Darfur
Nine years on is the UN still failing Darfur?
View event here. Download this episode View in iTunes By Nicky Armstrong Last night’s event at the Frontline Club saw a heated debate between the expert panel and the audience on the UN’s presence in Darfur. Chaired by Patrick Smith, editor of Africa Confidential, the discussion bought up many of the tangled complexities surrounding the […]
Nine years on is the UN still failing Darfur?
Since the start of the 2003 conflict in Darfur, questions have been raised about the role played by the United Nations and the viability of its mandate.
Join us at the Frontline Club to discuss the actions of the UN and whether they are still failing Darfur.
U.N Me Screening and Q&A with author Ami Horowitz
By: Ivana Davidovic When the United Nations was founded after World War II it embodied the world’s hopes for a more peaceful and just world. Since it’s noble founding, wars and human rights abuses have continued unabated, throwing a spotlight at the UN’s role in keeping the peace and building a fairer world for all. […]
Saving Darfur
My book is all set for its launch next month, which is one of the reasons why my Middle East blog has been a little quiet. Over at South of West though I’ve updated things with a bit more on the book, some endorsements and a list of events to promote Saving Darfur. This year […]
Darfur: A New Deadly Chapter… Or Maybe Not
The Independent’s splash makes for powerful reading… The Lord’s Resistance Army, one of the most feared guerrilla groups in Africa, has moved into Darfur, one of the continent’s most troubled regions, intelligence sources in Sudan say. The unexpected move by the LRA comes just as the war-weary west of Sudan recedes from world headlines and […]
I Think You’ll Find It’s a Bit More Complicated Than That
I’ve long been a fan of Ben Goldacre’s column Bad Science in The Guardian and his blog. It won’t surprise you to know that his use of rational thought and scientific evidence to dispel deliberate quackery and ill-thought out mumbo jumbo – take the MMR nonsense or homoeopathy – is rather popular in these quarters. […]
Evidence vs Dogma in Darfur
After six years of violence, the war in Darfur is over, according to a man who should know. General Martin Luther Agwai was handed mission impossible two years ago – setting up the joint UN and AU peacekeeping job. In an interview with the BBC, as he prepares to step down as force commander, General […]
Endorsements
So the second draft is done. There is more editing ahead, and the afterword will probably be redone to take account of ongoing developments in Darfur. But the back is broken, the end is in sight etc. My publisher has read the manuscript. But she knows what to expect. There are typos, occasional bouts of […]
Don’t Send Me Home, says Refugee
Been busy with other things so have missed a few gems over the past few weeks, so I’ll be catching up on a few oldies starting with this in the Sudan Tribune… The chairman of Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) Abdel-Wahid Al-Nur dismissed reports by the African Union – United Nations mission in Darfur (UNAMID) on […]
The Future of Darfur Advocacy
Over at The Promise of Engagement my good friend Bec Hamilton, who is researching a book on Darfur, kicks off a debate on the future of advocacy… 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 […]
Shoddy Deals for Darfur
So you may remember that a few weeks ago I wondered what had prompted three NGOs – smeared, criminalised, intimidated – expelled from Darfur to consider returning. With no guarantees that the same thing wouldn’t happen all over again once they had poured millions of dollars more into the region, they decided to return with […]
Gambling for Sudan
I’m generally in favour of celebrities getting involved in awareness raising campaigns for Africa’s miserable assortment of wars. And, while destroying children’s toys for Darfur appeared to show a slight misunderstanding of the nature of kids’ playthings in this part of the world, I wasn’t going to get too pedantic about cultural disconnects and so […]
Microwaving the Frog in Darfur
Here’s how one of my aid worker friends put it: "It’s like the boiling frog. If you had said to us at the start of the Darfur emergency that this is where we would end up, then no-one would have accepted it. But Khartoum made things worse bit by bit, almost imperceptibly until we ended […]
What’s the Point of Advocacy?
