Celebrating Moral Victory in Sudan

How can anyone be unhappy about the International Criminal Court’s indictment of President Omar al-Bashirs of Sudan?

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan has finally earned his day of infamy: On March 4, he became the first sitting head of state to be indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity by the fledgling International Criminal Court . He joins Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia, Charles Taylor of Liberia, and Jean Kambanda of Rwanda as heads of state subject to international justice for their international crimes. The fact that al-Bashir – sitting at the apex of a corrupt and brutally repressive state – is being prosecuted internationally is more important than the outcome of any particular charge in the indictment.   [more]

Well, some in the human rights community are not so happy and for good reason:

… at least five of the NGOs asked to leave Sudan have been UNHCR implementing partners carrying out important humanitarian programmes in Darfur but also Blue Nile State and Khartoum State. So it is noteworthy that this could have an impact not only on Darfur, but on vulnerable people elsewhere in the country.

We also have to be concerned at the possible implications this could have more broadly in the region. Our experience shows that when vulnerable populations are unable to get the help they need, they go elsewhere in search of protection and assistance. If food can’t get through to people, for example, then those people will soon suffer and have to look elsewhere.

 With some 4.7 million Sudanese – including 2.7 million internally displaced – already receiving assistance in Darfur, we are very concerned over the prospect of new population movements in the region should the fragile aid lifeline inside Sudan be disrupted. There are also 40,000 Chadian refugees in West Darfur.

Our work for internally displaced people as part of the UN team in Darfur has helped IDPs stay as close to home as possible while also relieving pressure on neighbouring Chad, where UNHCR and its partners are already caring for nearly 250,000 refugees from Darfur in a string of 12 remote camps spread over 600 kms near the Sudan border. These isolated camps and the remote communities surrounding them are already struggling to provide the basics needed to sustain 250,000 refugees. In addition, there are some 180,000 internally displaced persons in eastern Chad.

 Any influx to Chad would be an additional challenge for UNHCR and other humanitarian agencies because of ongoing insecurity and instability in the country, as well as limited resources such as water.

Moral victories can’t be celebrated by people who are starving to death and dying of thirst.

Others think Western support is simply hypocritical:

Criminals, including international ones, must be put behind bars, but the world is known to have put off justice “in the name of peace.” Unfortunately, this tolerance allows many people, in particular in conflict-ridden Africa and Asia, to think they should wait, close their eyes to crimes, unless they want to face difficult “consequences.”

This faulty reasoning is based on confrontation between the ethics of principles and the ethics of consequences. But it cannot be abandoned outright because it developed long ago and has become a fixture in international relations. All major players in the West use it selectively, when and if it suits them, which is unfair.

UPDATE:  Hmmmmmm.  From Rob Crilly at the Al Salaam Camp, North Darfur -

Aid officials warn that a humanitarian emergency is in danger of becoming a disaster. The move has put the supply of food to 1.1 million people in doubt, as the UN’s World Food Programme scrambles to find lorries to deliver sacks of grain. It had been using four of the expelled charities to get food to people in need. Outside the hospital – run by the International Rescue Committee until it was ordered out – a mother brushed flies from the face of her daughter. “My baby is sick,” Fatima Abdulrahmen said. “She has a fever and I brought her here and now I don’t know what to do. Who will help me now?”

The people who should be helping – the staff of 13 international charities including Oxfam, Médicins sans Frontières and Care – were boarding flights to the capital, Khartoum.

[..]

In El Fasher, capital of North Darfur, government officials began the process of seizing millions of pounds in assets belonging to the charities. Men with dark glasses and clipboards arrived at the Oxfam office to begin itemising equipment. They left with laptops, desktop computers and satellite phones, choking off communication. There was a similar scene at the French agency Action Contre La Faim. “We are due to start distributing food to the camps in a fortnight,” one worker said. “Who else is going to do this and stop people starving? Words cannot describe what is happening.”

Charities reported that their bank accounts were being frozen. Doctors with Médicins sans Frontières were trying to contain two deadly outbreaks of meningitis before being expelled. Their clinics have closed.

It’s all here

Gender Gap

On Wednesday, the World Economic Forum released the 2008 Global Gender Gap Report - here it is in pdf format.

