist Asian allies in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. North Korea is believed to have produced enough plutonium to make as many as a dozen or more nuclear bombs.

In July 2006, North Korea also test-fired a barrage of missiles, including a long-range one believed to be capable of reaching even parts of the US. North Korea’s relations with the United States have become particularly tense in recent years.

Most child soldiers were enlisted when they made their way to army camps in search for food and protection. As young as ten years of age, most of these youth have known little but family loss and violence. Some of them were orphans, while others were pursuing their parents. Children were mainly being recruited by militia groups and the southern Sudan defense forces. Though majority of children did not actively participate in combat but were instead used as messengers, cooks and guards. A surprisingly large number of children were also trained to use arms to defend themselves against northern government militia forces. Many of them as a result suffered severe psychological and physical injury. Moreover the brutal Ugandan Lord's Resistance Army has not yet released women and children it abducted in southern Sudan. A report by British-based Save the Children accused Sudanese government forces of recruiting children as young as eight in the South of the country, while over 8,000 children were still being used in rebel and militia groups across West Africa.

In the last three years, tens of thousands of children have returned home after serving in the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement Army (SPLA). The transition is not always easy, because for some children the armed groups represent the only family they can remember. And despite the terrible experiences these children have undergone while they were soldiers, it can be difficult for them to make a new life outside the rebel communities.

It emerged that former child soldiers in southern Sudan are failing to settle back into their communities and instead are picking up guns to fight again. They want to get back into the armed forces because they are used to carrying a gun, they have social status with a gun and they just can't get back into their communities.

A peace deal was signed in January 2005 to end two decades of civil war in the South but has yet to be fully implemented. Unless a community is build, unless education, sport, recreation for the community are provided, these children will be left out in middle.

Rwanda’s chief prosecutor, Martin Ngoga, confirmed the new releases and said the process is expected to start in mid February. They include 8,000 people linked to the 1994 massacres and 1,000 others convicted of other crimes. “This group will exclude key masterminds of the genocide,” Ngoga added.

Between April and June 1994, an estimated 800,000 Rwandans were killed in the space of 100 days. Most of the dead were Tutsis and most of those who perpetrated the violence were Hutus. In 2001, the government began implementing a participatory justice system, known as Gacaca, in order to address the enormous backlog of cases. Meanwhile, the UN set up the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, currently based in Arusha, Tanzania. The UN Tribunal has jurisdiction over high level members of the government and armed forces, while Rwanda is responsible for prosecuting lower level leaders and local people. Tensions have arisen between Rwanda and the UN over the use of the death penalty. But although the massacres are over, the legacy of the genocide continues, and the search for justice has been a long and arduous one. About 500 people have been sentenced to death, and another 100,000 are still in prison.

Some 800,000 members of the minority Tutsi ethnic group and moderate Hutus were butchered in 100 days of killings blamed on Hutu hardliners beginning in April 1994. Human Rights Watch warned this week that Rwanda faces a new round of ethnic violence if it fails to prosecute the killers of witnesses and survivors of the genocide. It said dozens of survivors and others involved in the traditional gacaca court process, where many genocide cases are being heard, have been killed in recent years.

The two ethnic groups are actually very similar, they speak the same language, inhabit the same areas and follow the same traditions. But when the Belgian colonists arrived in 1916, they saw the two groups as distinct entities, and even produced identity cards classifying people according to their ethnicity.  

The Rwandan Genocide stands out as significant, not only because of the sheer number of people massacred in such a short period of time, but also because of United Nations's (UN) inadequate response. Rwanda's genocide began hours after a plane carrying President Juvenal Habyarimana was mysteriously shot down as it approached the capital, Kigali, on April 6, 1994. The slaughter of 500 000 people ended after rebels, led by Kagame, ousted the extremist Hutu government that orchestrated the killings. The genocide ended when a Tutsi-dominated expatriate rebel movement known as the Rwandan Patriotic Front, led by Paul Kagame, overthrew the Hutu government and seized power. The genocide left both physical and emotional scars on its survivors.

Since 2003, Rwanda has released between 50,000 and 60,000 prisoners, of whom about 80 percent were accused of involvement in the genocide. Hundreds have been re-arrested, however, after committing other crimes, including killing genocide survivors in a bid to destroy evidence. The inmates to be freed in February will undergo a month-long civic “sensitisation” programme before being allowed to go to their homes, Ngoga said.

Theodore Simburudali, the president of Ibuka, an umbrella organisation that cluster together genocide survivors, feared the plan would lead to more deaths. “Many of these people that are to be released have lied about their role in the genocide for the sake of being pardoned. They end up coming and killing more survivors,” he fears. Simburudali accused President Paul Kagame’s government of neglecting the welfare of survivors, while spending huge resources on releases. “We have been requesting reparations all these past years but nothing has come forth,” he said.