Africa

The 2024 CHAN finals in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, which were due to kick off on 1 February, are postponed until August.

Hundreds of people have reportedly been underground since a crackdown on illegal mining began last year.

Rescuers say medical supplies are running low as health workers struggle to treat the victims.

Rescuers say medical supplies are running low as health workers struggle to treat the victims.

The police allege that the suspect was caught carrying the victim's head in a bag.

A displaced community in a shelter in Delmas, a commune in Haiti’s capital city, Port-Au-Prince. Credit: UNICEF/Herold Joseph

By Oritro Karim
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 14 2025 (IPS)

2024 was a transitional period in Haiti’s history, marked by rampant political instability, brutal gang violence, and widespread civilian displacement. Since the eruption of hostilities in March 2024, the Caribbean nation has been in a state of emergency. In response, the United Nations (UN) Security Council approved The Multinational Security Support (MSS) Mission in Haiti to assist the Haitian government in deposing gang activity and restoring order. However, the support mission has been largely ineffective as gangs continue to seize more areas in Haiti.

On January 7 2025, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) issued a report that detailed the deteriorating conditions currently plaguing the Haitian people. According to the report, at least 5,601 people were killed last year in Haiti as a direct result of gang violence, marking an increase of over 1,000 civilian casualties since 2023. Approximately 2,212 people were injured and 1,494 kidnapped as well.

The report also documented at least 315 instances of lynchings subjected to gang members and people allegedly associated with gang activity. According to OHCHR, some of these lynchings were carried out by Haitian police officers. Additionally, there were approximately 281 cases of summary executions involving specialized police units recorded in 2024.

“These figures alone cannot capture the absolute horrors being perpetrated in Haiti but they show the unremitting violence to which people are being subjected. It has long been clear that impunity for human rights violations and abuses, as well as corruption, remain prevalent in Haiti, constituting some of the main drivers of the multi-dimensional crisis the country faces, along with entrenched economic and social inequalities,” said UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk.

December 2024 marked an escalation in hostilities for Haiti. On January 3, 2025, William O’Neill, OHCHR’s Designated Expert on Haiti detailed the most recent attacks on healthcare personnel in Haiti. On December 17, 2024, gang members attacked the Bernard Mevs Hospital in Port-Au-Prince. “Criminal gangs have murdered and kidnapped physicians, nurses and healthcare workers, including humanitarian workers,” said O’Neill, adding that the gangs had “burned, ransacked and destroyed many hospitals and clinics, forcing many to close or suspend their operations”.

On December 24, 2024, gangs attacked the Université d’Etat d’Haiti Hospital (HUEH), resulting in 4 civilian casualties. These attacks have underscored the sheer level of insecurity facing Haiti’s healthcare sector. According to O’Neill, only 37 percent of hospitals in Haiti remain fully functional. Additionally, gangs continue to issue threats of attack on healthcare facilities, making life-saving medical efforts much more difficult.

“The Haitian people – including hundreds of thousands of children living in very precarious conditions – are once again paying the high price of this violence with their right to health severely hindered,” said O’Neill. Healthcare is urgently required at this time due to the sheer influx of injured persons as a result of gang violence as well as the spread of infectious diseases, such as tuberculosis and cholera.

Over 2024, gang violence has led to a surge of internal displacements. According to a press release from the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, nearly 703,000 civilians have been uprooted from their homes in 2024, which is nearly double the amount of displacements recorded in the previous year. Additionally, insecurity has led to an omnipresent hunger crisis, with approximately 5.4 million Haitians facing acute food insecurity, which is nearly half of the nation’s population.

Heightened insecurity has also greatly impeded response efforts from the international community since the wake of this crisis. The UN-backed MSS mission has largely floundered as a result of exacerbated gang violence. In June 2024, Kenya had deployed 400 police officers to assist the Haitian government in deposing gang activity. However, they found themselves outnumbered and overwhelmed by the gang members.

Himmler Rébu, a retired Haitian army colonel and former presidential candidate, informed reporters on the general ineffectiveness of the Kenyan contingent mission’s response, saying, “I heard there were Kenyans in the country, but where are they? Why are they in Haiti if we don’t see any difference? Since the mission’s arrival, gangs have taken several villages and at least seven key towns that had been spared.”

Türk has reiterated the need to scale up MSS responses going forward. “The Multinational Security Support mission in Haiti needs the logistical and financial support it requires to successfully implement its mandate,” he said, adding that there must be a stricter arms embargo to prevent gang members from acquiring firearms and ammunition. Additionally, Türk stated the need for stronger oversight measures from the Haitian National Police (HNP) to track human rights violations and hold perpetrators accountable.

