Monthly Archives: March 2009

March 31, 2009

Do Darfur’s IDPs Have an Urban Future?

Posted by Alex de Waal

Most of Darfur’s internally-displaced camps are urban settlements in all but name. In geographical terms the most striking impact of the last seven years has been to change Darfur from being overwhelmingly scattered rural villages and hamlets to huge extended

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March 29, 2009

Sudan: Double Standards?

Posted by Julie Flint

Abd al-Wahab Abdalla (25 March) says “The worst massacre of the last 12 months was by JEM! It killed 128 Meidob over 2 days.” There have been a number of allusions on this blog to the unrest at JEM’s base

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March 27, 2009

Agency Expulsions in Sudan: Consequences and Next Steps

Posted by admin

By Sara Pantuliano, Susanne Jaspars and Deepayan Basu Ray The expulsion of 13 international organisations and the suspension of three national NGOs by the government of Sudan earlier this month has generated widespread concerns about the consequences of the interruption

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March 27, 2009

Darfur as Biafra: Our Vulnerability and Their Capacity

Posted by Casey Barrs

The response of many to Biafra forty years ago was not just against the blockage of aid by General Yakubu Gowon but against the way aid itself was conducted. Our response to Darfur today, if learning comes from this crisis,

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March 26, 2009

Grading the Prosecutor–And the Bench

Posted by Alex de Waal

My posting on the ICC Prosecutor’s application for leave to appeal against the Pre-Trial Chamber’s decision to reject the genocide charge drew some fierce criticism from some quarters (notably Kevin Heller of www.opiniojuris.org). So I paused to consider. Article 58

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March 26, 2009

Burundian Voices

Posted by Tracy Kidder

Review of Life After Violence: A people’s story of Burundi, by Peter Uvin. Zed Books, London, 2008. I have a young friend who comes from the African nation of Burundi. Not very long ago an immigration agent at Kennedy Airport

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March 25, 2009

Darfur’s Politics of Numbers

Posted by Guy Gabriel

For Darfur watchers, the death toll is as much a political statement as an expression of fact. For those with just a passing interest in the region, ascertaining the number who have died involves making judgements on the credibility of

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March 24, 2009

INGOs Expelled from Darfur: Time to Acknowledge the Smoking and Loaded Gun

Posted by Ibrahim Adam

Yes, nobody wants to see Darfuris in the IDP camps and elsewhere suffer needlessly. And that “nobody” also includes, yes, the Sudanese government – as noted by LA Times journalist Ed Sanders in his recent piece about the government’s –

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March 23, 2009

Genocide by Force of Habit?

Posted by Alex de Waal

John Maynard Keynes was once irritated by a half-witted critic: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” In 2004 I wrote in the London Review of Books, “this is not the genocidal campaign of

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March 23, 2009

Genocide: Criminal Behavior and Law

Posted by John Hagan and Wynona Rymond-Richmond

Alex de Waal, Joachim Savelsberg, Alex Hinton, Tony Oberschall, Dan Chirot, and Scott Straus form a remarkably distinguished group of genocide scholars. We have benefited from all of their comments about our book, Darfur and the Crime of Genocide. Our

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