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.
Wednesday marked 20 years since the fall of President Siad Barre, the leader of Somalia’s last central government, and the beginning of the country’s long civil war. MSNBC’s Photoblog uncovered these archival photos from the early 1990s, as well as video footage from the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu.
The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal discusses the role Facebook played in the recent overthrow of Tunisia’s Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, revealing the behind-the-scenes work that Facebook’s security team did to subvert a would-be hacker that was attempting to steal “an entire country's worth of passwords.” Toward the end of the piece, Madrigal questions what responsibility, if any, Facebook has for making the social platform more activist friendly, especially “in places where activism can get you killed.”
In the cleverly titled piece for Foreign Policy “More Sudans, More Problems?” Maggie Fick gives an accessible, compelling overview of the challenges that lay ahead in South and North Sudan. The account is not limited to the outstanding issues that remain between the two soon-to-be countries; Fick also delves into some of the social and historical baggage that both sides will have to confront.
Members of the student group Accountability and Corporate Transparency for Congo, or ACT, brought their concerns about Yale’s endowment investments to a meeting of the university’s investor responsibility committee, asking that Yale take action in regards to its investments in electronics companies that may be doing business with armed groups in eastern Congo. “We think this is a case of grave social injury,” said PhD candidate and Congo expert Jason Stearns, as the Yale Daily News reports.
In the weekly newspaper Al Ahram, Ali Belail offers a commentary titled “Farewell my country that never was” on the failings of the Sudanese state. It’s a moving, personalized reflection:
Perhaps it was a country that never made sense. For it to have made any sense required us all Sudanese to swear allegiance to something bigger and more important. It couldn't be the tribe because there are so many. It couldn't be the race because there are so many. It couldn't be religion because there are so many. It could only be an idea that would encompass all those things.
N.B.: The link for that last one was only working sporadically, so if you want the text and it isn’t loading, email me.