Worldfocus Radio: Sudan, beyond Darfur
I produced this online radio show for Worldfocus.org.
Conflict and bloodshed in Sudan are not limited to the Darfur region — separate crises are flaring in the north, the south and in the central Nuba Mountains.
Worldfocus.org’s weekly radio show explores tensions in South Sudan, the site of a two-decade civil war between the Muslim north and mostly Christian south that killed more than 1.5 million people. The south is also home to 80 percent of Sudan’s oil.
The war came to an end in 2005 with the signing of a peace agreement that exempted the south from Islamic Sharia law and established a regional southern government as well as a system of shared oil revenues. But with increasingly deadly tribal violence in South Sudan and a humanitarian crisis that could soon eclipse that in Darfur, trouble is brewing once more.
In a conference on Sudan in Washington last week, leaders from the north and south pledged to avoid a return to war.
South Sudan is set for a referendum on independence in 2011 and many in the region hope that the vote will allow a break from Khartoum once and for all, creating a new African nation. Others remain wary, pointing to corruption and incompetence on the part of South Sudan’s government and accusing leaders of squandering oil revenues.
Worldfocus anchor Martin Savidge hosted the following guests:
Jen Marlowe is a filmmaker, writer and human rights activist. She traveled to South Sudan for the forthcoming documentary “Rebuilding Hope,” funded in part by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
Eric Reeves is a professor at Smith College and has spent the past 10 years researching Sudan. He has testified several times before the Congress and served as a consultant to human rights and humanitarian organizations in Sudan. He is the author of “A Long Day’s Dying,” a book about Darfur. He contributes to the blog Making Sense of Darfur.
Sunday Taabu left South Sudan at the height of the civil war in 1991. She is the founder of the South Sudan Institute for Women’s Education and Leadership and previously worked for the Government of Southern Sudan’s Mission to the U.S.
The show also includes audio clips from:
A Worldfocus interview with Scott Gration, the U.S. envoy to Sudan, on the importance of the region to the United States.
Peter Wankomo, who fled Sudan during the civil war and now lives in Canada. He’s the editor of a website, “South Sudan Nation,” which lobbies for the south’s independence.
A clip from Jen Marlowe’s forthcoming film, “Rebuilding Hope,” featuring a minister in the government of South Sudan and a woman living in the rural village of Akon. Both comment on what’s changed since the peace agreement and the end of the war.
Worldfocus Radio: Statelessness
I produced this online radio show for Worldfocus.org.
Imagine you have no birth certificate, no passport and no legal rights. You’re trapped in the country where you were born, but no document indicates that you even exist. The state doesn’t recognize you, so you can’t vote, you can’t access education and you can’t obtain formal employment.
This is a worst-case situation, but across the globe, between 12 and 15 million people live in various stages of statelessness, which means they lack citizenship in any country.
Some of the most notably stateless people include the Palestinians of the Middle East, the ethnic Tutsis of Central Africa, some Roma in Europe and Haitian children in the Dominican Republic.
Worldfocus.org’s weekly radio show explored the common themes that surface among stateless people — economic discrimination, social exclusion, identity and the feeling of invisibility.
Martin Savidge hosted the following guests:
Bill Berkeley, previously an investigative reporter and editorial writer at The New York Times, teaches journalism at Columbia University. He is the author of The Graves Are Not Yet Full: Race, Tribe and Power in the Heart of Africa and a forthcoming book on statelessness.
Dawn Calabia is a senior adviser for Refugees International. She has 30 years of experience with foreign policy analysis, human rights issues and public advocacy. She has handled governmental and non-governmental relations in the U.S. and the Caribbean for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and has led numerous fact-finding missions to Central America, Southeast Asia, South Asia and Africa.
The show also includes audio clips from:
Julia Harrington, a senior legal officer at the Open Society Justice Initiative, who explains how her organization uses legal channels to advocate for stateless people. Julia has brought cases before the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, the European Court of Human Rights, and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.
Adam Hussein, who was born stateless as a Nubian in Kenya, and is currently the project coordinator of the Open Society East Africa Initiative.
Samira Trad, the director of Beirut-based Frontiers-Ruwad, a human rights NGO.
Worldfocus: Stateless to Stathood (ongoing multimedia project)
I’m working on a summer-long multimedia project on statelessness.
Every day, 12 to 15 million people wake up as citizens of no nation at all. These men, women and children are scattered across six continents and excluded from virtually all the benefits of nationality - a passport, the right to vote, land ownership, access to health care and legal employment. From Rohingyas in Myanmar to Nubians in Kenya and Haitians in the Dominican Republic, stateless people live without the protection and recognition of the governments that rule the places where they live.
On June 10, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the first-ever legislation to recognize and reduce statelessness, which also addressed issues of global stability and security. The issue encompasses a tangle of nationalistic politics, international human rights law and ethnic discrimination.
This de jure statelessness — meaning, lack of legal status of nationality and citizenship — is often conflated with peoples seeking states of their own. Worldfocus’ project “Stateless to Statehood” traces a continuum — from people with literally no citizenship to groups striving for national self-determination. “Stateless to Statehood” examines the root causes of statelessness in the post-colonial period, the break-up of empires and the aftermath of major wars. We’re identifying potential ways to solve statelessness via legal and political avenues, as well as exploring the themes of nationalism and ethnic identity.
Theme design by Borja Fernandez.