Sudan & South Sudan

Sudan Permits U.N. Food Aid to Enter Blue Nile and South Kordofan

On April 4, the World Food Programme announced that for the first time since war broke out in Blue Nile and South Kordofan in September 2011, U.N. food aid has been permitted to enter these regions. The move, which is considered to be a sign of easing tensions between Sudan and South Sudan, has been heralded as “a major breakthrough”, enabling the U.N. to distribute food to tens of thousands of people who had been reportedly eating “roots and leaves” to survive. According to the U.N., an estimated 1 million people have suffered in these regions due to lack of food, with 200,000 having already fled to South Sudan and Ethiopia.

Sudan’s President Grants Amnesty to All Political Prisoners

Earlier this month, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir announced his “decision to release all political prisoners.” This move follows a U.N. representative’s February accusations that Khartoum had jailed members of the political opposition without trial or access to necessary medical care. National Consensus Forces representative Kamal Omar received the decision positively, but emphasized that “it needs to be accompanied by action on the ground.” He explained, “We need a climate that will allow political dialogue, freedom of expression and press freedom.” In late March, Vice President Ali Osman Taha made a similar appeal to political foes, inviting rebel groups to help draft a new constitution for Sudan.

Juba Captures Airstrip from Rebels in Bloody Battle

On March 28, the South Sudanese government announced that it had recaptured an airstrip in Pibor County in a battle that claimed the lives of 143 rebels and 20 soldiers. According to military representative Col. Philip Auger, the “airstrip has been used by Khartoum (Sudan) intelligence to transport and supply arms and ammunition to [rebel leader] David Yau Yau.” Despite such allegations, Sudan has continuously denied ties to South Sudanese rebels and has, in turn, accused its southern neighbour of supporting independent militias in its own country—an accusation that has similarly been denied by Juba.

DRC

Congo Rebels: UN Peacekeeping Brigade is “War”

M23 rebel spokesman Bertrand Bisimwa described the United Nation’s decision to deploy a peacekeeping mission to eastern Congo as a “war option.”  The brigade, whose deployment was unanimously agreed upon by the Security Council, is designed to bring stability to a region that has been plagued by unrest. The brigade is expected to arrive in Goma and North Kivu by the end of this month. Following the decision, government spokesman Lambert Mende urged rebels, “There is still time for our M23 brothers to disband.” Government soldiers have been fighting M23 forces since May of last year.

Ntaganda Pleads Not Guilty at ICC

On March 26, Bosco Ntaganda, a warlord accused of murder, rape, pillaging, and recruiting child soldiers in Congo pleaded his innocence before the International Crime Court. Ntaganda freely turned himself in to Rwanda’s U.S. Embassy last month; he had been wanted by The Hague since 2006.

EXTRA!

Check out a BBC piece covering Angelina Jolie and William Hague’s move to shift the world’s focus to sexual violence in Congo! http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21932895

This month, we explore new developments in South Sudan, and feature an opinion piece on the resignation of the US Special Envoy to Sudan.

The Conflict Minerals Act (Bill C-486) was introduced to the Canadian House of Commons at a press release yesterday. The bill seeks to implement the guidelines developed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to end the trade of conflict minerals into Canadian law. These guidelines at the Canadian level would require companies using minerals from the Great Lakes Region of Africa to publicize their supply chain and due diligence practices and ensure the minerals they use in their products have not financed illegal armed groups engaged in the Congo’s war. Not only would this mark one step in improving transparency and accountability within Canadian mining industry abroad, but it would also be the first country to incorporate the OECD guidelines into legislation.

In tandem, Mr. Dewar has also launched the Just Minerals Campaign—a project that runs in partnership with STAND Canada’s Conflict Free Canada Initiative. The campaign will work to raise public awareness and petition the Government of Canada to cut Canada’s ties to Conflict Minerals.

The campaign is similar to the efforts more than a decade ago that led to controls on the spread of blood diamonds, which were used to finance rebels in West Africa. It has been done before and can most definitely, with your help, be done again for conflict minerals.

Help Canada become a world leader in demanding transparency for our minerals. Sign and share our petition today to make Canada Conflict- Free.

On March 14, 2013 at 7 pm, at the Centre for Social Innovation in Toronto, STAND Canada will be hosting a launch event and film screening for its newest campaign: The Conflict-Free Canada Initiative, with support from the Enough Project and Raise Hope for Congo.

