Sudan Halts Uganda's Pursuit for Kony

From AllAfrica

The Uganda rebel leader Joseph Kony may soon find some breathing space after the Sudan authorities declined to renew the agreement they signed with Uganda, allowing the Uganda People's Defence Forces (UPDF) to pursue the rebels in southern Sudan.

According to the Ugandan Defence minister Amama Mbabazi the protocol agreement between the two countries that expired on 30th June this year will not be renewed.

[edit]

"Bashir said the agreement could not be renewed because of a new government with another Constitution that may not be in line with that agreement. You know there is another arrangement between SPLM and Khartoum," he said.

Darfur: Review of "The Ambiguous Genocide"

Alex de Waal has a review of the forthcoming book "Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide" by Gerard Prunier.

de Waal also has a book he co-authored called "Darfur: A Short History of a Long War" coming out in October. The Daily Star published an excerpt earlier this week.

From his review

Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide provides a competent sketch of the history of Darfur and the position of the conflict within the politics of Sudan and the region. The account is valuable in locating Darfur within the politics of the central Sahara and the long-running three-cornered wars between Libya, Chad and Sudan. Prunier correctly describes pre-colonial Darfur as an ‘ethnic mosaic’ rather than a region with a binary polarized ‘Arab’-‘African’ identity divide and notes the ambiguity of the term ‘Arab’ (though he doesn’t explore the varieties of Arabism). He makes useful points on the politics of the Umma Party, the main party in the ruling coalition toppled by the current government, and the Darfur Development Front in the 1960s and 1980s and on Libyan-Sudanese relations in the 1970s and 1980s. Errors and omissions are inevitable in any analytical narrative of Darfur: the chief difficulty of this book is that the author omits entirely the central protagonists.

International efforts to find a solution to Darfur’s agony are now in the hands of the African Union. Prunier dismisses this as ‘the politically correct way of saying “We do not really care”.’ But American, British and other international support to the Kenyan-headed North-South peace process, followed a similar formula of ad hoc multilateralism, and did bring an end to twenty years of comparably vicious war. Darfur’s peace process is in some respects more challenging. There is no cohesive leadership on either side and the political issues that divide the belligerents have yet to be thrashed out—the agenda for negotiations is itself a matter of acrimony. Meanwhile, the best hopes for a settlement may come from connecting external peacemaking to internal initiatives. Darfur’s own provincial aristocrats, the paramount chiefs—including the ruling Arab families—are seeking an exit from their predicament, one that restores a conservative social order and salvages their tribes’ reputation. If the Janjawiid are to be politically decapitated, it may be through the efforts of these hardened old tribal chiefs, arguing that for the government and its allies to submit to their mediation is a better option than extradition to The Hague and a cell in a Dutch basement.

Uganda: Weekend of Prayer and Action for Northern Uganda

A Press Release from The Uganda Conflict Action Network (Uganda-CAN)

The Uganda Conflict Action Network (Uganda-CAN) has called upon religious leaders and communities across the United States to make children in northern Uganda a priority. Uganda-CAN has formally announced a weekend of prayer and action for peace in northern Uganda, to be held September 23-25. Uganda-CAN is asking religious communities to speak out, pray and mobilize to support the children of northern Uganda that have been targets of the war for nearly two decades.

“Together we are raising a chorus of voices to demand attention to this forgotten war,” said Caitlin Rackish, Uganda-CAN religious outreach coordinator. “We are asking faith leaders across the U.S. and the world to break the silence, speaking and praying in solidarity for peace with our brothers and sisters in northern Uganda.”

Over the last two decades, more than 30,000 children have been abducted as a result of this war, forced into soldiering and sexual slavery. Many of the girls who are abducted become pregnant and must care for their children while fighting a war they did not choose. Up to 50,000 more children are forced to walk miles nightly into towns to sleep unprotected on streets, so as to avoid being kidnapped.

In this campaign, Uganda-CAN is asking religious leaders to speak to their communities about the plight of children, while leading prayer and action towards a more peaceful future that affirms the dignity and life of those in northern Uganda. Through phone calls, letters and demonstrations, Uganda-CAN will work to demand that policymakers prioritize these children.

Darfur: Sign the Petition Demanding U.S. Action

From Save Darfur

Recent reports determined that up to 400,000 people have died in Darfur as a result of the government-sponsored genocide. More than 2.5 million people have been displaced from their homes. A deadly famine is imminent, and it threatens to kill many more people. Nothing short of international intervention can protect the people of Darfur. We must demand that the U.S. government do everything necessary through the United Nations (UN) to ensure an urgent multinational intervention to protect civilians in Darfur.

In commemoration of the 400,000 dead in Darfur, a coalition of groups has launched a petition drive to raise 400,000 voices of conscience across the country demanding immediate action to protect the vulnerable people of Darfur. The Darfur genocide petition calls on President Bush to assert U.S. leadership by taking every step necessary through the United Nations to:

- Establish a mandate for an international force to protect civilians

- Deploy such a force in support of existing African Union efforts in Darfur

The United States has a unique capacity and clear obligation to take immediate action. Unless there is an urgent international intervention in Darfur, up to a million people may be dead by the end of this year.

We are hoping not only that you will sign the petition, but also actively help secure signatures from your friends, families, colleagues and strangers by referring them to this online petition. Each signature will hasten the end of the genocide. Government officials who remained silent during the Rwandan genocide regularly claim that if Americans had clamored for more government action, the U.S. would have been forced to work with the UN to intervene, and could have saved thousands of lives. We have the power to provide protection for the people of Darfur, and we must use it.

You can sign the petition online by filling out your information below and expressing your concerns directly to the President.

Darfur: Panel Speaks Out on Aid

The GW Hatchet has provided the only coverage, as far as I can tell, of Monday night's "Taking Action on Darfur" event - via Save Darfur

Paul Rusesabagina, a hero during the 1994 Rwandan genocide and the inspiration for the film "Hotel Rwanda," insisted that Washington needs to do more to save victims in Darfur, Sudan, during a program at the National Press Club Monday.

The event, "Taking Action on Darfur: A Capital Alert," coordinated by the American Jewish Committee, featured Rusesabagina, a Rwandan native who turned his hotel into an impromptu refugee camp for more 1,000 victims during the 1994 genocide. Rusesabagina spoke to an audience of about 50 GW students and other D.C. activists, urging them to take greater steps to stop the genocide in the Darfur region of Western Sudan.

"Hundreds of thousands of people have been butchered since I was a young boy and nothing has been done," Rusesabagina said. "The international community has declined responsibilities, and the whole of Africa is burning."

Darfur: Mortality Update

The latest from Eric Reeves

If we assume, now conservatively, 3.5 million conflict-affected persons in Darfur, then there are 6,300 “excess” deaths per month---over 200 human beings dying every day from the consequences of ethnically-targeted warfare and deliberate restrictions on humanitarian access. (The figure rises to 7,200 “excess” deaths per month if we assume 4 million conflict-affected persons.)

Thus in the two months since the last assessment by this writer, which found that approximately 360,000 people had died in the genocide (again, see “Darfur Mortality Update,” June 30, 2005; URL above), almost 15,000 more people have died, bringing the estimated total to over 370,000. Because the CMR has likely increased significantly since the period of the WHO-overseen mortality study (November 2004 to May 2005), particularly with the start of the heavy rains, calculation of this increase is subject to substantial upward revision with the availability of new data.

Darfur: Rains Bring Displaced Villagers Home to Farm

From UNHCR

Despite the volatile security situation in Sudan's Darfur region, hundreds of villagers uprooted by the conflict are making short trips home to cultivate their land during the rainy season while smaller numbers have returned for good.

According to UNHCR teams in West Darfur province, some 400 internally displaced people have temporarily come back to their village of Borta about 15 km north of the provincial capital, El Geneina. Making up 64 out of the 68 families in the village, they have returned to cultivate their crops at the peak of the rainy season.

Darfur: Sudan President Promises Help

From the AP

Sudan's president vowed Wednesday to work to end the suffering of the people of Darfur and pushed for a peace deal modeled on January's accord that ended the 21-year southern civil war.

Omar al-Bashir's comments came the day after his vice president authorized Sudanese negotiators meeting Darfur rebel groups on September 15 to conclude an agreement to try to end the two-year conflict in western Sudan.

"The problem of Darfur and its repercussions remain a thorn in the country's back and a stain on the clean cloth of peace," the Sudanese president told 450 lawmakers at a session of the new parliament formed as a result of the southern peace deal.

[edit]

Al-Bashir has denied claims that his government has backed the militia, known as the Janjaweed, in the violence and said Wednesday that Sudan's justice and security authorities are trying to secure areas where violence persists in Darfur and "apprehend the criminals and punish them."

He also said the southern comprehensive peace agreement, which outlined systems of power and wealth sharing and offered a referendum to southerners in six years to decide if they wanted autonomy, could serve as a model for Darfur's warring parties to follow.

"This would mean a just distribution of wealth and sharing of power [in Darfur] so that all claims of marginalization would end," al-Bashir said.

Niger: Despite Harvest, Food Crisis Continues

From CARE

Niger expects to begin harvesting food crops shortly now that seasonal rains have begun, but the current food crisis is not over, CARE said today. Except in some regions that have received less than an average rainfall, farmers should take in a good crop. But after paying their debts, many will not have enough food left for themselves and their families.

“Many farmers in Niger have mortgaged their expected harvests in order to meet immediate food needs,” said Kathy Tilford, CARE Country Director in Niger. “Farmers who harvest a mediocre crop this year will likely only be able to cover a few months of food needs after they pay back loans.”

Even worse affected than agriculturalists are herders, many of whom have lost the majority of their cattle, their principal sources of income and sustenance. Helping pastoralists recover their productive assets is critical, Tilford said.

Although the rainy season means harvest is around the corner, it also points to increased disease rates, aggravating the food security situation. Diarrhea, respiratory diseases and malaria disproportionately affect the poorest and most vulnerable people in Niger.

Sudan: Talisman Case

From the AP

A judge refused to dismiss a church's lawsuit alleging that a Canadian energy company aided genocide in its pursuit of oil in Sudan, despite efforts by the United States and Canada to stop the suit.

In the lawsuit, Talisman Energy Inc., a Calgary-based oil and gas producer, is accused of such crimes as ethnic cleansing, killings, war crimes, confiscation of property, enslavement, kidnapping and rape in Sudan.

Talisman and the Sudanese government collaborated on a plan for the security of oilfields, according to the suit, with Talisman hiring its own advisers to co-ordinate military strategy with the government. Talisman mapped out areas intended for exploration and discussed how to dispose of civilians in those areas, according to the suit.

The ruling allowing the suit to proceed came Tuesday after U.S. District Judge Denise Cote reviewed a diplomatic letter from the Canadian Embassy calling the case an "infringement in the conduct of foreign relations by the government of Canada" that would have a "chilling effect" on Canadian firms in the Sudan.

The judge said Canada had indicated that once Sudan peacefully resolved its internal disputes and Canadian trade support services resumed, Canadian companies would avoid joining Sudan's economic revitalization "out of fear of U.S. courts."

The U.S. Department of State told the court in a letter it took no position on the lawsuit's merits but shared the Canadian government's concerns.

But the judge noted in her ruling that the documents from the U.S. and Canadian governments did not suggest the civil case would hinder U.S. relations with Canada or the Sudan.

"Even giving substantial deference to the Canada letter, Talisman has not shown that dismissal of this action is appropriate," the judge wrote. "Finally, the United States and the international community retain a compelling interest in the application of the international law proscribing atrocities such as genocide and crimes against humanity."

The lawsuit, which seeks unspecified damages, was brought in 2001 by the Presbyterian Church of Sudan on behalf of current and former residents of southern Sudan.

Malawi: 'Warning Signs are Clear'

From the Mail & Guardian

The United Nations has launched an appeal for $88-million to help 4,2-million people threatened by hunger in Malawi amid a general warning about looming shortages elsewhere in Southern Africa.

In a statement issued on Wednesday, the World Food Programme (WFP) said funding shortfalls of $187-million mean that only a fraction of those needing food aid in countries such as Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe will receive it.

"The warning signs are already clear," said Mike Sackett, WFP Southern Africa director, in the statement issued in Johannesburg.

"Massive international assistance is needed, but we simply cannot respond in time unless we get immediate donations," Sackett said. "By raising the alarm now, we are hoping that the international community will help us to reach millions of the hungry -- before they become the continent's next group of starving."

The UN made similar and repeated appeals for West Africa, but the world did not respond until the situation reached the crisis point in countries like Niger. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wants to avoid the same mistake in Southern Africa and has written to donor governments asking for funding to "avert a catastrophe".

Congo: Army Rebel Threatens to Overthrow Kabila

From Reuters

A renegade Tutsi general who led an uprising in Congo last year has broken months of silence and said the time had come to overthrow President Joseph Kabila.

General Laurent Nkunda rocked Congo's fragile peace process when he attacked and seized the eastern Congolese town of Bukavu in May last year, only pulling out under international pressure.

Kabila's office dismissed Nkunda's latest threats, which were made in a letter written on Aug. 25 and seen by Reuters.

"We believe that the moment has arrived to begin using all necessary means to overthrow this government and replace it with a power that is inclusive, non-conflictual and capable of restoring peace in the republic," Nkunda said in the letter.

"Congolese lives are priceless. Every man killed, every woman held hostage, raped or sold in public, and every child burned or buried alive goes to justify the offensive against Kabila's plan and the dismantlement of his clan," he added, referring to what he says are rights abuses by army soldiers.

Following a massacre of Congolese Tutsis in Burundi last year, Nkunda published a similar letter calling for military action but none was taken.

Darfur: Bandits Hit Vital Aid Convoys

From Reuters

Fighting may have died down in Sudan's crisis-torn Darfur region, but rampant banditry has taken its place and is hitting key humanitarian aid convoys, the UN said on Wednesday.

"There has been a tremendous rise in banditry. Not a single day goes by without two, three or four attacks on aid convoys," Keith McKenzie, UNICEF's representative in Darfur since 2004, told a new conference in London.

"You never know when you are going to be hit or where. They seem to be targeting the humanitarian community and workers. If anything, the situation there is more unstable," he added.

What It Is All About

Last weekend, the blog Blue Girl, Red State wrote a post about a regular blog commenter who went by the name "Shameless Hussy."

Blue Girl reports that "Shameless Hussy" went to Darfur in June as a humanitarian volunteer and was traumatized by what she saw

What she dealt with daily goes beyond the pale...beyond the nightmares of most people; Children with all four limbs hacked off right above the knee or below the elbow. Twelve year olds who died in childbirth after being gang-raped by the Janjaweed. Women who gave birth to rape-babies who were then cast out by their families for shaming the family name, leaving only one avenue of survival for themselves and their children after the camps: Prostitution.

What is f**ing her up is the desperation, and the fact that she worked herself to death for over a month, and she still didn't really save anyone. Now that she's gone, it's like she was never there. Even the ones she helped keep alive, she didn't save. You try dealing with that reality.

And women are the preponderance of victims. Men do not leave the villages to go to the countryside to gather firewood and other necessary items of sustenance. Women venture out, even though every time they leave their villages, they are at horrific risk of being beaten and raped and disfigured. The reason they go instead of the men? The women are only attacked, the men are killed.

This post receive a fair amount of attention within the blogosphere (as far as posts about Darfur go) mainly due to the fact that Kevin Drum linked to it. And while getting bloggers to pay attention to Darfur, if only for a minute, is a minor miracle, it is worth asking why it takes a post about traumatized aid workers to generate any interest in genocide.

This situation in Darfur has existed for over two years and, if people were interested, they could find accounts of death, disease, rape and torture occurring there on an almost daily basis. 400,000 people have died and nearly 3 million have been displaced and yet nobody - not politicans, not the media, not bloggers - really seem to care.

To anyone who has been paying attention, the atrocities witnessed by "Shameless Hussy" are, sadly, well-known. If her story generates concern for the people of Darfur, then for that we should be thankful. And if people who were moved by it are really interested in Darfur, then they should start reading the analyses produced by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Eric Reeves and the International Crisis Group, supporting organizations like Doctors Without Borders, Save the Children, Save Darfur and STAND, reading blogs like Passion of the Present, Sudan Watch, the Coalition for Darfur, and Sleepless in Sudan and demanding that their elected leaders do something about it.

Our thanks goes out to "Shameless Hussy" and all those who sacrifice to help those in need. But we must keep in mind that Darfur is not about them - it is about this

Reminder: Spotlight on Darfur 1

A reminder from Allthings2all

Just wanted to remind you that Spotlight on Darfur 1 will be up on September 1 and I'm still taking posts. If you have posted on Darfur in the last couple of weeks, or post tomorrow I can include your post. Posts don't have to be long and can be informative or opinion.

Here's the details:

What I'd like to do is start a series called "Spotlight on Darfur". This could be held around once a month and hosted by a different person each time. Instead of going into the background and history of the Darfur crisis, which was covered in The Darfur Collection, these posts can be on any aspect of the current situation. All I ask is that they do not contain expletives (a wide range of ages read these posts).

Spotlight on Darfur 1 will be hosted at Allthings2all on Thursday 1 September. Please email the following info for your post by 12.00pm EST Wednesday 31 August:
1. The name of your blog
2. The URL of your blog
3. The title of your post
4. The URL of your post
5. A description of your post

Genocide: Romeo Dallaire

Save Darfur also links to this letter-to-the-editor from Romeo Dallaire

To the Editor:

Re "Bolton Pushes U.N. on Change as U.S. Objects to Draft Plan" (news article, Aug. 25):

After the horror of the Rwandan genocide, in which some 800,000 Rwandans were slaughtered in just 100 days, the world vowed "never again." Because the United Nations Security Council members demonstrated inexcusable apathy and wasted time debating semantics on whether or not genocide was taking place, I and my small United Nations peacekeeping contingent were forced to watch the slaughter up close with no mandate to intervene.

Eleven years later, little has changed. Yet in just two weeks, governments of the world have the chance at the United Nations world summit meeting in New York to make "never again" a reality by agreeing to accept their responsibility to protect civilians in the face of mass murder. They would agree to act in situations where the national government was unwilling or unable to do so.

If implemented, this historic measure could put an end to politicking, posturing and inaction and save millions of lives. The agreement would mean that all states share the "responsibility to take collective action in a timely and decisive manner" to protect civilians from large-scale killings, including ethnic cleansing, genocide and crimes against humanity.

This would be a historic shift, but negotiations at the United Nations are on a knife's edge, and the United States has still not committed itself to backing it fully.

Having seen what the failure to protect means on the ground, I urge the United States to seize the opportunity to show global leadership and help drive this agreement that could save the lives of millions.

Roméo Dallaire

Quebec, Aug. 29, 2005

The writer, a retired lieutenant general, was commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Rwanda.

Darfur: Facing Evil

Save Darfur links to this article in Friends Journal

"Do you feel old enough to make this decision?" I asked Micah Allen-Doucot,

The 12-year-old was sitting next to his father, Chris, at their dining table last April, a few days before their planned trip to Darfur. Micah had removed his Boston Red Sox baseball cap.

"Yes," Micah said. "My aunt doesn’t think so. She thinks I’ll see things I’m not ready to see. She’s worried. But I think I’m old enough."

"Are you concerned about the risks?" I asked.

"Risks?" He screwed up his eyebrows. Micah has an open, trusting face; brown eyes and a mobile forehead much like his father’s when Chris drops his mask of quiet determination and becomes quizzical.

"You could be attacked by the Janjaweed," I ventured.

"Attacked?" Micah’s brow swam with bewilderment. "I’ve never been attacked." In the end he concluded, "I’ll be okay, I’ll be with my dad."


This would be Chris’s second trip to Darfur. But Micah had never traveled outside the United States.

I was left with the feeling that Micah did not really understand the risks. He was relying on Chris, as a child would who truly trusts a parent.

Darfur raises questions for us all.

At what point does an individual start to care about people suffering in another part of the world?

What strikes the first spark of interest? And once that spark is struck, how is it kindled into a passion deep enough and hot enough to lead a person to action?

Sudan: Press Statement by President of the UN Security Council

From the United Nations Security Council

Following is today’s statement to the press by Security Council President Kenzo Oshima ( Japan):

The members of the Security Council thank the African Union for mediating peace talks in Abuja, Nigeria, between the parties to the Darfur conflict. The members of the Council laud Dr. Salim Ahmed Salim’s leadership of the mediation and stand ready to support both Dr. Salim and the African Union in their further efforts.

The members of the Council strongly urge the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army, the Justice and Equality Movement and the Government of the Sudan to return to the talks in Abuja on 15 September, as requested by the African Union, and urge all parties to negotiate constructively and urgently to secure an early agreement. Only through a political solution can a durable peace and reconciliation be achieved in Darfur.

The members of the Security Council hope that the example set by the Comprehensive Peace Agreement reached at Naivasha for North-South reconciliation will have a positive impact on the Abuja Talks and on the future of Darfur within a stable and united Sudan.

The members of the Council remind the parties of the previous agreements they have signed and urge them to adhere fully to the terms of the ceasefire agreement.

The members of the Council reiterate their support for the 5 July signing of the Declaration of Principles, which serves as a framework for further good-faith dialogue on more extensive negotiations pertaining to wealth- and power-sharing as part of a comprehensive settlement to the crisis in Darfur.

The members of the Security Council remain firmly committed to the cause of peace in all Sudan, including through the implementation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement and the resolution of the humanitarian crisis in Darfur.

The members of the Council reiterate their support for the continuing efforts of the African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS) operating on the ground in Darfur.

Congo: Hundreds of Soldiers Desert Ranks in Eastern DRC

From AFP

Hundreds of ethnic Tutsi soldiers have deserted joint battalions of the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of Congo based in the country's eastern Nord-Kivu province, a military source said Tuesday.

"Hundreds of Kinyarwanda-speaking troops headed for the Masisi area after disarming their comrades who protested against their action" when the men left the First and Second Joint Battalions during Friday night, the source said.

Those who speak Kinyarwanda are ethnic Tutsis who were generally members of part of the former rebel Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD), which fought the government in a 1998-2003 war and has since been integrated into a new national army.

Their apparent destination at Masisi is in territory that is currently a base for a rebel turned dissident army officer. He has been at odds both with the Kinshasa government and UN peacekeepers deployed in their thousands across the vast nation to oversee a peace process.

Darfur: Mediators Hope for Peace in Next Round of Talks

From the AP

The Sudanese government has authorized its delegation to the next round of Darfur peace talks to conclude an agreement with the rebels, the vice president said Tuesday.