On January 3, 2025, a contingent of 150 Guatemalan soldiers arrived in Haiti as a part of the MSS mission in hopes of restoring security. Normil Rameau, the Director-General of HNP, informed reporters that the most effective way of mitigating gang violence is through a “marriage” between the police and Haitian civilians.

It is also crucial for the MSS mission to receive proper funding to adequately respond to this crisis. The UN Trust Fund for the MSS mission has pledged approximately 96.8 million dollars. However, Miroslav Jenča, Assistant Secretary-General for Europe, Central Asia and the Americas, Departments of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs and Peace Operations, warns that much more is needed, adding that further delays or gaps in operation would present “a catastrophic risk of the collapse of national security institutions.”

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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Central African Republic appoint former Liverpool, West Ham and Cameroon defender Rigobert Song as their new head coach.

Israeli drones targeted a clearly marked World Central Kitchen aid killing seven aid convoy in the Gaza Strip killing seven aid workers. Credit: Tasnim News Agency

By Ed Holt
BRATISLAVA, Jan 14 2025 (IPS)

Humanitarian aid operations in some places may become impossible in the future, experts have warned, as a new report shows a dramatic rise in the use of armed drones in conflict zones.

The report Hovering Threats The Challenges of Armed Drones in Humanitarian Contexts by Insecurity Insight, released on January 14, shows that recorded incidents directly affecting aid and health care programmes in conflict zones rose almost four-fold in the last year and that the share of drone-delivered explosives among all incidents where explosive weapons impacted aid or health care doubled.

It also warns that given that it is considerably cheaper to deliver explosive munitions with drones compared to piloted aircraft and that drone use carries minimal risk to operators, coupled with the increasing availability of components on both military and commercial markets, the frequency of drone use in conflict and with it the number of incidents where aid operations are affected is likely to rise in the coming years—both in scale and in the number of affected countries and territories.

“There could be some time where aid organizations will not be able to work in some conflict zones [because of the risks associated with drones],” Christina Wille, Director of Insecurity Insight, told IPS.

The report highlights how the use of drones in conflict zones has expanded exponentially in the last two decades, and especially in the last few years. This is increasingly impacting aid and healthcare in those areas, killing and injuring health and aid workers and destroying aid infrastructure, including warehouses, IDP or refugee camps, and health facilities and ambulances.

Insecurity Insight’s research shows that armed actors’ use of drones has been a factor in conflict dynamics since 2001, but the first recorded instances of drone-delivered explosives impacting health care services were not until 2016. Until 2022, the number of recorded incidents directly affecting aid and health care programmes remained below ten per year.

By 2023, however, 84 incidents of drone use directly impacting aid operations or health services were recorded, and this figure surged to 308 incidents in 2024. Additionally, the geographic spread of drone-related incidents directly affecting aid or health services expanded from five countries or territories in 2022 to twelve in 2024. The share of drone-delivered explosives among all incidents where explosive weapons impacted aid or health care in conflict zones increased from 6 percent in 2023 to 12 percent in 2024.

The report also says that during this period, for the first time, explosive weapons were the most commonly recorded form of violence directly affecting aid or health operations.

The organization says that between 2016 and 2024, at least 21 aid workers and 73 health workers, six of whom worked for health NGOs, were reportedly killed in drone attacks.

Aid operations or health care services in conflict zones were directly impacted by drone-delivered explosive weapons in at least 426 documented incidents.

The majority of incidents of drone-delivered explosives that affected aid operations or health care in conflict-affected areas documented by Insecurity Insight involved Russian and Israeli forces, and the impact of drone use on aid organizations operating in conflict zones in Ukraine and Gaza has been stark.

In Gaza, since the beginning of Israeli forces’ offensive against Hamas following the group’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, aid organizations in the region say healthcare and humanitarian operations have been devastated by Israeli strikes, some of which have involved the use of drones.

In Ukraine, the situation is similar.

Pavlo Smyrnov, Deputy Executive Director of the Ukrainian healthcare NGO Alliance for Public Health (APH), which has been running aid and healthcare programmes in Ukraine, including in front-line areas, since Russia’s full-scale invasion of the country, said the risks to aid workers from drones were now so great that some areas had become off-limits to them.

“Because of drones, it is difficult to work in some places and impossible to work in others. In some places there are just so many drones we can’t work, and in other areas we can still work, but that work is much more limited,” he told IPS.

