Africa - INTER PRESS SERVICE

A girl reads a story book with lessons on life skills at an ELA club in Uganda. Credit: Uganda/BRAC

By Naureen Hossain
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 22 2023 (IPS)

BRAC’s Empowerment and Livelihood Program (ELA) has benefitted tens of thousands of girls, and its recently released report shows an organization willing to adapt to the circumstances to continue to ensure adolescent girls and young women receive meaningful sexual and reproductive health rights support.

The report titled Adolescent Empowerment at a scale: Successes and challenges of an evidence-based approach to young women’s programming in Africa was launched on February 15, 2023, at a BRAC  and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) jointly hosted event. The report was written with the support of the Spotlight Initiative, an UN-led, multi-partner initiative that aims to respond to and eliminate violence against women and girls, with a particular focus on family and intimate partner violence, sexual and gender-based violence, and harmful practices.

The history of BRAC’s Empowerment and Livelihood Program (ELA), which was designed to provide sexual and reproductive health education and livelihood training to adolescent girls and young women, is covered in the report. The program was launched in Uganda in 2006 and has since been implemented in Sierra Leone, South Sudan, and Liberia. During the program’s peak from 2013 to 2015, BRAC hosted over 1800 clubs with over 80,000 members.

“The reason that we partnered with BRAC, [and] have partnered with them in the field… is because of the incredible work that they do in this very efficient, kind of way,” said moderator Satvika Chalasani, a Technical Specialist for UNFPA who oversees programs for adolescent girls and ending child marriage.

BRAC’s report Adolescent Empowerment at a scale: Successes and challenges of an evidence-based approach to young women’s programming in Africa talks about its successes and also the need to change programs to ensure their success in a changing society. Credit: BRAC

Chalasani observed that BRAC had gotten to tens of thousands of women on the African continent through their program, Empowerment, and Livelihood for Adolescents, and it was important to learn from their experiences of 15 years in the field.

Willibald Zeck, UNFPA’s Chief of Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights, also noted BRAC’s record with youth empowerment programs in his opening remarks while adding that demographic changes in certain regions have influenced how such programs must be designed and implemented. It is estimated that over 60% of Africa’s population is under 25.

“As you know, in UNFPA, we really work across the continuum of sexual reproductive health and rights… And we see in certain regions around the globe the new demographics that are showing that there will be more adolescents in the population, but especially on the African continent. Which is a great opportunity in so many ways, but it also brings more challenges.”

Sarah Tofte, a research and policy consultant, and the report’s primary author, presented her findings, breaking down the program’s initial model and implementation and its eventual reset and adaptations.

The report includes findings from academic evaluations conducted by experts, randomized control trials (RCTs) conducted in the regions where ELA programs were hosted, and nearly 100 field interviews with participants and ELA staff.

The findings reveal an overall positive reception and impact on participants and their communities.

Tofte, the co-founder of Understory Consulting, a research and policy consulting firm, noted that the interviewees reported a greater, newfound sense of self through the ELA program, which they connected to making well-informed decisions and contributing productively to the community.

“So based on these positive academic results, and then what I was hearing from field interviews and what participants have been saying over many years, ELA really became a model for other adolescent and youth empowerment programming around the globe, including at the World Bank and at USAID.”

As the report explains, implementation challenges would surface as the program continued. Tofte, the co-founder, noted that while the program’s initial results had been positive, it had slowly ceased to achieve its intended impact.

“By 2017, anecdotal reports had emerged within BRAC about lagging performance of ELA clubs in several countries, including drops in attendance and gaps in the delivery of programming,” she said.

The decline in the program quality and the resulting challenge of sustaining the program over long periods of time also made it difficult to secure funding that would have gone toward addressing the decline. The program had become repetitive for some participants and staff, and issues of deeper community engagement had presented a hurdle for the program’s success.

In 2020, ELA would undergo a “reset” significantly through making fundamental and necessary changes to the curriculum. This would not only update the discussions on reproductive health and livelihood training but would make it more relevant to the economic and social circumstances of the girls they were intended for – while placing more emphasis on providing vocational and livelihood training and financial literacy. Other changes to the curriculum included adjusting the weekly ELA club meetings to optimize engagement and a new graduation model for students to leave the program after one year of completion. The resets were applied at a reduced scale to approximately 140 clubs in the countries where ELA programs were already present.

“Early feedback from this curriculum revamp from the participants suggest that the new curriculum is well received by participants and is driving a positive outcome in attendance and program impact,” Tofte said.

The ELA program adjustments are critical to modernizing the curriculum. What should be of note were the considerations taken to improve community engagement.

“Another big focus of the reset was to deepen community engagement. Prior, a lack of formalized mechanisms for community engagement resulted in some pushback at times from parents of community members who may not have fully bought into the ELA model,” Tofte said. She added that in some cases, the pushback was targeted at the sexual and reproductive health components when the content went against community norms around matters such as child marriage and sexual health.

In response, BRAC, through ELA, has taken measures to establish formal channels with community stakeholders and parents of the participants. By directly engaging with the community’s village elders, religious leaders, and other respected community members, ELA staff members can obtain their support before establishing a program. Formal community leadership committees are also formed, working with ELA staff to ensure smooth operations.

Rudo Kayambo, Regional Director of Africa for BRAC International, pointed out how the findings through field research and the trials were able to be synthesized and focused enough that they could be incorporated into the new program structure, which included paying attention to community members and groups that BRAC did not commonly work with in the past.

“One of the DNAs of BRAC is being able to learn and adapt it quickly,” she said. “…We have now managed to integrate all the lessons into a bigger multicultural program, and some of the key lessons were that they need to support the frontline workers.”

When asked to elaborate, Kayambo added that BRAC would provide technical training and the infrastructure to help monitor and use digital technology. “[Frontline workers] are the heart of delivering the value of the ELA program and all its components.”

Another significant change to the rollout of the new ELA program was the introduction of sexual and reproductive health programs targeted at adolescent boys. Boys were included in the program partly to fill a gap in youth-empowerment programs that had thus far been only directed at adolescent girls and women. Through a series of RCTs conducted in 50 rural communities, trial programs similar to ELA were conducted with boys and young men, targeting them specifically.

“[There was] the need to also incorporate adolescent boys and young men, because that formalizes our commitment to getting community buy-in,” said Kayambo.

Manisha Shah, a professor of public policy at UCLA who worked with BRAC to conduct the randomized trials, elaborated that the rationale was to include boys since they were already involved in the decisions and issues that girls and women had to contend with when it came to their health.

“Unless we get these boys on board with the agenda, it’s going to be really hard to think about how we improve the outcomes related to female sexual reproductive health,” she said.

A follow-up survey conducted in those communities two years after the trial programs ended revealed a decrease in intimate partner violence between 20 percent and 60 percent, with a “significant change in these boys’ attitude around violence” and an overall more positive reception and understanding of sexual and reproductive health.

“This just proves that we also need to be targeting the other side of the coin, which is the boys and the young men,” Shah said.

The event also showcased how other organizations partnered with BRAC through the ELA program, such as other NGOs like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Foundation’s deputy director for women’s empowerment Diva Dhar remarked that it was critical to recognize that adolescents deal with “really important transitions on school to work, to marriage, to financial, economic independence, to employment.”

“[Adolescents] are a very important age group… because that attitudes and norms crystallize at this age and can have long-term implications, including for future generations,” Dhar said.

When looking at women’s economic empowerment, Dhar stated that further causal evidence would be needed to explore the intersections between economic independence and family planning and health outcomes.

For the Gates Foundation, this has involved investing in programs that build up skills and training for girls and women, including non-traditional opportunities that will build empowerment.

The ELA program in Africa is a testament to BRAC’s success as an NGO, given its ability to inspire similarly multifaceted youth-empowerment programs and its model to evolve and improve their work. However, the report makes it clear that this is achievable through the continued support from partners and donors and from fostering community engagement. Only then can the communities’ women and girls be empowered through the knowledge and skills they obtain through the program.

“One of the key findings we are taking from this is that the role of mentors and community assistance are so important,” Kayambo said. “We are creating room for them to engage from an empowered perspective, and building their own agency, to give room for them to engage and build themselves up before they can empower others in the community.”

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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A child carries empty jerry cans to fill water from a nearby tap providing untreated water from the Nile river in Juba, South Sudan. Credit: UNICEF/Phil Hatcher-Moore

By Baher Kamal
MADRID, Feb 22 2023 (IPS)

Today, there are more children in need of desperate humanitarian assistance than at any other time since World War II.

“Across the globe, children and their families are facing a deadly mix of crises, from conflict and displacement to disease, outbreaks and soaring rates of malnutrition. Meanwhile, climate change is making these crises worse and unleashing new ones.”

Tragically enough, UNICEF – the world’s body which was created in the aftermath of the Second World War to save the lives of millions of children who fell prey to the devastating weapons used by their own continent: Europe – could not depict more accurately the current situation of the most innocent humans.

The UN Children Fund in fact reports on the pressing need to provide life-saving help to millions of children trapped in continuing atrocities committed by adults.

In its report: 11 emergencies that need more attention and support in 2023, UNICEF focuses on the following countries where, additionally, resources have fallen short:

 

South Sudan

Unprecedented flooding in South Sudan has taken a devastating toll on families. Crops have been destroyed, grazing spaces for cattle and other livestock have been submerged and families have been forced to flee their homes.

With hunger and malnutrition on the rise across the flooded regions, some communities are likely to face starvation without sustained humanitarian assistance.

UNICEF is working to screen and treat children with severe acute malnutrition, also known as severe wasting – the most lethal form of undernutrition, and one of the top threats to child survival. Read the latest appeal for South Sudan

 

Yemen

After eight years of conflict, the systems that Yemen’s families depend on remain on the edge of total collapse. More than 23.4 million people, including 12.9 million children, have, so far, fallen victim to such a brutal war.

In addition, more than 11,000 children have been killed or maimed since 2015, while conflict, massive displacement and recurring climate shocks have left more than 2 million children “acutely malnourished and struggling to survive.” Read the latest appeal for Yemen

 

Haiti

Political turmoil, civil unrest and gang violence, crippling poverty and natural disasters, a deadly combination of threats are already posing a massive challenge for families in Haiti. A surge in cholera in 2022 is posing yet another risk for children’s health – and their lives.

“There is an urgent need to step up efforts to protect families against cholera by delivering cholera kits and water purifying tablets and trucking in clean water.”

To contain malnutrition, UNICEF is also screening children for wasting to ensure that those who need help can be treated in mobile clinics and other facilities. Read the latest appeal for Haiti

 

DR Congo

An escalation in armed conflict and recurrent outbreaks of deadly diseases are taking a heavy toll on millions of children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The country hosts the “second-highest number of internally displaced people in the world.”

The cramped conditions in the camps that families are living in are fraught with danger for children, who face an increased risk of violence and disease. Read the latest appeal for Democratic Republic of the Congo.

 

A father and son remove their belonging from their flooded home in Taluka, Shujabad, District Mirpurkhas, Pakistan. Credit: RDF

 

Pakistan

The rains that brought historic flooding to much of Pakistan in 2022 may have ended, but the crisis for children has not.

Months after floods ravaged the country, vast swathes of cropland and villages remain under water, while millions of girls and boys are still in need of immediate lifesaving support.

Around 8 million people are still exposed to flood waters or living close to flooded areas. “Many of these families are still living in makeshift tents alongside the road or near the rubble of their home – often in the open, right next to contaminated and stagnant water.”

UNICEF on January 2022 reported that up to 4 million children in Pakistan are still living next to stagnant and contaminated floodwater Read the latest appeal for Pakistan

 

Burkina Faso

Political fragility, the impacts of climate change and economic and health crises have contributed to the internal displacement of around 1.7 million people in Burkina Faso – 60% of them are children.

“The anxiety, depression and other stress-related problems associated with displacement can take a lifelong toll on children’s emotional and physical health.” Read the latest appeal for Burkina Faso

 

Rohingya IDPs confined to a Sittwe camp in Rakhine State wait for international intervention. More than 1.5 million people are displaced in Myanmar. Credit: Sara Perria/IPS

 

Myanmar

Deepening conflict in Myanmar continues to impact children and their families, with some 5.6 million children in need of humanitarian assistance.

Attacks on schools and hospitals have continued at alarming levels, while grave violations of child rights in armed conflict have been reported.

The conflict has undermined the delivery of child health services, including routine immunisation, threatening to take a long-lasting toll on children’s health and well-being. Read the latest appeal for Myanmar

 

Palestine

“Children in the State of Palestine continue to face a protracted protection crisis and an ongoing occupation.” Around 2.1 million people – more than half of them children – now require humanitarian assistance.

Since 2009, UNICEF has been supporting family centres across the Gaza Strip to provide psychosocial care for children.

Children in need of more specialised services – such as those facing violence at home, school or work – are provided with a case manager who works directly with them and their families. Read the latest appeal for the State of Palestine

 

Bangladesh

As the Rohingya refugee crisis enters its fifth year, Bangladesh still hosts hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees who settled in the Cox’s Bazar District after fleeing “extreme violence” in Myanmar.

While basic services have been provided in the camps, “children still face disease outbreaks, malnutrition, inadequate educational opportunities and other risks like exploitation and violence.” Read the latest appeal for Bangladesh

 

Syria

The situation was already dire far earlier to the recent earthquakes. In fact, “more than a decade of humanitarian crises and hostilities has left children in Syria facing one of the most complex emergencies in the world.”

“Two thirds of the population require assistance” due to the worsening economic crisis, continued localised hostilities, mass displacement and devastated public infrastructure.

The conflict has seen one of the largest education crises in recent history, with “a whole generation of Syrian children paying a devastating price.” Read the latest appeal for Syria

 

Kenya

Four failed rainy seasons in a row have left Kenya experiencing its worst drought in 40 years. Without water, crops cannot grow, and animals and livestock die.

The resulting loss of nutritious food, combined with poor sanitation, has left “hundreds of thousands of children requiring treatment for wasting.”

Children with wasting are too thin and their immune systems are weak, leaving them vulnerable to developmental delays, disease and death. Read the latest appeal for Kenya

 

Millions more

In addition to these 11 nations so far identified by UNICEF as needing urgent life-saving humanitarian assistance, with millions of children being the most vulnerable, there are several other countries where they live in dire situations, on which IPS reports in Part II of this two-part series.

Universal Health Care priorities in Pakistan have been boosted by free healthcare insurance for the poor. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Feb 22 2023 (IPS)

A free health insurance initiative started in Pakistan has benefited poor patients, especially women who have outnumbered men in using the cashless health services under the Sehat Card Plus programme.

