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This week, Human Rights Watch, or HRW, called on the Congolese government to arrest Bosco Ntaganda, the former rebel commander and indicted war criminal who is now playing a key role (unlike the United Nations Mission in Congo, MONUC) in the joint Rwandan-Congolese operation to root out the FDLR militia in eastern Congo. HRW expressed concern that: [T]he government is considering appointing Ntaganda to a top position in the Congolese army, despite the accusations that he had responsibility for using child soldiers, as well as for committing several atrocities in Ituri district in northeastern Congo. HRW also raised the fact ...

Libyan Dictator Muammar Gaddafi isn’t just making flamboyant fashion statements at the African Union, or AU, summit in Ethiopia, where he has been made the AU’s new chairman for a one-year term. At the beginning of the summit, Gaddafi circulated a letter proclaiming himself Africa’s “king of kings,” a title bestowed upon him by 200 traditional leaders invited to Libya last August. Gaddafi has already called for the AU to take steps to create a ‘United States of Africa’ (led by guess who?) and extended the summit another day. Meanwhile, irritated African heads of state attempting not to alienate the ...

In case you missed it, there has been a flurry of important political developments in Zimbabwe over the past week. It has been hard to ignore reports of the raging cholera epidemic (latest death toll: over 3,300) and the desperate economic crisis (which has been called a “death spiral,” and which the term hyperinflation does not do justice.) Amidst the chaos, over four months after a power-sharing agreement was signed and after numerous fits, stalls, and re-starts in the talks, Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of Zimbabwe’s leading opposition group, the Movement for Democratic Change, or MDC, pulled an about face and ...

To follow up on Maggie’s excellent Zimbabwe post above, I wanted to highlight a gentle disagreement with a former colleague. Don Steinberg, a deputy president of the superb International Crisis Group (full disclosure: I used to work at Crisis Group so I might not be the most objective), has a new piece out on Zimbabwe this week. Don argues: The international community must show solidarity with this agreement and act quickly to shore it up. This is not the time for foot-dragging because we do not like all aspects of the agreement and really would prefer to see Mugabe get ...

According to reports off the wire, the Sudanese army is claiming to have captured the town of Muhajiriya in South Darfur. The reports sound credible, and our own analysts suggest that Justice and Equality Movement, or JEM, rebels that had been holding the town pulled out to positions 50 or 60 kilometers outside of Muhajiriya this morning. There were also additional aerial attacks by the Sudanese government this morning. Several large questions loom. What will happen to the civilians in the town? Why have the U.N. and the international community at large failed to respond to the repeated offensive aerial ...

In her statements yesterday about the increasingly volatile situation in Muhajiriya yesterday at the United Nations, Susan Rice was right on about how the international community should approach what could be a mounting stand off between the Sudanese government and Justice and Equality Movement, JEM, rebels: “While the rebel attack that provoked the clashes was ‘of grave concern,’ Rice said that ‘The onus is on the government to halt all aerial bombardment.’” Indeed, as Michelle at Stop Genocide writes this morning, the Sudanese government cannot “cry ‘sovereignty’” when it continues to launch aerial attacks on its own civilians and, it ...

In English, we often say, “The third time’s the charm.” In Sudan, just the opposite is true, with the local saying of “al-talta wagaa,” translating to, “The third attempt will fail.” It looks like the Government of Sudan is eager to find out which is true as it works with its proxy Chadian rebels in what will likely be the third attempt to take the Chadian capital of N’Djamena and oust Chad’s President Idriss Déby. Chad has experienced two coup attempts in the past three years. In Darfur, a Chadian rebel coalition led by Timane Erdimi, a relative of President ...

Somali political leadership met last Saturday in Djibouti, where they went ahead and rushed the process of voting in a new president, Sheikh Sharif Ahmed. A relatively moderate Islamic cleric, 44-year-old Ahmed studied in Libya and Sudan, and worked as a geography teacher in a Mogadishu secondary school. The leader of a local Islamic sharia court, Ahmed became chairman of the Islamic Courts Union, or ICU, which drove the warlords from Mogadishu and ruled the capital for six months in 2006 before being ousted by Ethiopian troops. Ahmed’s political credibility is derived from this brief period when the ICU was ...

In case you missed it, a press release from our friends over at the Genocide Intervention Network. They note that since September 2008, the Lord’s Resistance Army, or LRA, has killed more than 1,000 people in eastern Congo and 120 in south Sudan. Almost all of these deaths have resulted from deliberate LRA attacks on civilians. Since December alone, 130,000 people have been displaced around the district of Dungu in Congo. The LRA is truly a living horror ...

John Danforth, former U.S. Senator, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, and U.S. envoy to Sudan, recently urged the Obama administration to very quickly appoint a special envoy to Sudan. Danforth encouraged President Obama to act quickly in Sudan, where the historic Comprehensive Peace Agreement (which Danforth himself played a key role in negotiating) is in danger of collapsing, and the Darfur conflict is at a crucial juncture. To quote Danforth: “The U.S. must again be a catalyst, encouraging help from China, which is Sudan's largest trading partner, Kenya, and other countries that would be hurt by a new war ...