Jemera Rone, a human rights researcher who played an important role to reporting on rights violations committed in Sudan in the 1990s, passed away in Washington, DC on Wednesday, 29 July.
Before coming to Sudan, she opened and staffed Human Rights Watch’s first field office in the early 1980s, reporting on rights violations in El Salvador. This meant reporting not only on government abuses, but those of rebel groups as well.
“Her detailed reporting also helped establish the organization’s methodology, showing that carefully documented facts could cut through partisanship and ideology to put pressure on abusers – and those backing them – to stop,” says Leslie Lefkow, Human Rights Watch’s Africa Division Deputy Director,
She also spent many years working with South Sudanese. Her reports documented many atrocities committed by the government in Khartoum as well as the Sudan People’s Liberation Army and other rebel groups, according to Lefkow.
Her reports included “Civilian Devastation: Abuses by All Parties in the War in Sudan,” published in 1994, “Famine in Sudan, 1998,” and “Sudan, Oil and Human Rights,” published in 2003.
In a tribute to Jemera Rone published on the HRW website, Lefkow wrote, “Jemera was passionate, committed and prescient.”
“Back in 1994, in a telling warning of the devastation we see in South Sudan today, now led by the same men who were then its rebels, she wrote: ‘The leaders of the SPLA factions must address their own human rights problems and correct their own abuses, or risk a continuation of the war on tribal or political grounds in the future, even if they win autonomy or separation.’”
Lefkow praised Rone for her passion for accountability and justice, saying she will be sorely missed.