Author: Colin Thomas-Jensen

This past Sunday afternoon, the government of Sudan bombed the village of Shegag Karo in North Darfur. One of the bombs fell on an elementary school, killing 6 children. Another bomb destroyed the town’s market, killing 6 civilians and wounding many more. On Monday morning, the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum issued a press statement. Did they condemn the attack as a brazen violation of international humanitarian law and a United Nations Security Council ban on offensive military flights over Darfur? No. In fact, the release commemorated the two-year anniversary of the Darfur Peace Agreement, a moribund and counterproductive deal which ...

The government of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the armed groups, and international parties to the Goma peace agreement should urgently implement the accord and end the horrific suffering of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children facing brutal violence and deadly diseases in eastern Congo, 63 international and Congolese human rights and aid groups said in a joint statement today ...

A recent agreement between Chad and Sudan might appear to be good news for a part of the world that has been sliding toward chaos. However, these quarrelsome neighbors have signed four peace accords in the past two years, and in each instance fighting broke out shortly thereafter. A deeper regional crisis is looming, and the international community must finally demonstrate coordinated leadership to help end this proxy war ...

Chadian rebels’ lightning strike on the capital N’Djamena in late January and early February is the latest and most dramatic consequence of two combustible situations that remain on collision course: Sudan’s destabilizing policies and Chad’s internal political crisis. For the enormous danger that this political crisis poses—to international efforts to halt violence in Darfur, to long-term regional stability, and to civilians ensnared by warfare—the world is remarkably ill-equipped to address it ...

“What would happen if we thought of Darfur as we do of Iraq, as a place with a history and politics—a messy politics of insurgency and counterinsurgency?” This is the most telling question posed by Professor Mahmood Mamdani in “The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency.” The implication is that the growing public demand for strong international action—military or otherwise—to halt the atrocities in Darfur is somehow unwarranted because people have failed to understand that the systematic crimes against humanity committed against civilians in Darfur (and indeed Iraq) are an inevitability of “the messy politics of insurgency and counterinsurgency.” ...