Vice President Ali Osman Mohamed Taha spoke after meetings with the chief African Union mediator in the peace negotiations, Salim Ahmed Salim.

The AU mediates the Darfur talks and maintains some 5,000 peacekeepers in Darfur.

Salim, who also met with President Omar al-Bashir and First Vice President Salva Kiir Mayardit, said he received assurances from them that progress would be made in the sixth round of talks, due to begin Sept. 15 in Abuja, Nigeria.

"The African Union will do its best to see to the success of the coming round of peace talks," Salim said.

Taha, who handles the Darfur file, said the government would enter the talks with the hope that this round would be the final one.

Sudan: First Willing Refugees Could Return After Rainy Season

From UNHCR

UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres promised Tuesday that the first refugees will go home to South Sudan in October, and he urged them to work with the new South Sudanese authorities to consolidate peace in their homeland.

"You have the same rights as I do," Guterres told representatives of the 89,000 refugees in Kakuma camp in north-western Kenya, "the right to a home in your homeland."

Pledging that the UN refugee agency would help some of Kakuma's 66,000 South Sudanese refugees go home as soon as the rainy season ends, the High Commissioner said: "I am going to be very clear. There will not be any kind of forced return. Return will only be voluntary. Nobody will be forced to go back. This is the first guarantee."

Darfur: An Open Letter to Kofi Annan

From Eve Ensler at The Huffington Post

Dear Secretary General Annan,

Rwanda, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Congo, East Timor, Afghanistan, Peru, Burma, Columbia -- the litany of countries where women’s bodies have become the battlefield continues to grow. It is estimated that between 250,000 and 500,000 Tutsi women survived rape during the genocide in Rwanda. Between 20,000 and 50,000 women were raped during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the early 1990s Not until after conflicts end does the world learn of the scale of sexual violence perpetrated against women and girls.

Exactly what is it that we learn?

Looking at the situation in Darfur one could surmise that the United Nations has learned nothing.

Niger: Donor Funds Dry Up

From Reuters

Donor funds appear to have dried up for Niger just as the United Nations food agency is stepping up its operation to head off starvation among more than 2.5 million people there, a spokesman said on Tuesday.

Only $28 million has been received toward a $57.6 million appeal by the World Food Programme (WFP) for the West African country, where drought and locusts ruined last year's harvest.

"We are quite worried. For two weeks we had almost no new donations," WFP spokesman Simon Pluess told a briefing.

"We are less than 50 percent funded and we really need urgent donations now if we want to be able to respond properly to this present crisis."

Killing Neighbors: Social Dimensions of Genocide in Rwanda

Last week the Woodrow Wilson Center held an event on this topic

The presentation focused on the question of how ordinary people came to participate in genocidal violence against their own neighbors, friends and family. The research is based on 9 months of fieldwork in Rwanda and interviews with killers, victims, bystanders, resisters, and rescuers from two rural villages.

The Washington File from the State Department covered it

How do neighbors become killers of their neighbors, friends -- even family members?

This was the central question raised by Africanist and doctoral candidate Lee Ann Fujii, who, during a recent stay in Rwanda, explored the societal ramifications of the 1994 genocide.

The slaughter, which pitted two tribal groups, the Hutu majority and the Tutsi minority, against one another, resulted in the deaths of close to a million people. Most of those who perished were of the Tutsi minority, or were Hutus sympathetic to Tutsis. The mass murder wiped out nearly 30 percent of adult and teenage males, leaving a population that was nearly 70 percent female.

Fujii, who is studying political science at George Washington University in Washington, presented her findings August 25 at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in that city.

The scholar said that without the participation of the larger population, the genocide would not have occurred. “Close clannish ties that exist in Rwanda, and in African villages in general, seem to mitigate against violence by fostering greater cooperation -- not less,” she said. “It’s difficult to kill intimately, especially to kill someone you know.

Congo: Rebel Threatens Invasion

From the BBC via MONUC

Renegade Congolese rebel leader Gen Laurent Nkunda has threatened to re-invade eastern Democratic Republic of Congo to bring "peace" to the area.

In June last year he jeopardised DR Congo's shaky peace process when he briefly seized the town of Bukavu.

In a 17-page letter, extracts of which were published in the Congolese newspaper Le Potentiel, he accused the government of promoting ethnic hatred.

Meanwhile, the army has confirmed some of its men in the east have defected.

Correspondents in the area say an estimated 1,000 soldiers, who speak Kinyarwanda - the language spoken by the ethnic Banyamulenge whom Gen Nkunda claims to be fighting for - have gathered in Masisi, North Kivu province.

Uganda Asks Sudan to Extend Operation Areas Against LRA

From Xinhua

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has asked his Sudanese counterpart Omar al-Bashir to allow the military operations against the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) rebels north of Juba in southern Sudan.

"Last Friday, I talked to President Bashir. I want to pursue ( rebel leader) Kony there," Museveni was quoted by The New Vision newspaper on Tuesday as saying.

"Bashir said the Sudanese army in Juba can operate against Kony there. However, I proposed that we work together with the Sudanese army and the Sudan People's Liberation Army to hunt him," Museveni said.

Sudan: Garang's Widow Steps In to Continue His Mission

From Emily Wax in the Washington Post

The women wept and wailed, making rhythmic, guttural sounds. They collapsed over the coffin of John Garang, the Sudanese vice president and former rebel leader killed in a helicopter crash.

Then, one by one, the women fainted. It was their formal role at Garang's funeral in this southern city earlier this month, a rite of collective female mourning in a patriarchal society where it is taboo for men to cry, even for one of Africa's most revered icons.

But Garang's widow, Rebecca, did not break down in tears. Instead, she stiffened her resolve and rose to the larger occasion -- a tense and confused moment for a country that had just lost a pivotal leader and was threatening to erupt in violence. Garang, who commanded one side in Sudan's 21-year civil war, was the key architect of a January peace accord between north and south.

As soon as the news of his death reached her, Rebecca Garang, a tall and imposing woman in her fifties, began making firm press statements and vigorous speeches. She called for calm and urged people to continue her husband's mission. Within days, she had emerged as an eloquent and powerful force in a place where women rarely have a public role.

"I will not miss my husband as long as you people of Sudan are the watchdogs," she said at the funeral, referring to the peace deal that set up a national power-sharing arrangement. "In our culture we say, if you kill the lion, you see what the lioness will do."

Off Camera, Darfur Deteriorates

An op-ed from John Prendergast and Colin Thomas-Jensen in the Boston Globe

THE DEATH of Sudan's rebel leader-turned-vice-president John Garang has pushed the crisis in Darfur even further off the international radar screen. While the peace agreement that Garang crafted between his southern-based rebels and the Khartoum government has paved the way for a new government of national unity, Darfur is now suffering stage two of the ruling party's brutal counterinsurgency strategy. Stage one was well documented: the wholesale annihilation of the way of life and livelihoods of the civilian supporters of the rebellion. The Bush administration called this genocide.

Stage two, however, occurs largely off camera. The engineers of Darfur's agony are gradually exterminating the survivors of stage one -- the 2.5 million frightened civilians living in hastily erected camps. The rape of women is systematic and relentless, access to humanitarian aid is denied, and vulnerable Darfurians are losing their will to survive.

Despite pronouncements of some US and UN officials to the contrary, the security outlook across large swaths of Darfur remains dismal. Khartoum continues to provide materiel to the Janjaweed militias, who inflame ethnic divisions in Darfur aimed at stoking intercommunal conflict and fomenting anarchy. Government officials can then say that these are historic ''tribal" feuds, while those who are eager to improve relations with Sudan (read: eager to invest in the oil sector) will accept this falsehood, conveniently forgetting who set the destruction in motion.

Darfur: Ideology in Arms - The Emergence of Darfur's Janjaweed

By Julie Flint and Alex de Waal in The Daily Star

On February 27, 2004, hundreds of armed men mounted on camels and horses attacked the town of Tawila on the eastern slope of Jebel Marra, the heart of the Fur lands. By the time the attack was over, three days later, 75 people had been killed, 350 women and children abducted and more than 100 women raped. Overseeing this mayhem, moving between a temporary headquarters in a large canvas tent and a convoy of five Landcruisers protected by mounted men, was Moussa Hilal, 44, the most powerful leader of the government-supported militias that have come to be known as the Janjaweed. In the days before the attack, more than 500 Janjaweed had converged on Tawila from different directions and congregated, without interference from any of the government forces in the area, in a makeshift camp on a nearby hill. This was more than Arab raiders settling old scores. These Janjaweed had light and medium weapons, communication, internal structure - and impunity. The state capital, Al-Fasher, is only 64 kilometers miles away from Tawila and Governor Osman Youssef Kibir was fully informed of the attack while it was continuing. But it was only on the third day, after the Janjaweed withdrew, that the governor sent representatives to Tawila.

Confident of the impunity afforded him by the government, and of international community's refusal to match its bark with bite, Hilal has amused himself by playing word games while his men burn Darfur. He has never convincingly denied the crimes he stands accused of, nor shown any regret over the destruction of Darfur, its people and its multi-ethnic society. He has only protested at being called "Janjaweed" - a word customarily used to refer to outlaws and highwaymen from Chad. "The Janjaweed are bandits, like the mutineers. It is we who are fighting the Janjaweed." What Hilal does not deny, indeed relishes, is being a government agent. "A big sheikh. not a little sheikh." As the father in his desert tent took pride in his independence, so does the son in his Khartoum villa, many hundreds of kilometers away from Darfur, take pride in being the government's man, "appointed" by the government to fight against the rebels. "I answered my government's appeal, and I called my people to arms. I didn't take up arms personally. A tribal leader doesn't take up arms. I am a sheikh. I am not a soldier. I am soldiers!"

And not only "soldiers." According to documents obtained by the authors, Hilal is also leader - amid - of an Arab supremacist organization called the Tajamu al-Arabi, variously translated as the "Arab Gathering," "Arab Alliance," "Arab Congregation" and "Arab Congress." Little is known about the secret organization, which has roots in Moammar Gadhafi's Libya and active contact today, according to the documents, with "intelligence and security leaders" from other Arab countries. But its ultimate objective in Darfur was spelled out in an August 2004 directive from Hilal's headquarters. "Change the demography of Darfur and empty it of African tribes." Confirming the control of Military Intelligence over the Darfur file, the directive was addressed to no fewer than three intelligence services - the Intelligence and Security Department, Military Intelligence and National Security, and the ultra-secret "Constructive Security" or Amn al-Ijabi.

Liberia: Presidential Candidates Divided Over What to do About Charles Taylor

From IRIN

Candidates vying to be Liberia's next head of state are divided about whether to ask for former president Charles Taylor to be transferred from exile in Nigeria to stand trial for war crimes committed in Sierra Leone.

Taylor has been served 17 indictments for crimes against humanity for his involvement and support to the Revolutionary United Front rebel faction in Sierra Leone, known for hacking off hands, feet, lips and ears of civilians during the 1991-2002 civil war.

The UN-backed Special Court in Sierra Leone has repeatedly called on Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo to hand Taylor over for trial. However, Obasanjo has said that he will not turn the former warlord in, unless an elected Liberian president asks him to do so or Taylor breaks the terms of his asylum deal.

Congo: $103 Million Cleared for Election

From Reuters

The Security Council told the United Nations it can begin spending $103 million set aside to prepare for elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo, ending a cash crunch at the world's largest peacekeeping force.

Japanese Ambassador Kenzo Oshima, the Security Council president for August, wrote a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan allowing him "to begin immediately to provide logistical support to the electoral process."

The letter, circulated at the world body on Monday, cleared the way for election support even before a council vote expected next week on a resolution authorizing the election money to be spent.

Because the resolution would also dispatch an additional 841 international police officers to Congo, the United States insisted a vote on the resolution be delayed until the reinforcements can be cleared with the U.S. Congress.

Sudan: Khartoum Accuses Darfur Rebels of Violating Security Deal

From Xinhua

The Sudanese government on Monday accused the Darfur rebels of violating a security protocol signed by the two sides last year, the official SUNA news agency reported.

Minister of State in the Foreign Ministry Najeeb al-Khair was quoted as saying that his ministry has informed the African Union (AU) and the United Nations of the attack against al-Malam area in Niyala last week.

Condemning the attack, the minister said it is against commitments made by the Darfur rebels in the security protocol signed in the Nigerian capital Abuja last December.

Al-Khair said such an incident would spoil the atmosphere when the AU and all concerned parties were arranging for the next round of talks in Abuja slated for Sept. 15.

SUNA reported that the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM), one of the two main rebel groups in Sudan's western Darfur region, attacked the al-Malam area on Aug. 23 and seized a number of vehicles.

On Aug. 24, the SLM launched another attack against the same area, firing at armless people there and capturing seven of them as well as looting 3,100 heads of camels, SUNA said.

Sudan: Fear Keeps Refugees From Going Home

From the AP

The killings and burnings of homes have diminished since terrified villagers in Sudan's West Darfur state fled to camps for the displaced and African Union soldiers arrived to protect them. But a campaign of intimidation blamed on semi-nomadic Arabs known as the Janjaweed continues, and has cut so deeply into the local psyche that refugees can't shake their fear of going home.

Many of those in the camps complain it still is not safe even to venture to the outskirts of the compound, let alone trek to far-off villages.

"If we go outside the camp, we might be raped. If we go back to the village we may be killed," said Ashya Diar Sugu, who has lived at Riad camp on the outskirts of el-Geneina since the nomads attacked her home two years ago. They killed her husband.

The confinement is intensely felt by the rural folk. A short walk beyond the edge of the camp to collect firewood has regularly left women beaten and robbed, and often raped, by attackers they say are Arabs. Men in the camps rarely venture out, saying they likely would be killed.

Darfur: Interview with Nate Wright

Mother Jones has an interview with Nate Wright, co-founded Students Taking Action Now: Darfur (STAND)

MJ: What can an ordinary person do to help this cause?

NW: A lot of people don’t realize how simple it is to really help these people. Fifty cents will feed a refugee for a day. Nineteen cents will give a schoolchild a meal. It’s incredibly amazing how far a dollar will go just in the humanitarian aid effort. It doesn’t take a whole lot to really make a difference for these people. Several Congressmen have done a lot of legislation on this. Both the Darfur Accountability Act and the Darfur Genocide Accountability Act take people from both sides of the spectrum who have never before worked on anything, and yet, on Darfur they agree. But unfortunately there hasn’t been enough pressure to get through. Even something as simple as calling up a representative, talking to them about this, asking them what their stance has been on this, and pointing to legislation is good. If nothing else, just be a voice that says, “I care about the people in Sudan, and I want to see to this changed.” There’s just so many different small things that people can do to really change things. You do what you can with what you’ve been given, and I really think that holds true everywhere.

Uganda: Kony Stranded in Sudan?

From New Vision via AllAfrica

THE LRA leader, Joseph Kony, and most of his top commanders have fled deep into southern Sudan, beyond the Red Line and are said to be stranded with no food and drugs.

An agreement with the Sudanese government allows the Ugandan army to operate inside the Sudan, only south of the imaginary line.

According to military sources, Kony fled due to UPDF pressure in southern Sudan and northern Uganda.

The UPDF recently stepped up its anti-LRA operations with combined air and ground attacks on LRA positions, killing several rebels including commanders.

The overall army intelligence co-ordinator in the north, Col. Charles Otema Awany, last week said since Kony is behind the Red Line, it was now the obligation of the Sudan government to take him on.

Reminder: Darfur Event Tonight

From the American Jewish Committee and others

Paul Rusesabagina, the real-life hero of the film "Hotel Rwanda," will speak at a program coordinated by the American Jewish Committee designed to call for greater steps to be taken against the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan.

The program, "Taking Action on Darfur: A Capital Alert" takes place Monday, Aug. 29, at 6:30 p.m. at the National Press Club Ballroom, 529 14th St, NW, Washington, D.C.

Charles Snyder, senior representative on Sudan for the U.S. Department of State, and Brian Steidle, a former U.S. Marine and Darfur eyewitness who has traveled and photographed in the region, will also participate. The program will also feature film clips from "Hotel Rwanda" and Steidle's photographs.

In addition, a new fundraising initiative, "DC (heart) Darfur" will be launched. This Jewish community effort is part of the "Dear Sudan Campaign," a national interfaith fundraising effort to provide food and relief to Darfur refugees.

The American Jewish Committee is co-sponsoring the program with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Jewish Community Relations Council, and the Greater Washington Jewish Task Force on Darfur.

The American Jewish Committee has urged the U.S. government and the international community "to act without further delay to halt the unfolding genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan."

EDITOR'S NOTE: The event is free, reservations are required. Please RSVP to Nate Rulf at rulfn@ajc.org or 202-785-5470.

Africa's Oil Comes With Big Downside

From Reuters

The capital of the ancient Kalabari kingdom is vivid testimony to the downside of Africa's oil.

A gutted local government building stands by the central square, near a smashed statue of the town's founding king. Soldiers patrol the streets.

These are scars from a three-month occupation last year by a private militia accused of rapes and random killings, and dozens of villages in the oil-rich Niger River delta have suffered similar violence.

"We are in a state of emergency," said the head of Buguma's Council of Chiefs, 62-year-old Mangibo Amachree. Soldiers are keeping the peace for now, and Amachree prays they will stay until the 2007 presidential election, which already is raising fears of more fighting.

Often, oil money is a driving force in heating long-standing political rivalries to the boiling point.

Niger: Insurgents Threaten Guerilla War

From the Vanguard via AllAfrica

Still smarting from the frustration at the recently concluded National Political Reform Conference, for not achieving 25% derivation, South-South appears set to actualise its threat to control its resources at all costs.

To this end, an insurgent group that styles itself, South-South Liberation Movement, has started training youths for guerilla warfare preparatory to declaration of Niger Delta Republic.

Student Activist of the Year

A press release from Mother Jones

Mother Jones magazine today released its 12th annual roundup of college campus activism, naming the group filibuster mounted by Princeton students in response to the GOP's nuclear option threat the Protest of the Year; Nate Wright, co-founder of Students Taking Action Now: Darfur (STAND), Student Activist of the Year; and the "Boot the Bell" campaign, on behalf of Florida tomato pickers, the Victory of the Year.

[edit]

Student Activist of the Year: Georgetown junior Nate Wright co-founded Students Taking Action Now: Darfur (STAND) in response to the Bush administration's foot-dragging on the genocide in Darfur. Five months later there were 80 STAND chapters in 24 states. Wright also traveled to Africa to make an MTV documentary.

For Women and Children

An editorial from the Boston Globe

DURING FOREIGN wars and disasters, women and children suffer egregious abuses. They are raped, killed, or forced into servitude as soldiers, domestics, and sex slaves. They desperately need more protection than the vital but limited food-water-and-shelter response of international aid efforts.

A bill in Congress would enhance emergency aid, making the United States a leader in cracking down on sexual violence and abuse as well as in quickly rebuilding educational and economic activities.

A coordinator would be appointed in the State Department or the US Agency for International Development who would work to ensure that emergency aid always included strategies to protect women and children.

Federally funded aid workers would provide food, water, and shelter, but also rape prevention, healthcare, and schools to keep children safe and on an educational path.

In Darfur, Christine Knudsen of the nonprofit aid organization Save the Children spoke to groups of women who had various security needs. Some wanted escorts while gathering firewood so they'd be protected against rape; some wanted to be able to sell or make goods like soap or cloth to improve their economic conditions; some wanted better food for their families. The bill would use microenterprise to meet some of these needs, potentially giving women grants to make or sell goods and getting them safely to marketplaces. Maintaining women's livelihoods protects their children and creates an alternative to prostitution.

Peacekeeping troops would be sanctioned for sexually abusing the people they are meant to protect -- going as far as suspending the payment of peacekeeping funds to countries that fail to root out abusive troop members.

Waiting to provide this array of protections would be a mistake. Resources that aren't set up early are often permanently delayed. Those efforts that do occur are small and privately funded when what's needed is a comprehensive, well-funded response.

It's tough to budget for the toll of wars and disasters that haven't happened yet, but Save the Children says the 2006 federal budget should allocate at least $81 million to do this work. Congress set a precedent for this by targeting $12.5 million of tsunami aid to women and children.

This bill was filed by Representative Nita Lowey, a New York Democrat, who speaks of the world's victimized women and children as if they were voters in her district -- showing that while all politics may be local, what's local increasingly has a global face.

Darfur: Who Speaks for Her?

From TIME

The rapes continued through the day. Kicked and beaten, their hands bound behind their backs, the women lay side by side on the dusty earth beneath Sudan's scorching sun. Nine in all, they were spoils of war, taken last April from their village of Khor Abeche in a dawn raid by the Arab militiamen known as Janjaweed, who had descended on camels and horses and in pickups mounted with machine guns. The women's village, on the cusp of rebel and government redoubts in South Darfur, was burned and looted; their husbands and fathers and brothers were shot when they protested.

At the Janjaweed camp, the men took turns smothering the women's faces in their long, colorful shawls. The victims were told they were the rebels' whores and daughters, they recounted to TIME, and when they cried out, they were threatened with death. As the blistering day gave way to a chill dusk, the women lay there, denied food and water, some sobbing and others asleep from exhaustion. With the morning came the rebels' counterattack. The Janjaweed fled, leaving the women behind.

Nearly 2 1/2 years since fighting erupted between African rebels and government-backed Arab militias in Sudan's western Darfur region, the horror continues. When TIME published a cover story last October on the unfolding genocide against Darfur's non-Arab Muslims, some 50,000 had died and 1.4 million had been forced from their homes. Since then, the war has claimed tens of thousands more; 2.4 million are now displaced.

"Witnessing Genocide In Sudan"

For those of you who missed the 60 Minutes report on Darfur last night, you can read the transcript from the program here.

And this image still haunts me:

Darfur: Bandits Attack AU, Obstruct Aid

From Reuters

Bandits are stepping up attacks on African Union and relief convoys in Sudan's Darfur region disrupting the flow of aid in the conflict-stricken area, African Union and aid officials told Reuters on Sunday.

"There is a lot of banditry ... The area is lawless and they (gunmen) are attacking everyone," Jean Baptiste Natama, a senior AU protocol officer told Reuters.

Natama said one person was lightly injured on Thursday when unidentified gunmen attacked a patrol near Nyala, the capital of South Darfur state.

The AU official said the incident was the first of its kind in several weeks. But an aid official, who did not want to be named, said incidents of gunmen shooting at convoys and stealing vehicles and aid had increased in recent months in Darfur.

Darfur: "60 Minutes"

"60 Minutes" will be running a story on Darfur tonight

The horrible images of genocide are captured for a report on the mass murder and subsequent refugee crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan. Scott Pelley reports.

