LONDON — After months of fruitless shuttle diplomacy, threats of sanctions, broken promises and politicking, Sudan’s government has agreed to accept a coalition of United Nations peacekeepers to back up the beleaguered African Union mission in its western Darfur region. The deal, announced June 12 from the AU headquarters in Addis Ababa, would bring an additional 17,000 to 19,000 troops and 3,700 police officers into Darfur, a region the size of France where fighting between troops, government-backed militias and rebels has raged since 2003. An estimated 2.5 million people have been made homeless and some 200,000 have lost their lives [...]
TEL AVIV, Israel — As a seemingly inexhaustible source of bad news, the Middle East is arguably the perfect place to go in search for the silver lining that the proverb promises for every cloud. The Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki demonstrated last week how it is done: In an article in the Wall Street Journal, he argued eloquently that the desperate situation in Iraq should be seen as part of a struggle comparable with the American civil war and he challenged skeptics with the question: “Why expect freedom to come easy to Iraq?” As it turned out, al-Maliki is [...]
Hoping to curtail the violence in the oil-rich Niger Delta, new Nigerian President Alhaji Umaru Musa Yar’Adua sent his vice president to the United States to meet with an international consulting firm that advises world leaders on conflict resolution, Nigerian officials and experts told World Politics Review. Yar’Adua sent Vice President Jonathan Goodluck to Boston last month to meet with staff at the Consensus Building Institute, an advisory group that specializes in “multiparty conflicts.” CBI’s client list includes the United Nations and the governments of Nigeria, Kenya, and Angola, as well as U.N. officials in Sudan. Outside of Africa, the [...]