“The initiative is in line with the ICPD25 Programme of Action, under which 4.5 million people have received free services, with 62 percent of them women. In the last three years, we have been able to cut down maternal mortality rate from 186 deaths per 100,000 live births to 172,” Dr Muhammad Riaz Tanoli, CEO of the Sehat Card Plus (SCP), told IPS.

The International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) held in Nairobi in 2019 set a programme of action aimed at empowering women and girls. The SCP aims to ensure Pakistan meets the 2030 deadline for sustainable development goals for universal health and women.

So far, USD 80 million have been spent on treating patients at 1,100 hospitals across the country.

Shaheen Begum, a resident of Peshawar, is thankful to former Prime Minister Imran Khan, who launched the programme and said that her sister had died of delivery-related complication years ago because they didn’t have money to get quality treatment. She was lucky to undergo a caesarean section at one of the city’s top private hospitals on SCP, and she and her newborn baby are in good health.

“Since my first-month of pregnancy, I have been getting diagnostic services free of cost. Two days before delivery, I was admitted because of complications, and doctors performed a caesarean operation,” Begum, 26, a housewife, said.

Pakistanis living abroad with chronic ailments return to the country for treatment. Muhammad Kashif, 55, recently arrived from Malaysia to undergo liver transplant surgery.

Kashif said that the cost of a liver transplant in Malaysia was USD 7,000. Not only was it beyond his reach, but he would have had to call relatives to Malaysia to donate a liver. That would have been impossible, he said in an interview with IPS.

“One of my friends called me and asked to come back and get the surgery free of cost. I came to my native Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in November last year, and next month, my transplant was done at one of the country’s premier hospitals,” he said.

Like Kashif, Mushtari Gul, a Pakistani nurse working in Saudi Arabia, became extremely sick as her kidneys stopped functioning.

“Initially, I received dialysis for two months, but doctors advised renal transplant that wasn’t possible there due to its cost and donor,” she said.

Gul, 51, is one of the 235 people who received free renal transplants under the SCP. She said it wasn’t possible without an insurance scheme because its cost was  USD 6,500, not affordable even by affluent people.

Pakistan Medical Association (PMA) is appreciative of the scheme. “It is an unprecedented programme where the people are able to get services in expensive hospitals. Most patients who couldn’t afford heart surgeries are among the beneficiaries,” PMA’s Secretary, Dr Qaisar Sajjad, told IPS.

PMA has been asking the government to ensure World Health Organization’s aim for Universal Health Coverage is delivered, and this was a step in that direction, Dr Qaisar said.

Public health specialist Dr Fayyaz Shah told IPS that the system has been very good. Unlike the health insurance schemes in developed countries where people deposit annual premiums, here, the government pays the insurance company without charging people.

Before the programme’s launch, the infant mortality rate was 41 per 1,000 live births, which has now come down to 35. Shah elaborated that other health indicators also show improvement as poor people receive timely treatment.

Patients are getting free services for renal and liver transplants and major ailments and procedures, including cancers, surgeries, cardiac diseases, hernia, cataracts, gynaecology, eye, ear, nose and throat and other diseases.

The major beneficiaries are women and children, followed by cancer, heart, dialysis and people with urinary and diabetic problems, he said.

Local gynaecologist Dr Naseem Akhtar terms the programme a blessing for women. Ever since the start of the programme, there has been a drastic decline in mortality among women for pregnancy-related complications.

“Our staff also work harder because they get extra financial incentives from the funds generated from SCP. The patients in hospitals also get free medicines and diagnostic services,” she said.

At the end of every month, we send patients’ details and expenses to the government, and the payment is made within a week. The state-run insurance company is implementing the programme on behalf of the government, which has proved beneficial both for patients and healthcare providers, she said.

A senior nurse, Sania Ali, at a local hospital, said her monthly salary is $200, but she earns $300 additional from the patients undergoing treatment on SCP.

“Our doctors, nurses and paramedical staff want the mechanism to continue as it was a big source of their extra income they received in addition to their fixed salaries,” he said.

“This system has not only helped the poor patients but is also a big source of income for private hospitals. We are extremely busy dealing with patients, and our staff is working round-the-clock to operate on more patients and get more money,” said Dr Shah Raj, a public health physician. She said that each family is entitled to $4,500 per year from the programme. In case of liver and kidney transplants, the patients’ benefits are around $20,000, she said.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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Credit: UNDP Yemen

By Ulrika Modéer and Steve Utterwulghe
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 22 2023 (IPS)

Flexible and predictable funding allows UN agencies to respond promptly and with agility in times of crisis. In countries such as Afghanistan, Yemen, and Ukraine, UNDP implements projects and programmes that help protect livelihoods and enhance the resilience of vulnerable communities.

The UN has estimated that the world will need to spend between US$3 trillion and US$5 trillion annually to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030, while the COVID-19 pandemic has already increased that estimate by an additional US$2 trillion annually.

In addition, the highly fragile global economic outlook, impacts of climate change and rising geopolitical tensions, have led to a major deterioration in international public finance, resulting in 51 developing economies being highly indebted, with the spectre of defaults looming on the horizon for over-indebted developing countries.

Considering this dark scenario of compounded crisis, the multilateral system is being called upon to become more fit-for-purpose to support global public goods and overcome global challenges.

It is therefore imperative that institutions such as the UN and International Financial Institutions (IFIs) need to bolster their partnership to provide coordinated, effective, and targeted support to developing countries’ widening needs for SDG financing.

Against this backdrop and in response to the Addis Ababa Action Agenda and UN Secretary-General’s Roadmap for Financing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the UN System and IFIs have strived to work more closely together to promote sustainable and innovative financial systems at country level, and to catalyse more private finance.

In 2018, for example, UN Secretary-General António Guterres and former World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim signed a Strategic Partnership Framework, which consolidated their joint commitment to cooperate in helping countries implement the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

UN agencies have developed financial and non-financial partnerships with IFIs with the aim to support governments to leverage financing, technical expertise, and advocacy from a wider range of sources.

By joining forces, UN agencies and IFIs can use and complement their respective comparative advantages in support of national development priorities and maximize development impact on the ground.

Last week, the Executive Board of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) held its first regular session of the year in New York. It was clear that Member States are keen to see greater engagement with IFIs to deliver on sustainable development results at scale.

As we are gearing towards the SDG Summit, there is a reckoning that we cannot do business as usual. We need all hands on deck to make progress towards 2030.

This call for joint action should also be an opportunity for Member States – usually the same donors funding the UN system and IFIs – to reflect on the global funding architecture of the United Nations Development System (UNDS). The UNDS needs predictable, un-earmarked, and flexible resources to perform its core functions and preserve the core values of multilateralism, universalism, and development effectiveness.

Nevertheless, a report by the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation points out that OECD-DAC countries’ funding to the UNDS is more projectized and highly earmarked than the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, or regional development banks.

In this moment of immense global uncertainty, following the UNDP Strategic Plan, UNDP is scaling up its engagement with IFIs to support countries access the capital, technical expertise, and partnerships required to achieve the SDGs.

Since 2017, UNDP has mobilized over US$1.85 billion from IFI partners, both directly through grant contributions and indirectly through government financing to support loan implementation.

In many fragile and conflict-affected states, UN agencies, such as UNDP, stay and deliver, sometimes on behalf of IFIs who cannot always fully operate in these settings. UNDP works in close cooperation with the humanitarian system and across the development, peace, and human rights pillars of the UN system.

Flexible and predictable funding allows UN agencies to respond promptly and with agility in times of crisis. In countries such as Afghanistan, Yemen, and Ukraine, UNDP implements projects and programmes that help protect livelihoods and enhance the resilience of vulnerable communities.

Member States and shareholders of Multilateral Development Banks and other IFIs recognize the synergistic and complementary mandates of many UN agencies and IFIs. The partnership is or should be obvious in areas such as sustainable finance, climate action, crisis and fragility, and poverty alleviation.

But as the world is faced with unprecedented global challenges that require unparalleled levels of partnerships and a strong multilateral system, Member States should enable a deeper engagement between the UNDS and IFIs through robust political commitment backed by a funding architecture befitting a world racing towards 2030.

Ulrika Modeer is UN Assistant Secretary-General and Director of the Bureau of External Relations and Advocacy, UNDP. Steve Utterwulghe is Director of Public Partnerships, UNDP

Source: UNDP

IPS UN Bureau

 

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By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Feb 22 2023 (IPS)

On 9 February, Nicaragua’s dictator, Daniel Ortega, unexpectedly ordered the release of 222 political prisoners, including several former presidential candidates, opposition party leaders, journalists, priests, diplomats, businesspeople and former government supporters branded as enemies for expressing mild public criticism.

Also released were several members and leaders of civil society organisations (CSOs) and social movements, including student activists and environmental, peasant and Indigenous rights defenders. Some had been arrested on trumped-up charges for taking part in mass protests in 2018 and stuck in prison for more than four years.

But the Ortega regime didn’t simply let them go – it put them on a charter flight to the USA and before their plane had even landed permanently stripped them of their Nicaraguan nationality and their civil and political rights. The government made clear it wasn’t recognising their innocence; it was only commuting their sentences.

The rise of a police state

Ever since being re-elected in a blatantly fraudulent election in November 2021, Ortega has sought to make up for his lack of democratic legitimacy by establishing a police state. The regime effectively outlawed all civil society and independent media, closing more than 3,000 CSOs and 55 media outlets. It subverted the judicial system to falsely accuse, convict and imprison hundreds of critics and intimidate everyone else into compliance.

Political prisoners have been treated with purposeful cruelty, as though they’re enemy hostages – kept in isolation, either in the dark or under permanent bright lighting, given insufficient food and refused medical care, subjected to constant interrogations, denied legal counsel and allowed only irregular visits by family members, if at all. Psychological torture has been a constant, and many have been also subjected to physical torture.

The release of some prisoners hasn’t signalled any improvement in conditions or move towards democracy, as made clear by the treatment experienced by one political prisoner, Catholic bishop Rolando Álvarez, who refused to board the plane to the USA.

In retaliation for his refusal to leave the country, his trial date was brought forward and held immediately, in the absence of any procedural safeguards. It predictably resulted in a 26-year sentence. Álvarez was immediately sent to prison, where he remains alongside dozens of others.

Stripped of citizenship

The constitutional amendment stripping the 222 released political prisoners of their citizenship states that ‘traitors to the homeland shall lose the status of Nicaraguan nationals’ – even though the constitution establishes that no national can be deprived of their nationality.

It was an illegal act on top of another illegal act. No one can be deported from their own country: what the regime called a deportation was a banishment, something against both domestic law and international human rights standards.

On 15 February, the regime doubled down: it stripped 94 more people of their nationality. Those newly declared stateless included prominent political dissidents, civil society activists, journalists and the writers Gioconda Belli and Sergio Ramírez, both of whom had held government positions in the 1980s. Most of the 94 were already living in exile. They were declared ‘fugitives from justice’.

Mixed reactions

By rendering 326 people stateless, the Nicaraguan dictatorship fuelled instant international solidarity. On 10 February, the Spanish government offered the 222 just-released prisoners Spanish citizenship – an offer many are bound to accept. On 17 February, more than 500 writers around the world rallied around Belli and Ramírez and denounced the closure of civic space in Nicaragua.

In Argentina, the Roundtable on Human Rights, Democracy and Society sent an open letter to President Alberto Fernández to request he offer Argentinian nationality to all Nicaraguans stripped of theirs.

But Argentina, alongside most of Latin America, has looked the other way. Its silence suggests that democratic consensus across the region is more fragile and superficial than might be hoped, with willingness to condemn rights violations depending on the ideological leanings of those who carry them out.

Currently all the region’s big democracies – Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Mexico – have governments that define themselves as left-wing. But only one of their presidents, Chile’s Gabriel Boric, has consistently criticised Nicaragua’s authoritarian turn. In response to the latest developments he tweeted a personal message of solidarity with those affected, calling Ortega a dictator. The rest have either issued mild official statements or simply remained silent.

Now what?

The Nicaraguan government insisted that releasing the prisoners was its own decision. The fact it was accompanied by further violations of released prisoners’ rights was meant as a demonstration of power.

But the move looks like it was made in the expectation of receiving something in return. The Nicaraguan government has long demanded that US sanctions be lifted; at a time when one of its closest ideological allies, Russia, is unable to provide any significant support, Nicaragua needs the USA more than ever. But the US government has always said the release of political prisoners must be the first step towards negotiations.

Given this, the unilateral surrender of people it considers dangerous conspirators to the state it proclaims is its worst enemy doesn’t seem much like a show of force. And if it isn’t, then it’s a valuable advocacy opportunity. The international community must push for the restoration of civic space and the return of free, fair and competitive elections. The first step should be to support the hundreds who’ve been expelled from their own country, as the future builders of democracy in Nicaragua.

Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Senior Research Specialist, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

 

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Gilad Sade, in white, with Itamar Ben Gvir, to his left, during Gvir's visit with alleged recruits during a trial in 2004. All the minors were convicted. Credit: Ilan Mizrahi.

By Karlos Zurutuza
ROME, Feb 21 2023 (IPS)

Harassing Palestinians, vandalizing their cars and houses, occupying their lands: Gilad Sade, a 36-year-old Israeli, recalls his day-to-day life when he belonged to a Jewish supremacist organization.

“He boasted that he kept them away from the streets and drugs but actually paid them cash to commit these kinds of crimes. The boys sought the approval of the group by spitting on the Palestinians, pushing them to the ground, pepper-spraying them,” he recalls

“I was first jailed at thirteen and would go back to prison many times. During those years, Itamar Ben Gvir and I were thick and thin,” Sade tells IPS from Rome, Italy.

Itamar Ben Gvir is Israel´s newly appointed Minister of National Security.

His party, Jewish Power, won six seats in the November 2022 legislative elections. Today, it forms a far-right government considered the most extremist in the country’s history, led by Benjamin Netanyahu.

Raised in a family of secular Jewish immigrants from Iraq, Ben Gvir, 47, joined the Kach movement —an ultra-Orthodox organization designated as a terrorist group in the nineties by Israel, the US, the European Union, Canada and Japan— as a teenager. In 1995 he became famous for threatening then-Prime Minister Isaac Rabin three weeks before he was assassinated.

