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.
The deployment of 100 U.S. military advisors to central Africa to track LRA leader Joseph Kony has garnered ample media attention in recent months. Now The Washington Post’s Craig Whitlock examines in impressive detail the military contractors and jets bolstering that mission.
In the fourth installment of a publication first released in May 2011, Sudan specialist Eric Reeves sets out to record every confirmed aerial bombardment committed by the Sudanese government. The tally now, stunningly, stands at 1,797. Reeves writes:
The regime's systematic, deliberate, and ongoing assaults on its own people are unrivaled, Syria and Libya notwithstanding. This is an historically unprecedented campaign of human destruction by means of military aircraft, comprising astonishingly cruel and indiscriminate acts of killing, maiming, and displacing Sudanese (and now South Sudanese) citizens.
U.N. peacekeepers are often the subject of criticism, given the atrocities that transpire even under their watch. But The Economist highlights how peacekeeping is playing an indispensible role on the African continent, sometimes without pacifying communities for the long haul, but certainly helping prevent death and suffering while more lasting political solutions are worked out.
Philip Gourevitch, staff writer for The New Yorker and author of We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, talks to PBS’s Need to Know host Ray Suarez about ending crimes against humanity. Gourevich emphasizes the importance of prevention over adjudication, referencing Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia, and calls into question the preventative power of the threat of consequences. “By the time the guilty need to be punished, the atrocity hasn’t been prevented.”
With the news this week that the film “War Witch” secured a North American distributor and will be released in the United States early next year, this review on the IndieWire blog about cinema of the African diaspora is a good read. The film about a girl forced to become a child soldier in an unnamed African country reminiscent of Congo (where it was in fact shot) receives mostly compliments, and if the criticisms aren’t too irksome, it will be one to keep an eye out for in 2013.
Mollie Zapata contributed to this post.