5 Stories You Might Have Missed This Week

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.

The tremendous demonstration of people power in Egypt for the last week and a half has kept us here at Enough riveted to ongoing developments. Scott Horton offers one explanation in this Foreign Policy article for why Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak—or any other dictator for that matter—would cling to power even when the inevitable is near: life in exile as a former dictator is simply not that great. In a time in which ex-leaders are no longer granted immunity for past abuses, leaving office paves the way for criminal probes from international and domestic prosecutors alike.

African expert Nicolas van de Walle offers two lessons gleaned from the ousting of Tunisian leader Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. "[P]roviding unconditional diplomatic support and foreign aid to a dictator may be smart in the short run, but often leads to disaster in the long run," he writes.

Al-Jazeera provides footage on the protests—and  subsequent crackdown—in Sudan in a segment that also highlights the gap in opinion among the Sudanese population toward President Omar al-Bashir’s over two decades-long regime.

With South Sudan’s independence around the corner, the southern government had to settle on one detail first—the new country’s name. This piece in the Mail and Guardian Online laments the ultimate choice—South Sudan—and takes a look at the origins of state names across the continent.

And in this podcast, Human Rights Watch interviews survivors of Lord’s Resistance Army attacks in northeastern Congo.

• 5 Stories You May Have Missed This Week
• Sudan and South Sudan