“When he first moved out of his family house, he hung a photo of Barouch Goldstein in his new residence in Kiryat Arba,110 kilometres southeast of Tel Aviv,” recalls Sade. Also known as the “Butcher of Hebron,” Goldstein was a medical doctor from New York who murdered 29 Palestinians with an assault rifle in 1994.

Sade recalls that, as a child, he was often in the care of Ben Gvir. He was in primary school when he received his first assignment.

“We used to distribute leaflets calling for the expulsion of the Arabs from Israel or the demolition of the al Aqsa Mosque. Ben Gvir asked me to hide them under my shirt. As a child, the police would not search me.”

 

A school day in Hebron, one of the cities hardest hit by violence in Israel Credit: Mikel Ayestaran.

 

At the age of 14, Ben Gvir asked him to bring a ski mask and handed him a wire cutter to break into the United Nations compound in Jerusalem to vandalize UN cars and spray anti-UN graffiti on walls.

“He would never take risks. I could easily get in trouble or even get killed while he waited in his car listening to Hasidic music,” says Sade

Ben Gvir, he explains, recruited young people from broken families. “He boasted that he kept them away from the streets and drugs but actually paid them cash to commit these kinds of crimes. The boys sought the approval of the group by spitting on the Palestinians, pushing them to the ground, pepper-spraying them,” he recalls.

Contrary to what one might think, Sade says that there was no room for improvisation. “They trained us to deal with all sorts of situations: from occupying the home of a Palestinian family to handle a police interrogation,” explains Sade.

In an interview with Israel’s Channel 7, Ben Gvir said he had been arrested “hundreds of times” — the first time at 14 —and bragged about having been accused “in only just eight occasions.” At 18, his criminal record exempted him from military service.

Before launching his political career, he was convicted for “incitement to racism and support of terror,” by calling for the expulsion of Arabs from Israel.

“Today he has moderated his speech, at least in public, in order to reach parliament. But everyone knows that he is still the same racist influencer he´s always been,” says Sade.

Sade quit the extremist movement at 21.

“It was a very long and painful process to be able to overcome, among other things, the hatred towards myself for the damage inflicted,” he admits. He also regrets that many of his former colleagues “did not manage to break the walls of that mental prison.”

 

36-year old Gilad Sade has been forced to live in exile by threats he constantly receives from Israeli far-right movements. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza

 

Sade would become an adventure travel guide, and his fondness for photography would open the doors to journalism. As a freelance reporter working for both Israeli and international media, he works in places like Nagorno Karabakh and Kosovo. However, part of his job has focused on exposing those who, he insists, ruined his life and the lives of hundreds of young people.

But the price to pay was exile. The frequent target of threats, he cannot return to Israel. Especially today, when those who were his mentors are in power.

Itamar ben Gvir ‘s spokesman declined to answer to questions forwarded by IPS. He told this news agency that any accusation of hate crimes against the minister is “not serious” and “just jihadist propaganda.”

 

Domination

Last November, weeks before the new government was formed, Palestinian Authority officials warned that Itamar Ben Gvir´s appointment could have a “potentially catastrophic impact.”

Their concern appears to have been well-founded. In a report released by Amnesty International on February 1, the London-based NGO denounced the death of 35 Palestinians at the hands of Israeli forces during January alone.

“The killings help sustain the Israeli apartheid regime and constitute crimes against humanity as well as other measures such as administrative detention or forced displacement,” the Amnesty report said.

On January 27, seven people were killed in a synagogue and a dozen seriously injured in two attacks on Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem. Two weeks later, two Israelis were killed, including one child, in an intentional car-ram attack in Jerusalem.

The recent violence under the new administration continues a worrying trend. In its World Report 2023, Human Right Watch points to “a policy to maintain the domination of Jewish Israelis over Palestinians” under a new government which, the New York based NGO underlines, “includes Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has been convicted by an Israeli court for incitement to racism and support of a terrorist organization.”

 

Show of force in Jerusalem during Israel’s Independence Day. Credit: Mikel Ayestaran.

 

For Alberto Spectorowsky, an Uruguayan-Israeli citizen and professor of Political Science at Tel Aviv University, the current climate of violence in the country is related to corruption charges against the prime minister.

“There is a conflict unleashed between those who defend a democracy with liberal institutions and those who want to take away the power and independence of the Court of Justice,” Spectorowsky told IPS from Tel Aviv over the phone.

The current prime minister was sworn into office immersed in an open process for bribery, fraud and breach of trust. “Without this pending trial, Netanyahu would be another defender of liberal democracy,” claims the political scientist.

As for Ben Gvir, Spectorowsky points to “an open scenario”:

“Netanyahu has no interest in setting the Middle East on fire, and that is why he tries to contain Ben Gvir. However, the latter announced that he will leave the coalition if they take away his authority,” the expert underlines.

In an interview given to Israeli Channel 12, on February 4, the senior minister gave the government a period of three months to implement measures such as the death penalty for terrorists or the creation of a security body made up of armed civilians.

“As long as I continue to have influence, I will not overthrow the government,” said Ben Gvir. His most recent measure has been to increase by 400% the number of weapons permits that can be granted monthly.

Sade believes Ben Gvir is seeking to create his own armed militia.

“Now he wants to arm everyone to contain these attacks, which, however, have increased since he took office,” he adds. “What could you possibly expect from a country whose National Security minister asked me and others to commit hate crimes?”

Israel has become a trap, he says, “not only for the Palestinians, but also for anyone who thinks differently.”

Arusha, Tanzania: Maasai children taking their cows to a river. The government plans to displace about 150,000 pastoralists. Credit: Shutterstock.

By Juliana Nnoko-Mewanu and Oryem Nyeko
NAIROBI, Feb 21 2023 (IPS)

Tanzania’s policies on conservation and its ongoing impacts on Maasai people in Ngorongoro district highlight how communities historically marginalized by oppression still wrestle with colonial policies.

When colonial authorities declared the Serengeti area a national park in 1951, communities within its borders were relocated to Ngorongoro district for permanent settlement. But for the past half-century, these communities have continued to face numerous evictions even from these regions, while new regulations have curtailed their rights to graze cattle and cultivate subsistence gardens.

The government’s resettlement plan will forcibly displace people in these herder communities from Ngorongoro district, Arusha region, to Handeni district, Tanga region, about 600 kilometers away, with little or no consultation

Currently, the government plans to displace about 150,000 pastoralists for its conservation initiatives in two areas in Ngorongoro district, Loliondo Game Controlled Area and Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA).

In June 2022, security forces and Maasai violently clashed in Loliondo during a land demarcation exercise, which restricts the people’s access to grazing sites, water sources, and in some places cuts across their homes. The government had decided without consultation with affected communities to convert the area to a game reserve.

What happened in Loliondo in June is a continuation of the government’s forcible displacement of these communities. Loliondo is the tip of the iceberg, and Ngorongoro Conservation Area illustrates the government’s pervasive efforts to forcibly relocate Maasai people by reducing basic services and restricting movement into the area.

South of Loliondo, the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Site since 1979, spans vast areas of highland plains, savanna, savanna woodlands, forests, and includes the spectacular Ngorongoro Crater.

It adjoins the Serengeti National Park and is part of the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem in functioning as wildlife corridors essential to protecting animal migrations. Colonial authorities established the conservation area in 1959 as a multiple land use area, with wildlife coexisting with Maasai traditional pastoralists. It is managed by the NCA Authority, supervised by the Natural Resources and Tourism Ministry.

Semi-nomadic Maasai pastoralists have lived, used, and managed the area alongside other native communities for over 200 years. They grow corn, beans, pumpkins, and sweet potatoes, and graze cows, sheep, and goats, requiring large areas of rangeland as pasture for their animals.

The Maasai strive to live harmoniously with wildlife and their customs, such as taboos on consuming wildlife meat instead of beef and cutting down a live tree instead of using its branches, and traditional rules on managing grazing areas, promote conservation of their natural resources. Their cultural and spiritual practices are interwoven with the land, with sacred areas for assemblies to teach young Maasai about their culture and how they live with the ecosystem around them.

The Ngorongoro Conservation Area’s most recent plan from 1996 has primary objectives to conserve natural resources, protect the interests of the Maasai pastoralists, and to promote tourism. However, since the creation of the conservation area, the Maasai population has increased through natural population growth, resulting in an increased need for land and resources.

The government has used this to justify a new land-use model that expands the conservation area to include parts of Loliondo Game Controlled Areas, an adjacent park, and to relocate about 82,000 residents by 2027.

The government’s resettlement plan will forcibly displace people in these herder communities from Ngorongoro district, Arusha region, to Handeni district, Tanga region, about 600 kilometers away, with little or no consultation. Media have reported that up to 500 residents and 2,000 livestock have been moved to Msomera village in Handeni district since the relocation began on June 16.

Residents told us that the government downsized important health and education services beginning in February. Services in these areas were already less developed than in other areas, with lower health and education outcomes than national figures.

In February, the government grounded Flying Medical Services, a medical outreach service provider, and in October, announced that it would downgrade Endulen Hospital, the area’s main hospital, to a dispensary, reducing staff from 64 to 2. The government has also moved funding to schools to Handeni.

The government’s downsizing directly interferes with the communities’ ability to continue living in the area. It could have particularly devastating results in emergencies, including for pregnant women, and violates residents’ right to health and education.

UNESCO has pointed out that it did not recommend displacing the Maasai. Instead, a UNESCO committee recommended that “there is the need for an equitably governed consultative process to identify long term sustainable interdisciplinary solutions … with participation of all rightsholders and stakeholders, consistent with international norms.”

United Nations experts have also said the government should halt forced evictions and relocation. They urged the government to work with affected communities to evaluate challenges to conservation in the area, and design a plan that meets the needs of the local communities as well as conservation.

The displacement of Maasai in northern Tanzania needs to stop. The government should consult affected communities and ensure that they and their representatives have access to relevant information prior to consultation to obtain their free, prior, and informed consent, consistent with international standards, to any changes to conservation management plans.

Human Rights Watch’s written request to the government for further information did not get a response.

Excerpt:

Juliana Nnoko-Mewanu is a senior researcher on women and land and Oryem Nyeko is the Tanzania researcher at Human Rights Watch

The ageing of populations poses mounting challenges for governments that will require changes in national policy priorities, country institutions and social arrangements. Credit: Maricel Sequeira/IPS

By Joseph Chamie
PORTLAND, USA, Feb 21 2023 (IPS)

Fear of population ageing is all over the news media and in government offices of country capitals worldwide. Planet Earth is becoming “planet ageing”.

Population ageing is being described as a demographic time bomb, a humanitarian crisis, a growing burden, a national security threat, ticking towards disaster, a significant risk to global prosperity, a silver tsunami, an unprecedented set of challenges, a problem for young and old.

Government officials, business leaders, economists, healthcare providers, social organizations, political commentators and others are increasingly ringing alarm bells over the menacing demographic ageing of populations.

Adding to those alarm bells is the 2022 Japanese film, Plan 75, presented in May at the annual Cannes Film Festival. That dystopian film describes a government program that encourages senior citizens to be euthanized to remedy the burdens of an aged Japanese society.

More recently, a Yale University assistant professor of economics reportedly suggested that to address Japan’s demographic ageing, elderly Japanese people should commit “mass suicide”. After raising objections in Japan and elsewhere, he subsequently explained that his suggestion was taken out of context. He explained that his remark was intended to address a growing effort to revamp Japan’s age-based hierarchies and make room for younger generations in leadership positions in business and politics.

Demographic ageing coupled with population decline and increased human longevity are forcing governments to address mounting financial issues, especially retirement and healthcare benefits. Many government programs for old age benefits are facing insolvency in the near future

Mainstream media regularly reports that government expenditures on retirement and healthcare benefits for the elderly are outpacing tax revenues. Also, many governments are reportedly struggling to find the money to support retirees. Furthermore, current trends, unless they are reversed, indicate that the growing numbers of elderly people on the planet pose a challenge for governments to provide the needed care for them.

People have taken to the streets to protest government proposals to address population ageing by making changes to benefits and official retirement ages. In France people have taken to the streets to protest the government’s intention to raise the current age of 62 years to receive government benefits.

Similarly in China, retirees and their supporters are protesting government proposed cuts in benefits for the elderly. And fearing public backlash at the voting booth, elected government officials in the United States are bending over backwards in their assurances, retreating from possible program cuts, and promising that they “won’t touch” Social Security or Medicare.

The ageing of populations should not really come as a surprise to government officials and their many economic and political advisors and aides.

For decades demographers and many others have been writing articles, publishing books, giving presentations, and advising government officials and others about the demographic ageing of populations resulting from the continued decline in fertility rates and increased life expectancy.

Nevertheless, despite those considerable efforts and clear communication about population ageing, governments have not been paying enough attention.

Apparently, governments mistakenly came to believe that the demographic realities of population ageing could simply be ignored because those realities were largely academic matters as well as concerns for the distant future. In fact, however, those realities were neither largely academic nor concerns for the distant future.

Over the past half century, the median age of the world’s population has increased to 30 years in 2020 from 20 years in 1970, an increase of 10 years. Many countries have attained median ages in 2020 well above 35 years, such as France at 41 years, South Korea at 43 years, Italy at 46 years and Japan at 48 year.

In addition, many countries have seen their elderly population reach unprecedented levels. In the United States, for example, more than 1 in 6, or 17 percent, were 65 or older in 2020. That percentage is relatively low in comparison to many other developed countries. In Italy and Japan, the proportion 65 years and older is 24 and 29 percent, respectively (Figure 1).

 

Source: United Nations.

 

The ageing of populations certainly poses mounting challenges for governments as well for the elderly that will require changes in national policy priorities, country institutions and social arrangements.

Among those challenges are needs for financial aid, caregiving and assistance, medical treatment, healthcare and drugs. Such needs are not only increasingly overwhelming many households, but they are also straining government resources and the capacities of institutions to provide care for the elderly.

In addition to the financial costs, governments are wrestling with major policy issues. Population ageing is competing with national priorities that require financial resources, including defense, economy, employment, education, health care, environment and climate.

Population ageing is also raising vexing questions about the proper role of government and the responsibilities of individuals for their personal wellbeing in old age. Those questions continue to roil government legislatures and heighten concerns about retirement and old age healthcare among their citizens.

Much of the public believes that the government should be primarily responsible to cover the financial costs and provide the needed care and support to the elderly, as has generally been the case over the past decades in many countries.

Others, however, contend that it is not the role of the government to be primarily responsible to provide care and support to the elderly. They argue that the elderly themselves and their families should be primarily responsible for covering the costs and providing the needed care, support and assistance for older persons.

