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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 June 5, 2009

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.

 

  • This week in the bi-weekly podcast series Voices on Genocide Prevention, host Bridget Conley-Zilkic of the Committee on Conscience spoke with Carl Wilkins, who was one of very few internationals to stay in Rwanda through the genocide in 1994. Wilkins reflects on the experience of returning to Rwanda many years later and about his current work as an activist. “For 88 nights I was in the hallway of my home there during the ‘94 genocide, wondering if the rest of the world gave a rip. And now I’m the rest of the world.”
  • In a preview to the president’s speech in Cairo TNR’s The Plank ran a post detailing all that Khartoum has done to warrant a strong condemnation from the U.S. government. The post paints a clear picture of the opportunity President Obama had yesterday to make a resounding statement about Sudan for the world to hear. Unfortunately for the millions who are suffering in Sudan today, in the end, Darfur only got a passing mention.
  • Two opinion pieces written by a lawyer from the Central African Republic and a Ugandan human rights activist call on African members of the International Criminal Court to speak out loudly in support of the court at a time when negative opinions on the continent are certainly overpowering. Both pieces were written as a preview to a meeting next week in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, which will focus on the continent’s response to the ICC and is open to both member and non-member states. Both authors acknowledge that some countries may use the meeting as a soapbox to call on member states to rethink their support for the ICC. But the far better use of the forum is for African states – who were some of the first to ratify the Rome Statute – “to speak out strongly and forthrightly about the importance of the court as a means to end the all-too-widespread violence against African people,” as lawyer Lucile Mazangue explains.
  • Soldiers of Misfortune,” a visual feature in this month’s edition of Foreign Policy magazine, breaks down valuable statistics about U.N. peacekeeping today and over the past 10 years, during which the number of peacekeepers expanded sevenfold, growing more than any other deployed force in the world. But as the stats demonstrate – from the amount of territory each soldier is expected to protect, to the ratio of soldiers per person handling logistics – expectations resting on U.N. peacekeepers are also dramatically and unrealistically on the rise.

The Enough Team contributed to this post.