October, 2009

Congressman Mike Capuano (D-MA) addressed the Obama administration’s Sudan policy review in a letter to the editor published in the Boston Globe yesterday. Capuano notes that the plan looks good on paper, but that Congress will continue to keep tabs on the administration’s progress and remain “vigilant”:

“We will continue to press the administration to ensure that carrots do not obscure the necessary sticks. It is not unreasonable to seek progress through greater dialogue, but experience has taught us that Khartoum must be made to understand that evasion or inaction will be met with grave consequences.”

Read his entire letter here, and click here to read Congressman Capuano’s earlier statement and see what other members of Congress have to say about the administration’s new Sudan policy.

Congressman Capuano is the co-founder and co-chair of the Congressional Caucus on Sudan.

• Darfur and Southern Sudan
• Sudan Now

Last Saturday, October 24, Enough joined forces with the Hollywood Film Festival to host Ending Violence Against Women, the festival’s first ever human rights symposium. As I observed the packed house of enthusiastic spectators at the Arclight Cinemas in Hollywood, I couldn’t help but contemplate the enormous power of film and media when linked to a cause—in this case, the plight of eastern Congo.

We gathered to celebrate the winner of Come Clean 4 Congo, the video contest sponsored by Enough and YouTube’s Video for Change program (another first of its kind). The symposium began with a screening of the poignant, Emmy-nominated documentary, “The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo” and was followed by a panel discussion examining the root causes of the conflict and epidemic of rape in the Congo, as well the practical ways we as consumers and American citizens can help end the violence. Enough’s Co-founder John Prendergast, actor and Congo activist Emile Hirsch, and Program Director for the Sub-Saharan Africa Global Fund for Women, Muadi Mukenge covered the crisis with depth and a diversity of insight. But the real star of the evening was Matthew Smith, whose winning video “Life Should Be Free” opens with this disquieting message:

“When you use your cell phone you activate the cries of a million children working through the night, mining the ore that turns to tin, and that’s exactly where this story begins.”

Following the panel, moderator Bonnie Abaunza introduced actress Sonya Walger and Steve Grove, head of News and Politics for YouTube, who presented the Come Clean 4 Congo award. Judging by the questions generated during the Q&A session and the number of guests who left the theater eager to take action, the message of Matthew’s winning video was heard loud and clear:

“It’s time we stop supporting the unethical exporting of tungsten, tantalum and tin. It’s time for death to lose, and life to win. So share what you know: WE ARE CONSUMING THE CONGO!”

To join the RAISE Hope for Congo campaign, text “CONGO” to ACTIV8 (228488) and visit www.raisehopeforcongo.org

• Conflict Minerals
• Eastern Congo
• Prevention
• Protection
• Sexual Violence
• Violence Against Women
• War Crimes

“Violence against Darfuri women is not a women’s issue, it is an issue of accountability and justice,” proclaimed John Bradshaw, the Washington director of Physicians for Human Rights at a briefing filled with Congressional staffers and NGO representatives. PHR held a panel on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, with support from Enough and other partners, to highlight a situation that is far from over: violence against Darfuri women.

In 2008, PHR conducted extensive research in Farchana, a refugee camp in Chad, not far from the Sudanese border, that houses 20,000 refugees from Darfur. The conclusion of their recent report was clear: the atrocities committed against women continue, rape is a common occurrence, and physical, emotional, and social hardships endure long after the attack. PHR’s interviews revealed that a quarter of the women living in the camps have been raped, most commonly when they left the camps to collect firewood or graze their livestock.

Across the panel, the speakers spoke of rape as a tactic of war and a strategic method used to destroy communities and demoralize individuals. It affects both the women and the men who struggle with the stigma afterward.

According to Susannah Sirkin of PHR, women in the camps never feel safe and regularly risk their lives to feed their family. Leaving the camp to collect wood is a constant stress, with men lurking outside the camps, waiting to take advantage.

When Sirkin asked one woman what she would like from the international community, she said, “Tell the world that life in the camps is not good. Bring us back to the camps in Darfur and if you cannot, then take us from the camps in Chad. Anywhere else is better than here.” But the conditions in Darfuri camps are not much better than those in Chad. Dr. Mohammed Ahmed, a Sudanese doctor who works with rape victims in several Darfuri refugee camps, claimed that last month alone, he treated 13 girls who had been brutally raped. Some of the girls did not survive the abuse.

