Blog Posts in United Nations

This post follows from a story about the death of Antoinette that Lisa Shannon wrote about last week.

Yeah, it’s like that.

I talked to Antoinette's father today, in Mama Koko's living room.  A modest man, mid-50s, pressed, tucked, and in a baseball cap – visibly wearing the weight of his recent loss. He sat on the far end of the sofa, with Koko's elderly uncle, who had been badly beaten himself last year by the Lord’s Resistance Army, on the other end.

The father was at home on the day of the incident, taking care of his grandchildren while his daughter worked. He heard gunshots, then screaming, and grabbed the two young children. Along with thousands of neighbors, he ran toward safety in the town center, which houses the U.N. compound.  But by the time they reached the river, Congolese soldiers, or the FARDC, had blocked the bridge—the only route into the town center— intentionally preventing those escaping the attack from crossing to safety.
 
"Why didn't you just swim across the river?" I asked.

"It's deep. We can't swim,” he said. “And if we tried, the Congolese soldiers would shoot us like we were rebels."

Thousands of people were forced to sleep outside, less than a mile from the site where the LRA was in the middle of an attack, abducting an unknown number of townspeople.

I've written about the FARDC's failure to protect civilians and their human rights abuses before. Hearing the news of this attack before I left for Congo last week, I found their failure to intervene shocking, especially since the LRA attackers had walked right past them on the way to their target. But this?  Preventing locals from reaching safety?  Effectively corralling thousands of potential victims into a holding pen in the middle of an LRA attack? Astounding.

"They didn't want the LRA to slip into the center of town with the people," Koko's brother offered.

I asked the grieving father, "Does that seem like a reasonable explanation to you?"

He shook his head defiantly, "No. It's not right. The soldiers should be in the front and the people in the back so they can protect us. But the soldiers were in the back, and we were up front when the LRA was coming."

Thousands of people slept in the road next to the bridge until daylight, when they headed home. At 7 a.m., a 12-year-old boy, whose own sister had been injured in the attack, came with the news: Neighbors had found Antoinette’s body. They found her still holding her baby. The neighbors left the child in his dead mother’s arms until the family arrived. Antoinette’s sister swooped down and collected the little boy.

I asked, "If you could say something to Americans—the government or just regular people—what would you say?"

"I don't know what to tell the American government if I can't even talk to my own government. Because they don't care about the way people are dying from the LRA. They don't do anything about it."

A few days ago, this father gathered with his fellow citizens and marched through the center of Dungu in protest of the Congolese government's failure to protect.

"If you could have five minutes with President Joseph Kabila, what would you say?"

"I would ask him: Why did I vote for you? Everything that is happening to us, you don't do anything. We don't even hear your voice. You say nothing. You don't care."

"It sounds like you blame the Congolese government and the Congolese army for what happened,” I remarked. “Is that right?"

Both men on opposite ends of the sofa look at me with a mix of sadness and indignation. Koko's uncle couldn't contain himself, "Yeah, it's like that."

"Yeah, it's like that," the grieving father echoes again, and then again. "Yeah. It's like that.”

Lisa Shannon is the founder of Run for Congo Women and the author of the forthcoming book A Thousand Sisters. She is currently traveling in eastern Congo and posting regularly to her blog AThousandSisters.com.

Technorati Tags: Advocacy Eastern Congo Protection Sexual Violence United Nations Violence Against Women War Crimes

The international community has a significant role to play in addressing the myriad humanitarian problems plaguing southern Sudan, a half-decade after the signing of a peace agreement, or CPA, that officially ended hostilities between the North and the South. So says a report released today by 10 aid agencies, including Oxfam International. The authors write:

“Five years later, the peace agreement is extremely fragile and violence is again increasing. The humanitarian situation, already one of the worst in the world, is deteriorating; and in the eyes of most ordinary southerners, meaningful post-war development has been absent.”

Civilians continue to face daily threats to security; in 2009, more than 2,500 people were killed and 350,000 fled their homes from violence that egregiously targeted women and children. Disarmament efforts by the South Sudanese government have not created a sense of security among many communities, and the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Sudan has neglected its civilian protection mandate, the report said.

Food insecurity due to erratic rainfall in the past year contributed to the deteriorating humanitarian situation and highlighted the limited ability of humanitarian agencies to reach people in need.

Development indicators for South Sudan all remain far below basic standards, despite expectations of peace dividends, promised through the signing of the CPA: 

“(…) for many ordinary people meaningful post-war development has been absent. The delivery of basic services such as schools, health clinics, and safe water, should have been a key peace dividend that helped build popular confidence in the CPA. Instead, service provision has been painfully slow, leading to mounting frustration.”

