How Do You Stop Intractable Conflict? Take Away The Profit

How Do You Stop Intractable Conflict? Take Away The Profit

by Beenish Ahmed at Think Progress

http://thinkprogress.org/world/2015/07/29/3685331/the-sentry/

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A new organization called The Sentry will work to stem war across Africa by tracking its revenue streams.

“We acknowledge that this is an incredibly ambitious project,” Akshaya Kumar, who will help lead the initiative, told ThinkProgress in a phone interview.

The Sentry was launched earlier this month by co-founders by George Clooney and John Prendergast of the Enough Project, a Washington, DC organization that works to prevent genocide and war crimes. Both have long been engaged in combating resource wars and ethnic conflict across Africa. The Sentry’s aims are an outgrowth of those efforts, but it will take a different approach.

Real leverage for peace and human rights will come when the people who benefit from war will pay a price for the damage they cause.

“Our idea is that using these different tools — whether it’s sanctions enforcement or civil assets forfeiture or criminal cases for pillage as a war crime or anti-money laundering or even basic bank or mail fraud — that there are opportunities the nodes of the system where people are making a profit off of the conflicts that are ongoing in parts of eastern and central Africa,” Kumar explained.


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