RIGHTS-KENYA: Rethinking ‘Return Home’

September 14, 2008 By

Global Geopolitics – Global News Blog – Global Analyst Online – IPS
Sunday, September 14, 2008

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2008.

Najum Mushtaq

NAIROBI, Sep 15 (IPS) – The most urgent test of the grand coalition in Kenya is resettlement of the estimated 350,000 or so people made homeless by the violence after the December 2007 elections. Launched in May, the government’s Operation ‘Return Home’ has been riddled with flaws and many experts on internal displacement argue it has exacerbated the crisis rather than resolving it.

Official admission of the multiple failures of Operation Rudi Nyumbani, as the plan is known in Kiswahili, has come from one of the deputy prime ministers, Uhuru Kenyatta, who was sent by President Kibaki to visit some resettlement sites earlier this month.

At a transitional camp in Gitwamba, in Trans-Nzoia district, a surprised Kenyatta said, ”(Provincial) administrators had convinced the president that the resettlement programme was almost complete, yet thousands of people are still living in camps.”

Kenyatta’s comment underlines the government’s insensitivity which Keffa Magenyi, national coordinator of the Kenya IDP Network, identifies as one of the major flaws of Operation Return Home.

”The idea behind Operation Rudi Nyumbani — that those forcibly displaced, most of them very poor, should go back to their homes and farms rather than getting resettled elsewhere — was in accordance with the spirit and intent of the national reconciliation process,” Magenyi told IPS. ”But it lacked strategic planning, coordination and consultation with the IDPs.”

Magenyi is himself a displaced person. On four different occasions since 1993, he has seen his home torched and family members killed or forced to flee to camps by political violence in the Rift Valley. Four months into Operation Rudi Nyumbani, they are still waiting to go home.

”There was no data mapping,” observes Magenyi, ”Where the IDPs had come from and where they should go. No data or census of the displaced people either. There are simple and effective methods of doing it. The government also did not use the data that was available with different organisations like the Kenya Red Cross. They used their own criteria.”

The government criteria, based on proof of land ownership, meant that several IDP groups, such as small traders, farm workers and other people without land, remained unacknowledged or outside the resettlement and compensation plan.

There were no clear deadlines for the various phases of the operation, just a political imperative to be seen to act. A lack of coordination between a special ministry set up for resettlement, working from the office of the president, and provincial administrations actually tasked to implement the plan also led to haphazard management.

So most of the camps are officially closed and most of the IDPs ticked as returned home; but the overwhelming majority have only been moved to camps somewhere else. The very few who have gone back face an unwelcoming, sometime hostile, response from their erstwhile tormentors.

Magenyi, whose network is collecting data from IDPs across the country, estimates that 15 percent of them are still in the original camps, 45 percent are now integrated IDPs (those living with relatives or in other rural and urban host communities of their co-ethnics, segregated along ethnic lines) and the remaining 40 percent have officially gone back, but are actually living in transit camps.

On September 3, the government launched its compensation plan for returning IDPs at one of those transit camps. The ceremony in the Rift Valley town of Molo came to a premature end, however, as about 5000 IDP protesters surrounded the officials, challenged the authenticity of the lists drawn up by the government and refused to take the money.

Angry youth demanded that government officials explain why it took so long to come to the camps with the compensation plan and that too with dubious lists. An IDP representative in Molo, Philip Kamau, questions the provincial administration’s beneficiary lists, which blocks out hundreds of genuine victims of post-election violence. The protesters forced the officials to withdraw the list and agree to make a new one.

On Sep. 9, protesting IDPs blocked the Eldoret-Nairobi highway and police had to use force to break up their demonstration against delayed payments, unreliable beneficiary lists and the lack of security. Dozens were reported to be injured.

The haphazard resettlement has also broken hundreds of families, who have been forced to leave children behind in camps. In the Rift Valley district of Molo, one of the main IDP camp sites, a Unicef report last month identified 1,752 cases of children separated from their families. The report also counted 850-900 child-headed households in Molo district.

”There must be many more in other camps. And it’s because Operation Rudi Nyumbani did not take into account the fact that there are IDP children who need to go to school but there is not enough security in the host communities they are returning to,” says Jacqueline Klopp, a founding member of the Nairobi-based Internal Displacement Policy and Advocacy Centre and a professor at New York’s Columbia University.

Klopp sees not only a lack of consultation with the IDPs but also a lack of respect for them. ”If you are an IDP, it means you are poor, stigmatised and you are a problem. It is not so. These displaced people are teachers, traders, skilled people who are citizens of this country.

”They are talented, capable people who have organised themselves. They say (to the government), ‘Come talk to us. We’ll tell you who can go back, which areas are safe for return and which are not, who among the IDPs do not want to go back, what are the alternatives.’ But the government has not done that,” Klopp told IPS.

Dangers of politicisation

A recent conclave of the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM), the party of Prime Minister Raila Odinga sharing power with President Mwai Kibaki, was embroiled in lengthy debates over what members of parliament from the Rift Valley should get in return for supporting Odinga.

Also on the agenda was a demand for amnesty for the ‘boys’ arrested for crimes during post-election violence in January and February 2008. ”No resettlement without amnesty” is a slogan being used by communities resisting the return of IDPs.

Under pressure, Odinga reiterated his support for amnesty, eliciting criticism from his partners in the grand coalition.

A number of ODM MPs and ministers have been blamed for mobilising the campaign of violence both in reports by civil society and during the hearings of the Waki commission of inquiry into post-election violence.

But the arrests extend beyond ODM supporters. Hundreds of pro-Kibaki Kikuyu youth are also behind bars for attacks. There are significant numbers of IDPs from a wide number of ethnic groups including Kalenjins, Kissis, Luos and Luhiyas.

