President’s Corner: Frustration Over Darfur is Provoking Work on New Options

I was struck by a recent headline on an Agence France-Presse story: “UN Envoy Criticizes International Passivity Toward Darfur.” At a time when the Save Darfur Coalition is running newspaper and TV ads highlighting the genocide by the government of Sudan in Darfur, Jan Pronk, whom Sudan expelled as the chief of United Nations operations in the country, charged that the international community “has absolutely not reacted to this day against (Khartoum’s) violation of the Darfur peace treaty,” the AFP reported. “Any reply would have been better than no reply at all,” Pronk said.

The government of Sudan and one of three rebel groups signed the Darfur Peace Agreement on May 5, yet violence has increased dramatically since then, with both the government and the rebel signatory responsible. Since the agreement was signed a new rebel group, the National Redemption Front, has formed and also triggered more fighting.

The failure of diplomacy to stop the fighting in Darfur, where 400,000 people have died and more than two million have been displaced, provoking discussion of more dramatic options. Last month, an op-ed in The Washington Post called for the use of military force to stop what President Bush calls genocide in Darfur. Since that article, a group of military and other analysts have been meeting to consider what sort of military pressure would force the government in Khartoum to stop using Arab militias to attack primarily African civilians in villages across Darfur. In addition, a group has begun to discuss the possibility of using private security companies, funded by private donors, to protect refugee camps from attack.

Each of these ideas raises problems, but the fact that they are being actively discussed highlight the frustration over diplomacy’s failure and an unwillingness to look the other way in the face of genocide. The new Congress will face more pressure to take an active stance against the genocide in Darfur, and military options could well be on the table.

Working Towards Peace in Northern Uganda

RI Advocates Sarah and Kavita have been traveling throughout Northern Uganda to assess the current humanitarian situation and the impact of the peace process between the Government of Uganda and the rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). You can read their latest blog entry here: Baking bread in Northern Uganda.

The 20-year conflict in Northern Uganda displaced around 1.7 million people, who continue to live in squalid camps and settlements without access to adequate basic services.

Sarah and Kavita recently arrived in Juba, south Sudan, where the peace talks between the LRA and the Government of Uganda have been taking place for more than half a year. In Juba the RI team will be trying to meet up with people involved in the negotiations, and will look into humanitarian and protection issues, such as adequate support to demobilizing soldiers and the possibility of the LRA releasing women and children that the movement has held captive.

Earlier this month, Jan Egeland, the United Nations Under Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, visited south Sudan and met with LRA leader Joseph Kony to discuss the peace agreement. Unfortunately, according to reports, he was not very successful after his encounter with the elusive Kony.

RI applauds Egeland's dedication to bringing an end to the conflict in Northern Uganda. But as this recent letter to Egeland by President Ken Bacon outlines, while the peace process continues in Juba, there are still serious humanitarian concerns that need to be dealt with in Northern Uganda.

President's Corner: Diplomatic Gyre over Genocide

My frustration over the slow progress to end the killing in Darfur continues to grow, along with the death toll there.

Two years ago the Bush administration accused the government of Sudan of committing genocide in Darfur, where an estimated 400,000 people have died of war related causes and some 2.2 million have been displaced since early 2003. The Genocide Convention, which the U.S. ratified two decades ago, defines genocide as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group."

The causes of the violence in Darfur in west Sudan are a complex mix of economics, ethnicity, politics, climate change and livestock migration patterns, but attacks by government forces and government-backed Arab militias against African villages are a core element of the violence. In a typical attack, government planes bomb or strafe a village, which is then attacked by heavily armed Arab militias, who raze the village, kill men and boys, steal animals, burn crops and rape women and girls (Watch RI’s video on genocide in Darfur).

President Bush, the U.S. Congress and former Secretary of State Colin Powell have all called the attacks genocide because hundreds of African villages have been depopulated in an apparent effort to clear the land for Arab tribes.Nicholas Kristof, the columnist for The New York Times, calls Darfur the first genocide of the 21st Century.

