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The Enough Project’s RAISE Hope for Congo Campaign today announced that it will deliver to President Barack Obama on his first day in office, January 21, a petition containing 39,900 signatures asking for immediate action to halt widespread sexual violence against women and girls in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo ...

Gérard Prunier is undoubtedly one of the most astute contemporary analysts of Africa’s Great Lakes region, and his new book, Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe, is required reading for anyone trying to put Congo’s current crisis into broader historical perspective. After the Rwandan genocide, Prunier published The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide, a meticulously researched account of the genocide that, like his latest work, provided essential background to aid in understanding the intense and simmering context into which the genocide exploded. Prunier’s new book picks up where his last one ...

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 ...

The Enough Project will host a teleconference on their latest report, Obama, Africa and Peace ...

The recent pirate attacks off the coast of Somalia have piqued international interest in the state of anarchy in Somalia. The African Union has requested that the UN take over the African Union Mission in Somalia, and while this option has been shelved for the moment, it is worth examining lessons learned from other UN take-overs of regional missions. The UN has on several occasions taken over regional missions, with Liberia and Darfur are prime examples. However, while some may think substituting a UN peacekeeping mission in replacement of under-staffed and under-funded regional missions will dramatically improve the situation, this ...

Peacekeeping is rarely easy, but it is almost never effective when regional organizations try to do ‘peace on the cheap.’ In Liberia in the early 1990s, the Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) was forced to rely heavily on Nigeria for both financing and troops. Soldiers were not only poorly equipped, but under-fed and under-paid. ECOMOG then took seven years to disarm Taylor’s rebels and organize elections, which were won by none other than Charles Taylor himself. Darfur’s vast land area and huge numbers of IDPs simply overwhelmed the insufficiently-numbered African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS) troops, ...

A recent State Department map highlights the relationship between systems of justice and cases of violence against women around the world. The map usefully illustrates how ending what the Enough and others have called a “culture of impunity” is essential to halting the horrific epidemics of gender-based violence occurring today in places like eastern Congo. In Congo, law enforcement as we know it is nonexistent, and access to justice is near impossible for women who survive brutal acts of sexual violence. Congolese women and girls are afraid to report these abuses for fear that they will be attacked by the ...

Zimbabwe’s downward spiral continues. The United Nations estimated on Friday that the death toll from the cholera epidemic has reached 1,123, with suspected cases now at 20,896. The New York Times reported today on a recent U.N. survey reported that “7 in 10 people had eaten either nothing or only a single meal the day before.” In November, the U.N.’s World Food Program (WFP) was forced to cut rations to more than four million people in Zimbabwe after receiving “no response” from the international community to aid in feeding the suffering Zimbabwean population (in part because of President Mugabe’s long ...

The media continues to be infatuated with the pirates operating off the coast of Somalia. The swashbuckling Somalis have gotten a lot of media attention, and in terms of media bandwidth, the pirates have gotten much more coverage than the intense violence in eastern Congo and Darfur. To be fair, when you hijack oil tankers and cargo ships full of Ukrainian tanks, it is big news and the stories almost write themselves. But two interesting points have gotten lost among the Pirates of the Caribbean analogies. First, it now seems clear that the Europeans and the U.S. are far more ...

Gayle Smith, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress will be among the featured speakers at this year’s Global Philanthropy Forum (GPF), an annual gathering of cutting edge donors committed to international causes that will take place April 9-11 in Redwood City, Ca ...