Some updates on yesterday’s story from the BBC, L.A. Times, Reuters, Human Rights Watch, and the U.N.
And here is fresh reporting from CNN on the scale of the problem in Darfur.
The headline: “Rape is a way of life for Darfur’s women.”
I did a story about this when Human Rights Watch released its report on rape in Darfur in April. You can listen here.
The UN Security Council takes on the issue tomorrow. Listen to my preview on today’s show here and my coverage from the DRC which aired in January here.
Other links:
The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo
Lots to read/hear on Sudan today:
The World’s Lisa Mullins speaks with US Envoy Rich Williamson. Listen here. In the interview he accuses UN peacekeepers of failing to act forcefully in Abyei. He makes the same point before the UN Security Council.
Mia Farrow and John Prendergast brief the UN Security Council on Darfur.
The New York Times weighs in with an editorial.
From Sunday:
Eliza Griswold profiles longtime Sudan advocate Roger Winter.
Eric Reeves warns of mass starvation in Darfur.
Posted in Darfur, Genocide, Sudan
Tagged Abyei, Darfur, Eric Reeves, John Prendergast, Mia Farrow, Rich Williamson, Sudan
The first trial before the International Criminal Court was supposed to start next Monday June 23. Last week just as I was arranging interviews for a preview of the trial and description of the case against Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga, an ICC press release landed in my Inbox announcing the trial had been postponed. Now it looks as if it may not happen at all. It seems the prosecution has improperly withheld information from the defense. Here’s the BBC story and a Reuters dispatch. A hearing has been scheduled for June 24 to decide what to do next.
I made it to the Chateau de Versailles today. It is something else. Massive, opulent, beautifully restored. And very very crowded. I survived the masses and recorded some sound and got to stand in the room where the Versailles Treaty was signed in 1919. The Hall of Mirrors has 17 huge windows and 17 huge mirrors facing those windows, as well as countless chandeliers, velvet-covered stools, fancy busts, gold hinges, marble corners. Even with the throng of tourists, and youngsters on school trips, and their guides peppering them with facts, it was possible in the shimmering, twinkling light bouncing off all the reflective surfaces to glimpse a sense of stillness every once in a while as the movement in the galleries ebbed and flowed. You could imagine the tense and solemn occasion of the signing…just.
The Paris peace talks will loom large in my story about how WWI ended; it’s impossible to tell the tale of why the shooting stopped and what happened next without them. There are many books on the topic but two relatively recent ones which have been enormously helpful to me are Margaret MacMillan’s Paris 1919 (published in the UK as The Peacemakers) and Zara Steiner’s The Lights that Failed (about the period 1919 to 1933). I had the chance to interview both historians on this trip. I am struck by how hard each has worked to get inside the minds and the times of the figures to whom it fell to try to bring order to an international system that had pretty much collapsed. By the way, both authors, and the military historian Hew Strachan, whom I also interviewed this week, strenuously refute the old notion that the Versailles Treaty somehow led inevitably to WW2. That’s just too simplistic a reading of what happened between the wars for them. Anyway, lots to chew on. I will have my hands full trying to distill it for radio.
Hall of Mirrors from outside
Hall of Mirrors from inside
And some pics from earlier in the week:
Graves and cyclists in Ypres
The strangest thing I saw all week (also in Ypres). What is this?
Oxford students all dressed up for exams
In the trenches at the Imperial War Museum
Spent the day in Ypres/Ieper about which many people more eloquent than I have already expounded. I’m glad I went. It truly is like a giant graveyard, not just the city itself but the entire Salient where the two sides bogged down in their respective trenches from 1914 to 1918 amid unprecedented and colossal bloodshed. I will spare you my adventures on Belgian public transportation trying to reach “Hill 62″ and Sanctuary Wood where I had hoped to see the trenches which have been preserved since the war. I didn’t get quite that far. But I did spend a day in a place that evokes as well as anything the pain and loss and madness of what was truly a global war. At the In Flanders Fields museum in the old Lakenhalle in the Grote Markt a temporary exhibition Man Culture War tells just how global it was, not just geographically but in terms of the varied peoples who participated/were forced to participate.
The more I read about and understand this war, the more I reel from the figures. Can it really be that 60 million soldiers were mobilized, and of those 8 million died? (Michael Howard’s The First World War: A Very Short Introduction from Oxford University Press.)
More to come on WWI as you know.
Meanwhile, lots of good stuff on today’s show. Don’t miss Katy Clark on Bagram, Lisa Mullins and Michael Scharf on Luis Moreno-Ocampo’s accusations against the Sudanese government, or Elizabeth Ross’s piece on the Russian bells at Harvard. Don’t miss the Boston’s Globe’s audio slideshow on the bells either, narrated by the wonderful Diana Eck.
Posted in Darfur, Genocide, How Wars End, Sudan
Tagged Elizabeth Ross, Flanders, Ieper, Katy Clark, Lisa Mullins, Michael Scharf, PRI's The World, WWI, Ypres
Oxford yesterday, London today, Cambridge tomorrow. Greetings from the UK where I am doing some research on WWI and its aftermath for my how-wars-end project. I am chasing historians who are not just good scholars but gifted speakers and writers as well. They are the ones who make great radio.
Today I paid my first visit to the Imperial War Museum. If you’re in London go see it (and not just for the Ian Fleming show). I don’t know why I’ve never been before. I spent so much time in the WWI exhibits I didn’t see much else. But I did have a quick peek at The Children’s War exhibition. It’s about my parents’ generation of Brits who grew up during WWI and what it was like to be a kid then. I found it very evocative; many of the household items and children’s toys of that era were things I’ve seen in my parents’ tiny old black and white photos or at my grandparents homes when I was small myself. I forget how much my parents’ lives (both born in England in 1929 and 1936) were shaped by war.
Just before I left the museum I dashed up to the galleries on the top floor to see the giant John Singer Sargent painting “Gassed.” Sargent actually witnessed the western front in 1918. I’m glad I took the time, not only because the Sargent is so impressive and affecting but because in the same room (which I had all to myself) was a small exhibition “Disappeared” by a Kurdish artist called Osman Ahmed. He fled Iraq during the Anfal campaign in 1988 and his drawings reflect that displacement. Here’s what the catalogue says: “In these images, crowds of people migrate endlessly through a deserted landscape towards an unknown destination.” Some of the crowds are drawn with long squiggly continuous lines so you can see individuals but they’re all linked together, and even in drawings where the individuals are more defined and realistic, there’s an amoeba-like clumping fluid nature to the mass of bodies moving toward an ill-defined exit. The drawings are titled things like “Halabja Chemical Bombing,” “Martyr,” “Memories.” Not surprisingly perhaps, Osman Ahmed cites Goya’s Disasters of Wars and Picasso’s Guernica and Kathe Kollwitz’s lithographs as influences. Also a white South African artist I don’t know called William Kentridge.
Anyway, I was stopped in my tracks by these works this afternoon and had to tear myself away to make my next appointment. Later at an Internet Cafe I had time to do a quick search and found a little bit of coverage of Osman Ahmed. Given the power of what I had just seen I was surprised not to find more. On the other hand I think I may have slipped in before the show was officially open. It looks like the opening is this weekend. If I’d known about this show in time I would have tried to find Osman Ahmed (he apparently lives in London) to do an interview while I was here in the U.K. According to the catalogue, he’s doing a doctorate on artists’ responses to crimes against humanity and the role of drawing in documenting the Anfal campaign.
Posted in Announcements, Genocide, Iraq
Tagged Anfal, Halabja, Imperial War Museum, Iraq, Kurdish, Kurds, Osman Ahmed