As reported by The WIP, Time Magazine responded this way to the Report:

It’s not just about equality anymore. A country’s economy, health and productivity increase as its gender gap narrows, according to the authors of this study published by the World Economic Forum, the Swiss non-profit that hosts an annual meeting in Davos of world political and business leaders.

Perhaps it’s a bit sad that the principle of equality on its own won’t make for change.  Not to be overly deterministic, the reality is that most change happens when it’s economically necessary.  I’ve noticed that the economic necessity is referred to more regularly these days when it comes to developing countries.  Maybe something will happen then … other than a steady stream of reports that tell women what we already know.

Congo’s Holocaust

Yes, we’ve all been sitting on our butts here in the West while a holocaust rages in Congo.  5.8 million people dead; untold numbers of women raped, gang-raped, forced into pregnancy, infected with HIV and maimed for life.  When I read the history of WW II, I often come across the question, why did we do nothing to stop the mass killing of Jews?  We can ask the same question now:  why have we done nothing, why are we still doing nothing, to stop the holocaust in Congo?  I thought it was never supposed to happen again.

From Johann Hari at The Independent:

The deadliest war since Adolf Hitler marched across Europe is starting again – and you are almost certainly carrying a blood-soaked chunk of the slaughter in your pocket. When we glance at the holocaust in Congo, with 5.4 million dead, the clichés of Africa reporting tumble out: this is a “tribal conflict” in “the Heart of Darkness”. It isn’t. The United Nations investigation found it was a war led by “armies of business” to seize the metals that make our 21st-century society zing and bling. The war in Congo is a war about you.

 

Every day I think about the people I met in the war zones of eastern Congo when I reported from there. The wards were filled with women who had been gang-raped by the militias and shot in the vagina. The battalions of child soldiers – drugged, dazed 13-year-olds who had been made to kill members of their own families so they couldn’t try to escape and go home. But oddly, as I watch the war starting again on CNN, I find myself thinking about a woman I met who had, by Congolese standards, not suffered in extremis.

I was driving back to Goma from a diamond mine one day when my car got a puncture. As I waited for it to be fixed, I stood by the roadside and watched the great trails of women who stagger along every road in eastern Congo, carrying all their belongings on their backs in mighty crippling heaps. I stopped a 27 -year-old woman called Marie-Jean Bisimwa, who had four little children toddling along beside her. She told me she was lucky. Yes, her village had been burned out. Yes, she had lost her husband somewhere in the chaos. Yes, her sister had been raped and gone insane. But she and her kids were alive.

I gave her a lift, and it was only after a few hours of chat along on cratered roads that I noticed there was something strange about Marie-Jean’s children. They were slumped forward, their gazes fixed in front of them. They didn’t look around, or speak, or smile. “I haven’t ever been able to feed them,” she said. “Because of the war.”

Their brains hadn’t developed; they never would now. “Will they get better?” she asked. I left her in a village on the outskirts of Goma, and her kids stumbled after her, expressionless.

There are two stories about how this war began – the official story, and the true story. The official story is that after the Rwandan genocide, the Hutu mass murderers fled across the border into Congo. The Rwandan government chased after them. But it’s a lie. How do we know? The Rwandan government didn’t go to where the Hutu genocidaires were, at least not at first. They went to where Congo’s natural resources were – and began to pillage them. They even told their troops to work with any Hutus they came across. Congo is the richest country in the world for gold, diamonds, coltan, cassiterite, and more. Everybody wanted a slice – so six other countries invaded.

These resources were not being stolen to for use in Africa. They were seized so they could be sold on to us. The more we bought, the more the invaders stole – and slaughtered. The rise of mobile phones caused a surge in deaths, because the coltan they contain is found primarily in Congo. The UN named the international corporations it believed were involved: Anglo-America, Standard Chartered Bank, De Beers and more than 100 others. (They all deny the charges.) But instead of stopping these corporations, our governments demanded that the UN stop criticising them. [emphasis mine]

There were times when the fighting flagged. In 2003, a peace deal was finally brokered by the UN and the international armies withdrew. Many continued to work via proxy militias – but the carnage waned somewhat. Until now. As with the first war, there is a cover-story, and the truth. A Congolese militia leader called Laurent Nkunda – backed by Rwanda – claims he needs to protect the local Tutsi population from the same Hutu genocidaires who have been hiding out in the jungles of eastern Congo since 1994. That’s why he is seizing Congolese military bases and is poised to march on Goma.