Pelly did a story on Darfur several months ago, so I don't know if this is a new piece or simply a re-run of the earlier piece.

Darfur: Action is Character

There is a very serious post over at Blue Girl, Red State that contains some rough language, but I encourage everyone to read it

Anyone who reads Kevin Drum's site is familiar with a regular over there who goes by the screen name Shameless Hussy. She went to Darfur the first of June on a medical mission. She was offered an opportunity to post her experiences on that site, which is quite an honor, but what she dealt with over there she is having trouble writing about. It was the most brutal thing she ever dealt with, and she has been doing missions, including in war-torn Central America, since the tender age of 16.

[edit]

What she dealt with daily goes beyond the pale...beyond the nightmares of most people; Children with all four limbs hacked off right above the knee or below the elbow. Twelve year olds who died in childbirth after being gang-raped by the Janjaweed. Women who gave birth to rape-babies who were then cast out by their families for shaming the family name, leaving only one avenue of survival for themselves and their children after the camps: Prostitution.

What is f***ing her up is the desperation, and the fact that she worked herself to death for over a month, and she still didn't really save anyone. Now that she's gone, it's like she was never there. Even the ones she helped keep alive, she didn't save. You try dealing with that reality.

The Economics of Genocide in Sudan

The latest from Eric Reeves

The international community has fully demonstrated that it has no intention of confronting the NIF diplomatically---or even backing up previous diplomatic “demands” (such as the Security Council “demand” of July 30, 2004 that the NIF disarm the Janjaweed). Nor is there any willingness within the international community to move beyond the default policy of relying on the AU to protect victims of ongoing genocide. Humanitarian assistance is the primary substantive response to ethnically-targeted human destruction in Darfur.

Economic pressure on a cynical, brutal, and callously destructive security cabal---all that the NIF finally is at its core---will, even if slow to develop, at least not be hollow.

Save Darfur Store

Via Passion of the Present we found out that Save Darfur is now selling a variety of Darfur-related items.

Check it out - and check out their Cafe Press store as well.

Liberia: UN Force Plans Tough Action to Guard Polls

From Reuters

U.N. troops will take tough action to stop violence disrupting Liberia's first post-war elections in October, the start of a recovery process that will require years of outside help, a top U.N. official said.

Alan Doss, the new head of the U.N.'s Liberia mission, said the world body's peacekeeping force -- one of its biggest, with around 15,000 soldiers -- would "react robustly" to any effort to destabilize the polls and their aftermath.

Hopes are high in the crumbling capital Monrovia, a hotchpotch of shantytowns and burnt-out buildings, that new, democratically elected leaders will quickly rebuild a country shattered by 14 years of civil war.

But some fear hardcore members of Liberia's former warring factions are still sitting on sizeable stores of weapons despite a U.N. disarmament process.

Darfur: Region in Crisis

From UNICEF via Save Darfur

More than 2,960,000 people have been affected by the conflict in Darfur, and that number is expected to increase as one of the world’s most severe humanitarian crises continues to deteriorate.

For 30 months, marauding Janjaweed militia groups have driven Darfur villagers from their homes, stolen their cattle, destroyed wells and burnt buildings. The threat of violence continues, and villagers who are afraid to return home have flooded into urban areas and across the border into Chad.

Despite the international effort, many of the basic needs of the people of Darfur, both in Sudan and in the refugee camps of Chad, are still not being met.

Taking Action on Darfur

A press release from the American Jewish Committee

Paul Rusesabagina, the real-life hero of the film "Hotel Rwanda," will speak at a program coordinated by the American Jewish Committee designed to call for greater steps to be taken against the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan.

The program, "Taking Action on Darfur: A Capital Alert" takes place Monday, Aug. 29, at 6:30 p.m. at the National Press Club Ballroom, 529 14th St, NW, Washington, D.C.

Charles Snyder, senior representative on Sudan for the U.S. Department of State, and Brian Steidle, a former U.S. Marine and Darfur eyewitness who has traveled and photographed in the region, will also participate. The program will also feature film clips from "Hotel Rwanda" and Steidle's photographs.

In addition, a new fundraising initiative, "DC (heart) Darfur" will be launched. This Jewish community effort is part of the "Dear Sudan Campaign," a national interfaith fundraising effort to provide food and relief to Darfur refugees.

The American Jewish Committee is co-sponsoring the program with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Jewish Community Relations Council, and the Greater Washington Jewish Task Force on Darfur.

The American Jewish Committee has urged the U.S. government and the international community "to act without further delay to halt the unfolding genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan."

Zimbabwe

Passion of the Present has been doing a good job keeping track of the situation in Zimbabwe.

You can read their coverage here, here, and here - there is also much in addition to these three articles so check them out.

Sudan: UN Struggling to Feed 90,000 Refugees

From Reuters

The United Nations said on Friday it was struggling to feed 90,000 Eritrean and Ethiopian refugees in eastern Sudan with a near-50 percent shortfall in funding and breaks in supplies looming.

"We need the world's support to keep feeding," said the U.N. World Food Programme's Sudan country director Ramiro Lopes da Silva. "Their situation is precarious."

The influx of refugees into Sudan began in the 1970s and 1980s when civil war, drought and famine in Ethiopia forced thousands to flee. Their numbers swelled with the Ethiopian-Eritrean border conflict of the late 1990s.

WFP said the refugees, based in 12 camps, have scant possibilities of supporting themselves through farming or local employment. And far fewer than expected had sought voluntary repatriation due to concern over conditions at home.

Over half-way through a two-year feeding operation, only $9.4 million of $17.7 million funds needed until March 2006 had been received, WFP added in a statement released in Nairobi.

Malnutrition rates were rising to "worrying" levels.

Darfur: Too Dangerous for Refugees to Return

From VOA

The head of the United Nations agency for refugees, winding up a tour of Sudan's western Darfur region and eastern Chad, says Sudanese refugees want to go home, but it is too risky.

Earlier in the week, leaders at a camp in Darfur for those displaced by the fighting told U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres that, to them, security was more important than food.

After touring refugee camps in Sudan and Chad, Mr. Guterres said he was struck by the strong desire of those displaced by the Darfur conflict to return to their villages. But fighting continues between rebels and government troops and their allied Arab militias.

"The main problem for everybody is security," he noted. "They want to go back to their homes, and I think this is a basic right that needs to be granted to them. For that to be possible, there needs to be security. And, of course, we have told everybody that we would not mislead them, we would not promote return without security, and return must be voluntary. It must be their option, and respect of that is a basic principle of our action."

Sudan: ICRC Bulletin No. 33

From the ICRC

The heavy rains that have wrought havoc in the three regions of Darfur have resulted in a general slow-down of all activity, and the situation has therefore remained calm. They have also affected the assistance work of humanitarian organizations, as many roads have become difficult and dangerous to travel and relief vehicles have had to plough through flooded riverbeds and swift currents. In the town of Al Fashir alone there was more rain in one day in August than during the whole of 2004.

The ICRC's activities have also been affected by the rainy season. All planned distributions have been carried out, but not without delay. In the rural areas – primarily in North Darfur - where the ICRC has been providing seeds and tools, the local population has taken advantage of the lull to plant fields, and there is real optimism about next year's harvest. Unfortunately, in most of the rural areas badly affected by the conflict the people dare not leave their villages to sow crops. They will remain fully dependant on external assistance in the coming months.

Niger: Can Aid Do More Harm than Good?

From the BBC?

When Niger's president accused aid agencies of exaggerating his country's food crisis for their own gain, Western media reacted with shock.

How dare he bite the hand that feeds his people, commentators asked. Many suggested the president was making excuses for the failings of his own government.

But according to some leading aid experts, Mamadou Tandja had a point.

His remarks may have been self-serving, they concede, but they also raised serious issues about the way aid emergencies are handled.

"I think NGOs and rich country media do have an incentive to paint too simplistic and bleak a picture, as was the case in Niger's food crisis," Professor William Easterly of New York University told the BBC News website.

There were localised food shortages this year - but they were not particularly acute, and are now easing.
What Niger is experiencing is not a sudden catastrophe, but chronic malnutrition that makes people vulnerable to rises in food prices.

Glib talk of famine backed by pictures of starving children may help NGOs raise funds, but it does nothing to address these basic problems, says Mr Easterly.

Uganda: 1,000 Refugees Die Weekly

From Xinhua

One thousand internally displaced persons die every week in the war-ravaged northern Uganda, according to a preliminary analysis report undertaken by the Ugandan government, the United Nation's agencies and non-governmental organizations.

The report, named Health Mortality Survey for Northern Uganda, was quoted by local media as saying on Friday that on average there are 1.54 deaths per 10,000 people per day instead of the internationally accepted one death per day, adding the infant mortality rate was 3.18 per 10,000 deaths per day instead of two deaths per 10,000.

The report was conducted among 1.3 million internally displaced persons in Gulu, Kitgum and Pader districts between January and July 2005.

According to the report, the leading cause of death in the region apart from violence is malaria and HIV/AIDS.

Burundi: New President Promises Peace

From Reuters

Burundi's former Hutu rebel leader Pierre Nkurunziza became president on Friday with a pledge to honor the peace accord that brought him to power and ended a 12-year civil war which killed 300,000 people.

"In front of all Burundians, I, Pierre Nkurunziza, swear that I will always respect the Burundian constitution and the peace agreement," he said, touching the Burundian flag with one hand and placing another on the copy of the constitution.

"I swear to ban all ideologies of ethnic division and genocide. I swear to work for the development of all Burundi."

Nkurunziza's inauguration after a series of democratic polls was a huge step forward for the small central African nation, battered by war, ethnic division and poverty that forces many of its 7 million people to survive on as little as 25 cents a day.

Securing peace in Burundi is seen as crucial to overall stability in the volatile Great Lakes region, racked by ethnic conflict, fights over resources and refugee problems.

The former physical education lecturer, whose narrow escape from death at the hands of rampaging Tutsi soldiers turned him into a guerrilla fighter in 1995, became only the second elected Hutu president in Burundi's post-independence history.

Of course, the first Hutu elected president of Burundi back in 1993 governed for only a couple of months before he was assassinated by Tutsi army officers. Hutus then slaughtered thousands of Tutsi civilians and Tutsi soldiers in turn subsequently massacred tens of thousands of Hutus. This violence played an important role in ratcheting up the tensions in neighboring Rwanda before the genocide began in 1994.

Actor Cheadle Boosts Involvement in African Aid

Good for him.

Here are the details:

With "Hotel Rwanda," the horrific movie set against the background of genocide, now faded from the headlines, actor Don Cheadle is boosting his personal campaign to end war and famine in Africa.

The Oscar-nominated actor has launched "Live For Darfur," a series of events in which celebrities from rock band U2 to Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel dedicate their work toward raising awareness about refugees in the Darfur region of Sudan.

In September, Cheadle will attend Save Darfur Coalition's "National Day of Action" in Washington, to address the death and disease plaguing Darfur.

On the same day, he will participate in a National Leadership Assembly for groups to brief Save Darfur members and others on Sudanese issues.

But in an interview on Wednesday, Cheadle called the single events a "raindrop approach" and hinted at a torrent of more cohesive actions to come aimed at reaching a wider spectrum of people.

"That strategy hasn't been completely put together ... but we are working toward that," he said.

Cheadle earned wide acclaim last year for "Hotel Rwanda," in which he portrayed a hotel manager who saved the lives of some 1,200 refugees during the civil war in Rwanda that began in 1994.

More than just a movie role, Cheadle's work in "Hotel Rwanda" led him to become an activist for boosting aid to African nations whose people have been ravaged by starvation, drought and war.

Last year, the Bush Administration declared genocide was taking place in Sudan and called on world intervention. Since then, a long-running civil war has formally ended, but separate fighting in continues in Darfur, where more than 2 million people have been left homeless.

"The problems are very nuanced and complex and are things that we are in dire need of leadership from our government if we are going to see any change," said Cheadle, who has traveled to Africa three times in recent months.

He knows people tire of celebrities promoting causes and Americans are reticent about intervention in Africa, but Cheadle argues that American involvement is needed to prevent impoverished nations from becoming hotbeds of terrorism and disease.

"It will have a direct impact on our citizens down the line. You can't just throw away an entire continent," he said.

Update: A Call for Assistance

Earlier today I asked about US efforts to undermine a new UN agreement that would, according to Oxfam, "establish a new standard and oblige the international community to act were there to be another Rwanda or a similar mass murder of civilians where the government was unwilling or unable to do anything to stop the bloodshed."

Now, via Mark Leon Goldberg, it looks as if a version (PDF) of John Bolton's edits have been leaked.

Goldberg reports

For example, Section 117 under the heading "Impunity" previously read:

Recognizing that justice is a vital component of the rule of law we commit to end impunity for the most serious violations of international humanitarian law: genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes by cooperating with the International Criminal Court, the existing ad hoc and mixed criminal tribunals and other mechanisms of international justice as well as through strengthening national legal systems.

Sounds pretty good. But in Bolton’s edits, he replaces the words “international humanitarian law” with “crimes of concern to the international community” -- reflecting a hostility to the very concept of international humanitarian law. Even worse, he strikes out altogether every word following “war crimes,” thereby eliminating any reference to cooperating with the ICC or the ad hoc tribunals (that is, the ICTR and ICTY) and mixed tribunals (for example, the UN’s Special Court for Sierra Leone).

This is a big deal. America has long promoted international cooperation with the ICTY, ICTR, and Sierra Leone -- courts it helped to create and staff. Since assuming office, for example, the Bush administration has made a point of holding countries like Serbia accountable should they obstruct the work of these courts. Do Bolton’s edits reflect a shift in this policy? The ICTY is a UN organ; does the Bush administration now think that the UN should not cooperate with its own court and thereby abandon the ICTY?

Sudan: Rice Ready to Cooperate with Sudan

From the Sudan Tribune

The US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, has affirmed readiness to cooperate with Sudan regarding settlement of the pending issues towards improvement of the relations between the United States and Sudan at all domains.

Rice also affirmed in a written message to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Dr. Mustafa Osman Ismail, Thursday the keenness of the US administrations to cooperate with Sudan with respect to the implementation of the peace agreement as well as normalization of situation in Darfur.

She referred to her recent visit to Sudan, saying that it enabled her to get acquainted with Sudanese issues, indicating that she is ready to work with Sudan toward better relations.

Darfur: Holocaust Museum Official Visits Darfur Refugees In Chad

From VOA

An official of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum says if the genocide in Darfur is going to stop it’s going to take stronger political will on the part of the United Nations and individual countries.

[edit]

Mr. Fowler recently visited refugee camps in neighboring Chad and spoke about his visit with English to Africa reporter Joe De Capua.

Mr. Fowler says, “I returned to Chad to check up on the refugees and to find out what their conditions were a year after the first time I was there. The Holocaust Museum has been speaking out on the situation in Darfur since the beginning of 2004 and will continue to do so as long as the crisis remains.”

Conditions for the Darfur refugees in Chad have gotten better. He says, “The refugee relief effort in Chad has improved quite a bit. The camps are more organized. There’s more infrastructure in place. It’s still a pretty marginal existence and I know in some of the camps further north there are still real problems with water…but by and large the refugee situation has stabilized quite a bit from last year.” Nevertheless, there’s growing frustration that the refugees’ plight will continue for a very long time.

Mr. Fowler does not see major improvements in Darfur itself, despite several thousand African Union peacekeeping troops. “The deployment certainly has led to a little bit of improvement, but overall the situation remains really dire. The countryside is completely insecure. The two million people who’ve been driven from their homes can’t really go back because they’re subject to attack. So, whatever improvement there’s been is dwarfed by the continuing scale of the problem where you’d just got an immense civilian population that has been subject to murder and to rape and to looting and the survivors are barely hanging on in basically internally displaced persons camps.”

Following the genocide of World War Two, the term “Never Again” arose to signify there would be no more holocausts. However, when the Holocaust Museum official looks at Darfur he says, “My reaction is we still have a long way to go. We’ve made this promise over and over again since the end of the Holocaust that we’ll never again allow civilian populations to be targeted because of their group identity. And there in Darfur, that’s exactly what’s happening. And there’s still just enormous effort that’s necessary for us to really live up to the idea that we’re not going to let this happen.”

ICC and Genocide: A Call for Assistance

It has now been more than a week since Oxfam reported that the US, Brazil, India and Russia were trying to undermine a new UN agreement that "would establish a new standard and oblige the international community to act were there to be another Rwanda or a similar mass murder of civilians where the government was unwilling or unable to do anything to stop the bloodshed."

Since then, it has hardly received any press coverage, but today it was briefly mentioned, along with an apparent attempt to further undermine the International Criminal Court, in an article by Colum Lynch in the Washington Post

The proposed changes, submitted by U.S. Ambassador John R. Bolton, touch on virtually every aspect of U.N. affairs and provide a detailed look at U.S. concerns about the world body's future. They underscore U.S. efforts to impose greater oversight of U.N. spending and to eliminate any reference to the International Criminal Court. The administration also opposes language that urges the five permanent members of the Security Council not to cast vetoes to halt genocide, war crimes or ethnic cleansing.

It seems to me that these are two rather important issues that deserve some in-depth coverage.

I realize that this blog has a limited audience and that this post probably will not reach the desired targets, but I strongly urge those with access to information regarding these two issues to write and disseminate pieces explaining just what is going on (or, barring that, sending me an e-mail and pointing me toward some resources that will help me figure out just what is going on, so that I can explain it here.)

Sudan: UNHCR Chief Calls for More Support for Darfur Peace Process

From IRIN

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, has called on the international community to increase its support for the Darfur negotiations in order to bring peace to the strife-torn western Sudanese region, a spokesperson said.

"The main job of the UN here is to try to force things in order to have peace," Guterres said on Wednesday in Darfur, referring to the peace talks between the Sudanese government and the two Darfur rebel movements, scheduled to resume on 15 September in the Nigerian capital, Abuja.

The refugee chief was speaking on the second day of a 10-day visit to the region, intended to highlight the financial needs of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and other international agencies.

"The international community must give more money to support the peace process," Kitty McKinsey, regional spokesperson for UNHCR, told IRIN on Thursday.

"It is a turning point. There is a window of opportunity to end this conflict and the international community has to capitalise on it," she added.

Darfur: A Big Test For The Whole World

Via e-mail I was alerted to this piece by Edward B. Rackley in The Old Town Review. Rackley "[works] for a western donor government" and has the responsibility to "inspect and evaluate the performance of the recipients of our donated public funds" who are operating in Darfur.

I highly recommend that people read the entire thing - but here is an excerpt

Last week my political boss gave our team of advisors a serious dressing down. Darfur, he shouted, was “a big test for the whole of the world,” a test we were apparently failing. Little has changed in the political situation; Darfur remains a death trap for civilians. Aid agencies are stretched to their limits and yet hundreds of thousands still lack food, clean water, and shelter. We stared at the table in silence. Maybe he’s right, I thought. Maybe nothing has changed since Rwanda and the gulf between international concern and action remains as chiasmic as it ever was.

Peace in Darfur demands a political settlement between Khartoum and local rebels; this the international community cannot provide. Political will on both sides is lacking, the conflict seems destined to simmer on indefinitely. What the international community can do is better ensure the survival of innocent civilians as the political process slowly finds its feet. There are three paths that need to converge for this to happen, none of them easy.

First, improved and expanded humanitarian assistance. Donor money is available for Darfur relief efforts, but Khartoum must reign in its militias and stop obstructing aid agencies. Aid personnel are constantly harassed, arrested, even expelled from Sudan by recalcitrant officials. Without a doubt it is the most difficult working environment among the world’s large-scale relief operations. And the relief presence is enormous: over 1000 foreign aid workers with scores of agencies employing around 10,000 national staff to provide assistance for over 3.5 million war-affected and displaced in a region the size of France (but with only 6.2 million people). Unlike Rwanda, Congo or northern Uganda, no cumulative mortality figure exists for Darfur—again due to government obstruction. The UN agency charged with conducting mortality surveys has had members of its staff detained, physically intimidated, and expelled from the country by Khartoum officials.

Official obstruction and harassment is one obstacle to effective aid, the other is rampant insecurity. Despite the scale of the humanitarian presence, relief operations are largely confined to the safety of urban centres. Rural banditry and violent ambush deter regular food deliveries to outlying areas. Local trucking companies hired by the UN to move the food have lost so many drivers and trucks to murder and theft that many now refuse to lease their vehicles. With the current planting season missed because of violence-related immobility, widespread famine is expected by late 2005.

Second, a rapid and dramatic increase in the number of African Union peacekeepers. The African Union is a new institution with few resources and no experience of peacekeeping or military operations of the scale required. It currently has nearly 2500 troops on the ground, which is far too few. With recently pledged NATO support, it will scale up to 7500 by September and to 12,000 by Spring 2006. Most observers doubt this is possible given meagre AU resources and, even if so, claim it is still not fast enough to bring protection to Darfur civilians.

The AU mandate is to “monitor and verify” ceasefire breaches and unlawful violence against civilians. It is the duty of the government to protect civilians, a responsibility it shows no capacity or will to fulfil. Many Darfur advocates are pushing for a tougher, more trigger-happy mandate for the AU troops. This is unnecessary and undesirable for two reasons. First, a tougher mandate sends the wrong message that the onus is off the government to disarm militias and defend civilians. Proactive disarmament of militias by outside forces will trigger a new theatre of conflict, pitting peacekeepers against militias and their government backers. Longterm protection for civilians ultimately rests with political negotiations, due to recommence in June, not in peace enforcement. Second, although the current AU presence is too insignificant to deter targeted attacks, where present they provide an effective buffer for civilians. AU opposition to augmenting its troops with non-Africans, as in the Nuba Mountains and the South, should be re-considered. The AU target number of 12,000 for 2006 is too little too late. 30-40,000 troops by late 2005 is the minimum required given the vastness of Darfur.

Third, end impunity for Darfur’s killers. The Security Council’s vote to refer war crimes and suspects to the ICC is welcome, but government intransigence and sabotage is just around the corner. The UN and donor countries need to think hard about how they will tackle this impasse, which may rouse significant popular opposition (and violence) against foreigners in Sudan. Human rights groups argue that the prospect of justice is the best deterrent against further violence in Darfur, but this is a platitude. As in Iraq or Somalia, Sudanese would readily take to the streets in defence of their government if they felt it was unjustly accused or attacked, and Khartoum is a master manipulator of public opinion. Constant and relentless international pressure on the government is essential.

Congo: Hutu Rebels Given One-Month Disarmament Deadline

From AFP

The Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Uganda on Thursday set a one-month deadline for Rwandan Hutu rebels in the eastern DRC to disarm and return home in accordance to a decision they made earlier this year.

