Hi everyone I got a number of emails following my post yesterday and a couple of questions were raised (summarized below) that I thought were worth responding to publicly: 1. You mainly just give the names of “bad guys” you spoke with. It might have been helpful to include the names of some others. . […]
Return from Sudan
August 26, 2009 by 1 Comment
Hi everyone As many of you know I spent August in Sudan. Unfortunately this blog was a casualty of my time there – with the GOS having blocked this site inside Sudan I couldn’t access even the back-end of it to post updates. In many ways it was a blessing in disguise, both because I […]
Marc Gustafon: A Prescription for Darfur activists [Part 1]
August 1, 2009 by 6 Comments
The following is the first of a two-part post by Marc Gustafon, following an earlier series of posts from Tim Nonn, Rob Crilly and Alex Meixner, on the question of “What’s Next?” for Darfur advocacy. I have some comments on the proposal below, but will wait until the end of the second part of this […]
Time to take a position
August 1, 2009 by 5 Comments
Wow – is really the only thing I can come up with after reading this. Below is the relevant section of the transcript from yesterday’s U.S. State Department press briefing by Phillip Crowley. If you have the bandwidth (I don’t) you can watch the video of it. And if anyone knows who this incredibly persistent […]
The death of Garang
July 30, 2009 by Leave a Comment
It’s four years ago today since “Dr. John” as he was referred to by all the Southerners I knew at the time, was killed in a helicopter accident (an incident officially cleared of “suspicious circumstances” – yet suspicions remain). Like all who are taken from us before their time, there has been a tendency since […]
Beyond the “g-word”
July 29, 2009 by Leave a Comment
Following some comments I made in a previous post, David Scheffer, law professor and director of the Center for International Human Rights at Northwestern University School of Law, and the U.S. Ambassador at Large for War Crimes Issues (1997-2001), writes about the utility of advocates using the “atrocity crimes” terminology in Darfur. Atrocity Crimes in […]
Fighting to keep genocide out of the Bashir arrest warrant
July 28, 2009 by 3 Comments
High profile international lawyers Sir Geoffrey Nice QC and Rodney Dixon have once again applied on behalf of the groups, the Sudan Workers Trade Unions Federation (SWTUF) and the Sudan International Defence Group (SIDG), to submit an amicus brief to the ICC in the Bashir case. Their first attempt to do this earlier in the […]
UNDPKO briefing: “We are in many ways no closer to a solution . . .”
July 27, 2009 by 1 Comment
On Friday morning, the Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, Alain Le Roy, briefed the UN Security Council in New York during their 6170th meeting. His briefing covered the progress of UNAMID deployment (five battalion and five infantry companies arriving in the coming months; nine of the proposed eleven formed police units to be deployed by the […]
Who does the oil belong to?
July 26, 2009 by Leave a Comment
Following up on my last post regarding the ongoing contestation of the Heglig oilfield following the Abyei decision, this piece was sent to me by a friend of a friend that I first worked with in South Sudan five years ago. Garang Kuot Kuot works at the Council of Ministers, Northern Bahr El-Ghazal State, and […]
Marc Gustafon: A Prescription for Darfur activists [Part 2]
This is the second of a two-part posting by Marc Gustafon. A Prescription for Darfur activists [Part 2/2] By Marc Gustafon Ignoring the Peace Process Use of the word “genocide” has also caused activists to ignore the peace process. Since most Americans had been convinced that only one side of the Darfur conflict was responsible […]