”The violence and displacement in 2008 is different (from those in the 1990s). This time the IDPs include not the Kikuyus only, but also many other tribes. It is a cross-ethnic national issue,” says Magenyi of the IDP Network, who believes ODM cannot continue to isolate the issue amnesty for its supporters from the overall resettlement and reconciliation plan.

”The issue of amnesty for the arrested youth is being raised to divert attention away from the real culprits. The debate on whether to grant amnesty should start at the other end. It ought to be focused on the powerful politicians who had used those young boys to unleash the violence.”

Filed Under: Africa, Human Rights, Politics, Report

ENVIRONMENT: Cities Commit to Defend Biodiversity

September 14, 2008 By

Global Geopolitics – Global News Blog – Global Analyst Online – IPS
Sunday, September 14, 2008

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2008.

Kristin Palitza

DURBAN, Sep 15 (IPS) – Political representatives from 21 cities around the world have signed a declaration to protect and re-develop urban biodiversity in their towns. Each city committed to identifying five vital initiatives to conserve plants, animals and natural resources and put those plans into practice within the next 18 months.

From Africa, the Namibian town of Walvis Bay and four South African municipalities — Cape Town, Durban, Johannesburg and Ekurhuleni — are part of the Local Action for Biodiversity (LAB) project, which was kicked off in 2006 at the Sustainability World Congress by the International council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI).

”Cities occupy just two percent of the surface area of the planet, but absorb 75 percent of the world’s natural resources,” says Sebastian Winkler, director of ICLEI’s Count Down 2010 project.

Each participating city will select five projects to enhance biodiversity according to its particular natural environment. ”The strategy and action plans are different for each city because northern and southern cities have very different needs,” explains Kobie Brand, regional director of ICLEI Africa.

In Europe, for example, cities struggle with the fact that they have little biodiversity left and are likely to aim their projects at restoring nature. ”But in Southern Africa, the focus is more on protecting what we have, with the core issues being invasive species, climate change and habitat loss due to urban expansion,” says Brand. ”Most of the fastest growing cities in the world are in Africa.”

The Durban municipality plans to develop a green by-law to protect threatened species and list invasive plants. The City of Cape Town will focus on conserving its lowlands.

By the end of 2009, the 21 LAB cities will submit an assessment report to evaluate their progress in protecting urban biodiversity, just in time for the International Year of Biodiversity in 2010. By then, Brand expects that LAB, currently a pilot project, will have doubled in size. ”We hope to sign up at least another 21 cities by next March,” she says.

Brand says the success of the LAB project will depend on support from both politicians and environmental activists: ”We need the political will behind the projects to make them sustainable. It is key for cities to realise that we can’t lose our biodiversity base and enable proactive steps to be taken to preserve it.

”We still need to shift towards long-term, sustainable thinking and unlock the potential for economic growth and job creation through environmental initiatives,” she added.

Durban city manager Mike Sutcliffe agrees with Brand, pointing out that developing countries like South Africa and Namibia need to balance the triple bottom line of economics, social issues and biodiversity to achieve sustainable growth. Cities struggle to find an equilibrium between attracting industrial investment and job creation, while addressing the population’s social needs, such as housing and sanitation and, at the same time, making sure to conserve the environment.

”We are often looking at short-term profits only. It is most difficult to achieve this balance,” admits Sutcliffe. ”Our challenge is to balance growing industrialisation with quality of life.”

Environmental issues have been particularly neglected in South Africa. ”The environment is still the third leg after economic and social development in terms of importance,” says Richard Boon, manager of biodiversity planning of the Durban municipality. To change this, not only political buy-in is needed but also the commitment of each and every citizen.

”We need to demonstrate the benefits (of conservation) to the people so that we can link service delivery to biodiversity,” he adds.

”In South Africa, economic development, infrastructure and service delivery have been competing directly with biodiversity,” agrees George Davis, deputy director of the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI).

For example, there has been a big push for more housing — an important social service in a country like South Africa, where many poor families live in shacks — but new housing projects have often been constructed without regard for the environment.

”We need to change mindsets and start balancing social needs with the value of our ecosystems and species,” says Davis.

Although South Africa has progressive environmental policies and laws, the country has been slow in their implementation. ”We don’t have the budgets, human resources or regulatory frameworks to put them into practice,” explains Davis. ”The political commitment (to biodiversity) is not developed yet.”

South African politicians are only slowly waking up to the importance of conservation for long-term economical growth. ”Biodiversity in an urban context never had political commitment. We need to reformulate our environmental strategy and get budgetary buy-in,” admits Cape Town deputy mayor Grant Haskin. ”We need to think global but act local. Everyone has a responsibility, so does every city.”

One of Cape Town’s core initiatives will be the protection of its plant biodiversity. The municipality, which measures only four percent of South Africa’s landmass, has half of the country’s plant biodiversity, and more than 70 percent of the 9,000 species are endemic, not occurring anywhere else in the world.

Yet, only now have municipal authorities woken up to the need of preserving this natural habitat and urgent action is necessary. ”(We are) on the brink of a biodiversity mega-disaster as we have 13 plant species that are already extinct and 319 threatened plant species,” warns Haskin.

One of the reasons that nature conservation has been slow is that South African municipalities face numerous implementation challenges, caused by complicated procedures, lack of accurate biodiversity data, resource limitations, zoning and failure to integrate plans and frameworks of different local government departments. For example, municipalities do not have dedicated conservation budgets.

”The big challenge is implementation. There has been lots of talk, but nothing much has been done on the ground yet. We all have problems with budgets and are underfunded,” says Julia Wood, biodiversity manager at the City of Cape Town. She stressed the fact that urgent action needed to be taken to conserve the environment: ”Cape Town is currently losing twelve square kilometres each year in natural areas. Hopefully, LAB will help to change that.”