It is a lie. François Grignon, Africa Director of the International Crisis Group, tells me the truth: “Nkunda is being funded by Rwandan businessmen so they can retain control of the mines in North Kivu. This is the absolute core of the conflict. What we are seeing now is beneficiaries of the illegal war economy fighting to maintain their right to exploit.”

See the whole thing here

And see Roxanne Stasyszyn at Dissident Voice:

Most every Congolese citizen will agree that the reason for the instability in Congo is the international influence within their borders. Some point their finger at mineral trafficking. Some point to tribal and historical ‘facts’. Others, like Vital Katembo, claim it is obvious that people are doing harm when they are not achieving what they claim to work for—speaking of the humanitarian aid and conservation sectors—especially when they have the needed resources to accomplish their missions.

No matter where you point your finger or for what reason, the DRC is an international playground filled with extremely dangerous toys and irresponsible playmates. Many times, knowing where to point is simply based on how dangerous it is to point that way.

Stealing Resources in Congo

Stephanie Nolen is a truly great reporter and writer.  Watch her at The Globe for articles like this one in which she explains how Rwandan rebels responsible for the genocide there have become rich at the expense of a million Congolese people killed, raped, maimed, turned into refugees and living without hope that their country will be restored to peace – and how the government of the DRC and multinational companies from Europe, Canada and the US profit from the ongoing war.  Here’s a bit:

A squad of Congolese army soldiers are posted in Luntukulu to, in theory, isolate the Rwandan rebels. In reality, the checkpoint serves as a handy place for the soldiers to collect bribes from those who carry the minerals out of the militia’s territory. “We pay at every checkpoint coming and going: Every person who crosses pays 500 francs [about $1]. It’s not official but the province and district authorities know it,” said Olivier Mugaruka, who travels the rough roads of this region to buy tin, tungsten and coltan.

The soldiers also take a cut out of everything hauled out by legitimate miners such as Mr. Beningabo – an informal tax just like the 10 per cent he must pay to his village chief.

And that’s just small scale. In the next province of North Kivu, the infamous 85th brigade of the Congolese armed forces controls a huge cassiterite mine at Bisie, where it forces the local population to work. Although Congolese civil society organizations and media have repeatedly shown that the brigade controls the mine – and pockets the revenue from it – work continues undisturbed, and the tin is exported through both legal and illegal channels.

“We can only conclude that these activities are sanctioned at the highest levels,” said Patrick Alley, director of the British-based organization Global Witness, which has made extensive study of Congo’s mineral industry.

Read the whole terrible story here

And what has Canada done to assist the UN and the Congolese people?  Nada:

Allan Thompson, a Carleton University journalism professor and head of the Rwanda Initiative at the school, found two instances where Canada was asked by the UN, informally, to lead the Congo mission: 2003 and earlier this year. Canada’s help is seen by many as particularly significant because the country can send officials who speak French, the official language of Congo, and because Canada is well-regarded internationally.

However, Canada has rejected calls to lead the mission. Instead, Ottawa has opted to focus its attention and resources on the Afghanistan mission. The decision is seen by some as perhaps the most significant sign that Canada is moving further away from its internationally recognized role in global peacekeeping.

Read the whole article here

The Nuances of Food Production

My friend Rhona McAdam unwinds the complexities of decreased food production for us at iambic café and notes, in part:

The technology that we depend on now to boost agricultural yields is artificial nitrogen, created through heavy use of oil; an estimated 50% of agricultural costs now are tied to producing fertiliser. The commentator drew one scary comment from an interview subject: since its introduction after WW2 artificial nitrogen has allowed the world’s population to increase unchecked, by boosting yields (with less and less nutritious crops). The global population is such that now we have outstripped the yield that could be generated by natural nitrogen cycles, so we are facing the real possibility of not being able to feed the world even now. Which I guess is why the recent Unesco report on world farming was so firm on the use of organic farming practices, which include natural means of soil enrichment.

