Author: Maggie Fick

When news leaked last night of the International Criminal Court’s anticipated issuance of an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, we at Enough were sure of our opinion on the decision. As we argue in “What the Warrant Means: Justice, Peace, and the Key Actors in Sudan,” a strategy paper released today, the issuance of an arrest warrant against Sudan’s sitting head of state offers the Obama administration a chance to catalyze multilateral efforts to bring about a solution Sudan’s decades-long cycle of violence. The ICC’s likely move could constitute the crucial missing ingredient to conflict resolution efforts in ...

Last night, when the news broke that the judges at the International Criminal Court were set to issue an arrest warrant for Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, The Enough Project, the Save Darfur Coalition, and the Genocide Intervention Network issued a joint statement making their position on the Court’s expected decision clear: [The] decision will likely add international legal weight to a long obvious truth – primary responsibility for the atrocities in Darfur rests with the regime that Bashir heads. Individual nations and the international community as a whole cannot continue to do business as usual with Bashir once he is ...

Last night, the Enough Project hosted an inspiring event at the Center for American Progress in Washington, DC. John Prendergast moderated a panel discussion, featuring Franco Majok, a former “lost boy” from Sudan’s devastating North-South civil war, Craig Walzer, editor of Out of Exile: The Abducted and Displaced People of Sudan, and Dave Eggers, the acclaimed author and co-creator of the impressive Voice of Witness project, which aims to shed light on “human rights crises through oral history.” Out of Exile is the fourth installment in the Voice of Witness series. The book empowers displaced people and refugees, a group ...

The Congo Advocacy Coalition, a group of 100 aid and human rights organizations, sent a letter last week to John Holmes, the United Nations Under-Secretary-General for humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, in advance of his visit to eastern Congo. Holmes is visiting internally displaced persons, or IDP, camps in North Kivu province as well as villages wracked by the recent spate of Lord’s Resistance Army, or LRA, attacks in northeastern Congo. Today, Holmes called the LRA attacks “diabolical,” and vowed to “do everything he could to protect people in eastern Congo” from future attacks. The letter urges Holmes to ...

It’s an understatement to say that Chad is currently facing a lot of problems. N’Djamena is bracing for a coup attempt by a united, Sudan-supported rebel coalition, and the Chadian people are fighting for survival as their government brutally represses them (Amnesty International has much more on this) and bans charcoal, their main source of cooking fuel. To add to the chaos, 10,000 refugees from the Central African Republic—reportedly mostly women and children—are stranded in the remote savannah of southern Chad after having fled a wave of new fighting in northern CAR. More than 5,000 refugees have poured into the ...

A spokesperson for Djibril Bassolé, the joint African Union-United Nations mediator to Darfur, announced over the weekend that Sudanese government officials, and representatives from Darfur’s most significant rebel group, the Justice and Equality Movement, or JEM, will meet in Qatar today. This meeting is the first ever publicly acknowledged “one-on-one” discussion between government officials and the JEM rebels, and a JEM spokesperson said that the two parties were set to discuss “possible confidence-building measures, including the release of prisoners and a cessation of hostilities for a set period of time.” While the talks could be a first step toward a ...

A recent post from the brilliant IntLawGrrls blog directed me to Newsweek’s Anna Quindlen making the case for placing women’s well-being as a core tenet of a revitalized U.S. foreign policy: …according to the Global Fund for Women, two thirds of the world's uneducated children are girls, and, naturally, two thirds of the world's poorest people are female. Not coincidentally, women make up only about 16 percent of parliament members worldwide. Simple mathematics dictates that if we are interested in promoting prosperity, education and good government, the United States must focus on the welfare of women. One study shows that ...

Not everyone rushes to read the periodic reports of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon to the Security Council, but they do represent important statements of policy and everyone from rebels to world leaders carefully parse their meaning. All the more disappointing then that the Secretary General’s latest report on Sudan gets the facts badly wrong in talking about the Lord’s Resistance Army. The report claims, “Increased insecurity in Southern Sudan related to the faltering LRA peace process is a further concern.” Faltering peace process? The LRA peace process is undeniably dead, and as John Norris noted on Enough Said recently, the ...

This week, Human Rights Watch, or HRW, called on the Congolese government to arrest Bosco Ntaganda, the former rebel commander and indicted war criminal who is now playing a key role (unlike the United Nations Mission in Congo, MONUC) in the joint Rwandan-Congolese operation to root out the FDLR militia in eastern Congo. HRW expressed concern that: [T]he government is considering appointing Ntaganda to a top position in the Congolese army, despite the accusations that he had responsibility for using child soldiers, as well as for committing several atrocities in Ituri district in northeastern Congo. HRW also raised the fact ...

In case you missed it, there has been a flurry of important political developments in Zimbabwe over the past week. It has been hard to ignore reports of the raging cholera epidemic (latest death toll: over 3,300) and the desperate economic crisis (which has been called a “death spiral,” and which the term hyperinflation does not do justice.) Amidst the chaos, over four months after a power-sharing agreement was signed and after numerous fits, stalls, and re-starts in the talks, Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of Zimbabwe’s leading opposition group, the Movement for Democratic Change, or MDC, pulled an about face and ...