Category: Blog

This is not your typical Mother's Day message. We email, text and call each other from our Blackberry and iPhone regularly. We would have been Facebook friends if we had our own Facebook pages. And surely we would tweet each other if we became twitterers. But underlying all these dizzying 21st century communication tools is one of the saddest secrets in the world involving mothers and daughters. Innocently, inadvertently, we are using communication products that are powered by minerals (conflict minerals) that are fueling the highest rates of sexual violence in the world in a place called the Congo ...

A weekly round-up of must-read stories, posted every Friday ...

This Mother’s Day as we celebrate the wonderful women we call “Mom,” take a moment to remember the mothers whose children have been taken from them by the Lord’s Resistance Army. According to the 2011 State of the World’s Mothers Report, released this week by Save the Children, countries where the LRA operates rank among the very worst in which to be a mother: Sudan, CAR, and the Democratic Republic of Congo all fall within the bottom 10 ...

Efforts to end the current conflict minerals trade have gained momentum, but a new Enough Project report, “Certification: The Path to Conflict-Free Minerals from Congo,” and accompanying activist brief stress the need for a robust international certification system that would economically disincentivize maintaining a mining sector infiltrated by armed groups ...

Inspired by the first-ever student conference on conflict minerals, hosted recently by Stanford University, student activist and guest blogger Ali Hatcher wrote this post about the actions underway at UC Santa Cruz. "Our school has a few more hurdles to get through since we are a public school facing a time of deep budget cuts, and we must get every University of California campus (10 campuses spread out all over the state) to take action alongside us," he writes ...

Self-proclaimed ‘mama’s boys,’ actor Javier Bardem and Enough’s John Prendergast, teamed up to make this video drawing attention to the plight of mothers in eastern Congo. With Mother’s Day around the corner, Bardem and Prendergast sat down to talk about the role that the United States – and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the “Mom in Chief,” especially – should play in working for peace in Congo ...

The Darfur Interfaith Network of the Metropolitan D.C. area, along with GI-Net/Save Darfur Coalition, and other concerned people of faith, citizens, and groups throughout the D.C. area, will hold the second annual Hope for Darfur – Justice in Sudan rally on Sunday, May 15 to address these urgent concerns and call on our government and the international community to do more to help establish peace in Sudan ...

This peace process is going to take a while, and as activists, we’re going to have to stick it out, stick together, and continue raising heck about it with the Obama administration and other world leaders. Today, we hope you’ll join Sudan Now by signing our petition to President Obama’s right-hand-foreign-policy-man Denis McDonough, to encourage him to address key issues related to the peace process ...

Elections kicked off in Southern Kordofan today, a tense Sudanese border state that is host to a variety of armed actors, teeming with discontent among the population, and a competitive political scene divided between the ruling northern and southern parties, or the NCP and SPLM. Amid these dynamics, experts are warning about the potential for electoral-related violence to flare, as well as the effect that such a fragile situation may have on the vote itself. Last month, the home village of the SPLM candidate for governor Abdelaziz al-Hilu was allegedly attacked by militias, leaving 29 dead and 350 structures razed ...

Last week, Enough released a field dispatch by policy analyst Laura Jones, which delves into the situation in Malakal based on field research conducted just days after the attack on the town. “Lessons from Upper Nile” not only provides an in-depth look at the reasons behind this attack, but also delves into the SPLA’s approach to dealing with the militia problem, which ironically is in some ways to blame for the increase in militia-related violence ...