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Cameroonian soldiers patrol parts of Lake Chad that have been affected by terrorist activity. Credit: UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe

By Mohammad Abu Rumman
AMMAN, Jordan, Feb 24 2022 (IPS)

Killing terrorist organisations’ leaders is no effective way of fighting terrorism — as it’s political and economic crises on which terrorism feeds.

At the start of February 2022, the US celebrated the killing of Islamic State (IS) leader Abu Ibrahim al-Qurashi in Syria. The ensuing euphoria, however, failed to disguise the fact that this operation was merely a modest setback for jihadist groups.

It was probably more important for US President Joe Biden, who may hope – in anticipation of the midterm elections in November – that such actions will boost his popularity. After all, didn’t his predecessor Donald Trump celebrate the killing of the then IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi two years ago, and Barack Obama before him that of Osama bin Laden?

A brief look at the career of al-Qurashi shows clearly what is happening in the ongoing field of terrorism and counter-terrorism. The emir, on whose head the US administration had placed a bounty of millions of dollars, was once an ordinary unknown officer in the Iraqi army.

Mohammad Abu Rumman

He comes from a village in the Tal Afar district, which lies in north-western Iraq in the border region with Syria. His father was a muezzin at the local mosque. Al-Qurashi’s life – like that of most IS leadership figures – only started to derail when the Americans invaded Iraq.

Al-Qurashi joined al-Qaida and was then arrested. After his release, he rose up the ranks of the IS and eventually became a ‘hidden caliph’.

Let us imagine that the invasion of Iraq never happened, and all the ensuing sectarian violence, with thousands dead and millions displaced, never took place. Instead, a political solution was found for Iraq. Would this officer’s life have been so profoundly transformed then? And even if he had become radicalised, would this not have remained at worst an internal Iraqi issue?

Decapitating the IS doesn’t work

The example of al-Qurashi is hardly different from the career of dozens of other Islamist leaders. They all have a turning point in common that arrived with the devastating crises in the Arab and Islamic world.

Their rise as terrorist leaders was the result of state failure, misguided security policies, conflicts between opposing ethnic, religious and sectarian groups, as well as failed development policies and adverse socio-economic conditions.

The ensuing violence became a global threat as the international political community responded with military interventions, drones, and bounty campaigns – a game that seems to be far from over.

Mother and daughter injured during a terrorist attack. Credit: UN News

In Iraq and Syria, the IS may be less dangerous today than it was in its heyday.

The spiritual father of the IS in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was killed by an American air strike in 2006. A whole series of other leaders followed, all more or less equally dangerous. In 2011, Osama bin Laden was killed in a US military operation at his hideout in Pakistan.

Numerous other terrorist leaders were killed in similar fashion both before and after that. But has the danger from extremism and terrorism diminished as a result?

In Iraq and Syria, the IS may be less dangerous today than it was in its heyday. It is certainly no longer able to attract tens of thousands of fighters from all over the world. That time of magic, and the associated opportunities for propaganda, recruitment, and terrorist attacks, are in the past.

But the IS has not disappeared from Iraq and Syria either and still feeds on the crises there – notwithstanding the US’s declaration that the militia has been defeated. Nothing could illustrate this better than the complex and daring operation against a prison in Kurdish-controlled Hassakeh in Syria carried out by the IS just a few days before its leader was eliminated.

It ended with the deaths of hundreds of IS fighters and dozens of Kurdish militiamen – but only after nearly a week of fighting.

How the IS has globalized

The IS may be under pressure in Iraq and Syria, but it is not in the process of disappearing. Rather, it has become a global brand, maintaining dozens of bases around the world. In Africa in particular, it has been able to spread like a bushfire in recent years.

Africa is rife with religious and ethnic conflicts. Many states are fragile. Their land areas are often so large that IS offshoots have safe areas where they can retreat and spread out. Their conduct there is sometimes even worse than in the original caliphate in Iraq and Syria.

Just as the IS has succeeded in spreading its ideology in Africa, this has also happened in East Asia.

Since 2019, there have been dozens of terrorist attacks in about 15 African countries, with thousands of deaths. IS jihadists are active in central, western, and eastern Africa, from the Sahara to Congo, Uganda, and Mozambique. There are also cells in North Africa.

So far, the African terrorism problem is confined to the continent and is linked to regional crises. But the more joint international action is taken against it, and the more the local crises become entrenched, the greater is the concern that the African variant of IS terrorism could be exported around the world.

A foothold in Asia

Just as the IS has succeeded in spreading its ideology in Africa, this has also happened in East Asia, especially against the backdrop of splits within the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Since the withdrawal of NATO troops from Afghanistan, there have already been large-scale attacks carried out by the IS offshoot ‘Khorasan’.

Among other recruitment sources, this organisation has received an influx of jihadists who have had to flee Iraq and Syria with their families and whose countries of origin no longer want to take them back. But fighters from Central Asia are also flocking to it.

For now, the ‘Khorasan’ is still fighting against the Taliban, who want to rule Afghanistan and to prove to the world that they are capable of doing so. To that end, they are also trying to avoid the scenario from their first rule, when they offered shelter to al-Qaida and suffered a huge backlash following the attacks of 11 September 2001.

To be successful, then, the fight against terrorism must first and foremost address the root causes of the respective crises. The billions of dollars spent on military operations and bounties should be used for projects to strengthen state institutions, political integration, and economic development. Governments should be supported through projects that aim to build up their societies, integrate citizens into public life, and strengthen democracy and civil culture.

Mohammad Abu Rumman is a political scientist and director of the Politics and Society Institute in Amman. He was Minister of Culture and Youth in Jordan from 2018 to 2019 and is the author of numerous books, including I am a Salafist.

Source: International Politics and Society (IPS), published by the Global and European Policy Unit of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Hiroshimastrasse 28, D-10785 Berlin.

 

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The biodigester and part of the biogas plant of the Cocal company, surrounded by a sugarcane plantation on all sides, in the municipality of Narandiba, in the west of the southern Brazilian state of São Paulo, where sugarcane has replaced cattle ranching as the main economic activity. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
NARANDIBA, Brazil, Feb 23 2022 (IPS)

Nothing is wasted from sugarcane, one can conclude from the biomethane production process at the Cocal plant, a Brazilian company that produces sugar, ethanol, electricity and other by-products from sugarcane agro-industrial waste.

Biomethane, equivalent to natural gas, which is methane of fossil origin, is the result of a long chain starting with the planting of sugarcane, originally intended for the production of sugar and spirits.

The sugarcane crop vastly expanded after Brazil decided to replace part of its gasoline with ethanol, in the face of rising oil prices in the 1970s.

 

 

Excess waste caused environmental disasters until companies were able to make use of it: bagasse as a source of thermal and electrical energy, for example. The vinasse and other wastes served as fertilizers, but they were imperfect because they contained organic material and consequently emitted polluting gases.

Cocal decided to produce biogas starting in 2021, subjecting vinasse and cachaza (sugarcane filter cake) to biodigestion in a plant built near its sugar mill and distillery, in the municipality of Narandiba, in the west of the state of São Paulo.

The decomposition of organic material inside the closed environment of biodigesters produces biogas, a mixture of gases. The extraction of these gases converts the waste into cleaner and more efficient fertilizers.

Biogas, on the other hand, can generate heat and electricity by burning it. But Cocal intends to refine most of it, i.e. to separate biomethane, a powerful fuel, from other gases, such as carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide, which have industrial uses.

The biomethane from Cocal will be distributed through a pipeline to three nearby cities – Narandiba, Pirapozinho and Presidente Prudente – which have a combined total of 264,000 inhabitants. The project is a pioneer in supplying local gas to an inland region without access to natural gas, which in Brazil comes from offshore hydrocarbon deposits and has limited distribution due to the scarcity of pipelines.

It may, therefore, inspire similar projects, especially in the interior of the state of São Paulo, which concentrates more than half of the sugar and ethanol produced in Brazil, in more than 150 plants.

That is why biogas, which can generate electricity or biomethane, earned the nickname “pre-salt caipira”, referring to the large hydrocarbon deposits discovered since 2006 under an offshore pre-salt layer in national waters and a Brazilian term that is used to refer to inhabitants of rural, remote areas in the country.

Environmental reasons and local demand led Cocal, owner of two sugar and ethanol plants, to produce biomethane, said André Gustavo Alves da Silva, the company’s Commercial and New Products Director.

In addition, biogas is flexible and can be used for electricity generation or biomethane production, depending on market conditions. This reduces business risks, Alves argued.

 

Yenire (27) and Leonardo (23), together with their children Yeimar (10) and Yemberlin (1), came from Caracas where Leonardo worked sporadically with Loro, his 74-year-old carpenter grandfather. "We went through Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia. I didn't know it was this difficult to migrate. I lived with my family. Even though it was a difficult country, I was able to support myself. Now I value things a lot," said Leonardo. Venezuelan migrants travel long distances on foot, sometimes through different countries and with few belongings, in search of a place to settle. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

By Orlando Milesi
SANTIAGO, Feb 23 2022 (IPS)

The failure of Chile’s immigration policy, with its toll of deaths, xenophobic sentiments but also shows of solidarity, will be a pressing matter for the incoming administration of Gabriel Boric, who takes office on Mar. 11, and for the drafters of the new constitution, who will include the issue in the text that is to be ready in July.

Twenty-year-old Brenda, who is 38 weeks pregnant, Jaiden, 23, and their young son are a Venezuelan family who arrived in Santiago on Feb. 3 in one of four buses from the port of Iquique, 1800 kilometers north of Santiago. They came with 200 other migrants who crossed through the Colchane border post from Bolivia without visas.

“The only thing I want is a job to pay our expenses,” Jaiden said at the time. Eleven days later, Brenda delivered her baby in a Santiago hospital while Jaiden traveled to the town of Melipilla, 68 kilometers southwest of the Chilean capital, on his first day of agricultural work.

The death of 19 migrants in 2021 and three so far in 2022 while trying to reach the town of Colchane highlights the risk of a journey where they face a “Bolivian winter” with rain and sub-zero temperatures.

The influx from Bolivia – estimated at between 600 and 1000 immigrants per day in January by Colchane’s mayor, Javier García – overwhelmed the small town of 1,384 inhabitants, located at an altitude of 3,600 meters in the Andes mountains.

There has also been a rise in xenophobic reactions. In September, in the northern port city of Iquique, demonstrators set fire to tents and personal belongings in a camp where migrants were staying.

“We were there, it was terrible,” said Yenire, 27. She and Leonardo, 23, are originally from Caracas and they have two children, 10-year-old Yeimar and one-year-old Yemberlin. In Iquique, Yenire, who was two months pregnant, had a miscarriage, she told IPS.

Tensions flared again on Feb. 10 when a truck driver died at the intersection of the highways linking the northern city of Antofagasta and the city of Mejillones, allegedly at the hands of three migrants. The incident led to a strike and road blockade that lasted several days. Protesters held banners and signs demanding that the borders be closed to immigrants.

On Feb. 12 the outgoing government of right-wing President Sebastián Piñera published an immigration law that replaced the one in force since 1975, during the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990).

“The State must push for safe migration, manifested in actions aimed at preventing, combating and punishing the smuggling of migrants and trafficking in persons,” states the law, which gives greater powers to the government and the courts to deport those who enter the country through unregulated border crossings.

Jana (16) and Diego (18) are the parents of Diosmar, who was born on Jan. 13, 2022 at the San Juan de Dios hospital in Santiago de Chile. They are temporarily staying at the Ward Foundation shelter in Estación Central, a municipality in the western part of the capital. “I received very good care at the hospital and at no cost,” said Jana whose son is registered in the Civil Registry. The couple could not register as undocumented immigrants, necessary to initiate the procedures to apply for residency, because they are minors. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

Interior Minister Rodrigo Delgado announced that the mass deportations would continue: “We have at least one flight scheduled between now and Mar. 11 and it will take place specifically in the northern zone, carrying people detained in these operations that we are conducting.”

The worsening climate for immigrants in Chile was reflected by Venezuelan journalist Lorena Tasca, a professor at the University of Chile, in Santiago, who said: “I no longer feel at ease as a foreigner in Chile.”

Tasca, who arrived in 2014, wrote that she feels “very ashamed of how the Chilean media has handled the issue in recent years. My stomach clenches and I avoid news about migration or homicides and/or robberies involving foreigners.”

Pressure on Boric

This environment puts pressure on the future president, the leftist Boric, who during his campaign announced “a policy for regular, orderly and safe migration, aligned with international agreements, that recognizes the benefits of interculturality and promotes true inclusion and recognition of migrants and refugees in society.”

Luis Eduardo Thayer, a researcher at the Silva Henríquez Catholic University who was a member of Boric’s campaign team, said “the first thing will be to recover control of information and the border, which are two very weakened issues.”

“We don’t know how many migrants have entered, who they are, what their situation is, their background or if they have relatives here,” he told IPS.

“The situation has to be urgently rectified, to enable temporary entry. Some can be regularized, others cannot because they have a criminal record or have committed crimes,” he said.

Thayer said “the issues faced by local territories must be addressed to resolve tensions and conflicts in the places where migrants arrive or transit.” He also proposed “rational management of migration that takes the labor market into consideration.”

“Today the market operates by supply and demand, but this does not work because people have no information, no offers, no networks. We have to do what they do in Brazil, Spain or Canada, which combine migration with the labor market,” he said.

In addition, he remarked, “the protection of children and refugees must be a priority.”

Chile increasingly became a destination for migrants from other countries in the region starting in 1993. They began arriving from Peru and later from Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Haiti and finally – and en masse – from Venezuela.

Egli Managua (26), originally from Caracas, is the mother of Norelis Pedríquez, (10), and Katerine Gutiérrez (22) originally from the city of Puerto La Cruz, “a beautiful place,” is the mother of Kalanis Marumar (1). They are cousins and travel companions of Brenda, who had her baby on Feb. 14 in Santiago. “It was a month and four days of hard travel. On Jan. 16 we entered the country through Colchane,” Managua said at a shelter where they are staying in the Chilean capital. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

María Emilia Tijoux, a professor at the University of Chile’s School of Sociology, told IPS that “this is not a migration crisis but rather a crisis of migration policies.”

“Migrations could almost be called the new barbarism, because they imply a permanent punishment against thousands of people who move around the world, not only to Chile, but mainly to countries considered safer and more economically successful,” she said.

In her view, “migration policies worldwide are in crisis because it is a generalized displacement that is pulled by the strings of global capital. We are talking about cheap labor, mass expulsions for ecological reasons, wars, persecutions, political conflicts.”

