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.
Among its many challenges, illiteracy and lack of basic education lie at the heart of South Sudan’s struggles. Al Jazeera’s Anna Cavell reports about the reopening of Juba University and the country’s urgent need for its graduates.
Ahead of Uganda’s independence day next week, activists opposed to President Museveni have taken to the streets in Kampala to protest corruption and human rights abuses. Police have reacted violently, reportedly firing live rounds in their attempt to disperse protesters and arresting the main opposition leader, Kizza Besigye.
Pascale Kambale of the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa writes about the Congolese government’s “dirty trick” to control the so-called reform of the notoriously corrupted national electoral commission, or CENI. Under pressure from France, who endorsed Congo’s bid to host the upcoming Francophonie summit, Joseph Kabila’s government pledged to implement some crucial reforms. And as Kambale reasons:
…the executive clearly realised that it would appear ridiculous for such an important reform process to be led by an opposition MP – so the authorities rushed their own poorly-written bill onto the parliamentary agenda in order to save face.
Writing for the London Review of Books blog, Sudan specialist Jérôme Tubiana reports on his extensive travel in Sudan and South Sudan with arms expert Claudio Gramizzi to examine the origin of the weapons used on both sides of the conflict between the Sudanese government and the SPLA-North. The evidence they found suggests that the vast majority of the arms used by the SPLA-North comes from stockpiles captured from the Sudanese army.
In a feature datelined Jerusalem, The New York Times covers a provocative decision by some young family members of Holocaust survivors to have tattoos of Nazi ID numbers replicated on their forearms as a sign of solidarity with their elderly relative and a personalized expression of “Never again.” The piece quotes professor Michael Berenbaum, a preeminent scholar of the memorialization of the Holocaust: “We are moving from lived memory to historical memory,” Berenbaum said. “We’re at that transition, and this is sort of a brazen, in-your-face way of bridging it.”