However, the report points out that the use of drones is rising in other conflicts around the world. In 2023, the use of drone-delivered explosives affecting aid or health operations was reported for the first time in Burkina Faso, Lebanon and Sudan. In 2024, incidents involving drone-delivered explosives that impacted aid or health care were reported from more countries and territories, including for the first time in Chechnya, Colombia, Mali, Niger and Russia.

Experts say this proliferation of drone use is not just dangerous in itself—proliferation of any weapon increases risk—but because their specific nature means their use threatens to create bloodier conflicts where previously accepted humanitarian laws and rules of war will be more frequently broken.

“What is particularly worrying is how these weapons change the way combat is carried out. When you have people directly confronting each other, who knows what will drive people to make decisions [on weapons use] in these circumstances? But these drones are being used remotely, often by people a long way away, in rooms. It’s almost like playing a video game,” said Wille.

“What we can expect drone operators to do may be very different from what happens in a situation where someone feels their own life under threat because they are in a combat situation with a direct adversary. To some extent, the use of drones has led to prescribed norms being more frequently ignored by conflict parties and also because using drones to deliver explosives is so much cheaper. If you have to spend half a million dollars to hit a target, you will self-restrain because of the cost, but if it costs much less, it is easier to just say, ‘OK, we’ll hit a target now because we feel like it’. The drones have removed a lot of the cost barriers [that led to conflict parties using some restraint in their attacks],” she added.

Experts have also linked these rising attacks with a lack of meaningful global action over deadly military strikes on health and humanitarian operations in war zones, particularly those seen in Ukraine and Gaza.

“In the past, many conflict parties may have felt constrained in what they could do because they would fear some serious reprimand, even from allied states, but that seems to have disappeared now. Other regimes see states getting away [with attacking humanitarian groups] and are emboldened to do the same themselves,” said Wille.

She said this was making it much harder for aid agencies to know where they can safely operate.

“They cannot rely on parties to conflicts to regulate their actions to ensure they stay within prescribed norms,” she said.

Another problem related to drone attacks is that civilian populations in areas of conflict have begun to associate all drones with nefarious or lethal operations against them.

“One of the key challenges with the multiplication of drones in conflict and humanitarian contexts is their psychological and ‘chilling’ effect: a lot of people/civilians in those contexts associate drones with possible attacks or surveillance. The more drones there are, the more worried and ‘paranoid’ people become,” Pierrick Devidal, Senior Policy Advisor at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), told IPS.

“Because it is virtually impossible for people to distinguish drones used for civilian/humanitarian and military purposes, this lack of distinction compounds the problem and deepens an atmosphere of fear and anxiety. These perceptions and psychological issues are likely to create problems for humanitarian organizations wanting to use drones for humanitarian/operational purposes, as those uses may be (mis)perceived as related to military/security objectives,” Devidal added.

The Insight Insecurity report has a list of recommendations for measures aid agencies can take to mitigate the risks posed by the use of armed drones, including not just practical operative measures to ensure safety if drones are in an area but also the use of humanitarian diplomacy and deconfliction to avoid being targeted.

However, experts say with parties in conflicts appearing to be uninterested, or unable, to observe deconfliction agreements and the costs of implementing safety measures increasingly prohibitive—for example, in some places here you cannot operate anywhere in a vehicle without having a drone jamming device on your car—this is a requirement set by the police. These are expensive though,” said Smyrnov—many groups will struggle to keep operations going in areas where drones are frequently used.

“If the risks [of operating in a conflict zone] increase so too do the costs for the aid agencies,” said Wille.

“Security risks from the use of drones, e.g., mistargeting, drones failing and falling, etc., represent an additional security risk—a source of risks that did not exist before—in conflict and humanitarian settings to which civilians and humanitarian organizations will have to adjust and adapt. This will require more resources, time and energy that will not be spent in delivering aid. In short, it is not good news,” added Devidal.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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Hardy, nutrition-rich indigenous crops such as sorghum should be esearched as innovative solutions to ending hunger and malnutrition. More than 150 Nobel and World Food Prize Laureates call on world leaders to prioritize urgent agricultural research to meet food needs of 9.7 billion people by 2050. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Jan 14 2025 (IPS)

Neglected indigenous crops, rich in nutrition and resilient to climate change, are key to tackling global hunger only if governments invest in research and development (R&D) to tap the potential of such innovations.

More than 150 Nobel and World Food Prize Laureates are calling for investment in moonshot technologies to realize the potential of innovative solutions such as these hardy crops, warning that without swift action, there is a “food insecure, unstable world.”

Neglected crops are indigenous crops that have been lost or forgotten over time. They are important for the food security of resource-poor farmers and consumers, especially in Africa.

