Issues like water governance and cross-border coordination of energy supply are likely to become much more thorny diplomatic exercises to deal with.
Issues like water governance and cross-border coordination of energy supply are likely to become much more thorny diplomatic exercises to deal with.
A court in the Hague is due to issue this month a ruling on a case against China brought by the Philippines over maritime territory in the South China Sea.
Is the crisis in the Central African Republic a “clash of civilizations”? A recent report entitled “Behind the Headlines: Drivers of Violence in the Central African Republic” from Enough, a Washington-based project of the Center for American Progress whose goal is to end genocide and crimes against humanity, is particularly revealing. Comments by the author […]
While the world focuses on the calls for partition by pro-Russian citizens in the south and east of Ukraine, similar calls from a small African nation are drawing less attention — despite horrific human rights abuses occurring on its territory. In what the U.N. human rights body and Amnesty International have called “ethnic-religious cleansing” between the […]
This is something rare. Knowledge of a rapidly deteriorating situation in Africa and a somewhat timely, actual action by those in the world with the power to intervene. The situation is in the Central African Republic. And that intervening is the first step to stabilizing the slaughter and – hopefully – stopping another genocide from […]
The Secretary General’s latest quarterly report on the Africa Union-United Nations Hybrid Operation in Darfur (UNAMID) makes for grim reading. Citing frequent military clashes between the Sudanese government and armed rebel forces, the report states that increased violence in the region has displaced more than 300,000 people since the beginning of the year, more than […]
Sequestration bringing you down? Turn off CNN and check out Foreign Policy Blogs editors’ must-read pieces from around the web.
The U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has issued statements by High Commissioner Navi Pillay regarding the ongoing human rights crisis in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). While the system of oppression employed by the DPRK is manifest, it remains “one of the worst – but least understood and reported […]
Given all that we know and hear about Africa, success is not the first thing that comes to mind when penning about the African Union’s intervention in the continent’s conflicts. But this year, under the continental body’s watchful eye, Kismayo in Somalia has fallen in the hands of the Somalie government, and the two Sudan’s-South […]
This documentary is excellent. It documents the after effects of war on three young women who were abducted as children and forced to serve in the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). That rebel Ugandan force, led by Joseph Kony, is notorious for kidnapping and forcing those captured to fight. For more than 20 years his group has abducted […]
Hailemariam Desalegn was sworn in as Ethiopia’s new prime minister last week. He has some big shoes to fill. A cult of personality surrounds his predecessor, Meles Zenawi, who died last month.. Zenawi was a regional leader, fighting terrorism in Somalia and mediating the Sudan-South Sudan conflict. At home, he was the impetus behind Ethiopia’s […]
On Monday, the Republic of South Sudan celebrated its first anniversary and independence from now-neighboring Sudan. Following decades of civil war, the nation separated from Sudan one year ago. Leaders of Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda attended an official ceremony; meanwhile, thousands of people danced and waved flags during official celebrations of the newly formed nation in the capital city […]
When the International Criminal Court finally came into existence in 2002, it was lauded as a serious step towards universal justice and accountability for the worst international crimes. Ten years later, some of that excitement has worn off. Nowhere has that been more the case than Africa, the continent that has so far been the […]
Posted by contributor Andres Santamaria. Sudan and South Sudan continue to clash, with each side seeking to control lucrative oil fields near their border. However, as the crisis persists, there are many efforts to relieve some of the humanitarian problems that have emerged in South Sudan, according to Action Against Hunger. “Nearly half the population […]
Hollywood on the Potomac–movie actors deserting Tinseltown to remind the Big Dogs back east that every time an A-list celeb is arrested for picketing a foreign embassy an angel gets his wings.
Actor George Clooney, his father Nick, and four Congressional Democrats were among more than a dozen protesters who descended on the Sudanese Embassy on March 16 for the purpose of crossing, in a disorderly fashion, a police line.
The cast of characters? Along with Clooneys I and II, it included Reps. James Moran (D-VA), Jim McGovern (D-MA), John Olver (D-MA) and Al Green (D-TX). NAACP President Ben Jealous was also arrested, along with Martin Luther King III.
Clooney’s mid-day performance on Mass Ave was the finale to a 3-day tour in DC that included an impassioned plea to a standing-room-only crowd at the Council on Foreign Relations, and dramatic testimony delivered to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about the miserable state of affairs in the border region of Sudan.
Omar al-Bashir’s military, operating out of Khartoum, is working assiduously to wipe out mostly Christian populations hunkered down on some highly contested, oil-rich real estate to the south.
Clooney, who has frequently taken on the role of the world-weary activist in his films, accuses Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir and the ‘same criminals responsible for Darfur’ of conducting a genocidal war against his own people, of starving, maiming, raping, and murdering them.
And he says it as if no one has ever heard it before. . .