Filed Under: Environment, News

VIETNAM: Rising Mekong Tests ‘Living With Floods’ Strategy

September 14, 2008 By

Global Geopolitics – Global News Blog – Global Analyst Online – IPS
Sunday, September 14, 2008

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2008.

Tran Dinh Thanh Lam

HO CHI MINH CITY, Sep 14 (IPS) – Rising water levels, the result of heavy monsoon rains across Vietnam’s southern Mekong Delta, are sounding alarm bells throughout the country, and proving to be a major test for its flood control strategy.

Much of northern Vietnam has already been hit by flash floods and landslides.

”Southern provinces should be ready to cope with the same situation,” Vo Thanh, deputy director of the An Giang Meteorology and Weather Forecast Centre told the local media. An Giang province is one of Vietnam’s main rice-growing areas.

Vietnam is prone to heavy rainfall and tropical storms during the May through September monsoon season.

According to the Vietnam’s Central Committee for Flood and Storm Control, floods and storms have become stronger and more destructive over the past three years.

Floods towards the end of 2007 were followed by a rare prolonged cold spell. This, in turn, was followed by unexpected scorching weather and storms in early 2008, and then by recent tropical Typhoon Kammuri.

These weather conditions pose a major challenge to Vietnam’s flood warning system, part of a broader strategy adopted by the government called ‘Living with Floods’.

The strategy attempts to provide early warning of floods to mitigate the negative impacts and enable communities to take advantage of the potential economic benefits the annual floods bring, because they are part of a natural cycle on this region.

In early August, inhabitants of the northern mountainous provinces of Lao Cai and Yen Bai, where warning systems against severe flooding were established in 2006, were taken by surprise by landslides and floods triggered by Typhoon Kammuri.

A total of 129 people were killed, thousands of hectares of crops submerged and 189 bridges swept away.

”The new pilot flood warning stations appeared to be inadequate,” Le Thanh Du, deputy director of Lao Cai Department of Agriculture and Rural Development,” told the media.

The situation could also become critical in the South. ”This year, floods in the Mekong Delta could go beyond Alarm Level Three,” said Thanh.

Vietnamese meteorologists use alarm levels to indicate the degree of danger that flooding poses to rivers and dykes and the communities near them. Alarm Level Three indicates a critical situation.

News of villagers in Northern Thailand being forced out of their homes by recent fierce floods without receiving any warning from local flood-warning systems worry Nguyen Van, a meteorologist based in Can Tho in the Mekong Delta. ”We should be constantly on the alert,” he told IPS.

Meteorologists say the complex weather — tropical depressions and storms — will pour torrential rains to the Mekong Delta and add more water than usual to the on-going seasonal upstream floods.

”The weather is definitely very bad,” said Nguyen Thi Xuan Lan, deputy director of the South Vietnam Weather Bureau.

”From now to October, there will be around four more tropical depressions or typhoons,” Thanh told the media.

”We should therefore make sure that our flood warning system works properly,” Nguyen Van said. He added that communities living along the Mekong River are better prepared to deal with floods than in the past. ”People know they cannot evade the annual flooding, so they manage to take the challenge and make the most of it,” Van said.

About 20 percent of Vietnam’s 86.5 million people live in the Mekong River Delta, which produces 50 percent of staple food and 60 percent of fish for the entire country. The region accounts for 27 percent of the total GDP of Vietnam.

Local people consider it a disaster when there is no flooding. However, they are also concerned when serious flooding claims human lives and causes economic damage.

‘Normal’ floods therefore are welcome, for they bring sediments to rice fields, help dilute soleplate, develop aquaculture, and balance the ecology.

”Flood waters clean up the fields from pests and rats, and bring more fertile soil. This will yield farmers a good winter-spring harvest,” Van said. ”Floods in the Mekong happen every year, so people have learned to make use of ‘normal’ floods while taking suitable measures to prevent possible disastrous ones,” he said.

In 2000, the Delta experienced the worst floods in four decades. Waters rose to more than five metres, killing 500 people, more than 300 of them children.

Since then the government has launched the ‘Living with Floods’ approach. In addition to better flood warning systems, it included the building of hundreds of safe residential areas in seven flooded provinces and enhancements to the drainage capacity of local rivers.

Farmers have been advised to restructure their cropping calendar, such as planting short-term, summer-autumn rice seedlings so that the main harvest comes before the floods. They can also take advantage of rising water to cultivate water-borne plants, catch fish and shrimp or take up traditional crafts.

”So far, some 80 percent of people living in dangerous zones have been relocated to safe residential clusters,” Van said.

In last year’s flood season, An Giang earned 1.5 trillion dong (93 million US dollars) from farming and fishing. ”The ‘Living with Floods’ policy has yielded good results,” Van pointed out.

”There remain some 30,000 families living along the rivers that have not been relocated to safe residential areas,” he added. ”They will face the risk of landslides if the coming floods turn into dangerous ones.”

Filed Under: News

ASIA PACIFIC: MDGs – Children Under Five Straggling

September 13, 2008 By

Global Geopolitics – Global News Blog – Global Analyst Online – IPS
Saturday, September 13, 2008

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2008.

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Sep 12 (IPS) – Children under five years across Asia and the Pacific are being left behind in the race to reduce poverty even as the region boasts impressive strides in meeting major United Nations development goals.

The region’s economic gains, led by powerhouse China, will enable it to reach the first of the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), reducing poverty by 2015, states a new report released by the Asian Development Bank and two U.N bodies, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP).

‘’Its greatest success has been with poverty, for which the region as a whole is ‘on track’ to meet the 2015 targets of halving the proportion of people living in extreme poverty,” states ‘A Future Within Reach
2008′, a publication released this week. It comes ahead of a summit of some 100 heads of states and governments at the United Nations in New York later this month.