Officials from the three countries meeting here gave Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) until the end of September to implement their as-yet unmet March 31 pledge made after talks in Rome or face "serious consequences."

"The DRC government will maintain its contacts with the FDLR in order to obtain from the latter the implementation of the Rome Declaration by the end of September 2005," they said in a joint statement read by Richard Sezibera, Rwandan President Paul Kagame's special envoy for Great Lakes issues.

"Non-compliance by the FDLR will have serious consequences," he said after a two-day meeting here of the three countries' regional cooperation ministers also attended by officials from the United States, European Union, United Nations and African Union.

He did not specify what the "serious consequences" would be but a Rwandan official speaking on conditions of anonymity said the repercusions would be both political and military.

Congo: 12,500 Girls Members of Armed Groups

From IRIN

Some 12,500 girls currently belong to government and non-government forces in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and a programme to disarm, demobilise and reintegrate all militias into society is failing them, Save the Children, an NGO, said in an August 2005 report.

The report, titled "Forgotten Casualties of War", said many girls felt left out of the disarmament and reintegration process. It said they did not see themselves as "child soldier", but as "wives" or camp followers and, therefore, were not entitled to demobilisation and reintegration benefits.

It said girls in the DRC accounted for 40 percent of all children involved with armed groups.

Congo: Conflict, Neglect Cripple Healthcare

From Reuters

Nearly 200,000 people in a remote corner of Congo share one doctor, three nurses and a hospital most cannot reach, let alone afford, aid workers said on Thursday.

The collapse of the state health system, violence by militia and government soldiers and a lack of outside help have raised death rates in Mitwaba territory in northern Katanga to five times levels usually found in Africa, the relief workers say.

Mitwaba's predicament is similar to that of much of Congo, where, two years after a peace deal was signed, war-related hunger and disease continue to kill 1,000 people a day, on top of 3.8 million that have died since the conflict began in 1998.

"The main reason for the dire situation is the gradual collapse of the state health system," said Doctor Arsene Enyegue, a doctor working with the organization Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF, Doctors Without Borders) in Katanga.

"But this precarious situation has, of course, been exacerbated by the insecurity, which has reduced healthcare to virtually nothing," he said in the remains of Muvule health center, 75 km (50 miles) southwest of Mitwaba town.

Sudan: Prayer Service highlights the Tragedies of Sudan

From the The Quad-City Times

Rashida Ishag grew up in the central part of Sudan and her father was a leader in their village.

Wednesday night, she shared about the day when the leaders were asked “to collect the youngers” men to go participate in the genocide taking place in the south.

“He refused,” she said of her father. ‘We are same brothers,’ he told them.”

The army under the control of the Khartoum government did not share that same philosophy. Her father and others from the village were tortured to the point of death and then tossed out barely alive. He died two weeks later.

“After my father died, they came and burned my village in 1995,” she said.

About 100 people gathered Wednesday night in Rock Island for a prayer service and to hear inspiring stories of Sudanese people, such as Ishag’s, who have found renewed life in the Quad-Cities after leaving their war-torn region of Darfur.

Darfur: No Respite in Africa

An op-ed from Jerry Fowler, staff director of the Committee on Conscience at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and John Heffernan, a senior investigator for Physicians for Human Rights,
in the Washington Post

Last month, in the middle of a hot, dusty refugee camp in eastern Chad, we witnessed hundreds of men from Darfur, clad in immaculate white robes, crowding around a small generator-powered television. They were watching the news about a new member of Sudan's leadership: John Garang, longtime leader of the country's southern rebellion against its northern government. Now he was being sworn in as first vice president in a new "government of national unity" meant to end Sudan's long civil war.

To be sure, few of the refugees really knew much about "Dr. John," except that he was not a member of the Khartoum-based Arab elite that has orchestrated a campaign of murder and rape to drive them and more than 2 million other non-Arabs from their homes in Sudan's western region of Darfur. But given their desperation to return home and reclaim their former lives, his swearing-in was enough to create palpable excitement. For many of the estimated 200,000 Darfurian refugees in Chad, the new government represents hope of returning home.

We feared then that they were grasping at straws; with the death of John Garang in a helicopter crash a few weeks ago, our fear may have become reality.

Rwanda: In a Village Court, a Genocide Killer Confesses

From the Telegraph

The accused men, dressed in pink culottes and matching shirts, recounted their role in the slaughter of neighbours they once called brothers.

"We went to the house of Sebufiura with a big group to find Tutsis and they were running, but we found them and started killing them with machetes," said one of the eight accused, Pascal Ndahayo, a stocky 35-year-old in tatty trainers.

Sebufiura tried to buy his life with 20,000 francs [£20 today], which we took from him along with a sack of Irish potatoes. But then we killed him and his wife, and we put all the bodies in the toilet pit.

"I did this and killed others who I do not remember. I beg forgiveness from God, the government of Rwanda and the people here."

The crowd barely reacted. Then one tall woman in an olive-green suit stood up and quietly asked a question, probing for detail. Ndahayo responded haltingly, his answer was noted, and the proceedings continued.

Village courtrooms such as this one held in Gasabo district, about 20 miles from the capital, Kigali, are being held across Rwanda to pass judgment on those who carried out the mass murder of an estimated 800,000 Rwandans, mainly ethnic Tutsis, during the genocide of 1994.

Darfur: "No One Will Force You to Return"

Via Passion of the Present we get this

UN refugee agency chief António Guterres today told displaced Darfurians they would never be forced to go back to the villages they fled under armed attack over the last two years.

"Nobody will force you to return," he assured the leaders of displaced people who told him rape and burning of villages are still continuing in Darfur, the western region of Sudan that attracted international concern last year, but has since slipped from the world's front pages.

[edit]

The High Commissioner listened intently as displaced people told him of their need for security above all, even before food, which they also desperately need.

"There is still rape going on. Genocide is still going on and burning of villages is going on," the chief leader of the displaced people in Riyad camp told him. "We have no security in this camp. Our situation is not living. It is as if we are in prison."

Darfur: Security Concerns Camp Leaders

From the AP

Frustrated leaders of a refugee camp in the Darfur region of western Sudan on Wednesday told a U.N. official that security for the 13,000 inhabitants is a bigger issue than food, which is also scarce.

United Nations High Commission for Refugees chief Antonio Guterres held talks with leaders of the Riad displaced people's camp on the outskirts of Geneina, capital of West Darfur state.

[edit]

"This is not your home. We need to create a way that you can return to where you came from but we will not force you in any way," Guterres told some 45 male and female leaders of the Riad camp, who applauded his remarks. "When there is peace, when there is security, you can choose."

Guterres is scheduled to assess his organization's work in Darfur, neighboring Chad and southern Sudan, where millions of Sudanese have settled in camps after escaping violence and insecurity.

"This is the biggest displacement problem in Africa," Guterres said of Sudan.

Rwanda: Dalliare to Testify Yet Again at the ICTR

From AFP

The former commander of United Nations troops during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda will be called as a witness when the trial of Rwanda's former army chief resumes at the UN-backed court prosecuting suspects for the atrocities, officials said Wednesday.

Canadian General Romeo Dallaire, an outspoken critic of UN and international inaction during the genocide, appears on a list of prosecution witnesses to testify against General Augustin Bizimungu before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), they said.

"We will call General Dallaire," ICTR prosecutor Cire Ally Ba told the independent Hirondelle News Agency covering the Arusha-based court's proceedings in northern Tanzania.

"According to our plans, he will testify in the first quarter of next year, if all goes well in January," he said.

Dallaire's appearance would be his third before the ICTR which was set up by the United Nations to try the leading suspects in the 1994 genocide in which some 800,000 people, mainly minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus, by Hutu extremists.

In previous testimony, Dallaire has accused his UN superiors of denying him permission to carry out raids that could have prevented the massacres over the course of 100 days from April to July 1994.

In his 2003 book "Shake Hands With the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda," Dallaire, 59, says he was traumatised that he and his forces were unable to stop the massacres due to what he claims were too few troops and insufficient means.

The trial of Bizimungu, often referred to as the "brain" behind the genocide, Rwanda's former gendarmerie chief, General Augustin Ndindiliyimana, and two other senior officers, resumes on Monday.

All four of the accused have pleaded not guilty to charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.

Burundi: Integration of Army Encourages Refugees

From Reuters

Integration of ex-Hutu rebels into Burundi's Tutsi-dominated army is encouraging refugees from the tiny central African country's civil war to return in bigger numbers, the U.N. refugee agency said on Wednesday.

The relatively violence-free progress of recent democratic elections has also helped speed along the voluntary returns over the past two months, said Kaba-Guichard Neyaga, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) representative for Burundi.

"The new army and security services are contributing to the impression of confidence among refugees," Neyaga told Reuters.

"Refugees have historically feared the army, because they have been accused of discrimination. With the new configuration, there is a representation of both ethnicities."

Under a peace accord signed in 2000 that has guided Burundi's path out of a 12-year civil war, former Hutu guerrilla forces have been integrated with their former foes in the largely Tutsi army.

Chad: Almost Half at Risk of Famine

From AFP

Famine is a threat in almost half of Chad because of destructively heavy rains after a long period of drought, a food security official at the health ministry, Tao Bouhouraye, said.

"Today, we can't speak of famine in Chad, but we can talk of a risk of famine in the Sahel zone and in the centre of the country, as well as... in the west," Bouhouraye told AFP.

Ethiopia: More Than 3 Million Face Hunger

From Reuters

With hunger in Niger grabbing world attention, the United Nations urged donors on Wednesday not to forget Ethiopia, where it said more than 3 million people need emergency food aid this year.

In a country notorious for the famine that killed 1 million people 20 years ago, the U.N. World Food Programme said repeated droughts meant again children with bloated stomachs were sitting listlessly at feeding centres as gaunt parents toiled arid land.

"Scenes at some of the supplementary feeding centres, established and run by the government in southern Ethiopia, show the worst side of a hunger that remains depressingly familiar," said WFP's Ethiopia director Mohamed Diab.

Sudan: Parties Tussle Over Control of Energy Ministry

From Reuters

Sudan's ruling party and former southern rebels, in talks to form a new government, are vying for control of the oil producer's energy ministry, an official taking part in the talks told Reuters on Wednesday.

Officials from the former rebel group, the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM), have said they expect to finalise the formation of a new government by the end of August or the beginning of September.

"It's our position to take the oil ministry. ... The National Congress Party is interested in holding this ministry," said the SPLM official, who is taking part in the talks between the two sides.

The official said the issue was important to the SPLM because most of Sudan's oil reserves found so far are in the southern areas controlled by the former rebels.

"We want to make sure the south gets its share and oversees exploration in the future," the official added.

Niger: U.N. to Help End Hunger

From the AP

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Wednesday the United Nations was determined to get aid to all those in need in hunger-stricken Niger, days after an aid group said the U.N. response to the hunger crisis here was inadequate.

Annan was wrapping up a two-day trip aimed at highlighting the plight of 5 million people across northwest Africa, most of them in Niger, facing food shortages after their crops were ravaged by drought and locusts.

Annan met Wednesday with President Mamadou Tandja and said afterward they discussed the region's food crisis "and measures that ought to be taken to ensure what has happened this year does not happen in the future."

Still Dying in Darfur

From Ari Berman in The Nation

Here's a sad little secret: Every time I write about Darfur in this space, traffic drops by at least a third. So here goes nothing.

A few months ago I asked a veteran news producer why television had devoted so little attention to such a significant humanitarian crisis. The producer cited budget constraints and added, "Plus, the villages aren't burning anymore." When they were burning, as Nick Kristof has so poignantly documented, the media hardly cared. NBC spent 5 minutes on Darfur coverage last year; CBS devoted 3 minutes. This June, the major network and 24/7 cable news stations aired 126 segments on Sudan, compared to 8,303 segments on the runaway bride, Michael Jackson and Tom Cruise.

The world says "never again" to genocide and then it happens again. Ethnic cleansing by the government-backed Janjaweed militia has killed nearly 180,000 native Darfurians, mostly black Africans populating an arid region the size of France. Almost two million people have been displaced from their homes (not counting four million more displaced by the 21-year, North-South civil war).

"Despite some stabilization of the security situation in Darfur, at a deeper level, living conditions are steadily deteriorating," Kofi Annan recently told the UN Security Council, warning of a "descent into lawlessness." 3.2 million people need humanitarian assistance; 1.9 million live in crowded refuge camps. Rampant looting, criminality and the targeting of aid workers hampers crucial relief efforts. The death three weeks ago of rebel leader John Garang threatens to tear the fragile peace process apart.

Genocide and Statistics

Update: If you came to this post looking for statistics related to Darfur, I recommend you read these two posts on how it is nearly impossible to accurately determine the number of deaths that have occurred: Death Estimates Inaccurate and Two GAO Reports

Update II: Read this

Update III (3/28/08):

How many people have died in Darfur? Two years ago, the U.N. estimated 200,000. But the man who gave that figure now says it's far too low to be accurate. Sudan has long said it's way too high.

A new mortality survey might settle the question, but the U.N. has no plans for one — they say they are too busy trying to help the living. Activist groups say Sudan's government doesn't want one.

UPDATE IV (4/22/07):

An estimated 300,000 people may have died in the 5-year conflict in Darfur, a dramatic increase over earlier estimates of 200,000, a top U.N. official said on Tuesday.

Sudan's U.N. ambassador Abdalmahmoud Abdalhaleem said the figure was grossly exaggerated.

U.N. under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs John Holmes mentioned the new estimate in a speech at a U.N. Security Council meeting on the conflict in the western Sudanese region.

"A study in 2006 suggested that 200,000 had lost their lives from the combined effects of the conflict. That figure must be much higher now, perhaps half as much again," Holmes said, according to a written text of his remarks.

ORIGINAL POST

Last week, International Studies Quarterly published a study by Matthew Krain, an Associate Professor of Political Science at the College of Wooster, examining "the effectiveness of military action on the severity of ongoing instances of genocide and polititcide."

According to the press release

The study reveals that only overt military interventions that explicitly challenge the perpetrator appear to be effective in reducing the severity of the brutal policies. Military support for targets, or in opposition to the perpetrators, alters the almost complete vulnerability of unarmed civilian targets. And these interventions that directly target the perpetrators were not, on the whole, found to make matters worse for those being attacked ... He finds that even military intervention against the perpetrator by a single country or international organization has a measurable effect in the "typical" case.

When a single international actor challenges the aggressor, the probability that the killings will escalate drops while the probability that the killings will decrease jumps. Each additional intervention by another international actor raises the chance of saving lives.

In the introduction to the study, Krain notes

Policy makers faced with situations like those in Rwanda or Bosnia, Kosovo or Darfur, are forced to rely on past experience with interventions in other types of internal conflicts, often with disastrous results. This study is a step toward a better understanding of the effectiveness of potential responses by the international community to genocides and politicides.

Krain goes on to examine various intervention methods of dealing with on-going genocides and politicides (the "impartial intervention model," the "witness model," the "bystander model," etc...) and notes that not one of them is capable of reducing the severity of such situations.

After conducting a statistical analysis of the various models, Krain concludes

Policy maker concerns that intervention on the behalf of target populations will escalate the killing appear to be unfounded.

The only overt military interventions that appear to be effective in reducing the severity of genocides or politicides are those that explicitly challenge the perpetrator

He then discusses his finding as they relate to Darfur, writing

Intervention against the Sudanese government and the Janjaweed within the first year of the genocide would likely have had a measurable effect on the severity [2003] of state-sponsored mass murder in the following year.

Kraine does not claim that military intervention is the "only" option. In fact, he notes that "policy makers have a range of options available to them in the face of an ongoing genocide or politicide" and that his study "only examines one of those options."

Keeping that in mind, it is hard to argue with Kraine's basic conclusion

If actors wish to slow or stop the killing in an ongoing instance of state-sponsored mass murder, they are more likely to be effective if they oppose the perpetrators of the brutal policy.

Africa: Expelling Rebels

From the BBC

Uganda has announced it will expel six rebels from Democratic Republic of Congo after the UN voiced its concern over their presence in the county.

Uganda's internal affairs minister said the men had been declared persona non grata and must leave by Thursday.

The six are part of a group the UN says planned to use Uganda to launch a rebel movement to seize power in DR Congo.

From the Mail and Guardian

Sudan's new southern leader Salva Kiir issued a stark warning to the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), urging the Ugandan rebels to reach a rapid peace deal with Kampala or leave Sudan at once.

"The LRA have to reach a settlement to their problem with the Ugandan government, if not, they have to leave the south, otherwise we are going to find other solutions," the first vice president told reporters in Rumbek late on Tuesday.

Tit-for-tat clashes between the Ugandan army and the LRA -- which has several bases in southern Sudan -- have intensified in recent months.

Darfur: Lack of Money

From Humanitarian Hijinks

The African Union are not the only people in Darfur running out of money - today, air traffic in Darfur more or less grinds to a halt as the World Food Programme (the managers of the Humanitarian Air Services I have fondly written about on past occasions) runs out of fuel.

No more flights, no visitors or new arrivals, no supplies. No visiting finance manager to come and pay local salaries, no spare parts and no computers or other desperately awaited gadgets delivered by hand from Khartoum. At least food aid has been pre-positioned in most locations, and some cargo flights are still going ahead for now.

But as the WFP pilots join African Union soldiers on the tarmacs of El Fasher, Nyala and Geneina next to their empty helicopter tanks, I wonder who has neglected to pay the bill this time. Or, more importantly, whether they are even aware of the fact that two million completely powerless displaced people (and of course a few hundred angry aid workers) are sitting around waiting for them to do it.

Daily Darfur

From Reuters

Sudan's government and two Darfur rebel groups will hold a sixth round of talks next month to try and secure a peace deal for the vast region after more than two years of conflict, the African Union said on Wednesday.

From the Star-Ledger

Rep. Christopher Smith (R-4th Dist.) returned this week from the Sudan and vowed to press the Bush administration to provide new aid for African Union peacekeepers in the embattled Darfur region.

At one camp in Mukjar, in western Darfur, Smith said the 12,500 residents are virtual shut-ins, fearful of violent Arab tribal militia members in surrounding areas.

"They can't go a mile outside the camp without fear of being shot. You get the sense from the people that they are grateful to have a refugee camp that is secure, but that they want to return to their homes," Smith said.

About 5,000 African Union troops are in the region, Smith said, though there are plans to more than double that number. He said he intends to petition the State Department to increase U.S. aid to the peacekeepers.

"The Africa Union troops are all about protection," said Smith, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Africa and global human rights.

"They have a lists of unanswered needs that need to be met, especially vehicles and communications. They also need money. They pay their troops $1.28 per day -- even by African standards that's peanuts for putting their lives on the line," he said.

From the Globe and Mail

When Sudanese rebel leader and newly named vice-president John Garang was killed in a helicopter crash last month, the news prompted vicious rioting in both the north and the south of the country. At least 130 people died as accusations flew that the crash was no accident. There were real fears that Sudan's hard won peace deal, which so recently ended the world's longest-running war, could not survive.

But as the dust settles in Sudan, the predominant feeling among most Sudanese and outside observers is that it was, in this case, just a helicopter accident, and it appears that peace will outlive Mr. Garang and the rumours of an assassination.

From Toward Freedom

The on-going conflicts in the provinces of Darfur in western Sudan are a textbook example of how programmed escalation of violence can go out of control. It is increasingly difficult for both the insurgency and the government-backed forces to de-escalate the conflict which has been called with reason "genocide". It will be even more difficult after the war to get the pastoralists and the settled agriculturalists to live together again in a relatively cooperative way.

Sudan: USS Cole Familes Can Pursue Lawsuit

From the Virginia Pilot

A federal judge decided today that the families of the 17 sailors killed in the attack on the Norfolk-based destroyer Cole can pursue a lawsuit against the Republic of Sudan.

The families have accused Sudan of providing material support, including diplomatic pouches used to carry explosives, to the al-Qaida terrorists who floated a suicide bomb alongside the Navy vessel as it sat in the harbor of Aden, Yemen on Oct. 12, 2000.

The suit alleges that the East African nation gave financing and a safe haven for the terrorists who carried out the attack. Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden based his terrorist organization in Sudan through the 1990s before moving it to a remote region of Afghanistan.

The court papers say that the Sudanese government allowed an al-Qaida operative to ship four crates of explosives to Yemen before the bombing.

Also, the suit claims Sudan and bin Laden operated joint businesses and a bank that provided the financing for the Cole attack. The president of Sudan also is accused of personally authorizing bin Laden’s entry into the country and allowing him to avoid paying taxes.

The hearing today on Sudan’s motion to dismiss the suit was a crucial turning point in the families’ efforts to collect $105 million. Sudan argued that the families have not give sufficient proof that Sudan officials knew they were providing direct support for the bombing.

“Sudan provided no support for the bombing of the Cole,” Washington attorney Knox Bemis began.

District Judge Robert G. Doumar cut him off.

“When bin Laden and the Republic of Sudan own a bank together, what do you think about that? Do you think they’re partners?” Doumar asked.

“I’m not sure about partners,” Bemis said. “They both owned shares.”

“How about letting the operatives come in and out of the country freely?” Doumar inquired.

Bemis argued that the Cole families failed to establish a direct link between al-Qaida’s operations in Sudan and the bombing. The legal threshold, he said, requires “a substantial connection.”

Doumar said he had “great problems” with Sudan’s arguments.

“I find that there are facts sufficient to say: They’re sort of partners and therefore I would allow (the suit) to go forward,” Doumar said.

[edit]

Attorneys for the families have said that they hope to persuade the United States to pay any damages from Sudanese assets that the U.S. government as frozen.

Response to Preble

The comment came from Eddie of Live from the FDNF regarding the Chistopher Preble piece I linked to earlier

Couldn't help to comment and say this Christopher Preble guy doesn't know what the heck he's talking about.

He fails the "informed" test numerous times.

- "......US troops form the major part of all NATO forces....."

= That's bunk. NATO nations other than America comprise the majority of forces in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Kosovo. Even worse for Preble's credibility, while Gen. Clark's call for troops may/may not have contained intent for American ground forces, any operation in Darfur would likely comprise American air support and naval assets to be deployed in support of a NATO/AU intervention force, not Army or Marines.

- "and the military's difficulties retaining and recruiting personnel"

=Navy and Air Force recruiting and retention is going great, Marines are only going to miss the recruiting mark by a small percentage (while retention is very high) and the Army's recruiting woes have not affected its record retention.

- "the neighboring African countries recognize what's at stake."

