I checked the dictator’s heart and lived in luxury. But when revolution came, I realized the cost.

WHILE the eyes of the world have been riveted on events in Libya, Egypt and Tunisia, a post-election stalemate in Côte d’Ivoire, once the jewel of west Africa but now a byword for bloody chaos and division, has been getting nastier by the day (see article). More than 400,000 Ivorians have fled their homes, three-quarters of them from Abidjan, the country’s once shinily prosperous commercial capital, most of them in the past few weeks. Hundreds have been killed, mainly by the forces of Laurent Gbagbo, the former president who has refused to step down after being roundly defeated by his challenger, Alassane Ouattara, at the polls in November.

If Egypt's uprising represents the best of the turmoil sweeping the Middle East, then Muammar al-Qaddafi's brutal effort to stay in power in Libya represents its worst. Nobody will mistake Libya's bloody handling of its uprising for the relatively peaceful overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak's regime in neighboring Egypt or Zine El Abidine Ben Ali's in Tunisia.

(Dakar) - Security forces under the control of Laurent Gbagbo and militias that support him have, since late November 2010, committed extrajudicial killings, forced disappearances, torture, and rape, Human Rights Watch said today.

LINDA E. WATT: Good morning, everyone. I think we're almost all situated. My name is Linda Watt, and I'm the chief operating officer at the headquarters of the Episcopal Church, and a member of the council.

NEW YORK—Rwandan President Paul Kagame on Thursday backed away from a threat to withdraw his country's troops from a peacekeeping mission in Sudan if the United Nations published a report accusing Rwandan soldiers of genocide in neighboring Congo in the late 1990s.

In the waning days of his presidency, with very little planning or even forethought, George H.W. Bush sent 28,000 U.S. troops to support a humanitarian mission in a hapless country of no strategic significance to the United States.

IWAWA ISLAND, Rwanda — A few months ago, Gasigwa Gakunzi was hanging around a ramshackle house where poor children pay to watch television when the Rwandan police arrested him for loitering. The next thing he knew, he said, he was taken away from his family and carted off to this remote island in the middle of Lake Kivu.

The Nigerian political system remains fragmented and unstable. President Umaru Yar'Adua is incommunicado, despite fanciful reports of him playing with his grandchildren. The small cabal surrounding him, led by his wife Turai, has prevented outside political figures from seeing him, including Acting President Goodluck Jonathan (though there was a report, since denied, that he had), while the cabinet is divided between supporters of Yar'Adua and Jonathan. As long as Yar'Adua remains president, Jonathan's constitutional legitimacy is compromised and his political space constrained.

As Nigeria enters its second decade of civilian rule facing myriad problems, the BBC's Focus on Africa magazine asks if the country is on its way to being a failed state.