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5 Stories You Might Have Missed This Week

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5 Stories You Might Have Missed This Week

Posted by Laura Heaton on October 22, 2010

5 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.

Malcolm Gladwell’s recent piece for The New Yorker on social media (highlighted in the 5 Stories post two weeks ago) certainly generated a wide ripple, and here’s a particularly relevant response. Genocide Intervention Network’s Janessa Goldbeck wrote this eloquent reaction highlighting the recent impressive mobilization of student Sudan activists on Twitter and Facebook to point out how effective social media can be when confronting international issues:

Creating peace in Sudan is not an issue that Americans can take "direct action" against, like sitting in at a lunch counter. It is something we want our government to act on, and to make this happen we have to build political will, which means organizing both online and offline.

You’d expect nothing less than spectacular photographs from National Geographic, and this photo collection from southern Sudan by George Steinmetz certainly doesn’t disappoint. The first photo is especially dramatic and rather startling.

Plenty of people like to criticize celebrities for having what seems like only a superficial interest in the social issues they promote (sometimes rightly so). But the Christian Science Monitor’s Scott Baldauf writes about how George Clooney, fresh from his latest trip to Sudan, “deserves admiration.” Among his thoughtful observations, Baldauf draws an effective comparison to pre-World War II Europe:

Imagine if Humphrey Bogart or Jimmy Stewart had taken a documentary film crew to Hitler’s Germany in the late-1930s and confronted us with the truth about the roundup of Jews, Gypsies, gays, and others. Perhaps it would have created an upswell in citizen activism that would have demanded the US to take action. Perhaps some innocent lives could be saved.

Gun-toting soldiers, civilians, and children in the conflict zones Enough covers – indeed in many of the world’s war zones – often have one thing in common: the kind of weapon slung across their bodies. Foreign Policy published this interview with C.J. Chivers, who recently wrote a history of the Avtomat Kalashnikova, “the world’s most widely recognized weapon.”

Speaking of weapons and Foreign Policy, Maggie Fick wrote this piece for the website about (formerly?) defected General Gabriel Tanginye. During Sudan’s civil war, Tanginye fought against his southern brethren, but with a likely independence in the South looming, Tanginye is rethinking his options. And he certainly isn’t the only one positioning himself to reap the benefits being offered by the South’s ruling SPLM—or  wreak havoc if he doesn’t get what he wants. “The convenient reconciliations taking place today look frighteningly ephemeral, which means that the coming war in Sudan might be within south Sudan,” Fick warned.