The fear of population ageing is further complicated by population decline. Over the coming years, many countries across the globe are facing declines in the size of their populations due to below replacement fertility rates (Figure 2).

 

Source: United Nations.

 

Demographic ageing coupled with population decline and increased human longevity are forcing governments to address mounting financial issues, especially retirement and healthcare benefits. Many government programs for old age benefits are facing insolvency in the near future.

Possible options to address those financial issues include reducing retirement benefits, limiting eligibility, raising the retirement age and increasing taxes. As would be expected, reducing benefits, limiting eligibility and raising retirement ages are unpopular among most of the public. While many are in favor of increased taxes to fund retirement pensions and healthcare for the elderly, businesses and investors are generally opposed to raising taxes.

The consequences of the demographic realities of population ageing are largely unavoidable and need to be addressed. Governments may continue choosing to avoid addressing those consequences. Perhaps they are hoping that if the demographic realities are ignored, they somehow will magically disappear.

Governments need to stop ringing the alarm bells about population ageing. Instead, they need to adapt to the demographic realities of population ageing. In particular, governments need to address the weighty consequences of population ageing by making the admittedly difficult but necessary policy and program decisions regarding official retirement age, pensions benefits, assistance, and healthcare.

Joseph Chamie is a consulting demographer, a former director of the United Nations Population Division and author of numerous publications on population issues, including his recent book, “Population Levels, Trends, and Differentials”.

Farmer using tablet to contact customer/ iStock

By Hsiao Chink Tang and Anne Cortez
BEIJING, The People’s Republic of China, Feb 21 2023 (IPS)

Digitalization is a key driver of competitiveness and development. As the world takes the path to unprecedented digital advancement, Asia continues to be a powerhouse of digital transformations in a wide range of areas from microchip manufacturing to electric vehicles, from digital currency to e-commerce.

Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has accelerated digital transformations, but not all countries have benefitted equally. For example, rural farmers in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) were able to take advantage of existing digital mobile network, digital payment, and logistic services to find alternative markets and sell their produce online.

Many turned to established e-commerce platforms, such as, Pinduoduo, Taobao, and JD, and doing so innovatively via live-streaming.

In contrast, rural farmers in some other parts of Asia struggled to keep their livelihoods during the pandemic. Without access to face-to-face trades due to lockdowns, let alone selling online, many had to live with little or no income.

Businesses of micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) in many parts of Asia also suffered during the pandemic. Even in ordinary circumstances, persistent barriers such as poor and costly infrastructure, poor digital literacy, and limited government support hinder the growth of MSMEs in many developing economies.

Inevitably, during COVID, many MSMEs failed to capitalize on the pandemic-triggered digital transformation.

The above are some of the issues discussed in a dialogue organized by the ADB-PRC Regional Knowledge Sharing Initiatives (RKSI) and the Ministry of Finance, the PRC, on the topic of digital transformation and regional cooperation.

The forum acknowledged that despite the many opportunities presented by the digital economy in Asia, a great part of the region’s digital potential remains untapped, and key regulatory, infrastructural, financial, and capacity challenges remain.

There is also a widening digital divide among countries that are under-connected and those that are digitalized.

Prevailing digital infrastructure and non-infrastructure gaps, specifically in e-commerce across Central Asia, are highlighted in a Central Asia Regional Economic Cooperation Program (CAREC) Institute study. The study shows that e-commerce development among CAREC countries is highly varied and key gaps remain.

These gaps include those in basic digital infrastructure and regulatory policies resulting in a lack of economic opportunities, income inequality and weaknesses in the business environment. A solution to bridge this gap and drive an inclusive digital growth is regional cooperation.

In 2021, ministers from Central Asia Regional Economic Cooperation (CAREC) member countries endorsed the Digital Strategy 2030, which identifies areas that can catalyze collaboration and digitalization in the region. Similarly, Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) countries are considering a proposal to promote and enhance cooperation in the digital economy, leveraging on the GMS cross-border e-commerce cooperation platform.

Region-wide cooperation allows governments and stakeholders to coordinate policies, share costs of building and maintaining infrastructure, and expand markets to advance the digital economy. Regional cooperation mechanisms also help build trust and harmonization that are crucial for digital development among countries.

In turn, digital advancement promotes regional cooperation in trade, finance, transport, energy, and other sectors. To make inclusive digital transformation a reality, cooperation must extend beyond the public sector and encourage collaboration with partners from international organizations, private businesses, MSMEs, civil society, and other stakeholders.

Regional cooperation offers great potential to level the field and ensure that no one is left behind in the digital economy. Regional cooperation also means sharing and learning from country experiences across the region.

There are rich lessons and inspirational stories from not just digital-focused firms, but also individuals with digital skills, who have transformed their lives and that of their families and communities waiting to be heard and shared.

Regional focused platforms such as CAREC, GMS, and RKSI, play a crucial role on this front in facilitating such cross-border knowledge exchanges and partnerships to ensure inclusive and sustainable development, and improve people’s wellbeing.

Hsiao Chink Tang is a Senior Economist and Anne Cortez is a Communication Specialist at the Asian Development Bank-PRC RKSI, a south-south development knowledge sharing platform that draws on the PRC’s experience and facilitates knowledge exchange among ADB’s developing member countries.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Rohingya IDPs confined to a Sittwe camp in Rakhine State wait for international intervention. More than 1.5 million people are displaced in Myanmar. Credit: Sara Perria/IPS

By Thompson Chau and Guy Dinmore
BANGKOK, Feb 21 2023 (IPS)

Nearly 18 million people – about one-third of Myanmar’s population – need humanitarian aid this year because of civil war and the post-coup economic crisis, according to the latest United Nations estimates.

The numbers needing support continue to rise from the estimated 14 million people needing aid last year. More than 10,000 people were displaced by fighting in southern Kayin State in early January alone, joining more than 1.5 million IDPs across the country.

The UN says it recognises the urgent need to remain in Myanmar and step up humanitarian operations, but it is caught between a hostile military junta imposing restrictions on its activities and a loose network of resistance groups accusing the world body of legitimising an illegal regime.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is also facing increasing criticism for his apparent hands-off leadership in the crisis.

“Almost 18 million people – nearly one-third of the Myanmar population – are estimated to be in humanitarian need nationwide in 2023, with conflict continuing to threaten the lives of civilians in many parts of the country,” said Ramanathan Balakrishnan, UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for Myanmar.

He told IPS that international and local humanitarian aid organisations are “using a range of approaches” in different areas and had reached over four million people in 2022 despite severe underfunding and what he called “heavy bureaucratic and access constraints”.

Balakrishnan defended the importance of the UN’s engagement with General Min Aung Hlaing’s regime, which has ruthlessly crushed dissent since seizing power two years ago and overthrowing the elected government led by Aung San Suu Kyi.

“Principled engagement with all sides is a must to negotiate access and also to advocate on key protection issues. Advocacy to stop the heavy fighting and airstrikes in populated areas that are threatening the safety of both civilians and aid workers is as important as reaching people in need with humanitarian aid,” he said.

Aid workers accuse the junta of further restricting aid operations and blocking urgently needed aid from reaching millions of people. The regime admitted this month it cannot effectively administer about one-third of Myanmar’s townships. But it is able to choke access to some areas controlled by resistance groups and ethnic armed organisations that have been fighting the military for decades.

The junta is seeking to impose its authority with a new law making registration compulsory for national and international non-governmental organizations and associations and introducing criminal penalties for non-registered entities with up to five years of imprisonment.

“Civic space has been decimated in the country already due to the military’s actions, particularly its systematic harassment, arrest, and prosecution of anyone who opposed their coup,” said James Rodehaver, chief of the UN Human Rights Office for South-East Asia (OHCHR) Myanmar Team. “These new rules could greatly diminish what operational space is left for civic organisations to deliver essential goods and services to a population that is struggling to survive.”

Muslim Rohingya IDPs wait for aid to be unloaded in Pawktaw camp in Rakhine State, an hour by boat from the main city of Sittwe. Credit: Sara Perria/IPS

Many of the more than one million refugees outside Myanmar also need help. Most are stateless Rohingya Muslims forced out of Rakhine State into Bangladesh in waves of ethnic cleansing before the 2021 coup, with many held in border camps.

The UN’s reputation was already battered before the coup over its handling of the long-festering Rohingya crisis in which it was accused by aid workers and activists of being too accommodating with the Myanmar military. And it has come under further fire since.

In a joint letter last September, more than 600 Burmese civil society organisations said they “condemn in the strongest terms the recent public signing of new agreements and presenting of letters of appointment to the illegitimate Myanmar military junta by UN agencies, funds, programmes and other entities working inside Myanmar.”

“We call on you and all UN entities to immediately cease all forms of cooperation and engagement that lends legitimacy to the illegal, murderous junta,” said the letter addressed to the UN Secretary-General. The signatories argued that letters of appointment and agreements should be presented to what they regard as the legitimate government of Myanmar – the parallel National Unity Government established by ousted lawmakers – and “ethnic revolutionary organisations.”

A Myanmar researcher specialising in civil society and international assistance highlighted the role of Burmese CSOs in delivering aid. “Local CSOs comprehend the complexity of specific local needs in the current crisis as the communities they serve struggle with security concerns and essential public services, including healthcare and education,” said the researcher, who goes by the name Kyaw Swar for fear of security reprisals.

He said that donors and foreign organisations had adopted risk aversion arrangements post-coup, referring to UN and INGO’s costs for capacity-building components and disproportionate country-office operations. “Local CSOs have fewer operations, and risk management options [and] have no choice but to channel international aid to their respective communities.”

UN officials reject the notion that they are legitimising the regime and insist that only by operating in the junta-controlled heartland and also through cross-border assistance can aid be delivered to a substantial part of the population in desperate need.

“The UN finds itself in an almost existential bind. It can’t engage with an oppressive regime without being seen to condone its actions,” commented Charles Petrie, former UN Assistant Secretary-General and former UN chief in Myanmar.

“Somehow, the UN’s senior leadership needs to convince all that engaging in a dialogue with a pariah regime is not the same as supporting it and that it should be judged on the outcome of the discussions rather than being condemned for the simple fact of engaging,” he said.

“But being able to do so successfully implies that it has the level of credibility that right now it still needs to rebuild,” he added.

Questions have also been raised about the apparent lack of hands-on leadership on the part of Guterres. The UN Secretary-General seems to have made little personal intervention beyond routine statements, such as the latest marking the second anniversary of the coup in which he condemned “all forms of violence” and said he “continues to stand in solidarity with the people of Myanmar and to support their democratic aspirations for an inclusive, peaceful and just society and the protection of all communities, including the Rohingya.”

Since the coup and despite the unfolding humanitarian crisis, Guterres is seen as having taken a back seat and delegating to two successive special envoys. This stands in contrast to his predecessor Ban Ki-moon who actively intervened during the Cyclone Nargis disaster in 2008, personally meeting then-junta leader General Than Shwe and negotiating the opening of Myanmar to aid workers.

Petrie suggested Guterres should take a page out of Ban’s book and provide much more active leadership on Myanmar and be “more openly engaged and supportive of the work done by his special envoy.”

While China and Russia lend military and other support to the junta, much of the rest of the diplomatic world has taken a step back from the Myanmar crisis, leaning instead on ASEAN to assume the lead.

But the 10-member bloc has been ineffective so far. It has coordinated an unprecedented shunning of the junta’s leadership in regional meetings, but neighbouring countries – with their own blemished democratic records – are unwilling to penalise the regime. The ASEAN Coordinating Centre for Humanitarian Assistance on Disaster Management (AHA Centre) has been charged to respond to the humanitarian crisis, but with no success.

Laetitia van den Assum, the former Dutch ambassador to Myanmar and Thailand, said the aid response would have been more effective if ASEAN had set up a partnership between AHA and experienced UN and other organisations.

“That, in fact, is what happened in the aftermath of Nargis, when under the strong leadership of Dr Surin Pitsuwan, ASEAN and UN worked in tandem. It took time to put the effort together, but ultimately it took off,” van den Assum told IPS.

As with the UN leadership, Lim Jock Hoi, a Bruneian government official who was ASEAN chief until December, was barely noticed on the issue of Myanmar, in stark contrast to Pitsuwan, who helped persuade Than Shwe to accept humanitarian assistance in 2008 when Cyclone Nargis killed over 100,000 people.

“UN agencies like OCHA, WFP and UNICEF, as well as many dedicated INGOs, continue to provide assistance, more often than not under difficult circumstances, and with countless Myanmar civil society organisations playing critical roles,” Van den Assum observed.

“But until now, the SAC [the junta’s State Administration Council] has stood in the way of more effective aid,” she added. “What is missing is an overall agreement between Myanmar and ASEAN about such assistance, how to expand it and how to guarantee that all those in need are served. ASEAN and AHA have not been able to deliver on this.”

Observers point out that AHA is set up to respond to natural disasters and has no experience in intervening with aid in conflict situations.

“That had already become clear in 2018 when AHA was tasked to make recommendations for ASEAN assistance to northern Rakhine state after the enforced deportation of more than 750,000 Rohingya. The initiative died a slow death,” Van den Assum said.

“AHA was not to blame. Rather, ASEAN politicians had taken a decision without first considering whether it was the most advisable approach,” the veteran diplomat said.

No breakthrough is in sight. The junta has extended a state of emergency for another six months, admitting that it lacks control over many areas for the new elections it says it wants to stage but which have already been widely denounced by the resistance as a sham.

“Heavy fighting, including airstrikes, tight security, access restrictions, and threats against aid workers have continued unabated, particularly in the Southeast, endangering lives and hampering humanitarian operations,” the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported in its latest update.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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A view of the Security Council Chamber as President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (on screen) of Ukraine, addresses the Security Council meeting on the situation in Ukraine. April 2022. The Russian invasion of Ukraine began 24 February 2022. Credit: UN Photo/Loey Felipe

By Arul Louis
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 20 2023 (IPS)

Paralysed by its own Charter and structure, the world organisation that is charged with preventing wars confronts an existential challenge from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

When Security Council Permanent member Russia sent its troops into a smaller neighbour defying the UN Charter and all norms of international relations a year ago next Friday, Antonio Guterres, “This is the saddest moment in my tenure as Secretary-General of the United Nations”.

Beyond sadness from the betrayal and the pain inflicted on nations around the world, especially the poorest, the war drives into the very foundation of the UN built nearly 78 years ago.

