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African press review 5 June 2013

Burundi clams down on the media. Uganda's closed papers reopen. Is CAR recruiting LRA fighters to its army? Has Kagame purged his cabinet? And Egypt's Muslim Brothers slam Turkey's Taksim Square protesters.

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We start with bad news from Burundi.

Burundi's President Pierre Nkurunziza on Tuesay approved a new media law, which critics have condemned as an attack on press freedom.

The law forbids reporting on matters which could undermine national security, public order or the economy.

It marked a "black day for freedom of information" in Burundi, according to the campaign group Reporters Without Borders.

Last week, Burundi's National Communication Council imposed a one-month ban on the Iwacu newspaper's online forum because it claimed readers' comments breached the law by "endangering national unity, public order and security, incitement to ethnic hatred, justification of crimes and insults to the head of state".

Human Rights Watch described the closure as "heavy-handed and punitive".

Iwacu's site this morning is white print on a black page, explaining the closure with an apology to regular readers.

Speaking of press freedom, The Daily Monitor in Uganda is back in business, after the recent 11-day visit by armed police officers.

This morning, on the eve of the annual presidential state-of-the-nation address, the Kampala-based paper asks how President Yoweri Museveni has fared in the past 12 months.

Tomorrow, says the Monitor, Museveni is expected to restate his third-term agenda, built around restoring economic prosperity, infrastructural development, job creation and a promise to wage a war against corruption.

The leader of the opposition, Nandala Mafabi, yesterday descred the president’s diagnosis of the country’s economic bottlenecks as “diversionary” and reiterated the need to fight corruption in government in order to improve service delivery. Mafabi said misplaced government priorities were also hampering efforts to restore the economy and create jobs for Ugandans.

Regional newspaper the East African asks if LRA fighters are being drafted into CAR army. That's a lot of acronyms for one headline.

The accompanying report says that members of the Lord’s Resistance Army, who are active in northern Uganda but whose main hideout is in the Central African Republic, are being recruited into the Central African Republic’s army.

Sources familiar with LRA operations confirmed to The East African that the fighters coopted into the national army are mainly CAR nationals, numbering about 30, who had been abducted in their own country and forced into LRA ranks.

The source further revealed that the core of the LRA, which is Ugandan, including its leader Joseph Kony and his top commanders, are “settled and farming in their CAR hideout.”

Intelligence reports estimate the group, scattered across the DRC, the CAR and South Sudan, number between 250 and 400.

The East African
also says that the dropping of two senior Rwanda Patriotic Front figures from the Rwandan cabinet has fuelled speculation that the duo had opposed a third term for President Paul Kagame.

Former justice minister and attorney general Tharcisse Karugarama and the former minister of cabinet affairs Protais Musoni were dropped in a surprise mini-reshuffle late last week.

Musoni and Karugarama were the last of the remaining “historicals” who helped found the Rwanda Alliance of National Unity, an organisation of ethnic Tutsis and other Rwandans in exile, which later became the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which took power after the guerrilla war in 1994.

Political observers say the dropping of the two senior politicians could have been a result of divisions within Rwanda’s ruling party over whether Kagame should be given a chance to stand for the presidency again in 2017, when his constitutional mandate expires.

According to RPF insiders, momentum is building for an amendment to the constitution to allow the party chairperson another term in office.

The Egypt Independent reports that several Muslim Brotherhood leaders have accused Turkish protesters of receiving foreign funds from entities which they claim "want to make the highly successful Islamic project fail".

They said the crisis in Turkey is not really about the disputed development of Taksim Square. The whole issue is part of the war on Islam and an attempt to undermine efforts by Turkey’s Justice and Development Party to complete the Islamic renaissance it has achieved.

The Brotherhood statement goes on to say that what is going on in Turkey has nothing to do with daily or economic needs. It is intended to promote the idea that Islamic regimes, which have made economic achievements and proved to the world that they can stand in the face of all external challenges, have failed.

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