March, 2009

The Arab League officially rejected the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir. The move was anticipated, since numerous Arab League states had individually expressed solidarity with the Sudanese leader accused of orchestrating war crimes in Darfur. But the announcement is nonetheless a disappointment. The rhetoric from some of the Arab League members was predictably florid. Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi accused the ICC of “a new world terrorism that is not below the standard of the other terrorism." Syria’s Bashar al-Assad: maintained, “What is happening now with regards to Sudan is a new chapter in the chapters that consider the Arabs weak and disrespect the sovereignty of their countries.” Even the U.N. and African Union mediator in Darfur Djibrill Bassole argued that the arrest warrant would make a political solution to Darfur more difficult.

A few notable voices that have spoken up in favor of the ICC’s decision, among them Jordan and a coalition of human rights groups from the Middle East. But on the whole, the din of the Arab League summit, which ended yesterday afternoon, is overshadowing these responses. 

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon took a softly-softly line in his remarks to the Arab League, highlighting the dire humanitarian crisis but making no mention of the judicial process – a case that the U.N. itself referred to the ICC. Considering that the Arab League was expected to voice strong support for Bashir, this diplomatic line should not be surprising, but it would be refreshing if the Secretary General started using his bully pulpit to support international justice efforts sooner rather than later.  Indeed, the ICC’s own members – a coalition of 108 states – have not done much in the way of defending the Court’s work on Sudan.
 

Technorati Tags: Africa Darfur and Southern Sudan Genocide International Criminal Court Omar al-Bashir Peace Prevention Protection Punishment Sexual Violence United Nations War Crimes

Ambassador Susan Rice, U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, did not mince words when addressing the Security Council last week on the topic of the crisis in Sudan and the culpability of President Bashir and his government. From similar statements made by President Obama in our meeting with him yesterday and Secretary of State Clinton earlier this month, it’s encouraging to see the administration speaking with a unified voice and toeing a tough line.

Watch the clip of Ambassador Rice from the State Department blog: 

 Andrew Sweet contributed to this post.

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Yesterday, Enough Senior Advisor Omer Ismail and I had the privilege of meeting with President Obama and his new Sudan special envoy, General Scott Gration. General Gration is a thoughtful, committed public servant whose tenure as envoy could be very successful if the president gives him the right policy and tools he needs to succeed. We discussed with the president that what has been missing in U.S. policy for some time now is a strategic vision aimed at ENDING the cycle of war and famine in Darfur rather than simply managing the genocidal consequences. This requires the U.S. to commit to helping to build a credible peace process in Darfur and to rebuild a viable mechanism to oversee the implementation of the North-South deal. There will always be crises to address, the latest being President Bashir's expulsion of aid agencies from Darfur, and the U.S. of course must do everything it can to address these crises of the day. But as activists, we must keep our eyes on the longer-term prize: a peaceful, democratic Sudan. That should be President Obama's top priority, and General Gration should organize U.S. efforts to achieve this objective.

Check out our recent paper about why activism still matters and what you can do.

Technorati Tags: Darfur and Southern Sudan Genocide Peace Prevention Protection

I recently had the honor of working with the producer, writer, and cast of NBC's top-rated show, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. We worked together on an episode that will air tonight, Tuesday, March 31, at 10 pm on NBC. The back story involves forcibly conscripted child soldiers from Northern Uganda, and the legacies of war and trauma of abuse in the context of child soldierhood and sexual slavery. Neal Baer, the executive producer of the show, was determined to ensure that the issue of child soldiers would be portrayed sensitively and accurately. And Mariska Hargitay and Chris Meloni, the two lead actors on the show, spent considerable time learning about the issues facing child soldiers, particularly those press-ganged into servitude by the Lord's Resistance Army, or LRA. The LRA has waged Africa's longest running insurgency, a rebellion that has warped into a twisted Grimm's Brothers tale of abducted children and terrorized villages.

Mariska Hargitay and I blogged about the episode on Huffington Post yesterday. And Enough has focused attention on the dynamics of the conflict and the steps necessary to ending the crisis. We'll be working with Invisible Children and Resolve to support mass action events in April and lobby days in June, so stay tuned to our Take Action page for more details.

Here's a clip from CNN about filming tonight's episode at the U.N.:

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Enough Co-Founder John Prendergast and Enough Advisor Omer Ismail just returned from a meeting at the White House with President Obama and the U.S. Special Envoy to Sudan Gen. Scott Gration, a day before Gration travels to Sudan to assume his new role.

"I am confident that the Obama administration is serious about keeping their word on finding a lasting solution to the crisis in Sudan," Ismail said after his conversation with the president.