The momentum to tackle the issue of violence against women is growing in both the Congress and the State Department. Leaders increasingly acknowledge the importance of figuring violence prevention integrally into all of the United States’ foreign policy goals – and not just as a peripheral issue.

There are fewer news reports about the challenges Darfuris face, but as the PHR report and briefing soberly remind us, we must not assume that the problems therefore have gone away.

Photo: Darfuri women collect firewood. (Courtesy of Doug Mercado)

• Darfur and Southern Sudan
• Omar al-Bashir
• Prevention
• Protection
• Punishment
• Sexual Violence
• Sudan Now
• Violence Against Women
• War Crimes

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 discussion over Mahmood Mamdani’s controversial book, Saviors and Survivors, continues in this new review by Sudan scholar and activist Eric Reeves.

In the midst of all the reports last week about the new U.S. policy on Sudan, this one got buried. It’s a brief but interesting NYT profile of Scott Gration, the man at the helm of the U.S. diplomatic efforts, giving a bit of the back-story of how he ended up as Obama’s man in Sudan.

The United Nations’ new Citizen Ambassadorship was awarded to just one American, a photographer from Maryland with a passion for Congo. Emily Troutman was one of five recipients selected from nearly 500 candidates who submitted videos in a contest that asked participants to respond to the question: If you could speak to world leaders, what would you say? This article about Troutman in the Baltimore Sun features two of her videos about Congo, including her winning video “My Message to World Leaders: One Person at a Time.”

Nearly a month has passed since the Guinea’s military regime violently cracked down on pro-democracy protestors in the West African country. Human Rights Watch pieced together the gruesome details of the attack, concluding in a report this week that the violence was premeditated and ethnically charged. This report is just a summary of its findings; the complete version is forthcoming, but HRW notes that it felt compelled to release this early report “because of the gravity of the abuses committed and the need for immediate international action to bring the perpetrators of the abuses to justice.”

Veteran Congo analyst Jason Stearns recently started blogging (add that one to the blog roll), and came out with a very insightful Q&A with an anonymous MONUC official. A couple of key revelations, according to the rep: “The Congolese army is the single greatest threat in the Congo and will probably remain so for the near future,” and “For now, I think we need to stop supporting Kimia II. These operations do more harm than good.” Intriguing.

Enjoy the weekend!

• Conflict Minerals
• Darfur and Southern Sudan
• Eastern Chad
• Eastern Congo
• Sudan Now

The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010, signed into law yesterday by President Obama, has been making news because of all the things left out of it, including billions of dollars in cuts to expensive weapons systems. But for those of concerned with the role of conflict minerals financing armed groups and military units in eastern Congo, tucked away in this law is a modest but crucial step forward. Thanks to an amendment by Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA), section 1252 (search for "mineral-rich zones sec. 1252") of the legislation calls for the State and Defense Departments to work together to “produce a map of mineral-rich zones and areas under the control of armed groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.” The U.S. government is tasked to work with U.N. and NGO experts to produce the map and keep it regularly updated.

The idea of a mapping exercise to better monitor who controls key mines in eastern Congo is not new. The U.N. Group of Experts, tasked with monitoring Congo’s arms embargo, included mapping of mines as a key recommendation in its 2008 report, which was then taken up by the Belgian research group IPIS. They published an online map of militarized mining sites based upon field research they conducted in conjunction with a number of Congolese organizations this past summer. The vast technical resources and know-how of the State and Defense Departments will certainly augment such efforts. Because the context in eastern Congo remains so fluid, a map that shows which armed groups control which mines at a static point in time will only be so useful, but increasing the transparency of the trade is a crucial precondition for excluding rights abusers from the supply chain and helping to shift the market for minerals toward legitimate sources.

Photo: Congolese soldier on patrol. (Courtesy of Jason Stearns)

• Conflict Minerals
• Eastern Congo
• International Criminal Court

The Congolese military’s campaign against the FDLR has left a very visible scar on the civilian population in the region. But the Congolese military and its U.N. backers tout the success of the eight-month military offensive by noting that they’ve neutralized many FDLR rebels (over a thousand repatriated to Rwanda and upwards of 300 killed) and cut them off from some of the mineral mines they operated (ruthlessly, I might add).