The U.S. has taken little effective action to live up to its obligation to "prevent and punish" genocide. It has helped support a small, often timid African Union force in Darfur. The force, now 7,000 soldiers in an area as large as Texas, was sent to monitor a cease fire that never took place. In addition, Washington has been actively involved in diplomacy to end the war.

The latest round of diplomacy took place last week in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where UN Secretary General Kofi Annan had convened the African Union, the Government of Sudan and members of the UN Security Council. The UN wants to send an international force of more than 20,000 to replace the African Union force in Darfur, but Sudan has refused to authorize a UN force. Instead, Khartoum wants the weak AU force to remain, although it would accept a larger force.

UN officials left the Addis meeting saying that Sudan had agreed to a joint, or hybrid, AU-UN force in Darfur. Jan Egeland, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator, said the Addis meeting produced a "solid agreement that will end the crisis in Darfur and lead to a comprehensive peace," according to a press digest from the US Embassy in Khartoum. Yet the same press summary quotes Sudan's President, Omer Al Bashir, as saying that "Sudan rejects combined forces in Darfur." Sadly, such maddening contradictions often characterize diplomatic efforts to bring peace to Darfur.

At a joint presentation today (Nov. 20) in Washington, DC, Andrew Natsios, President Bush's special envoy for Sudan, and Jean-Marie Guehenno, UN Under Secretary General for Peacekeeping, both tried to put a bright face on the Addis meeting, but they conceded that many important details need to be worked out. For example, Khartoum is asserting the right to prescribe the mandate, size, composition and command structure for any new force. If past is prologue, the government of Sudan, which is adept at stalling for time and deflecting international efforts to end the death and displacement in Darfur, could draw out negotiations of each of these points.

But time is running out for the victims in Darfur. Violence has worsened in the last few months, and many humanitarian agencies are contracting their operations or pulling out entirely because working conditions are too unsafe or difficult. Arab militias are now patrolling in some of the huge camps for displaced persons, and fighting and instability are spilling over to Chad and the Central African Republic, thus regionalizing the violence in Darfur.

Despite the commitment of the U.S. and other signatories to the Genocide Convention to "prevent and punish" genocide, the killing continues as diplomats talk. President Bush has already received a million postcards asking him to act more effectively to stop the genocide in Darfur. How many postcards, how many deaths does it take to get his attention?

Trapped in No Man's Land

Sean wrote the following post about his and Kristele's visit to the Syria-Iraqi border last week.

We started our day driving at 165 km/hour down a shoddily paved road in the middle of the desert going from Damascus to Baghdad. We were heading to the border, where a group of 340 Palestinians are stranded in a No Man's Land between the two countries, with little hope of leaving any time soon.

The drive there was a bit surreal. The desert is camel beige and flat as a sheet of paper. There were small pools of water alongside the highway from recent heavy rains, but it would be otherwise dry. Covering the sand was a chunky layer of black rocks and a few low scrub bushes. To make the situation even more bizzare, it seems a truck had recently dropped half its cargo along the highway and the entire way there (about 250 kilometers), the highway was splattered with a trail of squashed and rotting tomatoes. Don't know what the symbolism of that was, but it was slightly disquieting.

It took us about three hours to get to the border post, where we saw the first signs of life. This one was truly depressing. The highway is sealed off on both sides by a concrete wall topped with barbed wire beginning about a kilometer before the actual post and heading towards Iraq as far as the eye can see. This was to keep people from evading the official entry. But it was the complete lack of life anywhere that made it bleaker than usual.

When we got to the Syrian customs point, we saw the first sign of Iraqi refugees. They come to Syria in hired taxis - the taxis being huge American-made suburbans. They came with suitcases, carpets, and other personal effects lashed to the roofs of the cars, and the trunks and back seats brimming with whatever else fit. There were probably about thirty of these SUVs waiting in the parking area (the parking area being a huge chunk of the middle of the highway) while their passengers cleared customs and immigration. We could see the families coming in and out, and they were mainly women and children. The Syrian authorities wouldn't allow us to talk to the refugees, so we weren't able to get a sense of their immediate situation. I will say that one family who was crying and hugging as they got out of their car pretty much summed up the situation.