Tijoux said “Venezuelan migrants come to Chile for different reasons. One was the invitation made by the president in Cúcuta,” a Colombian city bordering Venezuela, where Piñera offered “visas of democratic responsibility” for Venezuelans, in February 2019.

The Venezuelan exodus, mostly to other Latin American countries, became uncontainable since 2014, a year after the start of Nicolás Maduro’s government, according to data from the United Nations refugee agency, the UNHCR, which estimates that more than six million people have left the country since then.

“Then, since the 1990s, Chile began to be touted as a country that is supposed to be economically secure, with more work and possibilities for residence,” said the sociology professor.

Chile, with a population of 19.4 million people, hosted 1.46 million migrants as of 2020. Of these, 455,494 (30.7 percent) are Venezuelans, followed by Peruvians (16.3 percent), Haitians (12.5 percent), Colombians (11.4 percent) and Bolivians (8.5 percent).

Rodolfo Noriega, a Peruvian immigrant who is president of the Fundación Defensoría Migrante, told IPS that “visas should be granted so that people do not come as undocumented immigrants and children do not come clandestinely or through minefields to join their parents.”

“Fortunately, one path that the next administration seems to be preparing to take is regularization in combination with labor insertion,” said Noriega.

He said he expects the Boric administration “to be guided by principles….There will be dialogue and we will insist that the rights of migrants be respected. That is part of our struggle in the constitutional reform. What happens in the constituent assembly will be fundamental.”

Mane, Daniela, Sebastián, Plácida and Cecilia are Chileans staffing a shift at the Ward Foundation’s shelter in Santiago de Chile, which serves Venezuelan migrants who can stay there for a month while they find a way to support themselves, a job or rented housing. They receive three meals a day and accommodation and assistance to register as undocumented immigrants and begin the paperwork to regularize their status. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

The 154 members of the constituent assembly have the floor

On Jan. 27, several members of the Constitutional Convention, which will draft a new constitution to replace the one in force since the dictatorship, presented a “Migrant Agenda” to recognize and guarantee rights to all those living in Chile, “regardless of their nationality.”

The constituent assembly’s 154 members, half of whom are women and 17 of whom are representatives of indigenous peoples, were elected in a plebiscite in October 2020, and began their work on Jul. 4, 2021.

Most of them are progressive activists and leaders not linked to political parties, but to independent organizations and movements. They have until Jul. 4 to draft the new constitution, which will be endorsed or rejected by voters later this year in a referendum.

One of the promoters of the initiative on migrants, Benito Baranda, told IPS that “the right to asylum, which is in our legislation but not in our constitution, and the right to migration, that people must be welcomed in a dignified manner, must be taken into consideration in the constitution.”

“Last year only seven people were granted asylum while, given the situation of those leaving Venezuela, it is most likely that the requirements for asylum were met by a large number of the applicants. The government has been resistant,” he said.

He proposed recognition of a third principle: “That if you are born in Chile you are not stateless.”

“Boys and girls born in Chilean territory are left without a nationality because their parents are undocumented. A person cannot be left without a nationality…it is a right recognized in the San José pact signed and ratified by Chile,” he said.

According to Baranda, there is a “favorable” opinion among the constituents regarding these reforms.

“We will get support from two thirds of the members and then we will have to work with the community to get them to understand the substance and vote to endorse the constitution,” he added.

Tijoux said “the refusal to regularize leads to many problems, among them that people are left stranded and without rights. Our concern is for families with children, for pregnant women, in extremely precarious and in some cases subhuman conditions.

“There are thousands of migrants working in Chile, paying their taxes. But they suffer from xenophobia and racism that negatively target their origins, color, economic condition, nationality. Because of the negative view of Venezuelans we are facing extremely serious situations. Some do not want to speak out so as not to be identified and mistreated,” she said.

According to Tijoux, migration “cannot only be addressed by Chile but must also be addressed by the countries involved. Both from where they leave, are expelled or flee, but also where they pass through on terrible journeys during which we do not know how many have died.

“My great hope is the constitution. The constituents are aware of the problem and I trust that a door of humanity will open there,” she said.

Due to demographic pressures of growing elderly populations and the relative decline of workers paying taxes, governments are increasingly facing the need to adjust budgetary expenditures. Credit: K. S. Harikrishnan/IPS

By Joseph Chamie
PORTLAND, USA, Feb 23 2022 (IPS)

With the unprecedented ageing of populations worldwide, countries are struggling with the critical questions of who should be responsible for caring for the old and what should be the extent of care provided to women and men in old age.

Many believe that the government should be responsible for covering the costs and providing care, support and assistance to the old. In contrast, others, in particular social conservatives, contend that families and the old themselves should be responsible for providing the needed care, support and assistance for the old.

Similarly with respect to the extent of care to be provided to the old, some argue that given the high costs, the demands involved and the appropriate role of government in family life, only rudimentary care should be made available to the old in need. Others, however, believe that government should provide a broad array of services and care to the old, especially for those with special needs and disabilities.

For many countries the issue of caring for the old is the single most expensive domestic priority today and is expected to remain so in the years ahead. In addition to the substantial financial costs, governments are wrestling with contentious policy issues, including competing national priorities, the proper role of government and the responsibilities of individuals for their personal wellbeing in old age.

The significant increases in the proportions elderly that occurred during the past two decades are expected to continue throughout the 21st century. Among the populations of the twelve largest economies, for example, which account for approximately 70 percent of the world economy and 50 percent of the world’s population, the proportions 65 years and older have increased markedly since the start of the 21st century (Figure 1).

 

Source: United Nations.

 

In China, for example, the proportion aged 65 years and older nearly doubled in the recent past, increasing from less than 7 percent in 2000 to 12 percent in 2020. That proportion is expected to more than double by 2050, reaching 26 percent. Similarly, South Korea’s proportion elderly jumped from 7 percent in 2000 to 16 percent in 2020 and is expected to reach nearly 40 percent by 2050, with Japan and Italy close behind at approximately 38 percent elderly.

In addition to the growing proportions of the old, men and women are living longer than ever before. Since World War II remarkable achievements have been made in reducing mortality rates and increasing the length of human lives worldwide.

Over the past seven decades the world’s average life expectancy at birth has increased 26 years, from 47 to 73 years. The gains in life expectancy at birth over that period have been even greater, exceeding 33 years, in many developing countries, including Bangladesh, China, Ethiopia, India, Iran, Oman, Peru, Saudi Arabia, South Korea and Turkey.

The reductions in mortality rates are also providing additional years of life for the old. For example, by midcentury average life expectancies at age 65 among most of the populations of the twelve largest economies are expected to be no less than 20 years for men and no less 23 years for women (Figure 2).

 

Source: United Nations.

Particularly noteworthy are the projected life expectancies of elderly women in France, Italy, Japan and South Korea in 2050. In those countries, women on average can expect to live well into their nineties by midcentury.

Human longevity is also reaching record levels. The numbers reaching age 100 years, for example, have grown markedly over the recent past. Worldwide the number of centenarians increased nearly four-fold since the start of the 21st century and is expected to increase nearly eight-fold by midcentury, reaching close to 5 million.

Among the populations of the twelve largest economies, the numbers of centenarians are projected to more than quadruple by 2050. The numbers of centenarians in Brazil and China, for example, are expected to increase eight-fold over the coming three decades.

Also importantly, the ageing of populations is also resulting in a declining ratio of tax-paying workers to retirees. The potential support ratio (PSR), or the ratio of working-age persons aged 15 to 64 per one person aged 65 years and older, is declining rapidly with important consequences for decision-making, resource allocations and societal wellbeing.

At the global level, the PSR declined from 9 persons in the working-ages per person aged 65 years and older at the start of the century to 7 in 2020 and is projected to decline further to 4 by midcentury. Also, by the year 2050 some countries, including China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea and the United Kingdom, are expected to have PSRs of approximately 2 persons or less in the working-ages for each person aged 65 and older (Figure 3).

 

Source: United Nations.

 

Due to demographic pressures of growing elderly populations and the relative decline of workers paying taxes, governments are increasingly facing the need to adjust budgetary expenditures. Some political leaders advocate less spending on domestic programs and entitlements for the old and shifting more of the costs for support, caregiving and services to the old and their families, which they maintain has been successfully practiced by societies throughout much of the past.

Others, however, call for a readjustment of government expenditures including less spending on costly programs, including defense, and increased spending on the rising demands for services, support and care for the old. Increasing taxes on the wealthy, they argue, could make additional funding available for caring for the old.

Encountering increasing difficulties caring for the old, some governments, including China, India and the United States, have promoted and legislated filial obligations for elderly parents. In China, for example, Article 47 of the constitution states that adult children have the duty to support and assist their parents. Also, China passed a law nearly a decade ago requiring people to visit or keep in touch with their elderly parents or risk being sued.

Also in India, the government passed the Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Act in 2007, permitting needy elderly parents to seek monthly maintenance assistance from their children. In the United States, requiring children to care and provide support for their elderly parents is a state-by-state issue, with approximately half the states having filial responsibility laws.

The 21st century is one of unprecedented population aging. The increasing numbers and proportions of the old, who are living longer than ever before, are occurring with simultaneous declines in tax-paying workers who finance programs for the old in many countries.

The ageing of populations is challenging the viability of government pension systems and healthcare programs for the old. In addition, the demographic changes are increasing stress, anxiety and burdens on families, many of whom are struggling to find the resources, time and means to care for elderly family members.

Caring for the old can be particularly burdensome for women, who have traditionally provided care and assistance to elderly family members yet received limited compensation or recognition for their efforts. While many find providing care to the old emotionally rewarding, the work can be burdensome, interrupt employment and careers and harm the economic and personal well-being of caregivers.

In sum, caring for the old will increasingly be a mounting challenge for governments, communities and families throughout the 21st century. Among the central aspects of that challenge are who should be responsible for providing care for the old and what should be the nature and extent of the care to be provided to the old.

Ignoring or postponing addressing the consequences of population ageing is the typical response of governments when confronting relatively slow-moving, momentous demographic trends. Doing so, however, will only intensify the formidable challenge of caring for the old.

 

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, “Births, Deaths, Migrations and Other Important Population Matters.”

 

People walk past a residential building destroyed by shelling in Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine. Credit: UNICEF/Ashley Gilbertson

By Norman Solomon
SAN FRANCISCO, USA, Feb 23 2022 (IPS)

Fifty-nine years ago, Bob Dylan recorded “With God on Our Side.” You probably haven’t heard it on the radio for a very long time, if ever, but right now you could listen to it as his most evergreen of topical songs:

I’ve learned to hate the Russians
All through my whole life
If another war comes
It’s them we must fight
To hate them and fear them
To run and to hide
And accept it all bravely
With God on my side

In recent days, media coverage of a possible summit between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin has taken on almost wistful qualities, as though the horsemen of the apocalypse are already out of the barn.

Fatalism is easy for the laptop warriors and blow-dried studio pundits who keep insisting on the need to get tough with “the Russians,” by which they mean the Russian government. Actual people who suffer and die in war easily become faraway abstractions. “And you never ask questions / When God’s on your side.”

During the last six decades, the religiosity of U.S. militarism has faded into a more generalized set of assumptions — shared, in the current crisis, across traditional political spectrums. Ignorance about NATO’s history feeds into the good vs. evil bromides that are so easy to ingest and internalize.

On Capitol Hill, it’s hard to find a single member of Congress willing to call NATO what it has long been: an alliance for war (Kosovo, Afghanistan, Libya) with virtually nothing to do with “defense” other than the defense of vast weapons sales and, at times, even fantasies of regime change in Russia.

The reverence and adulation gushing from the Capitol and corporate media (including NPR and PBS) toward NATO and its U.S. leadership are wonders of thinly veiled jingoism. About other societies, reviled ones, we would hear labels like “propaganda.” Here the supposed truisms are laundered and flat-ironed as common sense.

Glimmers of inconvenient truth have flickered only rarely in mainstream U.S. media outlets, while a bit more likely in Europe. “Biden has said repeatedly that the U.S. is open to diplomacy with Russia, but on the issue that Moscow has most emphasized — NATO enlargement — there has been no American diplomacy at all,” Jeffrey Sachs wrote in the Financial Times as this week began.

“Putin has repeatedly demanded that the U.S. forswear NATO’s enlargement into Ukraine, while Biden has repeatedly asserted that membership of the alliance is Ukraine’s choice.”

As Sachs noted, “Many insist that NATO enlargement is not the real issue for Putin and that he wants to recreate the Russian empire, pure and simple. Everything else, including NATO enlargement, they claim, is a mere distraction. This is utterly mistaken. Russia has adamantly opposed NATO expansion towards the east for 30 years, first under Boris Yeltsin and now Putin…. Neither the U.S. nor Russia wants the other’s military on their doorstep. Pledging no NATO enlargement is not appeasement. It does not cede Ukrainian territory. It does not undermine Ukraine’s sovereignty.”

Whether or not they know much about such history, the USA’s media elites and members of Congress don’t seem to care about it. Red-white-and-blue chauvinism is running wild. Yet there are real diplomatic alternatives to the collision course for war.

Speaking Monday on Democracy Now, Katrina vanden Heuvel — editorial director of The Nation and a longtime Russia expert — said that implementing the Minsk accords could be a path toward peace in Ukraine. Also, she pointed out, “there is talk now not just of the NATO issue, which is so key, but also a new security architecture in Europe.”

Desperately needed is a new European security framework, to demilitarize and defuse conflicts between Russia and U.S. allies. But the same approach that for three decades pushed to expand NATO to Russia’s borders is now gung-ho to keep upping the ante, no matter how much doing so increases the chances of a direct clash between the world’s two nuclear-weapons superpowers.

The last U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union before it collapsed, Jack Matlock, wrote last week: “Since President Putin’s major demand is an assurance that NATO will take no further members, and specifically not Ukraine or Georgia, obviously there would have been no basis for the present crisis if there had been no expansion of the alliance following the end of the Cold War, or if the expansion had occurred in harmony with building a security structure in Europe that included Russia.”

But excluding Russia from security structures, while encircling it with armed-to-the-teeth adversaries, was a clear goal of NATO’s expansion. Less obvious was the realized goal of turning Eastern European nations into customers for vast arms sales.

A gripping chapter in “The Spoils of War,” a new book by Andrew Cockburn, spells out the mega-corporate zeal behind the massive campaigns to expand NATO beginning in the 1990s. Huge Pentagon contractors like Lockheed Martin were downcast about the dissolution of the USSR and feared that military sales would keep slumping. But there were some potential big new markets on the horizon.

