Author: Rebecca Brocato

In his weekly “Worst Place in the World” post, Michael Kleinman at Change.org’s Humanitarian Relief blog bestows the unenviable award on Sri Lanka, where an estimated 1,400 people are dying each week at the Manik Farm IDP camp near the epicenter of fighting between government forces and the Tamil Tigers this spring. The Times article reporting this shocking statistic also notes that ”the International Committee of the Red Cross revealed that it had been asked to scale down its operations by the Sri Lankan authorities, which insist that they have the situation under control.” Kleinman makes the important point that ...

Tomorrow night at 10 p.m., NBC will re-air an important episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, which highlights the plight of child soldiers and the predations of the ruthless Lord’s Resistance Army. Enough Co-founder John Prendergast consulted on the episode, entitled “Hell,” which tells the story of victims of LRA violence in northern Uganda and engages with issues of child soldiers and sexual violence in constructive, sensitive ways. Raising awareness about the atrocities committed by the LRA is critical, and efforts like this one introduce the issue to crucial new audiences. Here is the preview for tomorrow’s episode: ...

Writing in yesterday’s New York Times, Celia Dugger provides important details from the findings of the Kimberley Process team’s recent visit to Zimbabwe’s diamond fields. Located in the eastern province of Marange, the fields have been the subject of recent scrutiny in the wake of a damning report from Human Rights Watch narrating abuses that took place in the fields currently controlled by the Zimbabwean army. According to HRW, officials from within Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party have been directly benefiting from diamond mining and trading, which if undertaken legally could provide revenue to a country that is currently telling the ...

Intense fighting in northern Mogadishu has made that section of the capital a ghost town, according to an update from Doctors Without Borders in Nairobi. “Continuous shelling, explosions, and open combat among various armed groups have claimed the lives of dozens of civilians and plunged the city into chaos,” Doctors Without Borders, known by its French acronym MSF, said in a statement. Fighting between the extraordinarily frail Transitional Federal Government and Islamist fighters from al-Shabaab and Hizbul Islam continues to rage. More than 200,000 people have fled recent violence in the capital, running toward dire circumstances in towns outside the ...

A recent letter cosigned by a venerable group of organizations, including Amnesty International, the Carter Center, Freedom House, and Physicians for Human Rights decries the current situation in northern Sri Lanka and calls on the Obama administration to “assume the leadership necessary to mobilize the international community to protect the surviving civilians and to hold accountable those responsible for mass atrocities.” The letter speaks to how quickly the situation in Sri Lanka fell off the international radar. Mere months ago, a violent military campaign raged on a tiny swath of northeast coast, during which the Sri Lankan government went after ...

A powerful statement out today from Human Rights Watch shines the spotlight on deplorable crimes perpetrated against civilians by armed groups throughout the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Notably, the statement describes in detail the “significant” uptick in violence in the wake of largely unsuccessful military operations against the rebel groups the LRA and FDLR and features an important quote from HRW Executive Director Ken Roth, who takes the United Nations to task for their support of the Congolese army, known as the FARDC: UN peacekeepers should not support Congolese armed forces that are committing war crimes and failing ...

On Capitol Hill last night, Florida Congresswoman Ileana Ross-Lehtinen offered House Concurrent Resolution 159 to mark the fifth anniversary of America’s declaration of genocide in Darfur and emphasize the veracity of using the distinction in Darfur. An impressive bipartisan group has already signed onto the resolution, including California Democrat and Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Howard Berman, North Carolina Republican John Boozman, and Representative Chris Smith, the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health. The resolution offers a series of brief summaries of Sudan’s crises, taking pains to highlight the necessity of ...

This week, the Fund for Peace released its annual Failed States Index. A useful resource, this index identifies those countries they believe to be failed states as well as those fragile states on a perilous path towards failure. Enough’s countries of focus sit literally at the top of the Index. (No huge surprise there, given the nature of our work…) Somalia had the highest score, with Zimbabwe, Sudan, Chad, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo following closely behind. This unfortunate reality highlights the necessity of international attention to these crises, many of which routinely get lost on the world ...

Late last week, Zimbabwean Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai did something Zimbabwean leadership has not been able to do in more than a decade: Meet with the American president in the Oval Office. For Tsvangirai, the meeting with President Obama capped off a week of making the rounds with members of Congress, Secretary of State Clinton, and senior policy officials. Here's a clip from the press conference: Tsvangirai’s Washington visit was the first leg of a three week trip to western capitals meant to drum up donor support – in the form of $10 billion in direct aid – for Zimbabwe’s ...

What is the What tells the story of Valentino Achak Deng, a Sudanese “lost boy” who lived through a brutal Sudanese civil war between North and South that killed more than 2 million people during over 20 years of conflict. The book, published in 2006, details Deng’s journey from his home in the southern Sudanese town of Marial Bai to refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya to life as an immigrant living in the United States, and offers a powerful reminder of the horrors of civil war. According to Politico, a very high profile reader recently picked up the acclaimed ...