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.
Photojournalist Pete Muller, formerly based in Sudan during the lead-up to and beyond South Sudan’s independence, weighs in on the impassioned choice of terms used to describe the conflict in South Kordofan and Blue Nile:
All of these actions constitute war crimes and add to the exhaustive list of human rights abuses for which President Omar al-Bashir and his government must account. It is important, however, that observers remain committed to dispassionate analysis and remember that while genocide is always a war crime, not every war crime is genocide. (…) Those who have witnessed this war know that its devastation requires no exaggeration.
With attention focused on the presidential talks between Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir and South Sudan’s Salva Kiir, the Nuba Eyes and Ears citizen journalism team kept up a steady flow of updates about the ongoing violence in Sudan’s Nuba Mountains. This video features a young man, an SPLA-North fighter, who was helping his family move back home from Yida refugee camp when he was hit by shrapnel from an Antonov bomber. Seemingly delirious from the trauma, he doesn’t express pain but instead chants, “SPLA Oya, New Sudan Oya.” Ahmed Khatir writes: “After a summer lull, Sudan Air Force Antonov planes have become a more common sight in the skies above South Kordofan,” dropping more than 30 bombs across the region in September. * Please note that the video contains graphic images. *
Congo specialist Jason Stearns offers some analysis about the recruitment efforts of the M23 rebellion—who are eager accomplices, who is being hesitant this time around, and who might be persuaded to join the movement. “The longer the ceasefire lasts [without a solution], the weaker and more indecisive Kinshasa will look, and the more time the M23 rebels will have to rally more soldiers and politicians to their side,” Stearns warns.
Penelope Chester at U.N. Dispatch recaps Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s speech on smart diplomacy for the 21st century at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York this week. A key theme, as described by Chester:
“We want to move from aid to investment,” Clinton said. “Today, with new resources, development has to fit into a more dynamic economic picture,” she added, saying that development aid should be “a catalyst for sustainable growth and progress.”
Stanford professor Cécile Alduy conducted an extended interview for the Boston Review with author and New Yorker staff writer Philip Gourevitch about a range of fascinating topics drawing on his background covering conflict in Africa and the Middle East. The Q&A delves into “the challenges of writing about the history that we are in the midst of making, the burdens of memory and the appeal of forgetting, the dangers of narrative simplification, the limits of humanitarianism, and the messiness of politics.”