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A statement was released by Senator Russ Feingold (D-Wisconsin) on the recent attacks on civilians by the Lord’s Resistance Army: "I am horrified by the reported massacres that rebels of the Lord's Resistance Army have carried out over recent weeks in Congo and Sudan, leaving hundreds of people dead, scores of women raped, children abducted and villages ransacked. I condemn these atrocities in the strongest terms. Regional militaries have an important role to play in addressing the LRA threat, but I have long warned of the risks of rash and poorly planned military action and I am concerned the current ...

Michael Gerson also weighed in with his opinions on the LRA in Friday’s Washington Post. I give Gerson, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, credit for writing on issues like the Lord’s Resistance Army and Darfur at a time when they often don’t get a great deal of attention. Gerson is absolutely correct in making the case that Joseph Kony, head of the LRA, is as loathsome as possible, and in urging the international community to reach some resolution to the conflict. But I do worry that his account of the recent raid by the Ugandan military ...

A recent report by the United Nations notes that there are 9.1 million “internally displaced” persons in central and eastern Africa. (In the language of international relief work “internally displaced” have been driven from their homes, but not crossed an international border, in which case they would become “refugees.”) There are an estimated 26 million internally displaced persons throughout the world. That means central and eastern Africa account for an appallingly high 35 percent of the world’s internal displacement. There is a general trend toward larger numbers of internally displaced persons as countries become less willing to let people across ...

Today is the fourth anniversary of the signing of the historic Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended Sudan’s 20 year North-South civil war (which caused the deaths of over two million people and displaced more than four million). Chatham House, a British think tank, released a report to mark this anniversary and to underline the serious risks if the CPA fails. Implementation of the agreement is lagging, and Enough has repeatedly asserted that Darfur will continue to burn and other key regions—think Southern Kordofan and Abyei—will remain at risk of deadly conflict unless the international community pursues an “All-Sudan” solution involving ...

Reports on the wire of fresh Sudanese government air attacks in Darfur after a relative lull. With the International Criminal Court likely to move forward with an indictment of the Sudanese President, and an Obama Administration that has advocated instituting a no-fly zone poised to take office, President Bashir may be feeling increasingly desperate and hoping that the international community will essentially reward him for bad behavior by calling off the court ...

On January 7, Beijing’s Special Envoy to Sudan Liu Guijin told reporters that China wants to postpone the indictment of Sudanese President Bashir “so the international community could have more time to address the problem.” “More time” is precisely what Darfur’s over two million and counting displaced residents cannot afford. President Bashir has a record of directing his military forces and proxy militias to systematically target civilians not only in Darfur but throughout Sudan. Absent significant changes in the behavior of his government, civilians will continue to suffer and be targeted by government attacks. Back in July 2008, when China ...

Earlier this week, an African Union peacekeeper was killed when an AU convoy hit a roadside bomb near Mogadishu and a UN aid worker was killed by masked gunmen in the Gedo region west of the capital. The Islamist militia known as the shabaab is most likely behind these attacks. Following these incidents—emblematic of Somalia’s general state of anarchy—UN envoy to Somalia Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah urged the UN to create a “Baghdad-style Green Zone” in Somalia so that his international staff could actually be based in the country. That’s right: the U.N.’s international staff working on Somalia are based in Kenya ...

Senator John Kerry (D-MA), incoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has announced that the committee will start hearings on the confirmation of President-elect Obama’s nominee, Sen. Hillary Clinton, for Secretary of State, on Tuesday, January 13. Susan Rice, the nominee for United Nations Ambassador, will begin her confirmation process on January 15. These two positions will greatly influence America’s foreign policy, and not just the conflicts on which Enough works. The confirmation hearings will be an important time for members of Congress to represent their constituents’ views and press these nominees on the issues they believe to be ...

United Nations officials have finally managed to access the villages targeted by the LRA in a wave of Christmas massacres after the joint offensive on the Lord’s Resistance Army hideout in northeastern Congo by Congo, Uganda, and Sudan. The numbers aren’t pretty: 160 children were abducted and 80 women were raped in just one attack on the village of Faradje. Estimates on the numbers of people killed in this latest spree by the LRA, a rebel group led by Joseph Kony, have reached 500, and some 50,000 people have fled their homes. Meanwhile, according to the Ugandan newspaper New Vision, ...

The LA Times weighs in on the Bush-Darfur airlift. The Times, not surprisingly, comes down, as we have, on the “too little, too late” theme. However, the Times also highlights Stephen Hadley’s push back against New York Times Columnist Nicholas Kristof. From the editorial, “Hadley acknowledged Monday that military responses had been considered and rejected, but he said the decision was driven by pleas from leading church, advocacy and humanitarian organizations that feared such actions would only make things worse for Darfuris.” This really is shameless on Hadley’s (and, by extension, Bush’s) part: blaming humanitarian organizations for blocking an effective ...