STAND Canada will be announcing and launching its Conflict-Free Canada Initiative’s activities with a view to bringing the issue of conflict minerals to Canada and Mr. Kiavash Najafi, member of NDP MP Paul Dewar’s team, will presenting our new partnership with their office’s “Just Minerals” campaign in parliament!

The evening will entail a complimentary reception with food, coffee/tea & cash bar, a 75-minute unique documentary screening of “Blood in the Mobile,” and a concluding discussion and Q&A with keynote presenters.

Admission is free. We would love to have you!

Check out the event on Facebook for more information >>

Curious to learn more?

Read about the campaign
Sign the petition
Like the CFCI campaign on Facebook

Not sure what to say? Check out our fact sheet here and choose the points that you feel most strongly about. Here is a sample script:

My name is _______ and I am calling from________ (region). I am calling because I strongly believe that Canada should continue funding its support to the Sudans.

Although Canada currently helps through aid and supporting the peace process, funding cuts are expected over the next month. Conflict is ongoing in the  three regions of South Kordofan, Blue Nile and Darfur. As a result, over two million people are currently displaced due to food insecurity and conflict.

As a Canadian, I care about the Sudans and strongly believe cutting funding and aid to these regions is simply unacceptable.

Exercise your democratic rights and tell your MPs that the Sudans matter to you. Together we are capable of making the impact the Sudans so direly require!

Here is the three step process:

1. Read and get familiarized with our concise fact-sheet outlining the current crises in Sudan and South Sudan, alongside Canada’s current and past engagements. Have any questions? Contact Mieka Buckely-Pearson (STAND’s Operational Advocacy Director) at mbuckleypearson@standcanada.org.
   mbuckleypearson@standcanada.org.
2.  Participate in a nation-wide calling campaign on February 6th. Call your Members of Parliament (both your academic institution’s and home town’s MPs) to remind them that their constituents want Canada to maintain its involvement and continue supporting the people in Sudan and South Sudan. Tell your friends to join in - our strength is defined by our numbers.
3.  Remain persistent with the phone calls. If each of our members call their MPs 5 times, we can raise the awareness we need to make the Sudans a concern. If you are consistently led to a voice-mail system, call back in an hour – call as many times as necessary to ensure they receive the message and support our cause.

We need your help to ensure that Canada continues to consider Sudan and South Sudan priorities in our foreign policy. Join STAND members from across the nation on February 6th create a national impact. Check out our facebook event HERE. 

 ……genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

As you read this definition, the critical thinking wheels in your head are churning, and you probably have questions. That’s a good thing, because there are big questions and ambiguities surrounding Article II that haven’t been resolved. So, here we go. In order for an individual or group to be charged with the crime of genocide, specific criteria of the definition must be met.

The first criterion is the intent clause, which states that genocidal acts must be committed “with intent to destroy in whole or in part”. This mens rea (to use a fancy legal term that just means the necessary elements of a crime) is, in the words of Payam Akhavan, one of my absolute favorite genocide legal thinkers, both qualitative and confused (44). Akhavan notes the difference between the scope of intent, which requires that one intend to destroy a group as such, and the scale of intent, which makes reference to the hierarchy of mental states such as dolus eventualis (indirect intent), dolus generalis (general intent), and dolus specialis (special intent). It is the last of these – dolus specialis – which is necessary for a conviction of genocide to occur. As such, there is an understood difference between intended destruction, and intention towards other acts that may result in destruction (Akhavan 44). However necessary the intent clause may be to upholding a fair legal structure, it is difficult to prove the intention to destroy. Kurt Johannson notes three factors that make intent difficult to prove in a court or law (20). First, written materials may not exist, or may be destroyed before they are archived (20). Second, perpetrators may have elaborate means of hiding the truth, regulating access to information, and the ability to spread carefully contrived disinformation (20). Third, as explains why most genocide until the mid-20th century were not reported, “there appears to have existed a sort of conspiracy of collective denial whereby the disappearance of a people did not seem to require comment or even mention” (20). There is also the question of what counts as destruction – must it be physical, or can it be social or cultural as well?

