5 Stories You Might Have Missed This Week Posted by Laura Heaton on May 18, 2012
Here at Enough, we often swap emails with interesting articles and feature stories that we come across in our favorite publications and on our favorite websites. We wanted to share some of these stories with you as part of our effort to keep you up to date on what you need to know in the world of anti-genocide and crimes against humanity work. Reporting from the South Sudan side of the front line, a team from the Associated Press examined the impetus for the recent flare-up with Sudan. Reporter Jason Straziuso considers the immediate, if not lasting, impact of the rainy season on the border clashes, and photographer Pete Muller captures images of life as a soldier and a civilian on this contentious swath of land. Indispensible Congo blogger Jason Stearns provides an update on the ever-evolving Bosco mutiny, offering estimates of the number of fighters currently following Sultani Makenga, commander of the CNDP-offshoot M23, a description of their staging area, and insights on talks between Congolese and Rwandan officials about a variety of common issues but, conspicuously, not the fate of the mutineers. The Ugandan army was eager to have reporters speak to the recently captured LRA commander Caesar Acellam and highlight his role as a “big fish” in the rebel group. But analysts Simon Jennings of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting spoke to were more measured about the development, saying it offered little concrete insight into the strides made by the UPDF. “If Acellam did give himself up voluntarily, analysts say the arrest tells us little about how close the pursuit force is to catching Kony and the other commanders,” Jennings writes. “Little Mogadishu”—also known as the Singo Training School in Kakola, Uganda—is a thousand miles away from the real thing and situated beside a cow pasture, but it’s the “heart of the Obama administration’s strategy for fighting al-Qaeda militants in Somalia," writes The Washington Post’s Craig Whitlock. American defense contractors hired by the U.S. State Department, many with combat experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, will train about three-fourths of the African Union force deploying to Somalia, offering expertise in homemade explosives in particular. Drawing from U.N. officials, human rights advocates, and a leaked U.N. report, Foreign Policy’s Colum Lynch examines what’s motivating the dramatic decline in reporting about human rights violations in Darfur. The detailed piece highlights UNAMID’s compromised reporting on atrocities, as witnessed firsthand by members of the U.N. experts panel, that was “consistent with a pattern of bias ... which tended to ignore government abuses while highlighting those carried out by the rebels.” . -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "South Sudan Info - The Kob" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/SouthSudanKob?hl=en.
