1 million flee Congo fighting, U.N. says

About 1 million people have been forced to flee because of fighting between rebel and government forces in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the U.N. refugee agency said Friday, adding that it was investigating reports of camps being looted and torched.

Children eat bread and porridge at a camp for displaced people 12 kilometers north of Goma in Congo.

A rebel spokesman said they were keeping to a cease-fire so aid can reach displaced Congolese.

Babou Amane, deputy spokesman for the National Congress for the Defense of the People, said rebel forces had retreated to about 9 miles (15 kilometers) north of the city of Goma to create a "humanitarian corridor."

Despite a rebel cease-fire declared late Wednesday, security in Congo's North Kivu province was tenuous, with many aid organizations refusing or reluctant to venture out to help the homeless, authorities said.

About 50 medical personnel from Medecins sans Frontieres can move throughout the area relatively unobstructed and supplies are getting in, said Marie-Noelle Rodrigue, the agency's local emergency coordinator.

"Security is a concern, of course," Rodrigue said from Goma, the provincial capital. "For the moment, we have not been stopped by anybody."

Thousands of displaced residents are on the move and Medecins sans Frontieres has mobile clinics dispensing water and any other needed aid, Rodrigue said late Friday.

"We're trying to move with the people," Rodrigue said. "We're setting up mobile clinics where ever they are."

There have been some isolated cases of cholera but no epidemics or other major health concerns, Rodrigue said.

"For the moment, it is still under control," the 40-year-old nurse said.

David Miliband, the foreign minister of Britain, and his French counterpart, Bernard Kouchner, were heading to Congo and neighboring Rwanda on Friday, their offices said. France holds the rotating presidency of the European Union, which is considering its options, officials have said.

In addition, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon asked Alain Leroy, the undersecretary-general for peacekeeping operations, to travel to the region, the organization said.

European Union Commissioner Louis Michel was in Kinshasa, the Congolese capital, on Friday and obtained "verbal agreement" from Rwandan President Paul Kagame and Congo President Joseph Kabila to attend an emergency summit on the crisis to be held "in Nairobi [Kenya] under auspices of the United Nations," EU spokesman John Clancy said.

The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said it was investigating reports that some camps for displaced persons had been "forcibly emptied, looted and burned," according to a written statement.

In a written statement, the U.N. High Commissioner of Refugees spokesman Ron Redmond said Friday afternoon, "UNHCR staff in Goma this morning reported the situation calm but tense. Our office is open and our people are working, but security restrictions on movement remain tight."

He said rebels controlled Rutshuru, where UNHCR has an office. Rutshuru is 90 kilometers (56 miles) north of Goma, the provincial capital.

Redmond said the UNHCR was trying to verify "disturbing reports" from "humanitarian partners" about attacks on the camps near Rutshuru.

"We are extremely concerned about the fate of some 50,000 displaced people living in these camps, which include the UNHCR-administered sites of Dumez, Nyongera and Kasasa as well as several makeshift settlements," he said.

Rebel leader General Laurent Nkunda said Thursday that he ordered a cease-fire for his forces because he wants start work with the U.N. mission in Congo, known by its French acronym MONUC, to allow people back to their homes.

"We are respecting our cease-fire. ... We are waiting for the response [to the corridor offer] from the government and from MONUC, the U.N. forces," Nkunda said. "We want to have an agenda that we can discuss political issues with the government."

Nkunda, a Tutsi, has repeatedly blamed the Congolese government for failing to protect the Tutsi tribe from Rwandan Hutu militia in Congo. Hutu rebels have been active in the jungles of eastern Congo since Rwanda's 1994 genocide, according to the United Nations.

The United Nations estimates that during the 100 days of the genocide in Rwanda, the Hutu majority killed 800,000 Tutsis and and moderate Hutus.

The top U.S. diplomat for Africa said Friday that she was encouraged that the deadly conflict won't grow into "something that looks like genocide."

Assistant Secretary of State Jendayi Frazer spoke to CNN International by phone from Kigali, Rwanda, Congo's neighbor, where she planned to meet Saturday with Rwandan President Paul Kagame.

Frazer, who visited Thursday with Congo President Joseph Kabila, was making diplomatic rounds to deliver a U.S. message: "We understand the need for the Rwandans and the Congolese to work together to try to end the human crisis that's unfolded in North Kivu, as well as to cooperate together to address the negative forces in the eastern Congo."

One of the negative forces, she said, is the National Congress for the Defense of the People rebel force led by Nkunda, which fought government forces for four days until a cease-fire was declared late Wednesday.

Frazer said she would impress upon Kagame the need for continued cooperation between Rwanda and Kabila's government.

"Eastern Congo is very, very unstable right now. ... There have been attacks and counterattacks between rebels and the Congo military," she said.

Asked about the possible danger that the rebels could overrun Goma, Frazer said tensions seemed to be lessening.

"But I am growing confident that both President Kabila and President Kagame have been speaking to each other.

"They've exchanged envoys. ... They are engaged in the type of discussions that will be necessary to prevent such an attack on Goma as well as some type of ethnic reprisal that could lead to something that looks like genocide."

