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Sea levels are rising, and the people of Gardi Sugdub know disaster looms.

The tiny, low-lying island off the north coast of Panama doesn’t stand a chance against the steamroller of climate change. The nearly 1,300 people crowded onto to it will have to move.

And the community wants to move. In fact, they began planning to relocate to the mainland in 2010. But no one has yet been able to leave the sinking island, because government pledges of support for the move keep falling through. The relocation date gets pushed forward, over and over.

The government’s unfulfilled promises for the new location include a partly constructed hospital – a project now abandoned – and a new school building that’s taking forever to complete. People from the community ask about the delays, but authorities fail to provide full explanations.

Of course, climate change doesn’t wait for governments, and people cannot live on promises. With the relocation from Gardi Sugdub stalled, the community is in limbo, with the sea rising relentlessly around them. Floods are already making life harder for the island’s residents, impacting health, education, and culture.

And Gardi Sugdub, home to Guna Indigenous people for over a century, is not alone. In Panama, 38 communities may need to be relocated because of overcrowding and the rising sea level. Hundreds of communities around the world find themselves in a similar position – or soon will.

It’s difficult not to see Gardi Sugdub as a metaphor for humanity’s failure in the face of climate change. People look around and see the impacts: more frequent higher temperatures and other extreme events, floods, droughts, forest fires, and more. They ask governments to do something and governments reply with delays and broken promises rather than action.

But being a metaphor or a warning for the rest of the world doesn’t help the people on Gardi Sugdub. They need authorities in Panama to follow through, so they can get off the island with dignity and rebuild their lives on safer ground.

(written by Aiza Rodrigues Akhtar)

Last Friday, the EU imposed financial and travel restrictions against people from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, and Tanzania for “acts that constitute serious human rights violations and abuses” in eastern Congo.  

Most of them are leaders or senior commanders of abusive armed groups operating in the country. 

Rwanda has long been involved in supporting abusive armed groups, like M23, in eastern Congo, but this is the first time the EU has sanctioned a Rwandan army officer: Captain Jean-Pierre Niragire.

Last month, the United Nations Group of Experts on Congo reported that Niragire has been leading Rwanda Defense Force’s special forces’ operation supporting the M23 advance since May 2022. 

The EU sanctions are an important step. However, the EU should go further by showing that any Rwandan or Congolese commander who assists abusive fighters will be sanctioned.

Sanctions are a critical tool to help prevent more abuses. But they are only the start of a much-needed effort to hold abusers accountable. 

Yesterday, in a special edition of this newsletter, we highlighted ongoing mass atrocity crimes in Darfur, Sudan, and promised updates from our researchers interviewing survivors in neighboring Chad.

I received the following note from my colleagues, Belkis Wille and Jean-Baptiste Gallopin, this morning. It’s the testimony of a 16-year-old girl interviewed at a medical facility in Chad, near the Sudanese border. She’d been shot while she and tens of thousands of civilians, trapped inside the West Darfur capital of El Geneina, were desperately trying to leave the city and find refuge in Chad mid-June.

She describes how residents fled from one neighborhood to another under repeated attacks by the the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and its allied militias, and how these forces opened fire on a large group of fleeing civilians, some in cars and some on foot, on June 15.

I come from Anda Burta village but went to visit my sister in the Jebal neighborhood [of El Geneina] when the conflict started. We stayed for ten days, but then, a few days later, because forces came and burned Jebal, we went to the Salam neighborhood. We stayed there for two weeks.

Then we went to the Madaris neighborhood and stayed for 15-20 days, and then to Zahra, [a school dormitory turned into a makeshift camp for displaced people] and that was the day [June 14] when the governor [of West Darfur Khamis Abbakar] was killed.

There were multiple attacks and no armed forces protected us in any of those locations.

Then we heard that the governor’s forces had run out of bullets.

We decided to go to Ardamata [a suburb of El Geneina, where many people fled, perhaps hoping for protection from the Sudanese military based there]. We left at 9 pm.

We were in a vehicle driving through the Nasim neighborhood at 7 am on June 15 when we saw many armed people on the street and shooting started on the bridge. Many RSF and Arab armed forces started shooting at cars and people. Some were shooting from houses, some from the street, and some from cars.

Everyone started running including older people, women, and children. I was injured while I was in my vehicle. In front of me there was a burned vehicle.

Forces stopped the car in front of us, and they shot the people inside, and then shot up the vehicle. It was a Land Cruiser. I don’t know how many people were inside, but no fighters as far as I could see. Same with the vehicle behind us: they stopped it and shot the people inside. They then set the car on fire.

They came to our vehicle and asked, “Is this your vehicle?” Then they started taking out some of the people with us in the car and shot some and were taking others, maybe to arrest them. It was chaos, so we don’t know what happened to everyone, but we were many in the car.

As this was happening, we slipped away and ran. My sister’s five-year-old son was shot in the right foot.

As I turned back to look, I saw them shooting at the vehicle we had been in, and the fire was starting to spread to our car from the car behind. Me, my sister, and her son were the only ones from our car who survived as far as I know.

We went to a house nearby to seek safety, but Arabs lived there. They searched us before telling us we had to leave. We fled from there to the Salam neighborhood and from there we came to Chad.

This testimony highlights the need for people to be able to flee safely. We know other towns and villages continue to be attacked.

(compiled by Aiza Rodrigues Akhtar)

• Haitians protest, demand release of kidnapped American nurse and daughter (France 24) 
• Mexican city of Chihuahua bans misogynist lyrics in live music venues (The Guardian) 
• Australian charged with 1,623 sex offences against 91 girls in childcare (Al Jazeera) 
• EU Should Ban Use of Hazardous Herbicide (HRW) 

This daily newsletter is produced by a small team in Europe, and as you probably know, it is our tradition here in this part of the world to treat summer vacations seriously. We’re thus going to go on holiday from August 7 to September 4.

Our colleagues in the US may send along an update here and there over those four weeks, but regular service won’t return till September.

I want to thank all of our readers for your continued support, and I hope you all can take a break in the coming weeks, too.

- Andrew