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A devastating report from Physicians for Human Rights decribes the health situation in Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe is suffering from a mounting health crisis, and it is almost entirely man-made. Just as President Mugabe has long politicized the delivery of food aid, he has similarly manipulated the health system. The report asks exactly the right question: “When government policies lead directly to the shuttering of hospitals and clinics, the closing of its medical school, and the beatings of health workers, are we to consider the attendant deaths and injuries as any different from those resulting from a massacre of similar proportions?” ...

The Enough Project and Resolve Uganda issued a joint statement today calling on the incoming Obama administration to take “swift and decisive action” to protect civilians from the grave violence that has resulted from the poorly executed (and still in progress) “Operation Lightning Thunder” joint military operation against the Lord’s Resistance Army, or LRA, by the armies of Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Government of Southern Sudan. Enough and Resolve assert that “Operation Lightning Thunder” is still salvageable and should be salvaged. Ending the LRA insurgency is a crucial step toward sustainable peace not only in ...

We noted the other day that Sudanese Islamist leader Hassan al-Turabi had called for Sudanese President Bashir to be handed over to the International Criminal Court. Not surprisingly, al-Turabi has now been detained for his comments. This is not the first time al-Turabi has been held by the government for voicing his views. While Bashir might hope the arrest stops fellow Sudanese from calling for his ouster, this might well be an uphill battle if the International Criminal Court issues a warrant for his arrest. Our own Omer Ismail discusses the arrest over at Voice of America ...

My colleague John Norris nicely sums up the Bush administration track record on Darfur: “Bush cared enough about Darfur to declare it a genocide, but not enough to effectively respond.” For a bit more detail on how the Bush Administration’s tough talk has outpaced its tepid response to five-and-a-half years and counting of crisis in Darfur, check out our new interactive timeline ...

Enough Project Co-Chair John Prendergast has a thoughtful op-ed today in the Christian Science Monitor about President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe’s steadfast resolve to maintain his iron grip on power even if it means “burning his own house down.” Prendergast argues that the policy choices to deal with Zimbabwe all have downsides, and the time has come for some sort of international intervention to oust Mugabe. At her Senate confirmation hearing yesterday, United States Ambassador-designate to the United Nations Susan Rice expressed her resolve to: work with southern Africa and bring their private condemnation [of President Mugabe] into the public ...

At Susan Rice’s Senate confirmation hearing this morning for the post of United States ambassador to the United Nations, Senator John Kerry asked how the U.S approach to ending the conflicts in Darfur, Congo and Zimbabwe would be different in the incoming Obama administration. Rice asserted that the U.S. would take a leading role at the United Nations in addressing the “thorny challenges of peacekeeping in the context of Darfur and Congo and the autocracy in the context of Zimbabwe.” Rice cited two main challenges the international community faces with regard to ending the conflicts in Darfur and Congo: Lack ...

Dr. Susan Rice, former assistant secretary of state for African affairs during the Clinton administration, is on Capitol Hill this morning for her Senate confirmation hearings to become the next United States ambassador to the United Nations. Of all of President-elect Obama’s appointments to date, Dr. Rice has been the most outspoken in her criticism of the Bush administration’s failure to act boldly to end the crisis in Darfur. Dr. Rice’s personal experience as a U.S. diplomat during the Rwandan genocide in 1994 clearly influenced her opinions on the role of the U.S. in intervening to stop genocide: I swore ...

Amazing: The government of Sudan explains its recent aerial attacks in Darfur by saying: “The Sudanese army has bombed this area to protect the Sudanese civilians living in this area.” I am not sure how much more “protection” the people of Darfur can stand ...

A pretrial chamber of the International Criminal Court, or ICC, is conducting hearings this week to decide whether former Congolese rebel leader Jean-Pierre Bemba will stand trial at The Hague. In May 2008, the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Bemba on three counts of crimes against humanity and five counts of war crimes; the charges relate to the period between 2002 and 2003 when Ange-Felix Patasse, then president of the Central African Republic, or CAR, asked Bemba and his rebel group, the Congolese Liberation Movement, to put down coup attempts in the CAR. The Court has presented evidence from ...

Joshua Keating, writing for the new Foreign Policy Passport blog, recently highlighted the downward trend in political rights and civil liberties worldwide as represented in Freedom House’s 2009 Freedom in the World survey. According to the organization, over 2 billion people — 34% of the world’s population — live in countries, “where basic political rights are absent, and basic civil liberties are widely and systematically denied,” and only South Asia has registered improvements in the “state of democracy” in the past year. In his analysis of the survey’s results, Freedom House researcher director Arch Puddington underlined Africa’s particularly worrisome year: ...