NEWSPEACEBUILDING

Libya. Egypt. Syria. Big names getting big headlines right now - and for good reason. Africa and the Middle East are in the midst of an uprising--a swell of populist support for human rights and democracy. These are equally promising and dangerous times for the entire region, and they all deserve our support as they work so hard to achieve the goals of the people.

Today I ask you to speak out for a place that has fallen out of the headlines in recent years. A place that has been struggling for the last decade to reach some sort of peace from the ongoing campaign of violence against their people.

This Mother’s Day, Academy Award winning actor and self-proclaimed “mama’s boy” Javier Bardem used his star-power by sitting down the Enough Project's co-founder, John Prendergast, to draw attention to the threats women face in the Democratic Republic of Congo, ranked as one of the 10 worst places in the world to be a mother.

Awareness about the link between eastern Congo’s decade-long war, consumer electronics, and the trade in conflict minerals is growing. Perhaps most significantly, the conflict minerals provision of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act passed last year in no small part thanks to the efforts of activists, who pushed a notable shift in how people in Africa’s Great Lakes region perceived public concern over Congo’s minerals.

“[At first] we didn’t take this legislation seriously, and we thought there would be a compromise,” a mining executive said recently (i.e. ‘we thought we’d be off the hook’).

International campaign successfully encourages German National Railways (Deutsche Bahn) to withdraw from supportive role in the construction of an Israeli train from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem that crosses Palestinian villages in the Occupied Territories.

German National Railways (Deutsche Bahn) has announced that it will no longer participate in the construction of a high-speed Israeli train line from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem as the route passes through occupied Palestinian territory yet is intended for the exclusive use of Israeli citizens.

The news comes after an international campaign let by German, Palestinian, and Israeli activists calling on the Deutsche Bahn Group to withdraw from the project, which activists claim violates international law.

The line is set to cut travel time between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem to 28 minutes and is scheduled for completion in 2017. Deutsche Bahn was consulting with Israel Railways on the electrification of the route. According to a report in Der Spiegel, Germany’s Federal Transport Minister Peter Ramsauer told Deutsche Bahn CEO that the project was politically “problematic” and violated the “terms of international law.”

Update: BP has now stopped all business with Libya, and growing sanctions may soon stop others as well.

As unrest in Libya grew into full fledged violent clashes, Change.org member Alyssa Kwan saw a crucial chance to make a difference: calling on BP, one of the largest companies doing business with the Gaddafi regime, to suspend operations in Libya.

She launched a concise and effective petition, which quickly gathered more than 2,500 signatures. The UN seemed to agree with the sentiment, imposing sanctions on the current Libyan government and referring several members of the regime to the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.

Earlier this week a group of Libyan activists launched a petiton calling for Malta to grant asylum to two Libyan pilots who defected to the small island nation last Monday. Within 24 hours they had tens of thousands of signatures, more than 1,000 signatures an hour!

Who are these folks?

ENOUGH! Gaddafi is a group of grassroots Libyan activists both inside and outside the country, working together to bring down the regime of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, the long time dictator of Libya. Calling themselves a new voice of dissent against the Gaddafi regime, ENOUGH! Gaddafi seeks to utilize grassroots Libyan activism to "promote the ability of the Libyan people to overcome the limitations imposed upon them by an illegitimate and unjust government."

Last week, two Libyan pilots were ordered to bomb civilian protesters by Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. They faced an unimaginable choice: bomb their countrymen or face likely execution if they returned without carrying out the attacks. Instead, they found a third option - flying their planes out of Libya and defecting to the nearby island nation of Malta. In doing so, they saved the lives of untold numbers of their fellow Libyans.

But ever since Malta's Refugee Commissioner Mario Guido Friggieri and other government officials have refused to say whether they will give these pilots asylum.

As the frenetic excitement about southern Sudan's recent referendum wears off, the challenges of building up a new country from scratch loom. For some segments of southern Sudan’s society, the obstacles are even greater.

