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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 18, 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.

A feature piece in the Guardian highlights the challenges of disarming civilians in southern Sudan, especially among young men who keep cattle. While officially there is a disarmament campaign underway in the South, one cattle keeper describes how the process actually works. “The army makes a deal: The soldiers come and sell us the gun. After they sell me the gun, they come back and say we want the gun back. I pay five cows for one gun."

The Lens photography blog on The New York Times included a beautiful narrated slideshow titled “The Sirens of Sudan,” which featured photographs by Frédéric Noy. The images were taken in a rural part of Sudan, where the women, known as hakamas, sing to motivate the men in their community to protect the tribe from rival groups.

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and friend of Enough Lynn Nottage was interviewed by the U.N. refugee agency at the close of the first European run of her remarkable play, “Ruined.” In this Q&A she discusses the research and interviews that went into developing the fictionalized story of women who find a kind of refuge working in a brothel in war-torn eastern Congo.

The Voices on Genocide Prevention podcast series featured an interview with Jon Temin, a senior program officer focused on Sudan at the U.S. Institute of Peace.  Host Bridget Conley-Zilkic focuses her questions on the potential points of conflict in the lead-up and aftermath of the secession referendum in South Sudan, and Temin does a thorough job of summing up all that’s left to do.

Julie Flint writes on Making Sense of Sudan about the dismal state of affairs at the Darfur peace negotiations in Doha. She writes: “[T]he entire structure envisaged by the mediation has collapsed, that the ceasefire is in tatters and the Sudan government, as far as one can see, is set on destroying the only movement capable of mounting a military challenge to it.” Some of the commenters to the post questioned whether Flint’s assessment is overly dramatic, but at Enough, the readouts we’re getting from sources at the negotiations lead to similarly pessimistic conclusions.