An open letter from genocide scholars about what's happening in Sudan

Posted at our friends at Operation Broken Silence website.

Open Letter to the Obama Administration

A Photo Essay on the Long Walk from Blue Nile

No words needed....

PhotoEssay

The Elders. Have. A Blog.

I recently realized that The Elders have a blog.  What, you say?  Who, you ask?

"The concept originates from a conversation between the entrepreneur Richard Branson and the musician Peter Gabriel. The idea they discussed was simple: many communities look to their elders for guidance, or to help resolve disputes. In an increasingly interdependent world - a ‘global village’ - could a small, dedicated group of individuals use their collective experience and influence to help tackle some of the most pressing problems facing the world today?

Richard Branson and Peter Gabriel took their idea of a group of ‘global elders’ to Nelson Mandela, who agreed to support it. With the help of Graça Machel and Desmond Tutu, Mandela set about bringing the Elders together and formally launched the group in Johannesburg, July 2007."

The Elders are: Martti Ahtisaari; Ela Bhatt; Lakhdar Brahimi; Gro Brundtland; Fernando H. Cardoso: Jimmy Carter; Graca Machel; Mary Robinson; Desmond Tutu, and Kofi Annan.  Nelson Mandela is an Honorary Elder.

This is a link to the post, by Desmond Tutu, that (finally) brought their blog to my attention. It's a great read about the conflict between Sudan and South Sudan. 

Violence in Eastern Congo

"We have reached a new depth of misery in Congo's conflict when massacres go virtually unnoticed," said Oxfam's Associate Country Director Elodie Martel. "Vast swathes of the east have descended into chaos with no government or security presence. People have been abandoned to killing, rape, looting and extortion. They are fleeing for their lives and very little is being done to help." This is the renewed and more extreme violence in eastern Congo.  

More than 500,000 people have fled their homes in the past months.

Photo by Marie Cacace/Oxfam

This article in the Huffington Post gives some information about the crisis.

This is a statement from Ban Ki Moon.

At One Million Bones and Students Rebuild we have worked with many, many thousands of people over the past months, all of whom have indicated that they believe we have a responsibility TO HELP in crises like this. Each person has made a bone as a symbol of her or his conviction that we have an obligation TO HELP in crises like these.  Where are our political leaders?  

Shall we challenge our members of Congress to make a bone and think about the crisis the way we have been in classrooms and communities across the country?  

The funds that are being donated to CARE through the Students Rebuild challenge are being directed for services on the ground in Goma, which is squarely in the center of this area.  They'll need help more than ever.

Update on Darfur

Violence has been increasing in Darfur the last few months.  This link will take you to a new report, by the Enough project, that explains the situation.

Here's a summary from their website:

"Another Darfur peace agreement has failed, but the United Nations, or U.N., and some donor governments continue to prop up its implementation. This continued support is actually making matters worse in Darfur. By buttressing a dead peace deal, the interna- tional community is ignoring the ongoing conflict that the agreement did not address, while simultaneously contributing to the divide-and-conquer strategy of the Khartoum government, which seeks to negotiate separately with the various Darfur factions and to insulate the Darfur insurgency from other similar rebellions in South Kordofan, Blue Nile, and – potentially – the East.

The Doha Document for Peace in Darfur, or DDPD, was signed in July 2011 by the government of Sudan and the Liberation and Justice Movement, or LJM, only one of several Darfuri opposition rebel groups.1 From its inception, the DDPD was deeply flawed. It fails to address the most important security and political issues identified by Darfuris. Not only does it attempt to address the conflict in Darfur without including the three most prominent rebels groups in the region, the Justice and Equality Movement, or JEM, and both factions of the Sudan Liberation Movement, or SLM-Minni Minnawi and SLM-Abdel Wahid, but it also allows Khartoum to continue its divide-and-conquer strategy of dealing with each of the country’s conflict zones in isolation.

Nonetheless, the U. N. and key donor countries heralded the DDPD as an important step in ending the decade-long conflict in Sudan’s vast western region. Yet the government in Khartoum has consistently impeded any meaningful implementation of the agreement, which was already based on a shaky foundation. In fact, the DDPD’s shortcomings exist on two levels – an operational failure to actually follow through on the terms of the agreement and a deeper, conceptual failure of trying to address the crisis in Darfur separate from the myriad of conflicts in other marginalized regions of Sudan.

The agreement itself is badly flawed and incomplete. It is inadequate in that it does not tackle the core security and political issues that led Darfuris to take up arms against the regime in the first place. Moreover, it does not rein in the militias that continue to stoke the instability by preventing the return of internally displaced persons and refugees. The DDPD is eerily similar to the diplomatic disaster wrought by the earlier Darfur peace agreement signed in Abuja in 2006, which also spurred on intra-Darfur fighting and separated Darfur’s issues from the structural marginalization felt by most peripheral regions in Sudan.

The grievances found in Darfur are illustrative of larger national problems; in short, the situation is not unique. This is the root of the DDPD’s inherent flaw. The agreement addresses one manifestation of the broader problem of Khartoum’s rule – the economic, political, and social marginalization of populations living at Sudan’s peripheries. Until a comprehensive approach to political inclusion and democratic transformation for all Sudanese people is adopted, the DDPD –and any subsequent stove-piped agreements— will fail to bring peace to the volatile region, just as the Darfur Peace Agreement and similar such agreements were unable to do so previously.

In light of this, the U.S. government, as well as other key donors and multilateral organizations, must change their handling of Darfur as a separate policy portfolio from the rest of Sudan. Moving forward, Darfur must be integrated into holistic policy thinking concerning Sudan."

The conflict in Darfur has been on-going since 2003.  Estimates of the dead are in the hundreds of thousands, estimates of the displaced are up to 3 million.  Make a bone for the Darfuri people, won't you?