Deep in central Mali, what was supposed to be harvest season for villagers has become a season of starvation, death and destruction.Mali's health ministry says so far hundreds of people have died from what it describes as a man-made famine, as farmers and herders fight over land.It is an ancestral conflict that takes place at the height of the dry season between the Dogon, who are traditional farmers and hunters, and the Fulani, the semi-nomadic herders of the Sahel.

The Dogon accuse the Fulani of overstepping on their farmland to feed their animals, while the Fulani accuse the Dogon of killing and stealing their cattle. And now they are killing each other.In one of the worst attacks, 160 Fulani villagers were killed in Ogossagou in March. Mamadou Togo, the chief representative of Mali's Dogon people, tells Al Jazeera the attack was not perpetrated by Dogon hunters. He says the Dogon have not attacked any Fulani villages, despite there being tensions between the two communities.However, he admits that "when other people come and attack the Dogon, they retaliate"."We cannot sit and watch people come and kill us and go back without anything. We said no, this is intolerable," he says. "When you come to kill me and I'm not dead, for instance, if I can I will kill you."

The two sides both accuse the other of being the aggressor.Mahmoud Dicko, a Fulani and a powerful leader of the High Islamic Council, blames the mutual mistrust on outside interference."I am convinced that there are other invisible, obscure forces that are planning to destabilise the entire subregion. And to succeed in this destabilisation, it is necessary to create a war between the different ethnic groups," he says.The violence is not limited to Mali, either. In neighbouring Sahelian countries, Fulanis have been in conflict with other tribes as well. Fuelling this conflict are armed groups - including al-Qaeda and Islamic State affiliates - who are stepping in and taking sides.

Some have been fighting in the war in Libya."This crisis in the centre of Mali started from the occupation of northern Mali by terrorist groups [in 2012]," says Tiebile Drame, the Malian minister of foreign affairs. "The Malian crisis is directly linked to the situation in Libya, to the collapse of Libya in 2011."Since 2013, the United Nations peacekeeping mission MINUSMA has been operating in Mali. There are currently 14,000 UN troops - among them British, Canadian and German soldiers - as well as 4,000 French combat troops and regional G5 Sahel forces in the country.Despite this, the violence is spreading, and spiralling out of control.Insurgent and rebel groups also directly target security forces, launching suicide attacks and car bombings.

MINUSMA is now the deadliest UN peacekeeping mission, with more UN troops dying in Mali than anywhere else, or at any time before. This also adds to the feeling shared by many Malians that the security forces are not a source of protection but a source of danger.Nevertheless, the $1bn a year MINUSMA mission has been renewed for another year, while Mali's government is calling for the creation of a coalition force like the ones seen in Iraq and Afghanistan to intervene in Mali.But the Dogon and Fulani leaders we spoke to are both sceptical about outside actors.

Dogon leader Togo believes France profits from the instability in the country, saying Mali's former colonial master "wants to recolonise again this country because of the wealth underground".Meanwhile, Fulani leader Dicko says the UN mission and international community are failing Mali, spending billions of dollars "for their own comfort"."I say to leave us alone, to leave the Sahelians between us," he says. "We are brothers, we have lived together for millennia. We have a mechanism to settle things between us. If we are left alone, we ourselves will find a solution to this problem."To examine who profits from Mali's state of instability, and how the violence can be brought to an end, Talk to Al Jazeera In The Field meets Dogon and Fulani leaders to try to understand this complex conflict.

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Could refugees be the solution to saving struggling towns?

A year ago the small rural community of Mingoola on the New South Wales-Queensland border was facing a bleak future. Meanwhile in Western Sydney, refugee advocate Emmanuel Musoni saw problems affecting people in his community who’d come from war-ravaged countries of central Africa.

When they were put in contact late last year, they saw a solution to both their problems; a model many now believe could be used to help struggling rural communities across the country.

You can read more about Mingoola's social experiment here: http://ab.co/2feKGwb

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Living in a poor country with one of the worst doctor-patient ratios in the world - about one for every 24,000 people - it's perhaps no surprise that many Ugandans are tempted by alternative remedies, even though there's often little evidence to support the claims made about their efficacy in treating or preventing disease. But the phenomenon does beg many questions, not least of which are who is really benefiting from the sale of these products and how exactly are they marketed?

We'd heard reports about one particularly controversial business, a complex multi-level marketing scheme run in Uganda under the aegis of a Chinese company called Tiens, which produces food supplements.

Its products, we'd been told, were being inappropriately sold as medications - in some cases for very serious diseases. We had also heard disturbing claims that its sales representatives, or "distributors" as they are known, were being invited to invest large sums of money in Tiens products, when in reality there was little chance of most of them ever making the kind of dazzling returns that the company promised.

So we sent a filmmaking team and Ugandan reporter Halima Athumani to investigate further.

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To much of the world, Somalia has a fearsome reputation. It is seen as one of the most dangerous places on the planet - a failed state that is widely believed to be home to warlords, pirates and terrorists.

But in the north of the country, at least, the reality is different.

Somaliland is an autonomous enclave with its own flourishing capital city, Hargeisa. Though a long way off from receiving international recognition as an independent state, it is a haven of peace and stability when compared with the rest of Somalia.

But Somaliland has its dark side. Within living memory its citizens fell victim to the most savage of state-sponsored atrocities. General Siad Barre - the ruthless dictator who ruled Somalia from 1969 to 1991 - went to war with the clans who inhabited the area. Believing them to be supporting a rebellion against his regime, he took revenge by sending in his army with a mandate to "kill all but the crows".

The city of Hargeisa was virtually destroyed during intense and pitiless bombardment. Many thousands of people were killed or driven into exile. Barre's soldiers, meanwhile, tortured and murdered as many as 50,000 others - most of them civilians - and buried their bodies in mass graves. Now, as those who still live in this region try to secure their future, some feel those past agonies should be re-examined and those responsible held to account.

In this exclusive two-part investigation, People and Power meets a community coming to terms with the horrors of the past and joins forces with a group of forensic investigators and human rights activists attempting to bring an alleged war criminal, Yusuf Abdi Ali, also known as Colonel Tukeh, to account.



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More than thirty years of increasingly repressive rule by one man in Chad has in recent weeks given way to sudden political uncertainty, as first an unappointed military council and now a transitional government reckon with the country’s future in the wake of President Idriss Deby’s unexpected death.

Chad’s interim president Mahamat Deby – son of Idriss – on May 2 named a 40-member transitional government after days of widespread popular discontent over power being concentrated within a 15-member Transitional Military Council (CMT), led by Deby.

While some opposition leaders have joined the new transitional government, the majority of ministerial posts were reserved for members of Deby’s Patriotic Salvation Movement (MPS). And there is simmering public discontent that parliament was dissolved and the constitution suspended before the CMT was formed. While parliament reconvened this week, one opposition leader says Chad is still being denied a full transition to civilian rule.

In this episode of The Stream, we’ll look at what lies ahead for people in Chad as it adjusts to life without Idriss Deby.

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