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Last night, when the news broke that the judges at the International Criminal Court were set to issue an arrest warrant for Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, The Enough Project, the Save Darfur Coalition, and the Genocide Intervention Network issued a joint statement making their position on the Court’s expected decision clear: [The] decision will likely add international legal weight to a long obvious truth – primary responsibility for the atrocities in Darfur rests with the regime that Bashir heads. Individual nations and the international community as a whole cannot continue to do business as usual with Bashir once he is ...

The International Criminal Court is set to issue an arrest warrant for Sudan President Omar al-Bashir for war crimes in Darfur according to separately sourced reports by the New York Times and Reuters. The reports were dismissed by Sudan. Abdalmahmoud Abdalhaleem, Sudan's envoy to the UN, told Al Jazeera an arrest warrant against al-Bashir, "means nothing to us". "The anticipated arrest warrant for President Bashir is the potential game-changer the Sudanese people have been waiting for to shake up the deadly status quo that has led to millions of deaths in Darfur and Southern Sudan," Enough Project Co-chair, John Prendergast, ...

Last night, the Enough Project hosted an inspiring event at the Center for American Progress in Washington, DC. John Prendergast moderated a panel discussion, featuring Franco Majok, a former “lost boy” from Sudan’s devastating North-South civil war, Craig Walzer, editor of Out of Exile: The Abducted and Displaced People of Sudan, and Dave Eggers, the acclaimed author and co-creator of the impressive Voice of Witness project, which aims to shed light on “human rights crises through oral history.” Out of Exile is the fourth installment in the Voice of Witness series. The book empowers displaced people and refugees, a group ...

Khalil Ibrahim, the leader of the Justice and Equality Movement, or JEM, and high-ranking officials from the United Nations/African Union peacekeeping mission in Darfur, or UNAMID, met recently in N’Djamena, the Chadian capital. According to the JEM spokesperson Ahmed Hussein Adam, the goal of the meeting was to: create a joint mechanism allowing them to work together to protect civilians and IDPs in Darfur and to enhance the humanitarian situation there. This meeting, along with the JEM’s decision to withdraw from the town of Muhajiria in order to avoid a clash with the government troops, could be an indication that ...

A very interesting piece in the Financial Times on Congo, China and western aid. Apparently, some of the clauses written into the nine billion dollar mineral deal between China and Congo have led the IMF and the World Bank to insist that 11 billion dollars in debt relief for Congo cannot go forward unless sections of the deal are changed. In particular, the deal with Beijing gives China sweeping financial guarantees, including through earmarks of state revenues. The deal was struck before the global economic crisis, and a sharp tumble in both commodity prices and China’s demands for these resources ...

The Congo Advocacy Coalition, a group of 100 aid and human rights organizations, sent a letter last week to John Holmes, the United Nations Under-Secretary-General for humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, in advance of his visit to eastern Congo. Holmes is visiting internally displaced persons, or IDP, camps in North Kivu province as well as villages wracked by the recent spate of Lord’s Resistance Army, or LRA, attacks in northeastern Congo. Today, Holmes called the LRA attacks “diabolical,” and vowed to “do everything he could to protect people in eastern Congo” from future attacks. The letter urges Holmes to ...

It’s an understatement to say that Chad is currently facing a lot of problems. N’Djamena is bracing for a coup attempt by a united, Sudan-supported rebel coalition, and the Chadian people are fighting for survival as their government brutally represses them (Amnesty International has much more on this) and bans charcoal, their main source of cooking fuel. To add to the chaos, 10,000 refugees from the Central African Republic—reportedly mostly women and children—are stranded in the remote savannah of southern Chad after having fled a wave of new fighting in northern CAR. More than 5,000 refugees have poured into the ...

If the Obama administration is looking for examples of how not to fight terrorism and help rebuild failed states, it should take close look at the Bush administration’s disastrous policies in Somalia. It was so driven by short-term counter-terrorism objectives and targeted military strikes against alleged al-Qaeda targets inside Somalia that some within the U.S. intelligence community jokingly refer to Bush-era policy as ‘whac-a-mole.’ With a change in administration and a number of new developments inside Somalia—most significantly the withdrawal of Ethiopian forces and the election of a moderate Islamist as president—now is the time for the United States to ...

The inauguration of President Obama might seem like yesterday, but this Friday will mark his 25th day in the Oval Office. The anti-genocide constituency in the United States has pledged to put a spotlight on the new administration during its crucially important first 100 days in office to see that it brings real change to America’s approach to the conflict in Darfur, Sudan. This week, activists across the country will be taking part in a quarter mark check-in coordinated by Enough and our partners at the Save Darfur Coalition, the Genocide Intervention Network, or GI-Net, and STAND. Take action this ...

A spokesperson for Djibril Bassolé, the joint African Union-United Nations mediator to Darfur, announced over the weekend that Sudanese government officials, and representatives from Darfur’s most significant rebel group, the Justice and Equality Movement, or JEM, will meet in Qatar today. This meeting is the first ever publicly acknowledged “one-on-one” discussion between government officials and the JEM rebels, and a JEM spokesperson said that the two parties were set to discuss “possible confidence-building measures, including the release of prisoners and a cessation of hostilities for a set period of time.” While the talks could be a first step toward a ...