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.
Despite the high expectations, the first American president with direct ties to Africa has taken a far less transformative approach to the continent than many hoped. John Norris of the Center for American Progress considers why, writing for Foreign Policy on the heels of the release of President Obama’s new Africa strategy, whose rollout was “discrete to the point of stealth.”
The recent arrest by a Libyan militia of four staff members of the International Criminal Court has far greater implications for the court than the surprisingly quiet international response might lead one to believe. It boils down to a question of respect for diplomatic immunity, which enables the ICC to send staff members into a conflict-plagued country relatively safely to investigate cases. “But if the court is unable to safely conduct investigations, meet with witnesses, or ensure that defendants receive proper legal representation, it won't be able to adjudicate its way out of a paper bag,” write lawyers and Wronging Rights bloggers Kate Cronin-Furman and Amanda Taub in The Atlantic.
"We want to stay in Uganda but only during the nights," says Dinah Mbabazi, a Congolese sometime-refugee who, like many farmers living in the volatile region where the Lord’s Resistance Army and other militias operate, has made it a strategy to travel across the border to Uganda when the security situation heats up. Mark Schenkel spoke to refugees and local administrators about how this arrangement is working.
As if relations weren’t already dire, Sudan and South Sudan are also allegedly cooking up some deals with controversial global players Iran and Israel. The reports, described by The Economist, certainly don’t instill confidence that cooler heads will prevail should those partnerships come to fruition.
With the preoccupation of the mutiny led by Congolese rebel leader Bosco Ntaganda, has the international community let other rebel leaders off the hook? That’s how it seems, according to the findings of a team at the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, which asks whatever happened to Bosco’s former co-conspirator, Laurent Nkunda.