In an open letter to the “Agricultural R&D Moonshot: Bolstering U.S. National Security” meeting in the U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture in Washington, DC, this week, the Laureates called on world leaders to prioritize urgent agricultural research to meet the food needs of nearly 10 billion people by mid-century. They urged for financial and political support to develop “moonshot” technologies with the greatest chance of averting a hunger catastrophe in the next 25 years.

“The most promising scientific breakthroughs and emerging fields of research that should be prioritized to boost food production include research into hardy, nutrition-rich indigenous crops that have been largely overlooked for improvements,” the Laureates of the Nobel Prize and the World Food Prize said, citing other moonshot technology candidates as improving photosynthesis in staple crops such as wheat and rice to optimize growth and developing cereals that can source nitrogen biologically and grow without fertilizer.

“The scale of ambition and research we are advocating will require mechanisms to identify, recommend, coordinate, monitor and facilitate collaborative implementation of the proposed food security moonshots,” the Laureates said, in advocating for research investment to ensure the world’s future food and nutrition security.

Research to Rid the World of Hunger

While agricultural research had favourable returns on investment, the Laureates bemoaned that it was failing to provide people in developing countries with a nutritious diet in a resilient, environmentally sustainable, and cost-effective manner. The Laureates are convinced that improving agricultural productivity will be enough to meet the world’s future food needs but caution that if we do not prioritize agricultural R&D the global farming systems will be tied to the increased use of diminishing non-replenishable resources to feed humanity.

More than 150 Nobel and World Food Prize laureates call for urgent “moonshot” efforts to avert global hunger catastrophe. Credit: World Food Prize Foundation

The world was “not even close” to meeting future food needs, with an estimated 700 million people already going hungry and an additional 1.5 billion people needing to be fed by 2050, the Laureates said, urging for the transformation of the global food value chain.

Other moonshot initiatives that should be researched include the enhancement of fruits and vegetables to improve storage and shelf life and to increase food safety, and the creation of nutrient-rich food from microorganisms and fungi.

In 2007, African Union member countries pledged to invest one percent of their GDP by 2020 in science and research, an ambitious bid for science-led development but a goal many countries have failed to meet.

Science, technology and innovation have been identified as key to Africa’s development under the Africa Agenda 2063—a development roadmap for the next fifty years adopted by African Heads of State.

Climate Change Affecting Food Security

Climate change is projected to decrease the productivity of most major staples when substantial increases are needed to feed a world, which will add another 1.5 billion people to its population by 2050.

For maize, the major staple for much of Africa, the picture is particularly dire, with decreasing yields projected for virtually its entire growing area. Increasingly common extreme weather events associated with climate change will only make matters worse. Moreover, additional factors such as soil erosion and land degradation, biodiversity loss, water shortages, conflict, and policies that restrict innovation will drag crop productivity down even further.

“Yet as difficult and as uncomfortable as it might be to imagine, humanity is headed towards an even more food insecure, unstable world by mid-century than exists today, worsened by a vicious cycle of conflict and food insecurity,” said the Laureates, who include Robert Woodrow Wilson, who won the 1978 Nobel Prize for Physics for his discovery that supported the big bang theory of creation and Wole Soyinka, the first Black African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

“The impacts of climate change are already reducing food production around the world, but particularly in Africa, which bears little historical responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions yet sees temperatures rising faster than elsewhere,” Akinwumi Adesina, president of the African Development Bank, who received the World Food Prize in 2017, said in a statement. “In low-income countries where productivity needs to almost double by 2050 compared to 1990, the stark reality is that it’s likely to rise by less than half. We have just 25 years to change this.”

Other notable signatories to the letter include the 14th Dalai Lama., Ethiopian-American plant breeder and U.S. National Media of Science recipient Gebisa Ejeta, Akinwumi Adesina, president of the African Development Bank and Cary Fowler, joint 2024 World Food Prize Laureate, who is also the outgoing U.S. Special Envoy for Global Food Security who coordinated the appeal.

“We must take bold action to change course,” said the Laureates, adding, “We must be prepared to pursue high-risk, high-reward scientific research with the goal of transforming our food systems to meet the nutritional needs of everyone sustainably.”

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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The former head of state faced criticism after unveiling the likeness of himself last year.

Kamal Adwan Hospital faced several Israeli military bombardments. Credit: World Health Organization (WHO) December 2024

By Norman Solomon
SAN FRANCISCO, USA, Jan 14 2025 (IPS)

A few days before the end of 2024, the independent magazine +972 reported that “Israeli army forces stormed the Kamal Adwan Hospital compound in Beit Lahiya, culminating a nearly week-long siege of the last functioning hospital in northern Gaza.”

