Daily Brief Audio Series
Since mid-May, attacks by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and their allied militias on El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, Sudan, have escalated. Their opponents, the Sudanese armed forces and their allies, have fought from within the town, also placing hundreds of thousands of people at risk.
If the city of El Fasher falls to the RSF, recent history tells us, further atrocities against civilians are likely.
A few weeks ago, we looked at how a similar situation unfolded in El Geneina, the capital city of West Darfur, last year. In El Geneina, the RSF and their allies carried out wave after wave of attacks targeting ethnic Massalit people. They killed unarmed civilians in their thousands, raped women and girls, and tortured detainees.
They also looted on a massive scale and razed entire neighborhoods to the ground. They sent half a million people fleeing over the border to Chad.
Many of these atrocities are war crimes or crimes against humanity. The targeting of the Massalit ethnic group, with the apparent aim to have them permanently leave Darfur is ethnic cleansing.
It is also possible the RSF and their allies killed Massalit civilians with the specific intent to destroy in whole or in part the Massalit population in at least West Darfur. That would mean we’re looking at possible genocide.
The world failed to respond to those atrocities. They have to do more for civilians in El Fasher and elsewhere.
There’s a kind of double déjà vu going on here. In the shorter term, the city of El Fasher is threatened with the same destruction as the city of El Geneina. In the longer view, the mass atrocity crimes unfolding in Darfur today are reminiscent of those committed in Darfur in 2003-04.
It’s no surprise, perhaps, given the RSF is largely recruited from the old Janjaweed, the militia known for their appalling crimes against non-Arab groups, including the Massalit, 20 years ago.
Adding to the scale of the impending horrors today, El Fasher had been a place where people sought refuge. Hundreds of thousands of people fleeing the violence in other parts of Darfur ended up in El Fasher.
Since the conflict started in April 2023, we’ve been ringing alarm bells about the crisis, over and over, and highlighting the international community’s failure to address it.
On Thursday, the UN Security Council approved a resolution demanding the RSF halt the siege of El Fasher. It calls for accountability for grave crimes, including sexual violence. It also warns of imminent famine, especially in Darfur.
This is a good step, bringing much-needed global attention to the crisis and putting all warring parties on notice that the world is watching their actions.
However, it’s still far from enough.
The situation in Darfur demands an international presence with the job of protecting civilians there. The UN Secretary-General should work with the African Union to create and deploy one.
The urgent need for such a mission cannot be stressed strongly enough.
Georgia’s ruling party, Georgian Dream, apparently just can’t get enough of attacking fundamental rights these days.
Fresh off its massively unpopular “foreign agents” legislation, the government is now pushing an anti-LGBT bill.
The “foreign agents” bill – now law – is an assault on fundamental rights, specifically the right to freedom of association. It targets civil society and independent media by forcing certain nongovernmental groups and media outlets to register as “organizations serving the interests of a foreign power.”
Public outrage at the bill led to some of the largest peaceful protests Georgia has seen in recent decades, and it prompted harsh criticism from Georgia’s international partners. The government pushed the abusive legislation through regardless.
Now, they’re targeting the rights of LGBT folks.
Ruling party Georgian Dream has proposed a new bill that would ban same-sex marriage, adoption by same-sex couples, and gender-affirming medical care. It would also prohibit positive references to LGBT people in media, movies, schools, and public gatherings.
Understand what this means. They are proposing pre-publication censorship to remove any positive reference or image of same-sex relationships. They want to ban public assemblies that promote LGBT equality.
This is draconian stuff.
It would legalize homophobia and discrimination. It would violate the rights of LGBT people, and it would go against Georgia’s international obligations on fundamental rights.
Like the “foreign agents” law, the new anti-LGBT bill is inspired by similar legislation in Russia.
However, Georgian Dream is moving into nightmare territory on LGBT rights even faster than the Kremlin did. Russia started out with banning LGBT “propaganda” among children. It took some years before Russia made the ban relevant for all ages. Georgian Dream is trying to do it all in one go.
Obviously, Georgian Dream should immediately reverse course and withdraw the abusive anti-LGBT bill. But given their intense determination with the earlier “foreign agents” bill, steamrollering over unprecedented public and international pressure, I’m not super hopeful.
If Madagascar can do it, if Sierra Leone can do it, why can’t Uganda do it?
Other low-income countries in sub-Saharan Africa manage to offer children at least one year of free pre-primary education. But not Uganda.
Less than 10 percent of Ugandan children ages 3 to 5 are enrolled in a registered and licensed pre-primary school, known locally as “nursery” school.
Fees parents must pay for private preschools are usually too high, so most kids do not attend school until they reach primary school, at age six. Sometimes, young ones are sent to primary school before age six – that is, before they’re ready socially and developmentally – crowding classrooms for everyone.
This is damaging for the kids and damaging for the country. The pre-primary years are a critical time for children’s development. A new HRW report documents how lack of access to free pre-primary education leads to poorer performance later in primary school. More kids have to repeat a year, for example, and drop-out rates are higher.
