Nate Henn

Nate Henn, 25, was one of the victims in yesterday’s bombing in Kigali, Rwanda of a rugby field where the World Cup final was being televised on a giant screen. Nate listed himself as a 2007 graduate of the University of Delaware. When I was on the Inquirer’s editorial board writing about Northern Uganda from about 2005 through 2007, a group of students from UD was extremely passionate about and active in efforts to raise US awareness about the war in northern Uganda in which children were targeted and terrorized. A number of them walked in Philadelphia’s portion of the first, national Gulu Walk, in an effort to teach people around the world about that conflict. I suspect Nate was one of those participants, since he was in Uganda working with the NGO, Invisible Children, which seeks to help the kids of northern Uganda who still feel the aftereffects of a war in which they were kidnapped and forced to become soldiers and sex slaves.

A surge of activism beginning around 2005, helped propel the end of that war in northern Uganda, though the Lord’s Resistance Army, led by international war-crimes suspect Joseph Kony, continues to wreak bloody havoc on children and other bystanders throughout that region of Africa.  While the LRA’s continued existence is troubing, today let us simply herald the role individual activists who coalesce into a larger group, can play in an issue, no matter how big or small or how far away it may be.

One person can make a difference. Nate Henn made a difference. My condolences to his family.

Secretary of State Clinton will always be a lightning rod for people who are at odds with her or her husband, former President Bill Clinton. I remember back when Bill Clinton was making his first run for president, and there were wild stories out there that said Secretary of State Clinton’s legal writings urged children to rule over their parents, I looked up her writings. They were good, solid pieces that made strong arguments on children having rights, not becoming their own parents in terms of decisionmaking. Her positions had been totally skewed.

Now she is secretary of state and few people have talked about how she has buckled down and gotten off to an excellent start. (Ironically, I think one person who did note that was Pat Buchanan). She has done what she did as a freshman senator: quietly worked hard. Her voice was loudest in Africa, and I suspect that was so because she is passionate about the issues many Africans face, and she is especially passionate about the issues African women face and the roles they could be playing in making their communities and countries better.  

And thank goodness for that, too.

Highlighting women’s abilities and the constraints in many African countries that bar them from using their talents, isn’t just some sort of kooky feminist show, as some critics make it seem. Hillary is exactly right — and those involved in serious development work know it — that women hold the key in their countries to economic progress and improved family health and life. Many of the most effective social and economic programs were started and are run by women, who then put the money they earn to use for the betterment of their children, families and their communities.

Certainly not all poor men are wasteful and women are upstanding. I help support a young lady in Uganda and her mother has drunk away some of the money I have given her to support their family. But go to any poor twon, any poor village or displacement camp, and you’ll see many men simply nto contributing their share to their families’ well-being. Women need to be given as many opportunities and as much support as possible to step up amd contribute when men cannot or will not.     

Women in Africa are an untapped economic engine that can help lift their countries. 

Thank goodness Hillary understands that.

Joaquim Alberto Chissano, former U.N. envoy to northern Uganda

It’s sad to see an apparatus of peacemaking, the office of the U.N. special envoy to northern Uganda, close. But why should the United Nations keep it open considering that Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, has proven himself - once again - to be an unreliable peace partner. The charade ought to end that Kony ever will sign a peace pact or turn himself in to any authority without intense pressure. His reluctance, however, does not mean the world should turn away and let the LRA terrorize civilians in the Deomcratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic, Sudan, or anywhere else. What a monumental failure of regional and international authority that would be.

Here’s the story, from the Chinese Xiunha news agency:

  
UN quits special envoy for LRA amid chorus for Ugandan rebel leader’s arrest

By Lucy-Claire Saunders

    UNITED NATIONS, June 3 (Xinhua) — With the collapse of peace talks last year between the Kampala government and Joseph Kony’s northern Ugandan rebel forces, the United Nations will suspended its special envoy for the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) at the end of the month, according to a letter addressed to the president of the UN Security Council made public here on Wednesday.

    UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will suspend special envoy Joaquim Alberto Chissano’s assignment and close his office in Kampala on June 30, six months earlier than the Security Council originally mandated in December 2008.

    ”Due to the failure of LRA leader Joseph Kony to honor his commitments, the delegation of the government of Uganda and the LRA representatives are yet to sign the final peace agreement they initialed,” said the May 26 letter. “The onus now lies firmly with Mr. Kony to take the last step for peace and sign the final peace agreements.”