The number of people living below the global poverty line of one US dollar a day stood at 641 million in 2004, down from the 1.9 billion people living in absolute poverty across the region in 1990, adds the 77-page report. This was attributed to ‘’rapid reductions in South-east
Asia and China.”

Achieving the eight MDGs with a specific deadline was a commitment made by the world’s leaders at a 2000 summit at the U.N. The others include achieving universal primary education, promote gender equality to empower women, reduce under-five child mortality and improve maternal
health, including reducing the maternal mortality ratio.

Yet the Asia-Pacific’s achievements on the poverty front have not been even, as the figures of malnourished children reveal. In South-east Asia, for instance, one out of every four children under five years are
malnourished. ‘’This is a middle-income region and the number of underweight children are the same as Sub-Saharan Africa,” said Noeleen Heyzer, executive secretary of the Bangkok-based ESCAP, at a press conference.

‘’This is simply unacceptable,” she added. ‘’It shows the uneven progress across countries.”

The number of undernourished children in South Asia is higher, nearly every other child under five. ‘’Almost 50 percent of children are underweight in Southern Asia. This region alone accounts for more than half the world’s undernourished children,” added a U.N. background
note. Currently, there are close to 140 million children under five years across the globe who lack proper nutrients.

The Asia-Pacific region, which accounts for close to two-thirds of the world’s underweight children, ‘’is considerably behind its target for 2015,” states the publication of the U.N. bodies and the Manila-based
international financial institution. ‘’Twenty-eight percent (of the region’s) under-five children are underweight.”

Poor feeding practices is a major reason behind such a disturbing trend, noticeable in urban slum communities and among the rural poor, states the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). ‘’Countries in the region have some of the lowest exclusive breastfeeding and early introduction
of breast milk in the world.”

‘’Half of Asia-Pacific infants were not exclusively breastfed during first six months of life and almost one quarter lacked full coverage (two doses) of vitamin A supplementation,” it adds.

‘’Part of the problem is awareness. Mothers are not aware of the importance of breastfeeding,” Shantha Bloemen, spokeswoman for UNICEF’s East Asia and Pacific regional office, told IPS. ‘’They mix sugar and water to give the children to drink. And if they use unsafe water, that
can lead to diarrhoea.”

In addition, women have been influenced by companies marketing breast milk substitutes, like the powdered formula milk, adds Bloeman. ‘’The advertising of formula is having a huge impact in South-east Asia, because it is a growing market for the companies.”

The economic pull, attracting rural women to work in urban centres, has also impeded growth in children. So, too, the need for women to work in jobs that takes them away from breastfeeding, as is the case in countries like Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines.

Children born to mothers who are anaemic and underweight end up being trapped in a ‘’vicious cycle,” says Bloemen. ‘’Women who are breastfeeding need to get the right sort of diet, but that is not happening. They also need the required micronutrients, such as folic acid.”

Consequently, malnourished children are coming in the way of the region achieving its fourth MDG — reducing child mortality. ‘’Globally, child mortality has fallen to a record low, but the situation in Asia and the
Pacific is still of great concern,” states the new report. ‘’Some four million children in the region die before they reach the age of five.”

‘’Out of 47 countries for which data are available, 15 are ‘off-track,’ and several have regressed,” the report reveals. ‘’The pattern is similar for infant mortality.”

According to the U.N., ‘’Malnutrition is estimated to be an underlying cause in more than one third of all deaths in children under five. The decrease in child malnutrition has been slow.”

Globally, the number of children under five who are malnourished was 26 percent in 2006, down from 33 percent in 1990, according to the world body. ‘’By 2006, the number of children in developing countries who were
underweight still exceeded 140 million.”

If at all, the only achievement where children have gained most in the MDG campaign is in primary education, the second goal. ‘’Primary education is one of the region’s great successes: almost all countries have net primary enrolment rations above 90 percent and for many the
ration is approaching 100 percent,” states the report.

Filed Under: Asia, Development, Poverty, Report

SELF-STYLED INDIAN MUJAHIDEEN STRIKES IN NEW DELHI

September 13, 2008 By

INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR— PAPER NO.444

Global Geopolitics – Global News Blog – Global Analyst Online – IPS
Saturday, September 13, 2008

Copyright © B. Raman – South Asia Analysis Group
www.southasiaanalysis.org

B.RAMAN

The so-called Indian Mujahideen (IM) has once again, through an E-mail sent to some media offices, claimed the responsibility for a series of five explosions in three crowded market places of New Delhi between 6-45 PM and 7 PM on September 13,2008. At least nine persons are reported to have been killed and many injured. The message is reported to have been sent five minutes before the explosions took place. It speaks of nine Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) planted in different places. Five of these have exploded. Three are reported to have been detected by the police before the explosion could take place. One remains unaccounted for.

2.One has to await details of evidence regarding the IEDs before one could comment on their similarity,if any, with the earlier blasts in three cities of Uttar Pradesh last November, in Jaipur in May and in Bangalore and Ahmedabad in July, but the means of communication used to claim responsibility for the blasts and to provide authenticity of the claim are the same.The use of E-mails signed by similar kuniyats (assumed names such as al-Hindi or al-Arabi) and similar-sounding E-mail addresses indicate the same organisation has been responsible.

3. It is already quite clear that a wide area pan-Indian network of terrorists has come up in our midst and has managed to train a number of Indian Muslims not only in assembling IEDs, but also in clandestine methods of operation and communication. From what one heard of the contents of the message from the IM about the New Delhi blasts, there is an element of bravado in it. It taunts the security experts for not being able to establish who are behind these messages. It shows a certain confidence that the police are not yet on the trail of those sending these messages.

4. The success of the UP Police in identifying some of those involved in the blasts of last November did not prevent the blasts that followed in other cities. Similarly, the success of the Ahmedabad and Jaipur Police in arresting many of those responsible for the blasts in their cities has not come in the way of the successful strike in New Delhi.