About two kilometers from the Syrian border post, we saw a tent camp literally crammed between the highway and the concrete wall that contained people from escaping. As we entered, children were playing alongside the highway, and people were taking care of mundane tasks such as keeping their tents firmly staked into the ground.

We were able to spend about three hours in the camp, which was set up for Palestinians fleeing Iraq. There was a small community of Palestinians in Iraq (about 20,000 - 30,000), who have been there for two to three generations now. Saddam Hussein treated them well as a political gesture against the Israeli occupation of their lands. As a result, when Saddam fell, the Palestinians were seen as his allies and uniformly terrorized by local militias as the enemy. Every family that we spoke to had suffered threats, bombings of their homes, kidnappings, murders, or other violence that forced them to leave Iraq. Militias in Iraq have proclaimed death for any Palestinian that remains in the country.

When they reached the Syrian border, they were surprised to find they were not welcome, as Syria is already host to half a million Palestinian refugees. Syria is unofficially afraid that if they accept Palestinians from Iraq, it will act as a pull factor for more Palestinians to come. (To put this in perspective, Syria is a country of 18 million people - it now hosts 500,000 Palestinians and around 700,000 Iraqis, plus a range of other refugees from various other countries - almost 10% of their population is refugees). As a result, Syria has forced them to set up a tent camp in the no man's land, under the protection of the United Nations, while they wait for a permanent solution. Unfortunately, the permanent solution involves, A) going back to Iraq; B) being sent to the Occupied Territories in Israel; or C) being resettled in a third country. Most people we interviewed said they would rather die in the camp than return to Iraq. Israel refuses to let them into their territory, and most countries in the world refuse to accept Palestinian refugees, believing that their fate needs to be decided in political negotiations between the Palestinians and Israel. As a result, there is no forseeable escape for these people.

The conditions in the camp were depressingly bleak. They have lived in tents for 7 months now, despite summer temperatures around 110F and winter temperatures that are now regularly below freezing at night. They do not have enough food, and are surviving by trading jewelry and even clothing with passing cargo trucks for fresh vegetables. Though their potable water has improved, for many months it was making them sick.

We are off tomorrow to meet with the Embassies of the US and European nations to urge them to do something to help not only these Palestinians, but all the Iraqis that are suffering from a war waged from outside the region.

Urgent Appeal for Palestinians Fleeing Iraq

Kristele and Sean have learned that as the situation in Iraq deteriorates, Palestinians are particularly at risk. Many are in desperate need of resettlement and assistance. Kristele and Sean wrote this urgent appeal describing the Palestinians' plight and urging action to help them.

Palestinians from Iraq are now barred from entering Syria for resettlement, leaving this group trapped with nowhere to go. With few options available to them, one woman spoke for the group when she said, “I would rather be buried here than return to Iraq – there is nothing there for us but threats and death.” In the meantime, this group of people awaits help from a world that is unaware of their plight.

A few Palestinians from Iraq have sought refuge in a camp located in a "no man's land" between Syria and Iraq. View photos of the camp in this Photo Essay.

Baking bread in Northern Uganda

Sarah and Kavita have moved on to Pader in Northern Uganda and Sarah sends us this:

November 14, 2006
Pader, Northern Uganda

After two days in Kitgum, I was apprehensive about arriving in Pader. According to Kavita, when she was here in 2004, conditions were dire and the lodging choices were extremely primitive. Imagine our joy and surprise to find that GOAL, an Irish NGO working on water and sanitation here has a guest house. While there is no running water, there are abundant jerry cans filled with water and electricity for three hours a day. But the most amazing thing is that there is a restaurant in town and internet access! In our room even! The 21st century is an amazing thing.