“One especially promising market was among the former members of the defunct Warsaw Pact,” Cockburn wrote. “Were they to join NATO, they would be natural customers for products such as the F-16 fighter that Lockheed had inherited from General Dynamics. There was one minor impediment: the [George H. W.] Bush administration had already promised Moscow that NATO would not move east, a pledge that was part of the settlement ending the Cold War.”

By the time legendary foreign-policy sage George F. Kennan issued his unequivocal warning in 1997 — “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the post-Cold War era” — the expansion was already happening.

As Cockburn notes, “By 2014, the 12 new members had purchased close to $17 billion worth of American weapons.”

If you think those weapons transactions were about keeping up with the Russians, you’ve been trusting way too much U.S. corporate media. “As of late 2020,” Cockburn’s book explains, NATO’s collective military spending “had hit $1.03 trillion, or roughly 20 times Russia’s military budget.”

Let’s leave the last words here to Bob Dylan, from another song that isn’t on radio playlists. “Masters of War.”

Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good?
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could?

Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the author of a dozen books including Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State, published this year in a new edition as a free e-book. His other books include War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 and 2020 Democratic National Conventions. Solomon is the founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.

 

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Credit: UNAMA. UN Missions.org

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 23 2022 (IPS)

The widening political crisis in Ukraine, which has taken a turn for the worse with the declaration of two new independent states—the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic — is likely to prove once again the ineffectiveness of the 15-member UN Security Council (UNSC).

The UN’s most powerful political body, whose primary mandate is the maintenance of international peace and security, has remained paralyzed because of the threat of a double veto by Russia and its new found ally China against any possible sanctions or resolutions condemning Russia for an attack on Ukraine’s sovereignty and its territorial integrity – and a resulting violation of the UN charter.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who abruptly cut short an overseas trip, declared: “Let me be clear: the decision of the Russian Federation to recognize the so-called “independence” of certain areas of Donetsk and Luhansk regions is a violation of the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine.”

“Our world is facing the biggest global peace and security crisis in recent years – certainly in my tenure as Secretary-General. The principles of the UN Charter are not an a la carte menu. They cannot be applied selectively”.

He said the UN’s 193 Member States have “accepted them all and they must apply them all”.

“I am also concerned about the perversion of the concept of peacekeeping,” he said, criticizing the Russians, who claimed that any troop movements in and around Ukraine were meant for purposes of “peacekeeping.”

Andreas Bummel, Executive Director, Democracy Without Borders, told IPS the Russian invasion of Donetsk and Luhansk is a blatant military aggression and a clear violation of the UN Charter.

President Putin, he pointed out, has put into question the existence of Ukraine as an independent state. “Russia’s actions obviously represent a breach of international peace and security which must trigger international sanctions.”

It is not acceptable, he argued, that Russia can use its veto right in the Security Council to stop an effective response of the UN or even a condemnation. As Russia is acting only in its own interest, the use of the veto in this case is a misuse of this privilege, he noted.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague should be called upon to examine whether such a
misuse can be reconciled with the UN Charter, said Bummel.

“In addition, given the Security Council’s impotence in this situation, the UN General Assembly needs to assume its subsidiary competence as the UN’s highest body”.

Under the principle of “Uniting for Peace”, he pointed out, an emergency meeting of the General Assembly should be held that overrules a Russian veto in the Security Council and which mandates sanctions or other measures it deems necessary.

Speaking from the White House, US President Joe Biden condemned President Putin for his aggression against Ukraine, saying that Russian action is “a flagrant violation of international law and demands a firm response from the international community.

The US imposed a set of new sanctions—particularly against Russian oligarchies, their families and Russian banks.

“Who in the Lord’s name does Putin think gives him the right to declare new so-called countries on territory that belonged to his neighbors? Biden asked.

Putin, in an address to the nation, claimed that all of Ukraine was “created by Russia” and described the country’s pro-Western government as a threat to Russia.

James Paul, former Executive Director the New York based Global Policy Forum and author of “Of Foxes and Chickens”—Oligarchy and Global Power in the UN Security Council” told IPS the veto power certainly tends to freeze Security Council action whenever the core interests of the five Permanent Members are in conflict.

“This has always been a deep problem of the Council and prevented it from being effective, not only when vetoes are cast but also when they lurk in the background and sabotage action”.

In the case of Ukraine, he argued, the problem is not just in the present moment of high danger but in the whole long build-up that has centered on the post-Soviet security architecture in Europe and the eastward expansion of NATO.

In theory, he pointed out, this might have been managed by the Council and a security system for Europe built that would have included Russia. “Instead, we saw a whole series of moves by the United States that the Russians saw, not unreasonably, as threatening”.

Activities in the Council and veto-use have exacerbated US-Russian hostility rather than easing it, said Paul, a prominent figure in the NGO advocacy community at the United Nations and a well-known speaker and writer on the UN and global policy issues.

Meanwhile, the UNSC has remained politically impotent because the veto powers of the big five, namely the US, UK, Russia, China and France (P5), have always been a major obstacle in resolving some of the world’s ongoing military conflicts and civil wars – whether in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya or Yemen.

Asked about the deadlock and the potential veto by Russia, US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said: “We get things done by engaging every single day with other countries, because sometimes the veto power isn’t as powerful as you might think when other countries are unified in expressing their concerns”

Mandeep S. Tiwana, Chief Programmes Officer at CIVICUS, a global alliance of over 9,00 civil society organisations in more than 175 countries, told IPS the veto power of the permanent members of the Security Council has been a major impediment to saving future generations from the scourge of war as promised in the UN Charter.

Selective invocation of outrage by the P5 over military aggression, war crimes and crimes against humanity is a major impediment to achieving peace in our times. Civil Society groups, he said, have lobbied hard for many years to get the P5 to voluntarily give up their arbitrary veto powers to no avail.

Ironically, the P5 who are supposed to maintain international peace and security continue to be major producers and proliferators of weapons of war which fuel major conflicts, he declared.

Elaborating further, Paul said the Council has been a wrestling ring, a stage for enacting battles and for staging arguments to win over public opinion and media coverage.

The US has been able to count on the UK and France much of the time and whip many elected members of the Council into line as part of this drama.

“So, what we see today is a Council that is (as so often in the past) sidelined while other initiatives like the Franco-German effort take place beyond the UN. We see Germany acting more robustly than in the past, as the most powerful European state. The Europeans can’t use the Council, so they are using other means”.

“The veto is and always has been the Council’s political disease”, declared Paul.

In the 76-year history of the UN, the US has exercised an estimated 82 vetoes, and USSR 91, and its successor state, the Russian Federation about 28 vetoes.

US Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield, speaking at a Security Council Emergency Meeting on Ukraine, told delegates, that President Putin asserted that Russia today has a rightful claim to all territories – all territories – from the Russian Empire; the same Russian Empire from before the Soviet Union, from over 100 years ago.

“That includes all of Ukraine. It includes Finland. It includes Belarus and Georgia and Moldova, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. It includes parts of Poland and Turkey,” she said.

In essence, Putin wants the world to travel back in time. To a time before the United Nations. To a time when empires ruled the world. But the rest of the world has moved forward. It is not 1919. It is 2022, she added.

“The United Nations was founded on the principle of decolonization, not recolonization. And we believe the vast majority of UN Member States and the UN Security Council are committed to moving forward – not going back in time”.

“We must all stand with Ukraine in the face of this brazen attempt to usurp Ukraine’s sovereign territory. There can be no fence-sitters in this crisis,” she declared.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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‘My fellow Russians’: Vladimir Putin makes his case to the Russian people. Credit: The Kremlin, Moscow.

By External Source
BIRMINGHAM, United Kingdom, Feb 22 2022 (IPS)

Vladimir Putin’s recognition of the independence of the two breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk followed a surreal live broadcast of a security council meeting in the Kremlin. Sitting facing the 13-member council, Putin cajoled and argued as, one by one, his most senior officials – including Dmitry Medvedev, a former president and prime minister, and the country’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov – took to the lectern to provide their boss with “reasons” for the formal recognition of the two republics in the country’s east as independent states.

He followed this decision by authorising Russian troops to cross into the republics in a “peacekeeping” capacity. It was also reported that the recognition treaties give Russia the right to establish military camps there.

Blaming the decision entirely on Ukraine and those governments in the west – above all the United States – which “control” Ukraine, Putin questioned more than once the very legitimacy of the existence Ukraine as a nation-state. He put forward an argument that was very similar in language to an essay he published on the Kremlin’s website in July 2021, On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.

Putin portrayed recognition as a decisive step by a true “great power” asserting its interests and protecting vulnerable “kin” communities. But the gambit raises more questions than it answers. The most obvious among them is whether this is the end of the current crisis, or at least the beginning of the end of it.

An optimistic reading would be that the recognition offers a way out for everyone. Putin saves face by humiliating Ukraine and the west but avoids full-scale war and the human and economic costs that would impose on Russia.

If you take this at face value – that Putin is only interested in protecting the rights of the two pro-Russian republics – then accepting recognition would spare Ukraine a major military confrontation with Russia. It would also mean that Kyiv would avoid the domestic political difficulties and socio-economic costs that an implementation of the deeply unpopular 2015 Minsk agreement would mean for the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyi and his government.

 

Open wounds: the two breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine. Dmitriy Samorodinov via Shutterstock

As in Georgia after the invasion of 2008 – and with Crimea after its annexation by Russia in 2014 – recognition could lead to a gradual stabilisation in the regions. Neither side has to argue about the implementation of the Minsk agreement anymore. The deadlock that had been reached in this process would no longer constitute a source of tension and mutual recrimination.

But this is a very optimistic assumption. It would be a mistaken reading of perhaps the most dangerous moment of European and global security since the end of the cold war.

No matter how desperately one might long for a silver lining in the current situation, the fact remains that Russia’s recognition of the two breakaway republics is yet another major violation of international law. Western sanctions are now being introduced and may include full and most punitive measures. Previous disagreements between the EU, US and UK on the scale of sanctions seem to have been overcome.

Russian actions have, if anything, strengthened western resolve, as is clear from the immediate responses from countries like the UK and Germany, which has announced it won’t certify Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline.

 

Dangerous new beginning?

The current crisis is about more than the status of “certain areas of Donetsk and Luhansk regions”, as the territories are referred to in the Minsk agreement. It does not resolve the broader tensions between Russia and the west over the future European security order.

It is obvious that Putin has become convinced that the continuing status of Donetsk and Luhansk as de facto states within Ukraine – and thus as an instrument of leverage over Ukraine and, by extension, over its western partners – had ceased to serve Russia’s purposes. But his hour-long televised speech has given little cause for optimism that their recognition has put an end to the “Ukrainian issue”.

Significantly, Putin’s speech focused much more on the wider problems of Russian-Ukrainian relations than the problem of the two Donbas republics. The Russian president reiterated a much broader agenda that links the situation in Ukraine clearly to his overall challenge to the international order. Various snippets are worth looking at more closely in this regard.

According to Putin, Ukraine – as a result of Soviet boundary drawing in the 1920s, 1940s and 1950s – became an “artificial” territorial construct. After the collapse of the USSR, it ended up with “historically Russian territories” inhabited by ethnic Russians whose rights are violated in contemporary Ukraine.

Putin also asserted that these violations have in large part been due to Ukraine being a failed state in which decisions are being made by corrupt authorities that are under the control of “western capitals”. But, perhaps most importantly, he repeated that Ukraine, by moving closer to Nato, has already created threats to Russia – to which Russia must respond.

Taken together with the signing and immediate ratification of “friendship treaties” between Russia and the now recognised breakaway republics and the decision to move Russian troops into the newly recognised republics, Putin’s recognition speech and its tone make it much more likely, therefore, that this is at best a brief interlude in a continuing and deepening crisis.

More realistically, the recognition and the actions taken in its immediate aftermath signal a dramatic escalation on the part of Russia. Putin’s track record since 2008 should not leave anyone in doubt about the fact that this crisis is far from over.

Stefan Wolff, Professor of International Security, University of Birmingham and Tatyana Malyarenko, Professor of International Relations, National University Odesa Law Academy

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

The Peñasquito mine, owned by U.S. company Newmont Goldcorp and located in the state of Zacatecas in northern Mexico, produces gold, silver, lead and zinc, the latter two of which are essential for the energy transition. CREDIT: Courtesy of Lucía Vergara

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Feb 22 2022 (IPS)

The debate in Mexico and at an international level is focused on certain minerals that are fundamental to the energy transition, such as cobalt, lithium and nickel. But there are other indispensable minerals that remain in the background.

In addition to lithium deposits, Mexico has proven resources of bismuth, copper, fluorspar, graphite, molybdenum and zinc, involved in one way or another in the different processes of the transition to a low-carbon economy.

Beatriz Olivera, founder of the non-governmental organization Energy, Gender and Environment, stressed that Latin America’s second largest economy has the mining potential to make this transition possible.

“But we have an extractive model, the mineral is extracted and developed elsewhere,” she said, criticizing Mexico’s current mining policies, and in particular the elements that take on special value on the path towards energy decarbonization, a formula to contain global warming.

“If these minerals are extracted, where is the value chain, the benefit for countries like Mexico? We are only going to be left with the negative consequences and sacrifice zones are going to be created to satisfy technologies in other parts of the world,” she said in an interview with IPS.

Olivera is co-author of a forthcoming report on Mexico’s strategic transition metals that identifies 23 minerals for applications such as electrical installations, solar and wind power plants, as well as energy storage devices such as batteries.

The group identified 803 mining projects, of which 237 have a mineral granted in concession that is usable in the transition, most of them inactive, but still in force.

Almost half are in the initial stage, nearly a third in exploration, 13 percent in pre-production and the rest are in pre-feasibility, expansion or closed.

Meanwhile, 58 of the ventures belong to companies from Canada, 29 from Mexico, 26 from the U.S., seven from Australia, three from the United Kingdom, one from China, and in 113 cases the origin of the company is unknown.

Only 10 percent of Mexico’s territory has been granted in concession for mining activities, but these resources are present almost everywhere in the country. Several of these minerals play a vital role in the energy transition to a low-carbon economy. Map: Mexican Ministry of Economy

Mexico’s mining portfolio

Mexico is currently the world’s leading silver producer and is also a major player in the 12 minerals market.

In 2020, the country ranked second in world fluorspar production, fifth in bismuth, molybdenum and lead, sixth in zinc, ninth in copper and tenth in manganese.

In 2020, Mexican deposits produced 1.07 million tons of fluorspar, 732,863 tons of copper, 688,461 tons of zinc, 260,390 tons of lead, 198,448 tons of manganese, 18,562 tons of molybdenum and 1844 tons of graphite, according to the official Statistical Yearbook of Mexican Mining.