5. Normally, timely preventive intelligence comes either from intercepts of communications and/or penetration of the terrorist organisations. The IM has apparently been using the Internet for its internal communications and not telephones. If so, this highlights our inadequacies in intercepting Internet communications. Since we still do not know the identity and organisational structure of the IM, penetrating it would have been understandably difficult. We were presuming before the UP blasts of last November that all terrorist strikes must be the work of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) or the Pakistan/Bangladesh based Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI). Since November last, we have been focussing on the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI). It is possible that elements from all these organisations are involved. It is equally possible that there are other Indian Muslim elements who had not come to the notice of the police earlier/. It is important to keep an open mind and establish the composition and structure of the IM. Only then penetration would be possible.

6.Preventive intelligence also comes fom the thorough interrogation of those arrested in connection with the previous blasts. All the arrests made so far, whether in UP or Jaipur or Ahmedabad , were mainly of those involved in those blasts. They apparently did not enable us to identify and arrest those trained with a capability for assembling IEDS, but who had not yet participated in any terrorist strike.

7. It should be apparent by now firstly, that we have only identified the tip of the jihadi iceberg in our midst. The iceberg itself remains unexposed. Secondly, we have not yet been able to identify the command and control of the IM. Thirdly, like Al Qaeda, the IM is divided into a number of autonomous cells each capable of operating independently without being affected by the identification and neutralisation of the cells involved in previous blasts.

8. All these years, our focus was on the training camps for jihadi terrorists in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Interrogation of those arrested since the beginning of this year has brought out that many training camps had been held in different parts of India by the SIMI. We were apparently oblivious of the details of these camps and the identities of those trained. It is important to have a common investigation cell for the whole of India to identify the various elements involved in this wide area network and neutralise them. Piecemeal investigation in different States ruled by different political parties each with its own partisan perception and agenda will result in our continuing to bleed at the hands of this network (13-9-08)

(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

Filed Under: Asia, Featured, Terrorism

BOLIVIA: Deaths in the Amazon

September 13, 2008 By

Global Geopolitics – Global News Blog – Global Analyst Online – IPS
Saturday, September 13, 2008

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2008.

Franz Chávez

LA PAZ, Sep 13 (IPS) – The Bolivian government declared martial law in the northern province of Pando after as many as 15 indigenous supporters of President Evo Morales were killed by rightwing protesters near the town of Cobija.

A group of public employees of the provincial government of Pando, in the hands of the rightwing opposition, intercepted the victims as they were heading to a meeting of Morales supporters from Amazon jungle communities, where they planned to organise resistance against the pro-autonomy demonstrators who have been occupying public offices and holding protests over the past few days.

The killings occurred in the context of a wave of demonstrations that broke out on Tuesday, when members of the rightwing Santa Cruz Youth Union (UCJ) took control of public offices in the central Bolivian city of Santa Cruz, after breaking past the military and police cordons protecting the buildings.

The pro-autonomy movement led by Santa Cruz Governor Rubén Costas and backed by the regional governments of Beni, Pando, Tarija and Chuquisaca, which with Santa Cruz make up Bolivia’s relatively wealthy ”eastern crescent,” has in practice put an economic stranglehold on the country by blocking the main highways and partially cutting off supplies of natural gas to Brazil and Argentina.

On Thursday, leftwing President Morales, the first indigenous president in the history of Bolivia, accused groups of landowners in the eastern lowlands provinces of ”financing a criminal mentality,” and warned that ”patience also has a limit.”

The Roberto Galindo hospital in Cobija presented a dramatic scene as emergency room personnel tended those injured in the attack. They had deep slash cuts from machetes and axes, as well as bullet wounds from shotguns and rifles.

Some of the dead had bullet wounds from firearms used in the ”ambush” of the government supporters, which took place in the early hours of Thursday morning with the goal of preventing a meeting in the small town of Filadelfia, 50 kilometres south of Cobija, according to the local representative on the Comité de Vigilancia (Citizen’s Watch committee), Leyla Tudela.

Former Mayor of Cobija and leader of the Movimiento Amazónico de Renovación Democrática (MAR, Amazon Movement for Democratic Renewal) Miguel Becerra told a local radio station that it was ”a massacre of the campesinos (indigenous peasants), some of whom were run over by a truck belonging to the governor’s office.”

For their part, supporters of the governor of Pando, Leopoldo Fernández, accused Becerra of instigating the violence.

The Deputy Minister of Social Movements, Sacha Llorenti, a close Morales adviser, said the victims were shot in an armed attack by ”hired killers” in what he described as ”an outright massacre” in Cobija.

Llorenti blamed the incident on Governor Fernández, a rightwing landowner with a long track record in Bolivian politics.

Fernández called for a truce in the conflict to pacify the province. But in response to the national government’s statements, he said he would be ”the last to walk away from the fight.”

On Friday, the executive branch asked Congress to take action against Governor Fernández for the Porvenir massacre, according to the government news agency Agencia Boliviana de Información (ABI).

Former President Jorge Quiroga, the head of the rightwing Social and Democratic Power (Podemos) party, appealed to the Morales administration and called on both sides of the conflict to rein in their groups of organised activists.

”This is an entreaty, as an ex-president I know that this conflict can spill over and run out of control, causing many deaths,” he said.

Violence continued Thursday in the slum neighbourhood of Plan Tres Mil on the outskirts of Santa Cruz, which is basically populated by Aymara and Quechua Indians from Bolivia’s impoverished western highlands provinces.

UJC groups attacked a neighbourhood market where indigenous people sell their wares, and local residents showed up to protect the vendors.

Native people who have settled in the neighbourhood, originally from the western provinces of La Paz, Oruro and Potosí, are in fear of being attacked by the radical rightwing youth groups.