Rhona is able to explain much that is complex in a way that I can understand it.  This post is highly recommended – short but not very sweet.

Femicide in India

Where are the women of India:

According to Nobel Laureate  Amartya Sen, there should be millions more women and girls living in India than there are. The acclaimed economist compared the natural ratio of men to women globally with the ratio in India, and twenty years ago had calculated that India was “missing” about thirty-seven million women. That number has escalated to fifty million today.

Rita Banerji ’90, whose photographs bravely document some of India’s least treasured citizens, explains, “Perhaps ‘missing’ is too innocuous a term for what is actually happening—the systematic and targeted annihilation of a group [through] female feticide, female infanticide, dowry-related murders, an abnormally high mortality rate for girls under five due to starvation and intentional medical neglect, and the highest maternal mortality rate in the world.

Numbers tell the story in chilling detail:

• Some one million female fetuses are aborted each year.
• Midwives in some regions regularly kill the infant girls they deliver for as little as $1.50.
• Dowry-related murders of women stand at about 25,000 cases a year.
• A UNICEF report found that the mortality rate for girls under five is more than 40 percent higher than for boys the same age.
• WHO and UNIFEM estimate that one pregnant woman dies every five minutes in India.

These conditions persist due to a deep-rooted mind-set Banerji describes as “unresisting acceptance of female genocide. It’s almost like ‘this is cultural, normal, how it is and will always be.’”

The rest is here

Rita Banerji has an online photo gallery with pictures of over 10,000 missing women and girls and is attempting to document the missing and put an end to the femicide.

WTO Talks

Robert Weissman from Z-Space on the collapse of the trade talks:

Predictably, the cheerleaders for corporate globalization are bemoaning the collapse of World Trade Organization negotiations.

“This is a very painful failure and a real setback for the global economy when we really needed some good news,” said Peter Mandelson, the European Union’s trade commissioner.

Even worse, says the corporate globalization rah-rah crowd, the talks’ failure will hurt the developing world. After all, these negotiations were named the Doha Development Round.

“The breakdown of these talks is bad news for the world’s businesses, workers, farmers and most importantly the poor,” laments U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue.

But don’t shed any tears for the purported beneficiaries of the WTO talks. If truth-in-advertising rules applied, this might have been called the Doha Anti-Development Round.

The alleged upside of the deal for developing countries — increased access to rich country markets — would have been of tiny benefit, even according to the World Bank. The Research and Information System for Developing Countries points out that Bank analyses showed a successful conclusion of the Doha Round would, by 2015, increase developing country income in total by $16 billion a year — less than a penny a day for every person in the developing world.

The World Bank study, however, includes numerous questionable assumptions, without which developing countries would emerge as net losers. One unrealistic assumption is that governments will make up for lost tariff revenues by other forms of taxes. Another is that countries easily adjust to import surges by depreciating their currencies and increasing exports.

In any case, the important point is that there was very little to gain for developing countries.

By contrast, there was a lot to lose.

The promise to developing countries was that they would benefit from reduced agricultural tariffs and subsidies in the rich countries. Among developing nations, these gains would have been narrowly concentrated among Argentina, Brazil and a few other countries with industrial agriculture.

What the spike in food prices has made clear to developing countries is that their food security depends fundamentally not on cheap imports, but on enhancing their capacity to feed themselves. The Doha rules would have further undermined this capacity.

“Opening of markets, removal of tariffs and withdrawal of state intervention in agriculture has turned developing countries from net food exporters to net food importers and burdened them with huge import bills,” explains food analyst Anuradha Mittal of the Oakland Institute. “This process, which leaves the poor dependent on uncertain and volatile global markets for their food supply, has wiped out millions of livelihoods and placed nearly half of humanity at the brink of hunger and starvation.”

Farmers’ movements around the world delivered this message to government negotiators, and the negotiators refused to cave to the aggressive demands made by rich countries on behalf of agricultural commodity-trading multinationals. Kamal Nath, India’s Minister for Commerce and Industry, pointed out that the Doha Development Round was supposed to give benefits to developing countries — especially in agriculture — not extract new concessions.

