Category: Blog

Enough Project partners A Thousand Sisters and Jewish World Watch have launched a "virtual march" to build momentum behind the call-out for the Obama administration to appoint a special envoy for Africa's Great Lakes region. In this post from A Thousand Sisters, founder Lisa Shannon explains the job of a special envoy and discussion why appointing one is an important step toward stabilizing the Great Lakes region ...

Alleged war criminal Ahmed Haroun was announced the winner of the Southern Kordofan governor’s race this past Sunday, in elections that the leading opponent party, the SPLM, has called fraudulent. According to the National Elections Commission, the national body that is running the vote, Haroun won with 201,000 votes, over the SPLM candidate’s 194,000. The ruling northern party also won more seats than the SPLM in the legislative assembly ...

This is a picture of me -- when I was 20 years old -- with a family I met when I was visiting a homeless shelter. Michael, the boy on the far left, became my "little brother," and I've been his big brother for the last 27 years. Michael and I wrote a book in dual narrative about our lives together and apart, called Unlikely Brothers, and it comes out today via Random House ...

For 60 years now, the U.N. refugee agency, UNHCR, has provided life-saving services to some of the world’s most vulnerable populations. To mark the anniversary, U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres addressed an audience at the Brookings Institution to discuss the new challenges and necessary steps to address the changing nature of displacement today ...

In the wake of the jaw-dropping statistics from the new study of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Enough Project and 76 other NGOs have written to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to urge much greater engagement with the crisis in Congo, beginning with the appointment of a special envoy for the Great Lakes region. The letter was signed by 55 Congolese groups and 22 U.S. and international NGOs, including our friends at the Eastern Congo Initiative, V-Day, and Human Rights Watch, to name just a few ...

In September 2010, the Obama administration presented a package of incentives to the Government of Sudan in exchange for progress on the full implementation the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, or CPA, credible and peaceful referenda on southern secession and the future of Abyei, an agreement on post-referendum arrangements, and the resolution of the Darfur conflict through a peace agreement that is credibly implemented. In “No Rush to Reward Khartoum," Save Darfur Coalition/Genocide Intervention Network examine the progress thus far ...

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

Reacting to the new statistics boiled down to “four women raped every five minutes” in Congo, a few people questioned the accuracy of the findings, or suggested that “we don't need figures like this to know sexual violence is a problem.” Both responses may be true. But the press pick-up of the announcement of the American Journal of Public Health‘s findings proves its importance, at the very least, in redirecting attention to a persistent and particularly disturbing characteristic of the long conflict in eastern Congo ...

The question of ‘who is a southerner and who is a northerner?’ in Sudan will soon be unavoidable. The Khartoum government is set to begin registering citizens and issuing new national ID cards, a practical example of how the imminent split of Sudan will affect its citizens. The national ID card will be required to receive state-sponsored services, such as to register for school, conduct banking transactions, and acquire additional IDs and permits, such as passports and driving licenses ...

When the State Department’s Donald Yamamoto noted recently that the Obama administration was only taking the appointment of a special representative for Africa’s Great Lakes region “under advisement,” during testimony for the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, it raised concerns among not just a couple of members of Congress. Sixteen U.S. senators sent a letter to President Obama this week urging him to appoint a special representative, to “make an important statement that [violence in eastern Congo and ongoing LRA atrocities] are a high priority for your Administration.” ...