Blog Posts in United Nations
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.
Gearing up for the ICC Review Conference in Kampala, Uganda this week and next, Bridget Conley-Zilkic interviewed Diane Orentlicher, deputy in the Office of War Crimes Issues at the Department of State, for the Voices on Genocide Prevention podcast series. Prof. Orentlicher talked about what the United States hopes to see happen in Kampala, now that the U.S. is engaging in the ICC as a non-state party observer. She also diplomatically, but substantively, discussed the hot topic of the crime of aggression.
Hereway Holland put together a useful Reuters Factbox on the political climate in Rwanda and some trends to watch in the lead up to national elections in August. Covering potential rifts in Rwanda’s ruling party, crackdowns on opposition groups, regional considerations, and even the stability of the country’s stock market, it’s a good primer for those planning to follow what’s sure to be an eventful, and hopefully peaceful, election season.
Opening tonight in select theaters, Living in Emergency follows four doctors with Doctors Without Borders, or MSF, through stints in eastern Congo and post-conflict Liberia. It was the first time MSF permitted a film crew to capture the day-to-day experiences of those working in the field, and the film was shortlisted for an Oscar in the Documentary Feature category. Here are some additional details about the film and the trailer:
Foreign Policy and Washington Post reporter Colum Lynch was a guest on PRI’s The World this week, where he talked about his recent piece, 10 Worst U.N. Security Council Resolutions Ever (which we recommended in last week’s 5 Best Stories). Host Marco Werman asked the longtime United Nations watcher some interesting questions about how the world body operates – things you probably didn’t realize you wanted to know, but are now you glad you do. (Like does the U.N. ever retire resolutions? Is there any rhyme or reason to the numbers?)
Taking advantage of all the dignitaries coming to town for the ICC Review Conference, the Africa Youth Initiative Network led by Victor Ochen organized a soccer match to highlight the plight of war crimes survivors from the central African countries where the ICC has open cases. Ochen’s organization convinced U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni to suit up for the match, and Mark Leon Goldberg previewed the event on U.N. Dispatch, including some details about Goldberg’s chance meeting with Ochen in 2008.
The New, Not-Necessarily-Improved MONUSCO
Lots of changes – some substantial, others cosmetic – are afoot for the world’s largest peacekeeping force, the nearly 21,000-strong U.N. mission in Congo, or MONUC. Bowing, in part, to the demands of Congolese President Joseph Kabila, the U.N. Security Council has voted to drawdown the force by 2,000 peacekeepers by the end of June, conditioning further withdraw of peacekeepers on the Congolese government’s ability to meet certain security requirements.
President Kabila initially said that he wanted to see MONUC withdraw from the country by Congo’s 50th anniversary of independence on June 30, and then revised the deadline, calling for foreign forces to be off Congolese soil in time for the presidential election in October 2011. Critics have been quick to note the convenience of having 19,000 U.N.-affiliated eyes out of the country in time for Kabila’s re-election bid and a vote that is widely expected to be contentious.
Speaking to reporters following the Security Council vote last Friday, U.N. peacekeeping chief Alain Le Roy explained the significance of the mission’s name change, from MONUC to MONUSCO, which stands for the Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo – stabilization being the operative word. "He wanted the international community to acknowledge they have entered a new phase," Le Roy said. "We acknowledge that the situation has improved," he said, but he added that the situation in eastern Congo remains perilous. “We are not able to protect every single citizen,” he said.
Indeed, while MONUC operates under a Chapter VII mandate, granting the peacekeepers the right to “take necessary action” against potential assailants to protect civilians, rights groups, including Enough, have documented numerous occasions in which armed groups have deliberately targeted civilians within close range of peacekeepers.
Congo expert/blogger Jason Stearns boiled down the changes in MONUSCO’s mandate into a bulleted list, and he included some insights about Security Council politics prior to passage of the reauthorization resolution: “China is trying to remove many of the concrete suggestions for how to protect civilians, as well as the conditionality of supporting the Congolese army. The Americans are pushing strongly for protection of civilians (but not security sector reform), while Austria is pushing on strong language on security sector reform. Uganda - wonder of wonders - didn't see the need to say that sexual violence was ‘widespread.’”
Alarmingly, though not surprisingly given President Kabila’s recent appeals toward state sovereignty, the final resolution passed by the Security Council emphasized the role of the U.N. to “support,” act “upon explicit request from,” and “assist” the Congolese government on fronts ranging from training its army, to helping displaced people return home, and preventing armed groups from benefiting from the East’s lucrative mineral resources. Of course, the catch-22 of this plan is that the Congolese soldiers are themselves one of the major predators threatening civilians and exploiting mineral wealth in the region. One Congolese commander, Bosco Ntaganda, is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes. In another serious indictment, the latest Group of Experts report, leaked to the press late last week, identified government agencies levying illegal taxes at various stages of the mineral trade. With this track record it’s difficult to be optimistic about the willingness of Congolese state and military authorities to initiate the meaningful reforms that need to occur.
Along with the mandate changes, which take effect on July 1, MONUSCO will also have new leadership, as head of mission Alan Doss recently announced his retirement. French diplomat Jean-Maurice Ripert’s name has been floated for the post. Ripert is currently serving as the New York-based U.N. special envoy to Pakistan.
Photo: MONUC peacekeepers in eastern Congo (IRIN)
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)
LRA Attacks Hamper Aid Delivery in Central African Republic
On May 6, a group from the Lord’s Resistance Army attacked a truck in Mbomou prefecture in the Central African Republic on the main national road connecting the remote southeastern town of Obo and the capital of Bangui, 750 miles apart. According to sources on the ground who spoke to Enough, three people died and two were severely wounded. The truck, hired by the World Food Program, had delivered food to Congolese refugees and internally displaced people in Mboki and Obo and was on its way back to Bangui when it was attacked by the rebels. The attack took place between the towns of Dembia and Rafai, close to the village of Guerekindo.
This is the not the first time vehicles were attacked in Guerekindo. On April 3, a commercial truck travelling from Bangui to Obo was attacked on the same spot by a large LRA group. Eight people were believed to have been killed, although the real number remains unclear as many were burned when rebels set the truck ablaze. At least two more people are still suffering from serious wounds. One of the injured has a bullet lodged in his chest and is in critical condition. Enough sources in the town of Zemio say that the number of people killed on April 3 might exceed 10.
LRA attacks targeting vehicles travelling on national roads in CAR have been frequent. A similar attack took place on September 21, 2009 when a truck belonging to the Italian non-governmental organization COOPI was attacked between Mboki and Obo. There were seven people in the truck, which was carrying construction materials for a school in Obo. According to two surviving witnesses, one person was shot during the attack while two others, including the driver, were killed later by the LRA. Of the four remaining passengers, one 10-year-old boy was released while the other three were assigned to different LRA groups. One of the abducted, a 14-year-old boy, tried later to escape but was caught and killed by an LRA commander. “The LRA commander crushed his skull with a big club,” one of the surviving witnesses told Enough.
The attack on the COOPI truck and the subsequent attacks targeting vehicles travelling on national roads have caused a state of paralysis in the Haut Mbomou and Mbomou prefectures in the Central African Republic. Humanitarian aid, already limited before the arrival of LRA groups in January 2009, has been severely affected. The World Food Program delivered food to over 5,000 Congolese refugees in Zemio, Mboki, and Obo months after it had promised to do so. Insecurity was the primary reason, and the attack of May 6 will certainly delay badly needed aid for much longer.
Trapped in towns, unable to harvest their produce from their fields for fear of LRA attacks, the population of Haut Mbomou and Mbomou are now deprived of the only remaining way to secure food and aid – from the Bangui road. “The situation is dire,” a source in Mboki told Enough by telephone. “We are facing starvation and need help urgently.”
However, the CAR government has shown little interest in addressing the conflict choking a region more than 600 miles from the nation’s capital. Rumor has it that a CAR government official from the interior ministry who happened to come across the injured in Guerekindo on May 6 returned to Bangui and made an impassioned speech calling for help from the government – and French commandos – to pursue the rebels and assist the civilians in areas targeted by the LRA. He was apparently immediately demoted.
Civilians Suffer From Reckless Fighting In Somalia
Somalia Militia (AP).jpg)
Indiscriminant attacks in Mogadishu by both Islamist insurgents and the African Union-supported Somali government continue to brutalize civilians, warned both the U.N. and an international human rights organization in the past week.
"I am deeply disturbed by the plight of civilians in Mogadishu, who are caught amidst the warring parties," said the U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator for Somalia Mark Bowden in response to shelling last Monday in the Somali capital that killed more than 20 civilians and injured 76—acts that Bowden called “clear violations of the law of war."
Human Rights Watch described a similarly dire situation for Mogadishu residents in its new report, as fighting between the Transitional Federal Government, or TFG (with the support of the African Union Mission in Somalia, or AMISOM), and Islamist militias rages on:
Civilians in Mogadishu continue to bear the brunt of the fighting, which has long been characterized by indiscriminate attacks by all sides. Opposition fighters have unlawfully deployed in densely populated civilian neighborhoods and at times used civilians as “shields” to fire mortars at TFG and AMISOM positions—attacks conducted so indiscriminately that they frequently destroy civilian homes but rarely strike military targets. Often AMISOM or TFG forces respond in kind, launching indiscriminate mortar strikes on the neighborhoods from which opposition fighters had fired and then fled—leaving only civilians to face the devastation that ensues.
The report emphasizes that such attacks, even when committed in reciprocity, are a breach of the conduct of war and international humanitarian law. According to Human Rights Watch, although both AMISOM and the government deny indiscriminately firing on civilians, neither party has detailed the measures taken to ensure that attacks are only aimed at military targets.
Countless civilians have already fallen victim to the fighting in Somalia. According to the U.N. humanitarian coordinator, the month of March was particularly deadly: more than 900 civilians were wounded as a result of fighting, including 100 children under five. In addition, the United Nations estimates that in the past two and a half months nearly 100,000 people have been forced to flee their homes.
Jennifer Altoff contributed to this post.
Photo: Islamist militia in Somalia. (AP)