We met up with Alice Acca, the executive director of the Christian Counseling Fellowship when we arrived. Alice, who has met with Michelle Brown, our Uganda specialist, and Jan Weil, RI Board Secretary for the past few times they were in Pader is an amazing force of nature. Only 32, she founded and runs a very impressive NGO dedicated to helping young mothers in Pader. I asked her how she got involved. She told me that when she was 13 she had to flee this area to go to Gulu and ended up having to take care of three young children. She had to wash them, cook for them, feed them, and make sure they went to school as well as trying to go to school herself. She wanted to do something for the girls that she met when she was working as a social worker in the camps in Pader.

One of the most vulnerable groups that she works with are the young child mothers who have been released from the Lord’s Resistance Army. Many of them arrive pregnant with small children and they are very young themselves. It is difficult for them to go to school and many of them face stigmatization and rejection by their families. Another mouth or three to feed puts a strain on families in these overcrowded camps.

Alice’s group has a reintegration center where the young mothers, as well as other returning LRA abductees can stay for a few weeks while they get used to being free. They provide counseling, safety, and a secure environment for the young mothers, as well as counseling their families and the community that they will be reintegrating into. In addition to these services, Alice is also launching vocational training and sells the bead necklaces that the girls make. Kavita and I will be returning with some examples.

But one of the most innovative ideas is the bakery and small restaurant that these girls run. The food there is delicious and the restaurant is clean and neat. The residents of Pader are happy to have a bakery. It’s small steps like these that may help these girls and their children start a new life.

Rebuilding Lives amid a Fragile Peace in Eastern Congo

Rick sends in the latest from Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo:

Andrea, John, and I are sitting at the Bukavu airport, waiting for a bus to take us into the city. The trip takes more than an hour, and seems interminable because of the glacial pace of the bus and the terrible state of the road. But we're in a good mood because we've had a good visit to South Kivu, and there are just a few days left before we wrap up the mission.

We made it out of Lodja last week with no problem, despite the rain that had been falling all day and threatened to soften up the runway too much to be safe. We had a brief layover in Kinshasa, then headed east. Kinshasa to Kisangani, Kisangani to Kindu, Kindu to Bukavu: it was an all-day affair. After another brief night at a hotel in town, we took a UN helicopter south to Uvira, the staging point for operations to help the thousands of Congolese refugees returning from Tanzania.

The problem is that tension around the elections has slowed returning refugees to a trickle: of the 35,000 returnees expected in 2006, only 14,000 have come back so far. To get down even further south along Lake Tanganyika, into the home villages of the refugees, we turned to the Norwegian Refugee Council, an NGO with a lot of experience helping refugees and IDPs. Our hosts were Brad and Hanne, and staying at their place in Uvira felt like a vacation after our foray out to the wilds of Kasai Oriental province last week.

Last Friday, then, we organized a convoy of NRC vehicles to take us down the road to Baraka. The first obstacle was a road wash-out, about thirty minutes south of town. With the heavy rains in the region, a river had leapt its banks, carrying away a newly built bridge and flooding our road. A NRC car came up from Baraka to meet us, and we carried our gear across a narrow footbridge and down along the raging water, all captured on film by our intrepid cameraman, John.

Saturday morning, we pushed down to Fizi, a small village largely emptied out during the war. Andrea and I had visited the area in March, and were glad to see that conditions have improved, although people are still having trouble paying school fees to make sure their kids can continue the education they started at the refugee camps in Tanzania. We also visited the village of Kikonde, where hundreds of tin roofs glint in the sun, testament to NRC's efforts to help the most needy families -- with no distinction between returning refugees, returning internally displaced, or those who stayed -- build decent homes.

Although life is returning to the area, and peace has taken hold, this region along the shores of Lake Tanganyika has been a theater of war for 40 years. Laurent-Désiré Kabila, the father of the current president and who toppled Mobutu in 1997, began his rebellion here, conscripting members of the dominant Bembe tribe and inviting harsh reprisals from Kinshasa. After the start of the 1998 war, when Rwanda invaded the east of Congo against its former protégé Kabila, Burundian rebels took advantage of the chaos to occupy the area around Baraka and Fizi. The people we spoke with told us horrendous stories of rape and abuse; one woman called out to a girl of 9 to join us, then recounted how she had been sexually assaulted four years ago, when she was just 5 years old.

