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"Ending Mass Atrocities"
The ongoing crisis in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, where up to 6 million excess deaths have been recorded since 1998 and government neither controls nor governs its territory in a meaningful sense, is cause for concern to the international community and the United States government. The D.R. Congo is home to more than [...]
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Several people sent in questions to Alex de Waal in response to his article, “African Roles in the Libyan Conflict of 2011″ available in the March 2013 edition of International Affairs. Below are de Waal’s responses.
1) There seems to be a theme in this article about the notion of the [...]
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The extraction of the Falasha from Ethiopia remains a dark chapter in our history which we should not forget. As a nation we are poorer, deprived of their cultural and historical legacy. As a nation we are shamed by the cynical way in which our leaders exploited them for money and weapons. Most importantly, the Ethiopian Jews have become victims of this relocation, at best unwitting, at worst coerced. It is not surprising that people who have undergone such an uprooting are traumatized and prone to become social casualties. The revelation that the Israeli state has systematically violated their rights in the most sinister manner, betraying the trust that the Beta Israel put in that government as their protector, is a signal that this historic wrong needs to be righted.
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This time, the dominant Western advocacy no longer deems the promotion of human rights, beyond the rhetoric of Western and Burmese officials, as something affordable. But the ugly realities of human insecurity as lived by the great majority of Burmese Buddhist farmers, Rohingya Muslims, and Burmese Christians are difficult, if not impossible to address. So, Western advocacy is experiencing a Buddhist turn for the first time in the past twenty-five years: it’s all in the state of mind. If you can’t change the reality, change your perception, and the way you frame it, especially when doing so advances your national interest, however defined – hence, President Obama and his showcasing Burma as ‘a success story’ of his foreign policy.
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Chinua Achebe, who died today at 82, was a giant amongst the world’s literary figures of the twentieth century. As someone who studies the effects of war on and intentional targeting of civilians, I find that at a certain point our theories, data and narratives simply cannot capture massive violence with equal precision as a [...]
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The 2012 Human Security Report on Sexual Violence, Education, and War (HSR), claims that the occurrence of sexual violence against women, particularly those defined by the Rome Statute as crimes against humanity (rape, sexual slavery, forced prostitution) is decreasing during conflict, while at the same time representations of this violence treat the most severe [...]
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