Following a flurry of media reports indicating that some South African civil society organizations want President Zuma to distance himself from last week’s AU decision to oppose the arrest warrant for President al-Bashir, as well as a poll released yesterday indicating that the general public in some countries is not as opposed to the Bashir […]
Archives for July 2009
Gacaca decision
July 16, 2009 by Leave a Comment
Earlier this month I attended an all-day Gacaca court appeal by former sous Préfet Béatrice Nirere against her conviction on genocide charges leading to a sentence of life imprisonment with “special conditions” (isolation). As I commented, during the first day of the appeal the case against her consisted primarily of hearsay evidence, if that. With […]
Aid expulsions: Are we missing the real story?
July 15, 2009 by 5 Comments
Fellow bloggers over at Change.org have been running a couple of posts trying to get at the thorny question of just what the impact of the NGO expulsions has been on the provision of aid in Darfur. It’s been a question of intrigue ever since US Special Envoy, Scott Gration, came out with a strange […]
Rob Crilly: The Analysis is the Problem
July 14, 2009 by 4 Comments
Rob Crilly is a British journalist I met in Nairobi. He has spent the past five years covering Darfur, and has his first book coming out later this year, entitled Saving Darfur: Everyone’s Favourite African War. He and I disagree on several things (the value of the ICC for instance) and he, like many, has […]
The Red Terror: On memory & “progress”
July 14, 2009 by Leave a Comment
On Saturday, the US Mission to the AU hosted a screening of Obama’s Ghana speech for AU staff, and a friend who works there invited me along. With rain delaying the speech, there was time for an unofficial tour. We walked up three flights of stairs to look out over a construction site. “China has […]
Tim Nonn: Civil disobedience
July 13, 2009 by 3 Comments
To start us off, here is Tim Nonn’s piece – unabashedly focused on the question of what advocates can do to strengthen the movement and increase political will, it does not attempt to come up with policy solutions. Engaging with this within those parameters: I recall some discussions of civil disobedience for Darfur a few […]
What next?
July 13, 2009 by 5 Comments
Alex de Waal and Nick Kristof come from relatively different ends of the Darfur advocacy spectrum. Yet last week de Waal’s Making Sense of Darfur piece asked “Can Sudan Activism Transform Itself for the Obama Era?” and last month Kristof’s On The Ground blog began by saying “The Save Darfur movement seems to be losing […]
A picture worth a thousand words
July 12, 2009 by Leave a Comment
Walking up the stairs to the office of the Acting Head of the AU’s Conflict Management Centre you come across multiple, almost life-size photographs, of AMIS officers proudly standing to attention in El Fasher.
Reactions at the AU to Obama’s Ghana speech
July 11, 2009 by 4 Comments
ADDIS ABABA – I spent this afternoon in the Plenary Hall of the African Union, watching Obama’s Ghana speech and listening to the responses it drew from some hundred of the AU and local embassy staff in attendance. The broadcast quality was bad from the Ghanaian end due to the rains, and we all strained […]
Alex Meixner: Ongoing recalibration
Following a series of posts by Tim Nonn and Rob Crilly, today’s contribution comes from Alex Meixner – Senior Director for Policy and Government Relations at Save Darfur. In this quite lengthy post, Meixner deals with the question of how U.S.-based advocates can maintain political strength, as well as the policy question of what that […]