August 15, 2009 Tonight I took my “driver” to watch his football team (Merriek) play Zambia’s Zesco team in the African Cup. I put “driver” in inverted commas, because this gentleman – who looks to be pushing 80 – is so much more than the role he appears to assume when he gets into his […]
Lubna: “It’s not about the trousers”
August 29, 2009 by 2 Comments
Next Friday, September 4, is the third time Lubna Hussein will be going to court for the “crime” of wearing trousers. I met with Lubna a number of times when I was in Khartoum, and will be posting some background on her in the coming days. When I left, Lubna insisted on seeing me off […]
Key issues from my visit to Darfur
August 28, 2009 by 4 Comments
I’m still digesting my pages and pages of notes, and ordering my thoughts, so take this as a non-exhaustive list: 1. Collapse of GBV services following the expulsion of the humanitarians If there was one issue I could get a spot on CNN to talk about, it would be this. I had an inkling of […]
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 […]
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 […]
Abyei decision: As “politics as usual” sets in . . .
July 23, 2009 by 3 Comments
Twenty-four hours after the fact, the initially rosy press bites on the Abyei decision are starting to take on a tinge of gray. Immediately after the ruling, the GOS delegate to the PCA tribunal in The Hague said “We welcome the fact that the oil fields are now excluded from the Abyei area, particularly the […]
Abyei: The “let’s avoid war” decision
July 22, 2009 by 4 Comments
Today the ad hoc tribunal at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague handed down what reads to me like a “let’s avoid war” decision on the contested Abyei area; it gives both the SPLM/A and the GOS something they can claim as a victory. The tribunal’s first task, under the terms of the […]
Beyond the “g-word”
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 […]