Throughout, John filmed what he could, capturing stories on tape. We had been obliged to get special authorizations for him in Kinshasa to film here, which served us well last week in Kasai. This week, however, the authorities were less welcoming. He had a run-in with the military on Friday morning in Uvira, and then got picked up by the intelligence service in Baraka on Saturday morning while he was out filming. That cost us a $25 fine - and we had to pay another $20 yesterday to register our presence officially. Even today, while we were getting ready to leave Uvira, the immigration authorities hassled Brad for hours, saying that he was harboring spies who were going around filming clandestinely.

So, no arrests, and we have survived bad roads and long days to get here to Bukavu. Tomorrow we hope to get out to see some people who have been displaced by the ongoing fighting and abuse taking place in the hills nearby, and then Wednesday we're off to Kinshasa for our last meetings before leaving on Thursday.

Women's Peace March in Northern Uganda

Sarah sends this in from Gulu, Northern Uganda:

November 9, 2006
Gulu, Northern Uganda

As we drove back from our visits of the camps on the outskirts of Gulu, we came upon a traffic jam in downtown. Our driver told us, "It is the women with the peace march!"

As we got closer, we could hear the music blaring and the beating of the drums. Everyone was turned out on both sides of the road and we maneuvered to get a good view. Soon the women came into view – some wearing UNIFEM t-shirts, many with small babies tied to their backs, some in colorful green dresses. In the front were the older ladies dressed in their finery.

They strutted and danced and chanted. Many were carrying banners that said, "No peace without women." They were marching to Juba Sudan to protest the fact that there are very few women involved in the peace talks between the government of Uganda and the Lord’s Resistance Army. When they saw me taking photos, they began to cheer and clap. "We want peace now. Now is the time for peace. No peace without women."

Closer to Home in Gulu, Northern Uganda

More from Sarah:

November 8, 2006
Gulu, Northern Uganda

Today we drove with the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Activities (OCHA) out to visit some of the camps that had previously been inaccessible. Since the “Juba talks” – the peace talks between the LRA and the government of Uganda that are being hosted in Juba, South Sudan – there has been a virtual peace in Gulu. The roads are full of people moving between the ‘mother camps’ where they were formerly interned and the new ‘satellite’ camps and new ‘sites’ (areas that were quite close to the people’s areas of origin but had not been formally declared accessible by the government of Uganda). Men on bicycles and women on foot carted tools and materials to build huts up and down the roads.

We turned off the main road from Opit camp – a large camp that had been around for 15 years – onto a narrow side road lined on both sides with very high grasses. People dove into the grass on their bicycles or with their bundles - surprised to see a vehicle moving around. We drove for approximately 20 kilometers from the ‘mother camp’ of Opit until we came to a clearing on the road.

The weather was perfect- a clear blue sky, seventy degree weather and a fresh breeze blowing through the trees and grasses bringing the faint smell of wood smoke to our noses. On our left was a new UPDF deployment where soldiers dug ditches and women washed clothes. A soldier was dancing to the sounds of a radio as we pulled up to the road block (a stick placed across the way with the words STOP written in white chalk next to it). After chatting with the soldiers briefly, we walked to the other side of the road towards a large tree. From the road we could see the outlines of a few huts but as we got closer, we noticed that there were many men building bricks, hoeing the ground, and working to clear some of the tall grass around the area.

After the customary greetings to the elders of the site, we pulled up some wooden benches to interview the men. The OCHA surveyors acted as our translators. “We are happy to be here, the men told us.” There are approximately 300 of us on this piece of land. Some are in the bush hunting for food and the women are off gathering grass for the roofs. Our children are back in the mother camp – some are in school and others are looking after them. Sometimes they come here with us but they cannot stay because there is no water and no school.” Talk turned to the provision of water – “ The water here is very unhealthy. There is a swampy part that has water in the morning. We gather it then because when the sun comes up, it dries out.” They brought out a cup of water for us to see – it was milky white and smelled sour.