“The women of southern Sudan are ‘the marginalized of the marginalized,’ as Dr. John Garang used to say,” said Anyieth D’Awol, quoting the late rebel leader who saw many of the problems in Sudan originating from the Khartoum government’s negligence. As one stark example, literacy in southern Sudan stands at 24 percent, but only 12 percent of women can read and write.

Anyieth is southern Sudanese, but she first visited the South when she was 27. She studied human rights in the UK and has a law degree, fields she pursued because “I never thought I would stay in England. Always knew I wanted to come back to Sudan.”

“I don’t have a war story,” she said, in a tone that almost sounded like she was apologizing.

Last week it was revealed that a high profile DC lobbyist named Lanny Davis had decided to punt for Laurent Gbagbo, the illegitimate president of the Ivory Coast who has caused a national crises by refusing to step down after losing presidential elections last month.

Mr Davis was loud and obdurate in his defense of the West African despot, despite the country's electoral commission, international observers, the United Nations, United States, African Union and European Union all declaring that President Gbagbo had lost the November 28 elections to his opponent Alassane Ouattara. Mr Davis depicted himself as a peacemaker, with no interest other than transparency and 'crises management,' mumbo-jumbo-speak for 'being paid exorbitant sums of a poor country's money to get a despot out of a challenging situation.'

Update December 29, 2010: Last week it was revealed that Laurent Gbagbo, the illegitimate president of the Ivory Coast who has refused to step down after losing presidential elections, had hired high profile DC lobbyist Lanny Davis to punt for him. Davis was indignant against extensive media criticism over his choice of clients, but after Change.org members stepped in, Davis had a change of heart and dropped President Gbagbo as a client. We are now calling on Davis to drop President Obiang, an even more egregious client.

You've been the president of a West African nation for over a decade. The constitution says your term is up, your legitimacy as president is highly questionable and international observers and your own election commission are saying you've just lost a highly contested election. Everyone and their mother is calling for you to step down.

What do you do?

Answer: call a famous Washington lobbyist and see if leveraging exorbitant sums of money from one of the world's poorest nations can pull a few strings.

Such is the case for the Ivory Coast's President Laurent Gbagbo, who by most counts lost last month's presidential elections, but is now paying $100,000 a month to high profile DC lobbyist Lanny Davis for "crises management", mumbo-jumbo-speak for 'use my country's money to get me out of this situation.'

The Ivory Coast Election Commission declared Alassane Ouattara, a former prime minister and western-trained economist who has extensive support in the country's north, winner of the November 28 elections with over 54 percent of the vote.

But the Gbagbo government cried foul, claiming extensive voter fraud in the north and that the election commission was full of Ouattara supporters. The Constitutional Council, the Ivory Coast's equivalent of a supreme court, ruled in favor of President Gbagbo, excluding votes from northern districts with concerns over voter fraud and declaring Gbagbo the winner. The Constitutional Council, stacked with Gbagbo appointees, didn't address the tricky little question of the constitutionally-imposed ten year term limit on presidents.

They call themselves "The Dude Gooders" and their thing is "adventure philanthropy," pairing epic adventures with noble causes.

Founded on the belief that there is an inherent connection between the desire to explore our world and the desire to make a positive impact on the places we visit, the group plans to climb to the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest peak in Africa, to raise money for Falling Whistles, an advocacy group fighting to end the war in the Congo and rehabilitate child soldiers affected by the conflict.

The goal? $19,334. One dollar for every foot of elevation to reach the summit, which they will reach at the end of this month. They've already raised over $12,000, and 100 percent of the money raised goes to Falling Whistles.

Home to the world's deadliest war since WWII, over 6 million people have been killed in the Democratic Republic of Congo since 1998. Sexual violence is more widespread in the Congo than anywhere else on earth and thousands of children are involved in the war.

Falling Whistles began with a journal written about boys sent to the frontlines of war armed with only a whistle. The kids would make noise to scare the enemy and form a 'shield' for the first round of bullets.