Signs of weariness among some of the campaigners who first brought Darfur to the world’s attention. After six years of advocacy, of campaigning for an end to the conflict, there’s a moment of soul-searching. Nick Kristof, columnist for the New York Times, wrote the first article that catapulted the crisis into public consciousness. Now he […]
Save to Rename Itself Dave and Return to Darfur
Three expelled charities are still in talks to go back into Darfur, according to Reuters. I find this whole thing ridiculous, as I’ve posted before. The three agencies are Mercy Corps, Care and Save the Children (US). There are good reasons for returning of course: the agencies can gain much-needed publicity and funding. With 10 […]
Jem’s Mobile Media Centre
The war in Darfur is being fought with pickups loaded with Dushka anti-aircraft guns, rocket propelled grenades and a Toyota LandCruiser kitted out as a mobile media centre. Deep in North Darfur, along the border with Chad, Khalid Mohamed Ahmed produces a newsletter for the troops, updates sudanjem.com and even sends videos to YouTube. "Our […]
Those White Arab Horsemen At It Again…
Here’s how one UN official apparently summed up the Darfur conflict to an unnamed celebrity passing through N’Djamena recently… Un-named UN figure: (enthusiastically) “Yes, basically the janjaweed are the Arabs, you know the ‘white’ Arab horsemen who carried out the killings against black African tribes in Darfur” The full, rather comical exchange is posted on Celeste Hicks’ blog. […]
Dodging Antonovs in Darfur
It wasn’t much more than a speck. A tiny, white fleck in the wide blue sky above us. Our 4×4 lurched to a halt as Yahia, the driver, peered through the 10 inches of windscreen scraped clean of the mud that camouflaged the rest of the vehicle. Then we were off again, lurching over the […]
Dodging Antonovs in Darfur
It wasn’t much more than a speck. A tiny, white fleck in the wide blue sky above us. Our 4×4 lurched to a halt as Yahia, the driver, peered through the 10 inches of windscreen scraped clean of the mud that camouflaged the rest of the vehicle. Then we were off again, lurching over the […]
Food on the Frontline
Assida is a thick porridge made from ground millet and is one of the main staples of Darfur. It’s eaten by plunging your fingers into the stodgy mound, scooping out a scalding-hot lump and mopping up some of the sauce. For most of my five days with rebels of the Justice and Equality Movement it […]
Coffee on the Frontline
Just returning from five days with rebels of the Justice and Equality Movement in Darfur. The trip was a chance to get under their skin and explore their programme for a chapter of my book (Saving Darfur: Everyone’s Favourite African War). I’ll be posting more about the trip in the days to come but […]
The Shanghai Car Park
It’s good to know that when I stop off for lunch at my favourite Chadian Chinese restaurant, the Shanghai in Abeche, our armed friends are asked to leave their rocket propelled grenades in the car park. Tension is being racheted up between Chad and Sudan. First Chadian rebels, backed by Sudan, launched an attack […]
Back on the road
I’m back on the road after a couple of months stuck in Nairobi – the result of both the financial crash and the fact that I was locked in a room trying to write a book. Travelling would have been enough in itself but this is also my first trip to Chad. Arriving in Francophone […]
Aiding and Abetting Khartoum
So you are an NGO recently expelled from Darfur. Over the years the government in Khartoum restricted your operations in the field, kicked out your country director and a security officer, whom the regime accused of being a Mossad agent. Then, just when you are wondering how you can ever actually help the millions of […]
Save Darfur, Eat de Waal
Me, I love a good feud. The best ones are not between people with wildly opposing views (I’m thinking Creationists against Darwinists) but between people who should basically be on the same side (say Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins). Generally these are motivated not by intellectual differences but by pure loathing. So too on […]
A Confession
OK, I’ve been found out. I don’t know how many people have died in Darfur. This was helpfully pointed out by Guy Gabriel on the Making Sense of Darfur blog… The use of these figures in the media is inconsistent; both individual journalists and newspapers themselves vary in the numbers they use. For example, a […]
A Confession
OK, I’ve been found out. I don’t know how many people have died in Darfur. This was helpfully pointed out by Guy Gabriel on the Making Sense of Darfur blog… The use of these figures in the media is inconsistent; both individual journalists and newspapers themselves vary in the numbers they use. For example, a […]
U.S. General: Darfur No-Fly Zone Not “Developed”
Let’s be perfectly clear about this: deploying Western forces to establish a no-fly zone over Darfur is a bad idea, and would only further entangle foreign powers in a war in which they have no clear interest. Not to mention, the logistics and rules-of-engagement would be nightmares. Fortunately, the U.S. Air Force doesn’t seem terribly […]
Something I Should Have Read a Long Time Ago
I bought The Root Causes of Sudan’s Civil Wars more than four years ago when I was newly arrived in East Africa. I skimmed through it before a trip I did to Rumbek, but its dense text put me off using it as anything other than a reference book. It was kept on the shelf […]
Doctors Without Boundaries
So you’re a paediatrician who volunteers for MSF. You go to Darfur and … Beyond his work as a healer, Erlich was able to help document the genocide by providing children in the camps with paper and crayons they used to make drawings and smuggling them out of the camps. Over 150 of these children’s […]