The country has 38 clay deposits containing lithium, potassium, magnesium and sodium, of which at least 10 contain five billion tons of these minerals, although their extractive and economic viability has yet to be analyzed, independent expert José Parga told IPS.

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) estimates that Mexico has lithium reserves of 1.7 million tons.

Part of the government’s electricity reform proposal for the public sector to regain control of this industry includes the nationalization of lithium and the creation of a state-owned company to mine it.

Mexico has reserves of 53,000 tons of copper, 68,000 tons of fluorspar, 5,000 tons of manganese, 5,600 tons of lead and 19,000 tons of zinc, according to the USGS.

The mining law in force in Mexico since 1992 prohibits state-owned entities from mining discovered minerals, which in practice means the privatization of the sector, since the activity remains in their hands and the State merely regulates it.

Although there is no exploitation of cerium, dysprosium, erbium, scandium, europium, gadolinium, holmium, ytterbium, yttrium, lanthanum, lutetium, neodymium, praseodymium, promethium, samarium, terbium and thulium – the so-called rare earths, the set of 17 elements that have become fundamental for the transition – exploration is advancing for a project in the northern state of Coahuila.

In addition, zinc deposits could provide indium, gallium and germanium – other important elements for the energy transition that Mexico does not currently produce.

Most of the veins are located in the northern part of the country.

The manufacture of electric vehicles requires the use of several minerals that are abundant in Mexico. In the photo, an electric cab recharges its battery at a public station in a neighborhood on the south side of Mexico City. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS

Partially harnessed potential

Parga underscored Mexico’s potential, which has been only partially tapped.

“There is certainty that the materials are there, but they have not actually been the subject of an evaluation that would allow us to really know their potential and the eventual technical-economic viability of their exploitation,” he stated in his dialogue with IPS.

The expert said, “the first step to take advantage of the country’s mineral resources is to investigate their existence, quantify and classify them to make the best possible use.”

For at least a decade, international organizations have been warning about the consumption of raw materials for the energy transition, which could lead to their depletion or “peak consumption”.

In addition, the mining industry has triggered protests and resistance in communities throughout the country where it operates, due to the environmental damage caused, the low number of local jobs generated and its small contribution to the Mexican economy.

In fact, there are currently more than 50 conflicts between local populations and mining companies in the country.

In Mexico, the energy transition has been at a standstill since 2019 due to the policies of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who favors support for fossil fuels and hydroelectric power plants, to the detriment of renewable sources such as wind and solar.

Furthermore, this Latin American country, with a territory of 1.96 million square kilometers, 10 percent of which has been granted in concession to mining companies, lacks a national industry linked to the transition or a strategy for its development.

As a result, there is no production of wind turbines, solar cells or electric cars, as the raw material is exported and returns in the form of components to assemble solar panels or electric vehicles.

At a slow pace

However, there are already some attempts in the Mexican market, such as the assembly of electric units in the central state of Puebla, neighboring Mexico City.

In addition, the foreign ministry, with support from the University of California, launched on Feb. 8 the U.S.-Mexico Electrification Working Group, which seeks “to ensure a coordinated and strategic transition towards electromobility.”

In 2022, the parties will design a binational roadmap, which includes a diagnosis of the automotive sector in both countries and their opportunities in the electric transition. Electromobility refers to the introduction of vehicles that use electricity, instead of fossil fuels, and whose manufacture requires the so-called transition minerals.

But Mexico is undertaking this initiative without the National Electromobility Strategy, ready since 2018 but halted for “review” by the environment ministry under the López Obrador administration after it took office in December of that year.

Although some cities such as Mexico City have introduced electric urban transport vehicles, it is not yet a national trend. Moreover, the energy supply for these units still comes from fossil fuels.

Since 2016, the marketing of new hybrid and electric cars has increased fivefold in Mexico, according to the private consulting firm TResearch Mexico. In 2021, those sales exceeded 39,000 units, representing four percent of the total.

During the Glasgow Climate Summit in December, Mexico signed the Glasgow Agreement on Zero Emission Vehicles, signed by 37 countries, 46 metropolitan and regional governments, as well as 11 vehicle manufacturers, 28 fleet owners, 13 institutional investors in the automotive sector, two financial entities and 21 signatories from other segments, to eliminate the production of internal combustion vehicles between 2035 and 2040.

In January, fossil fuel-based generation in Mexico accounted for 76 percent of the total, followed by wind energy (seven percent), hydroelectric (6.67 percent), solar (4.4 percent), nuclear energy (3.87 percent), geothermal (1.55 percent) and biomass (0.07 percent), according to data from the non-governmental Observatory of the Energy Transition in Mexico.

Olivera and Parga highlighted the concerns about the role of minerals in the energy transition, both at the Mexican and global level.

“They are not necessarily going to be enough to make the transition to 100 percent renewable, we have to take it with a certain amount of moderation. But neither can we continue burning fossil fuels left and right,” said Olivera.

In her view, “there must be benefits for the people, with environmental and social controls, respect for the collective rights of peoples, mitigation measures for socio-environmental impacts and a fairer and more equitable distribution of benefits.”

For his part, Parga suggested building a value chain in Mexico that leads to the production of finished products, such as lithium batteries, and the participation of local communities in mining regions in the different stages of the production process.

“Apart from taking care of the ecological balance, preserving the environment and the cultural environment of the people and communities, it must also ensure that they obtain an economic benefit that allows them to raise their standard of living,” he argued.

The dilemma revolves around internal combustion vehicles, whose economic, environmental and health costs are high, and electric vehicles, whose footprint is also significant.

Residents survey the damage after Cyclone Ana triggered winds and floods in Malawi. There has been a call following the latest flooding for climate-resilient approaches to WASH because damaged infrastructure, especially water infrastructure, has serious health consequences. Credit: Charles Mpaka/IPS

By Charles Mpaka
Blantyre, Malawi, Feb 22 2022 (IPS)

On the night of January 24, 2022, as Cyclone Ana-triggered rains incessantly rattled on the rusty roof of her house, amid intervals of gusty winds, a thud woke up Josephine Kumwanje from her sleep.

Her heart leapt as she thought thieves had broken into the house.

She summoned some courage, tiptoed to the door of her bedroom, and peered into the dark. She did not see any evidence that the house had been burgled. The windows and the main door were intact.

But she could not sleep because the rain poured down in torrents – until the early hours of the morning when it reduced to a drizzle.

“In a long time, I haven’t seen a combination of heavy rains and strong winds in one night,” she recalls.

In the morning, she saw what that thud was all about: The pit latrine behind her house had collapsed, the slab caving into the hole so that the toilet was no longer usable.

Kumwanje’s latrine was one of the five that had collapsed in the neighbourhood that night. The storm had ripped off the roofs of three houses, and gullies were gorged into areas. The residents could not imagine that such damage was possible.

The tropical depression that formed to the northeast of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean around January 21 and swept into the Mozambique Channel caused heavy and incessant rainfall in Malawi on January 24 and 25, resulting in heavy flooding and destruction.

Two cities and 16 of the country’s 28 districts, mainly in the Southern region, had been affected.

The Department of Disaster Management Affairs said in a situation report that between January 24 and February 12, 2022, shows close to one million people had been affected, 190,000 displaced, 46 people killed, and 18 people still missing.

Among the sectors severely hit was water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH), including the five latrines in Makhetha Township in Blantyre City – even though they were far away from the ‘eye of the storm’.

A rapid assessment by the WASH cluster of the response team, co-led by UNICEF, has found that over 1,000 boreholes, the primary source of potable water in most rural areas in Malawi, have been destroyed.

Residents walk past storm damage from Cyclone Ana. The storm impacted one million people with 190,000 displaced, 46 people killed, and 18 people still missing. Credit: Charles Mpaka/IPS

Countless more have been contaminated, while 20 piped water schemes have been damaged, leaving an estimated 300,000 people with no or limited access to safe water. A total of 53,962 latrines collapsed.

According to UNICEF, the destruction of the WASH infrastructure could have far-reaching health consequences.

“These conditions entail significant risks of health outbreaks (cholera) with medium to long-term impacts on the health status of children,” Michele Paba, UNICEF Malawi Chief of WASH, tells IPS.

Worse still, the current floods compounded the damages from other recent floods and have reversed progress on recovery.

In March 2019, Malawi was one of the three countries – together with Zimbabwe and Mozambique – through which Cyclone Idai related flooding swept, destroying infrastructure, and affecting more than one million people in the three countries.

In January 2015, Malawi also suffered devastating floods, which killed 106 people, displaced more than 200,000 and affected more than one million people.

The floods also hit twelve of the 17 districts affected by floods in January 2015.

Five of the districts affected this year were the worst hit by Cyclone Idai in 2019 and were among those hardest hits by the 2015 floods.

Details in the Malawi 2015 Floods Post Disaster Needs Assessment Report show the floods had destroyed water facilities such as intake structures, water treatment plants, water supply pipelines, dams, and shallow wells.

The government pegged the recovery and reconstruction budget following the 2015 disaster for the WASH sector alone at 60 million US dollars.

But, as Charles Kalemba, Commissioner for the Department of Disaster Management Affairs, which is in the Office of President and Cabinet, indicates, Malawi has never recovered from these disasters.

“Floods have happened in this country several times in the past few years. In recent times, we had one in 2015. We had another in 2019, and now these. They happen, they attract our attention, and we forget soon afterwards. We have not been good at recovery and resilience at all,” Kalemba says.

Back in Blantyre, Kumwanje rebuilt her latrine in a week.

“I have children. For dignity and hygiene, I could not count on neighbours’ toilets,” says the mother of three, who earns a living selling second-hand clothes.

But the structure, made of plastic sheets, is temporary. It cannot withstand a similar storm.

Kalemba says the country needs serious work in preparedness and resilience, adding that the department is now eyeing a radical shift in strategy.

“We need to relook at financing. The money should not just be used to buy top-of-the-range vehicles for offices. We need to tackle real issues affecting people in the long term.

“Besides, we leave our response in the hands of development partners, but we can see people in these affected areas are becoming poorer. That shows us that the strategy we are using is not working. We need to take full control of the recovery processes, including finding our own resources, instead of waiting for donors,” he says.

In terms of WASH, according to UNICEF, the sector is “aggressively moving towards climate-resilient approaches to improve the sustainability of water and sanitation services and ensure value for money of investments made.”

“The main bottleneck at the moment,” says Paba, “is the lack of financial resources to address the needs because official development assistance has drastically declined over the past years and government allocations are limited.”

A February 2020 UNICEF analysis of public expenditure on the WASH sector in Malawi says that despite limited fiscal space, the government has increased budget allocations to the sector since 2017-18.

Between 2014 and 2019, the government funding averaged 0.39 percent of total expenditure, or just under 0.1 percent of GDP – with much of it heavily tilted towards water.

However, the report notes that Malawi’s budget allocations to WASH as a proportion of GDP is low compared to other countries in the region.

Apart from proposing the government adjusts to reductions in external funding and fixing the frontline staff deficit, the report recommends increased government financing towards WASH, especially for operations.

Paba tells IPS that the Ministry of Water and Sanitation, with support from UNICEF, is developing a climate-resilient financing strategy to help mobilise fresh investments to address sector needs and create a climate risk-informed investment plan.

The government, through the National Sanitation and Hygiene Strategy (2018 – 2024), is targeting increasing the number of households with improved sanitation access from 13.8 percent as it was in 2018 to 75 percent by 2030 and increasing the number of people accessing safe water supply from 83 percent to 90 percent by 2030.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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The Palestinian Flag in the West Bank city of Ramallah. Credit: UN News

By Alon Ben-Meir
NEW YORK, Feb 22 2022 (IPS)

No people have ever risen from the ashes of near-extinction to form a country and achieve the height of development in every walk of life like Israel. These magnificent accomplishments are now tragically marred with domestically charged struggles which ominously undermine its very existence.

Righting the Wrong

Israel’s achievements since its establishment are remarkable. In science, cybertechnology, medicine, agronomy, military innovation, aviation, and entrepreneurship, Israel has excelled while reaching the pinnacle of military prowess unmatched by any other regional power.

In spite of these impressive achievements, Israel failed to become the country that millions of Jews envisioned it to be. Although Israel is threatened by extremist Palestinians, radical Islamic groups, and Iran, it is powerful enough militarily to tackle such threats and prevail. The real danger Israel faces is largely self-made, emanating from multiple fronts which successive governments failed to address.

These failures include the continuing occupation, unending discrimination, rampant poverty, growing social discord, and the frictional relations with American Jewry; together they point to a gloomy reality and pose a grave danger to Israel’s survival as we know it.

Human rights violations in the occupied territories

Other than the thirst for annexing more Palestinian land and stern opposition to the establishment of a Palestinian state, the continuing occupation is designed to keep the conflict simmering and to provide the rationale behind Israeli “concerns” over national security.

It is sad to admit that the Jews who suffered from the horrors of persistent discrimination, segregation, and persecution culminating with the Holocaust, which led to the establishment of Israel, would violate the Palestinians’ human rights to such a degree.

How can any Israeli justify the terrible abuses of the Palestinians’ human rights to which they are subjected daily? Prolonged incarcerations, demolished homes, forced evictions, night raids, segregation, and denial of economic and social rights, not to speak of the relentless attacks on and harassment of innocent Palestinians by settlers forcing them to leave their land and property.

As Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin stated in Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem, “… we have to observe that in the Israeli public debate, the term ‘peace’ still does not mean primarily the fulfillment of Palestinian rights, including the rights of the refugees, but rather the principle of separation…”

In January 2021, B’Tselem stated that “A regime that uses laws, practices and organized violence to cement the supremacy of one group over another is an apartheid regime.” The same sentiment was precisely echoed earlier this month by Amnesty International.

Try as it may to defend itself, the reality on the ground in the territories speaks volumes about the brutal mistreatment of Palestinians by Israel. According to B’Tselem, last year Israel killed more than 300 Palestinians, over one-fifth of whom were children—the deadliest year since 2014.

It should shame every Israeli Jew who has become complacent regarding the ugly occupation, which savagely erodes Israel’s moral standing in the eyes of the international community. Although antisemitism has been in play from time immemorial, can anyone suggest that the treatment of the Palestinians by Israel is not contributing to the rise of antisemitism?

It is crucial that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is resolved because as long as the occupation continues, it will not only further undermine the Palestinians’ right but will further intensify Israel’s domestic problems.

Economic disparity

Over the past two decades Israel’s economy has consistently grown, making it one of the most stable economies in and outside the region. The average per capita earning is on par with most EU countries and the US.

