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.
Why would Burundi, which has faced its own civil war and bouts of violence, choose to send its soldiers to Somalia, where the threat of al-Shabaab looms large and so many would-be offensives have failed? Writing for the Christian Science Monitor, Beth Dickinson examines what Burundi gains from loaning its troops to AMISOM.
NPR’s Michele Kelemen featured Congolese activist Delly Sesete in a segment for Morning Edition. Sesete’s popular Change.org petition calling on Apple to make a conflict-free phone from Congo minerals has spurred fresh attention to the conflict minerals issue and the growing movement to address it. (The petition is just shy of 50,000 signatures, so sign it if you haven’t already.)
Africa Is A Country has taken the end-of-year-list genre of blog post to a whole new level, filling these last few days of 2011 with10 “Lists of 10.” Worth checking out: Top 10 African Films of 2011 by Busia Lewandowska Cummings.
Reporting from Mogadishu, Global Post’s Tristan McConnell offers observations about what the gains against al-Shabaab look like on the ground: “…at a place that two years ago was a frontline position, kids chase each other around abandoned sandbags.” Through candid remarks from AMISOM officials and commanders, McConnell also provides a guarded view of the sustainability of the advances.
It’s an inauspicious start to a democratic presidency when the only head of state attending the inauguration is Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. But such was the case this week in Kinshasa when Joseph Kabila was sworn in for another term as Congo’s president, in spite of urgings to hold off until allegations of fraud were addressed. The talk of Mugabe reminded us of this brilliant video—an ad for Nando’s (the chicken restaurant) and a reminder of some of Mr. Mugabe’s other friendships that have gone bust: