The State Department’s new list of governments using child soldiers is out. Seven countries are named this year. The list is not that surprising: It includes the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burma and South Sudan, which have deployed child soldiers for years. What five countries have in common, however, is that they get U.S. military assistance. This puts the Obama administration’s commitment to end the use of child soldiers to the test — and the clock is ticking.
Giving life is a leading cause of death of women and girls in Africa. And in the last 20 years, few African countries, especially those in sub-Saharan Africa, have made enough progress in bringing down the number of maternal deaths.
In the past week, a 30-minute video about Joseph Kony and his rebel group, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), has received more than 90 million internet hits. Viewers of the video now know, if they didn’t before, that he is a wanted man with much blood on his hands. For years Human Rights Watch has investigated the LRA’s horrors, from Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo to the Central African Republic (CAR) and South Sudan. We have visited remote massacre sites and listened to hundreds of victims and survivors who want their stories heard.
We’ve spent years investigating the horrors perpetrated by the LRA in central Africa — Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic (CAR), and South Sudan. We gathered evidence at massacre sites — wooden clubs covered in dried blood, rubber strips from bicycle tires used to tie up the victims, and freshly dug graves – and spoke to hundreds of boys and girls forced to fight for his army or held captive as sex slaves. And we’re elated that #stopKony is a trending topic on Twitter – if anyone deserves global notoriety it’s Kony.
A giddy optimism prevails in Juba, in Southern Sudan. Almost everyone in this dusty boomtown -- from teachers and students, to politicians and bodaboda taxi drivers -- says they will choose separation from the North in the January 9 referendum for southern independence. If they do, the ten southern states of Sudan will become Africa's newest nation, with enormous state-building challenges ahead. They will have to build the rule of law from scratch here and end entrenched patterns of communal violence and human rights abuses, especially by southern security forces.
In the past week, a 30-minute video about Joseph Kony and his rebel group, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), has received more than 90 million internet hits. Viewers of the video now know, if they didn’t before, that he is a wanted man with much blood on his hands. For years Human Rights Watch has investigated the LRA’s horrors, from Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo to the Central African Republic (CAR) and South Sudan. We have visited remote massacre sites and listened to hundreds of victims and survivors who want their stories heard.