Frazer said the United States also recognizes the limitations of MONUC, whose soldiers have lent support to Congolese troops.

The United States has said for some time that they need more troops and specialized forces, even for a limited time while diplomatic measures are being pursued, she said.

On Thursday, MONUC spokesman Kevin Kennedy said U.N. troops, numbering a few hundred, were struggling to keep the peace in Goma, a city of about 1 million people, and the surrounding countryside.
---------------------------------
1 million flee Congo fighting, U.N.

Halloween pardon sought for executed British witches

LONDON, England (CNN) -- Campaigners in London planned to petition the British government Friday for a posthumous pardon for the hundreds of people executed for witchcraft between the 16th and 18th centuries.

Witchcraft has not been punishable by death for nearly 300 years.

They said Halloween is a good time to highlight the "grave miscarriage of justice" suffered by the men and women falsely accused of being witches.

Their petition asks Justice Minister Jack Straw to recommend that Queen Elizabeth II issue a pardon.

"We felt that it was time that the sinister associations held by a minority of people regarding witches and Halloween were tackled head-on," said Emma Angel, head of Angels, a large costume supplier in London.

"We were gobsmacked to discover that though the law was changed hundreds of years ago and society had moved on, the victims were never officially pardoned."

Angels launched a Web site, pardonthewitches.com, to solicit signatures for their petition. They had between 150 and 200 by Friday morning, Angels spokesman Benjamin Webb said, but they hoped Halloween publicity would generate more.

Around 400 people were executed in England and some 4,000 in Scotland for alleged witchcraft, campaigners say.

The Witchcraft Act of 1735 put an end to trials of accused witches, but many still faced persecution and jail for other crimes such as fraud.

"It shifted from a spiritual thing to more of a criminal thing," Webb said, but "it didn't pardon those people who'd suffered before."

The campaigners worked with witchcraft historian John Callow to detail eight cases they hope will persuade the government to act.

They include the case of Ursula Kemp, a woman who offered cures in Essex, England in the 1500s. The uneven results of her work prompted accusations of witchcraft and she was hanged in 1582.

A century later, Mary Trembles and Susanna Edwards were begging for food in Exeter, England, when a local woman blamed one of them for an illness and they were jailed.

A jail visitor noticed Edwards' shaky hands and suggested she was "tormenting someone." It started a string of rumors that resulted in an accusation of witchcraft, and the women were executed in 1682.

In 1645, clergyman John Lowes was regarded as too attached to Catholicism in a strongly Reformed area. He had already defended himself once against witchcraft when he came to the attention of a notorious zealot named Matthew Hopkins.

Hopkins made Lowes walk for days and nights until he was unable to resistconfessing to being a witch. Lowes was hanged in Bury St. Edmunds, England, after conducting his own funeral.

"Today we are well aware that these individuals were neither capable of harmful magic nor in league with the devil," Callow said.

He said the endemic poverty of the 16th to 18th centuries put pressure on leaders and the judiciary to blame someone for society's problems -- so they decided to blame witches.

"A lot of these cases were score-settling in local communities," Webb said, adding many cases of alleged witchcraft weren't even reported.

"The notion that people could suspend their disbelief and believe that women were talking to toads -- just horrible times. Horrible times."

In 2004, one Scottish town managed to get a pardon for the 81 accused witches that had been put to death there. The independent baron court in Prestonpans, near Edinburgh, pardoned them before the court was officially disbanded in November of that year.

In its ruling, the court pardoned both the accused witches and their cats who, it said, were executed for "conjuration or sorcery." It said their convictions were based on insufficient evidence that often relied on "voices" or the actions of "spirits" to attest to their guilt.

A separate group petitioned the Scottish parliament last month, asking for pardons for each of the 4,000 witches who were put to death across the nation.

Ewan Irvine, a medium with Full Moon Investigations, acknowledged it's unlikely they will get a pardon for every accused witch, so the group is going ahead with a private memorial in Scotland instead.

"It would be an apology to all those accused," said Irvine, whose group investigates the paranormal.

Webb said while few people today may believe those men and women deserved execution, their stories still generate suspicion and stigma. That extends to modern-day criticism of children dressing as witches at Halloween with the idea that it's evil or connected to the devil, he said.

"Witches were not emissaries of Satan," Webb said. "They were in fact persecuted women and men who deserve a pardon."

A spokesman for the Ministry of Justice would not comment on the case but said the granting of such a pardon is extremely rare.

"To receive a royal pardon, the test is a high one," the spokesman said. "Evidence must prove conclusively that no offense was committed or that the applicant did not commit the offense. It is not enough that the conviction may be unsafe -- the applicant must be technically and morally innocent."

Accused witches were also tried and put to death in the famous Salem witch trials in the U.S. state of Massachusetts in the late 1600s, but all were later pardoned, said Alison D'Amario, director of education at the Salem Witch Museum.

The names of 14 were cleared in 1711 after their families applied to the government, D'Amario said. Gov. Foster Furcolo cleared one name in 1957, and then-Gov. Jane Swift cleared the remaining five in 2001, she said.

"Their names are now on a list that makes it seem as though they were innocent, which they surely were," D'Amario said.
----------------------------
Halloween pardon sought for executed British witches