The immediately proximate cause of the negotiations’ collapse was a demand by developing countries that they maintain effective tools to protect themselves from agricultural import surges. Rich countries refused the overly modest demand.

And agriculture was the area where developing countries were going to benefit.

The rough trade at the heart of the deal was supposed to be that rich countries reduce market barriers to developing country agricultural exports, and developing countries further open up to rich country manufacturing and service exports and investment.

Such a deal “basically suggests that the poor countries should remain agricultural forever,” says Ha-Joon Chang, an economics professor at the University of Cambridge and author of Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. “In order to receive the agricultural concession, the developing countries basically have to abolish their industrial tariffs and other means to promote industrialization.” In other words, he says, developing countries are supposed to forfeit the tools that almost every industrialized country (and the successful Asian manufacturing exporters) has used to build their industrial capacity.

In sum, says Deborah James, director of international programs for the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Economic and Policy Research, this was a lose-lose deal for developing countries. “The tariff cuts demanded of developing countries would have caused massive job loss, and countries would have lost the ability to protect farmers from dumping, further impoverishing millions on the verge of survival,” she says.

By the way, it’s not as if this is a North vs. South, rich country vs. poor country issue. Although there have been multiple lines of fragmentation in the Doha negotiations, the best way to understand what’s going on is that the rich country governments are driving the agenda to advance corporate interests, not those of their populations. That’s why there is so little public support for the Doha trade agenda, in both rich and poor countries.

Says Lori Wallach of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch: “Now that WTO expansion has been again rejected at this ‘make or break’ meeting, elected officials and those on the campaign trail in nations around the world — including U.S. presidential candidates — will be asked what they intend to do to replace the failed WTO model and its version of corporate globalization with something that benefits the majority of people worldwide.”

US Foreign Policy Kills Women

Sarah Wildman, “The Global War on Sex Education“:

[...]

According to a new World Bank report, despite a worldwide increase in access to contraception and contraceptive technologies, some 51 million unintended pregnancies take place every year in the developing world, and an additional 25 million pregnancies are gestated by women who use faulty contraception or don’t understand the methods they’re using.

Of that number, according to the World Bank, some 68,000 women die from botched or unsafe abortions each year, and some 5.1 million are left permanently disabled by them. “Giving women access to modern contraception and family planning also helps to boost economic growth while reducing high birth rates so strongly linked with endemic poverty, poor education and high numbers of maternal and infant deaths,” Joy Phumaphi, the World Bank’s vice-president for human development, and a former health minister in Botswana, said in a statement.

How does that connect to the Bush administration? Simple. Since the moment he stepped into office, Bush’s commitment to the foolish “abstinence only” training both domestically and internationally has been coupled with a slavish devotion to the restrictive, ghoulish, “global gag rule”, introduced by Ronald Reagan in 1984, that cut off funding for any organisation that used USAID funds to even touch the word “abortion”. That meant an organisation couldn’t counsel a woman on abortion as an option, even if it received money from an entirely separate funding source to do so. Given that the 1973 Helms Amendment already banned US funds from paying for overseas abortions, Reagan’s policy gagged healthcare providers and gave them a stark choice: lose crucial American funding (from the creation of USAID in 1965 to 1984, some 40% of all foreign funding to population control-oriented organisations globally came from the US), or severely limit the way they talked about reproductive choices.

Bill Clinton repealed the policy, but Bush reinstated it the moment he arrived in Washington, in January 2001. Then, in August 2003, he tried to deepen its impact, extending the ban from USAID to the entire state department, pushing to ban all employees at state from even discussing the consequences of abortion. Several reports issued at the time illustrated just how devastating Bush’s policy had become. By 2002 USAID had ended shipments of contraceptives to 16 developing nations in Africa and Asia as a direct consequence of the gag rule.

Instead of ending abortions, the global gag rule pushed women into back alleys and undermined, even closed, organisations that would have counselled women on how not to get pregnant in the first place. By diminishing access to contraception, it was actually laying the groundwork for unsafe abortions. The global gag rule didn’t just gag healthcare providers about abortion. It gagged them on contraception and education. Since 2002, the Bush administration has also withheld funding – to the tune of $39.7m – from the United Nations Population Fund, claiming – despite evidence to the contrary – that UNFPA is connected to forced abortions in China. The shortfall from the US has also helped undermine the spread of contraception and education around the world, particularly in Africa.

