March 28, 2024

26 aid organizations expelled (well – not exactly)

*UPDATE* – It seems the organizations “expelled” had not been operational in Sudan since 2008 anyway, so this is not the concern that the headline in the report below suggests in that no one currently serving the Darfur population has  been expelled at all.(NB – The Xinhua report claimed to have been a press release […]

Letter From Khartoum

Up now at Foreign Affairs, my piece “Letter From Khartoum” on the distinctly unfree and unfair conditions in which Sudanese people are being asked to go to the polls next year.

Sudan’s “new” national security law

Below is an unofficial translation of the most controversial aspects of the “new” National Security Act that the ruling NCP rammed through the Sudanese Parliament earlier this week. At first glance Section 50 (E) (“Detention or arrest of any suspected person for a period not exceeding thirty days provided that his or her family is […]

Law Reform (minus the reform part)

News reports indicate that a last-minute ditch effort by the NCP to check the box on the reform of the National Security Act (which gives Sudan’s security services the veneer of legal cover as they arbitrarily detain Sudanese citizens, incommunicado – more often than not torturing the detainees in their custody) took place yesterday. I […]

We don’t know what is on the list of benchmarks, but we can tell what is not

It has been several weeks since U.S. activists made a concerted effort to get the collapse of SGBV services in Darfur onto the radar of Secretary Clinton, General Gration and Ambassador Rice. Letters were sent, meetings were held, follow-up was provided. I wouldn’t have expected anything to actually shift on the ground within this timeframe, […]

Bits & pieces

I’m trying to stay offline as much as possible at the moment as I’m in self-imposed lock-down-drafting mode for the book. But a couple of things I can’t overlook. 1. Doha First, a useful post from Julie Flint over on the Making Sense of Darfur blog about Doha, serving to remind me that I never […]

Interviewing Musa Hilal

This is in The New Republic based on two interviews I did with Musa Hilal, “leader of the Janjaweed” when I was in Khartoum (note – I did not chose the headline). What was fascinating was the extent to which he genuinely sees himself as a peacemaker – a good reminder of the fact that […]

Postscript: Abdalhaleem’s other function

After reading my previous post a Darfur advocate came back to me with a sound point that deserves incorporation. Namely that in addition to distorting the field in terms of U.S.-based advocacy asks, Abdalhaleem’s comments (and those of the same genre) serve another function – trial ballooning for, in particular, a regional audience. In other […]

Let’s not get played by the “Abdalhaleem tactic”

After the Secretary General’s Nov. 16 report hit the news headlines this week, Sudan Ambassador to the UN, Abdalmahmoud Abdalhaleem, told Reuters: “One big fact should be the focus of the report — that the war is over . . .With peace in sight, the U.N. should, in coordination with the African Union and Sudanese […]

Podcast: Restore SGBV services – same message, different medium

As part of the Voices on Genocide Prevention podcast series, I did this interview shortly after I got back from Darfur. It’s really just another forum through which to plug the same message – Services for survivors of sexual violence in Darfur must be restored.