World

BRASÍLIA — The foreign ministers of Guyana and Venezuela met on Thursday in Brazil’s capital city to discuss the simmering crisis on their border over a disputed oil-rich region.

Guyanese Foreign Minister Hugh Hilton Todd and Venezuelan counterpart Yvan Gil met in Brasilia for the first high-level talks on the disputed Essequibo region since their respective presidents held a crisis summit in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines last month.

Neither diplomat made statements as they arrived at Brazil’s foreign ministry headquarters for the meeting, which was also attended by their Brazilian counterpart Mauro Vieira.

With both sides holding firm, observers do not expect a major breakthrough on Venezuela’s claim to Essequibo, which makes up about two-thirds of Guyanese territory.

The crisis has triggered international concern over a potential military conflict in relatively peaceful South America, though Presidents Irfaan Ali and Nicolas Maduro agreed at their meeting on December 14 not to resort to force.

Essequibo has been administered by Guyana for more than a century and is the subject of border litigation before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague — whose jurisdiction in the matter Venezuela rejects.

The region is home to 125,000 of Guyana’s 800,000 citizens, but Caracas has long claimed the region should be under its control.

The row was revived in 2015 as US energy giant ExxonMobil discovered huge crude reserves in Essequibo and reached fever pitch last year after Georgetown started auctioning off oil blocks in the region.

Maduro’s government then called a controversial, non-binding referendum that overwhelmingly approved the creation of a Venezuelan province in Essequibo, according to official results.

That sparked fears of a military conflict.

‘We believe in diplomacy’ 

Ivan Rojas, a Venezuelan international relations professor, told AFP no solution is expected to emerge from Thursday’s meeting.

“It is likely they will simply focus on mutual assurances and keeping the peace.”

The dispute escalated dramatically last month when the US held joint military exercises with Guyana and Britain sent a warship to Guyanese waters. Venezuela launched a “defensive” military deployment in response.

On Wednesday, Guyana said it remained “fully committed” to the agreement struck with its neighbour in December, “in particular the maintenance of peace”.

President Ali told AFP in Georgetown that the meeting was an important step towards fulfilling the December agreement, which foresees the creation of a commission “to look at all the consequential matters”.

The ministers would also seek to set up another presidential meeting.

“It gives us now the opportunity to outline the agenda with items that both sides would want to speak on... issues of trade, climate, energy security, initiatives to expand our trade,” the president said.

Venezuela’s Gil described the dialogue as a “success for diplomacy”.

On his arrival in Brasilia, he told state broadcaster VTV the meeting “removes any possibility of conflict beyond the territorial controversy we have”.

For his part, Maduro said last month: “We believe in diplomacy, dialogue and peace.”

Brazil, which borders both countries and is acting as mediator, welcomed the “engagement of Guyana and Venezuela in the ongoing dialogue process” in a statement announcing Thursday’s meeting.

Venezuela claims Essequibo has historically been considered part of its territory since 1777, when it was part of the Spanish empire, with the Essequibo River forming a natural boundary.

However, Guyana, a former British and Dutch colony, says the border was ratified in 1899 by an arbitration court in Paris.

BEIJING — The death toll from a landslide that struck in China's rugged southwest rose to 43 on Thursday, state media said, leaving just one victim still missing under the debris.

The landslide, which occurred in Yunnan province's Zhenxiong county before dawn on Monday, buried 18 homes and sparked the evacuation of more than 200 people.

Chinese state broadcaster CCTV reported on Thursday evening that nine more bodies were uncovered at the scene, raising the death toll from 34 on Wednesday.

President Xi Jinping on Monday ordered "all-out" rescue efforts.

Following the disaster, 200 rescue workers braved frigid temperatures and a layer of snow in a race against the clock to find buried villagers.

Images shared by state media showed responders in helmets, face masks and bright orange clothing digging through twisted metal and concrete through the night in a bid to locate survivors.

Dozens of fire trucks and large digging equipment could also be seen.

Landslides are common in Yunnan, a far-flung and largely impoverished region of China where steep mountain ranges rise up to the vast Himalayan plateau.

China has experienced a string of natural disasters in recent months, some following extreme weather events such as sudden, heavy downpours.

MANCHESTER, United States — Donald Trump won the key New Hampshire primary on Tuesday, moving him ever closer to locking in the Republican presidential nomination and securing an extraordinary White House rematch with Joe Biden.

With around 90 per cent of votes counted, Trump's winning margin hovered at about 11 percentage points, but his sole remaining challenger Nikki Haley vowed to fight on.

Trump, 77, attacked Haley in a rambling victory speech and said that when the primary contest reaches her home state of South Carolina, "We're going to win easily."

Trump's address was loaded with his trademark ominous warnings about immigration as he continued to lie about winning the 2020 election.

