Sixteen years of fighting between Moroccan and Polisario forces, from 1975-1991, has left Western Sahara contaminated by landmines and explosive remnants of war (ERW). During the conflict Morocco constructed a 2500 km defensive wall, known as the Berm. This earthwork fortification divides Western Sahara in two with Polisario controlling the area east of the Berm [...]

The Republic of Congo’s indigenous people, the country’s first inhabitants, are under threat.  The Baka, one of 15 ethnic groups, who traditionally have lived as hunters and gathers in the forest of central Africa, confront two grave dangers.  Their traditional habitat is under threat from commercial logging and when they do leave the forest, they [...]

The Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a Ugandan based guerrilla army, has been fighting in northern Uganda since 1986, in a civil war that has claimed an estimated 100,000 lives and caused around 1.6 million refugees to flee. The UN has described the war as the “biggest neglected humanitarian emergency in the world”.
Following the beginning of [...]

As of early 2009, Nigeria had an estimated 36.2 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, mainly along the country’s Niger River Delta and offshore in the Bight of Benin, the Bight of Bonny, and the Gulf of Guinea. Despite the enormous wealth of oil 71% of the population lives on less than $1 a day, and [...]

As soon as the Moroccan occupation of the Western Sahara started and the vicious and bloody war diffused, nearly 200,000 Saharawis made their way across the desert, under aerial bombardment, to refugee camps in Algeria. Five camps were created under the control of the Polisario Front - the Sahawaris’ national liberation movement, which had appeared [...]

Thousands of miles from any major civilisation and with temperatures as high as 50℃, two armies are prepared to resume a war. On one side there are over 100,000 heavily armed Moroccan conscripts, drafted from coastal cities and temperate mountain valleys, waiting behind a huge fortified rubble wall. This wall runs for nearly 2,500 km, is [...]