= No they don't. Egypt has a military that could crush Sudan's gov't forces and the janjaweed, but refuses to use it or even pressure the regime to stop the slaughter. The other African countries, if they were truly serious about halting the slaughter, would have pushed for a much more stringent mandate as well as far more troops.

- "Humanitarian groups, NGO's and others are increasingly able to operate in the region."

= Really? Is that why aid workers are being arrested, threatened and other agencies agonizing over pulling out for their own safety?

- "The African Union is willing and able to confront crises like the one in Darfur."

= Absolutely incorrect. The African Union is fundamentally unwilling and unable to confront this crisis, let alone others like the LRA insurgency in Northern Uganda, the constant crisis in the Congo, the Zimbabwe disaster, the violence in Cote D'Ivorie and Somalia, etc etc.

- "Helping it to do so will establish a precedent for solving regional conflicts and simultaneously allow Americans to shed some of our burdensome obligations as the world's policeman."

= Newsflash Mr. Preble... because of the lack of firm leadership by Pres. G.H.W. Bush, Clinton and G.W. Bush, neither the Europeans nor the Africans are able to solve regional conflicts without direct American aid, usually in the form of diplomatic, economic and military intervention. Until we fall from superpower status, we are going to have ever increasing responsibilities as the global policeman.

Darfur: Taking Action

A press release from the American Jewish Committee

The American Jewish Committee is coordinating "Taking Action on Darfur: A Capital Alert," a program to highlight the need to take action against the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan, on Monday, Aug. 29, at 6:30 p.m. at the National Press Club Ballroom, 529 14th St., N.W., Washington, D.C.

The program will feature Paul Rusesabagina, former Manager of the Milles Collines Hotel and hero of the story on which the award-winning film "Hotel Rwanda" is based; Charles Snyder, Senior Representative on Sudan for the U.S. Department of State; and Brian Steidle, a Darfur eyewitness. Film clips from "Hotel Rwanda" and current photos from the region will also be shown.

In addition, a new fundraising initiative, "DC (heart) Darfur" will be launched. This Jewish community effort is part of the "Dear Sudan Campaign," a national interfaith fundraising effort to provide food and relief to Darfur refugees.

The American Jewish Committee is co-sponsoring the program with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Jewish Community Relations Council, and the Greater Washington Jewish Task Force on Darfur.

The American Jewish Committee has urged the U.S. government and the international community "to act without further delay to halt the unfolding genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan."

The event is free, reservations are required. Please R.S.V.P. to Nate Rulf at rulfn@ajc.org or 202-785-5470.

Sudan: Refugees Could Return Home in Two Years

From Reuters

Around 4.5 million Sudanese refugees could return home in two years if foreign governments provide enough political and material assistance, the head of the U.N. refugee agency said on Tuesday.

U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres told Reuters Sudan needed help to settle political disputes, and money to improve living conditions so Sudanese refugees in the country and abroad can return to their homes.

"Hopefully, in two years all of Sudan's refugees can return home if the conditions are right," said Guterres, who is on a 10-day visit to Sudan and some neighbouring countries.

So, "if foreign governments provide enough political and material assistance" and "all the conditions are right," then nearly 5 million refugees might be able to return home in two years.

Foreign governments have yet to provide enough political and material support for anything in Sudan and there is no reason to assume that that will change any time in the near future.

So basically, Guterres is predicting that the situation will continue indefinitely.

Niger: MSF Criticizes UN for "Inadequate" Response

From the AP

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan toured the hunger-stricken desert nation of Niger on Tuesday, and a French aid group criticized the world body for an allegedly slow and “inadequate” response to the crisis.

[edit]

With an entourage of more than 100 officials and journalists in tow, Annan toured the main hospital in Zinder, where dozens of weak, skeletal children lay in beds, some with IV drips in their arms.

He asked mothers about their children and then visited an emergency feeding center set up by the French aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) or Doctors Without Borders. Officials there said 2,354 children had been admitted to the center in the last month.

In a statement on the eve of Annan’s visit, Doctors Without Borders said “the U.N. was slow to react to the current epidemic of acute malnutrition in Niger, and its response continues to be inadequate.”

When asked about the criticism, Annan skirted the question, saying only: “I was very impressed with what MSF is trying to do in Niger.”

Marcus Prior, a U.N. World Food Program official in Niger, expressed surprise at the criticism from Doctors Without Borders.

“We work very closely with them in our operations here and are surprised these concerns weren’t raised in Zinder,” he said. “We need to focus on doing what is most important for the people in Niger, which is rolling out free food distribution in the villages as widely and as quickly as possible.”

Doctors Without Borders, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999 in recognition of its pioneering humanitarian work, is not alone in criticizing the U.N. response to the hunger crisis.

Darfur: UNHCR Chief Urges Sudan to Beef Up Security

From VOA News

The head of the U.N. High Commission for Refugees starts a 10-day tour of Sudan and Chad to underscore the need for international support of the people of Darfur. It is his first visit to the region.

The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres met with top officials in the Khartoum government Tuesday to push for increased security for people living in the country's volatile western Darfur region.

Mr. Guterres, the former Portuguese prime minister, plans to spend most of his 10-day trip to the region visiting refugee camps in Darfur and in neighboring Chad. The U.N. agency has had to provide much of the food and shelter for the two million people driven from their villages by the Darfur conflict. About 200,000 of them fled to the border deserts of eastern Chad.

Spokeswoman for the U.N. refugee agency Kitty McKinsey says the purpose of the trip is to refocus the world's attention on Darfur and to stress the need for the international community's support for peace in both southern Sudan and Darfur.

Darfur: No NATO Troops

On NPR this morning, Chistopher Preble of the Cato Institute delivered a rebuttal to Wesley Clark's call yesterday to send NATO troops to Darfur

In the second of two commentaries on the situation in Sudan's Darfur region, commentator Christopher Preble of the Cato Institute says NATO should not send troops to the region. Preble says Darfur is an African problem, and African nations are able to solve it themselves.

I'll post a transcript as soon as I can track it down.

Update: Here it is

The human tragedy in Darfur continues. Although the African Union has done heroic work attempting to stop the genocide there, more can and should be done. US policy-makers should continue to work with African governments and with our NATO allies to seek a resolution to the crisis. However, given that American troops continue to make up a major part of all NATO forces, we should be extremely weary about a NATO mission that would deploy US troops to the region. The rest of the world and some Americans mistakenly assume that the United States has the military power and the political will to intervene everywhere indefinitely, but we do not, as is demonstrated by the public's eroding support for the current operation in Iraq and the military's difficulties retaining and recruiting personnel.

To ask our troops to take on a new peacekeeping mission in East Africa shows a lack of respect for an overworked fighting force. Calls to deploy NATO troops to Darfur seem reasonable on the surface and other member states in NATO may choose to send troops there, but that is a decision for each individual government consistent with the wishes of its citizens. The public demands that policy-makers remain focused on the most urgent national security challenges. To the extend that what is taking place in Darfur does not fall in this category, the solution to halting the genocide there must come from Africa with the world's help, not the other way around. Fortunately, the neighboring African countries recognize what is at stake. New Nigerian and Egyptian peacekeepers have just arrived while leaders in Chad, Kenya and even Libya have expressed concern and a willingness to help resolve the conflict. The African Union has pledged to increase its forces in Sudan to more than 7,000 by next month and then possibly again to around 12,000 by next year.

Some sneer at the contributions made by the African countries despite the fact that the AU's meager force has accomplished a lot already. The head of the UN mission to Sudan reports that since AU troops arrived, quote, "things are getting better in Darfur." Humanitarian groups, NGOs and others are increasingly able to operate in the region. Negotiations to address the political crisis there are scheduled to resume at the end of the month.

Given that our resources are limited, Americans should encourage other states to address humanitarian crises before such crises threaten regional security. The African Union is willing and able to confront crises like the one in Darfur. Helping it to do so will establish a precedent for solving regional conflicts and simultaneously allow Americans to shed some of our burdensome obligations as the world's policeman.

Apparently You Can't Even Pay TV Networks to Cover Genocide

From Think Progress regarding Be A Witness

BREAKING: NBC, CBS, ABC Reject Ad Criticizing Their News Coverage

Apparently you can't even pay TV networks to cover genocide.

American Progress created a television advertisement for BeAWitness.org, our netroots campaign that calls out the television news media for their deplorable coverage of the genocide in Darfur. Over the weekend, three Washington DC television affiliates, NBC-4, CBS-9, and ABC-7, informed us that they refused to air the ad.

Since the major networks seem to have their hands full covering stories like Natalee Holloway and the Runaway Bride, the ad does what the media won't — puts the spotlight on Darfur, and suggests that genocide warrants increased coverage.

ABC News broadcast just 18 minutes of Darfur coverage in its nightly newscasts in all of 2004 — "and that turns out to be a credit to Peter Jennings," as Nicholas Kristof pointed out. NBC News featured 5 minutes, and CBS only had three, "about a minute of coverage for every 100,000 deaths." Now they won't allow us to pay for 30 seconds to urge better coverage of the genocide.

Send a message to NBC, CBS and ABC demanding that the stations air the ad.

Here are the official responses from the networks:

NBC: WRC-TV has chosen not to accept the submitted commercial advertisement, "Genocide is News," sponsored by BeAWitness.org.

CBS: Management did not approve the airing of the " Beawitness.org" spot.

ABC: I just got word that WJLA-TV will not be able to accept the creative for Be a Witness.org. Please let me know if there may be any alternative creative that we may run.

Burundi: New President Faces Monumental Tasks

From IRIN

Burundi's presidential election on Friday marked an important milestone in a country that has been beset by 12 years of civil war, but extreme poverty, lingering ethnic divisions and continuing low-level insurgency remain barriers to lasting peace.

These are just some of the challenges President-elect Pierre Nkurunziza - who was until his election leader of the Conseil national pour la défense de la democratie-Forces pour la défense de la democratie (CNDD-FDD) - will have to overcome if Burundi is to consolidate the democratic progress that brought him to power.

Congo: Chased Then Robbed - Another Day in Katanga

From Reuters

First gunmen chased them, then the army robbed them: for residents in Congo's Katanga province situations have a tendency to go from bad to worse.

Three thousand residents fled their camp fearing an attack by "Mai Mai" militia on Sunday to sleep on beds of leaves, only to return to find the government troops sent to their rescue had stolen bicycles, bed mats and much of their maize.

The incident, 10 km (six miles) outside the remote town of Mitwaba, highlights the plight of villagers in a region where former pro-government militiamen are fighting the army, but both sides frequently turn their guns on easier targets.

Congo: Militiamen Shoot Dead Electoral Official

From IRIN

Unidentified militiamen shot dead an electoral official on Monday when they attacked a voter registration centre in Fataki, a town in the northeastern district of Ituri in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Independent Electoral Commission Chairman Apollinaire Malu Malu said.

Congo: Interview With MSF Head of Mission

From IRIN

Q: What is the humanitarian situation in Ituri and how are the living conditions of the people?

A: This is the main issue because an organisation like MSF cannot get a clear picture of what is happening. Why? Because accessibility is difficult. What we know is that when we had the possibility to work in different camps surrounding Bunia, we knew the situation was not good. Medically speaking, we had some mortality rates that were already two or three times higher than those that are acceptable as emergency situations. So, in many places we surpassed these emergency levels. Now that we have withdrawn, we can easily imagine that the situation is just getting worse, and what is worrying us the more is that not a single actor has accessed these areas to know what is taking place there.

For example in the area of Jina, the mortality rate was between four and six deaths per 10,000 per day, when we know that the figure is 2 percent per 10,000 per day for an emergency situation. We were still providing sanitation, water, as well as health care, and now that we have withdrawn we know that the situation is worse.

We are even worried because we do not even know what is happening in these areas. The only news we get from there is from the patients we see coming to Bon Marché. They are victims of armed violence, victims of rape and these are the few witnesses that are coming to be treated.

Q: What are the living conditions of Iturians, since some have been forced to abandon their homes and take refugee in forests for example?

A: All the people who have gathered around places secured by MONUC and other security services have the same fears. They are saying that their villages are not safe anymore that they can no longer stay in their homes safely, otherwise they will be attacked, they will be raped, and they will sometimes be killed.

They are looking for security by gathering in these camps of the displaced people. This poses a problem because you have a concentration of people who have lost everything. They have food problems; because they do not have access to their fields, and they have living condition problems because they abandoned their belongings.

In these camps, there is a potential of disease epidemics and when such diseases strike, it can be catastrophic. We witnessed this in April when cholera broke out in Camp Kakwa. MSF treated 1,600 cholera cases within Kakwa, Chomya and we had recently a few cases in Bunia, but it seems this is over. There were about five deaths.

Uganda: Cheadle Joins 'Nightline' for Report

From Reuters

A few months after Don Cheadle went to Africa on a humanitarian mission and brought "Nightline" along for the trip, the actor and the show are back in Africa.

The "Hotel Rwanda" star is reporting for the ABC News show Tuesday night on his visit to Uganda, where children are being pressed into service and abused by the Lords Resistance Army. The LRA is a rebel group that has been fighting the Ugandan government for 20 years.

Cheadle, who traveled to Uganda with his family for a screening of "Hotel Rwanda," visited shelters in the country where the children go to avoid being taken by the LRA, which is known to abduct children between ages 8 and 14 either as soldiers or for sex.

Niger: Annan Visits Famine-Stricken State

From AFP

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan arrived in Niger to assess the impact of devastating famine in the largely desert country, one of the world's poorest, and talk to those dealing with it.

Annan began his two-day visit by flying in to Niger's second city, Zinder, in the south of the sub-Saharan country, where President Mamadou Tandja was on hand to greet him, an AFP correspondent said Tuesday.

Daily Darfur

From the BBC

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has arrived in Sudan for a 10-day assessment mission.

Former Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Guterres will meet government officials in Khartoum before travelling west to Darfur province.

From IRIN

The appointment of Riek Machar as vice president of the southern Sudan government will boost hopes for a successful conclusion of reconciliation talks between armed groups in the region, an analyst said.

From Reuters

Sudan's Foreign Ministry has asked the United Nations to help investigate the July 30 helicopter crash that killed former southern rebel leader John Garang, U.N. officials said on Monday.

The United Nations will provide transportation and logistical support into the crash site in Uganda, U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq said.

The Rev. Joseph Bragotti, mission director of the Comboni Missionaries, Tony Stieritz, director of the Cincinnati Archdiocese Catholic Social Action Office, and Charlie Cytron-Walker, a rabbinical student at Hebrew Union College have this op-ed in the Cincinnati Post

What if, when you woke up this morning, you knew that somewhere in this world hundreds of people were going to be murdered before the end of the day? You would probably feel overwhelmed by the very thought. Unfortunately, there is no "what if" about it today. In Darfur, the western region of Sudan, nearly 360,000 have already died from violence, malnutrition and disease. More than 2.5 million of Darfur's people have been left displaced within Sudan or huddled in refugee camps in neighboring Chad, living in constant fear. They are all the victims of a systematic effort of rape, destruction and genocide that words fail to describe.

From Village Soup

However, I do hope for the day when those refugees will be able to walk out of their camps and trudge back through the desert sands to their villages, when men and women can reconstruct their houses of mud brick and straw and sticks gathered from the surrounding fields, when they can cultivate their fields of sorghum and millet and herd their animals and draw water from the well without fears of violence, when children can go to a real school for the first time in their lives, and maybe even have a few minutes toward the evening to play "rocks" in the dusty streets of their villages.

Niger: UN Food Distributions Not Reaching Those With Greatest Needs

From Doctors Without Borders

Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) warned today that recently begun food distributions in Niger are not reaching those with the greatest needs, especially children under five years of age in the worst-affected areas. MSF calls on United Nations' Secretary General Kofi Annan to take measures to ensure that UN agencies like the World Food Program (WFP) and UNICEF distribute aid according to the real needs of people.

To date, the distributions undertaken by the WFP fall short, in quantity and quality, in responding to the gravity of the current epidemic of acute malnutrition encountered by MSF medical teams in the region. The targeting of areas for distribution is based on an early-warning system that monitors harvests, and does not take into account the actual nutritional needs of a population. Since November 2004, this method has proven ineffective.

Since January 2005, MSF has admitted more than 21,000 children suffering from severe acute malnutrition into therapeutic nutritional programs in Tahoua, Maradi, and Zinder provinces. More than 12,000 of these children live in three departments in the south of Maradi province, where the nutritional situation continues to worsen. Between August 8 and 14, MSF admitted 1,053 children for emergency nutritional treatment from this region alone – an alarming increase from the first week of July, when 403 children were admitted. The WFP, though, only expects to distribute food rations to 110,000 people, or barely 10% of the area's 1.2 million people.

Darfur: Be A Witness Ad Rejected

An e-mail from Be A Witness

A few weeks ago we asked you to help support our campaign and put our ad on television. The ads were to begin airing tomorrow on the Washington, DC affiliates of all six networks – ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, FoxNews, and MSNBC – that are the focus of our campaign.

Now, we have just learned that two of the stations, NBC-4 and CBS-9, rejected our TV ad. These networks are devoting endless hours to cover Michael Jackson, Tom Cruise, and the "Runaway Bride," but they won’t allow us to pay for 30 seconds to challenge them to do a better job covering the Darfur genocide.

You can help today by sending a message to NBC-4 and CBS-9 demanding that they air the TV ad:

http://www.BeAWitness.org/action

During the month of June, NBC News aired 80 times as many segments devoted to Michael Jackson, Tom Cruise, and the Runaway Bride as it did to the Darfur genocide. CBS News was even worse. It did not run a single story on the Darfur genocide.

We can’t let these networks get away with it. We need your help to demand that NBC and CBS air the ad.

UK Must Lead UN Move to Stop Genocide

From Oxfam

Oxfam International today praised the British government for supporting a new agreement designed to stop genocides like Rwanda from ever happening again. However Oxfam has also urged the Prime Minister to go further and use his influence with the US in particular, but also Brazil, India and Russia to get them to back the deal ahead of crucial talks which resume at the UN today.

A new measure committing governments to take timely and decisive action to stop atrocities like genocide is on the agenda for the UN Summit, the biggest meeting of world leaders in history, to be held in New York on 14-16 September. Governments are on the brink of a historic agreement on their collective responsibility to protect civilians facing genocide or atrocity. However some countries, including India, Russia and Brazil have tried to block the measure and the US is trying to water it down.

“This is an opportunity for the Prime Minister to show his commitment to a progressive foreign policy agenda. As negotiations resume today we’re urging Britain to use every diplomatic resource at its disposal to secure an agreement designed to stop future genocides,” said Barbara Stocking, Director of Oxfam, “It is now crunch time in the negotiations. The government must use whatever influence it has with Brazil, Russia, India and the US to get them to support this vital agreement. The Prime Minister has had a close working relationship with President Bush in particular. We hope that this is an issue where the Prime Minister will use this relationship to secure agreement on a foreign policy objective that could help save millions of lives.”

The final negotiations on what world leaders will announce at the Summit start today. The current Summit draft agreement would establish a new standard, that states “share responsibility to take collective action in a timely and decisive manner” to protect civilians from large-scale killing including genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.

This agreement would oblige the international community to act were there to be another Rwanda or a similar mass murder of civilians where the government was unwilling or unable to do anything to stop the bloodshed.

The UK, along with other governments such as Japan, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, the EU, Rwanda and Kenya have strongly supported the agreement so far but pressure will build on them to compromise and weaken the language of the Summit declaration that world leaders will sign.

Oxfam warns that failure by governments to commit their leaders to seize this opportunity would send the message that governments are no more ready or willing to act to stop genocide than they were in Rwanda a decade ago.

Uganda: Children of War

Last night, Dateline ran a piece about the Lord's Resistance Army and the Night Commuters in Uganda

But it’s not just a matter of survival: For Patrick, the shelter gives daily comfort to a soul tormented by what he witnessed, and even more so by something the rebels forced him to do.

Patrick is an escapee.

Morrison: Did you see other people being killed?

Patrick: Many. Many, many.

Patrick, now a tiny 13-year-old, was a 10-year-old when the war came his way. Within minutes, he had committed murder.

Patrick: We normally use a big sticks to kill somebody if you need.

Morrison: You said you usually used a big stick?

Patrick: Yeah.

Morrison: Did you kill more than one?

Patrick: Yeah.

Morrison: Many?

Patrick: Many. For fear, you must kill. If you refuse, you are going to be killed.

And then, out came the story that none of us who heard it have been able to forget — how Patrick learned the lesson: kill or be killed.

It was, he said, the very first night of his abduction. Patrick, his parents and his siblings, were forced at gunpoint into the bush near a river. And then he watched as the rebels killed his father. He watched as they slashed away at his mother with their knives. And then, as she lay grievously wounded, a rebel commander turned and spoke to the children.

Patrick: Then they say that we must kill our mother.

Horrified, Patrick and his young brothers and sisters refused.

Patrick: Then they said, if you refuse, they’re going to kill us all. Then we do that. So then, after that...

Morrison:Well, wait a minute, Patrick. Then you had to kill your own mother?

Patrick: Yeah. With fear to be killed, we kill our own mother.

You can read correspondent Keith Morrison's piece on "Coming Back From Uganda a Changed Man" here.

Somalia: Extreme Violence Part of Daily Life

Via Passion of the Present we are alerted to another area of concern

Violence against civilians continues to be a major problem in the strife-torn Horn of Africa nation of Somalia, the international humanitarian aid organisation, Médecins sans Frontières (MSF), said on Monday.

MSF said in a statement that this year alone, it had treated more than 500 cases of violent trauma injuries in its two hospitals in the town of Galkaayo, the regional capital of central Somalia's Mudug region.

Galkaayo is divided into two halves, north and south, which fall in the separate regions of Puntland and Mudug respectively. MSF said it had been forced to operate separate hospitals in north and south Galkaayo because patients could not cross the frontline that splits it in two.

Mudug, home to some 350,000 people, is divided along clan lines into North and South Mudug. The Majeerten sub-clan of the Darod clan dominate North Mudug, while the Habar Gedir sub-clan of the Hawiye clan are in South Mudug.

"Médecins sans Frontières wishes to sound the alarm about the continuing violence in the country. The suffering of the Somali people has received little attention from aid organisations and the international community," it said.

Darfur: Wesley Clark on the Need for NATO Forces in Darfur

This morning, Wesley Clark was on NPR arguing for sending NATO troops into Darfur to protect civilians and humanitarian operations.

Clark is currently a board member of the International Crisis Group and you can read the ICG's report here.

