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.
Amid a host of issues that have triggered violence among ethnic groups in Darfur, fighting broke out at a gold mine over who would be allowed to prospect there. "Half a million artisan miners have joined a gold rush across Sudan, according to the government, which estimates it made $2.5 billion from gold exports last year," Khalid Abdelaziz of Reuters reports.
The How We Made It in Africa blog reported on the recent trend of Africans from the diaspora returning to the continent as entrepreneurs. Kate Douglas interviewed Jonathan Howard, CEO of the UK-based Business Council for Africa, about the impact:
In recent years there have been a number of areas that the diaspora have been particularly useful in Africa’s development, according to Howard. The first is in bridging the skills gap. Many members of the diaspora are being grabbed up by Western companies and sent back to Africa to help with these companies’ African operations.
Gregory Warner of NPR filed a feature from Goma about a group of boxers who train together early in the morning in the eastern Congo city. The boxers and their coach tell Warner about how the discipline and the camaraderie has helped them process and overcome difficult pasts fighting for armed groups. But that history feels much less remote with the presence and recruitment efforts of M23, even just outside their training sessions, over the past several months.
Photojournalist Karim Ben Khelifa’s work is presented in the current issue of Foreign Policy magazine: a collection of portraits of combatants on both sides of long-simmering divides, like the Gaza Strip, Kashmir, and South Sudan. Short testimonies from the subjects about why they fight accompany Khelifa’s photographs.
The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in South Sudan published a new map that illustrates the hotspots across the new country. The map includes the most recent stats on displacement and the trajectories people fleeing conflict and those returning to South Sudan are following, the prevalence of aerial bombardments and clashes in the volatile border area, food security conditions, and details about access for humanitarian agencies.