The Law Students Association

Some of LSA's high board in the P. R. glitz of Club Week.

Finally - my first posting in weeks. One reason for this lag has been that I'm a bit busy right now as President of something called the Law Students Association. We host lectures and films and we are a vehicle for student concerns, and hope to link current students with internships and other opportunities. Its been very satisfying so far to hang out with students and faculty and learn more about the future of our department, but it is currently consuming about 20% of my free time with emails and meetings and so forth.

We recently helped the department host a lecture and discussion with Aaron Page, on the plaintiffs' team of the Aguinda v. ChevronTexaco case. An NGO partner of the plantiff's team maintains an interesting website on their case. Among other charges, the plantiffs, indigenous people in Ecuador, claim that toxic waste from Texaco's oil explorations has given them cancer and prevented their access to clean water. (I'll let you guess which side of the case has deeper pockets.)

Finally, here's the webpage for a group some of us are volunteering for currently, the Sudanese Community Development Project. They operate a small school that I visited recently. As many Sudanese people live here in Egypt without the refugee status that would allow them to attend public school, places like this are their best option for learning in a structured environment. Unfortunately I don't have much time to help just now but they have a very good thing going.

Last but not least, there's even a modest LSA webpage on the Law Department website now. We are proud of this little technocratic miracle. More "content" to come there so stay tuned . . .

Abdullahi An-Na'im on Shari'a Law

This week, Abdullahi An-Na'im came to AUC to deliver a few lectures. He points out some interesting possibilities in the political sphere for forwarding emancipatory religious and human rights agendas in the Muslim World. Far from being an advocate of a Bush/Rice vision for the Middle East (which could go unstated if only they'd stop invoking human rights), he criticizes both the imposed colonial discourse and the post-colonial Islamist discourse on these matters. Since I don't feel competent to sum up his work, I'll put a few links up.

Take a look at An-Na'im's project, The Future of Shari'a Law, and his own website at Emory University in Atlanta, USA, which features several downloads of his work.

An-Na'im left Sudan after his mentor, the Islamic reformer Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, was executed by the Sudanese government in 1985. You can read about the Republican Brothers and their interest in Shari'a reform, among other projects, in several places, including:

New Perspectives Quarterly
Alfikra - The Republican Thought
World Peoples' Blog
The Sudanese Thinker

The Global Day for Darfur

September 17 was the Global Day for Darfur coordinated by major human rights organizations across the world to pressure the government of Sudan to accept UN troops within their borders. Cairo was one of several cities that hosted the Day for Darfur, which took place at the American University in Cairo, hosted by Student Action for Refugees (STAR). Sudanese music, dance, food, crafts, and a film festival on the Darfur issue marked the occasion. The Cairo Institute for Human Rights Research summarizes their reasons for participating in the Day for Darfur here (English version).

It was wonderful to see the mingling of Sudanese and other residents and students who came together to celebrate these shared concerns. I thought of taking pictures but recognize that this is a politically sensitive issue in Egypt and that many people may not have been comfortable with their photo being taken. The internet is full of commentary on Darfur, but I'll just write a little blurb here on the major issues as I understand them.

Currently, various rebel groups based in Darfur fight with the Janjaweed militia, who are paid by the government to destroy villages and assisted in their operations by the government's air force and police. Some rebel groups in Darfur have signed a peace agreement with the Sudanese government but this has intensified the fighting of other rebel groups with the government. The African Union recently extended the mandate of its 7,000 peacekeeping troops until the end of 2006. But this is not an adequately provisioned or mandated force to effectively deter fighting in a region the size of France.

Though the atrocities in Darfur have been reported by human rights NGOs and many media outlets for years, the adequate political will necessary for finding a workable end to violence and dispossession of land has not been found. The violence stems from political and economic marginalization of the Fur and other ethnic groups in western Sudan, a separate decades-long civil war between the government and rebels in the south, and the government's expanding interest in land for oil exploration. Hundreds of thousands of people have died in the conflict, with millions internally displaced and others becoming refugees in Chad and other neighboring states. Rape, property destruction, poisoning of wells, and theft of livestock are widely established allegations as to the government's tactics in addition to murder. As many refugee camps are unreachable by humanitarian groups after the recent increase in fighting, malnutrition and starvation have become more likely among camp residents. See what Doctors Without Borders has to say about their decreasing access to Darfur camps here.

The recently-passed UN Resolution 1706 would add peacekeepers to the UN's current humanitarian role in Darfur. Unfortunately, this resolution hinges on the consent of the Sudanese government, which has not been granted.