Gob– That’s fantastic, Bryn. I personally love carting out African anecdotes to prove how effective I’ve been in my career as well.
Bryn – So let’s cut to the chase here. You and Al Gore were in...
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groundhog day
towards new solutions to old problems
A year ago today, I found myself on a UN evacuation plane flying high over N'Djamena toward Yaounde while thousands upon thousands Chadians crossed the Chari river into Cameroon to escape the bloody street fighting between the Alliance Nationale (AN) rebels and government troops (ANT).
Some over the bridge. Some in motos. Some through the river itself - by canoe or breaststroke. Untold hundreds died in the fighting itself.
The rebel offensive, a grouping of several rebel factions under...
I watched Danish television for the first time in my life just last night. It turned out that the soup du jour was a charity telethon for Africa - so as a result, I didn't really have to understand what they were saying to get this jist of the show.
The emotive images of malnourishment, sickness and destitution spoke loud enough - and for those of us growing up with Sunday morning World Vision hour (following Inspector Gadget), we already know the MO of these kinds of shows.
Celebrity...
I remember the 14th of July 2008 quite clearly, the day the International Criminal Court officially indicted President Omar el Bashir on three counts of genocide, five count of crimes against humanity and two counts of war crimes. The refugee camps in Eastern, my colleagues told me, erupted into festivities at the news.
I arrived in the East on my last mission later in the month and the indictment was still the talk of Abeche. Was it right or wrong to indict Bashir? Would this lead to a...
Speaking in Germany a few years ago, Gareth Evans, former co-chair of the commission that drafted the Responsibility to Protect, was poignant in saying that:
"It has taken the world an insanely long time, centuries in fact, to come to terms conceptually with the idea that state sovereignty is not a license to kill – that there is something fundamentally and intolerably wrong about states murdering or forcibly displacing large numbers of their own citizens, or standing by when others do...
It was quite the shock, upon arriving in Chad, to drive around the town and see the generic baggy camouflage uniforms barely hanging on to their young hosts. With their black berets drooping over their eyebrows, it was hard not to snicker at the sight even though that beyond appearances there was nothing funny about it.
One of my bosses sneered at the sight, calling them all 'little Colonels' in a surprisingly contemptuous voice, given his usual stoic demeanour.
Later on during my time...
One poorly understood distinction in the world of displacement is the difference between a refugee and an internally displaced person (IDP). Though both groups are either fleeing human rights abuse or violence, one steps over a border and the other does not.
Check. Understood. Seems embarrassingly basic, actually.
But while the lines that divide countries, for instance between Chad and Sudan, were arbitrarily created and often lack clear demarcation, the difference they make cannot...
Afterall, it would be pretty difficult to explain that both soldier and aid workers wearing the European Union flag are actually so different.
Doctors Without Borders, one of the more fiercely...
Almost any conversation of summer weather in Canada makes a passing reference to bug season. We've grown accustom to 'getting chewed' by the ‘mozzies’ in our great outdoors. And who doesn’t remember pressing Xs into their mosquito bites with a fingernail or lathering themselves in DEET.
The way we so casually deal with or exterminate them (electric tennis rackets!) makes the bug season little more than a nuisance to gripe about. So much so, that we often tend to forget just how...
When I saw the first UN and EUFOR 4x4s traveling through the streets of N'Djamena last fall, it started to seem like just maybe the world was paying enough attention to the Chad-CAR-Sudan triangle to actually quell the violence in the region. Afterall the size and scope seemed, at the time, rather impressive.
At mid-term, the reality has been somewhat different. Six humanitarian workers have been killed in Chad in 2008 and many of my colleagues from the humanitarian community are...
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