The White House released this transcript following the meeting:

REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT AFTER MEETING WITH SUDAN SPECIAL ENVOY SCOTT GRATION, SUDAN ADVOCATES, AND MEMBERS OF CONGRESS

Roosevelt Room

5:24 P.M. EDT

THE PRESIDENT:  Hello, everybody.  Obviously on a busy news day, I wanted us to make sure that we weren't losing sight of something that has been an ongoing international crisis, and that is the situation in Darfur.

As many of you know, there has been a longstanding humanitarian crisis there, prompted by displacement and genocide that has been taking place.  There have been a series of negotiations around resolving this crisis in Sudan.  It has not gotten resolved, and it is now worsening.

And so I wanted to publicly affirm the importance of General Scott Gration, who has been appointed as Special Envoy to Sudan , to work on a whole host of issues that I think are of importance to the international community and should touch the conscience of all of us.

General Gration is one of my top national security advisors.  He's somebody who I've known for a long time.  We've traveled together in Africa .  He was a close associate during the campaign.  And so I can't think of somebody who is better equipped to travel to Africa, the continent where he grew up, and communicate to Sudan a couple of important points:  Number one, we have an immediate crisis prompted by the Khartoum government's expulsion of nongovernmental organizations that are providing aid to displaced persons inside of Sudan. And we have to figure out a mechanism to get those NGOs back in place, to reverse that decision, or to find some mechanism whereby we avert a enormous humanitarian crisis.

Even as we're dealing with that immediate issue, we can't take our eyes off the longstanding conflicts in Sudan that have resulted in all these persons being displaced.  And that means that General Gration's task is going to be to see if we can reinvigorate the North-South agreement, make sure that it's implemented in an effective way, and that we are also exploring a mechanism whereby we can get talks between rebels and the Khartoum government that could help, once and for all, resolve the Darfur situation.

This is going to be a very difficult task.  It will be a time-consuming task.  We don't expect any solutions overnight to the longstanding problems there.  Fortunately, what's happened in Darfur has touched so many people around the world, and we have seen such an extraordinary mobilization of advocates, many of who are sitting at this table -- we've got bipartisan interest on the part of members of Congress around this issue -- that I actually think that America can speak effectively with one voice and bring the moral and other elements of our stature to bear in trying to deal with this situation.

I can't think of a person who's better than Scott Gration to represent us in this critical task, and I am sending him off with my full confidence.  He will be speaking for the administration, and he will be coming back to report to me very shortly about what he's found there and additional steps that we can take to deal with this situation.

So, thank you, Scott, for the great work.

GENERAL GRATION:  Thank you, sir.

THE PRESIDENT:  All right, everybody. Thank you.

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Actress Mariska Hargitay and Enough's John Prendergast co-authored a story for the Huffington Post today about "Hell," the all-new episode of Law & Order: SVU, which airs tomorrow night.

Law & Order: SVU Takes on the Issue of Child Soldiers and Sex Slaves in Africa

It's midnight. We are in a studio in North Bergen, New Jersey, filming take after take of a scene for an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. We're tired. It's the fourteenth hour of what will be a sixteen-hour day. We're tired, but we're ambitious. When the episode airs on March 31st, 2009. at 10PM on NBC, we need it to reach not only into households across this country, but all the way into the dense forests of one of the most troubled places on earth. The episode is called "Hell," and it is based on the experiences of child soldiers and sexual slaves in Central Africa.

The history of the region is harrowing.

For over two decades, the Lord's Resistance Army, or LRA, has brought untold suffering to the people of central Africa--for many years in northern Uganda and southern Sudan, more recently in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

This small but ruthless militia specializes in abducting children and enlisting them to serve as soldiers and sex slaves. Boys are brainwashed and given guns; sometimes they're forced to kill their own family members. Girls serve as "wives" for the militia commanders, often bearing their children.

Click here to read the rest of the post.

Check out the preview for the episode and learn more about the LRA on our special page.

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A Q&A with Enough's Colin Thomas-Jensen appeared on the blog ICC Observers yesterday. In the interview, Thomas-Jensen provides a useful primer on the challenges and breakthroughs of the International Criminal Court - past, present, and future. Check it out here.

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For civilians wracked by waves of violence in eastern Congo, a peace agreement is only a meaningful event if it leads to improvements in their daily lives. In that regard, the verdict is still very much out on the latest agreement—a deal reached last Monday between the Congolese government and the CNDP rebels formerly led by deposed warlord Laurent Nkunda. U.N. Special Envoy Olusegun Obasanjo and Great Lakes region envoy Benjamin Mkapa helped to finalize the deal, though it is still very much an agreement on principles moving forward. If anything is to be learned from the last peace agreement signed in Goma, implementation and sustained follow-through is now mission critical.