For this reason, it is hard to grasp why successive Israeli governments would fail miserably to address the debilitating economic disparities among the Israeli population, Jews, and Arabs alike. As Thomas Jefferson eloquently stated, “Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor.”

According to a December 2021 survey, over 2.5 million Israelis—including over 1 million children—live in poverty, with 932,000 households living in a state of economic distress. The country that spends billions on building settlements and massive infrastructure in the West Bank, in addition to the billions more spent on security, allows over one million children to go hungry, especially at the early stages of their cognitive development.

This is not only unconscionable but criminal. To think that this is happening to a people that have been yearning to live with dignity among their fellow Jews defies the very reason behind Israel’s creation.

Social disconnect

After more than seven decades of existence Israel dangerously lacks social cohesiveness, which is the hallmark of a viable and strong community. Although significant improvement has taken place between Jews of different cultural and racial backgrounds, there is still a huge social cleavage between Sephardic (Middle Eastern and North African) Jews and Ashkenazi Jews who are of European origin, and discrimination against and scorn for Israeli Arabs.

In addition, there is a clear social schism between secular and Orthodox Jews, between Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox, as well as between reform and conservative Jews. Just think, 40 percent of secular Israeli Jews said they hate Haredim, and nearly 20 percent of traditionalists stated that they dislike Haredi Jews.

That the Jews who finally established an independent state would show this much intolerance and contempt for their fellow Jews is nothing less than disgraceful. The ingathering of the Jews from all corners of the world—regardless of skin color, religious affiliation, cultural or political background—was first and foremost the very foundation for Israel’s creation.

Many of Israel’s political leaders are sadly preoccupied with their petty politics. They lack the moral courage and the fortitude to speak out against this socially ugly phenomenon and foster the continuing estrangement between different segments of Israeli Jews. This has an even greater effect on the Israeli Arabs, which only deepens their alienation from the Jewish population.

Political fragmentation

Even after more than seven decades of existence Israel remains deeply divided politically, with scores of political parties each claiming they have the answer to the country’s multiple challenges. In every election over 20 political parties compete; new parties with colorful names are created and the leader of every party wants to be the prime minister.

Not once has a single party been able to form a government on its own, settling instead to form coalition governments which by their very nature require compromises and often settle on the lowest denominator. The current Bennett-Lapid coalition government exemplifies that to perfection.

By way of example, since all the parties could not reach a consensus on a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they agreed NOT to deal with it, albeit it is the most critical issue facing the nation.

It is understandable that Jews who immigrated to Israel from various countries will have different political views. But one would think that after 73 years, new generations of Israelis would settle on fewer political parties representing the mainstream of the political spectrum—left, right, center, and religious.

This would allow for the formation of a coalition government that enjoys a significant majority and can get things done. Instead, political bickering and party and personal interests are consistently placed above the nation’s interests.

As James Madison explained, the problem is that when political factions obtain power, they put their interests above the common good, “both the public good and the rights of other citizens.” Netanyahu and his party epitomized this horrible reality.

Relation with US Jewry

The American Jewish community is unlike others in Europe; it is the second pillar that sustains and enriches Jewish life in and outside Israel. Although American Jews largely oppose the occupation, they have always stood fast in support of Israel both financially and politically. Not once have they shirked that allegiance, which they consider central to the well-being of world Jewry.

For these and many other reasons, for Israel not to fully embrace the American Jews with all its might is outrageous. One glaring example says it all. Why on earth would both the Netanyahu and now Bennett governments revoke a plan for an egalitarian prayer plaza at the Western Wall—promised to Reform and American Jewish leaders—to allow Jews to pray however they choose?

The CEO of the Israel Reform Movement Anna Kislanski put it succinctly when she said: “It is both infuriating and upsetting when the Prime Minister of a ‘change government’… yields to extremist factions that object to the Agreement and its implementation…[and] capitulate[s] shamefully to bullying and violence…”

Such an “extremist faction” was on full display on IDF’s radio station, where Army Radio Talk show host Irit Linur despicably uttered about Reform Jews, “…. you weren’t accepted here. Go away – go, go, go. Put up a wall somewhere else…. Your place isn’t here…. You don’t belong, you only ruin things.”

I for one, cannot fathom how a country that was born to provide a welcoming and safe haven for all Jews, could so callously betray that central premise. It seems to me that for Israel, the American Jewish community is there to be milked financially and used as nothing more than a tool to influence American policy in support of Israel.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi recently said that Israel is “the greatest political achievement of the 20th century,” with which I concur. But as I survey the Israeli scene, I feel despair. No, this is not the country that I and millions of other Jews envisioned. Israel was meant to be a model democracy—free, fair, judicious, and just, where equality and social equity is a right, where everyone is treated decently and with dignity.

This is where Israel’s ultimate strength and security lies. Ignoring that will devour it from within and pose a greater danger to the country than its worst enemy.

Dr. Alon Ben-Meir is a retired professor of international relations at the Center for Global Affairs at New York University (NYU) who taught courses on international negotiation and Middle Eastern studies for over 20 years.

 

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By Anis Chowdhury and Jomo Kwame Sundaram
SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 22 2022 (IPS)

COVID-19 has exposed major long-term economic vulnerabilities. This malaise – including declining productivity growth – can be traced to the greater influence of finance in the real economy.

The deep-seated causes of the current resurgence of inflation, inequalities and contractionary tendencies have not been addressed. Meanwhile, reform proposals after the 2008-2009 global financial crisis (GFC) have been largely forgotten.

Anis Chowdhury

Declining productivity
Productivity growth has been declining in major economies since the early 1970s. As the World Bank noted, well “before the … pandemic, the global economy featured a broad-based decline in productivity growth”.

World labour productivity growth slowed from its 2007 peak of 2.8% to a post-GFC nadir of 1.4% in 2016, remaining under 2.0% in 2017-2018. This slowdown has hurt over two-thirds of advanced, emerging market and developing economies.

Except for a brief productivity spike in some countries around the turn of the century, labour productivity growth in developed Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries was declining, with trends low, but stable after the GFC.

Why the slowdown?
For Robert Gordon, this was mainly due to declining total factor productivity growth (TFP) – or slower technical innovation, organizational improvements and labour skill growth – in recent decades, particularly in industrial nations.

For the World Bank, reduced investment and TFP growth deceleration have been roughly equally responsible for the productivity slowdown. Slowing working age population growth and limited education progress have also contributed.

The United Nations noted, “as firms around the globe have become more reluctant to invest, productivity growth has continued to decelerate”. It blamed the slowdown on reduced investments in machinery, technology, etc.

Slower transitions to more diverse and complex production have also delayed progress. Some supply shocks due to ‘natural causes’ – of which 70% were climate change related – have also hurt productivity growth.

Growing inequality has weakened demand, slowing economic and productivity growth. As workers’ spending declined with labour’s income share, demand has been sustained by more public and private borrowing.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

The International Monetary Fund (IMF)’s April 2017 World Economic Outlook confirmed this trend. Productivity growth declines have lowered real incomes, reducing consumer spending, demand and growth.

A joint report of the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), OECD and IMF also blamed unconventional monetary policies – very low, even negative real interest rates, and corporate bond purchases. Thus, corporate financial fragilities have weakened investment and productivity growth, especially since the GFC.

Deeper malaise
More sustainable and inclusive growth policies can help increase productivity. But blind faith in ‘market solutions’ since the 1980s has worsened resource misallocations, sectoral imbalances and job-skill mismatches.

One-sided demand stimuli – through more deficit spending or monetary expansion, without complementary supply-side measures – have only made limited impact. Also, supply-side measures to enhance growth need appropriate regulatory reforms – not wholesale deregulation.

Deregulation has often strengthened product market oligopolies while labour’s bargaining strength has generally declined. Growing corporate power has reduced labour income shares as executive salaries have risen since the 1980s.

Paranoia viz deficits and debt has cut public spending. Public investment remained flat during the early 2000s, rising slightly after the GFC, before declining until the pandemic. Worse, public spending cuts have not been offset by more private investment.

Slower capital stock increases cut potential growth in advanced economies from the 1980s. Debt and deficit paranoia has cut public services, social protection, public education and healthcare – hurting the vulnerable most.

Negative externalities
Markets have also failed the environment, undermining sustainability. Inadequate investments in renewable energy and sustainable agriculture have resulted in food and energy shortages – now exacerbating inflationary pressures.

Financialization, tax cuts and deregulation have also encouraged speculative activities, share buybacks and other portfolio purchases. Unconventional monetary policies have also enabled unviable ‘zombie’ firms to survive.

Thus, there has been rising protectionism and harmful beggar-thy- neighbour policies – such as competing corporate income tax rate cuts while weakening environmental protection and labour rights.

Meanwhile, much needed productive investments, especially in infrastructure, technology and innovation, remain underfunded. National problems have been worsened by failure to improve multilateral economic governance.

Financialization
Declining productivity growth was due to finance’s creeping dominance over the real economy from the 1970s. With banking more internationalized and concentrated, traditional financial intermediation by commercial banks has been undermined by market allocation and ‘universal banking’, combining both commercial and investment banking services.

Financialization has thus subverted economic motives, markets and institutions, adversely affecting progress, balanced development and long-term productivity growth in various ways:

• Corporate decision-making and firm behaviour are increasingly influenced by short-term financial market indicators, e.g., share market prices, rather than medium- and long-term prospects;
• Non-financial corporations increasingly profit from financial, rather than productive activities;
• ‘Non-traditional’ financial activities (e.g., stock market investments) of commercial banks have increased their exposure to systemic, including external risks;
• The distinction between short-term speculation and patient long-term investment has become blurred;
• Executive and even managerial remuneration has been increasingly linked to short-term profitability, as measured by share prices, not longer-term considerations.

Such features have adversely affected real investments and innovation, due to finance pursuing short-term returns. Thus, financialization has negatively affected investment, technology adoption and skill upgrading, with adverse consequences for productivity and decent jobs.

Misallocation
The financial system has also undermined the real economy by syphoning talent from it, with attractive inducements. Thus, talent has gone to finance at the expense of the real economy, especially harming technological progress.

James Tobin challenged “throwing more and more of our resources, including the cream of our youth, into financial activities remote from the production of goods and services, into activities that generate high private rewards disproportionate to the social productivity.”

Then American Finance Association president Luigi Zingales showed financial growth in the last four decades has basically been rent seeking, i.e., securing profits without adding any value.

Finance has captured rents “through a variety of mechanisms including anticompetitive practices, the marketing of excessively complex and risky products, government subsidies such as financial bailouts, and even fraudulent activities… By overcharging for products and services, financial firms grab a bigger slice of the economic pie at the expense of their customers and taxpayers”.

Banking abuses have been innovative, ranging from collusion, abusive practices, market manipulation, rigging interest, exchange and other rates, passing risk to unsuspecting customers, aiding and abetting tax evasion and money laundering.

Real economy drag
Finance has thus retarded development of the real economy in various ways. First, financial development has not been conducive to intermediating between savings and real investments. Markets allocate funds by criteria other than promoting investment in the real economy.

Second, financial markets and speculation do not generate or otherwise add real value. Third, financialization and regulatory failure have generated more frequent and damaging financial crises.

Seeking to maximize returns, fund managers and their ilk mainly invest in response to short-term financial trends. Presumed to be best left to markets, actual capital formation – increasing economic output – and productivity growth have slowed, to the detriment of most.

 

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By Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury
SINGAPORE, Feb 21 2022 (IPS-Partners)

What happens in Europe cannot be expected to remain in Europe, particularly in this interconnected world. As war clouds gather in that continent with Russo-Western relations deteriorating by the day over Ukraine, ripples, indeed waves, are expected in consequence on the waters of faraway Asia. There, despite the onslaught of the Covid pandemic, nations appeared till recently to be devoting themselves to economy-boosting efforts, regionally expanding trade (ASEAN), or domestically sharing prosperity (China). Now suddenly, as Russia and the West try to tap the reservoir of till-now vocal support from their respective camp-followers in that region, these countries feel trapped between Scylla and Charybdis. Slowly but surely, given the imperatives of geo-politics, they may be constrained to take sides, albeit in the case of some, most reluctantly.

Dr. Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury

Take China, for instance. Between the US and Russia, China faced a Hobson’s choice, for given its burgeoning fierce rivalry with the former, its rational pick would most certainly be the latter. Presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are political besties on the global scene who have met numerous times proclaiming mutual support. But on the current issue, initially, the involvement of Ukraine posed a modicum of problem for China. China relied substantially on Ukraine’s military manufacturing know-how and China itself was Ukraine’s largest trading partner. So, making a choice on this would have been something China would be happy to pass. But alas that was not to be! Even though US Secretary of State Antony Blinken had called his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi to help rein in Russia, and China had initially urged calm equally upon both Moscow and Washington, Moscow’s pleadings and pressures on Beijing ultimately prevailed.

Already, Sino-US relations were reaching their nadir. The Biden Administration was relentless in its efforts to contain the spread of Chinese influence in every possible way. Now as China was preparing to host the winter Olympics seeking to dazzle the world with its pomp and performance, the US led a campaign for its diplomatic boycott. Putin chose that moment of Chinese angst to fly to Beijing and clasp Xi in a strong bearish hug. The result was a 5300-word joint statement describing the friendship between the two countries as having “no limits”. For the first time China came out unequivocally in support of Russia in opposing NATO’s eastward expansion, and Russia in turn endorsed China’s position in clearly opposing any kind of independence for Taiwan. Never before Russia and China’s declaration of mutual support was so unambiguous. The Russian Bear and the Chinese dragon were now locked in a tight embrace with nary a sunlight between them. Russia and China were now in the same camp pitted against the US and the West in this dangerous dichotomy in global politics.

India was another Asian power that is perhaps also forced to make a choice it would have been happier to avoid. Washington’s confrontation with Moscow could not have come at a worse time for New Delhi. Even normally India would be reluctant to choose between the two protagonists, because it seemed to want to link itself strategically to both, increasingly a difficult endeavour. At this point in time India is poised to procure five S-400 air defence missile systems from Russia and badly requires a waiver from the US in terms of sanctions, which for the same reason had earlier been slapped on Turkey. Now was obviously not the time for India to show any thickening of camaraderie with the US. Even with China, India is often unwilling to throw down the gauntlet in any definitive manner, as New Delhi well knows if push comes to shove, and a shooting conflict with China does occur, significant actual US support in men and materiel might be wanting. But India’s options were shrinking. Its Quad partners the US, Australia and Japan thought it the appropriate time to flex Quad muscles and try and link the contests in the two theatres, Europe and Asia. Australia hosted a Quad Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in Melbourne. India’s diplomatic skills might have avoided critically unfriendly references to Beijing or Moscow, but the outcome of the meeting left no doubt as to India’s choice of camps- Euro- American or Sino-Russian. For India, getting together of China and Russia is not good news. Also because at the Olympics in Beijing, Putin invited Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan to visit Russia soon. Moscow had held back on hosting a Pakistani Head of Government for over twenty years , mainly perhaps not to give New Delhi any cause for umbrage.

