Briefly

MALAWI

Mbeki hails Muluzi for stepping aside

JOHANNESBURG — South African President Thabo Mbeki praised Malawi’s President Bakili Muluzi this week for holding elections, saying his decision to step down at the end of his term sends a message to all of Africa.

Voters in Malawi go to the polls on May 18 to elect a successor to Mr. Muluzi, who has served two terms as president — the maximum the constitution allows. The country has come a long way “from when Malawi had presidents for life,” Mr. Mbeki said Tuesday in Pretoria after receiving the credentials of Malawi’s new ambassador, Michale Kamphambe-Nkhoma.

Next month’s presidential and parliamentary elections will be the third time that Malawians vote under a multiparty system since the end of the dictatorship of Hastings Kamuzu Banda, who came to power in 1966 and made himself president for life in 1971, jailing political opponents and living in luxury until he lost the elections he was forced to hold in 1994.

SOMALIA

Easter message offends Muslims

MOGADISHU — Islamic clerics have accused Western aid workers of trying to convert children in a southern Somali town to Christianity and said such actions risk adding religious turmoil to the country’s other problems.

The Umbrella Group of Religious Teachers said people in Merca took offense at Western aid packages distributed in schools that contained gifts commemorating Easter.

“If these groups don’t stop, the Somalia people have a right to jihad [struggle],” the group said.

The condemnation is a potentially important development for Western aid workers in southern Somalia, the most dangerous region of the overwhelmingly Muslim nation of 7 million that collapsed into anarchy 13 years ago.

NIGERIA

Navy men kill 5 oil-rig pirates

LAGOS — Nigerian navy men fatally shot five pirates trying to seize control of an Italian-owned oil-pumping station in the troubled Niger Delta, a senior police source told Agence France-Presse by telephone yesterday from Yenagoa, capital of Bayelsa State.

Meanwhile, one civilian was killed and eight others, including a four-month-old baby, were seriously injured in a hit-and-run attack by ethnic militants on a boat carrying villagers to the market in the oil city of Warri.

On Tuesday, bandits armed with shotguns tried to storm the Gebidaba flow station, an oil facility owned by the Italian giant Agip, but were fought off by a navy security detail, the police source said. The pirates wore magic charms they thought would ward off bullets, he said.

Weekly notes …

Guinea’s only operational MiG-21 fighter plane crashed into the sea off Conakry, the capital, killing the pilot, military officials there said yesterday. The pilot ejected from the aircraft just before Tuesday’s crash, but his parachute failed to open. “This was the only aircraft of this type that we had,” a senior military officer told Reuters. … Swaziland’s King Mswati last year fired former Prime Minister Sibusiso Dlamini through a text message to his cell phone, enraged lawmakers said yesterday. The kingdom’s new parliament — regarded, as its predecessor was, as a rubber stamp for royal policies — convened last month, and members this week reviewed Mr. Dlamini’s termination last year. Analysts said many royalists were shocked by the abrupt method used to dump the prime minister, a strong supporter of sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch.