Blog Posts in War Crimes
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.
Congress Passes Conflict Minerals Legislation
Today, Congo activists, U.S. consumers, and the people of Congo won an incredible victory against long odds. Congress passed the Wall Street reform bill with the inclusion of a key provision on conflict minerals. The conflict minerals language requires companies that use tin, tungsten, tantalum, or gold in their products to file a disclosure report with the Securities and Exchange Commission detailing whether these materials originated in Congo or its adjoining countries. And thanks to you, the bill requires companies to audit these reports to actually prove whether they are sourcing from conflict mines or not.
While passage of the conflict minerals provision is not a cure-all for completely ending the war in Congo, it is a huge step forward. This new law – once it is signed by President Obama – begins to eliminate the source of funding that allows armed militias to continue to terrorize and humiliate communities, cause countless deaths, and commit widespread sexual violence and rape.
While the fight is not over, activists should be very proud of this impressive victory and deserve to relish in this moment. Across the United States, Congo activists, members of the diaspora, and concerned consumers – the growing movement across America that sees the urgency in ending the world’s deadliest war – rallied around the passage of this legislation. They overran the Facebook pages of elected officials, followed up with phone calls, met face-to-face with their representatives, and called on industry leaders to clean up their supply chain. Senators Sam Brownback (R-KS), Dick Durbin (D-IL), and Russ Feingold (D-WI), Representatives Jim McDermott (D-WA), Howard Berman (D-CA), and Donald Payne (D-NJ), Chairmen Chris Dodd (D-CT) and Barney Frank (D-MA), and many other brave members of Congress also deserve special praise for taking a major step to ending the neglected conflict in eastern Congo. These are just some examples of the creative advocacy that has helped elevate the issue of conflict minerals to reach today’s tipping point.
From the day President Obama signs the bill, the Securities and Exchange Commission will have nine months to promulgate regulations implementing the new law. It will be up to us to ensure that these regulations are as strong as possible. While the jewelry and manufacturing lobbyists were caught off guard by the conflict minerals language and weighed in too late to remove the language, you can be sure industries will fight to make sure the regulations implementing the law are as weak as possible. As this story continues to develop, we’ll be coming to you with new ways of getting engaged. Please stick with us.
Congratulations on today’s exciting victory!
Photo: Tin ore (Sasha Lezhnev)
Bashir’s New Cabinet and the Threat of War in Sudan
The key question looming for all of Sudan remains Khartoum’s response to the impending self-determination referendum for the South, scheduled for January 9, 2011. Sudan’s ruling National Congress Party, or NCP, completely dominates governance in Khartoum, and thus holds the key to peace or war. The NCP cabinet—formed by President Omar al-Bashir in the wake of the April electoral travesty billed as “national elections”—has now been announced, and it offers some ominous clues about the direction in which the NCP is headed.
This new government in Khartoum is as much a reflection of its past as the National Islamic Front, or NIF, as the previous government. Indeed, the appointment of Ali Ahmed Karti as foreign minister in particular signals a clear continuation of ruthless Islamist policies that have been a source of acute tensions between the North and South. His appointment has already roiled the waters in Khartoum’s relations with Egypt, and can be expected to be a source of real difficulties in relations with the U.S. and E.U.
The cabinet appointments as a whole strongly suggest that the "political space" claimed for northern political actors as a product of recent national elections was mere wishful thinking; certainly the recent sharp crackdown on human rights advocates and the press are consistent with previous policies and those we might expect from this new cabinet. The new NIF/NCP cabinet is also consistent with the most important shift discernible in the balance of power within the ruling elite, namely, that this power rests increasingly within the small circle of presidential advisors, particularly Nafi'e Ali Nafi'e. Nafi’e is the hardest of the “hard-liners” in the regime, and his constituency has been ascendant for several years.
Also of note in this connection is that General Bakri Hassan Salih continues as Minister of Presidential Affairs: He is the former Minister of Defense, and clearly one of those most responsible for the Darfur genocide. He is named prominently in a key Human Rights Watch report from December 2005, identifying those most responsible within the NIF/NCP military and political hierarchy for ethnically-targeted violence in Darfur. The report (“Entrenching Impunity: Government Responsibility for International Crimes in Darfur”) concludes with a two-page list of those who Human Rights Watch believes should be investigated by the International Criminal Court, or ICC. The list includes not only Bakri Hassan Salih, but Saleh Abdalla ‘Gosh’ and Abdel Rahim Mohammed Hussein (see below), former First Vice President Ali Osman Taha, Ahmed Haroun (former State Minister of the Interior), and President Omar Hassan al-Bashir. The last two are indeed wanted by the ICC for crimes against humanity.
The brutal Abdel Rahim Mohammed Hussein continues as Defense Minister. He was previously Minister of the Interior, during the worst years of genocidal destruction in Darfur, and has notoriously pushed for forced returns of internally displaced persons, as well as severe restrictions on humanitarian assistance. Moreover, he is named in a confidential “Annex” to the 2006 report by the U.N. Panel of Experts on Darfur as one of those most responsible for the actions of the janjaweed militias. Sixteen others are named in the Annex, including Saleh Abdalla ‘Gosh’; ‘Gosh’ is the former head of the fearsome National Security and Intelligence Service, or NISI, and presently serves as yet another “presidential advisor.” The confidential Annex reports that 'Gosh' failed “to take action as Director of NISI to identify, neutralize and disarm non-state armed militia groups in Darfur.” He also was accused of “command responsibility for acts of arbitrary detention, harassment, torture, denial of right to fair trial, committed by members of the NSIS in Darfur under his control.”
Here it is worth recalling the largest conclusion of the Panel of Experts in August 2006—more than three years into the genocide—and what this may portend for renewed fighting in southern Sudan, in which the regime would certainly depend heavily on proxy militia forces:
“[We found] credible information that the Government of the Sudan continues to support the Janjaweed through the provision of weapons and vehicles. The Janjaweed/armed militias appear to have upgraded their modus operandi from horses, camels and AK-47s to land cruisers, pickup trucks and rocket-propelled grenades. Reliable sources indicate that the Janjaweed continue to be subsumed into the Popular Defence Force in greater numbers than those indicated in the previous reports of the Panel. Their continued access to ammunition and weapons is evident in their ability to coordinate with the Sudanese armed forces in perpetrating attacks on villages and to engage in armed conflict with rebel groups.” (Paragraph 76)
Much has been made of the appointment of the southerner Lual Deng to head the new "Petroleum Ministry," which has been spun off from the former Ministry of Energy and Mining. In fact, this appointment simply confirms that the accounting books on oil revenues, including those owed to the Government of South Sudan, have by now been thoroughly "cooked." The NIF/NCP has denied the South many hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of the past five years through accounting legerdemain and skewed reporting on extraction totals and locations. The appointment of Lual Deng clearly suggests that no forensic accounting will yield significant insight into the whereabouts of revenues expropriated by Khartoum.
This is a cabinet and security cabal that will strongly support President al-Bashir in any decision to delay, abort, or militarily preempt the southern self-determination referendum. In that sense, it may well be a war cabinet.
Eric Reeves is a professor of English at Smith College. He has published extensively on Sudan, nationally and internationally, for more than a decade. His book on Darfur—A Long Day’s Dying: Critical Moments in the Darfur Genocide—was published in 2007.
Tiptoeing Around Africa’s Human Rights Abusers
This post originally appeared on Change.org's Human Rights blog.
The Obama administration rolled out an impressive full afternoon event last week at the State Department, headlined by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, which was very clearly designed to win over an audience of 300+ Africa specialists.
If the sampling of people I spoke to there were representative of the larger group, and I believe they were, there’s a sense of disappointment about President Obama’s limited engagement with the continent. Some pundits, like the New Yorker’s George Packer, point out, “Obama never placed democracy and human rights at the center of his foreign policy.” But President Obama’s well-regarded speech in Ghana last year certainly raised these expectations.
However, the briefing didn’t alleviate these concerns about the Obama administration’s follow-through, at least not on the conflict mitigation/prevention front.
Among my colleagues at the Enough Project and our partner organizations working on some of the most egregious human rights abuses, there is a particular frustration about the Obama administration’s hesitancy to criticize or use pressure to influence some of the continent’s most repressive leaders. Certainly after the policies of the Bush administration, the trend toward humility and respectful engagement is refreshing. But where’s the red line? So far, the Obama administration has been shockingly tolerant of backsliding on human rights issues and disrespect for democratic values, seemingly favoring policies that maintain the status quo rather than push for bold reforms.
Take the volatile Horn of Africa, for instance. The United States has good relations with most governments in the region, which is a useful diplomatic tool. But as Somalia expert Professor Ken Menkhaus aptly pointed out at a House subcommittee hearing recently, many of these governments are despised by their own people. The United States risks undermining the renewed good graces that the Obama administration ushered in if the U.S. government doesn’t using its leverage to push these “partners” to reign in corruption, address impunity rampant among security forces, allow press to report freely without fear of retribution. (I could list specific countries for each of these abuses, but this paragraph would get awfully long.)
Click here to continue reading.
Photo: Billboard honoring President Obama in Ghana (AP)
White House Blog Picks Up LRA Bill Signing
The White House’s Office of Public Engagement recently published a blog post about the ceremony held last week where President Obama signed into law the Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act. The post includes a photo taken in the Oval Office of President Obama and the guests invited to the signing ceremony, including Enough Co-founder John Prendergast and representatives of our partner organizations, Invisible Children and Resolve Uganda.
Starting from the day the bill was signed, the Obama administration has 180 days to devise a strategy for eliminating the threat posed by the Lord’s Resistance Army in central Africa and bolstering efforts to protect civilians.
The signing ceremony represented a major victory for the tens of thousands of activists around the United States who mobilized to push the LRA bill through Congress. Getting the bill to President Obama’s desk was no small feat – just ask the students who camped out in front of Senator Coburn’s office in Oklahoma for 11 days last winter – but the advocacy work is far from over. Attention must now be focused on ensuring that the strategy put forth by the administration is designed to effectively neutralize the LRA leadership, encourage lower level LRA fighters to defect, help abducted children in the LRA ranks return to their homes, and assist communities terrorized by the LRA rebuild.