Guterres warned this month, “I fear the world is not sleepwalking into a wider war, I fear it is doing so with its eyes wide open”.

And the invasion has raised questions about the UN’s resolve “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,” as the first sentence of its Charter declares.

Yet the Charter itself has paralysed the UN by conferring veto powers for permanent members at the Security Council, which alone can act,.Russia’s vetoes have mired the Council in the morass of inaction renewing calls for its reform.

Describing the situation, General Assembly President Csaba Korosi said, “The Security Council — the main guarantor of international peace and security – has remained blocked, unable to fully carry out its mandate”.

“Growing numbers are now demanding its reform,” he said noting that at the Assembly’s High-Level Week in September, “one-third of world leaders underscored the urgent need to reform the Council — more than double the number in 2021.”

While the reform process — in which India has a special interest as an aspirant for a permanent seat –that has itself been stymied for nearly two decades has come to the fore, it is not likely to happen any time soon.

But the General Assembly, which does not have the enforcement powers of the Council, has used the imbroglio to set a precedent forcing permanent members when they wield their veto to face it and explain their action.

Russia appeared before the Assembly to answer for its vetoes while facing a barrage of criticism.

The Assembly also revived a seldom-used action under the 1950 Uniting for Peace Resolution of calling for an emergency special session when the Council fails in its primary duty of maintaining peace and security.

It passed a resolution in March demanding that Russia “immediately, completely and unconditionally withdraw all of its military forces from the territory of Ukraine within its internationally recognised borders”.

It received 141 votes – getting more than two-thirds of the votes 193 required for it – while India was among the 35 countries that abstained. This, as well as the subsequent three passed last year ultimately were but an exercise in moral authority with no means to enforce it.

A proposal made by Mexico and France in 2015 calling on permanent members to refrain from using their vetoes on issues involving them also has been getting a re-airing– but to no avail.

India, which was a member of the Council last year was caught in the middle of the polarisation at the UN, both at the Council and the Assembly, because of its dependence on Russian arms and the support it had received at crucial times in the Security Council from its predecessor the Soviet Union.

India abstained at least 11 times on substantive resolutions relating to Ukraine in both chambers of the UN, including resolutions at the Council sponsored by Moscow.

India faced tremendous pressure from the West to join in voting on resolutions against Russia and openly take a definitive stand condemning Moscow.

External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar told the Security Council in September, “As the Ukraine conflict continues to rage, we are often asked whose side we are on. And our answer, each time, is straight and honest. India is on the side of peace and will remain firmly there”.

And while keeping the semblance of neutrality while voting, India came closest to taking a stand in support of Ukraine — and by inference against Russia — when he said, “We are on the side that respects the UN Charter and its founding principles”.

Now out of the Council, New Delhi’s profile has been lowered and it also does not have to publicly display its tight-rope walk as often, although it may yet have to do it again this week when the Assembly is likely to have a resolution around the invasion’s anniversary.

The pain of the invasion is felt far beyond the borders of Ukraine.

Guterres said, “The Russian invasion of Ukraine is inflicting untold suffering on the Ukrainian people, with profound global implications”.

The fallout of the war has set back the UN’s omnibus development goals.

More immediately, several countries came to the brink of famine and the spectre of hunger still stalks the world because of shortages of agricultural input, while many countries, including many developed nations, face severe energy and financial problems.

The war shut off exports of food grains from Ukraine and limited exports from Russia, the two countries that have become the world’s food baskets.

Besides depriving many countries of food grains, the shortages raised global prices.

The one victory for the UN has been the Black Sea agreement forged with Russia, Ukraine and Turkey in July to allow safe passage for ships carrying foodgrains from Ukrainian ports.

Guteress’ Spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said that in about 1,500 trips by ships so far, “more than 21.3 million tonnes of grain and food products have been moved so far during the initiative, helping to bring down global food prices and stabilising markets”.

A UN outfit, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has also made an impact during the war, working to protect nuclear facilities in Ukraine that were occupied by Russia’s forces while shelling around them.

It said that it has managed to station teams of safety and security experts at Ukraine’s nuclear power plants and at Chernobyl, the site of the 1986 disaster “to help reduce the risk of a severe nuclear accident during the ongoing conflict in the country”.

Arul Louis is a New York-based nonresident senior fellow with the New Delhi-based think tank, Society for Policy Studies.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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A school of fish swim in the Pacific Ocean in Australia. Credit: Ocean Image Bank/Jordan Robin via United Nations

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 20 2023 (IPS)

When the United Nations began negotiations on a legally binding treaty to protect and regulate the high seas, one diplomat pointedly remarked: “It’s a jungle out there”—characterizing a wide-open ocean degraded by illegal and over-fishing, plastics pollution, indiscriminate sea bed mining and the destruction of marine eco-systems.

Although the origins of the proposed treaty go back to 2002, the initial negotiations began in 2018, with a new round scheduled to take place February 20 through March 3.

The discussions will include four elements of the 2011 package that have guided the negotiations, namely marine genetic resources (MGRs), questions on benefit-sharing, area-based management tools (ABMTs), marine protected areas (MPAs), environmental impact assessments (EIAs), capacity building and the transfer of marine technology (CB&TT).

Without a strong Treaty, says Greenpeace, it is practically impossible to protect 30% of the world’s oceans by 2030: the 30×30 target which was agreed at COP15 in Montreal in December 2022.

Dr Laura Meller, Oceans Campaigner and Polar Advisor, Greenpeace Nordic said:
“The oceans support all life on Earth. Their fate will be decided at these negotiations. The science is clear. Protecting 30% of the oceans by 2030 is the absolute minimum necessary to avert catastrophe. It was encouraging to see all governments adopt the 30×30 target last year, but lofty targets mean nothing without action.”

“This special session taking place so soon after the last round of negotiations collapsed gives us hope,” she said.

“If a strong Treaty is agreed on the 3rd of March, it keeps 30×30 alive. Governments must return to negotiations ready to find compromises and deliver an effective Treaty. We’re already in extra time. These talks are one final chance to deliver. Governments must not fail,” she declared.

Dr Palitha Kohona, former co-Chair, UN Ad Hoc Working Group on Biological Diversity Beyond National Jurisdiction, told IPS even though the goal of the UN Preparatory Committee is clear, the details have bedevilled negotiating parties.

As during previous negotiations on shared global resources, he said, it is the difficulty involved in making compromises on the “key issues of financing and monetary benefit- sharing from Marine Genetic Resources” exploitation that has prevented the conclusion of the much-anticipated binding legal instrument.

“While the conservation of marine biological diversity is a priority for the globe, and is consistent with the SDGs, the developing world feels (with considerable justification) that they should also have access to the wealth that is expected to flow (gush) from the exploitation of marine genetic resources.”

Past negative experiences of missing out on new and lucrative developments, colour the thinking of the developing world. If both sides are to emerge with a win/win outcome, compromises will have to be made, he argued.

“The precedent of the Sea Bed Authority and the many environmental treaties could be adapted to the needs of the proposed treaty. Imaginative and ambitious thinking is required”.

Given the dire situation confronting the oceans and the unimaginable consequences for humanity of a collapse of the biological resources of the oceans, (small scale fisherfolk, especially in poor countries are crying for a positive outcome, where the protein intake comes mainly from the oceans), “let us hope that pragmatic compromises could be arrived at the next round of negotiations”, said Dr Kohona, a former Sri Lankan Ambassador to the UN and current envoy in Beijing.

More than 50 High Ambition Coalition countries promised a Treaty in 2022 and they failed. Many of the self-proclaimed ocean champions from the Global North refused to compromise on key issues such as financing and monetary benefit sharing from Marine Genetic Resources until the final days of talks. They offered too little, too late, said Greenpeace.

The sticking points which must be resolved are on finance, capacity building and the fair sharing of benefits from Marine Genetic Resources. Resolving these impasses depends on the Global North making a fair and credible offer to the Global South

Asked about the primary issues holding up the final treaty, James Hanson, a Greenpeace spokesperson, told IPS finding an agreement will largely depend on a fair agreement on the finance behind supporting developing nations to implement the Treaty (how much money, and who will be paying?) and finding a fair compromise on the sharing of monetary benefits from marine genetic resources.

The key to resolving these issues will be High Ambition Coalition countries returning to the table with a credible and timely offer on both issues. These countries are the ones which have committed to delivering a Treaty, and so the onus is on them to compromise to get a Treaty over the line.

China also will have a crucial role to play as a power broker, holding significant sway over many developing nations. China’s welcomed flexibility at the last round of talks on ABMTs is encouraging, and we hope this continues at this next round of talks.

China’s position on MGRs is still at odds with the EU’s, and this impasse must be resolved through compromise on both sides.

Asked whether he expects the outstanding issues to be resolved in the current sessions, Hanson said there seems to be willingness and desire from all sides to deliver a Treaty at this last round of talks.

“The progress made last time, and this special session being called so soon after the last round of talks failed, gives us hope. We encourage countries to return to the table with willingness to compromise and seek agreement, for the sake of the oceans,” he declared.

Pepe Clarke, Oceans Practice Leader at WWF International said: “For most people, the high seas are out of sight, out of mind. But the ocean is a dynamic mosaic of habitats, and the high seas play an important role in the healthy functioning of the whole marine system.”

With two-thirds of the ocean falling outside national waters, a High Seas Treaty is an essential precondition for protecting 30% of marine areas worldwide, he noted.

“We have a chance to achieve a global, legally binding agreement that would address the current gaps in international ocean governance. We’re optimistic the COP15 biodiversity agreement will provide the shot in the arm needed for governments to get this important agreement over the line,” Clarke noted.

The waters beyond national jurisdiction, known as the high seas, comprise nearly two-thirds of the ocean’s area, but only roughly 1% of this huge swathe of the planet is protected, and even then often with little effective management in place.

The high seas play a key role for many important species of sharks, tuna, whales and sea turtles, and support billions of dollars annually in economic activity.

Jessica Battle, Senior Global Ocean Governance and Policy Expert, who is leading WWF’s team at the negotiations, said overfishing and illegal fishing, habitat destruction, plastic and noise pollution, as well as climate change impacts, are all rife in the high seas.

“Heavily subsidized, industrial fishers seek to exploit and profit from ocean resources that, by law, belong to everyone. It’s a tragedy of the commons.”

She said a legally binding High Seas Treaty would help to break down the current silos between isolated management bodies, and result in less cumulative impacts and better cooperation across the ocean – it would create a forum where all ocean issues can be discussed as a whole.

“The high seas, the wildlife that migrates through these waters, and the climate-regulation functions of the ocean need urgent protection from both current and new threats, such as deep sea mining,” declared Battle.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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A rural Peruvian woman stands in front of police officers who guard the streets of Lima during the ongoing protests demanding immediate elections to resolve the current political crisis. She is part of the delegations from the country’s southern Andes highlands, one of the rural regions neglected by the overwhelming centralism of Lima and its elites. CREDIT: Walter Hupiú/IPS

By Mariela Jara
LIMA, Feb 20 2023 (IPS)

The current political and social upheaval in Peru is not a temporary problem, but has to do with deeply-rooted inequality and social hierarchies, according to historian José Carlos Agüero.

In this South American country, 59 people have died in the two months since Dina Boluarte was named president, 47 directly due to the crackdown on the protests that began on Dec. 7. The 60-year-old president has stood firmly behind the armed forces and the police despite the death toll caused by their actions.

Peru has been a republic for 200 years, but due to the acute Lima-oriented centralism deep-seated problems of inequality and discrimination especially affect rural Amazonian and indigenous Quechua and Aymara populations.

“What a social upheaval can bring are not solutions, but momentum that can help combat the most deadly effects of this combination of factors that is so dangerous to people, which is what matters to me above all,” Agüero said in an interview with IPS.

In 2021, according to the latest official statistics, urban poverty stood at 22 percent and rural poverty at 40 percent, especially high in the country’s highlands and Amazon rainforest. Regions such as Ayacucho, Huancavelica and Puno – some of the centers of the current wave of protests – had the highest levels of poverty, ranging from 37 to 41 percent.

Lima is home to more than 10 million people, nearly a third of the total population of 33 million. The capital receives a large influx of people from the provinces, who flock to the city seeking opportunities that do not exist in their places of origin.

Agüero, 48, is a historian, essayist and writer who won the National Literature Award for non-fiction in 2018. In his work he reflects on the country and its past. He himself is the son of two members of the Maoist armed group Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), who were extrajudicially executed in the 1980s.

In his analysis of the causes of what is currently happening in Peru, he mentions various aspects raised by other historians such as cultural and ethnic aspects in relation to how the groups that hold power in the capital have not paid enough attention to the regional dynamics of the country’s Andes highlands, and have underestimated the region’s tradition of protests.

He also cites the crisis shaking the political system of parties and representation, which sociologists and political scientists have been pointing to for more than two decades, without managing to bring about any solution.

And he refers to – and disagrees with – anthropological interpretations by observers who argue that the country is in the grip of a process of indigenous, especially Aymara, people demanding and gaining respect for their rights.

Agüero’s explanations are based on his studies of history and racism, which he says reflect the burden of failing to dismantle the social hierarchy still in place in Peru in the 21st century.

“Reactions break out against the caste-like hierarchical relations periodically, not just now. Outbreaks are ready to occur at any time,” he said, referring to the social protests that have been ongoing since Boluarte was sworn in as president on Dec. 7, after President Pedro Castillo was impeached by Congress.

Castillo, a 53-year-old rural schoolteacher and trade unionist, became president in July 2021, thanks to strong support in rural Peru, with the backing of a far-left party, which later turned its back on him. His government was characterized by poor management and a rejection of politicians and the traditional elites.

The impeachment and imprisonment of Castillo sparked mass demonstrations, especially in the central and southern Andes, by people demanding that early elections be held this year and calling for a citizen consultation on a Constituent Assembly to rewrite the constitution. Boluarte finally agreed to bring elections forward to October 2023, but Congress shelved the bill.

“Overt racist interactions are not the only aspect we can talk about, but also the constant belittling and snubs, which are perhaps the most powerful driving force behind our relations when it comes to the moment of truth, when it is either kill or be killed, or when you have to decide on the distribution of wealth, or the legitimacy of a protest or a political proposal,” said Agüero.

He said that according to this logic, there are people who will be left out of the national pact because they are seen as less worthy or less equal. “All of that has been put back into play to explain what is happening right now,” he said.