While fire spread through the hospital, its staff issued a statement saying that “surgical departments, laboratory, maintenance, and emergency units have been completely burned,” and patients were “at risk of dying at any moment.”

The magazine explained that “the assault on medical facilities in Beit Lahiya is the latest escalation in Israel’s brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza, which over the last three months forcibly displaced the vast majority of Palestinians living in the area.”

The journalism from +972 — in sharp contrast to the dominant coverage of the Gaza war from U.S. media — has provided clarity about real-time events, putting them in overall context rather than episodic snippets.

+972 Magazine is the work of Palestinian and Israeli journalists who describe their core values as “a commitment to equity, justice, and freedom of information” — which necessarily means “accurate and fair journalism that spotlights the people and communities working to oppose occupation and apartheid.” But the operative values of mainstream U.S. news outlets have been very different.

Key aspects of how the U.S. establishment has narrated the “war on terror” for more than two decades were standard in American media and politics from the beginning of the Gaza war in October 2023. For instance:

**·Routine discourse avoided voices condemning the U.S. government for its role in the slaughter of civilians.

**The U.S. ally usually eluded accountability for its high-tech atrocities committed from the air.

**Civilian deaths in Gaza were habitually portrayed as unintended.

**Claims that Israel was aiming to minimize civilian casualties were normally taken at face value.

** Media coverage and political rhetoric stayed away from acknowledging that Israel’s actions might fit into such categories as “mass murder” or “terrorism.”

**Overall, news media and U.S. government officials emitted a mindset that Israeli lives really mattered a lot more than Palestinian lives.

The Gaza war has received a vast amount of U.S. media attention, but how much it actually communicated about the human realities was a whole other matter. The belief or unconscious notion that news media were conveying war’s realities ended up obscuring those realities all the more. And journalism’s inherent limitations were compounded by media biases.

During the first five months of the war, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post applied the word “brutal” or its variants far more often to Palestinians (77 percent) than to Israelis (23 percent).

The findings, in a study by Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), pointed to an imbalance that occurred “even though Israeli violence was responsible for more than 20 times as much loss of life.” News articles and opinion pieces were remarkably in the same groove; “the lopsided rate at which ‘brutal’ was used in op-eds to characterize Palestinians over Israelis was exactly the same as the supposedly straight news stories.”

Despite exceptional coverage at times, what was most profoundly important about war in Gaza — what it was like to be terrorized, massacred, maimed and traumatized — remained almost entirely out of view.

Gradually, surface accounts reaching the American public came to seem repetitious and normal. As death numbers kept rising and months went by, the Gaza war diminished as a news topic, while most talk shows seldom discussed it.

As with the slaughter via bombardment, the Israeli-U.S. alliance treated the increasing onset of starvation, dehydration, and fatal disease as a public-relations problem. Along the way, official pronouncements — and the policies they tried to justify — were deeply anchored in the unspoken premise that some lives really matter and some really don’t.

The propaganda approach was foreshadowed on October 8, 2023, with Israel in shock from the atrocities that Hamas had committed the previous day. “This is Israel’s 9/11,” the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations told reporters in New York, and he repeated: “This is Israel’s 9/11.” Meanwhile, in a PBS News Weekend interview, Israel’s ambassador to the United States declared: “This is, as someone said, our 9/11.”

What was sinister about proclaiming “Israel’s 9/11” was what happened after America’s 9/11. Wearing the cloak of victim, the United States proceeded to use the horrible tragedy that occurred inside its borders as an open-ended reason to kill in the name of retaliation, self-protection, and, of course, the “war on terror.”

As Israel’s war on Gaza persisted, the explanations often echoed the post-9/11 rationales for the “war on terror” from the U.S. government: authorizing future crimes against humanity as necessary in the light of certain prior events.

Reverberation was in the air from late 2001, when the Pentagon’s leader Donald Rumsfeld asserted that “responsibility for every single casualty in this war, whether they’re innocent Afghans or innocent Americans, rests at the feet of the al Qaeda and the Taliban.”
After five weeks of massacring Palestinian people, Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that “any civilian loss is a tragedy” — and quickly added that “the blame should be placed squarely on Hamas.”

The licenses to kill were self-justifying. And they had no expiration date.

This article is adapted from the afterword in the paperback edition of Norman Solomon’s latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine (The New Press).

This was originally published by MediaNorth.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Eleven survivors describe what happened and raise safety questions about the dive boat Sea Story.

