Here at Enough, we often swap emails with interesting articles and feature stories that we come across in our favorite publications and on our favorite websites. We wanted to share some of these stories with you as part of our effort to keep you up to date on what you need to know in the world of anti-genocide and crimes against humanity work.
January 17 marked the 51st anniversary of the assassination of Democratic Republic of Congo’s first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, just seven months after he took office. Writing for the Guardian last year to commemorate the 50th anniversary, Congolese scholar Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja wrote about Lumumba’s legacy and "the most important assassination of the 20th century."
Three months in to the Kenyan offensive in Somalia, the Somalia Report’s Jay Bahadur assesses the mission so far.
NPR’s Michele Kelemen spoke to U.S. special envoy Princeton Lyman about the recent violence in Jonglei and U.S. efforts to help professionalize the South Sudan army. A former aid to Lyman, Cameron Hudson, also spoke about the deep challenges the new country faces, even apart from its tense relationships with Khartoum. Speaking about South Sudan’s leaders, Hudson said:
Politically their instincts, I think, are in the right place, but when faced with really overwhelming violence, tribal violence and intercommunal violence around them, there are tendencies and temptations on the ground that make doing the right thing difficult on a day-to-day basis. So the United States and other allied countries, I think, have a real opportunity and responsibility to keep Sudan on track.
Foreign Policy’s Turtle Bay blogger Colum Lynch summed up the findings of a paper released by Oxfam and Save the Children about the many early warning signs leading up to famine in the Horn of Africa and the missteps taken by a variety of actors—but chiefly the U.N.—that resulted in an underestimation of the scale of the needs.
It’s on the topic of foreign policy where the Republican presidential contenders have produced some of the most memorable gaffes of the primary. In “Continent or Country?” Alexis Okeowo of the New Yorker provides an overview of the candidates’ remarks about Africa.