Update: Here is the text of Clark's remarks, via WESPAC

After a series of UN Security Council resolutions on Darfur and a donors conference to boost the African Union Mission there, you could be forgiven for thinking the international community has responded adequately to the crisis. Sadly, this is far from the case. The international community urgently needs to take bold new action.

The truth is, civilians are still targeted in Darfur. The pro-government Janjaweed militias still remain unchecked. Humanitarian access is still restricted along key transit routes and in areas where millions of displaced Sudanese have gathered. Women and girls are still being raped as they leave their camps to collect firewood and forage for food. It's a tragedy.

The African Union's priority must be to protect civilians. It must be able to take all necessary measures -- including offensive action -- against any attacks or threats against civilians and humanitarian operations.

But the AU Mission's force numbers and mandate are simply not sufficient to cope with the reality on the ground in Darfur. The AU current plan is to deploy 7,700 troops next month, and possibly 12,000 troops next year. But this is far too slow. A minimum of 12,000 troops are needed on the ground right now, not six months from now.

The African Union should deploy a battalion task force of around 1,000 troops to each of Darfur's eight sectors and maintain another battalion task force in reserve. Each sector would then have close to 1,000 troops, twice as many civilian police, and 1,000 headquarters and other support staff.

Even if the African Union can overcome the political obstacles to strengthening its mandate in Darfur -- and that's a very big "if" -- it's in no position to get such large numbers of troops on the ground in such a short time. Despite the European Union and NATO assistance, the African Union mission looks set to fall short of its target of 7,700 troops by September.

The UN Security Council, in consultation with the AU, should request and authorize NATO to deploy a multinational "bridging force" to bring the combined force level in Darfur immediately up to 12,000 to 15,000 troops while the African Union prepares and deploys its own forces.

This is not an easy recommendation to make for Darfur, where all multinational organizations have been at pains to keep non-African troops out of Sudan. But the notion that the atrocities in Darfur are solely African problems requiring exclusively African solutions has to be reconsidered. These ongoing offenses are crimes against all humanity. They demand an international response that gives human life priority over diplomatic sensitivities.

Working together, NATO and the AU can save the lives of tens of thousands of innocent civilians. They can demonstrate to outlaw regimes like the government of Sudan that the international community will not tolerate crimes against humanity.

And we must do this now.

Zimbabwe: IMF Considers Expulsion

From the BBC NEWS

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is holding discussions in Zimbabwe on Monday, ahead of a meeting over whether to expel the African nation.

The IMF has urged President Mugabe's government to sort out the economy, which suffers from hyper-inflation, a collapsing currency and debt arrears.

Following the week-long discussions in the capital Harare, the IMF's board will meet in September.

Zimbabwe owes $295m (£163.5m) in late debt repayments to the IMF.

Congo: Burned Huts, Empty Fields Await Returning Congolese

From Reuters

Some of the thousands of people who fled militia attacks in southeastern Congo are returning home, but they do so to charred huts, with nothing but the clothes on their back and living in fear of more raids.

They are trickling back from the forests to find homes that have been torched, food stocks and crops pillaged and vague promises of security from poorly-equipped and ill-disciplined government soldiers who failed to protect them the first time.

"We all fled in April when we were attacked by the Mai Mai," said Kabula village elder Kabange Ngoy, referring to the bands of government-armed militia rampaging around the north of Congo's southern Katanga province.

"The military were supposedly looking after us but they fled, even leaving behind their mortars. They said they might die if they fought the Mai Mai," he added as he wandered around a house with nothing left standing but a few charred walls.

Genocide: We Always Forget

By Mark V. Vlasic in Foreign Policy

Every year, international diplomats pause to remember the world’s most recent genocides. Yet, at this very moment, people are being ethnically cleansed in Sudan. While dignitaries repeat their promises to “never forget,” Sudanese are being rounded up and executed for no other reason than because they belong to a particular national, religious, ethnic, or racial group.

[edit]

The tragedy of Rwanda and Srebrenica is not that they were missed opportunities or chance events that occurred outside the reach of international institutions. Rather, they happened right under the nose of the very international institution that was supposed to prevent such atrocities. The United Nations is the preeminent organization entrusted with the world’s conscience. Despite its unique role, the United Nations’ leadership stood by and watched the Rwandan and Srebrenica genocides unfold.

We say we will “never forget” genocide and mass murder. But each time we turn our backs to the current slaughter, we intentionally forget the horror that humans can inflict upon their neighbors. We forget the richness of humankind that is sacrificed to hate—and perhaps even worse, that which is sacrificed to inaction.

It is time for the U.N. leadership to remember the past and stand as a uniting voice for action. Much of the world celebrated the opening of the International Criminal Court in 2002, but the slaughter in Sudan continues. Having another international court in The Hague does not alone stop ethnic cleansing. Only by stopping the mass slaughter of humanity do we honor the memory of those who have perished in past genocides. Only by standing up to evil may Kofi Annan and the United Nations truly state, “We will never forget” without being seen as hypocrites by those still lying in mass graves.

Darfur: UNHCR Chief to Highlight Security Problems

From IRIN

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, was due to arrive in Sudan's capital, Khartoum, on Monday to urge the Sudanese government to ensure security for displaced people living in the strife-torn western Sudanese region of Darfur.

Guterres will be on a 10-day visit to Sudan, Chad and Kenya, a spokesperson said.

Following meetings with Sudanese President Umar al-Bashir and other government officials, Guterres will on Wednesday visit Darfur, where fighting has displaced 1.9 million civilians.

"In Darfur, he will be underlining the need for the government of Sudan to provide additional security to its own citizens," Kitty McKinsey, regional spokesperson for UNHCR, told IRIN on Monday.

"Security needs to be provided for the displaced people in the camps as well as in the villages where they would like to return to," she added. "It is the responsibility of the Sudanese government."

Genocide Pact Needs Blair's Help

From the BBC

Tony Blair has been urged to use his influence to increase support for an international deal to stop genocide.
The charity Oxfam has praised the UK's commitment to the deal but hopes the PM will persuade less willing states.

India, Russia and Brazil have attempted to block the agreement and the US has tried to dilute it.

The pact, which would oblige countries to intervene when there is evidence of genocide in another nation, is to be tabled at a UN Summit next month.

Darfur: The Bosnia of Our Time

From Michael Totten at Tech Central Station

Every day 500 black African Muslims are murdered by Islamists in Sudan's northwestern region of Darfur. The total number of dead now exceeds 400,000. That's 133 September 11ths.

The U.S. is airlifting 1,200 Rwandan troops for humanitarian relief. It's a nice gesture. But that's all it is -- a token gesture. Actually stopping a genocidal regime and its death squads will take a lot more than a handful of Rwandan troops. It would require a full-scale military intervention by Western powers.

The U.N., where state sovereignty trumps human rights, will never authorize anything of the sort. If the West -- through NATO or an ad hoc "coalition of the willing" -- doesn't put a stop to this soon, the genocide won't likely end until it is complete.

We've seen crises like this one before.

In the early to mid-1990s Serbian forces under Slobodan Milosovic waged a savage war of extermination in Bosnia and Croatia for four years while the "international community" convened talks, held conferences, and sent farcically under-equipped and ineffectual "peacekeepers" into the killing fields. The relatively well-armed Croats managed to roll back the Serbian invasion (while committing no small number of war crimes of their own). But not until the Clinton Administration unleashed the American armed forces did Slobo surrender Bosnia to law, order, and civilization. Belgrade's crushing of Kosovo, the Bosnia campaign's shorter lived little brother, was likewise squelched by Western European and American power.

Just as the Clinton Administration moved with agonizing slowness toward interventionist positions over Bosnia and Kosovo, the Bush Administration is incrementally turning the ratchet up on Sudan. The U.S. government, including Colin Powell and President Bush himself, has finally stopped prevaricating and declared the eliminationist campaign in Darfur a "genocide." This is no idle statement. The Genocide Convention requires signatory nations "to prevent and to punish" genocide wherever in the world it occurs. Prevention and punishment include the unilateral use of military force. That's why almost every government in the world balks at the g-word. The U.S. is the first country to take that critical step beyond which passivism (or is it pacifism?) is illegal as well as immoral.

So many cried out in unison after the Holocaust: never again. "Never," however, turned out not to mean never. "Again" was the operative word. Terry George's recent film Hotel Rwanda ought to make short work of any doubts about that. Most everyone seems to agree these days that the entire world - the U.S., NATO, the U.N, everybody - failed Rwanda. President Clinton later apologized for his part. Yet hardly anyone dares compare Sudan and Rwanda, even though the similarities between the two could not be any more obvious.

[edit]

Regime-change might fracture the country along ethnic lines and break it into pieces. It may sound horrible, but I'm not convinced that it is. Sudan's border isn't natural. It was carelessly drawn by European imperialists with no regard whatever to the consequences of corralling mutually hostile groups together into one polity. The forging of separate sovereign nations settled the war in the former Yugoslavia. It's what will end the war in Israel/Palestine, too, whenever the two-state solution is put into place. There are worse things than short Western interventions. And there are worse things than new smaller countries. Civil war, genocide, and Islamist regimes are three of those things.

Uganda: New Video, Photo Essay Tell Story of “Night Commuters”

From Human Rights Watch

Human Rights Watch has documented the plight of Uganda’s lost generation of children in a new video, “Night Commuters: Uganda’s Forgotten Children of War.” A powerful photo essay by Bruno Stevens accompanies the video.

The video spotlights the phenomenon of tens of thousands of children in northern Uganda who walk miles every day to avoid abduction by rebel troops. The video shows the children embarking from their villages on long journeys in search of a safe place to sleep in urban areas.

Human Rights Watch takes an unflinching look at the harrowing conditions of the children’s lives through original footage and interviews. The situation in northern Uganda has resulted in a pervasive climate of fear. Since 1986, 30,000 boys and girls have been abducted in northern Uganda and forced to become child soldiers and sex slaves. The group that is responsible for these atrocities, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), has waged war against the Ugandan government for nearly two decades.

Once abducted by the LRA, children are forced to carry out raids, beat and kill civilians and kidnap other children if they want to stay alive. The girls end up sexually violated and physically abused. They are forced to beat or trample to death other children who attempt to escape, and are repeatedly told that they will be killed if they try to run away.

To avoid LRA abduction, every night as many as 40,000 children flee their homes in the countryside to sleep in the relative safety of towns. They seek refuge overnight at churches, hospitals, bus stations and temporary shelters before returning home again each morning.

This video spotlights a society living under the constant threat of having its children abducted and shows the world that a crisis that the United Nations has called a “crime against humanity” can no longer be ignored.

Darfur: African Union Forces Effective Where Deployed

From the BBC

There is no doubting the effectiveness of African Union peace monitoring troops in the areas where they are operating in Darfur.

For example, AU camps have been set up in Labado and Khor Abache in South Darfur in the past 6 months.

These two villages had been laid waste by terror tactics of the janjaweed and by fighting between Government of Sudan troops and rebel SLA and JEM soldiers.

The villages were set on fire and hardly a building was left standing; dozens of people had been killed and the occupants fled either into the bush or to nearby displacement camps.

Now in both places, villagers are coming back, drawn by the security of knowing the very presence of armed observers will protect them.

[edit]

I spoke to a number of humanitarian workers from the international community in South Darfur, who didn't want to quoted, but said proper protection could not be given to the oppressed people of Darfur, unless the mandate was 'more robust' as one person put it.

Zimbabwe: "Green Bombers" Hired to Keep Up Urban Crackdown

From Reuters

Zimbabwean authorities will use graduates of a controversial government youth scheme to police Harare shanty towns and keep up a campaign against illegal vendors and dwellings, the state-owned Sunday Mail reported.

A month ago Zimbabwe called a halt to its demolitions of unregistered shacks and stalls, which prompted international outcry and a critical United Nations report that said the blitz had made at least 700,000 people homeless or jobless.

The main opposition Movement for Democratic Change says the youths -- graduates of the National Youth Service and known also as "Green Bombers" -- have been used in the past by President Robert Mugabe's ruling ZANU-PF party to intimidate opponents through violence and torture.

Mugabe denies this and says the training programme is needed to instil discipline in the country's youth.

Darfur: Has it Become Passe for Politicians as the Issue Du Jour?

From Rick Mercier in the Free Lance Star

WE SEEM TO BE just about at the point where we can file the people of Darfur, Sudan, in the "Where are they now?" category.

You may remember them as the victims of a genocide perpetrated by their government and its militia allies. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 300,000 of them have died, 2.5 million have been made homeless and countless numbers of women and girls have been systematically raped.

But we haven't heard much about Darfur lately. The agenda-setting media in the United States have pretty much stopped reporting on the situation in western Sudan, deciding that the food emergency in Niger is the Africa catastrophe du jour. (You don't expect them to devote significant time and resources to more than one big Africa story at a time, do you?)

"Blogger War Ends with Partnership"

Dawn Eden--one of my very favorite bloggers--has written a very nice piece about the Coalition for Darfur in her weekly column for the N.Y. Daily News (published every Sunday).

Thanks Dawn! You're the best!

Here is the text of the piece:

This story begins with a Northern liberal and a Southern conservative engaging in a war of words - and ends with a joint effort to stop real-life violence.

The liberal, who calls himself Eugene Oregon, first E-mailed the conservative, Feddie, to tell him that he was flat-out wrong. Feddie, a Georgia lawyer whose real name is Steve Dillard, had written on Southern Appeal (southernappeal.blogspot.com) in support of federal judicial nominee William Pryor.

Oregon, who writes for Demagogue (demagogue.blogspot.com), was vehemently opposed to it.

As the pair carried out a point/counterpoint dispute over Pryor in their blogs, they delved further into each other's blogs and discovered something in common. They were both alarmed at the killings in the Darfur region of Sudan, and frustrated at the international community's lack of response.

Feddie describes what happened next: "In February 2003, Eugene read an op-ed by Eric Reeves in The Washington Post called 'The Unnoticed Genocide' and started writing about the situation in Darfur on a regular basis. I started linking to Eugene's posts on Darfur and began writing my own. Eventually I suggested that [we] work together on a blog that would reach out to all bloggers, regardless of their political views, in hopes of raising awareness of the genocide taking place in Darfur."

Together, last March, they created the Coalition for Darfur (coalitionfordarfur.blogspot.com). Partners agree to post a link to the coalition's home page on their blogs, and to post a piece that the coalition provides to them once a week. The coalition also raises money for Save the Children and Catholic Relief Services.

For grass-roots activists, partnerships like the Coalition for Darfur represent a new kind of activism, one that reaches people who are put off by petitions and sign waving.

40

I waited patiently for the Lord
He inclined and heard my cry.
He brought me right out of the pit,
out of my miry clay.
I will sing a new song,
How long to sing this song?
He set my feet upon a rock,
and made my footsteps heard.
Many will see,
Many will see and fear.
I will sing, sing a new song.
How long to sing this song?

"Africa’s growing torment goes unseen"

From the Sunday Herald:

DESPITE a long summer of public appeals and media attention finally being paid to the desperate hunger in Niger, in huge swathes of western and southern Africa people are still facing starvation.

The latest figures suggest a million people are facing food shortages in Mali, along with 500,000 in Burkina Faso and 600,000 in Mauritania.

This week United Nations Secretary- General Kofi Annan will visit Niger to highlight the fact that despite heart-rendering television reports and a late spate of donations, hundreds of thousands are still facing food shortages there, an embarrassment for Niger’s president, Mamadou Tandja, who insists “there is no famine”.

A combination of locusts and severe drought are a problem across the whole region – aid may be distributed country by country, but the lack of rain and a plague of insects know no bounds. While southern Africa enters its September-December “lean season” where the norm is for food stores to run low ahead of a new harvest, in the west of the continent the sporadic rainfalls have not stopped the need for food aid to tide whole populations through the worst of their hunger. In countries such as Niger, where sustenance farmers have lost 70% of their animals, buying food at an inflated price is not an option.

The UN says it needs some £1.2 billion to feed more than 25 million Africans this year across great swathes of southern Africa, the Horn of Africa and the Sahel, a 3000 mile-wide stretch of countries along the arid, sand-blown southern borders of the Sahara from Mauritania in the west to Sudan’s Darfur region in the east. The money raised so far from the G8 and other donors? Less than half – a shortfall of some £614m.

But, as countless development experts have pointed out, this tragedy is just the latest of Africa’s “complex emergencies”: flooding in the Central African Republic; climate change and desertification; HIV/Aids across the continent; bad, corrupt and sometimes simply cruel governance, as in Zimbabwe and Eritrea; unfair trade terms; chronically outmoded and underfunded agricultural systems; deep, pervasive poverty; huge movement of refugees; locust plagues; and fragile states where civil war is persistent as in eastern Congo and Sudan.

Darfur: Rep. Chris Smith Presses Sudanese Leaders on Human Rights

From the AP

Rep. Chris Smith has met with leaders in Sudan, pressing them to improve human rights and to resolve violent conflict in the African nation's Darfur region.

Speaking by telephone Saturday from the capital city of Khartoum, Smith said he has met in recent days with top government leaders, pressing for enhanced security at refugee camps so humanitarian workers can better do their jobs. He also called on the Sudanese government to have political will to continue the peacemaking process.

[edit]

Sudanese leaders appealed for the lifting of economic sanctions against the country. But Smith said that cannot happen until more tangible improvements in human rights are made.

Black Churches and Darfur Activism

From Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on PBS

In Sudan, tensions remain high after the death of that country's first Christian vice-president, John Garang, who was killed in a helicopter crash three weeks ago. Local religious leaders have been appealing for calm so that the fragile peace agreement in southern Sudan will hold. They've also urged that peace talks move forward in the troubled Darfur province.

Here in the U.S., a diverse coalition of Christians, Jews, and Muslims has been mobilizing on Sudan. Many African Americans were slow to join that coalition, but as Kim Lawton reports, black churches are now providing a new grassroots momentum for the cause.

Darfur: Taking Action on Darfur - A Capital Alert

I received this announcement from Save Darfur

Taking Action on Darfur: A Capital Alert

Featured guest speakers:

Paul Rusesabagina, former Manager of the Milles Collines Hotel and hero of the story on which the award-winning film Hotel Rwanda is based.

Charles Snyder, Senior Representative on Sudan, US Department of State.

Brian Steidle, Darfur eyewitness.

-----

Monday, August 29th at 6:30 pm

The National Press Club Ballroom

529 14th Street, NW Washington, DC

-----

Sponsored by the American Jewish Committee, NAACP, Jewish Community Relations Council of Washington, the Greater Washington Jewish Taskforce on Darfur.

This event is free to the public.

Zimbabwe: Living in Fear After Harare Evictions

Via Passion of the Present we get this

The skin on the young child's face is cracked and blistered from exposure to the wind and the cold nights.

"We stayed outside without shelter, until we started to build shelters," his mother, Beatrice explains.

They were evicted on 28 July from the Porta Farm settlement on the edge of Harare and transported to Hopley Farm on the opposite side of the capital.

Beatrice, her husband and their three children were among the estimated 10,000 people who were dumped without food, shelter or water in Hopley Farm, which was set up in the latest phase of the government's crackdown on dwellings that the authorities say are illegal.

Zimbabwe: Secret Footage Reveals Desperate Plight of Homeless

From Amnesty International

On 20 August, Amnesty International will release secret footage recently smuggled out of Zimbabwe. The footage graphically illustrates the plight of the victims of the Zimbabwean government's Operation Murambatsvina -- or Operation "Drive out the rubbish".

The footage was filmed earlier this month and includes shots of victims currently being held in Hopley Farm -- an informal camp on the outskirts of Harare, set up after an official transit camp was closed by the government. The plight of the homeless people at Hopley Farm was only made public when human rights lawyers raise grave concern about the situation and notified humanitarian agencies. Access by the humanitarian agencies was denied until late last week.

"Rather than confront the massive humanitarian crisis that its actions have created, the government of Zimbabwe is compounding suffering and human rights violations by attempting to hide the most visible signs of internal displacement," said Audrey Gaughran, Amnesty International's researcher on Zimbabwe.

"We now know about Hopely Farm -- but how many other locations are there that the world is not aware of? How many thousands of ordinary Zimbabweans are now living in these horrifying conditions? We are calling on the Government of Zimbabwe to immediately make public all the locations to which it has transported victims of Operation Murambatsvia and to allow full and unfettered humanitarian access to them."

Burundi: Ex-Rebel Leader Elected President

From the AP

A former Hutu rebel leader was chosen by lawmakers as Burundi's president Friday, culminating an internationally mediated effort that hopes to bring peace to a central African nation wrecked by a dozen years of ethnic war.

Pierre Nkurunziza, the 40-year-old son of a Hutu father and a Tutsi mother, appealed for support from all Burundians to meet the challenges of healing ethnic divisions and rebuilding the shattered economy as he tries to get the last Hutu rebels to lay down their arms.

[edit]

Nkurunziza, who saw soldiers from the long-dominant Tutsi minority kill his politician father during ethnic violence in 1972, had been expected to be chosen president by Parliament under a power-sharing constitution adopted during three years of peace negotiations.

His Force for the Defense of Democracy was once Burundi's largest Hutu-led rebel group and as a political party now controls both houses of Parliament.

CAR: The Plight of Rape Victims Endures

From IRIN

Nearly five years after Congolese rebels introduced rape as a psychological weapon in the Central African Republic (CAR), individual victims and the nation as a whole are still dealing with the fallout.

[edit]

The MLC, headed by Jean-Pierre Bemba, had been invited by President Ange-Felix Patassé to shore up his government against André Kolingba, who tried to unseat him in a bloody, abortive coup on 28 May 2001. Bemba's fighters ran amok - looting, killing men and raping women in Ouango in the eastern area of the capital, where Kolingba and his Yakoma people were based.

The situation worsened in October 2002 when rebels headed by Francois Bozize - then army chief of staff, now president - successfully seized power.

[edit]

Women and girls of all ages - some younger than six years, some older than 60 - were not spared. Now, many married women face divorce; others have contracted HIV-AIDS; some have had babies.

[edit]

Most rape victims say they are still shamed and rejected by their communities, and many try to avoid humiliation by staying indoors; many girls have dropped out of school because insensitive classmates laugh, rather than sympathise, with their ordeal; older victims feel ostracised by their neighbours, husbands and relatives.

[edit]

The ordeal of rape victims is being perpetuated: ostracism has forced households to break up; family support structures have fallen apart - rape victims often have little or no money and find it difficult just to get food; some children have dropped out of school because parents can no longer pay the fees.

Niger: WFP Facing Funding Shortfall

From Voice Of America

As the World Food Program continues its emergency airlifts to Niger, the UN agency says response to its emergency funding appeal has fallen short.