Eleven survivors describe what happened and raise safety questions about the dive boat Sea Story.

Cameroonian Alice Nkom thinks accusations she is funding terrorism are a ploy to stop her advocacy.

Cameroonian Alice Nkom thinks accusations she is funding terrorism are a ploy to stop her advocacy.

Cameroonian Alice Nkom thinks accusations she is funding terrorism are a ploy to stop her advocacy.

Assault rifle seized in Mexico. Drug gangs illegally import firearms from the United States, which helps them drive their criminal activity. Credit: GAO

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO, Jan 13 2025 (IPS)

The case of a man arrested in Texas, in the south of the United States, for shipping arms parts to Mexico immediately caught the attention of authorities in both countries. But it was only one thread in a web that continues to become more and more tangled.

At a binational meeting in early October, following the inauguration of leftist President Claudia Sheinbaum on 1 October, Mexicans complained to their counterparts about the flow of gun parts through online shops and the United States postal service into Mexico.

The host, the Mexican government, briefed the United States government on the issue and asked for more measures to control the smuggling, including uniform shipping codes to make it easier to identify packages and confiscate them, which Washington has so far rejected.“Most trafficked weapons are obtained by dozens or hundreds of proxy buyers who conduct multiple transactions of low quantities of weapons, which are then trafficked across the border in large quantities of small shipments, usually in private cars. Detection and interdiction of these shipments is impossible”: Matt Schroeder

Sheinbaum herself stressed in her morning conference on Thursday 9 January the importance of cooperation to curb trafficking at customs and borders.

“Just as they are concerned about the entry of drugs into the United States from Mexican territory, we are concerned about the entry of weapons. What we are very interested in is that (with Trump) the entry of weapons stops,” she said.

Mexican drug cartels hire individuals in the United States to ship parts to Mexico, where they assemble the weapons, and people who receive payment in cash or remittances on both sides of the border.

In the Texas case, which broke out in December 2023, the accused sent parts and manuals, and assessed on how to assemble 4,300 rifles in exchange for payment of US$3.5 million.

It is a modality that belongs to the so-called “ghost guns”, which can be manufactured with 3D printers or assembled with parts without serial numbers, making them untraceable.

Eugenio Weigend, an academic at the public University of Michigan, with its campus in Ann-Arbour, Michigan, noted that the manufacture of so-called “miscellaneous weapons”, such as components, is on the rise.

“They are a problem. Traffickers find many ways, it’s a new channel they use, it’s one of several options. It adds another layer to the arms trade and exacerbates the problem” of drug trafficking and violence, he told IPS from Austin, capital of the border state of Texas.

The Gun Control Act of 1968 does not regulate the fragment industry, so minors and people who would not pass a legal background check in the United States can buy them.

In recent years, the production of these components has increased exponentially in the northern nation, with lethal consequences for Mexico.

As the November report Under the Gun: Firearms Trafficking in Latin America and the Caribbean, produced by the non-governmental Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), explains, transnational criminal organisations frequently change their methods and ways of obtaining weapons, persistently seeking the least guarded route.

Fragments are components, such as frames and receivers. However, specific figures for seizures of arms parts alone are not always published in a disaggregated manner, as statistics tend to group together both whole weapons and their components.

US and Mexican government delegations met in October in Mexico City to discuss security issues. Despite bilateral efforts to control the trafficking of whole or parts of arms to Mexico, this flow continues to flourish, fuelling violence in the country. Credit: SRE

Lethal mix

While Mexico provides drugs for the United States trafficking and consumption market, its northern neighbour supplies weapons to criminal gangs, in a vicious cycle that causes its share of death in both territories.

Between 2016 and 2023, seizures of shipments to Mexico more than tripled, according to the non-governmental Small Arms Survey (SAS), based in the Swiss city of Geneva.

In parallel, figures from the United States Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF)  indicate that half of the weapons seized in Mexico were manufactured in the United States, while almost one-fifth came from other countries.

In more than one-sixth of the cases, non-United States companies produced them, while the ATF was unable to establish their origin in a similar percentage.

ATF was able to trace half of the product to retail buyers, but failed to link almost 50% to a specific buyer. Half were handguns and one third were rifles.

The statistics show an obvious underreporting, as the ATF only receives weapons that a federal agency, such as the attorney general’s office or the Army, captures in Mexico and forwards to it. But captures by state agencies are excluded.

Texas and Arizona were the main sources, due to their gun shops and fairs, and this Latin American country was the main market. There are more than 3,000 arms manufacturers operating in the United States, including several producers of parts kits.