Meanwhile, in the town of Yacuiba, on the border with Argentina, a group of demonstrators swarmed a natural gas facility that exports fuel to Buenos Aires, and managed to cut off supplies.

Bolivia exports six million cubic metres a day of natural gas to Argentina, Bolivia’s second largest gas export market after Brazil.

An attack on the gas pipeline to Brazil Wednesday reduced the volume of gas flow from 26 to 23 million cubic metres per day, creating concern among diplomats at the Brazilian embassy in La Paz.

Filed Under: Latin America, News, Politics

Q&A: Zimbabwean Women Have Had ‘‘More” Trauma After Independence

September 13, 2008 By

Global Geopolitics – Global News Blog – Global Analyst Online – IPS
Saturday, September 13, 2008

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2008.

Interview with Women of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA) National Coordinator Jenni Williams

CAPE TOWN, Sep 13 (IPS) – Zimbabwean women have experienced higher levels of trauma, including violence and lack of food, after the country’s independence from Britain in 1980 than before.

This is one of the findings of a study conducted by the civic movement Women of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA) on trauma in the collapsing southern African state.

The study reveals the complexities of the emergency caused by the political and economic crisis. Trauma has not only been inflicted through direct violence (beatings, torture and rape) but by food deprivation and a lack of access to medical treatment and shelter.

State violence, economic decline and the destruction of social capital have had severe consequences for women.

According to the report, most women interviewed experienced more incidences of trauma after the country’s independence from Britain in 1980 than before independence.

Of the 1,983 WOZA members interviewed, 14 percent experienced a lack of food in 1979, compared to a staggering 66 percent between 1980 and 1999. While nine percent did not have access to medical treatment in 1979, this figure shot up to 24 percent between 1980 and 1999. Similarly, while six percent did not have access to shelter in 1979, 12 percent reported a lack of shelter between 1980 and 1999.

From 2000 the incidences of ‘‘experienced trauma” were annually higher than incidences of ‘‘witnessed trauma”. Children, who are often in the presence of their mothers during these incidents, are equally victimised. Stephanie Nieuwoudt spoke to Jenni Williams, national coordinator and one of the founders of WOZA. WOZA is the Ndebele word for ‘‘come forward”.

IPS: How do women survive financially in a country where the price of a loaf of bread is millions of Zimbabwean dollars?

Jenni Williams: That is the trillion dollar question. The answer is that we simply do not know how it is done. In Zimbabwe, it is a huge achievement if one manages to send your children to bed at night with one meal in their bellies.

I was at a conference in South Africa where I ate three meals a day at the hotel where I was staying. I felt sick. My system could not handle three meals a day. Zimbabweans do not eat that much any more. The meals we have are substandard.

Yet women survive. They are scavenging all the time. The informal trade is still very much alive. A woman will, from somewhere, find a few vegetables to sell at the side of the road and when they are gone she will look everywhere to find more to sell.

Some people go shopping in neighbouring countries and bring back goods to sell in Zimbabwe or they look for piece work. They survive from day to day.

The efforts by (Zimbabwean president) Robert Mugabe to criminalise informal trade have to stop because it is an important part of the economy. For thousands of people in Zimbabwe it is the only way they can survive.

It is mostly women who are involved in informal trade. They are the ones who support their families financially. The irony is that many of the top brass in Zimbabwe who support the actions against illegal traders probably come from homes where their mothers were informal traders.

Women are still the backbone of rural agriculture, but they are mostly forced to hand over their crops to the army.

Zimbabwe has great agricultural potential. It was one of the most important agricultural countries in Africa. It is an agricultural giant which has been forced into unconsciousness. If women and other farmers can be supported with inputs — seeds, fertiliser and so forth — there can be a quick recovery.

The people in Zimbabwe are ill. Their health is jeopardised by eating irregularly and when they do eat, it is substandard produce. Many are HIV positive and suffer from opportunistic HIV-related illnesses. But there are too few people to care for the sick.

Many doctors and other healthcare workers have left the country. There is no medicine. It is even difficult to find a headache tablet. The hospitals are like ghost towns.

Zimbabwe was one of the most educated nations in Africa. Robert Mugabe promised free primary education but the education system is in shambles.

Stress, trauma and illness are killing people. The life expectancy of a woman is 34 and that of a man 37. I am 46 and there are not many people of my age around.

IPS: What has been the most surprising finding of the research WOZA did on the trauma suffered by Zimbabwean women?

Jenni Williams: On average we found that violence increased more than three times since 2000. People suffered an average of more than 16 events of trauma since 2000, compared to 2.9 in 1979 and 5.8 from 1980 to 1999.

The increase seems improbable when one remembers that the 1970s was a time of open struggle. Yet the figures prove that the increase since 2000 was dramatic. This is under the rule of a man who was once regarded as a liberation war hero. History will judge Robert Mugabe harshly for this.

It is also surprising that when women do get counselling, they prefer to discuss issues of displacement rather than their experiences of violence and torture.

IPS: The report focused to a large extent on trauma suffered by women in Matabeleland, in the south of the country. Why?

Jenni Williams: My generation suffered under ‘‘Gukurahundi” û the 1980s conflict between government forces and opposition movements in Matabeleland. Over 10,000 Ndebeles in this region were executed by government forces. In one case 55 men and women were shot and killed in one day.

People were burnt alive in their huts or executed publicly. They were suspected of being members of the opposition party Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU). These people suffered a lot of trauma.

There is huge support for the opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, in Matabeleland. The people are ready to be mobilised.

IPS: The members of WOZA are often beaten and thrown into jail. You were arrested in March this year and a court case is still ongoing. In August you were arrested again but released after being severely beaten.

Jenni Williams: WOZA has more than 60,000 members. It is a mass-based organisation. But members know when they sign up that they run a risk of being arrested and beaten.

We have workshops training people on how to cope with reprisals. The members are totally committed even though they know of the high risk.