Access to water is a big issue in Northern Uganda. In the camps, at the best of times, people can access about 7 liters a day – far less than the SPHERE standards regulated 15 liters. This water is suppose to serve for cooking, drinking, washing clothes, and bathing. People stand in line for hours to wait their turn at the water pump.

“Before we were in the ‘mother camps’ we were here. This is our homeland. We normally live further apart but we are building our houses closer together for security,” they told us, “We are very free here. More so than in the mother camps. We can move around and work our land. We feel safe because the army is here but we have not seen any rebels for a long time. We want a better life for ourselves, we have suffered for over 20 years.”

Down the Gulu-Kampala Road

Sarah just sent us a few stories from Northern Uganda. Their ability to find a reliable internet connection has been limited (surprised?), so this one is from November 7.


November 7, 2006

When RI visited Gulu in February 2006, it was too dangerous to drive to Gulu. Due to attacks by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) who were fighting with the Uganda People’s Defense Forces (UPDF), NGOs usually flew or went in military convoys. Since the government of Uganda and LRA have begun peace talks in Juba, South Sudan, a lot has changed. My colleague, "Madame X", and I drove to Gulu from Kampala on Tuesday.

While there was a lot of initial confusion about whether or not we would have to leave at 5am (as many of you know, I’m not a morning person), we eventually decided that we would leave at 7am so we would reach a key bridge before the military convoys and get to Gulu around 1pm. It was raining and quite cool when we left Kampala and made our way through the traffic clogged rush hour listening to a local radio ‘morning show’ that specializes in calling up listeners and pretending to be in love with them and encouraging them to declare their love as well. About an hour outside of the city, the scenery changed - the sun came out, the countryside became very lush with banana trees and mango trees and occasional monkeys running up to our car as we swerved around potholes.

Our driver, Andrew (not his real name), started to tell me about his childhood in Gulu. “Sometimes, I sit with my wife and I ask her why I was born an Acholi,” he told me. “To be born an Acholi is to have nothing but problems.” He elaborated later, “My brother was abducted by the LRA when he was fourteen years old. We do not even know where he is. We believe he is dead. He is dead to us. You see – we cannot be living always in the past. We have to try to survive. My family fled to Kampala when the rebels came to fight. But it is the UPDF who gives us the problems.”

When we drove up to the outskirts of Gulu town, we began to see the immense government-controlled camps where the displaced Acholis live. While the conflict with the LRA has lasted for over 20 years, it wasn’t until about 1996 when the government of Uganda mandated that the bulk of the population had to move into these camps where they could be ‘protected’ by the UPDF. In order to protect the population, the UPDF enforced a very strict curfew, beating or killing anyone found outside the camps for suspected collaboration with the LRA. Sadly, putting everyone in the camps, allowed the LRA to attack the population with ease. Many times the camps would be attacked at night and children abducted and huts burned down.

Andrew became more visibly agitated the closer we came to the town. “See that soldier there? All he has to do is use his gun and steal someone’s bicycle. That person would have to give it to him. We have no power here in our own land.” We arrived at our guesthouse and he was anxious to leave. Have a cold drink, we offered. “No. I am not from here anymore. I want to go home to Kampala.” He said and drove off back down the Gulu-Kampala road.

From Refugee to Resident in the Ivory Coast

Refugees International staff Maureen Lynch and Dawn Calabia returned from the Ivory Coast last week where they met with Liberian refugees who are trying to rebuild their lives now that the Liberian civil war is over. However, they discovered that a lot needs to be done to help these people transition from refugee to resident.

Read their latest article, Cote d’Ivoire: Support local integration for Liberian refugees.

Around the world with Refugees International

Here in the US, we're focusing on the election results and wondering how the new Congress will be working to assist refugees. Meanwhile, outside of the US, millions of people are still forced to live in camps far from their homes as they seek refuge from conflict. Refugees International's Advocates are all over the world right now talking to refugees and determing ways to improve their lives. Here's a brief update on everyone:

• Sean and Kristele are in Syria (and soon heading to Jordan) hearing horrendous stories from Iraqi refugees who have fled the war.
• Sarah and Kavita are in Northern Uganda meeting people displaced by the 20-year-war between the government and the Lord's Resistance Army and looking at whether various peace talks are actually helping people living in camps.
• Sayre & Yemi arrived safely in N'djamena in Chad just last night, where they will be looking at how the conflict in Darfur is spilling over into Chad and the Central African Republic. This morning, they headed to the south of Chad to look at the situation of refugees from the Central African Republic.
• Our Senior Advocate on Stateless issues has partnered with a contact at Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service , and they interviewed children in the Dominican Republic today.
• And of course Rick and Andrea are still in the Congo in South Kivu.