Since 2005, the trend in the manufacture of miscellaneous weapons, which are essentially frames and receivers, has been on the rise, totalling 2.7 million in 2022. But between then and 2023, production fell by 36%, according to the United States Department of Justice, based on its partial figures.

Guns boost the capacity of criminal groups vying for access to the juicy United States criminal market, which also has an impact on violence levels in Mexico.

This has a direct impact on violence in this country of 130 million people, where more than 30,000 homicides occur annually, most of them committed with firearms, and more than 100,000 people go missing.

“Most trafficked weapons are obtained by dozens or hundreds of proxy buyers who conduct multiple transactions of low quantities of weapons, which are then trafficked across the border in large quantities of small shipments, usually in private cars. Detection and interdiction of these shipments is impossible,” SAS researcher Matt Schroeder told IPS from his Washington headquarters.

Estimates indicate that between 200,000 and 873,000 firearms are trafficked across the United States border into Mexico each year, with between 13.5 million and 15.5 million unregistered firearms circulating in Mexico.

The trafficking of US weapons, especially high-powered rifles, has fuelled violence in Mexico throughout this century, and US and Mexican authorities have failed to curb it. Infographic: Wilson Center

Inefficient

Measures implemented by both governments have not been sufficient to stem the flow of arms and their fragments.

The two nations formed the High-Level Security Dialogue in 2021, with five groups, including one on cross-border crimes. They are also part of the Bicentennial Framework, a binational security initiative that replaced the Merida Initiative that the United States funded between 2008 and 2021.

The United States has provided Mexico with US$3 billion in assistance since 2008 to address crime and violence and strengthen the rule of law, without the desired results.

This could be explained by facts such as those detected by the United States Government Accountability Office (GAO), which found no specific activities to achieve the set goals, nor performance indicators and evaluation plans.

In 2021, the GAO recommended improved weapons tracing, investigations of criminal organisations and greater collaboration with Mexican authorities.

That year, Mexico sued eight companies, including six United States-based producers, for US$10 billion in damages for negligent marketing and illicit trafficking of weapons in a case before the United States Supreme Court.

And on the other side, the administration of outgoing President Joe Biden, in office since January 2020 and set to hand over to ultraconservative tycoon Donald Trump on 20 January, stepped up federal controls on the purchase and distribution of guns.

Because of the loophole, the ATF issued a provision in 2022 reclassifying parts kits to have serial codes. The United States Supreme Court is considering a lawsuit brought by the producers of these kits against the measure.

The academic Weigend envisioned a complicated panorama, especially with Trump’s return to the White House.

In Mexico “this issue will continue to be a priority and a problem on the border, but in the United States I am not so optimistic that a regulation will pass at the federal level,” he said.

“Perhaps the Mexican administration will raise its voice more than the United States, it can generate more information about the impact of guns in the country, do more research, highlight the fact that the Hispanic population (in the United States) suffers more gun violence than other groups,” he said.

In fact, during his first term in office (2017-2021), Trump had a mixed performance on gun control, as his administration strengthened background checks for gun buyers and increased prosecution for gun crimes.

But it did not establish stricter laws, production and sales increased in 2020, among other causes due to the covid-19 pandemic, and the fight against cross-border trafficking made little or no progress.

For researcher Schroeder, binational trafficking requires resources to shore up several areas.

“A significant reduction in this trafficking requires, at the very least, a significant increase in resources for inspection at ports of entry and exit, for investigation of trafficking schemes, and greater coverage and education of potential sources of weapons in the United States,” he said.

Bilateral cooperation is on hold on the eve of Trump’s inauguration, who has criticised Mexico for its role in drug trafficking, to which the Mexican government has responded by asking it to help stem the flow of weapons.

A latent threat is the disappearance of the ATF, which would complicate the investigation and tracing of weapons. Republican senators Lauren Boebert, an explicit gun enthusiast, and Eric Burlinson introduced an initiative to that effect on Tuesday 7 January.

The men have been underground since the police began a crackdown on illegal mining last year.

Critics say the money could be put to better use in at a time when the country is struggling economically.

By Anis Chowdhury
SYDNEY, Jan 13 2025 (IPS)

Thank God, we have survived another year of genocide, war, destruction and climate crisis. The passing year of 2024 has been a mixture of hope and despair. It began with some hope as the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled in favour of South Africa’s case against Israel for committing genocide and ordered Israel to take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts within the scope of Article II of the Genocide Convention, and to take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

Anis Chowdhury

Alas, the hope quickly vanished as the genocide continues by the very people who promised, “never again” and worked tirelessly for the Genocide Convention. Officially, more than 45,000 killed – mostly women and children. According to the prestigious medical journal Lancet, the actual death toll by July 2024 reached more than 186,000 due to the cumulative effects of Israel’s destruction of hospitals, blocking of aid, cutting off water & electricity supplies and every other means of ethnic cleansing.

