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.
Reporting from Juba, Josh Kron of The New York Times reveals details about the abuse of police recruits in southern Sudan. The story points to the daunting challenge of transitioning from a region marked by rebellion and war to a country that respects human rights and rule of law. A key clip:
Southern Sudan is expected to become a close strategic partner to the United States in an increasingly troubled region and, as one of the poorest places on earth, a recipient of hundreds of millions of dollars in American aid.
But the rebels-turned-government here have struggled with a core element of their transformation: shaking off a culture of severe military discipline that has been deeply ingrained over generations.
The mobile court system in eastern Congo proved this week through the Fizi trials to be a valuable system for dealing with perpetrators in a region where the state’s judicial system is in shambles and impunity reigns. Nicole Fritz of the Open Society Institute, one of the main backers of the mobile courts, writes of the program as a promising way for delivering “justice without theatrics.”
AP photographer Pete Muller attended the Fizi trials, and The Washington Post published a collection of his stunning photos.
The BBC’s Mike Thomson has focused his reporting recently on the Lord’s Resistance Army and why it is taking so long to stop a relatively small group from wreaking havoc over a comparatively large region of central Africa. In this segment, Thomson speaks with Kevin Kennedy at the U.N.’s peacekeeping department in New York. Not all of the information is correct (the peacekeeping force in Congo is not “very small,” but in fact one of the largest in the world), but the perspective offered straight from a peacekeeping spokesman is interesting nonetheless.
The blogosphere was buzzing this week with reactions to the news that senior CBS correspondent Lara Logan had been sexually assaulted while reporting in Egypt. One particularly eloquent response defending Logan came from journalist Kim Barker on “Why We Need Women in War Zones.” A particularly relevant point related to Enough’s work:
[T]hey also do a pretty good job of covering what it’s like to live in a war, not just die in one. Without female correspondents in war zones, the experiences of women there may be only a rumor.
Look at the articles about women who set themselves on fire in Afghanistan to protest their arranged marriages, or about girls being maimed by fundamentalists, about child marriage in India, about rape in Congo and Haiti. Female journalists often tell those stories in the most compelling ways, because abused women are sometimes more comfortable talking to them. And those stories are at least as important as accounts of battles.