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Author: Maggie Fick

Bemba at The Hague: A Focus on Sexual Violence

Bemba at The Hague: A Focus on Sexual Violence
A pretrial chamber of the International Criminal Court, or ICC, is conducting hearings this week to decide whether former Congolese rebel leader Jean-Pierre Bemba will stand trial at The Hague. In May 2008, the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Bemba on three counts of crimes against humanity and five counts of war crimes; the charges relate to the period between 2002 and 2003 when Ange-Felix Patasse, then president of the Central African Republic, or CAR, asked Bemba and his rebel group, the Congolese Liberation Movement, to put down coup attempts in the CAR. The Court has presented evidence from ...

Clinton and Boxer on Women and Violence

Yesterday at Senator Hillary Clinton’s secretary of state confirmation hearings, Senator Barbara Boxer of California made a strong case for the importance of making women’s issues a central element of United States foreign policy. Boxer showed photographs of Afghan women and schoolgirls who were burned in acid attacks by the Taliban. She also mentioned the work of New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof in bringing attention to the violent crimes against women in Afghanistan and to the plight of sex slaves in Cambodia. Boxer said that the awareness-building work of Kristof and others is essential because “no women or girl ...

Julia Spiegel Diavlogs on Uganda

Julia Spiegel, Enough’s field consultant who resides in Uganda, was there for the recent military campaign against the rebel group, the Lord’s Resistance Army, in the forested border region of Congo known as Garamba. Julia has recounted her experiences and analyzed the policy situation in a blogginheads.tv video dialogue, known as a “diavlog”, with UN Dispatch blogger Mark Leon Goldberg. Blogginheads pioneered the diavlog format, which the Huffington Post has termed a “lovably wonky political webcam-debate blog.” ...

In Africa, Hope for Change

In Africa, Hope for Change
Three papers—the Washington Times, South Africa’s Business Day, and the Sydney Morning Herald—feature op-eds on the same theme: President-elect Barack Obama’s personal connection to Africa, and the enormous opportunity the Obama administration will have to dramatically redefine U.S. relations with the continent. In the Washington Times op-ed, Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade had stirring words on the potential for a new relationship between the U.S. and Africa: Thus, your looming presidency has helped resurrect the American Dream on our continent as an African dream. Africans everywhere have gained renewed confidence in themselves and the capacity of their nations to change. And ...

A Fragile Birthday

A Fragile Birthday
Today is the fourth anniversary of the signing of the historic Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended Sudan’s 20 year North-South civil war (which caused the deaths of over two million people and displaced more than four million). Chatham House, a British think tank, released a report to mark this anniversary and to underline the serious risks if the CPA fails. Implementation of the agreement is lagging, and Enough has repeatedly asserted that Darfur will continue to burn and other key regions—think Southern Kordofan and Abyei—will remain at risk of deadly conflict unless the international community pursues an “All-Sudan” solution involving ...

A Green Zone for Somalia?

A Green Zone for Somalia?
Earlier this week, an African Union peacekeeper was killed when an AU convoy hit a roadside bomb near Mogadishu and a UN aid worker was killed by masked gunmen in the Gedo region west of the capital. The Islamist militia known as the shabaab is most likely behind these attacks. Following these incidents—emblematic of Somalia’s general state of anarchy—UN envoy to Somalia Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah urged the UN to create a “Baghdad-style Green Zone” in Somalia so that his international staff could actually be based in the country. That’s right: the U.N.’s international staff working on Somalia are based in Kenya ...

Ethiopia’s Assault on human rights

Today, the Ethiopian government passed a controversial bill that puts serious restrictions on the ability of foreign and local aid agencies in Ethiopia to work on a number of key issues, such as human rights, criminal justice and conflict resolution and reconciliation. The law is so restrictive that close observers such as Human Rights Watch’s Chris Albin-Lackey predicted before it was passed that it “will render the activities of most international and local human rights organizations illegal” – an ominous trend given Ethiopia’s own internal problems, its controversial military role in Somalia and lingering tensions with Eritrea. Another insider warned ...

The New Yorker profiles humanitarian workers in eastern Chad

A recent New Yorker article, “Lives of the Saints,” by Jonathan Harr, details the work of the United Nations Refugee Agency (also known as UNHCR) in eastern Chad. While the article focuses primarily on the personal trials and tribulations of the expatriate UN staff working in some of the twelve refugee camps that UNHCR. operates in eastern Chad, the author does not shy from critiquing the institutional flaws of UNHCR (certainly another story in itself). The article also provides some context on the general lawlessness and armed banditry that plagues eastern Chad, which confirms the sad reality that the over ...

Why We Like Kristof

Nicholas Kristof’s recent New York Times op-ed, “A New Chance for Darfur,” underlines why a new Obama administration is well placed to take “serious steps” to end the crisis in Darfur. In effect, Kristof is saying what the Enough Project has been saying for some time—although the situation in Darfur is still dire, there are opportunities in the midst of crisis, and the incoming Obama administration is uniquely suited to tackle the Darfur crisis if he makes ending the genocide a priority instead of following the Bush administration’s policy of what John Prendergast, John Norris, and Jerry Fowler recently called ...

The LRA strikes back (on civilians)

Although Lord’s Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony thinks he is a messiah and claims to be a fundamentalist Christian, he apparently had no qualms about ordering his notoriously brutal rebel army to commit horrific acts of death and destruction against local Congolese populations as the LRA fled their outpost in Congo’s Garamba National Park following the launch of “Operation Lightening Thunder,” joint offensive begun in mid-December by the armies of Uganda, Congo, and southern Sudan.On Christmas day, the L.R.A killed 40 people in the village of Faradje; the BBC reported that the LRA. cut off peoples’ lips as a warning ...