A new piece in today’s Wall Street Journal highlights the complexities of even these so-called successes. Who is left to fill the void in the mines where the FDLR once operated?

"As long as the region remains so militarized, even more now with these operations, it's very likely that the minerals are very directly profiting -- if not [militia groups] -- then the army itself."

So said Carina Tertsakian, a researcher with London-based Global Witness, a group that works to expose links between resource exploitation and conflict. Military sources quoted in the WSJ article flatly deny the allegation, but as journalist Sarah Childress reports:

During a recent visit to one cassiterite mine in Nyampego, a tiny village in South Kivu, tall, lanky Congolese soldiers patrolled the mine or lazed on the mountaintop, machine guns slung over their shoulders.

A representative from a company purchasing the refined minerals added – without even questioning whether the military is involved in the mines – that the military takeover of some of the mines has made it even more difficult to trace which minerals are mined legally.

The change in management has left the miners themselves in a difficult place indeed.

Don’t miss the full article here.

Photo: Soldiers in eastern Congo (AP)

• Conflict Minerals
• Eastern Congo

In early October, RAISE Hope for Congo held a fundraiser to benefit Actions for the Welfare of Women and Children in Kivu (ABFEK), an organization based in Bukavu. Founded in 2007 by Amani Matabaro, ABFEK spearheads two programs: the Kivu Sewing Workshop for the Welfare of Women, which helps survivors of violence and rape rebuild their lives, and Education Assistance for Children, which partners with local school headmasters to provide financial and social support to vulnerable children unable to afford school fees.

Thanks to a great turnout at Washington D.C.'s Stir Lounge, we raised $1,000 for ABFEK.

Now, pioneering journalist and author Kevin Sites is working to match that amount. Kevin, who has devoted his journalism career to reporting on the human toll of global conflict, met Amani while in the Congo for the "Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone" war reporting project on Yahoo News (full disclosure: I was supervising producer of the project). Amani served as Kevin's fixer, or local producer.

In a post on his Facebook profile, Kevin is calling for donations. It's simple: just visit the donation page. Be sure to write "Facebook match campaign" in the "In Honor of" field.

You can also mail your donations to us by December 1st, 2009. Make checks payable to "The Enough Project" and be sure to write “RHFC Fundraiser - Facebook match campaign” in the memo line. 100 percent of the proceeds will go to ABFEK. You can mail them to:

Enough Project
c/o RAISE Hope for Congo Fundraiser
1225 Eye Street, Suite 307
Washington, DC 20005

A big thank you from RAISE Hope for Congo and the Enough Project to Kevin, for helping to spotlight the invaluable lifesaving efforts of people like Amani in eastern Congo.

Photo: Amani Matabaro at the sewing workshop. (Enough/Candice Knezevic)

• Advocacy
• Conflict Minerals
• Eastern Congo
• Sexual Violence
• Violence Against Women
• War Crimes

For more than 15 years, a band of rebels calling themselves the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, known by the French acronym FDLR, has preyed on local communities in eastern Congo. They are notorious for their use of rape as a weapon to terrorize the local population and for exploiting the region’s vast mineral wealth, committing unconscionable abuses to maintain their grip on the illicit trade in conflict minerals.

Soldiers from Congo and its neighboring countries have long pursued the FDLR, whose leadership fled over the Rwanda-Congo border after taking part in Rwanda’s 1994 genocide. But the FDLR’s command center, located in the German town of Mannheim and operated by rebel group’s president, has been largely left untouched.

In a series of articles over the past few months, the German newspaper Die Tageszeitung, TAZ, sought to light a fire under German authorities by exposing the direct link between the insidious rebel group and its leader, Ignace Murwanashyaka, who is currently protected under Germany’s asylum law.

TAZ’s stories are in German (the originals are here, here, and here), but The New Times newspaper in Kigali, Rwanda published a piece this week that provides some details about what the German paper’s editors seek to do. Said Tageszeitung’s Africa editor to The New Times:

"We hope that this investigation will contribute towards raising the profile of this issue in Germany and encouraging the German authorities to take appropriate measures. It is clear that any European effort to bring peace to Eastern DRC has to involve moving against leaders of armed groups operating from Europe with impunity."