It's exciting to know that we're in so many regions at once. We promise to share with you what they are finding in the field.

Meeting Families 4 Years After the War

Rick has returned safely from Lodja and forwards the following brief message before his next flight:

Back in Lodja, after three bumpy days of travel. We're staying at the Catholic mission, working with Caritas, the international Catholic relief agency. We have an internet connection, but not much time: we hope to get on a flight in a few hours for Kinshasa, but still need to do some work before we leave. So, this will be short.

We got here to Lodja last Friday with no problems - although the long, slow ascent in our Antonov-26 after take-off from Kinshasa made me a little nervous. Father Duda, from Poland, was at the airstrip here to greet us, and drove us into the forest the next day, to get out to areas where entire villages had been displaced during the war.

The first stop Saturday night was Katoko-Kombé, then onwards Sunday for a few more hours to the village of Omesende. The traditional chief rode with us, wearing his ceremonial necklace of leopard teeth, and we were greeted with singing as we drove through the villages. In Omesende, we met families still displaced by the war, one with a two-year old girl too weak from malnutrition to do little more than twist in her mother’s arms, her mouth stretched open with silent cries. Fertile land lies fallow and children go hungry because people have been unable to replace tools and seeds looted during the war four years ago.

After a full day of talking with people - former displaced, demobilized soldiers, nurses and teachers doing their best to provide some help with no resources - we headed back over the footpath that was our road to Katoko, then drove back here to Lodja yesterday. Today, it's raining, making us wonder if the plane from Kinshasa will be able to land and take us back. We hope so: tomorrow morning, we have seats on a UN plane going to Bukavu, to start the second part of our mission.

News and notes

No news from our staff in the field today, so I thought I’d suggest a few good articles from over the weekend.

• Jeffrey Gettleman in the New York Times wanders through Otash camp in South Darfur in the New York Times Week in Review. (free login req’d)
  
• Nora Boustany in the Washington Post writes about the upcoming ICC Tribunal against Congolese rebel leader Thomas Lubanga Dyilo. (free login req'd)
  
• Alexander Higgins of the the Associated Press reports that 100,000 refugees are fleeing Iraq into Syria and Jordan according to the UN. Stay tuned for information from our staff members Sean and Kristele who are investigating Iraqi refugees in the region right now.
  
• The BBC reports on the weekend’s China-Africa Summit. China has pledged $5 billion in loans and credits to Africa over the next 3 years.

Eyes on Darfur

Yesterday, I talked to a group of Syracuse University students about the crisis in Darfur. At some point, I pessimistically told this group that it didn’t look like the conflict in Darfur was going to end anytime soon. The fighting was continuing and could potentially last many more years. (After only a few months of working on this issue, my skepticism sure did rise rapidly.) One girl raised her hand and asked me, “If the conflict in Darfur does last five more years or even longer, people aren’t going to keep paying attention to this crisis. What will happen? Will the world continue to send billions of dollars in aid for so long?”

This is a key question. While the world has continued to provide help for long-term crises in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Northern Uganda , and other places in need, these regions have tended to receive far less support than those crises that remain in the public eye. This is one of the reasons why we here at Refugees International continue to encourage people to take action on Darfur and all of our issues. Telling your friends about the problem, calling your member of Congress and asking them what they’re doing to help, emailing the White House, writing a letter to the editor in your local paper, posting a link about the crisis in your own blog – all of these actions keep the discussion going and remind our elected officials that we’re counting on them.