The upshot of all this would be that if because of the tensions, war breaks out in Europe, Asia is unlikely to remain unique for long.

In the meantime, in the main politico-diplomatic battleground of Europe the situation was hotting up. The flurry of activities, such as visits back and forth of leaders to various capitals, were coming to naught. Within the western camp, Continental Europeans such as France and Germany were as cautious as the Anglo-Saxons, the US and the UK were gung-ho, predicting the imminence of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This, of course, was being denied by Putin and the Russians. Nevertheless, Moscow does not deny that the situation is serious, nor would it specifically rule out war, not because they would invade Ukraine, but because the West was intent on the eastward expansion of NATO! In the meantime, the Ukrainians, at the very eye in the storm are calling for calm, with their President, Volodymyr Zelensky warning that “panic is our enemy’s best friend”.

There are fears therefore that should war, which has been described as ‘imminent’ for a remarkably long time, already actually come about, it would be the result of a tragic self-fulfilling prophecy! Even if there not be war, and diplomacy manages to avert it for now, the world will be divided into two distinct camps, the US and its Western allies on one side and Russia and China on the other. The Communique in Beijing is most significant as it portrays not just two camps pitted against each other, but two different socio-political models offered to the rest of the world. The neutrals and the non-aligneds of the past are being forced by circumstances to make choices. The US and its allies picking up India, Sweden and Finland for instance, and Russia and China roping in Pakistan, Iran, perhaps Turkey, and most certainly, North Korea. It might become a battle of two political paradigms, each seeking to shape future human destiny.

Now a footnote to the crisis in Ukraine. It is tempting to recall that it was that region that in October 1864 witnessed a disastrously suicidal failed action of the British cavalry. It has been glorified for its valour in poetry by Alfred Lord Tennyson as the “Charge of the Light Brigade”. In a more sobre assessment a French Marshal described it as “magnificent, but not war”.

Must history repeat itself in such predictable fashion?

Dr Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury is the Honorary Fellow at the Institute of South Asia Studies, NUS. He is a former Foreign Advisor (Foreign Minister) of Bangladesh and President and Distinguished Fellow of Cosmos Foundation. The views addressed in the article are his own. He can be reached at: isasiac @nus.edu.sg

This story was originally published by Dhaka Courier.

Mayan indigenous communities in eastern Guatemala are waging an ongoing struggle for the defense of their lands and resources, in the face of encroachment by mining, power and oil corporations. These struggles have resulted in protests on behalf of the affected communities and against the Guatemalan government's repression of activists and indigenous inhabitants, and have now reached the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. CREDIT: Courtesy of Raúl Ico Pacham/FB

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Feb 21 2022 (IPS)

A struggle for the defense of their territories waged by indigenous Maya Q’eqchi’ communities in eastern Guatemala could set a historic precedent for Latin America’s native peoples because it would ensure not only their right to control their lands but also their natural resources, denied for centuries.

This could happen if the Inter-American Court of Human Rights based in San José, Costa Rica rules in favor of these communities involved in litigation for the defense of their ancestral territories and for control over their own future and development.

The struggle is against a nickel mine operated since 2011 by the Switzerland-based transnational Solway Investment Group on lands in Guatemala that these communities consider their own, in the municipality of El Estor near Lake Izabal, in the department of the same name in eastern Guatemala."We hope it will be a historic decision, that the Court can decide for the first time on the permanent sovereignty of indigenous peoples over their natural resources.” -- Leonardo Crippa

The mine is a private venture over which the local indigenous communities had no say. Furthermore, they argue that there is evidence that it is contaminating the area’s natural resources, lawyers and activists told IPS.

The mine “pollutes the rivers, destroys the hills, without regard for the lives of the people in the municipality,” said activist Abelino Chub of the Maíz de Vida Association, in an interview with IPS from El Estor.

Chub, of the Mayan Q’eqchi indigenous people, lives in El Estor and has worked for years in defense of indigenous territories in Izabal, in the face of inroads made by international consortiums in the production of nickel, bananas, electricity and oil, he said.

Because of his involvement in that struggle he was arrested and imprisoned in February 2017, as part of a pattern of persecution that other people who have fought against the transnationals have also experienced firsthand.

Solway Investment has been operating the mine since 2011, after purchasing it from the Canadian corporation Hudbay Minerals, which obtained the exploration permit in 2004 and the mining permit in 2006.

However, work on the mine came to a halt when Guatemala’s Constitutional Court accepted an appeal for legal protection from a union of fishermen from Izabal, who alleged that fishing had been hurt by pollution from the mine.

In addition to Guatemala, Solway Investment operates in Ukraine, Russia, Macedonia and Indonesia, and in 2019 reported more than one billion dollars in total assets, according to its official website.

Abelino Chub, a Mayan Q’eqchi’ activist from the Maíz de Vida Association, who is part of the struggle in defense of the Mayan territories located in the area of El Estor and surrounding municipalities in the eastern Guatemalan department of Izabal, was arrested and imprisoned in February 2017 for opposing extractivist projects granted concessions by the Guatemalan government in the area. CREDIT: Courtesy of Abelino Chub/FB

In the hands of the Court

Since 1974, more than a dozen Q’eqchi’ Mayan communities have been trying to obtain a collective land title from the government’s National Land Fund (Fontierras).

But the government of that time and subsequent administrations denied them that right, despite the fact that since that year they have met all the legal requirements.

In 1985 they even obtained a provisional collective agrarian title, attorney Leonardo Crippa of the Washington-based Indian Law Resource Center (ILRC) told IPS.

In 2002 the communities met the last of the requirements: the payment to Fontierras of a quota on the value of the land, Crippa said from the U.S. capital.

But they were denied their right to collective title as a result of obscure legal maneuvering.

The General Property Registry claimed that documentation on the provisional title had been lost, and demanded that the communities themselves make the effort to replace it, despite the fact that by law it was the responsibility of the government agency.

“The Registry allowed a page from a document to be extracted that made the registry entry disappear and that prevented the land titling agency from granting the definitive title in due time and form,” Crippa said.

As a result, the communities were not only denied their right to collective ownership of their land. In addition, extractive industry projects were imposed on them in their territory, and in other indigenous communities in the country, without carrying out the consultations required by law, or without conducting them properly.

In the case of the nickel mine, “they never asked the communities, they only asked the workers to sign some forms in support of the supposed consultation,” said Chub, 39.

The mining activities are carried out on overlapping lands, i.e., the boundaries are unclear and intermingle with those of the indigenous villages, due to problems in the land registry, and to date the discrepancy is still in place.

Following the struggles of the Mayan communities to defend their territories, which included the seizure of land in eastern Guatemala, the Guatemalan government authorized evictions that turned violent. Now the Maya Q’eqchi’ communities await an Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruling. CREDIT: Courtesy of Raúl Ico Pacham/FB

These indigenous communities, where the majority of the population speaks only their ancestral Mayan language, Q’eqchi’, did not stand idly by.

In August 2018, following legal action in Guatemala, they brought the case before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), based in Washington.

The ILRC had been working with them since 2005 and three years later they had a clear strategy: to focus on one of the 16 communities, known as Agua Caliente, because it best represented the indigenous cause.

Agua Caliente is home to some 400 people, according to a 2014 census.

In a March 2020 report, the IACHR recognized the responsibility of the State of Guatemala for the violation of the indigenous community’s right to property, and violation of due process, among other rights protected by the American Convention on Human Rights.

Furthermore, the IACHR added that the State does not have a law that recognizes the right of indigenous peoples in Guatemala to collective ownership or dominion of their lands and the resources under their possession, as guaranteed by international agreements to which the country is a signatory.

The IACHR also said that the titling procedure to which Agua Caliente was subjected for more than 45 years had not been effective because it did not grant a definitive title within a reasonable period of time.

As the basis of the litigation still remains, regarding the overlapping of the Agua Caliente and mine lands, the case has been referred to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which together with the IACHR make up the inter-American human rights system created by the Organization of American States (OAS).

In a Feb. 9 hearing the parties were heard, and final arguments will be presented in writing on Mar. 11.

“We hope it will be a historic decision, that the Court can decide for the first time on the permanent sovereignty of indigenous peoples over their natural resources,” said Crippa. As an Inter-American Court verdict, this would have regional effects, especially since its rulings are not subject to appeal and set a legal precedent.

Raúl Ico Pacham, a Mayan Q’eqchi’ native of the Chab’ilch’och’ community in the municipality of Livingston, in the eastern Guatemalan department of Izabal, had to flee the country following the persecution of activists in defense of their ancestral territories. He is now living as an undocumented immigrant in New York and has applied for political asylum in the United States. CREDIT: Courtesy of Raúl Ico Pacham/FB

Government persecution of activists

In the midst of this struggle, in October 2021, the State of Guatemala, through the Public Prosecutor’s Office and police forces, persecuted people who led protests against the government for granting the concession, and against the mine.

The government also declared a one-month state of siege in the area.

“They did that to scare people,” said Chub, who had to flee because he feared for his life, mainly because of his involvement in the fight against banana companies in the area.

He added, however, that in this area there are several major companies that band together to persecute activists regardless of whether they are fighting against mining, oil or banana companies.

Chub’s home was raided on Oct. 26, during the state of siege. But he had already fled to another part of the country.

“They broke the lock with a sledgehammer and entered. The only thing they found there was water, corn and beans,” he said.

Raúl Ico Pacham, who also belongs to the Q’eqchi’ Mayan people, had to leave Guatemala, fleeing persecution by the State. He is a native of Livingston, one of the municipalities in the department of Izabal, and has been an activist with the Guatemalan Comité Campesino del Altiplano (CCDA).

“My struggle was, more than anything, for the recovery of our ancestral lands that had been taken from us long ago by landowners and the military,” Pacham, 35, told IPS in an interview from New York, where he arrived without documents in April 2021 and has requested political asylum.

In 2016 the activist participated with other members of the affected indigenous communities in a takeover of ancestral lands. But the government ordered their eviction, a process that turned violent in October 2017.

In August of that year they broke into his house and stole, he said, documents from investigations they were carrying out on the land that had been taken from the indigenous people.

“In 2021 I was almost killed, I was stabbed and I had to leave the country,” he said.

Nujeen Mustafa addresses the Global Disability Summit with a message that the world should stop seeing children with disabilities as burdens when they are assets. Credit: @NujeenMustafa/Twitter

By Joyce Chimbi
Nairobi, Kenya, Feb 21 2022 (IPS)

Struggling with stigma and discrimination in an unaccommodating environment, Nujeen Mustafa knows all too well the difficulties children with disabilities face in emergency and protracted crises.

Struggling with stigma and discrimination in an unaccommodating environment, Nujeen Mustafa knows all too well the difficulties children with disabilities face in emergency and protracted crises.

Born in Syria 23 years ago with cerebral palsy, Mustafa had never seen the inside of a classroom until she made a 3,500-mile journey from Syria to Germany in a wheelchair aged 16 years. She entered the German education system in Grade 8 and completed her GCSE at 21. Her compelling story is captured in the book ‘Nujeen, One Girl’s Incredible Journey from War-Torn Syria in a Wheelchair’.

“Back in Syria, I was homeschooled by my older siblings because the infrastructure was not accessible for people with disabilities. My siblings taught me how to read and write. I read books on my own and watched television to compensate for the lack of formal education,” Mustafa tells IPS.

Mustafa addressed the recent Global Disability Summit in a session with Education Cannot Wait Director Yasmine Sherif. The Government of Norway, the Government of Ghana, and the International Disability Alliance co-chaired the summit during which participants committed to “eliminating stigma, barriers, and discrimination against persons with disabilities through legislation, policies and advocacy work done together with organizations of persons with disabilities.”

“Nujeen’s incredible journey is an inspiring story of hope. However, for a majority of children with disabilities in the midst of armed conflict and crises, their stories, unfortunately, don’t end as positively as Nujeen’s,” says Sherif. “We can no longer leave these children, among those left furthest behind, in the shadows.”

Children with disabilities can flourish to their full potential if given access to education, says Nujeen Mustafa. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

According to UNHCR registration data, an estimated 11.7 million Syrians are displaced. Three percent of the registered Syrian refugee population lives with disabilities.

Globally, the World Health Organization (WHO) statistics show that approximately 20 million out of the 135 million people in need of humanitarian assistance live with some form of disability and lack rehabilitation support and assistive technology.

The WHO says this figure does not include people with conflict-caused disabilities. Within this context, Mustafa says invisible disability is a most pressing issue for people with disabilities and more so children in conflict and crises.

“People in conflict situations or those fleeing conflict are likely to have acquired a disability. Perhaps they lost a leg, an arm, sight, or hearing due to conflict. Of concern, data on refugees or internally displaced persons are not filtered or seen through the disability lens,” she observes.

“Often hidden from society, children with disabilities are, more often than not, much more invisible. Even in rehabilitation or a country’s reconstruction processes, accessibility and inclusion of children with disabilities are not taken into account.”

Research by WHO confirms that volatile and unpredictable safety and security situations in emergency and protracted crises create significant and critical protection gaps.

“Children with disabilities are being left behind the education system because, in crisis situations, there are many competing priorities. I do not believe that enough organizations have the necessary data concerning people, and more so children, with disabilities in emergency and conflict situations,” Mustafa says.

There is, therefore, a great and urgent need to work on mechanisms that could detect invisible disability, which requires significant concerted efforts from individuals, families, humanitarian organizations, and governments.

“We need to prioritize systematic awareness-raising of the specific needs of children with disabilities at the high-level decision-making process. People that can make a difference in the lives of these children do not see them,” she cautions.

“Education is the building block towards a proper future, but children with disabilities are not seen as people worth investing in. There is a perception that education or training will be of no value to these children because there will be no opportunity for them to utilize acquired knowledge.”

As such, UNICEF’s most recent data shows one in every ten children globally have a disability, and nearly half of all children with disabilities are likely to have never attended school.

“My siblings bought me books every school year so that I consume the same content as my peers. This was of high value to me. It helped me cope and come to the realization that perhaps there were some alternative ways for me to get an education similar or close to what my peers had,” Mustafa recalls.