In her speech, Haley insisted the race was "far from over" and told supporters that Democrats actually want to run against her former boss, due to his record of sowing "chaos."

"They know Trump is the only Republican in the country who Joe Biden can defeat," Haley, 52, said.

Despite adding New Hampshire to his previous easy victory in Iowa — and looking near unstoppable as he seeks to become the Republican candidate in November — Trump kept to his hard-right messaging, with no hint of reaching out to the more moderate voters who supported Haley.

At one point swearing on primetime TV, Trump said the United States was a "failing country" and claimed that undocumented migrants were coming from psychiatric hospitals and prisons and "killing our country".

President Biden responded by saying: "It is now clear that Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee."

"And my message to the country is the stakes could not be higher. Our Democracy. Our personal freedoms — from the right to choose to the right to vote," Biden said in a statement.

With strong turnout in the north-eastern state, Haley had hoped for a major upset. But US broadcasters quickly projected her defeat as the first tallies came in.

Trump was already the runaway leader in national Republican polling, despite two impeachments as president, and four criminal trials hanging over him since leaving office.

While Haley repeatedly questioned Trump’s mental fitness, her efforts in New Hampshire were not expected to create much more than a speed bump for the populist right-winger’s surge to November.

“I think it’s a two-person race now between Trump and Biden,” Keith Nahigian, a veteran of six presidential campaigns and former member of Trump’s transition team, told AFP.

New Hampshire was markedly more Haley-friendly than the states she will subsequently face, should she stay in the race, and continuing into February and South Carolina will be a tough sell.

Trump won a crushing victory in the first Republican contest in Iowa last week, with Haley a distant third.

What was once a crowded field of 14 candidates then narrowed to a one-on-one matchup on Sunday after Florida Governor Ron DeSantis dropped out following his second-place Iowa finish.

No Republican has ever won both opening contests and not ultimately secured the party’s nomination.

Trump did little actual campaigning in New Hampshire. However, his message, a mixture of personal grievance and right-wing culture war firing his base, has delivered the kind of momentum that supporters believe will sweep him back into the White House.

“I think it’s gonna be a wipeout for Biden. He’s gone,” said Luis Ferre, 72, who travelled from New York to be at Trump’s election night party at a Nashua hotel.

Haley spent the week hammering the message, backed by polling, that most Americans do not want to see a Trump-Biden rematch. That, however, may not be enough to prevent the inevitable.

“Nikki Haley’s supporters will surely feel that Tuesday night in New Hampshire was a reasonably good night. But once the relative shine of the Granite State result wears off... all but the most ardent Haley supporters will be looking through a glass darkly,” said Aron Solomon, a political analyst for legal marketing agency Amplify.

Good night for Biden 

Biden, meanwhile, won an unofficial Democratic primary in New Hampshire, giving him a symbolic boost.

The president marked the day by campaigning alongside Vice President Kamala Harris in Virginia at a rally for abortion rights.

With Trump touting his role in the ending of the constitutional right to abortion, Biden told an enthusiastic crowd that the Republican was “hell-bent” on further restrictions.

WASHINGTON — The United States destroyed a Huthi anti-ship cruise missile that was ready to launch soon after the second round of joint American-British strikes against the Yemeni rebels, the Pentagon said on Tuesday.

"Shortly after taking these strikes, an additional Houthi target was struck by the US in self-defence, destroying an anti-ship cruise missile that was prepared to launch and which presented an imminent threat to vessels operating in the region," Pentagon spokesman Major General Pat Ryder said.

The additional strike occurred "probably within 15 to 30 minutes of the main operation there", Ryder told journalists.

US and British forces carried out a first wave of strikes against the Iran-backed rebel group earlier this month and followed that up with further joint strikes overnight.

The United States has also launched multiple unilateral air raids against missiles that Washington said posed imminent threats to civilian and military vessels.

Overall, “we assess that we’ve destroyed or degraded over 25 missile launch and deployment facilities” and have “struck unmanned aerial vehicle, coastal radar and air surveillance capabilities, as well as weapons storage areas, with good effects”, Ryder said.

The Yemeni rebels began striking Red Sea shipping in November, saying they were hitting Israeli-linked vessels in support of Palestinians in Gaza, which has been ravaged by the Hamas-Israel war.

The Houthis have since declared US and British interests to be legitimate targets as well.

In addition to military action, Washington is seeking to put diplomatic and financial pressure on the Houthis, redesignating them as a terrorist organisation last week after dropping that label soon after President Joe Biden took office.

MORONI, Comoros — The Comoros’ supreme court on Wednesday confirmed the re-election of President Azali Assoumani, whose victory in a disputed vote last week was followed by deadly protests.