Caroline Hurford is a spokesperson for the WFP. From Rome, she spoke to English to Africa reporter Joe De Capua about the funding shortfall and relief operations.

She says, “Well, right now, we have about 43 percent of what we’re looking for. We’re looking for $57 million and we mustn’t forget that we’ve actually had to borrow from our own stock, something in the region of $20 million. So, essentially, we’re a little bit concerned at the moment because there seems to have been a dropping off in contributions being made and we’re wondering whether or not we need to send out more film crews in order to capture the footage and just remind the world that there are still huge needs out there. Because we know that the situation is costing rather more to address simply because of the fact that we’ve got this very short two month window in which to get the food to the people who need it most. In other words, we need to feed people during August and during September because in October, we hope that they will have a harvest. But because we don’t know quite the extent of that harvest we’ll obviously have to put in some safety net type mechanism so that people don’t find themselves in as dire a situation as we’ve already seen.”

CAR: 4,000 Central African Refugees Cross into Chad

From Reuters

Some 4,000 refugees from the Central African Republic have poured into southern Chad in the past week after fleeing attacks by armed groups, the United Nations said on Friday.

It is the third major wave of refugees to arrive in Chad in as many months after 10,000 Central Africans crossed in June and July after clashes between soldiers and armed groups, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

Congo: 2,500 killed in first half of 2005

From Xinhua via MONUC

As many as 2,500 people have been killed and 1,500 women have been raped in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)'s eastern region of Walungu in the first half of 2005, said the Congolese Press Agency on Thursday.

Niger: Child Malnutrition Hits Thousands

From Reuters

In the dry north of Nigeria, there is chronic malnutrition stemming from a complex set of factors including poverty, poor healthcare and a staple diet lacking in many important nutrients -- but this year measles compounded the problem.

People ill with measles require a lot of protein for their organisms to fight the disease. Children who do not get enough can quickly become malnourished.

A study by MSF in Jibia, one of the sub-regions within Katsina state, found that in the April-June period, six children under five were dying every day for every 10,000 people. The organisation considers anything above two out of 10,000 an emergency situation.

"Our nutritional study in Jibia found 2.7 percent of children under five were severely malnourished and 7 percent were moderately malnourished," said Thierry Allafort-Duverger, MSF's head of emergency operations, on a visit to the feeding centre.

"The population is very large so this small percentage, which is actually too high, means we're talking about a great many children."

Darfur: How Oil Drives the Genocide in Darfur

From David Morse in Mother Jones

This is a resource war, fought by surrogates, involving great powers whose economies are predicated on growth, contending for a finite pool of resources. It is a war straight out of the pages of Michael Klare's book, Blood and Oil; and it would be a glaring example of the consequences of our addiction to oil, if it were not also an invisible war.

Daily Darfur

From the August 11th report by the Secretary General

While the daily rate of casualties from fighting has declined in recent months, the damage to the social and economic fabric in Darfur and the longer-term costs of this conflict are steadily becoming clearer. The descent into lawlessness by the armed movements, unprecedented criminality in Nyala and violence against humanitarian workers and property in some camps for internally displaced persons is a dangerous pattern that demands urgent corrective action by the parties.

This trend is symptomatic of the damage caused by prolonged, violent conflict. Economic life in Darfur has been depressed to the extent that declining revenue for Nyala has reduced the town’s administrative structures to a point of near breakdown. Internally displaced persons crowded into camps for an indefinite period and cut off from their traditional patterns of living are vulnerable to psychological as well as physical insecurities, falling prey to rumour and cynical manipulation that inspire acts of violence directed even at those who have come to
Darfur to assist.

From UNHCR

On Monday, the High Commissioner, António Guterres, is scheduled to set off on a ten-day mission to visit UNHCR operations in the Darfur region of Sudan, Chad, Southern Sudan and Kenya. The situation in Sudan, both in Darfur and in the South, are of key importance to UNHCR with some 200,000 refugees from Darfur in 12 camps in neighbouring eastern Chad and hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people within Darfur with serious protection needs.

The High Commissioner will also assess the situation in southern Sudan where UNHCR is planning to help return home some 500,000 refugees who fled the 21-year long civil war and are now mainly in Kenya, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. There are also an estimated 4.6 million people who fled the civil war in the south and are displaced within Sudan. Some have already been making their way back home after the signing of the peace accords in January. In June, on his first mission as High Commissioner, Mr Guterres visited Uganda where he met southern Sudanese refugees living in settlements and talked to them about their hopes and fears of going back home.

Mr Guterres visit starts in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum on Tuesday where he is expected to meet senior government officials, UN agencies, donors and UNHCR partners and staff. The following day he is scheduled to travel to Darfur where he will visit camps for the displaced and meet African Union, and local government officials. In eastern Chad it is planned he will visit two of twelve UNHCR-run refugee camps, and meet senior government leaders before heading to southern Sudan to see for himself preparations for the return of refugees including rehabilitation of schools, hospitals and demining of roads.

From the New York Times

When the International Criminal Court's 18 judges took their oaths in March 2003, the tribunal was backed by 139 countries and heralded by supporters as the most ambitious project in modern international law.

It was intended to replace the ad hoc tribunals addressing atrocities in Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Sierra Leone. This year the Security Council, with the United States abstaining, gave the court approval to prosecute cases related to atrocities in Darfur, Sudan.

Many legal scholars say it is unlikely that Americans would ever face the court because its focus is on the most egregious of war crimes, like systematic genocide, and the court is intended to try cases from countries where the judicial systems are unable or unwilling to handle such cases. There are also safeguards that would give the United States' own military and civilian courts jurisdiction over Americans.

But Bush administration officials, including some at the State Department, assert that the court could still move against American officials.

"The exposure faced by the United States goes well beyond people on active duty and it includes decision-makers in our government," said a high-ranking State Department official who was authorized to speak about the policy but only if he was not identified. "We're not hallucinating that our officials are at risk."

"The idea is that the court gets to second-guess if it's not satisfied," the official added.

Bruce Broomhall, director of the center for the study of international law and globalization at the University of Quebec in Montreal, disagrees. He noted that for the court to act against a suspected war criminal, the prosecutor must satisfy the judges that the host country was "shielding the individual concerned from criminal responsibility."

Still, Mr. Broomhall said, there is "a glimmer" of an argument behind the administration's concern. "If the crime is sufficiently organized and intense and a crime against humanity - if you get past that first threshold - it's potentially a crime within the jurisdiction of the court," he said.

Others, like Richard Dicker of Human Rights Watch, acknowledge that there are countries that may want to use the court "as a political battering ram."

"What's in dispute," said Mr. Dicker, director of international justice for the group, "is what kinds of safeguards are necessary to prevent these kinds of distortions. The United States has adopted a solution that's inimical to the rule of law, that says because we're the most powerful state in the world, we'll create a two-tiered system of justice."

And apparently, jailed Muslim cleric and terrorist suspect Abu Hamza is none too pleased with his treatment, or with the attention being focused on Darfur

Writing to a friend, he said: "98,000 Iraqis killed in one year, plus two million due to sanctions and other wars in the last 10 years.

"750,000 of them are children, none of them ever attacked Britain or USA or the West, yet they are killed in their homeland by USA and its policies...that is the equivalent of 20 times Hiroshima of Japan, all for the eyes of Israel and the global Zionist lobbies.

"Yet too much noise from Darfur in Sudan to divert world attention and to pressurise Sudan to allow its land to be divided and used against the interest of Africa."

Study Shows Some Types of Military Interventions Can Slow or Stop Genocide

A press release from International Studies Quarterly and Blackwell Publishing

A study published in the latest issue of International Studies Quarterly is the first to examine the effectiveness of military action on the severity of ongoing instances of genocide and polititcide. The study reveals that only overt military interventions that explicitly challenge the perpetrator appear to be effective in reducing the severity of the brutal policies. Military support for targets, or in opposition to the perpetrators, alters the almost complete vulnerability of unarmed civilian targets. And these interventions that directly target the perpetrators were not, on the whole, found to make matters worse for those being attacked. "If actors wish to slow or stop the killing in an ongoing instance of state-sponsored mass murder, they are more likely to be effective if they oppose the perpetrators of the brutal policy," author Matthew Krain states. He finds that even military intervention against the perpetrator by a single country or international organization has a measurable effect in the "typical" case.

When a single international actor challenges the aggressor, the probability that the killings will escalate drops while the probability that the killings will decrease jumps. Each additional intervention by another international actor raises the chance of saving lives. Krain's study examines factors affecting all ongoing instances of state-sponsored mass murder from 1955 to 1997 and simulates the effects of interventions on two cases, including the current case of mass murder in Darfur, Sudan. His results also confirm that attempts to intervene as impartial parties seem ineffective. "By finding that increasing the number of interventions against perpetrators of genocide or politicide reduces severity this study confirms that international interventions against perpetrators do save lives," Krain concludes.

Darfur: Despite Fewer Casualties, Conditions Steadily Deteriorating

From the UN News Center

While deaths from clashes between Sudanese Government forces and armed factions in Darfur have declined, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan warns in a new report that the ensuing “descent into lawlessness” – looting and rebel attacks against civilians and aid workers – has only intensified insecurity in the war-torn region.

“While the daily rate of casualties from fighting has declined in recent months, the damage to the social and economic fabric in Darfur and the longer-term costs of this conflict are steadily becoming clearer," says Mr. Annan in his monthly report to the Security Council, which notes that as of 1 July, 3.2 million people were in need of humanitarian assistance and 1.9 million were living in crowded camps in Sudan.

Niger: What is the Cause of the Hunger?

Interesting article from The Economist (subscription required)

Niger's distress shows up most clearly in prices, not quantities. A pastoralist's terms of trade depend on two prices in particular: the price of what he can sell (his livestock) and the price of what he must buy (food). In Niger this year, the latter has soared; the former has plummeted. According to one report, the price of millet and sorghum rose to 75-80% above its average for the last five years. By June, the sale of one goat bought half as much millet as it had six months earlier. It is precisely this kind of cruel twist in the terms of trade, Mr Sen argued, that can bring a community to its knees. These unfortunates will suffer a lack of power to purchase food, even if there is no lack of food to purchase. Why did prices move against Niger's pastoralists so far and so fast?

The spike in the food price may have reflected high foreign demand as much as low domestic supply. Traditionally, during the lean months before their harvest, Niger's farmers import cereals that are cheaper to grow in wetter, coastal neighbouring countries than in their own country. But according to CILSS, an intergovernmental body responsible for the region's food security, significant amounts of grain have this year been flowing in the opposite direction. Ghana, Benin, Côte d'Ivoire and Nigeria have all been buying up grain in the region.

This is partly because these countries' own harvests were disappointing. But in Nigeria's case, the FAO thinks that government policies were also to blame. Nigeria has imposed controls on imports of rice and wheat products; it has also taken steps to protect and promote its millers and poultry farmers. Both of these policies have raised demand in the country for millet and sorghum, which provide alternative sources of flour as well as chicken-feed. As a result, Nigerian cereals that might have found their way to Niger are instead being consumed at home. Nigeria has twice Niger's income per head and more than ten times its population. Its powerful market pull may have helped to undermine the purchasing power of Niger's pastoralists. “In the fight for market command over food,” Mr Sen noted in his book, “one group can suffer precisely from another group's prosperity, with the Devil taking the hindmost.”

Nigeria, with Burkina Faso and Mali, has also restricted grain exports to Niger this year, violating its trade treaties with the country. Such restrictions have often played an ignoble, supporting role in the history of famine. A ban on cereal exports between India's provinces, for example, condemned Bengal to ruinously high prices in its great famine of 1943.

What of the other term in the terms of trade? Livestock prices have fallen in the past year, partly because northern pastures were damaged and animals were emaciated as a result. But the deterioration in the terms of trade can also generate its own momentum. Higher cereals prices prompt herdsmen to sell more of their livestock. These distress sales drive the price of animals down further, forcing pastoralists to sell still more of their herd. In his book, Mr Sen raised the theoretical possibility that a pastoralist's supply curve might actually bend back on itself: as the relative price of livestock falls, a hungry pastoralist might supply more animals to the market, not fewer as elementary economic principles would imply.

If mass hunger were simply the result of there not being enough to eat, the remedy would be obvious: more food. The emergency rations now being shipped, flown and trucked into the Sahel are indeed necessary and urgent by the time hunger and destitution are acute and widespread. But if mass hunger begins with a collapse
in purchasing power, rather than a shortage of food, it does not take an airlift to prevent it. What is needed is a way to restore lost purchasing power by, for example, offering employment, at a suitable wage, on public works. The market respects demand, not need. But give the needy enough pull in the market, and the
market will do most of the rest

Ummm ... Irony

From KUNA

President Omar al-Bashir urged the US on Thursday to pressure Darfur rebels to stick to the cease-fire agreement and not impede the flow of humanitarian aid and seek a peaceful solution to the problems of Darfur.

Al-Bashir made this and other remarks as he met with a visiting delegation from the US Congress, headed by vice-chairman of the congressional Foreign Relations Committee Christopher Smith. The Sudanese president complained to the visitors that negative signals from congress have emboldened the rebels to drag their feet on carrying on negotiations with the Sudanese government, said Sudanese News Agency.

He underscored his government's conviction for a political solution with the rebels and a commitment to the cease-fire agreement and to enable safe passage of humanitarian aid and full cooperation with forces of the African Union toward bringing peace and security to the Darfur region.

Furthermore al-Bashir said his government's improvement on all these issues have been testified to by the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.

Niger: People Dying from Hunger Should Not Have to Wait for the TV Crews to Arrive

From the Economist

THE Famine Early Warning Systems Network, known as FEWS Net, monitors the threat of mass hunger in some of the poorest parts of the world. It is hardly surprising, then, that FEWS Net has published an inquiry into the world's failure to respond to food shortages in Niger and the rest of the Sahel. The report is subtitled simply: “What went wrong?” That is the right question to ask. But what is surprising, and disconcerting, is that the report was written in 1997, not 2005.

This illustrates two things: Niger's present nightmare is a recurring one; and whatever went wrong in 1997 was not put right by 2005. In both cases, signs of distress were recognised early, but the response was dilatory. In both cases, relief agencies and donors failed to settle on an assessment of need. The decisive difference is that, in 1997, the international media were largely absent. In 2005, by contrast, the drought of attention eventually turned into a deluge. The Niger appeal received more money in the ten days after the media arrived on the scene than it had in the previous ten months.

Uganda: LRA Reluctant to Take Up New Peace Initiative

From IRIN

The rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) has responded poorly to a recent initiative by mediators attempting to peacefully end the 19-year-old war in northern Uganda between the insurgents and government forces, sources said.

Zimbabwe: Inflation Hits Record High

From IRIN

The price of goods and services in Zimbabwe rose by at least 47 percent last month - the highest increase ever recorded in the country, according to the Central Statistical Office (CSO).

[edit]

Inflation reached 164.3 percent at the end of June, and last month's record hike drove the annual rate to its current 254.8 percent.

Cameroon: Dam Nears Collapse, 10,000 Lives at Risk

From Reuters

A natural dam holding back a lake in Cameroon is on the verge of collapse, threatening to unleash a wall of water into neighbouring Nigeria and sweep away 10,000 people in its path, a scientist warned on Thursday.

Burundi: Gatumba Massacre -- An Urgent Need for Justice

From Amnesty International

On the anniversary of the Gatumba massacre, which took place in August 2004, Amnesty International calls on the forthcoming government of Burundi and the international community to ensure that those responsible are brought to justice.

"The new government should undertake to set up an independent and impartial body to investigate this and other massacres and those found to be responsible should be held to account," Amnesty International said today.

Burundi: Combatants Clash Ahead of Presidential Vote

From Reuters

Fighters of the militant Hutu Forces from National Liberation (FNL) clashed with the army in the northwest late on Wednesday and five rebels and three soldiers were killed, army spokesman Adolphe Manirakiza said.

The FNL also launched a mortar attack in the hills north of the capital, the army said, adding that no one was injured.

"There are indications that the FNL is planning to intensify attacks from now until the inauguration, just to show that it is still present on the ground and maybe put some pressure on the new government to talk to them," Manirakiza said.

The explosions echoed across the city, stoking fears the FNL plans to interrupt Friday's election and the presidential inauguration a week later with renewed fighting.

Darfur: The Rainy Season

From Humanitarian Hijinks

The flipside of the coin is that there are lots of diseases festering away in those puddles, and the children who've managed to catch diarrhea or malaria are already looking decidedly less cheerful. While few malnourished babies in Darfur look quite as alarming as those I've seen in pictures from places like Niger, they are still a miserable and haunting sight.

Every location has its own sad tales and horror stories of toddlers, kids, even adults (including an AU soldier in West Darfur) being swept away by the raging rivers, and floods in low-lying areas have caused some houses to collapse. It's not easy battling the elements when you're already running low on life's bare necessities.

There are many striking things about the people of Darfur, but the one that continues to amaze me most is the fact that they just get on with it all while sit around to dwell on random thoughts like these. "It's life," they shrug. "Now when do you think we'll get some more food and plastic sheets? We don't have time to wait around all day."

Burundi: Born-Again Ex-Rebel Set to Become President

From AFP

A decade after disappearing into the jungle to join Burundi's civil war, ex-Hutu rebel chief Pierre Nkurunziza, a born-again former sports teacher, is poised to become the nation's first post-transition president.

The 40-year-old Nkurunziza, who rose through the ranks to head the Forces for the Defence of Democracy (FDD) guerrilla army, will become one of Africa's youngest leaders when parliament elects a new head of state from a one-man slate.

Friday's vote and next week's swearing-in of Nkurunziza and the power-sharing government he will run under a new constitution will mark one of the last steps in an extended peace process aimed at ending Burundi's 12-year ethnically driven war.

They will also herald a major turning point in Nkurunziza's nascent and surprising career as a statesman, politician and peacemaker that many say is driven by his moral and religious convictions.

Zimbabwe: News Round Up

From the AP

Zimbabwe's government accused a U.N. envoy of bias and ignoring its efforts to give the poor dignity and hope, in a 45-page response to a United Nations report condemning a slum clearing campaign that has left some 700,000 people without homes or work.

From Voice of America

The South African Council of Churches has been waiting since the beginning of August for Zimbabwe government import approval for a shipment of more than 37 tons of humanitarian assistance. The aid is destined for Zimbabweans who recently lost their homes and businesses in the government's forced removal campaign.

For weeks, three truckloads of maize, beans, cooking oil, and blankets have been ready to leave for Zimbabwe.

On August 1 they were sealed by South African customs officials, and blessed by Anglican Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndugane. But within hours the South African Council of Churches, the SACC, which has coordinated the relief, was told that the Zimbabwe government required proof that the maize meal was not from genetically-modified crops.

The Zimbabwe government then refused to accept a certification from the supplier - demanding that the South African government provide one.

From Angola Press

Zimbabwe Wednesday ruled out an appeal for international food aid to help avert drought-induced starvation, saying the southern African country would independently import enough to feed its people.

Zimbabwe: The End of Tyranny

The Boston Globe ran this op-ed by Robert I. Rotberg

TYRANNY OFTEN ends in a whimper, not a conflagration. So it seems in today's Zimbabwe, where President Robert Mugabe's immensely corrupt regime has destroyed a once prosperous African country, leaving behind only the stench of decay. No velvet revolution has been possible, but political and financial bankruptcy has finally pushed the dictator's back to the wall.

[edit]

But finally, earlier this month, Mugabe had to go hat in hand to Mbeki, asking for hundreds of millions, if not the full $1 billion. In exchange for such a cash infusion, South Africa has demanded that Mugabe must negotiate in good faith with Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, a political party that European, American, and some African observers believe actually won the three rigged elections of 2000, 2002, and 2005.

''Never!" was Mugabe's initial petulant reaction. South Africa threatened to withhold its bailout. It also unleashed a regional diplomatic firestorm. President Olusegun Obsasanjo, president of Nigeria and chairman of the African Union, told Mugabe that he had to think again -- that his time of tyranny was at an end. Obasanjo dispatched Joaquim Chissano, former president of Mozambique, to make sure Mugabe understood what he had to do. Chissano was instructed to moderate discussions between Tsvangirai and Mugabe that would lead to Zimbabwe's political and economic reconstruction, and possibly to properly supervised new elections.

[edit]

Zimbabwe is exhausted. Now that Mbeki and Obasanjo have at last acted, after years of smugly accepting unnecessary suffering in Zimbabwe, there is a fair chance that the battered nation's vital signs can be resuscitated.

Niger: Women and Children Starve as Men Hoard Food

From the Independent

Noura Abdurrahi's four children were crying from hunger, and she knew there was food in the house. But her husband, Musa, had locked it away, out of her reach, when he had left to search for work the previous week.

What happened to Noura at a village near Zinder is replicated through much of the stricken communities of Niger. In the midst of starvation and disease, many men in rural areas are determined to control the meagre supplies, seemingly oblivious to the suffering of their families.

So acute is the problem that Unicef and international charities have launched urgent projects focusing exclusively on women. It is, they say, a far more certain way of ensuring the children and the elderly - the most vulnerable - get at least the very minimum needed for survival.

This extraordinary situation appears to be peculiar to Niger. Neighbouring countries caught up in the crisis caused by droughts and plagues of locusts - Mali, Mauritania and Burkina - are also predominantly Muslim with patriarchal cultures. Yet there, aid workers say, women are not sidelined to anything like the same degree.

In some villages, men have stopped women from having contact with Unicef officials, insisting that only they were entitled to speak for the community. There have also been repeated cases of men selling food given as aid, or passing it on to male members of extended families.

"We have millet and sorghum at the back of our hut, but we are not allowed to get it," 33-year-old Noura said. "The room was bolted by my husband when he went to Nigeria to find a job and his father and brothers have the key. They say it is up to me to feed my children, but that is not easy. A lot of families round here are in the same situation. There is nothing we can do."

Niger: Famine Debates are Irrelevant to Those Starving

From G. Jefferson Price in the Baltimore Sun

This time last week, I was in Kawa Fako, a village in the province of Dogondoutchi in Niger with a team of Americans and Nigeriens distributing food rations to the starving people of that community.

Two-thirds of the nearly 1,000 tons of millet, beans and cooking oil was delivered to people in the Nigerien province of Tannout. One-third was sent to Dogondoutchi.

There is a lot of debate about how bad conditions in Niger really are, whether it's technically correct to call the situation a famine, how much worse things are than the normal cycle of drought and starvation that Nigeriens experience every year.

The debate was irrelevant to Binta Amadou, 35, the mother of three, as she sat on the sandy ground in Kawa Fako, suckling her infant girl, Hayizu, and described the extraordinary hardship that she and her husband and their children have endured.