Nine of our members were arrested in August on the charge of malicious damage to property after they wrote our WOZA slogan, ‘‘Woza Moya” (come healing spirit) on a road in Bulawayo.

I was arrested along with 13 others in May when we protested against the election violence in Zimbabwe. I was kept in prison for six weeks on the charge that I would mobilise a Kenya-style uprising against the government during the run-off election.

I was freed after (Movement for Democratic Change leader) Morgan Tsvangirai withdrew from the run-offs. This case is still pending.

Ironically we view police stations as the final place to get a particular message across. When we are imprisoned and it becomes news, we know the message has hit home û people from around the world take notice of what is happening in Zimbabwe.

We often do not get arrested because the police officers are the sons of members. They know that we are a community-based movement who address issues which are Zimbabwe’s issues and not just women’s issues.

However, even though some police officers understand what we do, the police remain the main perpetrators of violence against us. When they arrest us, we focus on telling them that we are fighting for a better Zimbabwe with social justice for us and them. WOZA has a history of six years of non-violent protest.

The people of Zimbabwe live in fear all the time, regardless of who they are. There is a deep awareness that one can be arrested at any moment and tortured and killed. Our study revealed that repeated exposure to trauma has a cumulative effect. Some 53 percent of the women who were surveyed had scores indicative of a psychological disorder.

WOZA is investigating models of peace and reconciliation in Rwanda and South Africa. Can one really start thinking about healing while Robert Mugabe is still in power?

It is of the utmost importance that the people of Zimbabwe are healed. If healing does not take place, we will continue to have a violent society. In South Africa we are looking at what the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions achieved and in Rwanda we are looking at the Gacaca courts.

WOZA was founded because of the oppressive regime of Mugabe and, in spite of him, it grew into a massive organisation. We need a structure to promote the agenda of healing. In the meantime we have ways and means of accessing people and helping them on a one-to-one basis.

In the long term we hope to engage the security forces as well. We need some form of reconciliation with the same people who are responsible for the trauma and atrocities.

By openly writing peace slogans like ‘‘Woza Moya” on the streets and marching against oppression, we show the next generation that one can fight in a non-violent way against a terrible situation.

*****
+ Women of Zimbabwe Arise (http://www.wozazimbabwe.org)
+ TRADE-SOUTHERN AFRICA:The Deal’s Signed But Where’s The Action? (http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=43855)

Filed Under: Interview, Report

CULTURE-NIGERIA: Writers, Film-makers Defy Censors

September 12, 2008 By

Global Geopolitics – Global News Blog – Global Analyst Online – IPS
Friday, September 12, 2008

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2008.

Amina Koki Gizo

KANO, Sep 12 (IPS) – ”I don’t sell cocaine,” says the video vendor in Kano’s Rimi market when I ask for Adam Zango’s music video CD Bahaushiya. He is not referring to the white powder, but instead a new illegal substance — Hausa films that have not passed through the Kano State Censors Board.

The video CD I’m asking for is an especially hot drug: a series of six music videos satirising corrupt old men, lamenting fickle girlfriends, and featuring dancing Hausa girls. The musician, Adam Zango, also an actor and director in the Hausa film industry, was arrested and jailed for three months for releasing the collection during a ban on Hausa filmmaking in Kano.

The censors board in Nigeria’s northern Kano State was instituted in 2001 after the controversial implementation of Islamic shari’a law in Kano State. Film-making was at first banned outright, but the filmmakers’ association of Northern Nigeria (MOPPAN) suggested a ”review” board as a compromise measure, which allowed the industry to continue, though with certain restrictions on language, dress and ”close dancing between men and women.” (Five of the ten laws were specifically related to women’s clothing or interaction with men.)

The censors board and the film industry underwent an even more dramatic transformation in August 2007, when a private mobile phone video of a popular Hausa actress and her lover having sex was leaked to the public. The actress, Maryam ”Hiyana”, and the man who had surreptitiously recorded the video immediately went into hiding.

Within days, hundreds of black market entrepreneurs in Kano, the centre of the Hausa-language film industry, were charging thousands of naira to see what was being called ”the first Hausa blue film”. Outraged religious and political leaders called for an indefinite suspension of the Kano film industry and the mass expulsion of other performers suspected of ”improper” behavior.

By late September, the Kano State Censorship Board, under the leadership of its new Director General, Abubakar Rabo Abdulkarim, had issued new, stricter guidelines to both filmmakers and writers in the state. Article 97 of the censorship regulations states that ”Any person who… publicly exhibits any indecent stage show or performance, play or any show or performance tending to corrupt public morals, is guilty of an offence and is liable to imprisonment for 3 months or to a fine or to both such imprisonment and fine.”

The imprisonment clause has been put into effect several times. Besides Adam Zango, who was imprisoned in September 2007, pioneering Hausa director and former Kano State gubernatorial candidate Hamisu Lamido Iyan Tama was jailed after copies of his film Tsintsiya were impounded from a video shop in Kano in May 2008. He was accused of not registering his company Iyan Tama Multimedia with the censorship board.

(A court case reveals that the company had, in fact, registered and paid the required fees.) Ironically, the director was arrested the day of his return from the Zuma Film Festival in Abuja where Tsintsiya had won an award for Best Film on Social Issue.

The new censorship regime has had the effect of suppressing Hausa filmmaking in Kano, Northern Nigeria’s largest city. The exact size of the industry is hard to determine, but a 2002 study by the national censors board counted 133 Hausa films produced between January and August of that year, making the Hausa film industry second in size only to Yoruba.

Although filmmakers are still doing post-production in Kano, locations have been moved to neighboring states, the majority now being shot in neighbouring Kaduna State. Filmmakers bypass the Kano State Censors Board by marking ”Not for sale in Kano” on their films and selling them in other states.