Last month, French internet company OVH dropped FDLR’s website from its server under pressure from a TAZ reporter who questioned why OVH would host a site operated by a group currently committing war crimes. (Even the U.N. wasn’t able to convince OVH to shut down the website, which goes to show the power of bad press.)

The website is back in operation now, but the TAZ investigations will hopefully continue to expose the links between the Europe-based FDLR leaders and the egregious abuses committed by the foot soldiers in Congo. Perhaps the German authorities will be forced to think more creatively about how to shut down the European branch of the FDLR if these stories generate a public outcry. (How would you feel if you read in your local paper that a person orchestrating attacks against civilians, in particular very violent rape, was living in your midst, being protected by your government?)

Just this week, Radio Okapi, a local station in eastern Congo, reported fresh attacks by the FDLR that left 10 people dead and 20 wounded near the Virunga National Park in North Kivu province. A U.N. spokesperson, speaking to a Bloomberg reporter in Congo’s capital of Kinshasa, confirmed the attack.

More than 1,000 civilians have been killed, 7,000 women and girls raped, and 900,000 people forced to flee their homes since a military operation against the FDLR began in January 2009.

NB: Longtime Congo watcher Jason Stearns published an insightful blog post yesterday about the activities of the FDLR diaspora, including some recommended steps to take for getting rid of the rebel group that “do not involve the massive displacement of 900,000+ people.”

Photo: Ignace Murwanashyaka

A preliminary hearing at the International Criminal Court for Darfur rebel leader Bahr Idriss Abu Garda is nearing its end. Judges will soon decide whether enough evidence exists to bring Garda to trial over charges that he staged an attack on an African Union peacekeeping base in 2007 that killed 12 peacekeepers.

A piece today from the Institute for War & Peace Reporting provided details on the latest developments in the preliminary hearing, reporting that questions about the viability of the case now center on the neutrality of the base.

According to the prosecution, a case exists because peacekeepers are protected by international law that says attacking non-combatant peace forces is illegal. The defense argues that this protected status does not apply because the neutrality of the peacekeeping base is questionable.

Garda’s lawyer Karim Khan argues that because a Sudanese government representative was present at the peacekeeping base, it is possible the government was benefiting from information available to the peacekeepers. He suggested that the Sudanese official used the information to facilitate the government’s airstrikes on civilians and rebels in the area.

Under a peace agreement, the Sudan Liberation Army, the Justice and Equality Movement, and the Sudanese government were allowed to have a representative at the base.

Witnesses testified to the local suspicions felt toward the base. Rebels, alarmed by the presence of a Sudanese government official, prevented peacekeepers from patrolling and helicopters from landing. They also demanded the removal of the government representative.

Garda led the attack on the base after the Sudanese government bombed rebels in the area. The defense argued that the peacekeepers also failed to protect civilians during this bombing.

Under questioning by the defense, a Gambian peacekeeper said that no peacekeepers left the base to check what was going on when the bombing took place. Another witness testified that thousands of women and children demonstrated in front of the base to express their disappointment with the lack of protection the peacekeepers were providing.

The prosecution argued that even if the government representative was present, the peacekeepers were still entitled to civilian protection because they were not a party to the Darfur conflict, their mandate did not allow them to participate in hostilities, and they could only use force for self-defense.

A statement from peacekeepers read aloud in the courtroom noted: "Our mission was to establish peace. The AU had to bring the belligerent parties together through dialogue. Our role was to encourage dialogue. AMIS [African Union Mission in Sudan] was not mandated to intervene militarily."

Whether the defense will get to make this argument in court remains to be seen; the judges have 60 days to decide whether Garda’s case will go to trial.  But for now, this initial hearing sheds light on the local dynamic between civilians, rebels, and peacekeepers and acts as a reminder of the limitations of peacekeepers in Darfur, especially in the eyes of a population that still feels insecure, despite their presence.

• Darfur and Southern Sudan
• International Criminal Court
• International Criminal Court
• Protection
• United Nations
• War Crimes