In March 2009, the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir and five other senior Sudanese officials for crimes against humanity and war crimes for murder, rape, torture, and displacement of civilian populations in Sudan’s restive Darfur region. (The other indictees include Ahmed Haroun, Ali Kushayb, Bahar Abu Garda, Abdallah Banda, and Saleh Jerbo.) In July 2010, it added charges of genocide to the indictment against President Bashir, based on evidence that the Sudanese government had carried out ethnic cleansing with the “intent to destroy in whole or in part an ethnic group.” Mr. Banda and Mr. Jerbo have appeared voluntarily before the ICC chamber, and their trials are due to begin in 2012. President Bashir remains a fugitive, and while he has visited several countries that are signatories to the ICC treaty, none has acted on behalf of the ICC in arresting Bashir.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