This family support built her confidence and drove her to explore her potential. Today, Mustafa is an author and a disability rights advocate on a global platform, becoming the first Syrian person with a disability to brief the United Nations Security Council in 2019.

Families or caregivers of every child with a disability need to be educated to recognize the potential in their child. To fan this potential, not despite the disability, but because of it.

Education, she emphasizes, is a vital part of building a confident and self-assured individual who is ready to go out, face the world and fulfill their potential.

Mustafa says social barriers and stigma surrounding disability within current education systems must be broken down. This calls for a more comprehensive understanding of who is at school, who is not, and why.

Nujeen Mustafa, a UNHCR Supporter who, at 16, traveled 3,500 miles from Syria to Germany in a steel wheelchair says active participation of children with disabilities is “not a favor but a right”.
Credit: Education Cannot Wait

Placing children with disabilities at the heart of humanitarian crisis response requires the systematic documentation of existing protection gaps.

“We are dealing with a multilayered problem that includes factors such as logistics, management, planning, and implementation of crisis response as well as social barriers,” she says.

Against this backdrop, Mustafa spoke of the frequently unmet needs of vulnerable children with disabilities in conflict and emergencies. She painted the harsh reality of lack of and, at best, great difficulties in accessing safe, quality, and disability-inclusive education.

“I am a firm believer in disability-inclusive education because this is how we eliminate stigma towards people with disability. If people from all walks of life know and interact with one person with a disability and especially at a very young age, perceptions around what is considered the norm will change,” she says.

Mustafa’s own experience with Germany’s education system affirms her belief that under the right conditions, children with disabilities can flourish to their fullest potential to become agents of positive social change.

“Whether it be individual, societies or organizations, we should stop perceiving children with disabilities as burdens – because they are assets. Children with disabilities are not problems to solve.”

Mustafa called upon humanitarian agencies to raise awareness of the importance of education. To ensure that when countries in protracted conflict and emergency crises or fragile peace resume some semblance of education, children with disabilities are not left further behind.

Credit: @LailaOnMars, Twitter

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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Credit: Religions for Peace

By Azza Karam
NEW YORK, Feb 21 2022 (IPS)

A “Joint Statement of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China, issued on February 4, 2020 on International Relations Entering a New Era and the Global Sustainable Development”, contains laudable and strong language about commitment to democracy and human rights:

“The sides [the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China] call on all States to pursue well-being for all and, with these ends, to build dialogue and mutual trust, strengthen mutual understanding, champion such universal human values as peace, development, equality, justice, democracy and freedom, respect the rights of peoples to independently determine the development paths of their countries and the sovereignty and the security and development interests of States, to protect the United Nations-driven international architecture and the international law-based world order, seek genuine multipolarity with the United Nations and its Security Council playing a central and coordinating role, promote more democratic international relations, and ensure peace, stability and sustainable development across the world… The sides share the understanding that democracy is a universal human value, rather than a privilege of a limited number of States, and that its promotion and protection is a common responsibility of the entire world community.”

The fact that these are the words from one country that is amassing thousands of troops on the borders of a sovereign nation (threatening to enter it and ‘protect’ its people at any moment as of the writing of this), together with another country which is denying the existence of camps housing over a million people of one particular religion and ethnicity, within its borders, is interesting – eerily so.

And yet it was not so long ago, that ‘noblesse oblige’, ‘la mission civilisatrice’ and ‘white man’s burden’ were being articulated as pretexts for territorial takeover and the oppression and subordination of people, land, and dignity.

The colonial missions (mandates, protectorates, etc.) created a fundamental imbalance in the power of man over (others’) resources, and the power of some (men) over others, and a continuing legacy of interference in others’ affairs ostensibly to help (hence presumably the reference to sovereignty in the above statement), and usually – and here is part of the vexing reality – at the behest of nationals who ask for the ‘assistance’.

And it is still the case, that the very ideologies of supremacy of one people over another, including of one race and/or one sex or one religion over another, the refusal to be held accountable to centuries of discrimination now part of the DNA of almost all institutions; the insistence on subjugation of nature to man; and the perpetuation of misogyny – all continue to define our present broken world.

But today we have an awareness among esteemed politicians, academics, and several governmental, intergovernmental and non-governmental institutions, that religion matters. Indeed, that in various forms of ‘engagement’ with (usually specific and selective) religious institutions, religious NGOs, and/or religious leaders, good things come about.

Salvation may be imminent. “Faith for [insert the wording here]” or “religion and [insert appropriate term here] is the new formula for overcoming most difficulties, from vaccine hesitancy to gender discrimination, from electoral gerrymandering to racism, and everything in between.

And why not? After all, religious institutions (churches, mosques, temples, etc.) actually are the original development and humanitarian actors, and are still critical service providers in countries where governments are increasingly struggling to serve basic needs of many of their populations.

The very first schools and hospitals known to societies all around the world originated in and through religious bodies. Today, Catholic Churches alone manage significant public health infrastructures from North America to Sub-Saharan Africa. Caritas Internationalis for instance, is one of the largest (Catholic) humanitarian and development NGOs in the world.

If we begin to look at other religiously inspired NGOs, we will find a significant number of them delivering much needed refuge and support to the largest refugee and displaced populations ever recorded in human history, as well as health, education, sanitation, nutrition and humanitarian relief services, to hundreds of millions, in all corners of the world.

Furthermore, ‘Islamic finance’ is a source of funding for major United Nations entities’ development and relief efforts (e.g. UNHCR, UNDP, UNICEF) around the world – and more of that is being sought after, with various Muslim entities rushing to provide fatwas (religious edicts) and justifications for why this is good Islamic practice.

Increasing ‘faith investments’ in and for sustainable development are being strongly advocated for by some, with new initiatives emerging in that advocacy space to ‘help and encourage… ethical religious investments’. Private sector interest is focusing on how ‘faith-based actors’ are facilitators of emerging markets – and possibly multipliers of profits, for some pharmaceuticals, among other companies.

Just as in the 1990s, we started to learn how investing in women’s rights makes economic sense. Today, we are hearing how investing in faith actors makes that kind of sense too. In fact, some humanitarian and development religious NGOs (mostly with a Christian background, many Evangelical) are being actively mobilised to run initiatives to champion freedom of religion and belief, and/or to facilitate strategic ‘advocacy’ for major faith-based NGOs – ostensibly as part of their learning and wisdom acquired defending other human rights (albeit sometimes with an underdeveloped track record).

Yet, while they touched on almost every single aspect in their strong statement, neither the Russian Federation nor China reference ‘faith’, or ‘religion’ in their Joint Statement. Indeed, not once is ‘civil society’ mentioned. For these powerful states, as with others like them, religions, and any aspect of civic engagement, are either non-existent, or totally subservient to their own will, as to be unworthy of singling out.

Instead, an appropriation of the language of human rights, of democracy, of “cultural diversity”, “balance, harmony and inclusiveness” and even “moral principles” is de rigeur. But you see, this is the other side of using religion. You can overemphasize its value, or you can eclipse it.

Religious institutions, faith leaders and faith-based NGOs, have a responsibility to protect civil society. Instead of seeking to earn a celebrity status with some governments or political parties, or trying to leverage their own influence as Catholic/Protestant/Orthodox/Evangelical/Jewish/Muslim/Hindu/Buddhist/etc., all faith actors need to learn to come together as a collective power that is part of their secular civil brethren.

In doing so, their combined moral, economic, financial, political, cultural, and social weight, will dwarf the most authoritarian of structures. At the very least, in coming together to serve all, religious communities can hold all decision makers accountable to a collective justice – of gender, of environment, of voice, of representation, and ultimately, of dignity.

Civil societies are the barometers of collective planetary wellbeing. As we dismember and silence civil societies, by using/focusing on (some) religions at a time, and serving piecemeal selective interests, we ensure that the arc of history remains mired in the abuse of indivisible and interdependent human rights, which are central to vibrant and healthy democracies.

To the tyranny of states and religious institutions alike, I would say: stop using your power to gain political and financial expediency. Instead, work with all religions on a level playing field, with the rest of civil society, to hold one another accountable, and thereby, to ensure peace and security for all times.

Prof. Azza Karam, PhD, is Secretary General, Religions for Peace International.

 

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At least 43% of the estimated 6000 languages spoken in the world are endangered. Only a few hundred languages have genuinely been given a place in education systems and the public domain, and less than a hundred are used in the digital world. Credit: Danilo Valladares/IPS

By Baher Kamal
MADRID, Feb 21 2022 (IPS)

“Every two weeks a language disappears taking with it an entire cultural and intellectual heritage. At least 43% of the estimated 6000 languages spoken in the world are endangered. Only a few hundred languages have genuinely been given a place in education systems and the public domain, and less than a hundred are used in the digital world.”

This shocking fact has been highlighted by the United Nations on the occasion of International Mother Language Day, marked 21 February

Over the past three centuries, languages have died out and disappeared at a dramatic and steadily increasing pace, especially in the Americas and Australia. About half of the 6,000 or so languages spoken in the world are under threat

Languages, with their complex implications for identity, communication, social integration, education and development, are of strategic importance for people and the planet, says the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)

“Yet, due to globalisation processes, they are increasingly under threat, or disappearing altogether. When languages fade, so does the world’s rich tapestry of cultural diversity. Opportunities, traditions, memory, unique modes of thinking and expression — valuable resources for ensuring a better future — are also lost.”

 

Mother tongues in education

The International Mother Language Day recognises that languages and multilingualism can advance inclusion, and the Sustainable Development Goals’ focus on leaving no one behind.

UNESCO believes education, based on the first language or mother tongue, must begin from the early years as early childhood care and education is the foundation of learning.

This year’s observance is a call on policymakers, educators and teachers, parents and families to scale up their commitment to multilingual education, and inclusion in education to advance education recovery in the context of COVID-19.

 

A full decade for indigenous peoples’ languages

This effort also contributes to the United Nations International Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022-2032), for which UNESCO is the lead agency, and which places multilingualism at the heart of indigenous peoples’ development.

Participants at the High-level event, “Making a decade of action for indigenous languages,” on 28 February 2020 issued a strategic roadmap for the Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022-2032) prioritising the empowerment indigenous language users, UNESCO reported.

More than 500 participants from 50 countries, including government ministers, indigenous leaders, researchers, public and private partners, and other stakeholders and experts, adopted the Los Pinos Declaration, at the end of the two-day event in Mexico City, which was organised by UNESCO and Mexico.

 

“Nothing for us without us”

The Declaration places indigenous peoples at the centre of its recommendations under the slogan “Nothing for us without us.”

The Declaration, designed to inspire a global plan of action for the Decade, calls for the implementation of the internationally recognized rights of indigenous peoples, expressed notably in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007, the UN System-wide Action Plan (SWAP) on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2017, among several others.

 

On the verge of extinction

In its strategic recommendations for the Decade, the Los Pinos Declaration emphasises indigenous peoples’ rights to “freedom of expression, to an education in their mother tongue and to participation in public life using their languages, as prerequisites for the survival of indigenous languages many of which are currently on the verge of extinction.”

With regard to participation in public life, the Declaration highlights the importance of enabling the use of indigenous languages in justice systems, the media, labour and health programmes. It also points to the potential of digital technologies in supporting the use and preservation of those languages.

Building on the lessons learnt during the International Year of Indigenous Languages (2019), the Declaration recognises the importance of indigenous languages to social cohesion and inclusion, cultural rights, health and justice and highlights their relevance to sustainable development and the preservation of biodiversity as they maintain ancient and traditional knowledge that binds humanity with nature.

 

But, what is a “mother tongue”?

According to the United Nations Association – UK (UNA-UK), Your ‘mother language’, or ‘mother tongue’, is the language you spoke from earliest childhood. For most people, this is just one language but children in multilingual families may learn two simultaneously.

UNESCO considers mother languages to be an essential part of culture and identity, and carriers of values and knowledge.

They are vital to the preservation and transmission of traditions, expressions, songs, jokes and rituals, which make all our lives richer, adds the Association, which was founded in 1945, advocating for UK action at the UN; and is the UK’s leading source of analysis on the UN; with a vibrant grassroots movement of 20,000 people from all walks of life.

UNESCO recommends that countries that have a bilingual or multilingual education system (where they use one or more official languages) give its school students the opportunity to use their mother tongue as their language of instruction.

Research shows that particularly in early years education, use of a child’s mother tongue helps to create a strong foundation for learning.

“However, in some countries, a particular language might be preferred for political or cultural reasons. This can result in the domination of one language in education and other public services.”

People that don’t speak the dominant language or speak it poorly can thus be disadvantaged and in the worst cases, it can lead to discrimination in daily life, exclusion from jobs or services and even oppression, says UNA-UK. “It can also result in other languages becoming endangered and ultimately extinct.”

 

Key facts:

According to the United Nations Association – UK:

• Just like endangered animal species, some languages are rapidly dying out and shared commitment and interest is needed to help keep them alive. At one time, there were between 7,000 and 8,000 distinct languages worldwide.

• Over the past three centuries, languages have died out and disappeared at a dramatic and steadily increasing pace, especially in the Americas and Australia. Now, very few people speak most of the 6,000 known languages around the world.

• About half of the 6,000 or so languages spoken in the world are under threat.

Isn’t all that alarming?

A child walks past a damaged building in eastern Ukraine. Around 1.5 million Ukrainians have been forced from their homes since fighting in the far east of the country began in 2014. The UN and other humanitarian organizations are supporting those who have been displaced, as they try to adjust to their new lives. 3 February 2022. Credit: UNICEF/Ashley Gilbertson V

By John Burroughs
NEW YORK, Feb 21 2022 (IPS)

If the Ukraine crisis erupts into war – even intensified limited war in Eastern Ukraine with overt Russian intervention – the consequences will be severe and far-reaching.

A non-comprehensive list includes: vastly greater loss of life due to armed conflict in Ukraine; destabilization of global peace and security, not least the always urgent pursuit of nuclear arms control and disarmament; and impairment of the will and capability for cooperation on climate protection, public health, and other vital matters.

The proximate cause of the crisis is Russia’s menacing behavior, including deployment of troops and equipment near the border with eastern Ukraine and in Crimea and Belarus, and conducting a nuclear forces exercise in Belarus.

Especially in context and combined with Putin’s at times bellicose rhetoric, these actions are unlawful threats under the fundamental UN Charter prohibition of the “threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state”.

In the case of the exercise, it is also an unlawful threat because it is contrary to general international law to threaten the commission of an illegal act – here the use of nuclear weapons.

Longer-term causes of the crisis are the utterly reckless declaration, made in 2008, the last year of the second George W Bush term, that NATO membership is in principle open to Ukraine and Georgia; and more broadly the long history since the mid-1990s of US and NATO disregard of Russian security interests and proposals.