Rafik Mohamed, president of the court’s constitutional and electoral section, said Assoumani had won with 57.2 per cent of the vote, revising the victor’s previous score downwards slightly while greatly boosting a strangely-low turnout figure.

“There are grounds to declare him elected in the first round,” Mohamed told a press conference.

Opposition leaders rejected the results, describing the vote as fraudulent, but the court dismissed as inadmissible lawsuits seeking its annulment.

“We will not endorse fraud,” Aboudou Soefo, a defeated opposition challenger, told AFP. “We will mobilise.” 

Assoumani declined to comment. 

“I will speak tomorrow,” he told reporters at a hotel in the south of the capital, Moroni, where supporters gathered to celebrate the win. 

Last week, after the vote, Moroni was paralysed by two days of running street battles between stone-throwing youths and armed soldiers. 

At least one person was fatally wounded, according to medics.

The opposition had pointed to the unexpectedly low 16 per cent turnout figure in the presidential vote initially announced by the electoral commission as evidence that something was amiss. 

The figure was far short of that for governor polls the same day.

According to the original electoral commission tally, 189,497 Comorans voted to choose governors for each of the three islands in the archipelago, but only 55,258 cast a vote for president.

‘Long and tumultuous’ 

But on Wednesday the supreme court released new figures saying 191,297 people — 56 per cent of registered voters — had cast their ballot in the presidential race.

It was not immediately clear how the adjustment came about.

“Democracy is in mourning and the peace and stability of the country is seriously affected,” said Daoudou Abdallah Mohamed, a former interior minister and a candidate from the Orange opposition party. “I do not recognise these results.”

In a joint statement, the five defeated opposition challengers denounced what they called a “dictatorial drift” that they said had brought the Supreme Court to heel. 

They denounced vote-tampering, “massive fraud” and an “electoral charade”.

Last Friday, the US embassy in Moroni expressed concern about the results and urged the electoral commission to “clarify” them.

France, which was the islands’ colonial power until independence in 1975, also expressed concern, urging “all Comoran actors to favour restraint and dialogue”.

Interior Minister Fakridine Mahamoud described the process as “long and tumultuous”. “It’s normal there was competition,” he said after the final tally was announced. 

Assoumani, a 65-year-old former military ruler turned civilian president, has previously dismissed the concerns.

A former army chief-of-staff, Col. Assoumani initially came to power in a coup in 1999, before handing over to civilians in 2006. 

He returned to politics and won relection in 2016 in a vote marred by violence and allegations of irregularities.

BERLIN — Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock set off for east Africa on Wednesday to push for sanctions to force Sudan’s warring parties to start peace talks.

Baerbock will go to South Sudan, Kenya and Djibouti, where she will also discuss ways to protect shipping in the Red Sea from attacks by Yemen’s Houthi rebels.

Baerbock had been due in Djibouti on Wednesday but was delayed as her flight failed to receive clearance on time to overfly Eritrea.

Instead, her plane circled over the Red Sea before finally landing in Saudi Arabia’s Jeddah for refuelling, delegation sources told AFP.

No reason was provided for the refused approval, but Baerbock has already had ministerial flight problems. She was forced to cancel a trip to Australia, New Zealand and Fiji last August because of a defective plane that only took her to the United Arab Emirates.

Baerbock had been due to meet her Djibouti counterpart as well as the leader of East African bloc IGAB on her arrival. 

Ahead of her visit, she said Sudan would be a focus of talks.

Since April 2023, the war in Sudan pitting forces loyal to army chief Abdel Fattah Al Burhan and his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, commonly known as Hemeti, who commands the Rapid Support Forces, has killed more than 13,000 people and displaced 7.5 million.

Images from Darfur have brought back grim memories of the genocide 20 years ago, Baerbock said.

“Together with my partners in Djibouti, Kenya and South Sudan, I will explore possibilities to bring generals Burhan and Hemeti finally to the negotiating table, so that they don’t drag the people in Sudan deeper into the abyss and destabilise the region any further,” she said in a statement.

“For me it is clear that we must raise the pressure on both sides — through sanctions, by holding them accountable for their violations against the civil population and by influencing their supporters abroad.”

Previous mediation attempts have yielded only brief truces, and even those were systematically violated.

Beyond political talks, Baerbock will hold meetings with members of Sudan’s civil society.

“Sudan will only find longterm peace with a civil democratic government,” she said, emphasising that the conflict should not become a “forgotten crisis”.

Sudan’s army-aligned government this month spurned an invitation to an east African summit organised by the IGAD East African bloc and subsequently suspended its membership in the group for engaging with Daglo, commander of the rival forces.

Both sides have been accused of war crimes, including the indiscriminate shelling of residential areas, torture and arbitrary detention of civilians.