President Bush, the U.S. Congress, the United Nations, and other world governments should not let this conflict go on for another 5 years. They should insist on creating a viable peace process that brings all parties to the table. They should set firm deadlines on this process, backed by a credible threat of force, if necessary. They should continue to support the African Union, which is the only force providing any protection on the ground. They should lean on China, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Libya to pressure the Sudanese government to stop the slaughter. The list of potential actions they can take goes on. Ultimately, they should prove that my skepticism is unwarranted.

Your actions do make a difference. And if you need a reminder of why you need to act, I put together a few photos of some of the women in Darfur who are counting on us. You can view them at: http://www.refugeesinternational.org/content/report/detail/9572/

Meetings and more meetings...

The latest from Rick: "We are getting to know the UN buildings here in Kinshasa very well: meetings with the Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the UN Development Programme, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, UNICEF, MONUC... Our heads are filling up with information on displaced people going home, refugees coming back, action plans, coordination groups, what everyone is doing (or not doing) about rape, politics, security, humanitarian needs -- it can get a little overwhelming. But by loading up now, we can compare what we see in the field with what staff in the capital say is happening.

Kinshasa, meanwhile, is still calm after the elections. The European Union forces are here and there, with heavy concentratrations around the houses and offices of politicians involved in the polls. Election observers are starting to trickle into the city from the hinterlands, filling up the hotels and celebrating the end of their missions.

We, however, are going in the other direction. At 6 AM tomorrow, we need to be at the offices of Malila Airlift, a local airline, to check in and weigh our bags, to make sure we're not over the limit. They then drive us out to the airport, and our plane, an Antonov-26, is due to take off for Lodja at 9:00. Two hours later, we should touch down deep in the center of the country. When we tell people here where we're going, they look at us for a moment, and then say, Ah, Lodja... and how are you getting there? The priests who will be taking care of us there are apparently very excited at the impending visit by outsiders -- and have promised to drive us even deeper into the countryside on Saturday, to the village of Kotoko-Kombe: no electricity, no cell phone network, but reportedly home to many who were once displaced by fighting and have since returned, but without much help. We'll let you know what we find."

Not-so-scary Halloween in the Congo

Rick and Andrea are still doing fine in the Congo. Here's the latest from Rick. And if you're really looking to learn a lot about the humanitarian situation there, read Rick's recently released 36-page report on the Congo.

No Halloween parties in Kinshasa tonight -- I guess the Congo is scary enough as it is. Actually, the fact that it's not so scary at the moment has us wondering if something is wrong: the elections went off smoothly on Sunday, and life in Kinshasa seems like it's back to normal, complete with impossible twisted traffic jams, 100% humidity, and young women cruising hotel bars looking for some friendship.

We've been meeting a lot of our old contacts over the past couple days, staff members at MONUC and the UN who have come to expect our visits every few months. Everyone is cautiously optimistic about the elections, but we won't really know, of course, until the results come out in a week or so. In the meantime, most everyone is wondering about the future of MONUC: it's the UN's biggest peacekeeping force, and major donors like the U.S. seem eager to see it scaled back. There's still plenty left to do in the DRC before the hard-won peace is sustainable -- ultimately, it will be up to the Security Council to decide in February, when MONUC's mandate expires, what to do next.

Besides going around to meetings, we're also trying to figure out how to get to Lodja, our first destination. There's a flight there on Friday, and another coming back next Tuesday, so that's our plan at the moment. We learned today from the priest there (Lodja is remote, but at least it has a cell network) that he actually wants to take us 150 KM to the east of Lodja, where, apparently, former displaced people are trying to rebuild their lives without any help at all. Hmmm... it sounds like we'll be spending a lot of time in an old jeep on bad roads.

The main event today, though, was the arrival of filmmaker John Baynard, who will be traveling around with us documenting our work and looking for new stories about the DRC. Our hotel had given away his room, but we got him fixed up someplace else, and tomorrow he'll hit the streets with us. Our plans have actually been waylaid a bit by tradition: it's All Saint's Day, and the UN has the day off. Time to get some writing done, and meet people for drinks and coffee instead of in their offices.