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5 Best Stories You Might Have Missed This Week

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5 Best Stories You Might Have Missed This Week

Posted by Laura Heaton on February 5, 2010

5 Best Stories You Might Have Missed This Week

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.

Writing from eastern Congo for the Guardian, David Smith offers a unique view into the peacekeeping mission there, profiling some of the Indian soldiers serving MONUC.  The mission attracts ample criticism for its inability to protect civilians – which is certainly very valid – but Smith’s story describes an actor in the conflict zone that, from afar, we rarely consider: the people underneath the blue helmets.

Another perspective we rarely see (especially for those of us at Enough who can’t get visas to travel beyond southern Sudan) is the view from Khartoum, which photographer Deanna Dent captured in these spectacular shots.

The Guardian also ran this descriptive piece about Somalis fleeing into pockets of relative safety to escape the indiscriminate violence by the al-Shabaab militia. The feature draws in stories of people like Quresh and her baby, newest arrivals in a camp near the town of Burao; “ugly places,” the writer offers. “There are no schools or health facilities. Not even proper sanitation. Privately owned, the residents are charged to occupy their huts and draw water from the solitary well.” As the author witnesses during his short stay at Burao, new hardships often befall even those people fortunate enough to escape the violence that initially forced them from their homes. Many of Somalia’s 1.3 million internally displaced people have had to flee multiple times.

In much of Central Africa, the Red Cross is taking the lead to try to reunite families separated in conflict. Often, parents lose their children in the chaos of fleeing to safety, and the process to reconnect them can be challenging and, as this short video
shows through the story of two families, bittersweet.

To end the week on a lighter note, Foreign Policy’s Elizabeth Dickinson puts a spin on the Oscar nominations, coming up with a “best of” in foreign affairs 2009. Dickinson makes a compelling case for some of this year’s nominees, but FP is taking nominations and votes from the public too.