Briefly

SUDAN

Darfur truce flawed, rights group says

KHARTOUM — The cease-fire signed with western rebels in the Sudan’s Darfur region last week does not force the government to disarm and disband militias behind much of the fighting, Human Rights Watch said yesterday.

A day earlier, Chadian mediators said the cease-fire was holding. “We have recorded no formal complaint of a cease-fire violation,” one reported.

In Addis Ababa, capital of Ethiopia, the African Union announced that it will deploy military observers next week to monitor the Darfur truce. Two rebel groups started a revolt last year, accusing Khartoum of neglecting the area and arming Arab militias to attack African villages.

KENYA

Former Moi official charged with fraud

NAIROBI — A high-profile opposition lawmaker was charged in court yesterday with corruption in connection with a land transfer deal that cost a state firm the equivalent of $3.5 million, police said.

William Ruto, a Cabinet member in the government of now-retired President Daniel arap Moi that lost the February 2003 election, and Samuel Mwaita, a former commissioner of lands, were accused of “obtaining money by false pretenses and handling false documents,” said a spokesman for anticorruption police.

NIGERIA

Liberian leader makes official visit

ABUJA — Liberian interim leader Gyude Bryant left yesterday after a 24-hour visit to Nigeria, where predecessor Charles Taylor lives in exile.

Mr. Bryant stopped short of calling on his host, Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, to hand over Mr. Taylor, 56, to a tribunal that has indicted him on war crimes charges in Sierra Leone, which neighbors Liberia. Mr. Bryant told reporters here Tuesday: “If the court invites Mr. Taylor, the most honorable thing for him to do is to go there and exonerate himself.”

Weekly notes …

Botswana has reported its first polio case in 13 years, and northern Nigeria is the probable source, the World Health Organization said yesterday. A spokesman for the U.N. agency said genetic checks of the virus that infected a 7-year-old boy show that it is linked closely to a polio strain endemic to Nigeria’s north, where Muslim leaders have resisted a WHO vaccination campaign. … Angola has deported about 60,000 illegal immigrants, mainly from the Democratic Republic of Congo, since cracking down on clandestine diamond prospecting in December, Portugal’s Lusa news agency reports. Most of the illegal immigrants were detained in the diamond-rich northeastern provinces of North Lunda and South Lunda, a military official told Jornal de Angola during the weekend, Lusa said. The two provinces border the DRC.