 

Rocío Quispe, a 64-year-old indigenous Quechua woman, worked hard to build her house in the hills of the Santa María neighborhood in the working-class Ate Vitarte district in eastern Lima, after her family fled the highlands department of Ayacucho, the epicenter of poverty that was hard-hit by the 1980-2000 internal armed conflict. In the photo she sits with her six-year-old granddaughter and the family pet. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

 

Coming from a ‘forgotten people’

Rocío Quispe, a Quechua woman from the central Andean department of Ayacucho, one of the areas hardest hit by the internal armed conflict that ravaged Peru between 1980 and 2000, lives in the Santa María neighborhood in the Ate Vitarte district in the east of Lima, one of the most populous with just over 700,000 inhabitants, mainly of middle to low socioeconomic status.

She is 64 years old and lives with her 27-year-old daughter and six-year-old granddaughter in a house that she has built little by little in the hilly area of ​​Santa María on the outskirts of the capital. She does not have a steady job and does what she can, selling food for instance, to get by. She is one of the millions of people from other parts of Peru who have come to Lima in search of a better future.

“We came because of terrorism, we dropped out of school, we left everything behind. So many people were shot dead there, they would come in your house and kill you. First my sister came, then I came and we have worked here without stealing, without harming anyone,” she told IPS.

She said her aim was to live in peace, free of the fear she faced in her home region.
Her family had fields in the rural community of Soccos, where a massacre of 32 women, men, girls and boys was committed by a police unit called Los Sinchis in 1983.

“Many of us from Ayacucho came to Lima to have a life because we felt abandoned,” Quispe said. In the capital she worked hard to buy a piece of land and help her parents, and when she got pregnant her top priority became her daughter’s education.

Like many of her neighbors, Quispe protested in December outside the Barbadillo prison where Castillo was initially detained, accused of staging a coup d’état for trying to dissolve Congress and install an emergency government, ahead of an impeachment vote by legislators.

“Because we are protesting they call us terrorists. But the real terrorists are the people who sell out their homeland, who forget about our people, who from their positions in power accuse us just because we want our children to have a good school, a good education,” she said indignantly.

When she speaks there is strength in her voice: “We are a neglected people from Ayacucho where we grew potatoes, corn, wheat and barley, and for them to call us terrorists makes us very angry. They call us terrorists, they call us stinky ‘serranos’ (hillbillies), cholos (a derogatory term for indigenous or mixed-race people), they call us all sorts of things.”

And she complains that Congress, which she sees as a corrupt center of power, conspired to overthrow Castillo.

“These people who they despise elected a president who was a provincial ‘serrano’ schoolteacher. Maybe he didn’t really know how everything worked, but the lawmakers didn’t leave him alone, until they drove him to desperation,” Quispe said.

The protests continue, although with less intensity. There are roadblocks in regions such as Cuzco, Puno, and Arequipa, while Boluarte began a round of talks with political parties on Feb. 15 to address the crisis.

The measure was seen as a grasping at straws to hold onto the office of president, given the documented reports about a number of killings committed by the security forces during the crackdown, which Boluarte has not condemned.

 

Historian, essayist and writer José Carlos Agüero is photographed at the presentation of his book Persona (Person), in September 2018 in the north Lima district of Los Olivos. In his critical reflection on the current social outbreak in Peru, he says the elites form a network of privilege that is also racist, neglecting the country’s rural indigenous and mixed-race majority. CREDIT: Courtesy Rossana López

Not one, but many Limas

According to the National Institute of Statistics and Informatics, in Lima 65 percent of the population consider themselves ‘mestizo’ or mixed-race, 19 percent indigenous, eight percent black and five percent white. Nevertheless, racism is a daily feature of life and has turned many people intensely against those who are protesting in their regions or have come to the capital to make themselves heard.

Why don’t the elites recognize that there are many Limas? Although Agüero said he could not give a definitive answer because there are few studies on the elites in Peru, he said he could talk about their behavior and the way they organized in politics.

He believes that it is not a question of ignorance; it is not that they do not understand. “There are highly educated people who have studied in foreign universities and are part of what we call the elite. They have demographic data, surveys, everything necessary to understand that Lima is a very large metropolis, now made up of several different Limas,” the writer added.

“But they rule like elites in other parts of the world. They maintain the conviction that they are privileged. In Peru, it seems to me that they form a network of privilege in a way that is also racist,” he remarked.

Agüero said that this position isolates them but at the same time puts them in a role of paternalistic control.

“What matters most to me is that the distribution of power, real, economic and symbolic, should stop being a matter of privilege and in the control of an elite network that is also racist. For me that is the issue,” he said.

From climate change to child marriage, education is seen as the solution. ECW Director Yasmine Sherif protests early marriage with young delegates at the Education Cannot Wait Conference held in Geneva. Credit: ECW

By Joyce Chimbi
GENEVA & NAIROBI, Feb 17 2023 (IPS)

From southern Ethiopia to northern Kenya and Somalia, the most severe drought in the last 40 years is unfolding. It is simply too hot to go to school on an empty stomach, and close to 3 million children are out of school, with an additional 4 million at risk of dropping out entirely across the Horn of Africa.

Further afield, months after unprecedented floods and landslides ravaged Pakistan, villages remain underwater, and millions of children still need lifesaving support. More recently, while children were sleeping, a most devastating earthquake intruded, and an estimated 2.5 million children in Syria and 4.6 million children in Turkey were affected.

Today, child delegates from Nigeria and Colombia told the world that climate change is ruining their childhood and the world must act now, for 222 million dreams are at stake. They were speaking at the Education Cannot Wait High-Level Financing Conference held in Geneva.

 

Nafisa from Nigeria reminded delegates at the Education Cannot Wait High-Level Financing Conference held in Geneva that the climate emergency is a child’s rights issue. Credit: ECW

“I am a girl champion with Save the Children and a member of the children’s parliament in Nigeria. Children are least responsible for the climate crisis, yet we bear the heaviest burden of its impact, now and in the future. Climate emergency is a child’s rights crisis, and suffering wears the face of a child,” said Nafisa.

In the spirit of listening to the most affected, most at risk, Pedro further spoke about Colombia’s vulnerability to climate change and the impact on children, and more so those in indigenous communities and those living with a disability, such as his 13-year-old cousin.

Pedro and Nafisa stressed that children must play a central role in responding to the climate crisis in every corner of the world. They said climate change affects education, and in turn, education has an important role.

This particular session was organized in partnership with the Geneva Global Hub for Education in Emergencies, Save the Children, and Plan International, in the backdrop of the first-ever High-Level Financing Conference organized in close collaboration with the Governments of Colombia, Germany, Niger, Norway, and South Sudan, ECW and Switzerland.

Birgitte Lange, CEO of Save the Children Norway, stressed that climate change is not only a threat to the future, “for the world’s 2.4 billion children, the climate crisis is a global emergency crisis today that is disrupting children and their education. Climate change contributes to, increases, and deepens the existing crisis of which children are carrying the burden.

“Last year, Save the Children held our biggest-ever dialogue, where we heard from at least 54,000 children in 41 countries around the world. They shared their thoughts on climate change and its consequences for them. Keeping children in school amidst a climate crisis is critical to the children’s well-being and their learning. Education plays a lifesaving role.”

Rana Tanveer Hussain, Federal Minister for Education and Professional Training in Pakistan, spoke of the severe impact of the floods on the country’s education system, “more than 34,000 public education institutions have been damaged or destroyed. At least 2.6 million students are affected. As many as 1 million children are at risk of dropping out of school altogether.

“During this crisis, ECW quickly came forward with great support, extending a grant of USD 5 million through the First Emergency Response Program in the floods-affected districts in September and October 2022, targeting 19,000 children thus far. In addition, ECW multiyear resilience program has also been leveraged to contribute to these great efforts. But the need is still great.”

Gregorius Yoris, a young leader representing Youth for Education in Emergencies in Indonesia, said despite children being at the forefront of the climate crisis, they have been furthest left behind in finding solutions to climate change.

Folly Bah Thibault, broadcast journalist, Al Jazeera, and Founder and President, Elle Ira A L’Ecole Foundation Kesso Bah moderated the session on climate change in which child delegates told how children are being left furthest behind in the climate crisis. Credit: ECW

With one billion children, or nearly half of the world’s children living in countries at extremely high risk of climate change and environmental hazards, Dr Heike Kuhn, Head of Division, Education at the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development in Germany, told participants it is time to raise climate resilient children.

“Weather-related disasters are growing, and young people are the most affected; we need three things in place: climate resilient schools, climate resilient teachers, and climate resilient students. We need climate-smart schools to stay safe when disaster strikes,” she explained.

“We must never forget about the teachers, for they must be agents of change, and teach children to use resources such as water and energy in a sustainable way. Children must also be taught how to behave during extreme weather changes such as earthquakes without leaving behind the most vulnerable children.”

As curtains fell on the landmark two-day conference, Yasmine Sherif, the Director of Education Cannot Wait, told participants, “The greatest feeling comes from the fact that all ECW’s stakeholders are here and we have raised these resources together, governments, civil society, UN agencies, private sector, Foundations.

“When I watched the panels and the engagements, I felt that everyone has that sense of ownership. Education Cannot Wait is yours. The success of this conference is a historic milestone for education in emergencies and protracted crises.”

In all, 17 donors announced pledges to ECW, including five contributions from new donors – a historic milestone for education in emergencies and protracted crises and ECW. Just over one month into the multilateral Fund’s new 2023-2026 Strategic Plan, these landmark commitments already amount to more than half of the USD 1.5 billion required to deliver on the Fund’s four-year Strategic Plan.

On the way forward, Sherif said ECW is already up and running, but with the additional USD 826 million, the Fund was getting a big leap forward toward the 20 million children and adolescents that will be supported with holistic child-centered education. This is in line with the new Strategic Plan, whose top priorities include localization, working with local organizations at grassroots levels, youths, and getting the children involved as well.

“We can no longer look at climate-induced disasters and education in silos. Conflict creates disruptions in education, so does climate-induced disasters and then the destiny of children and adolescents having to flee their home countries as refugees or forcefully displaced in-country,” she emphasized.

“Most of all, as we have seen in Afghanistan and across the globe, the right for every girl to access a quality education. And we are moving already, and that is where we are going from here. Thanks to the great contribution in the capital of humanitarian settings, we are bringing the development sector of education to those left furthest behind. Thank you, Switzerland, for hosting us.”

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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A return of non-alignment was evident at the March 2022 UN General Assembly special session on Ukraine. Fifty-two governments from the global south did not support western sanctions against Russia. CREDIT: Manuel Elias/UN

By External Source
Feb 17 2023 (IPS)

An African proverb notes that “when two elephants fight, it is the grass underneath that suffers”. Many states in the global south are, therefore, seeking to avoid getting caught in the middle of any future battles between the US and China. Instead, they are calling for a renewal of the concept of non-alignment. This was an approach employed in the 1950s by newly independent countries to balance between the two ideological power blocs of east and west during the era of the Cold War 

The new non-alignment stance is based on a perceived need to maintain southern sovereignty, pursue socio-economic development, and benefit from powerful external partners without having to choose sides. It also comes from historical grievances during the era of slavery, colonialism and Cold War interventionism.

These grievances include unilateral American military interventions in Grenada (1983), Panama (1989) and Iraq (2003) as well as support by the US and France for autocracies in countries like Egypt, Morocco, Chad and Saudi Arabia, when it suits their interests.

82 southern states refused to back western efforts to suspend Russia from the UN Human Rights Council. These included powerful southern states such as India, Indonesia, South Africa, Ethiopia, Brazil, Argentina and Mexico

Many southern governments are particularly irked by America’s Manichaean division of the world into “good” democracies and “bad” autocracies. More recently, countries in the global south have highlighted north-south trade disputes and western hoarding of COVID-19 vaccines as reinforcing the unequal international system of “global apartheid”.

A return of non-alignment was evident at the March 2022 UN General Assembly special session on Ukraine. Fifty-two governments from the global south did not support western sanctions against Russia. This, despite Russia’s clear violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty, which southern states have historically condemned.

A month later, 82 southern states refused to back western efforts to suspend Russia from the UN Human Rights Council.

These included powerful southern states such as India, Indonesia, South Africa, Ethiopia, Brazil, Argentina and Mexico.

 

The origins of non-alignment

In 1955, a conference was held in the Indonesian city of Bandung to regain the sovereignty of Africa and Asia from western imperial rule. The summit also sought to foster global peace, promote economic and cultural cooperation, and end racial domination. Governments attending were urged to abstain from collective defence arrangements with great powers.

Six years later, in 1961, the 120-strong Non-Aligned Movement emerged. Members were required to shun military alliances such as NATO and the Warsaw Pact, as well as bilateral security treaties with great powers.

Non-alignment advocated “positive” – not passive – neutrality. States were encouraged to contribute actively to strengthening and reforming institutions such as the UN and the World Bank.

India’s patrician prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, is widely regarded to have been the intellectual “father of non-alignment”. He regarded the concept as an insurance policy against world domination by either superpower bloc or China. He also advocated nuclear disarmament.

Indonesia’s military strongman, Suharto, championed non-alignment through “regional resilience”. South-east Asian states were urged to seek autonomy and prevent external powers from intervening in the region.

Egypt’s charismatic prophet of Arab unity, Gamal Abdel Nasser, strongly backed the use of force in conducting wars of liberation in Algeria and southern Africa, buying arms and receiving aid from both east and west.
For his part, Ghana’s prophet of African unity, Kwame Nkrumah, promoted the idea of an African High Command as a common army to ward off external intervention and support Africa’s liberation.

The Non-Aligned Movement, however, suffered from the problems of trying to maintain cohesion among a large, diverse group. Many countries were clearly aligned to one or other power bloc.

By the early 1980s, the group had switched its focus from east-west geo-politics to north–south geo-economics. The Non-Aligned Movement started advocating a “new international economic order”. This envisaged technology and resources being transferred from the rich north to the global south in order to promote industrialisation.

The north, however, simply refused to support these efforts.

 

Latin America and south-east Asia

Most of the recent thinking and debates on non-alignment have occurred in Latin America and south-east Asia.

Most Latin American countries have refused to align with any major power. They have also ignored Washington’s warnings to avoid doing business with China. Many have embraced Chinese infrastructure, 5G technology and digital connectivity.

Bolivia, Cuba, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Venezuela refused to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Many of the region’s states declined western requests to impose sanctions on Moscow. The return of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva as president of Brazil – the largest and wealthiest country in the region – heralds the “second coming” (following his first presidency between 2003 and 2011) of a champion of global south solidarity.