Daily Darfur

From AFP

Uganda has postponed what had been billed as an emergency East African summit on Sudan called after the death last month of Sudanese vice-president and ex-rebel leader John Garang, officials said.

Uganda, which chairs the regional grouping that oversaw talks leading to the January deal that ended Sudan's 21-year north-south civil war, said the summit, proposed for Saturday, would be put off due to attendance questions.

From the New Vision

A Sudanese panel probing the death of John Garang in a helicopter crash is to visit the site on Thursday, a member of the panel said.

“The national committee will travel to the crash site on Thursday and then proceed to Kampala,” Siraj Eddin Hamid told AFP.

Garang died on July 30 when a Ugandan presidential helicopter on which he was travelling crashed on its way back to southern Sudan.

His death came three weeks after he became first vice-president under a landmark January peace deal he helped craft.

It raised fears about the peace process in the war-ravaged country and sparked deadly riots in Khartoum and southern towns, with some southerners charging the government might have had a hand in it.

Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir (above) issued a decree on August 8 establishing the seven-member committee and named former vice-president Abel Alier, a southerner who like Garang hails from the Dinka, the region’s biggest ethnic group, to head the panel.

The committee includes six aviation experts, three from the Sudanese government and three from the former rebel group Garang headed, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM).

From Washington Jewish Week

Two women, generations apart, last week brought the same urgent message to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Polish-born Regina Spiegel, who lost her entire family to Adolf Hitler's Final Solution more than six decades ago, finds stark parallels in today's headlines from Africa.

"We are facing a crisis now in Sudan because the world did not learn the lesson of the genocide that was brought during World War II," said the Rockville woman, 79. "Hundreds of thousands of civilians may perish in the western Sudan. Why? Because, only because of their ethnic identity."

Rwandan Stephanie Nyombayire, who lost her grandparents and some 100 other relatives to her nation's 1994 mass murders, sees such slaughter repeating itself in Sudan's southwest Darfur region, which she toured earlier this year with mtvU, a campus television network.

World observers may quibble over the meaning of genocide, "but when countless women and young girls are being raped, when children's everyday drawings are of dead bodies, when men and women struggle every day to put food in their children's mouths, we must stop the talk and begin the action," said the Swarthmore College student. "We will not and cannot let the words, 'Never again,' continue to be void of meaning."

The Jewish grandmother and the Central African student last Friday morning both drew standing ovations from some 300 people attending the "A Call to Action for Darfur: National Student Leadership Conference II."

From the Canadian Christian

THE RIDE Against Genocide was a 960km bicycle journey to raise awareness of the genocide, starvation and mass rape in the Darfur region of Sudan.

The ride began July 11 with John Weiss, a professor at Cornell University in New York, and ended August 7 on Parliament Hill, where the riders presented a petition to members of the Canadian government.

"It was an overwhelmingly positive response," said David Kilgour, an independent MP and well-known Christian who hosted the rally. "In each of the 23 communities where the riders stopped, no one refused to sign the petition."

The petition urges the Canadian and American governments to undertake a "far stronger and more rapid use of our joint military assets in the pursuit of security and peace in Darfur."

Kofi Annan: "No war, no peace climate in Darfur unhelpful"

Today, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan "urged the Sudanese Government and armed movements to recognize that despite some stabilization of the security situation in Darfur, living conditions are steadily deteriorating," noting:

"The longer the parties allow this climate of no war, no peace to continue, the higher the price to be paid for restoring safety, dignity and prosperity to the lives of all people in Darfur."

Eric Reeves: Genocidal Choke-Hold in Darfur

The latest for Eric Reeves

The dying continues amidst a situation in Darfur that could easily deteriorate rapidly, with no additional protection resources in the offing. The suffering and dying---of innocent children, women, and men---continues with no end in sight.

We continue to be judged for our refusal to intervene.

Africa: UN Official Makes Urgent Appeal for Food Aid

From the UN New Center

The United Nations Representative for under-developed countries today made an appeal to the international community for immediate assistance for millions of starving Africans in the Least Developed Countries (LDC), especially children, in urgent need of food.

“I would like to draw the world’s attention to the alarming situation of men, women and children in Niger and its neighbouring Least Developed Countries who have resorted to eating leaves and grass as a result of a double-disaster: a severe drought and the invasion of locusts destroying nearly 80 percent of their crop,” Anwarul Chowdhury said in a statement.

Mr. Chowdhury is the Under-Secretary-General and High Representative for the Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Developing Countries and Small Island Developing States.

Besides Niger, the countries that need urgent international assistance are Burkina Faso, Chad, Eritrea, Mali, Malawi, Mauritania, Mozambique, Senegal and Zimbabwe, Mr. Chowdhury said.

In his statement, Mr. Chowdhury pointed out that at the UN Conference on the Least Developed Countries held in Brussels in 2001 the international community pledged to provide adequate food aid to LDCs facing severe food shortages.

“That pledge, that commitment has yet to be redeemed. The crisis in Niger should serve as a warning bell to the constraints of the 36 countries in Africa, out of 50 Least Developed Countries, facing food shortages,” he added.

Congo: Officers Cleared of Murders

From the BBC

Fifteen top army officers accused of killing 353 refugees in the Republic of Congo have been cleared of murder by a court in the capital, Brazzaville.

The so-called Beach case, named after Brazzaville's river port, relates to refugees returning from neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo in 1999.

Relatives and human rights groups say the victims were tortured and executed.

The court acknowledged that 85 people had disappeared, but said it could not explain how this had happened.

Darfur: Cash for Peacekeepers Running Out

From the AP

The cash-strapped African Union will be able to pay its peacekeepers in Sudan's troubled Darfur region for only three more months unless rich countries help, officials said Wednesday.

While donors provided air transport, accommodation and military hardware for the force to deploy, only a fraction of the cash needed has been received to finance operations of 5,086 peacekeepers, military observers and civilian police attempting to stabilize Darfur, African Union officials said.

"Fresh violence and looting reported in Darfur"

According to Reuters:

The UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) on Tuesday said violence in the war-ravaged western Sudanese region of Darfur had continued, with reports over the past week of looting and attacks on internally displaced persons' (IDP) camps.

Darfur: Rebels Want Peace by Year End

From Reuters

Darfur rebel commanders say they still aim for a peace deal by the end of 2005 even though they have asked for a postponement of talks with the government, the top U.N. official in Sudan said on Wednesday.

Jan Pronk, speaking after two days of meetings with Sudan Liberation Army commanders in the western region, said they had requested the delay to hold a rebel movement conference to reach a unified position in the negotiations with Khartoum.

Plagued by Technicalities

Last week, David Loyn of the BBC wrote about the crisis in Niger and asked "How many dying babies make a famine?"

Famine is a troublesome word with a very specific meaning to the professional aid community.

It is usually taken to define a situation in which a high proportion of the general population are vulnerable to death by hunger-related disease.

This describes a much more intense situation than the loose way that famine is generally understood - and the pictures of starving babies in Niger certainly look like "famine" to the outside world.

In technical terms Niger's President Mamadou Tandja may be right to say that this is not a famine.

The debate over "famine" is much the same as the debate over "genocide" in Darfur

"For those who are dying from acute malnutrition and related diseases, the debate about whether there have been enough deaths to justify the famine label, and the extent to which this exceeds the normal hungry season mortality rate is not helpful.

"Avoiding the famine label has often been convenient for those seeking to justify slow or failed responses."

Last September, the US declared that genocide was taking place in Darfur, but three months later, the report (PDF file) of the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur concluded that it was not, though it also stipulated

The conclusion that no genocidal policy has been pursued and implemented in Darfur by the Government authorities, directly or through the militias under their control, should not be taken in any way as detracting from the gravity of the crimes perpetrated in that region. International offences such as the crimes against humanity and war crimes that have been committed in Darfur may be no less serious and heinous than genocide.

But the press responded, not with headlines reading "Massive Crimes Against Humanity in Darfur," but rather with headlines such as "U.N. report: Darfur not genocide."

But the point was essentially moot, as one thing quickly became clear: overwhelming evidence of massive crimes against humanity could not get the world to act, nor could a genocide declaration. In fact, it seems that nothing could prod the global community to act to address the situation in Darfur, be it genocide, quasi-genocide, or "merely" crimes against humanity.

As Loyn reports of Niger, warnings of an impending food crisis have been raised since November, but nobody paid attention until it was too late

They did not respond to the requests on paper as they did to pictures of dying babies.

The reverse is now occurring regarding Darfur. It has become, in the words of Eric Reeves, a "genocide by attrition," and the world has stopped paying attention.

Last month, the UN reported that violence in Darfur had diminished over the past year, mainly because militia have run out of targets after destroying hundreds of villages.

As Reeves has written, the genocide in Darfur is now

[M]ore a matter of engineered disease and malnutrition than violent killing. In other words, disease and malnutrition proceeding directly from the consequences of violent attacks on villages, deliberate displacement, and systematic destruction of the means of agricultural production among the targeted non-Arab or African tribal groups became the major killers.

It is entirely possible that Darfur will not begin to receive sustained coverage again until this "genocide by attrition" has taken the lives of tens of thousands more and footage of dying babies in Darfur begins to show up on the nightly news.

And then, in lieu of actually addressing that problem, we can have a debate about whether or not this new situation meets the technical definition of "famine."

Niger: Kofi Annan to Visit Starving in Niger

From Reuters

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan will visit Niger next week to highlight the impact of food shortages affecting millions of people in the West African country, Niger government officials said on Wednesday.

Darfur: Group Looks to Spread Word About Genocide in Africa

From the Contra Costa Times

Tim Nonn shielded his Petaluma family from the horrors of Darfur.

The systematic slaughter of families, the rapes of mothers and children, the piles of the dead from starvation -- none of those horrific details invaded the Nonn household.

When TV infrequently mentioned atrocities in that western region of Sudan, south of Egypt, Nonn switched channels.

"It was just too hard to see those starving families," he said.

Nonn's avoidance of the ethnic cleansing that the Sudanese government-backed militia has engaged in since 2003 changed a year ago.

He tuned in to a news program, and his indifference shattered..

Today, Nonn is the founder and national director of a grass-roots organization called "Dear Sudan." The group spreads awareness of the genocide in Darfur and wants to stimulate suburban Americans to do something about it.

Sudan: Looting and Arrests

From Humanitarian Hijinks

I was intrigued to hear about the problems that aid workers in another part of the country are having though: a friend of mine in Khartoum tells me today that the police has been going around in the camps where South Sudanese displaced communities live, arresting anyone who owns a bed, a mattress, or anything else of any value. The argument is that these people are usually poor, and that any possession out of the ordinary would almost certainly have been looted during the riots earlier this month.

Some of the arrests have unfortunately included national staff members of international NGOs in Khartoum, who are starting to get just a little annoyed by it all.

The Responsibility to Protect

There are two articles on the responsibility to protect in Embassy Magazine.

The first

Intense negotiations continue on a wide range of United Nations reform issues leading to next month's Millennium+5 Leaders Summit in New York.

Obtaining strong endorsement of the "Responsibility to Protect" (R2P) principles has been a priority for Canadian officials since the current UN reform effort was initiated by Kofi Annan in 2003.

Initial discussions seemed promising. The Responsibility to Protect was strongly supported in the report of the High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change and also a follow-up report by Annan, entitled "In Larger Freedom." The latter was the focus for debate by governments at the UN General Assembly this spring and summer. Those debates have led to successive "draft outcome documents" for the September Summit which have been more restrained in their commitment to R2P principles, a reflection of the divisions among member states.

Incorporating R2P in the September reform package would oblige governments to sign on at the highest level to the idea that sovereign states have a responsibility to protect their own populations from crimes against humanity. But when they are unwilling or unable to do so, the broader international community must bear that responsibility.

A majority of governments support this concept of "sovereignty as responsibility." Many early concerns about the inviolability of sovereignty and how R2P should be interpreted have been addressed to the satisfaction of skeptics. The African Group has begun to articulate its own unique perspective on the protection of civilians, emphasizing early warning, the moral imperative to stop genocide wherever it happens, and a continuum of responses from prevention to reaction and also post-conflict rebuilding.

However, a vocal minority of states persist in opposing R2P, seeing it as an encroachment on traditional notions of state sovereignty and international law. While the most vocal opponents of R2P are members of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), including Pakistan, Venezuela, Cuba and Egypt, the NAM has been unable to issue a categorical rejection of R2P in the latest negotiations.

Some NAM countries attempt to undermine support for R2P by urging the postponing of any agreement, calling for the General Assembly to take up the issue during its upcoming 60th session.

The second

Among the proposals being considered is the Canadian-commissioned report on the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). In diplomatic terms, the report aims to help establish clear rules on when to intervene against the use of force, and, by extension, help reinstate the authority of the UN against arbitrary use of force by some nations.

Calling for the "responsibility of the international community to protect" civilians caught up in warfare, and, as a last resort, to use military force to do so, the heralded report essentially puts the protection of citizens first, and, by extension, ultimately limits the international use of force. It also advances the idea that the obligation is owed by sovereign states to its citizens -- a concept widely seen as the very foundation of the UN. A key aspect of R2P is the element of "shared responsibility": the idea that when sovereign states are unwilling or unable to protect the lives of their citizens, that the broader community of states must bear the responsibility.

"If [R2P] is adopted at the [UN] Summit, it could mean warp speed in diplomatic terms," says former ambassador and permanent representative of Canada to the United Nations, Paul Heinbecker, who was at the 74th Annual Couchiching Conference in Orillia, Ontario earlier this month. The event is where leading Canadian and international experts from various fields discuss central policy challenges. Currently director of the political think-tank, the Laurier Centre for Global Relations, Governance and Policy, Mr. Heinbecker handed the Canadian-commissioned R2P report to the UN Secretary General five years ago. "Of course, immediate action would be preferable from a Canadian point of view, but these crucial ideas have come a long way in a short time and will now be part of the UN's discourse," he says.

Zimbabwe: Operation Murambatsvina: The Tipping Point?

From the International Crisis Group

Operation Murambatsvina (Restore Order) cost some 700,000 Zimbabweans their homes or livelihoods or both and otherwise affected nearly a fifth of the troubled country's population. Its impact, as documented in a scathing UN report, has produced a political shock that has returned Zimbabwe to the international spotlight and made the quality of its governance almost impossible for its regional neighbours to ignore, however difficult they find it to be overtly critical. While an immediate requirement is to reverse as thoroughly as possible the disastrous humanitarian effects of the operation, action is urgently needed to address Zimbabwe's larger governance problem. This will require efforts on three parallel tracks -- the maintenance of overt international pressure, support for building internal political capacity and, above all, active regional diplomacy to facilitate political transition.

Uganda: Army Says Gunship Attacks Kill 25 Rebels

From Reuters

Ugandan troops backed by helicopter gunships killed at least 25 rebels in separate clashes on both sides of the border with southern Sudan, the Ugandan army said on Wednesday.

The military attacked Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) fighters in northern Uganda's Kitgum district on Monday, army spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Shaban Bantariza said, and again on Wednesday in Sudan's lawless Imatong Mountains.

"This afternoon in southern Sudan's Kit Valley we caught up with an LRA group and killed between 15 and 20 of those thugs," he said. "We are still identifying the bodies."

Everytime I see one of these articles, I feel complled to post this passage from the Refugee Law Project's report "Behind the Violence: Causes, Consequences and the Search for Solutions to the War in Northern Uganda" (the report does not appear to be available on-line any more)

Thus while there is tangible horror at the activities of the LRA, the lack of distinction between the ‘rebels’ and ‘abductees’ generates intense confusion. As one informant said, “A ‘rebel’ who is killed in battle may have only just been abducted one hour ago. If you are killed you are a rebel, if you are abandoned or escaped you are an abductee.”

Congo: First Step Toward Democracy - A Five-Hour Wait in the Sun

From the Christian Science Monitor

Dressed in his best, if threadbare summer suit, waiting to register for his country's first multiparty elections in four decades, a 60-something farmer named Raphael Ukelo recalls previous elections: "You'd get into the voting room, and a very big man would say, 'Only take a green card - not a white one,' Mr. Ukelo recalls. "And if you didn't do it, oooh...." he says with a laugh. Choosing the green card meant voting for tyrannical President Mobutu Sese Seko.

Now this sprawling African nation aims to get the voting process right. Nationwide elections are slated for the Democratic Republic of Congo next year. Registration began on July 24 and will end this Sunday. Yet many obstacles remain. There's far more history here of kleptocracy than democracy. And in a country as large as Alaska and Texas combined - with few roads - electioneering involves a logistical effort as daunting as D-Day.

Still, many citizens see voting as integral to peace and economic revival in a land where up to four million people died during a 1998-2003 war.

Niger: Global Aid System Stalled as Niger's Crisis Deepened

From the Washington Post

In a clearing among the millet fields of this starving village, tiny red-earthen graves are sprouting in a row.

Yet what perplexes village chief Issufu Ibrahim, who can count 24 mounds from the past few months alone, is not the tragedy of so many children dying but the apparent unwillingness of anyone to help alleviate the worst spell of hunger in local memory.

Aside from three sacks of grain that arrived from neighboring Nigeria, Ibrahim said, his village of 500 families has seen no evidence that a massive international aid effort is underway.

"We always are hearing, 'They have given something, they have given something.' But on the ground, we have not seen it yet," said Ibrahim, his words tumbling out in a rush of frustration. "We are crying, 'Why are they not giving to us? Why are they not giving to us? Our children are dying.'"

Africa: UN Faces Massive Aid Shortfall as Famine Ravages World's Poorest Continent

From the AP

To witness Africa's unrelenting hunger, look no further than into the fever-bright eyes of 17 severely malnourished infants languishing in a west African hospital.

Worse than normal food crises raging all but unaddressed in parts of Mali and elsewhere in Africa this year have focused new attention on the politics and geography of hunger across the world's poorest continent, as well as on how rich nations respond.

The United Nations says it needs $2 billion US to help feed more than 25 million Africans in 2005. Funds raised so far? Less than half, with a $1.1 billion shortfall.

"Hot spots come and go due to crisis and drought, but the vast majority of people (Africans) are just too poor to feed themselves when there's a slight disruption of their environment," says Peter Smerdon, a spokesman for the UN's World Food Program.

This year's hot spots have been in west Africa, where poor rains and a plague of locusts last year wiped out crops and grazing lands. Aid groups warned late last year of looming hunger across Niger, Mali, Mauritania and Burkina Faso.

Amid international donors' preoccupation with the Asian tsunami disaster, pleas for help for west Africa were mostly ignored. Only in recent weeks when media beamed images of starving children in Niger around the globe did aid start to arrive in that country.

"As you can see from Niger, you have a long period with nothing, then the camera crews arrive and it becomes a political issue. Then aid arrives," says Smerdon.

Still, across Africa, "the vast majority of people are forgotten," he says.

Daily Darfur

From the AP

Secretary-General Kofi Annan accused Sudanese rebels of increasing abductions, extortion and banditry in a "descent into lawlessness" that has intensified insecurity in the conflict-wracked Darfur region.
The targeting of humanitarian workers, harassment and looting of civilians, and "unprecedented criminality" in the town of Nyala are also part of the "dangerous pattern" of violence caused by the prolonged conflict, he said.

"While the daily rate of casualties from fighting has declined in recent months, the damage to the social and economic fabric in Darfur and the longer term costs of this conflict are steadily becoming clearer," Annan said in the report to the U.N. Security Council obtained Tuesday by the Associated Press.

From Caritas

More people living in a town in Darfur are suffering from malnutrition than those in nearby makeshift camps, according to an ACT/Caritas survey published on 11 August 2005.

This remarkable finding is the key point of the report. The survey indicates for the first time that more people who have chosen to remain in their homes may be in worse condition than those Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) who were forced to flee their villages and who now live in large camps that are served by humanitarian agencies.

The survey was conducted during a three-week period in July and August, covering the people of Zalingi town and the adjoining camps in Western Darfur.

From Christian Today

Sudanese authorities have lifted a curfew imposed two weeks ago to stop the capital's worst violence in decades, which killed at least 111 people.

"We have lifted the curfew," an Interior ministry official said. "There will be no checkpoints, but the forces will still be out on the streets."

News of the sudden death of former southern rebel leader and newly sworn-in First Vice President John Garang two weeks ago sparked riots in Khartoum’s central commercial streets and suburbs.

Tit-for-tat violence followed, polarising the capital’s northern Muslim and southern Christian communities. But Khartoum has remained largely peaceful over the past week.

Spotlight on Darfur

From Allthings2all

Recently I've had some people asking if there is going to be a follow up to The Darfur Collection. Rather than trying to repeat the Collection, which I think stands on it's own, I'd like to help put together more regular roundups of posts by various bloggers on the Darfur crisis.

What I'd like to do is start a series called "Spotlight on Darfur". This could be held around once a month and hosted by a different person each time. Spotlight on Darfur 1 will be hosted here, and posts are invited. I have one post from some-one to include already. Instead of going into the background and history of the Darfur crisis, which was covered in The Darfur Collection, these posts can be on any aspect of the current situation. All I ask is that they do not contain expletives (a wide range of ages read these posts).

Spotlight on Darfur 1 will be hosted here on Wednesday 1 September. Please send the following info for your post by 12.00pm EST Tuesday 31 August:
1. The name of your blog
2. The URL of your blog
3. The title of your post
4. The URL of your post
5. A description of your post

I'd appreciate if you'd follow those guidelines. It makes it easier for me to have all that in your email. Email the information to:
catez2003 ATT yahoo DOTT com

There is already some-one who may be the host for Spotlight on Darfur 2, and if you are interested in hosting in the future please email me and let me know. Also - if you have a blog, you might like to post about this to let others know.

Darfur: UN Mission Reports Fresh Violence

From the UN News Center

The United Nations Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) today reported fresh violence, looting and attacks on refugee camps in the strife-torn western Darfur region, where tens of thousands of people have been killed and millions displaced during two-years of fighting between the Government, allied militia and rebels.

UNMIS received several reports of related incidents indicating that banditry and armed attacks on vehicles – UN-hired trucks, as well as vehicles operated by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and commercial enterprises – continue in the three Darfur States. The goods on the trucks were looted and while there were no reported casualties, there were some reports that trucks had been highjacked.

Meanwhile, UNMIS says that last Thursday, a Government of Sudan police officer on his way to Zam Zam camp in North Darfur was killed by unidentified gunmen and his weapon taken. Also, in South Darfur on Saturday, armed tribesmen reportedly attacked returnees from Kalma camp in their village of origin, Sarman Jago.