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.
At the Foreign Policy blog Mladic in The Hague, blogger Michael Dobbs marks the 17th anniversary of the Srebenica massacre by highlighting the efforts still ongoing to deny the crimes occurred. “The Srebrenica crime scene was like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle deliberately scrambled by the perpetrators that took more than a decade of hard investigative work to reassemble,” he writes, describing efforts both figurative (like the PR campaign of a Bosnian Serb faction) and literal, like Mladic’s moves to destroy mass graves by having his men dig up and scatter the remains of murdered Muslim prisoners.
In a piece for The Nation, Nick Turse offers an extensive overview of U.S. military involvement in Africa. “Fighting them over there, so we don’t need to fight them here has been a core tenet of American foreign policy for decades, especially since 9/11. But trying to apply military solutions to complex political and social problems has regularly led to unforeseen consequences,” Turse cautions.
Senate legislation from 2006, written by then-Senator Barack Obama and co-sponsored by then-Senator Hillary Clinton, should be kicking in about now in light of the ample evidence pointing to Rwandan support for the M23 rebellion in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. The bill authorized the U.S. secretary of state to withhold U.S. assistance to countries found to be destabilizing Congo. Armin Rosen, writing for The Atlantic, examines why U.S. officials have been reluctant to invoke that bill move against Rwanda.
The media-savvy M23 rebels are eager to send the message that they have the military prowess and discipline to stabilize the areas under their control in eastern Congo, hence the increasing coverage from inside the towns and villages they have occupied. Photographer Peter Greste took a collection of photos on M23-controlled turf, which were published by Al Jazeera.
Rebecca Hamilton’s insightful exposé on a small, influential group of South Sudan advocates landed her an appearance on PRI’s “The World” this week, where Hamilton talked with host Lisa Mullins about the extensive report, which drew heavily from interviews with members of “The Council.”