This all hits children’s lifelong prospects, thus undermining Uganda’s economic potential generally.
The Ugandan government introduced free primary education in 1997 and free secondary education in 2007. Over the years, they have made promises to add at least one year of free pre-primary education to the mix, but things aren’t moving as quickly as they should.
The main reason given – perhaps the only reason ever given – is money.
Last year, however, Uganda’s own Ministry of Education and Sports co-published a cost-benefit analysis of introducing pre-primary education in the country. It estimated 90 percent of the costs of scaling up pre-primary education could be covered through savings from fewer kids repeating a year and fewer underage kids enrolled in primary school.
Uganda is also not too poor to afford this. The World Bank charts Uganda’s gross national income per capita at US$930. Yes, that makes it a “low-income country,” but other countries even worse off manage to offer at least one year of free pre-primary education. Madagascar and Sierra Leone both have a gross national income per capita of only US$510.
The problem is not money but priorities. Uganda devotes only 8.4 percent of its national budget to education, while, for example, neighboring Kenya and Tanzania both allocate more than 18 percent.
Around the world today, most countries already guarantee at least one year of free pre-primary education. Uganda can afford to join them. In fact, it can’t afford not to.
A major international conference opens in Berlin today. The Ukraine Recovery Conference aims to generate government aid and private-sector investment for “recovery, reconstruction, reform, and modernization” in Ukraine.
Now, some may find this a bit odd. After all, Russia’s full-scale, atrocity-fueled invasion of Ukraine is ongoing, and the destruction continues to unfold. So, it may seem a bit premature to talk about rebuilding.
But it’s never too early to plan for the future, and when it comes to children and their education, the future is now: the needs are there today, war or no war.
The impact of Russia’s invasion on Ukraine’s education system has been enormous. Human Rights Watch has documented extensive damage and destruction to schools and preschools from attacks, as well as from Russian forces that occupied, pillaged, and trashed schools. Ukraine’s government says more than 3,790 educational facilities have been damaged or destroyed.
Donors meeting in Berlin this week should prioritize support for rebuilding damaged schools and making them accessible for children.
However, getting buildings up and running again is only one part of what’s needed.
The damage to schools and risks to students have pushed Ukraine to adopt distance learning in many cases. But many parents and children still lack the devices and connectivity needed for distance learning.
The conference in Berlin ought to address this, as well, and act to help make sure children and teachers have the tools and technology they need.
And one more thing. Ukraine still suffers from a Soviet-era legacy of institutionalizing kids deemed to have disabilities or to be from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds. Ukraine’s government has created a detailed roadmap to deinstitutionalization, and recent EU reconstruction money includes plans for building foster-family-style homes for thousands of kids.
New funding at the Berlin conference should aim build on this momentum for getting kids out of institutions.
Russia’s invasion continues, the war is not over, and further atrocities can be expected. But the rebuilding of Ukraine has already begun, and those meeting in Berlin this week should keep in mind, the future of the country lies with its children.
I’d like to report a missing person. Actually, more than a million of them, missing for a thousand days.
In September 2021, the Taliban prohibited girls from attending school beyond sixth grade in Afghanistan. The following year, they expanded the ban to universities, blocking women students from finishing their advanced education.
These bans are on top of other severe restrictions on women and girls to work, to travel, and to even leave their homes. It’s the most serious women’s rights crisis in the world and has been condemned by international experts as “gender apartheid.”
The absence of girls and women from secondary and university education is obviously a tragedy for the individuals concerned. Women throughout Afghanistan describe their situation as isolation and suffocation, drawing comparisons to “living in prison-like conditions.”
But the policy is also a punishing blow to the country as a whole.
“Afghanistan will never fully recover from these 1,000 days,” my colleague and expert Heather Barr says. “The potential lost in this time – the artists, doctors, poets, and engineers who will never get to lend their country their skills – cannot be replaced.”
Missing people, missing talents, missing dreams, missing lives.
In no other country does this happen. Afghanistan is the only state in the world that bars girls and women from secondary and higher education. Only the Taliban thugocracy is so viciously anti-women that they hinder their country’s advancement and progress by blocking half the population from participating in society.
It’s like running a marathon and deciding to saw off one of your legs before the race begins.
There are brave girls and women defying the Taliban by attending underground schools, but clearly that can’t overcome all the losses, both personal and to society as a whole. We need to see more effort from the outside world, as well.
At the end of June, UN experts and envoys on Afghanistan will meet in Doha, Qatar, to continue to discuss the international community’s approach to Afghanistan. It’s an opportunity to stand with Afghan women and avoid doing anything that might look like trivializing the serious human rights crisis or legitimizing the Taliban regime.
Afghan women have been clear about what should be done. The international community should hold the Taliban accountable for their crimes against women and girls.
They must not grant the Taliban a seat at the UN, for example, or invite them to UN-organized meetings. No one should lift sanctions on the regime until there’s verified improvement in human rights, especially women’s rights.
Anything less risks normalizing the widespread terror of the Taliban regime.