The second criterion, is that the crimes be committed against one of the specific categories of groups listed in Article II. The United Nations Genocide Convention applies only to four groups, those that are a national, ethnical, racial or religious. As such, many other groups – including political and economic groups – are excluded. To use a familiar case study, from 1975 to 1979 the Khmer Rouge killed an estimated 1.7 million – 2.5 million Cambodians out of a population of roughly 7 million total (Sadat xxi). While the phrase “Cambodian genocide” in widespread in common parlance, it is difficult to make a legal case for what happened in Cambodia as being a genocide, because people were targeted for being members of social, political, or economic classes (Sadat xxi). While many scholars have advanced arguments that the mass torture, starvation, and killings that took place in Cambodia during this time was indeed a genocide, there are many legal scholars who hold that the specific requirements of genocide were unmet (Sadat xxi). Gareth Evans writes that for all its compelling general moral authority, the UNGC held no legal application to the Cambodian situation. He says: “Because those doing the killing and beating and expelling were of exactly the same nationality, ethnicity, race and religion as those they were victimizing – and their motives were political, ideological and class-based…the necessary elements of specific intent required for [the Genocide Convention’s] application were not there” (Sadat xxi).

These issues with the UNGC have led many members of the academic community to formulate their own definitions of genocide.

Horowitz wrote, “Genocide is defined as a structural and systematic destruction of innocent people by a state bureaucratic apparatus”.

Fein wrote, “Genocide is the sustained purposeful action by a perpetrator to physically destroy a collectivity directly or indirectly through interdiction of the biological and social reproduction of group members, sustained regardless of the surrender or lack of threat offered by the victims.”

Charny wrote, “Genocide in the generic sense means that mass killing of substantial numbers of human beings, when not in the course of military action against the military forces of an avowed enemy, under conditions of the essential defenselessness of the victims.”

But there is something that must remain at the forefront of our minds: prosecution of the crime of genocide is based on genocide as defined in Article II (well, the Article II text was put in the Rome Statue, which is what the ICC uses). Do you think that we need to reevaluate and possibly change the accepted legal definition of genocide to make it more inclusive? What do you think?

Leave your responses in the comments!

Citations

Akhavan, Payam. Reducing Genocide to Law. Cambridge: Cambridge U Press, 2012.

———– “The Universal Repression of Crimes Against Humanity before National Jurisdictions : The Need for a Treaty-Based Obligation to Prosecute”. Forging a Convention for Crimes Against Humanity. Ed. Leila Nadya Sadat. Cambridge: Cambridge U Press, 2011. 8-27. Print.

“Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.” United Nations Treaty Collection. Web. 14 Oct. 2012.

Johannson, Kurt. “What is Genocide?”. Ed. Helen Fein. New Haven: Yale U Press, 1992. 17-26. Print.

Sadat, Leila Nadya. “Preface and Acknowledgments”. Forging a Convention for Crimes Against Humanity. Ed. Leila Nadya Sadat. Cambridge: Cambridge U Press, 2011. xix-xxviii. Print.

———- “A Comprehensive History of the Crimes Against Humanity Conventio”. Forging a Convention for Crimes Against Humanity. Ed. Leila Nadya Sadat. Cambridge: Cambridge U Press, 2011. 455-531. Print.

Neekoo Collett is a political science student from the University of Alberta. Her research focuses on “factors of restraint” and the situation of Baha’is in Iran, as well as the politics of genocide language and the proposed Crimes Against Humanity Convention. You can find her eating cake, applying for graduate programmes, and watching documentaries about the Amish when she should be studying. 

What is Genocide? by Neekoo Collett is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Raphel Lemkin – a victim of the Holocaust, and participent of the Nuremburg trails – first used the word genocide in his 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. He wrote:

By ‘genocide’ we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group. This new word, coined by the author to denote an old practice in its modern development, is made from the ancient Greek word genos (race, tribe) and the Latin cide (killing)…. Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group” (80).

A couple of years later, in 1948, two incredibly important documents were released by the United Nations. You’ve probably heard of them: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and The Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

The Genocide Convention (or the UNGC, as I affectionately refer to it) defines genocide in Article II. It says:

……genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

 

As you can see, this definition is extremely different from Lemkin’s conception of genocide! Why is this? The United Nations website tells us this:

 … the definition of genocide set out in article II is a much-reduced version of the text prepared by the Secretariat experts, who had divided genocide into three categories, physical, biological and cultural genocide. The Sixth Committee voted to exclude cultural genocide from the scope of the Convention, although it subsequently agreed to an exception to this general rule, allowing “forcible transfer of children from one group to another” as a punishable act. The drafters also voted down, by a very substantial margin, an amendment that sought to add a sixth punishable act to article II. It would have enabled prosecution for imposing “measures intended to oblige members of a group to abandon their homes in order to escape the threat of subsequent ill-treatment”.

