Here at Enough, we often swap emails with interesting articles and feature stories that we come across in our favorite publications and on our favorite websites. We wanted to share some of these stories with you as part of our effort to keep you up to date on what you need to know in the world of anti-genocide and crimes against humanity work.
Doctors Without Borders’ Condition: Critical project brings us new moving testimonies from survivors of sexual violence in Congo and from some of the medical personnel, who are working under serious constraints to deliver care and, in some cases, simply basic services.
Michael Graham of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is the featured guest on the Museum’s Voices in Genocide Prevention podcast series, speaking about a project he is leading with Google Earth to map destruction in Darfur.
International Criminal Court Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo discussed the Prosecution’s case against Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir with the NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown, responding to some of the criticism the Court has received and to recent claims by the Sudanese president himself that the ICC’s arrest warrant has not affected him. A key quote:
As I say, the arrest warrant will be implemented in two years or in 20 years. The issue, to stop the crimes.
When I present my case, people were saying, oh, this will stop any possible negotiation.
It’s not true. When we started, there was no peace negotiation. In June 2008, negotiators resigned because they can do nothing. After I request the warrant, a new process started, and it’s still ongoing.
So, there are two parallel tracks.
Arresting President Bashir is one track. Making — stopping the crimes and making a settlement for these people is a different track, very important.
Excellent reporting from Mogadishu by Edmund Saunders continues in this important Los Angeles Times piece about the effects of intense fighting in the capital on the youngest Somalis. This story underscores the devastating day-to-day impact of fighting on the innocents in the crossfire. Saunders tells of 5-year-old Omar, who was shot in the head by a stray bullet while he slept and has not said a word since the surgery to remove the bullet and his right eye.
Each day, his grandmother, Fatuma Ali, talks to Omar and searches his face for a sign of recognition. He rarely displays emotion. No fear or pain. But sometimes there is a trace of something else behind that stare: anger.
Makes one wonder what’s to come of a country ignored by the international community, whose children under the age of 18 have only known war.
If you can get beyond the very broad use of the word ‘African’ – where else in the world would we describe people so generically, by only their continent association? Australia maybe – this is an interesting article in the Economist about 10 east and central African countries that are trying to keep better tabs on the excess of small arms that have circulated virtually unregulated in the region since the 1980s.