Ironically, it is possible for the apartheid state of Israel to trample on the ICJ and the international humanitarian laws only because of its backing by the US and its allies. One grapples with the inexplicable spectacle of its stone-faced Western allies ignoring, and indeed justifying, the slaughter and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza.

I wrote three pieces for IPS trying to explain the inexplicable – Gaza Massacre and Western Hypocrisy (4 Mar., 2024); ‘Unbounded’ Impunity Emboldens Israel (27 Feb., 2024) and The West’s Frankenstein Moment (14 Feb., 2024). Amidst the continued horror, injustice and the miseries of the occupied Palestinian people, I thought it was pointless to write or make academic analyses.

Instead, I opted for activism and joined the mass protests that became a regular feature around the world, loudly and defiantly declaring, “From the River to the sea, Palestine will be free”, where the two – Palestinians and Jewish people – will live as free citizens, enjoying full democratic and economic rights to realise their full potential as equal human beings.

My children and grandchildren also joined as we drew inspiration from the resilience of the Palestinians, refusing to surrender and demanding to live with dignity.

It seems people power is beginning to have some positive impact. More countries, especially in the Global South, are taking a firm stance against the apartheid state of Israel; breaking with their Western allies. Norway, Ireland, Spain and Slovenia recognized the State of Palestine. Australia changed its position to support a vote at the UN demanding Israel end the occupation of Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Yet, there were more disappointing events: Israel expanded its ruthless bombing to Lebanon and assassinated key figures, eliminating likely partners in a possible peace deal; the war in Ukraine became more protracted while Putin threatens to use nuclear war-heads. And the US, the supposed leader of the so-called rule-based ‘free world’, elected a narcissist, Donald Trump, as its President, bent on wrecking the rules, claiming US supremacy and exceptionalism. The CoP29 climate summit ended with disappointment as the world’s most vulnerable nations have been abandoned, and there has been little progress on reducing fossil fuels.

The fate of the displaced people in Sudan, Myanmar and elsewhere became worse, as conflict drags on. Amnesty International reported, “the Arakan Army unlawfully killed Rohingya civilians, drove them from their homes and left them vulnerable to attacks. These attacks faced by the Rohingya come on top of indiscriminate air strikes by the Myanmar military that have killed both Rohingya and ethnic Rakhine civilians”.

The Rohingya people – the world’s largest stateless population – continue to face persecution and abuse. They now face a double-edged sword as the Arakan Army tightens the noose around Myanmar’s Junta.

Conflict in Sudan has led to a man-made famine, the world’s largest hunger crisis, and the worst internal displacement crisis in the world. Nearly 20 months of war has made more than one-fifth of the country, over 12 million people, displaced from their homes.

Nevertheless, there have been some sparks of hope. The heroic people of Syria and Bangladesh overthrew their repressive regimes, which seemed almost impossible the day before; and it appears a new dawn has come for these nations.

People in both Syria and Bangladesh are hoping for a just, equitable and democratic society. However, they are also genuinely apprehensive as such a systemic transition is fraught with uncertainty. It is like a caterpillar’s morphosis inside a cocoon – it can come out either as a butterfly or as a moth.

The shadow of the failed ‘Arab Spring’ in Egypt, Algeria and Tunisia haunts the Syrian people. They also fear the sectarian conflict and big-power games that followed in Libya as Israel pounds and expands its occupation.

In the case of Bangladesh, the last three attempts at systemic transition have ended in disappointments. The high hope for a democratic, just society evaporated quickly as the country witnessed unprecedented extra-judicial killings, vote rigging and finally turning into a one-party state within about 3 years of its independence earned at the cost of millions of lives. The second attempt post 1975 was skidded by Ershad’s coup whose military-civilian regime was neither a butterfly nor a moth – rather a hybrid. Then the third attempt post 1990, turned into a monster with the tyrant Hasina’s kleptocratic rule by theft and extreme repression.

Despair must not overtake hope. Human history is the stories of struggles; but our ability to rise after every fall, to emerge from the depths of despair with new found determination and unwavering hope determines our progress.

Anis Chowdhury, Emeritus Professor, Western Sydney University (Australia). Held senior United Nations positions in New York and Bangkok. E-mail: anis.z.chowdhury@gmail.com

IPS UN Bureau

 

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