Essentially, as with most outputs of the UN, compromises had to be made between drafters of the committee, which meant that some things were left out and some things were defined very narrowly. The result of this is that the “official” definition (and we’ll talk about why this definition, despite its flaws is important) has faced a lot of criticism, and a lot of alternatives have been offered by the academic community.

In Part 2, we’ll look at the main critiques of the UNGC definition, and some alternatives presented by academics.

In Part 3, we’ll look at the ways in which the word ‘genocide’ is used (and not used) by different groups – states, the media, perpetrators, and victim groups.

In Part 4, we’ll look at why it’s important to have one definition of genocide, and why it’s also important to look beyond definitions.

Neekoo Collett is a political science student from the University of Alberta. Her research focuses on “factors of restraint” and the situation of Baha’is in Iran, as well as the politics of genocide language and the proposed Crimes Against Humanity Convention. You can find her eating cake, applying for graduate programmes, and watching documentaries about the Amish when she should be studying. 

Download PDF

Sudan & South Sudan

U.N. Agrees with Amnesty International: South Sudan’s Army Committing Human Rights Abuses

On October 4, the United Nations in South Sudan (UNMISS) expressed its support for Amnesty International’s allegations of human rights abuses against South Sudan’s army (SPLA). Amnesty International’s report, released a day earlier, accuses SPLA soldiers and police forces of “acts of torture and abuse committed against civilians, including children as young as 18 months old” during the Operation Restore Peace campaign, a federal effort initiated in March to recover automatic weapons from South Sudan’s population. Despite Amnesty International and UNMISS’s calls for intervention, Amnesty’s report has been rejected by South Sudanese officials; Lt. Kuo Deim Kuol of the SPLA has called the findings “not accurate.”

Sudanese President Reopens Borders with South

On Sunday, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir called for all borders with South Sudan to be reopened; the ruling comes despite the neighbours’ ongoing refusal to agree upon rights to the Abyei border region since South Sudan’s secession in July 2011. Under much pressure by the Security Council and African Union, the Sudans have made progress on various issues, including oil compensation and the establishing of a demilitarized zone. Violence, however, ensues in both countries; an ambush by unidentified attackers in Darfur last week four peacekeepers dead and eight injured.

Sudanese Army Accuses Rebels of Killing 5 Civilians

On Tuesday, Sudanese military spokesman Col. Sawarmy Kahlid accused the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N) of shelling in the South Kordorfan state, leaving 5 women dead and 20 wounded.  The rebels deny the allegations and reports of causalities, maintaining that their efforts were defensive responses to shelling waged by military forces. South Kordofan state governor Ahmed Haroun accused Sudan Sudan’s government of “being indirectly responsible” for the violence; South Sudan has repeatedly denied Sudan’s continued allegations that it supports SPLM-N.

DRC

M23 Rebels Lay Sights On Uganda Border Town

The M23 rebel group, which recently gained control of the small town of Nyamilima, expressed plans to seize the Ugandan border town of Ishasha last week, maintaining that it has intentions of protecting the town’s population from the presently ruling Mai Mai and FDLR rebel groups. In response, members of the Ishasha population, including police and local authorities, have reportedly started fleeing into Uganda to avoid anticipated clashes between the M23 and Mai Mai forces. The M23 group also confirmed interests in taking the city of Goma, which has recently endured a series of murders and other violence; according to an M23 spokesman, the group will take the city if the government “cannot secure its population.”

Harper Has “Grave Concerns” About Human Rights in DRC

On Friday, Prime Minister Stephen Harper expressed plans to speak out for Congolese victims of rape at this weekend’s summit of la Francophonie in Kinshasa. Despite his concerns, Harper has neglected to boycott the event, however, despite having voiced intentions of snubbing the upcoming Commonwealth conference unless the host—Sri Lanka—makes headway on its own human rights violations.

EXTRA!