Congolese have plenty of reasons to be skeptical.  For a brief moment in early 2008, the situation looked equally promising when the CNDP and 22 other armed groups had signed a framework agreement to end the fighting and integrate militarily. However, implementation of that agreement quickly stalled and prospects for a sustainable peace faded as it became obvious that the Congolese government and the CNDP entered into the agreement with divergent intentions. The government sought to dilute CNDP’s influence by lumping them in technical negotiations over military integration with a litany of other armed groups. On the other hand, Nkunda and the CNDP sought to use agreement as a stepping stone toward political talks—something that the government wasn’t willing to do.

With Nkunda and his ambitious political agenda now removed from the scene and CNDP neutered militarily, Monday’s agreement could be a step forward. On paper, the deal transforms the CNDP (which in French stands for National Congress for the Defense of People) into a legitimate political party. In return for ending the armed rebellion, the government guaranteed the liberation of CNDP prisoners and promised a general amnesty for CNDP members who join the Congolese army or police.

This agreement effectively ends the CNDP rebellion, but the political and military situation in the southern portion of North Kivu is shifting dramatically in their favor. Before Nkunda’s removal and Rwanda’s military incursion into eastern Congo earlier this year, very few Congolese Hutus or Tutsis—known informally as “Rwandaphones” for their shared language—held positions of power in North Kivu.  As the operations came to a close, former North Kivu governor Eugene Serufuli (also a founding member of the RCD, Rwanda’s proxy rebel group from the late 1990s until the 2006 election) resurrected the idea of splitting North Kivu into two along ethnic lines: ethnic Nande-majority territories to the north and Rwandaphone-majority territories in the south. North Kivu is now witnessing the calculated re-emergence of a “Rwandaphonie” authority in the Petit Nord territories of southern North Kivu, with former CNDP members assuming administrative and military control.

The details of the deal between Congo and Rwanda that allowed Rwandan forces into eastern Congo are still unknown, but the return of Rwandaphonie is almost certainly a part of what was agreed upon.  In exchange for removing Nkunda—a huge political liability for Kinshasa—Rwanda now appears to have been granted proxy authority over southern North Kivu, an area where it has many economic interests. This is not without significant risk, as the non-Rwandaphone community is suddenly out in the cold.

Stay tuned. 

Rebecca is Enough’s field analyst in eastern Congo.

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Many recent debates and discussions regarding the ICC warrant for President Bashir have included disagreements regarding the best approach towards the use of statistics to judge the conflict. Writing as part of the roundtable discussion currently underway on The New Republic's website, Smith College Professor and Darfur expert Eric Reeves recently had this to say about mortality statistics in Darfur:

"Violent mortality is likely to be understated for a number of reasons. For example, deaths that may be directly related to genocidal violence and displacement, but which take the form of dehydration or disease, are typically not reported as violent deaths, if they are reported at all. In some of the most brutal violence of recent years -- which took place north el-Geneina (West Darfur) in February 2008, in much of North Darfur during Khartoum's large-scale August 2008 offensive, and in Muhajeria and surrounding villages in South Darfur in February 2009--we know that many scores of thousands of people were displaced, and that a great many subsequently died. But we simply don't and can't know how many because there is no meaningful commitment of resources on the ground for a comprehensive tabulating of deaths."

"When asking whether genocide in Darfur continues, however, we need to consider more than recent deaths. We should recall, for example, that the U.N. Commissioner for Refugees estimates that 315,000 people were newly displaced in 2008 alone, most of them deliberately and violently. The agents were typically Khartoum's regular forces or its militia allies (although there was substantial violence between Arab tribes as well). Given the harshness of the environment in Darfur, and the overcrowding of IDP camps, such deliberate displacement of African tribal groups should force to mind Clause (c) of Article 2 of the 1948 Genocide Convention: 'Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.' This is precisely the meaning of much intentional displacement in Darfur, especially evident in the recent attacks on villages in the Muhajeria area of South Darfur."

Reeves' entire comment can be found here.

Technorati Tags: Darfur and Southern Sudan International Criminal Court Peace Prevention Protection

The New York Times has a helpful read out on the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s new report (PDF) on the Pentagon’s Africa Command, or AFRICOM. The report—with the cumbersome title, “Defense Management: Actions Needed to Address Stakeholder Concerns, Improve Interagency Collaboration, and Determine Full Costs Associated with the U.S. Africa Command”— concludes that AFRICOM has a long way to go in recovering from its “early missteps in explaining its missions and purpose,” which have caused serious doubts and concern at the State Department, in Congress, and on the African continent about the Pentagon’s goals.