“Hundreds of women are dying every day in poor countries from botched abortions,” says Barbara Crane, executive vice-president of the North Carolina-based reproductive rights organisation IPAS, who wrote me by email last week. “By repeatedly cutting the budget for international family planning and putting in place the global gag rule, the supposedly ‘pro-life’ Bush administration ignores this tragic reality – and without doubt causes more unsafe abortions, posing high costs to women, their families and society at large. It is ironic that the same groups that oppose abortion rarely step up and support better access to contraception.”

The Bush administration has time and again put American women’s lives second to a religiously inspired relationship to women and reproductive health. Take their latest attempt to restrict American women’s access to contraception and the kind of pre-emptive contraceptive measures that pro-life forces should love. In this latest salvo, the US department of health and human services would allow any healthcare provider the right to refuse to treat a woman, and defines “abortion” in such a broad manner as to restrict access to IUDs, the morning after pill, and some birth control pills. This affects any entity – from public and private hospitals to pharmacies – that receives public funding from HHS, explains Jill Morrison, senior counsel at the National Women’s Law Centre. “Under the guise of simply interpreting current law,” Morrison explained, if this HHS proposal goes through it would “completely expand the federal abortion refusal laws to include some of the most commonly used forms of contraception.” Morrison said it was fair to call this a “domestic gag rule”.

The Bush administration’s relationship to sex and reproduction has been consistently abysmal, from their utterly failed effort to promote abstinence only among teenagers to its unique ability to hire militantly anti-contraception “experts” like Susan Orr, a veteran of the religious Family Research Council, who was named acting deputy assistant secretary for population affairs in October of last year (and stepped down, quietly, in May). Orr was previously known for championing a measure that would strip funding for birth control for federal workers, saying she was “quite pleased because fertility is not a disease. It’s not a medical necessity that you have it” and earlier calling contraception part of a “culture of death”.

The Bush administration’s notion of contraception and sex education has been consistently – maddeningly – oxymoronic. Abortion rates are lowest in countries where women have access to education, especially education on contraception. So while we in the US hold our collective breath, waiting out these last few months of Bush’s efforts to restrict our freedoms, globally women are literally dying for him to leave.

Inseminating Cows by Candlelight

When charity is cruel and stupid:

It almost sounds like a joke. Set up dairy enterprises in rural African villages with no refrigeration, electricity, veterinary care or passable roads for a population that can’t drink milk because it’s 90% lactose intolerant.

But the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation didn’t think it was a joke when it announced the gift of $42 million to Heifer International at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January — the biggest gift the Little Rock, AR-based Christian charity which sends live animals to poor countries has ever received.

Using cherubic, 4-H/Unicef style advertising — kids hugging the animal “gifts” they will also dispatch — Heifer pledges to stamp out world hunger in poor countries using the grain, water and grazing land they don’t have to raise animals.

To get around the lack of rural electricity for the proposed dairy operations in Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda, Heifer will create “chilling plants” with their own backup power generators according to a press release where the milk will be stored for pickup by “refrigerated commercial dairy delivery trucks”– both of them.

Farmers will artificially inseminate cows, perhaps by candlelight, with “high-production dairy animal semen” — more backup generators required to keep it frozen? — and increase milk quality through providing “improved animal nutrition” to the cows with the food they don’t have.

Gates Foundation Live Animal Aid to Africa is Cruel and Stupid

Martha Rosenberg

War on Peasant Farmers

From Kirk Tousaw:

It is totally inaccurate to call what is happening in Colombia a “war on drugs” because the targets and victims are primarily peasant farmers and their families. Now we learn that, despite the war causing widespread civil unrest/war and US efforts to spray poison throughout the country, coca farmers in Colombia planted MORE coca last year than the year before. A lot more.

Of course, the US response is to blame “insurgents” but let’s remember that those “insurgents” exist pretty much because the US has been making war against peasant farmers in Colombia for decades. Notice that the US has spent $5 Billion, with 80 percent of that going to the military.