Policymakers would do well to take a look at the recommendations offered in the report, including a call for concerted international mediation between CPA parties to resolve issues relating to the referendum and its aftermath. The report also prescribes ways to prioritize civilian protection for both the government of southern Sudan and U.N. peacekeepers, including training U.N. personnel on its mandated protection responsibilities. Funding allocation for emergency assistance, basic service delivery, and the southern government should be made more flexible and have an eye toward the long-term by emphasizing support for local NGOs and local government structures.

The report makes clear that in this critical year for Sudan an incredible amount of work remains. The international community must firmly stand behind consequences for any of the political parties that take steps that put civilians in jeopardy. 

Technorati Tags: Advocacy Darfur and Southern Sudan Prevention Protection Sudan Now United Nations

Escalating attacks from armed groups have led the World Food Program, or WFP, to suspend operations that would reach one million in need in southern Somalia, the U.N. agency said in a statement released yesterday.

The organization reported that “rising threats and attacks on humanitarian operations, as well as the imposition of a string of unacceptable demands from armed groups, have
made it virtually impossible” to continue work in the area vastly under the control of the rebel group al-Shabaab.

According to WFP spokesman Peter Smerdon, the militant group demanded the payment of $20,000 every six months for security as well as the cessation of food imports in favor of purchase from Somali farmers. Members of al-Shabaab later demanded that the agency and its contractors end activities in the area on January 1, 2010. A Shabaab spokesman recently said the rebel group did not demand payment from the WFP.

The WFP says it is pre-positioning supplies and staff to provide assistance to any population movement following the suspension but is “deeply concerned about rising hunger and suffering among the most vulnerable (…).” The agency’s work continues in the rest of the country, reaching an estimated 1.8 million hungry people.

The latest report from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre raised the alarm about a deteriorating security situation across the country that is spurring a domino effect of negative developments that leave Somalia’s 1.5 million displaced people at ever-worsening risk. Here’s an excerpt from the report’s overview:

The security situation has deteriorated since May 2009 due to intensified clashes between government forces and insurgents, causing civilian causalities, injuries and population dis-placement. Humanitarian and human rights organisations continue to report displacements, child recruitment, attacks, sexual violence, and efforts to protect IDPs and provide humani-tarian assistance have been ineffective.

Humanitarian agency staff and property continue to be directly targeted. In July 2009, Al-Shabaab demanded that three UN agencies stop operating in areas under its control; in November the group ordered the World Food Programme to stop importing food and start buying from Somali farmers, even though such a system would lead to even greater food insecurity. Meanwhile, some donors have significantly reduced humanitarian funding in 2009 for fear that it is being diverted to extremist groups, affecting the capacity of most UN agencies.

As the report notes, the bright spot in generally gloomy state of affairs is that the government signed two key international conventions last year aimed at dealing with internally displaced people and the rights of children, but in light of the current conditions on the ground, IDMC stated that meeting those commitments will be “impossible in the short term.”

Laura Heaton contributed to this post.

Photo: Women and children share a meal.

Technorati Tags: Peace Prevention Protection Sexual Violence Somalia United Nations Violence Against Women War Crimes

Two recent articles – one by the New York Times' Jeffrey Gettleman and the other by the sharp-tongued and insightful Sudan observer Rob Crilly  – shed light on the current situation in Darfur. The two articles paint starkly different portraits of the status quo in Darfur and provide divergent forecasts of what 2010 holds for a region of Sudan that has undoubtedly slipped out of the forefront of public and media attention in the past year, in part due to increased focus on the uptick in violence in southern Sudan.

Reporting on the front page of Saturday's New York Times, Jeffrey Gettleman brings word of a “fragile calm” in Darfur, while emphasizing that the conditions for the over four million displaced Darfuris (residing in camps in eastern Chad and in Darfur) are far from acceptable:

“In the camps, the transient life of the refugee is becoming permanent. Most people hate living here. The crowded huts, the waiting for food handouts, the idleness are steadily taking their toll.”

Still, Gettleman’s piece leaves the overall impression that the situation in Darfur is improving, while conspicuously understating both the unsustainable nature of the status quo, and perhaps more egregiously, the role the Sudanese government played in creating the humanitarian crisis to begin with.

