Blog

Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) released a statement on the arrest of Laurent Nkunda, and, as usual, he hits all the right notes: I welcome the arrest of Laurent Nkunda and the commitment demonstrated by the Congolese and Rwandan militaries to work together to disarm illegal armed groups in eastern Congo. I hope this cooperation will continue and Nkunda’s removal will prove to be a decisive step toward lasting peace and stability for the region. Nonetheless, capitalizing on this breakthrough will require sustained political will to dismantle Nkunda’s army and develop a comprehensive approach to disarming the rebel Forces Démocratiques pour ...

As previously discussed both here and at UN Dispatch, the challenges faced by United Nations peacekeeping missions remain immense. United Nations peacekeeping chief Alain Le Roy recently spoke to the Security Council, issuing a plea to find a solution to the increasing gap between expectations and abilities of blue helmets around the world. While the council recently authorized a force of 5,000 for Chad, the UN peacekeeping department is still looking to fulfill the number of troops needed in other nations, like the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Top UN officials are sounding the alarm that UN missions simply will ...

In a recent article, some Congo analysts I respect are echoing the concerns we expressed here regarding the potential for the situation in Congo to deteriorate even further as the Rwandan and Congolese armies launch a ‘15-day’ military operation against the FDLR in eastern Congo. According to Guillaume Lacaille of the International Crisis Group: “The more Rwanda stays in the DRC, the higher the risk of political instability in North Kivu and if a military operation against the FDLR is launched quickly, without more preparation to protect the population, there will be high civilian casualties.” Gerard Prunier, a long-time observer ...

Over at change.org, Michelle and Michael have begun an inspired rumble over the role of advocacy organizations in responding to Darfur. As someone who has worked on both sides of this issue, starting out with a humanitarian agency but now on the advocacy side of the house, there are a few points I think are worth making: Michael asserts that, “Any organization which claims it can save Darfur is courting hubris, at the least.” Point taken, but without political pressure toward such an ambitious goal, the policies of the United States and its allies drift away from actually making the ...

Today, Enough released Darfur Rebels 101, a strategy paper aimed at dispelling the commonly held, but false, notion that Darfur’s rebel groups are hopelessly fractured into scores of rival factions, most of which are little more than clusters of bandits who opportunistically profit from lawlessness and chaos. Just a few weeks ago at an event in Washington, Andrew Natsios, the former White House Special Envoy for Sudan, claimed that there are “dozens of independent groups operating in Darfur.” Based on the Enough Project’s regular and extensive contacts with key rebel officials, it is clear that only a handful of rebel ...

A recent Christian Science Monitor op-ed dug deeper than many diplomats, analysts, and journalists have cared to into the grisly subject of sexual violence in eastern Congo. As co-authors Marc Sommers and Kathryn Birch assert: [P]robably no war zone in recent times has employed rape as sexual terrorism as extensively as the various military forces [in eastern Congo]… Make no mistake: these are not isolated incidents involving rogue soldiers. This is an organized campaign of sexual terrorism – and the global community must respond forcefully. Sommers and Birch urge the Obama administration to take bold action—in coordination with the UN ...

This week in the Hague, the International Criminal Court, or ICC, began the war crimes trial of Thomas Lubanga, a Congolese rebel leader charged with systematically recruiting hundreds of children under 15 to fight as soldiers during Congo’s bloody civil war, which resulted in the deaths of roughly 4 million people between 1998 and 2003. Lubanga reportedly showed no emotion as he plead not guilty to the child soldiering charges and insisted that he was trying to bring peace to the Ituri region. (He is not the only indicted war criminal to have made such a ludicrous claim.) Ituri, like ...

Enough Advisor and resident Darfur expert Omer Ismail recently returned from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where he participated in the Second Sudanese Women’s Forum on Darfur, sponsored by Femmes Africa Solidarité, an impressive women’s rights organization run by and for African women. The conference was attended by women from Darfur, women politicians from Sudan’s ruling party, and women from all over Africa, from Mali to Zimbabwe. Human rights champions such as Mary Robinson of Ireland and Ruth Messinger of the United States were also present to show their support for the conference, which aimed not only to emphasize the solidarity of ...

The U.S. has demanded an immediate end to all violence in Darfur and a commitment to the peace process under Joint Chief Mediator Djibril Yipènè Bassolé. In a written statement issued late Tuesday, State Department acting spokesperson Robert Wood said: "The United States condemns the military activity carried out by the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) in North and South Darfur since January 22, as well as the incursion by the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) into Muhajaria and other areas of South Darfur, which resulted in an increase of violence over the last week." "This fighting and subsequent Government of ...

On January 14, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1861, extending the mandate of the year-and-a-half old U.N. Mission in the Central African Republic and Chad, or MINURCAT, until March 2010. Last December, while the Security Council discussed the details of the mandate, I held out hope that the final mandate might reflect at least the smallest of indications from the U.N. that it might attempt, through MINURCAT, to lay the groundwork for a broader international effort to deal with the grave internal political crisis and endemic security problems in Chad. I was wrong. Last fall, my colleague Omer Ismail ...