ALGIERS (AFP) –
Seven north African states held talks Tuesday in Algeria to plan a coordinated response to Al-Qaeda following a dangerous rise in the terror threat in the Sahara-Sahel region, officials said.

The conference “indicates our shared will to take adequate and suitable steps in a coordinated manner” in response to the terror threat “which has seen dangerous developments,” said Algerian Foreign Minister Mourad Medelci.

An Al-Qaeda offshoot in north Africa, Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), along with other criminal groups, has exploited the vast spaces of the Sahara and Sahel to hide from authorities after launching attacks or kidnapping foreigners.

“Obviously, putting into place effective and multifaceted border cooperation between our countries is crucial,” Medelci said before he and his counterparts or their deputies from Burkina Faso, Chad, Libya, Mali, Mauritania and Niger began talks behind closed doors.

Medelci also condemned growing links between terror and criminal groups in the region which has seen a rise in weapons and drug smuggling.

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NAIROBI, Kenya – Somali pirates freed a North Korean chemical tanker and its 28 crew Tuesday after the owners delivered a ransom, the European Union Naval Force said.

The MV Theresa VIII was hijacked last November, northwest of the island nation of the Seychelles.

The vessel had not asked for assistance but warships were monitoring the situation, said Cmdr. John Harbour. He could not provide details on the ransom.

Also on Tuesday, the EU Naval Force said it intercepted two pirate groups. The two groups, each consisting of a mothership and two skiffs, were tracked by maritime patrol aircraft after commercial ships reported attempted attacks.

Seventeen pirates in total had been detained, Harbour said. One of the attacks took place nearly 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) from the Somali coast and the other one was northwest of the Seychelles.

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MOGADISHU, Somalia – Somalia’s government signed an agreement with a powerful militia on Monday that offers high-level militants senior government positions in return for their military support during a long-planned offensive against an Islamist insurgency.

The agreement gave the Ahlu-sunah Wal-jamea militia five ministries as well as diplomatic posts and senior positions within the police and intelligence services.

The militia holds several towns and districts in central Somalia. The weak U.N.-backed government barely clings to a few blocks of the capital of Mogadishu with the help of more than 6,000 African Union peacekeepers.

The government came under attack by insurgents again on Monday as both sides traded mortar and machine gun fire after the president returned from Dubai. Casualty figures were not immediately available. Scores were killed in fighting last week.

Sheikh Mohamed Dahir Hefow, the militia’s head, signed the deal with Somali finance minister Sharif Hassan Sheik Aden at a ceremony held at the African Union’s headquarters in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa.

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British rock impresario and Africa aid promoter Bob Geldof, a.k.a. “Saint Bob,” was back in the headlines this past week after blowing his stack at the BBC for a story it aired alleging that Ethiopian rebels had diverted 95% of the $100 million in Ethiopian famine relief raised in the mid-1980s – much of it by Geldof’s iconic Band Aid concert.

Geldof’s spirited denials (he called the BBC a “rotten old cherry” and said there was not a “shred” of evidence to support the claim) drew support from NGOs that worked in Ethiopia at the time, along with those who remember the miseries of the famine which killed hundreds of thousands of people, as well as the gumption Geldof showed by pulling together rock stars from the U.S and Britain to help feed the victims. In the days since, however, Geldof has raised eyebrows for his apparent refusal to acknowledge the possibility that money may have been skimmed off the top, which many aid agencies and humanitarian workers say routinely happens in developing nations. In fact, doubts in the last few years about whether relief supplies reach their intended sources in conflict zones have given rise to a whole new way of thinking about humanitarian aid – and caused some to question whether giving aid in times of war does any good at all. (See pictures of Geldof in Africa with President Bush.)

“Whereas outsiders might have been well-intentioned in wanting to solve the problems of famine in Ethiopia, the regime and rebels were very much aware of how they could make use of that aid to advance their own interests,” James Shikwati, director of the Inter Region Economic Network, a Nairobi-based think tank, and a longtime critic of foreign aid, tells TIME. “Instead of trying to defend themselves, I think Bob Geldof and his friends should be looking at this as part of the problem of the aid industry.” Shikwati is a leading advocate in an emerging movement that wants to see foreign development assistance – and some emergency help – stopped entirely in Africa. He says foreign aid fosters corruption and a sense of dependence on Western donors. In some countries, leaders have also been accused of steering development projects to areas where people have voted for them while opposition areas get nothing, Shikwati says. (See pictures of Africa’s AIDS crisis.)

The real story behind Ethiopia’s famine exemplifies many of the problems with aid. In the West, the famine of the 1980s was seen as a great natural disaster. Band Aid was so successful – it raised tens of millions of dollars – because it played on Westerners’ sense of obligation to “save Africa” and their sense of guilt for somehow “allowing” the famine to happen. But the reality was far more complex. While Ethiopia was indeed in the grip of a drought, Mengistu Haile Mariam’s government, which was fighting an insurgency at the time, restricted NGOs from helping famine victims in certain areas and forcibly moved hundreds of thousands of people from one place to another in a repeat of Soviet-era collectivization campaigns, exacerbating their plight. The rebels, who came to power years later, are partly responsible for people’s suffering, too. A CIA report cited by the BBC found that money raised by the insurgents, ostensibly to help the starving, was “almost certainly” diverted for military purposes.

It seems ironic that in one of his ripostes, Geldof argued that current Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi – who was a rebel leader during the time of the famine – denied that any aid had been diverted in the 1980s. But Meles has been accused of doing the very same thing in recent years in Ethiopia’s Ogaden region, which is also home to a rebel insurgency. Aid workers operating in the region in 2007 told TIME the government allowed them to distribute food in some places and not others. They spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of upsetting the government. In a report soon after that, Human Rights Watch accused the Meles government of rounding up and killing livestock in the region and blocking aid. The government has repeatedly denied such accusations. (Read about the rise of extremism in Somalia.)

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WASHINGTON _Thousands of Burmese Muslim refugees at an unofficial refugee camp in Bangladesh are facing starvation and acute malnutrition as the government continues to block international humanitarian aid, according to Physicians for Human Rights , a humanitarian watchdog group.

PHR said in a report this week that the Bangladesh government has stepped up a crackdown against the nearly 300,000 unregistered Rohingya refugees outside the camps over the past six weeks and is sending them back to their native Myanmar .

Some families in the unregistered Kutupalong camp haven’t eaten for days and are borrowing money, often at exorbitant interest rates, to survive, the report said.

“There is an immediate need for food ration for the Rohingya refugees,” said Richard Sollom , the PHR researcher.

He said Bangladesh authorities are “going out of their way to arrest and expel the refugees” prior to elections this year in neighboring Myanmar , fearing they will provoke another exodus.

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