    In 2006, Chissano was tasked with facilitating the Juba peace negotiations between the governments of Southern Sudan, Uganda and representatives of the sectarian guerrilla army, LRA. While progress was made in establishing a ceasefire, facilitating disarmament, and creating monitoring mechanisms, many of the initiatives undertaken were short lived.

    In November, while peace negotiations were still underway, Konyordered his forces to conduct a systematic campaign of violence and intimidation in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), enabling the LRA to take control over large swaths of land.

    ”It’s become very clear over the past six months that LRA leader Joseph Kony has pretty emphatically withdrawn from the Jubapeace process and has given no indication that he intends to engage in good faith in the peace negotiations,” senior policy analyst Paul Ronan of the advocacy group Resolve Uganda told Xinhua in an interview. “I would guess that the secretary-general and Chissano didn’t see an opportunity to meaningfully engage Kony.”

    In his letter, Ban reiterated his “deep appreciation” for Chissano and said if ever a final peace agreement was reached the former president of Mozambique would represent him at the ceremony.

    However, given the unlikely hood that Kony will accept any peace deal, the international community has become increasingly vocal in the arrest of the LRA’s top commanders, including Kony himself.

    ”It is high time that the United Nations and the international community worked with regional governments that are affected by the LRA to design and implement a viable, responsible strategy to arrest Kony because that, at the moment, is the best option available for ending the current LRA violence,” said Ronan.

    In May, U.S. Republicans and Democrats introduced legislation in both the House and the Senate that would require the Obama administration to develop diplomatic, military and intelligence strategies to protect civilians in the region from the LRA and prevent future attacks within six months of the bill’s passage.

    The bipartisan bill, known as the Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act, is co-sponsored by Democrat Russ Feingold and Republican Sam Brownback, Representatives Jim McGovern and Brad Miller and former Africa subcommittee chairman Ed Royce.

    ”This bill rightly targets LRA leader Joseph Kony,” said Royce in a press statement. “Kony’s removal is essential to peace in the region.”

    The bill also authorizes funding for humanitarian assistance for those areas affected by the LRA’s brutality, including additional funds to support recovery and reconciliation in war-torn areas of Uganda, the DRC, the Central Africa Republic and South Sudan, and would address conditions that originally gave rise to the LRA.

    On June 22 and 23, approximately 2,000 people are expected to attend a day of lobbying Congress and a conference at the D.C. Convention Center to hear from leading conflict experts, activists, and the U.S. government officials who have been tasked with resolving this conflict, said Ronan.

    For over two decades, Kony has led a brutal campaign of violence that has led to the displacement of million of civilians and the abduction of tens of thousands of children, who are used as child soldiers.

    Just between Dec. 2008 and Jan. 2009, some 1,100 people have been killed by the LRA while hundreds have been abducted and 200,000 uprooted, according to the UN peacekeeping mission in DRC, MONUC.

    ”This is a conflict that is destabilizing four countries, has displaced hundreds of thousands of people and has led to the abduction of hundreds of kids,” said Ronan. “The arrest of Kony and his top commanders, while certainly not an easy task, would go a long way in ending that immediate violence.”

Mosquito net mural in Bungoma, Kenya

Stef Schiffer commented on my previous post about what Concern Worldwide was doing for World Malaria Day, arguing that bed nets was just a Western feel-good initiative. The comment included this site, with a well-done video.  Thanks to Stef for telling me about it. The people on the video, many of them first- and second-generation Africans, make a good point, that the causes of mosquitos becoming malaria carriers in the first place are not cured by bed nets. That is certainly worth emphasizing, as is the role insecticides play in causing illnesses, directly and indirectly, to residents of poor countries.

But I generally reject false either-or debates. It’s not a question of bed nets OR reducing chemicals and insecticides in African and other nations. If one way to reduce the chances that a child - or adult - in a malarial-prone country will contract malaria is by having him or her sleep under a bed net, then why the hell not use that as one tactic? There are other approaches, beyond looking at chemicals and using nets, such as speeding up research of an anti-malarial vaccine.

In Uganda

Would the folks on that video condemning bed nets also agree that birth control is irrelevant to preventing unwanted pregnancies and transmission of certain diseases because the underlying cause is having sex in the first place? That seems to me the possible extension of their argument. I say come at a problem, especially one that takes so many lives, from as many directions as possible. Here’s a good Web site, from the Kaiser Family Foundation, to learn more about malaria.