The Defense Department is working hard to avoid furthering the conception that AFRICOM aims to militarize U.S. foreign policy in Africa. However, the report notes that AFRICOM has failed to meet its initial personnel goals of filling their ranks with diplomats and civilians from agencies beyond the traditional military commands. If AFRICOM pushes to include a greater percentage of non-military personnel in both its leadership and rank-and-file, then it may be able to begin to recover from some of the early critiques of the mission. Thus we see that AFRICOM not only faces a real public relations challenge, but some clear operational hurdles as well.

Finally, I’d have to agree with Senator Russ Feingold’s (D-WI) recent comments on the Senate Floor, which Enough reported on here, that in instances where AFRICOM provides support to joint military operations on the continent, such as the recent Operation Lightning Thunder against the Lord’s Resistance Army, the command must be aware of  “the potential [for AFRICOM] to eclipse our civilian agencies and thereby perpetuate perceptions on the continent of a militarized U.S. policy.” While U.S. support for African military-led operations may be essential in some cases, AFRICOM and the administration as a whole need to make sure that military efforts are complemented by sound, strategic diplomacy and careful measures to protect civilians.

Check out the summary and recommendations of the 47-page report on the GAO website here.

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The recent violence in Jonglei which killed more than 750 in southern Sudan appears to be the continuation of inter-clan cattle raiding that has long plagued the beleaguered state. The current episodes of violence are mainly clashes between the Murle and Lou Nuer in the wake of yet another botched disarmament process. It points to the systemic underdevelopment in most of southern Sudan and the weakness of state administration and security forces. Jonglei has been one of the most unstable states in the South since the Comprehensive Peace Agreement was signed. It is a massive state with no infrastructure, a heavily armed civilian population, and many different ethnic groups competing for scarce resources.

If you want a vision of where southern Sudan could go if it remains undeveloped, militarized, fractured by ethnic fault lines, and governed by weak, shallowly-rooted institutions, Jonglei is the place to look. The heavily armed cattle-keepers are caught in a security dilemma: each group is afraid to disarm because they  believe this will leave them vulnerable to attack from their armed neighbors, and the army and police are too weak to provide genuine security. In the past, Bashir's National Congress Party has skillfully manipulated and fueled this instability, though it appears involvement by the Sudanese Armed Forces in the current violence has been limited.

Adam is Enough's Sudan field analyst.

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NBC has posted a preview for this week's all-new episode of Law & Order SVU. Enough's John Prendergast advised the episode's writers on "Hell," a (fictional) story about the Lord's Resistance Army that now terrorizes populations across Africa's Great Lakes region. Three days until showtime: "Hell" airs this Tuesday, March 31 at 10/9c.

Learn more about the LRA on our special page.

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Qatar's Gulf Times reports that Deputy Secretary General of the Arab League, Ambassador Ahmed Bin Helli, announced to reporters on Thursday that at the Arab League summit on March 29-30 in Doha, Qatar, the Arab League intends to, “issue a decision crystallizing a unified Arab position on the warrant against the Sudanese President Bashir.”

The Arab League summit is sure to be tense, and lots of folks in New York, Beijing, Pretoria, and beyond will be watching to see how unified this unified Arab League position might actually be. There has been a clear tendency among Arab states to publically support Bashir and denounce the ICC even as they explore potential replacements for Bashir behind the scenes.

As reported by Enough on Wednesday, Sudan’s religious leaders issued a fatwa urging President Bashir not to attend the summit, where he could risk arrest by enemies that might be “creeping around.”

Precious few among the 22 members of the Arab League happen to also be signatories to the Rome Statue; only Jordan, Djibouti, and Comoros Island are members of the International Criminal Court, or ICC. Although Jordan issued a statement before the ICC arrest warrant issuance for President Bashir claiming that they would “side with other Arab states on a possible arrest warrant,” they have since announced that they would fulfill their obligations as ICC members. There is clear dissent among and within branches of the Jordanian government over the ICC warrant for Bashir, but a common theme seems to be the desire of Jordanian officials to see the ICC take up an investigation of ongoing atrocities occurring in Gaza.

But in reality, this guessing game is neither here nor there, because summit host Qatar is not an ICC member state and therefore not obligated under the court's founding Rome Statute to arrest Bashir. Before I wade too deep into the legal waters, I will direct you to the excellent and highly informative Opinio Juris blog, which provides consistently astute analysis on all of the legal ins and outs of the ICC case against Bashir.

The bottom line you will not hear among the many pronouncements at the summit: more and more Arab leaders see Bashir as more of a liability than an asset, and that may ultimately speed his demise.

John Norris contributed to this post.

Technorati Tags: Darfur and Southern Sudan International Criminal Court Omar al-Bashir Peace Punishment United Nations War Crimes