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.
In an oped printed in The Washington Times, Human Rights Watch’s senior Uganda researcher Maria Burrett and senior international counsel Elizabeth Evenson offer a sobering reminder that the Ugandan soldiers often held up as the best hope for the job of defeating the Lord’s Resistance Army have a very troubling legacy of abuses themselves, and thus various international and regional actors also engaged in the fight should keep very close tabs on them.
After reopening with much fanfare last month, Somalia’s National Theater in Mogadishu was hit by a suicide bomb this week during an event attended by the prime minister, leaving seven people dead. But despite the ongoing security concerns, a more peaceful life is returning to the capital. Photographer Sven Torfinn captured this hopeful set of images from Mogadishu for The New York Times.
Neil Ascherson very favorably reviews Jason Stearns’s Dancing in the Glory of Monsters for the New York Review of Books. The detailed piece offers a useful overview of the history of the First and Second Congo Wars.
The International Criminal Court’s first conviction and the surge in attention to LRA leader Joseph Kony has increasingly left people asking about Congolese rebel leader-turned-army commander Bosco Ntaganda. Until this week it seems, Ntaganda had been living carefree in eastern Congo, in spite of an ICC arrest warrant and charges that he has committed war crimes in Congo. British Channel 4 broadcasted an extended report about Ntaganda and the mounting pressure to bring him to justice.
On April 1, Foreign Policy published an oped by Washington director of Human Rights Watch Tom Malinowski: “Why I’m Leaving Human Rights Watch.” Here’s a key illustration of Malinowski’s point, but be sure to read all the way to the end of the piece:
None of this joyful liberation [among the victorious rebels in Libya] would have been possible had Qaddafi not given his people something to be liberated from. Had he not stolen their freedom, they would not be cherishing it. Had he not shown them the worst of what people are capable of, they would not be showing us the best. Yet if human rights groups like mine had their way, there never would have been a dictator like Qaddafi!