“When the soldiers come, we go into the water up to our necks and hide, with only our noses out of the water,” a displaced villager
.. “Even if you die in the water, it’s better to be killed by snakes or crocodiles than by soldiers,” she said.
.. Aid workers and journalists are under attack, with armed men breaking into a Catholic compound and raping a 67-year-old American nun.
.. Multiply this family’s tragedy by millions and you get a window into the catastrophe faced by South Sudan, already one of the world’s poorest nations. Even before the civil war started two years ago, a girl was much more likely to grow up to die in childbirth than to finish high school.
.. All sides in this civil war have engaged in atrocities, and it has unfortunately taken on an ethnic dimension.
.. A new United Nations report suggests that government-affiliated soldiers were allowed to rape women in lieu of wages ..
.. it would help to have an arms embargo and sanctions aimed at the assets of individuals on each side of the civil war: Make leaders pay a price for intransigence, instead of profiting from it. “Go after their assets,” advises John Prendergast of the Enough Project, an anti-genocide group. “Stinging financial pressure that targets the top leaders on both sides will impact calculations more than anything else.”
.. when a government that we helped put in place is regarded by citizens as more dangerous than hungry crocodiles, then surely we can try a little harder.
Syria’s truth smugglers
“What we’ll do is take these activists – young, enthusiastic, self-appointed, social-media-savvy, with considerable personal courage – and we’ll sensitise them to the sort of evidence that is required to inform an international criminal case, so they’re not running around collecting stuff that’s of no use for a criminal process.”
.. He pointed out that the first witness called at the Nuremberg trials was the Third Reich’s state archivist, and he showed me a graphic to illustrate his approach.
.. Syria represents a near-ideal case study for a paper-driven approach.
“It is highly bureaucratised,” he said. “It generates an awful lot of paper, because it is a culture in which decision-making by subordinates is implicitly discouraged, so people are forever reporting upwards, trying to get others to take responsibility for decision making, and covering their ass … that produces paper.”
.. When Adel and his investigators come across a cache of abandoned documents, they must make an assessment of their overall significance, but they are not supposed to winnow out individual pages in search of an elusive “smoking gun” memo. This is partly to prevent the exclusion of potentially exculpatory evidence, and therefore to pre‑empt possible procedural objections from the defence in any future trial. But ostensibly mundane documents often prove to be the most damning.