Writing on the Huffington Post, Rob Crilly argues that Darfur is tragically becoming all too similar to other long-term, slow burn African conflicts:

“On a continent of forgotten wars, there was always supposed to be something different about Darfur. This was the first genocide of the twenty-first century. A slaughter of the innocents. The land's African farmers were being wiped out by Arab raiders - the dreaded Janjaweed - doing the bidding of an evil Islamist empire in Khartoum. (…)

"Where once Darfur had been different, today it is achingly familiar. Complex, miserable and messy. Africa is not short of similar conflicts that grumble on for years, unresolved and out of sight."

Instead of finding hope in the overall decrease in violence in Darfur in recent years, Crilly calls attention to the frequent, fragmented skirmishes between Darfur's multiple rebel factions, poor conditions in the camps, banditry, and violence against the joint AU/UN peacekeeping force.

But Crilly's analysis does not lead him to a place of inertia or inaction. On the contrary, Crilly warns that "we cannot afford to let Darfur slip away." International attention and coordinated pressure yielded the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended decades of war between Sudan's North and South. Crilly says that the same level of engagement is necessary now if Sudan is to avoid ongoing stalemate in Darfur and a potential resumption of North-South conflict in the coming year.

Despite their contrasting analysis of Darfur today, Gettleman and Crilly agree on some key points: 2010 is a make-or-break year for Sudan. Diplomats cannot afford to let Darfur become another "forgotten war" or to skate through the contentious national elections set for April. And the status quo throughout the country – be it fragile calm in Darfur or troubling backslide in the South – is unacceptable and dangerous for the majority of the people of Sudan.

Technorati Tags: Advocacy Peace Prevention Sudan Now United Nations

MAKPANDU, Western Equatoria, Southern Sudan -- As she spoke softly in her native Zande language, Monique*, an 18-year-old Congolese refugee and orphan living in Makpandu refugee camp in southern Sudan, kept picking at her skirt as if trying to brush off some unseen dirt or thread. During our half-hour interview under the shade of a straw-roofed structure at the camp, Monique did not make eye contact with me, my colleague, or our translator, staring into the distance behind us or over her own shoulder as she described the time she spent as a captive of the Lord’s Resistance Army or LRA.

“When I was abducted, I wasn’t married,” she said without emotion. “But the tonton [LRA] made me take a soldier as my husband.”

Five months later, Monique escaped during the commotion caused by a clash between the LRA and the southern Sudanese army. Now she is one of more than 2,700 refugees living in Makpandu camp in Western Equatoria state near the border of Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Unlike many areas in southern Sudan, the verdant state of Western Equatoria enjoyed relative peace and stability following the 2005 signing of Sudan’s Comprehensive Peace Agreement. But in the past year, Western Equatoria has suffered from the insidious and brutal presence of the LRA.

In 2009, tens of thousands of Sudanese in Western Equatoria were displaced and hundreds more abducted or killed by the LRA. Meanwhile, the U.N. mission in Congo estimates that over 200,000 people in northeastern Congo were displaced from late-2008 to last June, many of whom fled across the border into Sudan to escape violent reprisal attacks by the LRA following a failed U.S.-backed military offensive against them in Garamba National Park.

Now living in two large refugee camps, in the towns of Makpandu and Ezo, refugees from Congo like Monique and others from the Central African Republic are stuck—afraid to go home due to the continued threat of the LRA but generally unhappy to be forced to live dependent on the U.N. refugee agency and international NGOs providing services in the camps.

In Makpandu camp, most people are from the Zande ethnic group; like the Zande of southern Sudan, the Congolese Zande are farmers who grew their own food and supported themselves back home in northeastern Congo before the LRA terrorized their communities and forced them to flee to Sudan. The refugees we interviewed desperately wanted to go home, but many of them faced similar predicaments as Monique: amid fractured families and uncertainties about the situation in their home villages, people in Makpandu say they have a hard time imagining their futures.

Monique said she is hopeful that her mother and siblings are still at their home in the village of Kiriwo, but she hasn’t had any contact with them. At Makpandu, Monique is classified as an orphan because there was no one she knew who could take her in.

The refugees in limbo in Makpandu are a testament to the fact that the continued tragedy of more than two decades of terror throughout central Africa rendered by the LRA will not end until the group is dismantled from the top down. The shadow of LRA leader Joseph Kony is felt today in refugee camps in Western Equatoria, in villages in northern Uganda, in Congo’s Garamba National Park, and increasingly in Central African Republic and further north in Sudan where the LRA is on the march. The sun will not shine again in these places until the shadow of Kony is eliminated.

Please see this post to hear the story of Mama Francoise, another woman we interviewed for this series about Makpandu refugee camp.

*Name has been changed.

Technorati Tags: Darfur and Southern Sudan Eastern Congo Protection Sexual Violence United Nations Violence Against Women