Blog Posts by Jennifer Smith

The report “Renewing the Pledge” released yesterday by a group of 26 international NGOs and civil society organizations highlighted the urgency of renewed international attention to Sudan. With less than six months to go before referenda in south Sudan and Abyei determine whether they remain united with the north, there is a laundry list of priority issues that still need to be resolved.

As we move closer to the January 2011 referendum on southern Sudanese independence and a laundry list of unresolved issues remains between the two parties, criticism of U.S. Special Envoy Scott Gration is reaching fever pitch. It is hard to go more than a couple of days without reading an article, paper or blog somewhere in the U.S. complaining about his perceived shortcomings and suggesting that solutions would be just around the corner, if only the Obama Administration could get its act together.

Like many others, Refugees International has been watching the Sudanese elections process closely, eagerly awaiting feedback from the various electoral observer missions. Preliminary statements coming out of some of the missions are fairly disappointing. The focus seems to be less on providing an objective assessment of how the process measures up to international standards, and more on excusing certain actions because of low expectations and a political desire for the elections to be seen as a success.

When my colleague Melanie Teff and I visited Upper Nile and Southern Kordofan states a few weeks ago, we spent a lot of time hearing and talking about water. Sudan had been experiencing a drought, and harvests had yielded far less than normal. People were worried. The international community was worried. The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) announced that it was increasing its expected number of beneficiaries for food aid in south Sudan this year from 1.1 million to 4.3 million people, a massive increase.

The escalation of violence in south Sudan should serve as a wake-up call at this critical point in time. Five years ago this week, the government in Khartoum and rebel leaders in south Sudan ended a long and bloody civil war with the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. Today, with one year left to go before a referendum on southern independence in 2011, the outlook is grim. Last month, the Khartoum government cracked down on protesters and detained senior members of opposition parties.

Refugees International wrote in a September 2009 field report that sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo had increased since the start of the government-led “Kimia II” military operations against the FDLR rebel group. When Refugees International Advocate Camilla Olson and I were in South Kivu in August carrying out research for the report, many displaced women described their experiences after they fled the fighting. One woman from Ziralo groupement told RI she escaped after hearing gunshots outside her house. In the chaos, her family was scattered and left home with nothing. She spent four nights in the forest before she could make it into town. She said women were raped by the FDLR while fleeing, and she didn’t want to go back home as long as they were still around.

Public statements made by the United Nations peacekeeping mission in the DR Congo, MONUC, have been the subject of much controversy in recent months. On October 28, a group of international agencies focusing on protection sent a letter to the top UN official in the country, Alan Doss. In the letter they criticized the tone of the last Secretary-General’s report on MONUC which they said minimized the humanitarian crisis ongoing in the east of the country. Although Refugees International was not involved in this letter, my colleague Erin Weir and I raised the issue of optimistic language with senior MONUC management on our recent trip to Congo last month.

On my recent trip to eastern DR Congo with my colleague Camilla Olson, we overlapped with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as she visited Goma. The visit of such a senior U.S. official to a place people often say the world has forgotten about was encouraging. For those of us working on Congo issues, it was a rare source of hope that greater attention would be paid to the never-ending cycle of violence that has led to the deaths of millions of civilians and exhausted donors and aid workers.