By Olivia Warham, May 17, 2012 Follow The JC on Twitter Churchill described appeasement as feeding a crocodile, hoping it chooses to eat you last. If humans learned anything from the 20th century, it should have been that if you keep averting your eyes to genocide elsewhere, eventually you will have to fight to save your own neighbourhood, and you will do so at enormous cost. Alas, we have failed to draw the obvious conclusions from appeasement. Hence those who form “the international community” are responding to 21st century genocide in Sudan as if the Holocaust never happened. And whether in Armenia, Rwanda, Bosnia or Sudan, there has been a predictable pattern to the world’s reaction,…

President Obama has just created something called the Atrocities Prevention Board. Its aim is ambitious to say the least, but it matters because it recognizes that crimes against humanity rarely come out of the blue. The warning signs were there in the case of Armenia, the Holocaust, Bosnia, Rwanda, and currently in Sudan, if the international community had chosen to notice them. On the twentieth anniversary of the start of the Bosnian war we should feel anger and shame because ‘the international order’ is still ignoring those warning signs when they occur. We should also acknowledge the human consequences of the West’s failure in Bosnia. For instance, we should remember how peacekeepers stood by as Serb…

In bars around the globe, in war zones, in refugee camps, after natural disasters, over drinks at conferences, people are comparing hair-raising travel stories. The scariest flight, the most disgusting hotel, the most horrific meal they were obliged to eat in order to avoid an international incident. The challenges of overland borders provide their own special tales of woe. For those whose knowledge is limited to crossing between the U.S. and Canada by car, or traveling on the Eurostar, it is hard to believe there can be anything interesting about this experience. There can be. Cuidad del Este is a bustling city on the Paraguayan side of the Rio Parana. It forms the triple frontier…

Sudan is not often in the news but the rapid slide toward war in the region right now has brought it international attention. Here is a brief explanation of what’s going on. In January 2011 the people living in the southern third of Sudan voted by an astonishing 99% to separate from northern Sudan. This followed decades during which the mainly Arab and mainly Muslim groups who have power in Sudan tried to “ethnically cleanse” Sudan of those it considers racial inferior or politically unreliable i.e. the black African population of the south. More recently the regime, based in the capital, Khartoum, has also tried to rid the poor, marginalised western region of Darfur of…

Despite what the UN says, the terror continues in Darfur The UN Security Council is reconsidering the deployment of its joint African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur, known as UNAMID. UN officials say there is now “much less organised violence” in the remote western province of Sudan. Hence they want to scale back UNAMID, an operation costing $1 billion a year. However, the Sudanese government continues to bomb, rape and terrorise its own citizens in Darfur, just as it has since April 2003. A forthcoming Waging Peace report on recent attacks by the Khartoum regime and its proxies runs to 90 pages (1). Last year there were 132 confirmedaerial bombing raids by the Sudanese armed forces. Anywhere…