Blog Posts in Genocide
Share Your Enough Moment
In their forthcoming book, The Enough Moment, John Prendergast and Don Cheadle present the stories of celebrities, activists and survivors who have dedicated their lives to advocating for human rights in Africa. It all begins with an "Enough Moment" -- an experience in your life when you realize you have to stand up, speak out, and organize with others on vital human rights issues in Africa.
The book hits stores Sept. 7, but you don’t have to wait to share your own Enough Moment. We’re interested in hearing your story now, so we’re gathering video versions of personal Enough Moments.
Just begin the video by introducing yourself: Tell us your name, where you live, and what you do. In three minutes or less, describe how you are involved in fighting for human rights in Africa, and the moment in your life that prompted you to take action.
Most importantly, be yourself. Film your video in a simple, natural environment. It's just you, on camera, sharing your story.
Want to see an example? Here's Enough's own Mari Wright sharing her Enough Moment.
When you're finished with your video, upload it to YouTube with the tag "enoughmoment." Please title it “[your name]’s Enough Moment.” For example, John would title his video “John Prendergast’s Enough Moment.” Finally, email the link to us at yourmoment@enoughproject.org.
Later this summer, we'll be launching a special Web site, www.enoughmoment.org, where your video will appear alongside other Enough Moments from celebrities, activists, and survivors.
To learn more about the book and to pre-order your own copy, click here.
Thank you, and we look forward to hearing about your Enough Moment.
Human Rights Leader Samantha Power on the Life of a U.N. Icon
This post originally appeared on Change.org’s Human Rights blog.
If Samantha Power — who was a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, acclaimed journalist, and popular Harvard lecturer on human rights before becoming a close advisor to President Obama — says that she has a story to tell about a “man of action and a man of reflection,“ who had “a thirty-four-year head start in thinking about the plagues that preoccupy us today,” we would all do well to listen.
The story of longtime U.N. diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello has become a centerpiece of Power’s public discussions on the importance of the U.S. taking a principled stance on human rights in its foreign policy, the shortcomings of the United Nations, and how to confront, or better yet prevent, mass atrocities and genocide. From her book Chasing the Flame grew the film “Sergio” by director Greg Barker, which after making the rounds at international film festivals, debuted on HBO last week. Following the screening, Power and Barker joined a public conference call moderated by a veteran of African conflict zones, John Prendergast.
Their candid conversation, which lasted well into the night, is a rare gem, and I wanted to draw attention to it today. You can listen to this podcast after the jump, at the bottom of this post.
When Sergio Vieira de Mello died in the rubble of the bombed out U.N. compound in Baghdad, the United Nations lost one of its most experienced and talented diplomats. Power eloquently described how she channeled her grief over his death into an effort to examine and immortalize his legacy. And she found that, beyond simply an intriguing biography, the tragedy of Vieira de Mello’s death was a metaphor for the vexing, even debilitating, challenges the United Nations faces around the world.
Power first met Sergio Vieira de Mello when their paths crossed in eastern Europe in 1994. She was a young journalist covering the war in the former Yugoslavia and Vieira de Mello was a top U.N. diplomat dispatched to work on ending it. Though it would be another 10 years until Power began researching Vieira de Mello’s life for the biography, she recounts their first dinner meeting with a level of detail that conveys the significance of those first impressions. He was “a cross between James Bond and Bobby Kennedy,” she wrote.
Vieira de Mello did indeed travel with the headlines of the day; a timeline of significant dates over the last 30 years of the U.N.’s history mirrors the major promotions and moves of Vieira de Mello’s career since he was 21. As he rose through the U.N. ranks, he continuously reflected on his decisions from both a philosophical and a practical standpoint. As Power wrote in Chasing the Flame:
At the start of his career he advocated strict adherence to a binding set of principles. (…) He was deeply mistrustful of state power and of military force. But as he moved from Sudan to Lebanon to Cambodia to Bosnia to Congo to Kosovo to East Timor to Iraq, he tailored his tactics to the troubles around him and tried to enlist the powerful. He brought a gritty pragmatism to negotiations, yet no amount of exposure to brutality seemed to dislodge his ideals.
At times, Vieira de Mello’s approach flirted with moral lines, such as when he chose to negotiate directly with the Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge while the rest of the world isolated the genocidal regime, and certainly he was responsible for his share of mistakes. But the profile Power paints is of a leader who challenged himself to translate failures into lessons. He understood that his engagement — the U.N.’s engagement — would not always, or perhaps even not often, move mountains. But he understood that even a small improvement made the effort worthwhile. Vieira de Mello personifies Power’s concept of an upstander, someone who doesn’t simply stand by when injustices occur.
It’s remarkable to have the chance to hear Samantha Power, a woman many people regard as a hero in her own right, describe the inspiration she found in one of the fallen heroes of our time. Listen to this podcast; the lessons she draws from Vieira de Mello’s life are central to the work all of us do as human rights advocates.
You can download the entire podcast by right-clicking here and selecting "Save as."
Photo: Sergio Vieira de Mello (Wikimedia Commons/Agência Brasil)
5 Best 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 Sudan Tribune compiled some public perceptions about the vote in the South and turned up some interesting information about why people voted for who they did – in sweeping numbers, Salva Kiir – and how they might have cast their votes differently had the poll occurred after the long-awaited referendum next year to decide the future of southern Sudan.