For its part, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has shown that non-alignment has as much to do with geography as strategy. Singapore sanctioned Russia over the invasion of Ukraine. Indonesia condemned the intervention but rejected sanctions. Myanmar backed the invasion while Laos and Vietnam refused to condemn Moscow’s aggression.

Many ASEAN states have historically championed “declaratory non-alignment”. They have used the concept largely rhetorically while, in reality, practising a promiscuous “multi-alignment”. Singapore and the Philippines forged close military ties with the US; Myanmar with India; Vietnam with Russia, India, and the US; and Malaysia with Britain, Australia, and New Zealand.

This is also a region in which states simultaneously embrace and fear Chinese economic assistance and military cooperation. This, while seeking to avoid any external powers dominating the region or forming exclusionary military alliances.

Strong African voices are largely absent from these non-alignment debates, and are urgently needed.

 

Pursuing non-alignment in Africa

Africa is the world’s most insecure continent, hosting 84% of UN peacekeepers. This points to a need for a cohesive southern bloc that can produce a self-sustaining security system – Pax Africana – while promoting socio-economic development.

Uganda aims to champion this approach when it takes over the three-year rotating chair of the Non-Aligned Movement in December 2023. Strengthening the organisation into a more cohesive bloc, while fostering unity within the global south, is a major goal of its tenure.

Uganda has strong potential allies. For example, South Africa has championed “strategic non-alignment” in the Ukraine conflict, advocating a UN-negotiated solution, while refusing to sanction its BRICS ally, Russia. It has also relentlessly courted its largest bilateral trading partner, China, whose Belt and Road Initiative and BRICS bank are building infrastructure across the global south.

Beijing is Africa’s largest trading partner at US$254 billion, and builds a third of the continent’s infrastructure.

If a new non-alignment is to be achieved in Africa, the foreign military bases of the US, France and China – and the Russian military presence – must, however, be dismantled.

At the same time the continent should continue to support the UN-led rules-based international order, condemning unilateral interventions in both Ukraine and Iraq. Pax Africana would best be served by:

• building local security capacity in close cooperation with the UN;
• promoting effective regional integration; and
• fencing off the continent from meddling external powers, while continuing to welcome trade and investment from both east and west.

Adekeye Adebajo, Professor and Senior research fellow, Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship, University of Pretoria

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Hate speech loads the gun, misinformation pulls the trigger - And that's the kind of the relationship that we've come to understand over the years. Credit: Shutterstock.

By Baher Kamal
MADRID, Feb 17 2023 (IPS)

In this world of wars, massive weapons production, sales and use; of sharpening inequalities and deadly climate emergencies, hate speech and its inhumane impact, is being amplified at ‘unprecedented scale’ by new technologies.

Hate speech has now reached dangerous records, fuelling discrimination, racism, xenophobia and staggering human rights violations.

It mainly targets whoever is not “like us” i.e ethnic minorities, black, ‘coloured,’ and Asian peoples; and Muslims worldwide through widespread Islamophobia, let alone the millions of migrants, and the billions of poor. In short, the most vulnerable human beings, let alone the world’s girls and women.

“A lot of the time people want to talk about content moderation, what should be allowed on these platforms, without paying close attention to the political economy of these social media platforms. And it turns out hate speech is profitable”

The UN reports that the new communications technologies are one of the most common ways of spreading divisive rhetoric on a global scale, threatening peace around the world.

A new UN Podcasts series, UNiting Against Hate, explains how this dangerous phenomenon is being tackled worldwide.

 

Online hate speech on staggering rise

According to a leading international human rights organisation, Minority Rights Group, one analysis records a 400-fold increase in the use of hate terms online in Pakistan between 2011 and 2021.

Being able to monitor hate speech can provide valuable information for authorities to predict future crimes or to take measures afterwards.

There is concern amongst human rights experts and activists that hate speech is becoming more prevalent, with views once perceived as fringe and extreme, moving into the mainstream.

An episode of UNiting Against Hate features Tendayi Achiume, the outgoing UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, and Jaroslav Valůch, who is the project manager for fact-checking and news literacy, at Prague-based media development organisation “Transitions”.

 

‘Hate speech is profitable’

For Tendayi Achiume, a former independent UN human rights expert, more attention needs to be paid to the business models of social media companies.

“A lot of the time people want to talk about content moderation, what should be allowed on these platforms, without paying close attention to the political economy of these social media platforms. And it turns out hate speech is profitable”.

 

Hate speech and misinformation, closely related

Christopher Tuckwood, the executive director of the Sentinel Project warns that hate speech and misinformation are closely related: “Hate speech loads the gun, misinformation pulls the trigger.“

“And that’s the kind of the relationship that we’ve come to understand over the years”.

It’s now theoretically possible for any human being who can access an Internet connection to become a producer of that sort of content. And so that really does change things, and with a global reach, adds Tuckerwood.

The Sentinel Project is a Canadian non-profit organisation who’s Hatebase initiative monitors the trigger words that appear on various platforms and risk morphing into real-world violence.

Tuckwood describes it as an “early warning indicator that can help us to identify an increased risk of violence.”

It works by monitoring online spaces, especially Twitter, looking for certain keywords, in several different languages, and then applying certain contextual rules to determine what was or was not most likely to be actually hateful content.

 

In the Balkans

Another organisation doing a similar kind of hate speech mapping is the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network.

The Network monitors every single trial related to war crime atrocities in Bosnia and Herzegovina and amounts to 700 open cases.

In mapping hate it looks out for four different aspects; “hateful narratives by politicians, discriminatory language, atrocity denial and actual incidents on the ground where minority groups have been attacked.”

 

Politicians fuelling hatred

According to Dennis Gillick, the executive director and editor of their branch in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the primary drivers of hate narratives in the country are populist, ethno-nationalist politicians.

“The idea behind the entire mapping process is to prove the correlation between political statements and political drivers of hate and the actual atrocities that take place.”

The Network also wants to prove that “there is a lack of systematic prosecution of hate crimes and that the hateful language allows for this perpetuating cycle of violence, with more discriminatory language by politicians and fewer prosecutions.”

As a result of hate speech, we have seen a rising number of far-right groups being mobilised, explains Gillick.

 

Fake humanitarian groups spreading hateful language

“We are seeing fake NGOs or fake humanitarian groups being mobilised to spread hateful or discriminatory language, in order to expand this gap between the three different ethnic and religious groups in this country.”

The real-life consequences reported by the Network have included defacing or vandalising mosques, or churches, depending on where a specific faith group is in the minority, and open calls to violence.

According to Gillick, this is fuelling the agenda of ethno-nationalist parties who want to cause divisions.

 

Need to create counter narratives

The way to combat this toxic environment, according to Gillick, is to create counter-narratives, disseminating accurate, factual information and stories that promote unity rather than division.

However, he acknowledges that this is a big ask.

“It is difficult to counter public broadcasters, big media outlets with several hundred journalists and reporters with thousands of flights a day, with a group of 10 to 15 journalists who are trying to write about very specific topics, in a different way, and to do the analytical and investigative reporting.”

 

Minorities under attack

Another organisation that is trying to create counter-narratives is Kirkuk Now, an independent media outlet in Iraq, which is trying to produce objective and quality content on these groups and share it on social media platforms.

“Our focus is on minorities, internally displaced people, women and children and, of course, freedom of expression,” says editor-in-chief of Kirkuk Now, Salaam Omer.

“We see very little content [about them] in the Iraqi media mainstream. And if they are actually depicted, they are depicted as problems.”

 

Social media moguls urged to change

The heads of many of the world’s biggest social media platforms were urged to change their business models and become more accountable in the battle against rising hate speech online.

In a detailed statement, more than two dozen UN-appointed independent human rights experts – including representatives from three different working groups and multiple Special Rapporteurs – called out chief executives by name.

They said that the companies they lead “must urgently address posts and activities that advocate hatred, and constitute incitement to discrimination, in line with international standards for freedom of expression.”

They also said the new tech billionaire owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, who heads Google’s parent company Alphabet, Apple’s Tim Cook, “and CEOs of other social media platforms”, should “centre human rights, racial justice, accountability, transparency, corporate social responsibility and ethics, in their business model.”

And they reminded that being accountable as businesses for racial justice and human rights, “is a core social responsibility, advising that “respecting human rights is in the long-term interest of these companies, and their shareholders.”

The human rights experts underlined that the International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the UN’s Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights provide a clear path forward on how this can be done.

 

Corporate failure

“We urge all CEOs and leaders of social media to fully assume their responsibility to respect human rights and address racial hatred.”

As evidence of the corporate failure to get a grip on hate speech, the Human Rights Council-appointed independent experts pointed to a “sharp increase in the use of the racist ‘N’ word on Twitter”, following its recent acquisition by Tesla boss Elon Musk.

This showed the urgent need for social media companies to be more accountable “over the expression of hatred towards people of African descent, they argued.

Soon after Mr. Musk took over, the Network Contagion Research Institute of Rutgers University in the US, highlighted that the use of the N-word on the platform “increased by almost 500 per cent within a 12-hour period,” compared to the previous average, the human rights experts said.

Muslim Women in a rickshaw, Varanasi India, 2018. Credit: Adam Cohn/Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
 
The United Nations will commemorate International Women’s Day (IWD) on 8 March.

By Mariz Tadros
BRIGHTON, UK, Feb 17 2023 (IPS)

Since researching the experiences of gender discrimination against women in poverty who belong to religious minorities, many fellow feminists have turned their back on me.

The inherent assumption among some of my feminist critics is that by defending women who are targeted on account of their religious affiliation, I am defending their religions. Yet defending the rights of a Hindu woman in Pakistan or Muslim woman in India do not constitute defending Hinduism or Islam.

Defending a woman’s right not to be discriminated against because of her identity and challenging religious bigotry both go hand in hand. We need to challenge all political projects that seek to homogenize people while simultaneously defending women, minorities, artists and others whose positioning accentuates their experiences of inequality.

Feminist reluctance to address injustices experienced by women who belong to religious minorities is also driven by concern that we end up empowering religious movements whose ethos is against women’s equality.

Again, we need to distinguish between women who are the targets of hate because they do not share the same faith as the majority, and anti-feminist movements who often are from the majority. We need to show solidarity with the former while challenging the latter.

Well-meaning progressive, feminists based in the West are reluctant to openly advocate for the rights of religious minority women living in Muslim majority contexts because of legitimate concerns that this would feed into orientalist (racist) representations of radical militant Islamist groups or by intolerant sections of society.

Yet can we be inadvertently reproduce a colonialist mindset when we decide to omit the experiences of minority women out of fear of misappropriation in the west?

Why should women who have experienced genocide be denied transnational feminist solidarities because it would be more progressive to focus on the Muslims who were against the genocide.

Research undertaken by the Coalition for Religious Equality and Inclusive Development, shows that in countries including Iraq, Pakistan and Nigeria, experiences for women are made worse where their experiences of gender inequality, religious marginality and socio-economic exclusion intersect.

For example, women belonging to religious minorities become easy targets of vilification and assault because of the visible manifestation of difference through what they wear. Yazidi, Sabean or Christian women are exposed to harassment in disproportionate levels in Iraq because they do not cover their hair while in Pakistan, Hindu women dressed in Sari are subject to ridicule and targeting because their middle bodies are said to be ‘exposed’.

Even if you belong to the majority religion, and you cover up more than the others, this still means exposure to harassment for being seen to practice the religion differently, as experienced by Ahmediyya women in Pakistan and the Izala Sufi women in Nigeria.

Women from religious minorities can also be at significant risk of sexual assault. While all women in patriarchal societies are exposed to sexual harassment independently of their religious affiliation, women affiliated to religiously marginalized communities are targeted because of the circulation of stereotypes that they are more available or ‘fair game’ or that men are not obligated to respect them the same respect as those from the majority religion.

While all women living in poverty suffer the impact of gender, caste and socio-economic exclusion combined, the experiences of discrimination become more acute and severe when shaped by ideological prejudice.

In our research in the aftermath of covid, Muslim women spoke about being denied health care because of the scapegoating of Muslims for the spread of the pandemic, while in Iraq Yazidi women spoke of how despicable stereotypes of Yazidi women not washing meant doctors denied them treatment.

The feminist movement cannot continue to represent itself as committed to inclusivity through intersectionality (the recognition of and redress to- interface of gender, race, class, ableism and so forth in shaping and influencing power dynamics) while turning its back on women who come from a religious minority background where their rights are denied.

A review by doctoral researcher Amy Quinn-Graham of UN Women’s website and publications related to intersectionality and/or ‘minorities’ from 2014 – 2019, showed that compared to indigenous women, migrant women, women with disabilities, women and girls living in rural localities, older women, and women and girls of African descent, all of which were accounted for in the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women agreed conclusions from 2017 onwards, concerns for the vulnerabilities facing “ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities” were raised only once and for the first time in 2019, by the EU.

Certainly, there are feminist movements, scholars and those engaged in policymaking who recognize and seek redress for discrimination on grounds of religion experienced by socio-economically excluded women, but it seems they are the exception, rather than the norm.

It is not too late for us to be inclusive, and this International Women’s Day we should recognize and show solidarity with women who belong to religious minorities living on the margins. We just have to start by not making excuses for their omission from our “intersectional lens”.

Professor Mariz Tadros is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies; a professor of politics and development and an IDS Research Fellow specialising in the politics and human development of the Middle East. Areas of specialisation include democratisation, Islamist politics, gender, sectarianism, human security and religion and development. Prof Tadros has convened the Coalition for Religious Equality and Inclusive Development (CREID) since November 2018.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Faruqi, Education Cannot Wait Global Champion and Captain of the Afghan Girls Robotics Team speaking during the Spotlight on Afghanistan at the ECW High-Level Financing Conference in Geneva, Switzerland. Credit: ECW/Michael Calabrò

By Busani Bafana
GENEVA & BULAWAYO, Feb 16 2023 (IPS)

It has been more than 500 days since the Taliban regime in Afghanistan shut down schools and shattered the education dreams of girls and women like Somaya Faruqi, who has been forced to leave her homeland to continue her education.

Faruqi, a student and engineer, has appealed for global intervention in securing the right to education for the millions of girls and women stopped from attending school and university after the Taliban regime that took power in the war-scarred nation in September 2021 closed girls out of school.

