By Charlie Clements Charles De Long was the U.S. Minister to Japan in 1871. After an incident in which an Okinawan vessel was shipwrecked in Taiwan and a number of its passengers murdered, De Long encouraged the Japan to falsely

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After only two years of deployment, the UN Mission in the Central African Republic and Chad (MINURCAT) will, at the request of the Government of Chad, start its drawdown and exit by 31 December this year. MINURCAT will hand over

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In most areas of public policy, gathering and analyzing evidence for the nature of the problem and the efficacy of response is a sine qua non for designing and implementing programs. The statistical analysis of disease patterns is the basis

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In the early days of AMIS deployment, the Sudan government raised fears that peacekeepers from sub-Saharan Africa would be bringing HIV/AIDS into Darfur, and talked about screening incoming troops for HIV. At the time, Khartoum was opposed to increasing the

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Reporting to the U.N. Security Council on the situation in Darfur last April, the U.N.-African Union Joint Special Representative to Darfur, Rodolphe Adada, revealed to members evidence of remarkable progress in the region during the past year. Compared to the

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The incident statistics collected and verified by UNAMID for June show that harassment of UNAMID and international actors continues unabated. The general pattern of violence continues to manifest the characteristics of a low-intensity conflict, with a low level of confirmed

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When the Joint Special Representative of the UN and AU for Darfur, Rodolphe Adada, presented his report to the UN Security Council on Monday, he felt confident enough to make public the findings of UNAMID’s monitoring of the situation in

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Before his final departure from Sudan in December 2006, Jan Pronk addressed the UN staff in Khartoum and Juba. In his address he presented fifteen guidelines for peacekeepers. They were reproduced on his weblog. Here they are: First: United Nations

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After the Sudan Government and JEM signed a ‘Declaration of Intent’ in Doha earlier this week, hopes have been raised that a ceasefire might be in prospect. We should be cautious. Since September 2003 there has been a succession of

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Conventional peacekeeping operations are designed as stop-gap measures, either for a brief period of time or with a limited brief in a frozen conflict. This can be functional if the peacekeepers are dealing with institutionalized belligerents, with functioning hierarchies. In

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