The L.A. Times ran a nice (if slightly floridly worded) feature
about the women who work on the streets of Khartoum serving tea, unofficially Sudan’s national beverage.
In the typical Vanity Fair fashion of delving deep into individuals profiled, the magazine published a fascinating piece about Sam Childers, known as Reverend Sam, who has made it his personal mission to take down Lord’s Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony. In his outpost in southern Sudan, complete with his own contingent of southern Sudanese soldiers, “he is not your typical evangelical Christian missionary, nor, as a white American, is he your typical African warlord,” writes Ian Urbina.
BBC’s Lucy Fleming covered the underground trade in araqi, gin made from fermented dates, in this dispatch from Khartoum. Despite the strict punishment meted out to those who violate Sharia law by buying or selling the liquor, the business is triving, as this colorful piece tells.
After two years at the helm of Change.org’s Stop Genocide blog, the influential human rights blogger known simply as Michelle has filed her last piece. She reflected today on the anti-genocide movement, the perhaps the unattainable ideal of ‘never again,’ and the intentions of individuals who dedicate their energy to this very steep uphill battle.
5 Best 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.
In an op-ed in the Guardian, journalist and Sudan expert Julie Flint described some of the ways the Sudanese government is using its national security law – ostensibly in place to keep al-Qaeda suspects in custody – to violently suppress opposition, even in modest forms, in the run-up to the election next month. As she points out through examples, the ‘African success story’ the Guardian recently described deserves a bit more nuance, published, as it was, a day after Sudanese security services arrested a student leader in Khartoum and subjected him to a mock execution.
In her weekly segment for the New York Times magazine, Deborah Soloman interviewed author Chinua Achebe about the recent religious violence in Nigeria, the political turmoil that recently saw the country’s president go “on leave” in Saudi Arabia, and Achebe’s experience living in exile in the United States. (The best-selling author recently published a collection of short stories, his first book in more than 20 years.)
Sean Brooks from the Save Darfur Coalition, fresh from a trip to Darfur, made some excellent points about the serious challenges faced by the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Sudan’s troubled western region. Here’s one:
(…) UNAMID can only carry out its Chapter 7 mandate and other duties to protect civilians with the consent of the Sudanese government. (…) For citizens throughout Darfur, this arrangement means that daily security depends almost entirely on the local relationships between residents, UNAMID, and the controlling authorities in the area.
Despite the immense difficulty of gaining reliable information from the war zone that is Somalia today, Amnesty International issued a report this week documenting abuses against civilians during the past six months. Amnesty found that the most egregious and widespread abuses – torture, stoning, amputations – are occurring in areas controlled by groups opposed to the fragile Transitional Federal Government in efforts “to intimidate and instill fear in the population in order to assert their control over territory,” they wrote.
A piece by the Washington Post/Foreign Policy’s Colum Lynch, writing on his new blog Turtle Bay, gives a good useful overview of some of reasons why the United States and the United Nations are in an “awkward” position as Sudan prepares to hold its first multiparty elections in over 20 years. Lynch’s piece also highlights some of the most quote-worthy remarks of the week.
5 Best 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.
What has the $15 million directed by the Canadian government toward the epidemic of sexual violence in Congo accomplished? Little, argues this article by The Globe and Mail’s Geoffrey York. Featuring insights of Congolese human rights leader Justine Masika Bihamba, York describes the bureaucratic and administrative black hole into which much of the funding intended to prevent sexual violence and rehabilitate victims disappears. For example:
An internal Canadian government report … concluded that Canada was spending too much money on T-shirts, vests, caps, cardboard folders and gaudy posters while failing to make progress on the bigger issues of prevention and justice. Ms. Bihamba chuckled grimly as she described the foreign- aid projects. The simple problem with the campaign, she said, is that most perpetrators of sexual violence are illiterate – they can't read the printed messages.
Genocide in Darfur, political oppression, and international justice – these are all themes inherently part of Sudan’s hip hop music. Even when it isn’t election season, this burgeoning music scene is discreet, reports AFP’s Guillaume Lavallee from Khartoum. But the artists find ways to express themselves. "If there are songs that speak the truth, I sing them in French," one rapper said, instead of Sudan's native Arabic.
Enough’s Maggie Fick and Justice Africa’s Neha Erasmus had a stimulating debate hosted by the Making Sense of Sudan blog on the topic of how to portray experiences, challenges, and daily life in Sudan within the U.S. advocacy movement.
The latest edition of the Voices on Genocide Prevention podcast series features an interview with New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. Host Bridget Conley-Zilkic poses some difficult questions, such as asking Kristof to respond to the criticism that the Darfur advocacy movement in the United States oversimplified the story of Darfur or created the expectation among Darfuris that the international community would “come in and save them in a way that didn’t happen.”
Refugees International’s Erin Weir and U.N. Dispatch’s Mark Goldberg discuss Weir’s upcoming trip to southern Sudan in this bloggingheads.tv diavlog. Their engaging chat covers many of the major challenges confronting the North and the South this year, and in particular addresses the deficiencies of the U.N. mission in the South, which Weir will be evaluating during her visit.