“Exactly 514 days ago, my heart was shattered along with the dreams of millions of girls in Afghanistan after the Taliban took over the country; they unleashed terror upon us, tearing apart families and our homes and leaving us hopeless and in a world that no longer feels like our own,” Faruqi, a Girls’ Education Advocate and Captain of the Afghan Girls Robotics Team, said at the Education Cannot Wait (ECW) High-Level Financing Conference in Geneva, Switzerland this week, calling on the world to take decisive action against the Taliban.

ECW, the UN global fund for education in emergencies and protracted crises, convened a two-day conference to marshal support to raise $1.5 billion to roll out its four-year strategic plan to support children and adolescents affected by crises to learn in safety and without fear. The conference seeks to mobilize the resources to meet the educational needs of the 222 million children and adolescents in crisis.

International correspondent and author Christina Lamb, who moderated a panel discussion on Afghanistan, highlighted that war and natural disasters posed a challenge to children’s education and dominated the news agenda. Today Afghanistan was one country that has dropped out of the headlines where girls and women need help more than any other place on earth.

“Two decades of educational progress has literally been wiped out in 18 months by the return of the Taliban and the devastating restrictions that have been imposed on women and girls,” remarked Lamb, who has been reporting on Afghanistan for over 30 years as a  foreign correspondent.

“Afghanistan today is the only place on earth today where girls are banned from high school … one Afghan girl recently told me, ‘Soon they will say there is a shortage of oxygen, so only men are allowed to breathe.’”

Speakers at the Spotlight on Afghanistan session asked the world not to forget the plight of girls in the country. They were speaking at the ECW High-Level Financing Conference in Geneva. Credit: ECW/Sandra Blaser

Describing education as the key to unlocking the limitless potential in every child, Faruqi—now a refugee in the United States— lamented that millions of children are today deprived of their basic right to education because of the Taliban’s quest to suppress women’s rights.

Calling the denial of education a “tragedy beyond measure,” Faruqi says girls and women in many parts of the world are in a predicament—from the banned education in Afghanistan to child marriages in Ethiopia to the insecurity of girls in schools in Nigeria.

“222 million children are missing the  opportunity of education, and it means that we are missing 222 million for incredible talent; future leaders, the scientists, the writers and the doctors, the engineers, and many more,” she said, adding that, “We can’t afford to waste any time and the hope of all these children is on you the leaders and donors to support and help to fund the education system in every crisis-affected country … solidarity without action cannot do anything.”

Pakistani education activist and 2014 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai recalled the time she was unable to attend school when the Taliban banned education in her country and fears that the world will forget the plight of Afghan women and girls.

“We should not accept the excuses given by the Taliban; what is the justification given by the Taliban … it is time for world leaders to unite and become one voice for Afghan women and girls. It is time we find ways in which we ensure that the Afghan people and children are not left behind,” Yousafzai said in a video message to the ECW conference.

ECW Executive Director Yasmine Sherif told a press conference that ECW was committed to ensuring that girls’ education continued in Afghanistan. Credit: ECW

​Education Cannot Wait’s Director Yasmine Sherif said that about USD 70 million had gone to education in Afghanistan, and nearly 60 percent of that funding has gone to supporting girls.

“We have an ongoing program that has continued—it did not stop,” Sherif said at a press briefing, noting that there was a short suspension after the Taliban issued the decree banning education for girls, but the education program had now resumed.

“We have informal discussions with the de facto Ministry of Education, and we are able also at the local community level, through our partners, to continue delivering education to girls, and we will not stop,” said Sherif, adding that the program to support secondary girls education was soon to launch a USD 30m investment.

“We have informal discussions with the de facto Ministry of Education, and we are able also at the local community level, through our partners, to continue to deliver education to girls, and we will not stop.”

Fawzia Koofi, a Women’s Rights Activist and Former Deputy Speaker in the Afghan National Parliament, called on the world to put pressure on the Taliban to respect transformation in Afghanistan and secure the rights to education for girls and women.

“We should take the situation of Afghanistan as a global humanitarian crisis,” Koofi urged, requesting the international community to provide study opportunities to Afghan women and girls outside Afghanistan.

Gordon Brown, UN Special Envoy for Global Education and Chair of ECW’s High-Level Steering Group, said the fight for girls and women in Afghanistan must not be lost.

“It is absolutely fundamental that no regime nor religious order nor dictator should prevent a girl having a right to an education; that is why we must turn words into action now,” Brown said, urging the world to stand in solidarity with all the girls demonstrating against the Taliban and support community schools.

Faruqi appealed to the global audience: “We have to work together and fund the education system because every child and every girl deserves to live a life at least by having the simplest human right, which is education. Words without action are not enough. This is a real and meaningful action that can make a positive difference.”

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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Excerpt:

Education Cannot Wait’s Director Yasmine Sherif said that about USD 70 million had gone to education in Afghanistan, and nearly 60 percent of that funding has gone to supporting girls; more funding was on its way. “We have an ongoing program that has continued—it did not stop.”

Gordon Brown, United Nations Special Envoy for Global Education, Chair of the High-Level Steering Group, asked an Education Cannot Wait High-Level Financing Conference to stand in support of the children of Syria and Turkey who are displaced due to the earthquake. These children join 222 million others without an access to education. Credit: ECW

By Joyce Chimbi
GENEVA & NAIROBI, Feb 16 2023 (IPS)

As an unparalleled, unprecedented global education crisis unfolds, an estimated 222 million crisis-impacted children are desperate to learn. As barriers to accessing education increase, darkness beckons, and education is their last hope.

“The children of Syria and Turkey today are in addition to the 222 million children around the world in every single continent who are displaced. An estimated 78 million will not go to school today or any other day, and 140 million children whose education has been so disrupted and so traumatized that they are not able to read and write by the age of 11,” Gordon Brown, United Nations Special Envoy for Global Education, Chair of the High-Level Steering Group.

He asked the delegates at the conference to stand in support of the children from the two countries impacted by a devastating earthquake that has killed more than 41 000 people and displaced tens of thousands.

Brown stressed the need to speak up for children in Afghanistan, Chad, Ethiopia, Yemen, Ukraine, and many more, for they are the most neglected, forgotten, and isolated, and they need and deserve support. Brown was speaking during the opening session of the first Education Cannot Wait (ECW) high-level financing conference underway in Geneva, Switzerland.

Education Cannot Wait’s High-Level Financing Conference kicked off today in Geneva, Switzerland, and has already raised more than USD 826 million towards an ambitious four-year strategic plan. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

The conference was organized in close collaboration with the governments of Colombia, Germany, Niger, Norway, South Sudan, and Switzerland to deliver the promise of an education for all children affected by crises.

ECW, the UN global fund for education in emergencies and protracted crises, continues to marshal much-needed support for crisis-impacted children. But as conflict and disaster mount pressure on economies, education systems, and international assistance, funding is always stretched.

“This financing conference represents a promise to the boys and girls of the world. No matter who you are, no matter where you live, and no matter what barriers stand in the way, you have the right to a quality education. Education Cannot Wait is a lifeline for these young learners,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres.

“With your generous new commitments, we can deliver education to an additional 20 million children and transform the various humanitarian nightmares into bright new hope for the future. Let’s keep our promise to the girls and boys of the world. Let’s keep their dreams alive.”

Yasmine Sherif, the ECW’s director, said in 2016 when ECW was founded, there were 75 million children in need of education support. The number has since increased to approximately 222 million children, and adolescents and counting as additional crisis situations emerge, such as those in Syria and Turkey.

Syria now needs an additional USD 39 million due to the earthquake. ECW has already announced USD 7 million as a First Emergency Response Grant in Syria that will provide children impacted by the quake with life-saving access to education, Sherif said.

“But funding is not matching the growing need around the world. Education Cannot Wait, and resources cannot wait for 222 million dreams. It takes a great idea and a great mind, and then the rest of us make it happen.”

Yasmine Sherif, the Director of Education Cannot Wait, said in 2016, when ECW was founded, there were 75 million children in need of education support. The number has since increased to approximately 222 million children and adolescents and increasing all the time. Credit: ECW

Speaking to more than 2,000 online participants and 600 in-person attendees, Sherif said the High-Level Financing Conference seeks to mobilize at least USD 1.5 billion to actualize the ambitious  2023-2026 Strategic Plan, to reach at least 20 million boys and girls with education support in the next four years.

A few hours into the conference, Sherif announced that in excess of USD 826 million had been raised and that the five top donors include Germany, the United Kingdom, Norway, the United States, and Denmark. She further expressed confidence that as an understanding of what is at stake increases, ECW, and its strategic partners will reach USD 5 billion at the end of the four-year strategic plan.

Ignazio Cassis, Federal Councilor and Head of the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, Switzerland, said that Switzerland would remain a strong global humanitarian capital and center for education in emergencies.

He noted that while Switzerland is a notable prosperous country, it was not always the case and that the magic formula was in a central role given to education in government policies since the emergence of modern Switzerland 175 years ago.

“This past Thursday, some 900,000 boys and girls across Switzerland went to school in safety as part of their compulsory education. On this same Thursday, 222 million children affected by crises around the world have not been so lucky. Switzerland appeals to world leaders to make the education of these children a top priority. We need to be able to count on a well-educated future generation; the peace, freedom, and prosperity of all nations depend on it,” Cassis expounded.

Youth debate during the opening session at the ECW High-Level Financing Conference in Geneva. Credit: ECW/Sandra Blaser

ECW was applauded for enduring and staying on the ground even as the conflict became a protracted crisis. In Afghanistan, for instance, Sherif says ECW has invested more than USD 70 million since 2017 through community-based schooling and that 58 percent of those receiving that education are girls.

Catherine Russell, Executive Director of UNICEF, said that there is an even greater need to keep working together, creating a movement, moving forward and upward for 222 million dreams depend on this unity. She particularly stressed UNICEF’s deep commitment to ensuring that every child, everywhere, has access to education.

“When children in crisis-affected countries have access to education, they also have access to a range of services that support their well-being like psychosocial support, social interaction, essential public safety information, and in many cases, a nutritious meal and clean water. And, of course, education provides children, whether living in emergency contexts or not, with the foundational learning tools to survive and thrive as adults,” she said.

Founded in 2016, ECW supports the implementation of the largest education emergency program globally and has already raised over USD 1.1 billion from donors, the private sector, and philanthropic foundations and reached close to 7 million children and adolescents with holistic education supports.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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By Ines M Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Feb 16 2023 (IPS)

In late January, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, finished an official visit to Venezuela. He said he’d found a fragmented society in great need of bridging its divides and encouraged the government to take the lead in listening to civil society concerns and responding to victims of rights violations.

But Venezuelan civil society had hoped for more. Two days before his arrival, the National Assembly, Venezuela’s congress, had approved the first reading of a law aimed at further restricting and criminalising civil society work. International civil society urged the High Commissioner to call for the bill to be shelved. Many found the UN’s response disappointing.

Another turn of the screw

The bill imposes further restrictions on civil society organisations (CSOs). If it becomes law, CSOs will have to hand over lists of members, staff, assets and donors. They’ll be obliged to provide detailed data about their activities, funding sources and use of financial resources – the kind of information that has already been used to persecute and criminalise CSOs and activists. Similar legislation has been used in Nicaragua to shut down hundreds of CSOs and arrest opposition leaders, journalists and human rights defenders.

The law will ban CSOs from conducting ‘political activities’, an expression that lacks clear definition. It could easily be interpreted as prohibiting human rights work and scrutiny of the government. There’s every chance the law will be used against human rights organisations that cooperate with international human rights mechanisms. This would endanger civil society’s efforts to document the human rights situation, which produces vital inputs for the UN’s human rights system and the International Criminal Court, which has an ongoing case against Venezuela.

The law-making process has been shrouded in secrecy: the draft bill wasn’t made publicly available and wasn’t discussed at the National Assembly before being approved. The initiative was immediately denounced as a tool to control, restrict and potentially shut down CSOs and criminally prosecute their leaders and staff. If implemented, it could mean the end of civil society as we know it in Venezuela.

The UN and Venezuela

The previous High Commissioner, Michelle Bachelet, visited Venezuela in September 2019. She was criticised for taking a cautious approach. Moreover, most of the commitments in the agreement the government signed with her were never fulfilled.

Following that visit, the UN Human Rights Council established the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela (FFMV), tasked with investigating alleged human rights violations. In September 2022, the FFMV issued a report detailing the involvement of Venezuela’s intelligence agencies in repressing dissent, including by committing human rights violations such as torture and sexual violence.

But intimidation only grew as Türk’s visit approached, with some protest leaders put under surveillance, followed and detained.

Venezuelan CSOs called for a more energetic approach, but Türk followed his predecessor’s footsteps. His visit was characterised by secrecy and brevity, particularly in terms of the time dedicated to engaging with civil society.

Bachelet’s agreement with the government had included the presence of a two-person UN team to monitor the human rights situation and provide assistance and advice. This has now been extended for two years, but the details haven’t been made public.

Civil society activists have continued to work closely with the UN field office and wouldn’t want to risk its presence in the country, so to some extent they understand Türk’s caution in dealing with the Venezuelan government. But they also view his visit as a missed opportunity.

Türk’s statement to the media at the end of his visit was very much focused on the political and economic crises and healing divisions in society, with human rights ‘challenges’ occupying third place on his list of major concerns.

Alerta Venezuela, a Colombia-based human rights group, recognised the references Türk made to ‘new issues’ – such as the need for Venezuela to sign the Escazú Agreement on environmental rights and decriminalise abortion – alongside ongoing human rights violations such as extrajudicial executions, arbitrary arrests and torture. But it criticised crucial omissions and the UN’s apparent willingness to take government data at face value.

On the anti-NGO bill, the High Commissioner said he’d asked the government to take into account his comments but didn’t provide any information about their content, so it isn’t clear whether he advocated for amendments to a law that can only remain deeply flawed or for it to be shelved – which is what civil society wanted him to do.

The Venezuelan government has all along paid only lip service to cooperation with the UN and hasn’t kept its promises. Repression is only going to intensify in the run-up to the presidential election scheduled for 2024. Any strategy that involves trusting the government and hoping it will change its position seems doomed to failure.

High-level human rights advocacy needed

More energetic criticism came from the independent and less politically constrained FFMV, which expressed ‘deep concerns’ about the potential implications of the draft NGO law for civic and democratic space.

That is the stance civil society would like the High Commissioner for Human Rights to have taken. They want the office holder to be a human rights champion standing independent of states and unafraid of causing a stir.

Türk is only five months into his four-year term. Civil society will keep doing its best to engage, in the hope that the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights can become the human rights advocate the world – and Venezuela – need.

Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Senior Research Specialist, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

 

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