Following the exodus of the Hausa film-making scene from Kano State, Malam Rabo, the director general of the censors board, turned his attention to the writers in the state.

On Friday, August 8, pamphlets from a mysterious ”Organization for Islamic Values Protection” were distributed in the mosques around Kano claiming that writers in Kano State are agents of foreigners in a plot to destroy the Islamic upbringing of children and promote immorality. The flier specifically called for the restraint of Ibrahim Sheme, an award winning Hausa novelist to be ”restrained”. According to his blog, Sheme has also received anonymous death threats.

The standoff between writers and the censorship board is escalating. A letter directed to the five writers’ organisations in Kano dated 12 August confirmed a request first made in June 5 for each writer in the state to register individually with the board before they can publish or distribute writing. The requirements included submission of a comprehensive list of association membership, bio-data and past publications of every member, and individual subject files to be created for each author.

In response, the writers’ associations, under the leadership of Ado Ahmad Gidan Dabino, chairman of Kano Association of Nigerian Authors, went ”on strike” for three weeks. The strike ended on 16 August, with the writer’s associations promising, in a general communiqué, that ”by next week new titles would flood the market.”

In an email update to the Association of Nigerian Authors, Dr Yusuf Adamu called on members to demand Rabo’s sacking. ”Write in the papers please, people write… Those of you from the north should please write to your State Governors and complain about it.”

After an August 25 meeting with both state and national leaders of the ANA, the censorship board agreed to require registration of writers’ associations rather than individuals.

Novelist Sa’adatu Baba speaks passionately against the censorship board, ”I want the governor of Kano State to sack Malam Rabo from his seat. We need a reasonable person, a person who respects literature, a person who can judge us both writers and filmmakers, because I know that if we have somebody who loves literature, he cannot do this to us.”

Her passion is echoed in the responses of other artists, from Kano ANA chair Ado Ahmad Gidan Dabino, who has said in a radio interview that the government should build a new wing of the prison for writers, to Nazir ”Ziriums” Hausawa, a hip hop musician who recorded a song requesting God to send plagues of piles to those who keep them from producing their art. Adam. Zango has responded to his 2007 imprisonment with a new song calling Rabo a donkey.

Such songs are banned from the radio, but pass virally from handset to handset.

The suppression of creativity in Nigeria is hardly a new phenomenon. Writers have been imprisoned and even executed like novelist and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa. However, the popular imagination combined with the subversive possibilities of such new technologies point to the impossibility of the task undertaken by the Censorship Board.

Filmmakers travel out of state to film and bring the digital tapes back in to edit, taking them back out of state to market. Writers, kept from publishing articles in local newspapers, repeat sentiments on blogs and pass digital photos of correspondence with the censors via email listserves.

Bus drivers plaster the windows of their ramshackle vehicles with stickers of ”porn-star” Hiyana. Young people cite watching movies as inspiration for using their phones to record conversations with corrupt lecturers and authority figures who they then expose as hypocrites.

In the Clarendon lectures given at Oxford University in 1996, formerly imprisoned Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o theorised that whereas the state seeks to silence alternate stories, ”art tries to restore voices to the land. It tries to give voice back to the silenced”. In Northern Nigeria , despite state-sponsored bans, book burnings, and imprisonments, it is becoming difficult to silence those voices in the first place.

Filed Under: Africa, Politics, Report

POLITICS-ZIMBABWE: Power-Sharing Deal Signed

September 12, 2008 By

Global Geopolitics – Global News Blog – Global Analyst Online – IPS
Friday, September 12, 2008

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2008.

Stanley Kwenda

HARARE, Sep 12 (IPS) – Zimbabwe’s political leaders signed a long overdue power sharing deal late on Thursday night.

The deal follows four consecutive days of talks between the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) and the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) at a Harare hotel.

With economic and social conditions in the country continuing to deteriorate, Zimbabweans welcomed the news.

”This is what we have been praying for in a long time because it’s the only way that our country was to go forward but to be honest this is too good to be true,” said Chenesai Musundure, a Harare primary school teacher.
[Read more...]

Filed Under: Africa, Featured, Peace Efforts, Politics

ISI-SPONSORED ATTACK ON INDIAN EMBASSY IN KABUL BOOMERANGS

September 12, 2008 By

INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR: PAPER NO.440

Global Geopolitics – Global News Blog – Global Analyst Online – IPS
Friday, September 12, 2008

Copyright © B. Raman – South Asia Analysis Group
www.southasiaanalysis.org

B.RAMAN

(To be read in continuation of my earlier paper of September 4,2008, titled “US Special Forces Launch Hit & Withdraw Raid in S. Waziristan” at http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/papers29/paper2832.html )

The car bomb explosion outside the Indian Embassy in Kabul on July 7,2008, has boomeranged on Pakistan. According to reliable Pakistani police sources, the US has been able to collect independent evidence from its own sources that the plan for the explosion was drawn up by serving officers of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and executed through a suicide bomber selected by Serajuddin Haqqani, son of Jalalludin Haqqani, the senior Taliban Commander.

2. These sources say that while the US has conclusive evidence on the role of some serving officers of the ISI in organising the explosion, it still does not have adequate evidence to show whether Lt.Gen.Nadeem Taj, the Director-General of the ISI, who is related to Gen.(retd) Pervez Musharraf, was in the picture and whether clearance had been obtained at the political level.

3. The US generally does not act upon intelligence against Pakistan provided by India due to the possibility that it may be motivated. It acts only when it is able to collect independent evidence from its own sources. The US has not yet been able to identify all the ISI officers, who had played a role in organising this attack just as it was able to identify in 1992-93 all the ISI officers, including Lt.Gen.Javed Nasir, the then DG of the ISI, who had instigated the Afghan Mujahideen not to sell back the unused Stinger missiles to the US.
[Read more...]

Filed Under: Featured, Terrorism
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