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.
If the registration for Congo’s election – only its second in 51 years – is any indication, the November poll is going to be "trouble," Melanie Gouby reports for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting. And because the country has one election under its belt (a whopping one!), the international community is far less attentive or supportive this time around.
Aiden Hartley, author of The Zanzibar Chest, reflects on the famine in the Horn of Africa and how food aid has been manipulated in the past to exacerbate the suffering of Somalis. One of the more cynical op-eds on the current crisis, but Hartley brings up some points that are worth keeping in mind.
“Why is the U.N. soft-pedaling its criticism of Sudan?” Foreign Policy’s Turtle Bay blogger Colum Lynch asks.
In a Q+A on the Congo Siasa blog, Bukavu-based civil society leader Eric Kajemba provides some insights into how the Dodd-Frank bill is playing out on the ground in eastern Congo, perhaps most alarmingly within the government, which was “thinking it had to do something in reaction to the US legislation, so it suspended exports of minerals from the eastern Congo.” As difficult as it can be to hear the criticism, Kajemba sums up some widely held perceptions – whether true or not – in the East, which are important for U.S.-based advocates to consider.
Building off of their highly-publicized study suggesting far higher numbers of rape victims in the Democratic Republic of Congo, researchers Amber Peterman and Tia Palermo, joined by a couple of co-authors, write about the complexity of reporting about rape in a war zone. (H/T: Wronging Rights) Writing in Foreign Affairs, they point out:
Even in peacetime, sexual violence is severely and unevenly underreported. Beyond prevalence, patterns of where, when, and by whom rape is committed — not to mention why it is committed — are even less clear. War exponentially worsens these problems. As a result, estimates of rape in prominent conflicts are often unreliable.