To take just one example, when the first GW Bush administration determined that the US would withdraw from the ABM Treaty, Russia proposed renegotiation of the treaty. The US answer was simple: No.

The United States then proceeded to establish missile defense facilities in Romania and Poland that Russia, with some reason, regarded as destabilizing.

The only rational path is diplomacy. At two Security Council meetings on Ukraine, on January 31 and February 17, this was the refrain of all Council members, including Russia.

Diplomacy is indeed mandated by the UN Charter, which requires member states to “settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered.”

As the Russian response to a US proposal conveyed, there is some common ground for negotiation on such matters as limits on military deployments and regional arms control, conventional and nuclear. Former US Ambassador to Ukraine Michael McFaul surveys possible topics in this recent Foreign Affairs article.

However, as Russia has been insisting, what is lacking above all is US interest in addressing Russia’s categorical opposition to even the possibility of NATO membership for Ukraine. Instead, the United States has been mechanically saying that foreclosing that possibility is a “non-starter”.

This displays a lack of the creativity and imagination that diplomats on occasion are quite capable of putting to good use. Among possible courses of action: neutrality for Ukraine; an alternative European security arrangement; a long-term moratorium on NATO expansion; or some combination of the foregoing and other measures.

Also, a resolution of the status of eastern Ukraine will have to be reached, with the people of that region having a voice in the outcome. Similarly, the status of Crimea will have to be addressed or the issue deferred.

The stakes are very high. Energetic, creative, and determined problem solving is imperative.

For civil society commentary, see:
No war in Ukraine, then no war anywhere, United for Peace and Justice
The Ukraine crisis: commentary, responses, and background, United for Peace and Justice
Appeal: Diplomacy instead of preparation for war, IPPNW Germany and IALANA Germany (in German)

 

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Excerpt:

The writer is Senior Analyst, Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy, New York City

The rise in coal prices can partly be attributed to the rising electricity demand, especially in Asian coal-producing countries. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

By Sara Bardhan
MUMBAI, India, Feb 18 2022 (IPS)

Coal—considered to be one of the most polluting fossil fuels and, therefore, one of the biggest contributors to climate change—took centre stage at COP 26. A last-minute intervention by India during the negotiations resulted in a crucial amendment to the coal pledge in the Glasgow Climate Pact.

While earlier drafts of the pact mentioned completely quitting coal power, India’s push for a change in the final text resulted in a watered-down commitment to ‘phase down’ instead of ‘phase out’ coal—this means that India pledged to cut down its total projected carbon emission by 1 billion tonnes by 2030, and achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2070.

At COP 26, India pledged to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2070. However, its coal expansion plans and lack of investment in renewable energy sources tell a different story. What will it take for India to quit coal?

While this controversial decision has sparked acerbic debate worldwide, in India, it comes on the heels of the country’s recent coal shortage. Despite Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s dismissal, recent data by the Central Electricity Authority shows that coal stockpiles have dwindled to their lowest in years and coal-fired power stations have either reported outages or had stock worth only a few days on average.

The reasons cited for the coal crunch include:

1. Increased energy demand during COVID-19
During the pandemic, India’s power demands shifted considerably. While demand dropped during the first lockdown, by September 2020, India’s electricity demand was 3.4 percent higher than in September 2019. This happened primarily because of a rise in demand for electricity from the industrial, agricultural, and commercial sectors.

2. Extended monsoons in coal-rich central and eastern states of India
Spells of heavy rain in India’s largest coal-producing states of Odisha, Jharkhand, and West Bengal disrupted the coal supply chain by affecting mining sites and transportation networks.

3. Global fluctuations in the price of coal
According to reports, coal prices quadrupled during the lockdown. The rise in prices can partly be attributed to the rising electricity demand, especially in Asian coal-producing countries.

This acute power shortage invited unwitting comparisons to countries from the Global North, most of which are currently working towards increasing their use of renewable energy. India’s total annual coal demand in 2021 stood at 1.05 billion tonnes. In fact, the India Energy Outlook 2021 suggests that, in the next two decades, India is set to see the largest increase in energy demand by any country.

In addition, the Climate Action Tracker (CAT) has rated India’s non-fossil fuel electricity capacity target (40 percent) as ‘critically insufficient’ and its emissions intensity (volume of emissions per unit of GDP) target of 33 percent–35 percent by 2030 as ‘highly insufficient’.

 

Why is weaning off coal so difficult for India?

1. India has a coal-dependent economy
Bhupendra Yadav—India’s minister for environment, forest, and climate change—rationalised the country’s climate strategy by stating, “Every country will arrive at net-zero emissions as per its own national circumstances, its own strengths and weaknesses.

Developing countries have a right to their fair share of the global carbon budget and are entitled to the responsible use of fossil fuels within this scope…Developing countries have still to deal with their development agendas and poverty eradication. Towards this end, subsidies provide much needed social security and support.”

Yadav’s sentiments reverberate across coal-dependent communities in India. According to Sandeep Pai of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, roughly 3,00,000 people are working directly with government-owned coal mines (earning fixed salaries and benefits), another 5,00,000 are reliant on coal for their pensions, and close to 4 million have livelihoods that are directly or indirectly linked to coal.

Evidently, in India’s coal belt, where families have depended on coal extraction for generations, quitting dependency on coal is not an option. This is primarily because these families do not own land where they can farm and, even if they do, research shows that mining operations usually generate acidic and chemically noxious environments that directly impact the quality of agricultural land and groundwater available in surrounding areas.

Consider the coalfields in Maharashtra’s Vidarbha region where land is barren and unproductive—covered in rubble, soot, dust, sand, waste, and debris; the Jharia coalfield in Jharkhand where accidental fires have been blazing for years, leaving the ground charred and land, is dotted with fatal sinkholes; or Chhattisgarh’s Hasdeo forest where coal mining has not only caused profound ecological damage but also displaced local elephant populations.

 

2. India’s energy is still largely coal-based
As millions of homes in the country still lack an electricity connection, Samantha Gross, director of the Energy Security and Climate Initiative at the Brookings Institution, points to the fact that India’s “energy policy currently focuses on bringing affordable electricity to all homes”.

Consequently, India’s increased investment in coal evacuation, infrastructure, project development, exploration and clean coal technologies is estimated to require 1 billion tonnes worth of coal production by 2023–24. Moreover, the CAT’s projections show that India’s coal capacity is expected to reach almost 266 GW, from the current 200 GW, by 2029–30.

Another key dimension in the discourse surrounding India’s climate policy is the role of energy in improving social development. Union Minister Yadav briefly mentioned it, and research has shown that modern energy services such as electricity and clean cooking fuels are critical in improving health and education outcomes, reducing poverty, and increasing productivity.

This means reliable and continuous access to electricity is crucial in building a better future for India’s marginalised. And since it is cheaper to produce electricity using coal than deploying renewable sources, the immediate trade-off in switching from coal to renewable sources is that we risk putting the country’s health and education outcomes in a precarious position.

Lastly, while India provides subsidies to both conventional and renewable energies, according to the CAT, coal subsidies are still approximately 35 percent higher than those for renewables such as solar energy and hydropower. It is no surprise then that climate professionals find India’s coal expansion plans counter-intuitive to its international climate commitments.

 

What is the way forward?

In its coal-rich central and eastern states, India has primarily implemented and expanded state-run mining projects by expropriating Adivasi lands. To compensate for the dispossession of land, local Adivasis are guaranteed jobs as assistants or labourers but the state’s compensation policies are famously ill-implemented. According to various reports, women and Adivasi workers have disproportionately suffered the impact of coal-induced displacement.

Repeated displacement and migration also lead to the breakdown of social support networks, cements inequalities and insecurities, and often leads to diminishing intra-community solidarity. As such, in more ways than one, India’s coal industry has always depended on Adivasi lands and labour and, without appropriate compensation or diversification, coal-dependent Adivasi communities are likely to face uncertainty once again in light of India’s energy transition.

While it is difficult to postulate a one-size-fits-all model for the entire country and the coal belt, here are some suggestions for how we can envision a post-coal India that is also sustainable and inclusive:

1. Develop a rehabilitation strategy on closure of coal mines
Since 2008, approximately 123 mines have been closed in India. However, there are still no proper guidelines to address the decommissioning of coal power plants. In 2020, the Supreme Court made it mandatory for mining companies to regrass mining areas on completion of mining projects.

However,  studies note that India still needs to plan a rehabilitation strategy to de-risk coal-dependent regions, rebuild their economies, and deploy adequate social protection measures.

At present, India is developing a framework for dealing with the closures of coal mines and undertaking pilot projects for the socio-economic transformation of the country’s coal mining areas with monetary assistance from the World Bank.

2. Diversify coal-dependent economies
One of the most important steps in building a robust post-coal economy is to invest in strengthening and re-training coal-dependent communities. There are currently no specific schemes that address or assist them in India.

However, American federal programmes such as Solar Training and Education for Professionals (STEP) and the Partnerships for Opportunity and Workforce and Economic Revitalization Dislocated Worker Grant set significant precedent for India to formulate its own. Attention also needs to be given to training displaced workers for employment in the renewable energy sector.

3. Promote entrepreneurship in rural coal-dependent regions
The Energy and Resources Institute of India (TERI) recommends the promotion of rural enterprise and microcredit financing, among other measures, to navigate post-coal revitalisation. Studies show that promoting entrepreneurship by microfinancing and adequate funds in rural areas is critical because it helps create networks, encourage community leadership, and build a diverse economy with a variety of employment options.

4. Leverage climate finance
India’s green transition could be financed by budget borrowing mechanisms such as development financial institutions (DFIs) and investments via the Climate Change Finance Unit (CCFU) to help facilitate the release of new policies, promote green finance, and aid capacity building.

There are several nationalised banks throughout the world that specifically focus on financing green technologies in their respective countries. In 2016, the Indian Renewable Energy Development Agency (IREDA) became the first such government-backed agency.

However, it is still unclear how effective it has been in promoting clean energy in India. Overall, there is an urgent need to develop a standardised framework of green finance investments and their monitoring and evaluation in the country.

Sara Bardhan is a multidisciplinary feminist researcher working at the intersection of gender, health, and governance in developing urban spaces. She has previously worked with the Social and Political Research Foundation and Transform Rural India Foundation among others. Her writings have appeared in publications such as The Wire, The Fuller Project, Citizen Matters, and Feminism in India. Find out more about her.

This story was originally published by India Development Review (IDR)

The Seychelles is a nation made up of some 115 islands in the Indian Ocean. Credit: UN News, Manahas Farquhar/ Matthew Morgan

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 18 2022 (IPS)

A former Indian ambassador once told an American audience that one of the biggest misconceptions about the Indian Ocean is that it belongs to India. “Not so, but we wish we did”, he said, amidst laughter.

Speaking before the UN’s Ad Hoc Committee on the Indian Ocean last year, an Indian diplomat told delegates: “India and the Indian Ocean are inseparable. It is not just a statement of a fact of geography; but of deeper civilizational, historical, cultural, economic and political linkages that have been forged over centuries between India and the Ocean that bears its name”.

Throughout history, he pointed out, “India’s wellbeing and prosperity has been linked to its access to the Indian Ocean region. This remains even more relevant today and hence we have a vital stake in the security of the Indian Ocean.”

But rising big power geo-politics in the region have virtually doomed a longstanding proposal for a Zone of Peace (IOPZ)-– irrespective of whether it is in the Indian Ocean or in “India’s Ocean”.

For an unprecedented 58 years, the United Nations has been laboriously struggling to fully implement the proposal, first initiated by Sri Lankan Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike during the General Assembly sessions in 1964.

The proposal was also endorsed by the then 113-member Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), the largest single political coalition at the United Nations.

At the height of the Cold War, the US, France, Britain and the former Soviet Union had naval bases in the region, including refuelling facilities in Socotra Island in the former South Yemen, Gan air base in the Maldives, Asmara in Ethiopia, Port Victoria in the Seychelles, the UK-owned military base in the island of Diego Garcia and Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam.

A 1971 UN resolution (2832) did declare the Indian Ocean a zone of peace calling upon the “great powers” to enter into immediate consultations with the littoral States of the Indian Ocean with a view to halting the further escalation and expansion of their military presence in the Indian Ocean.

But it never happened – and the declaration has remained stagnant since then.

Meanwhile, the resurrection in 2017 of the informal alliance, originally created in 2007 and called the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (and known as the Quad), comprising the US, Australia, India, and Japan, is being viewed as a group aligned in their “shared concerns about China’s increasingly assertive behavior in the Indo-Pacific region”.

Aerial view of the vast destruction of the Indonesian coast caused by the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004. Credit: UN Photo/E. Schneider

According to a New York Times story last December, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken pledged to strengthen relations with Indo-Pacific nations through billions of dollars in American investments and aid “and, in doing so, counter Beijing’s regional pull”.

The Indo-Pacific region covers countries of South Asia, including India and Pakistan, two nuclear powers, plus Australia, Japan and the 10 countries that comprise the Association of Southeast Nations (ASEAN): Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and
Vietnam.

Vijay Prashad, Executive Director, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, told IPS the idea of the ‘zone of peace’ is sadly not widely known. There are several countries in the world that have come together to establish a ‘nuclear-weapons free zone of peace’, such as in the South Pacific and in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The ‘zone of peace’ does not include international waters, which means that it does not impact the shipping lanes where military ships traverse.

He pointed out that the idea of the ‘zone of peace’ comes out of the peace agenda of the non-aligned states, which is why it was broached for the Indian Ocean in 1964.

The region has several nuclear powers – India and Pakistan, but also the military bases of the United States as well as France and the UK, said Prashad, who is also Non-Resident Senior Fellow, Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China.

An advance of the idea of the Nuclear-Weapons-Free Zone (NWFZ), he argued, is important for several reasons:

1. It would be a pathway to pressure India and Pakistan to return to the table and seriously discuss a peace agenda.

2. It would settle the long-standing question of the Chagos islanders, whose case in the UK courts to reclaim their lands in Diego Garcia (now a US-UK base) would be strengthened. The same applies to the people of Agalega (see: https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/about-a-small-mauritian-island/article24073692.ece) and

3. It would put down a marker against the Indo-Pacific warfare agenda of the Quad and of AUKUS, said Prashad.

Addressing a meeting in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta last December, US Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said the Indo-Pacific region is the fastest growing region on the planet. “It accounts for 60 percent of the world economy, two-thirds of all economic growth over the last five years. It’s home to more than half the world’s people, seven of the 15 biggest economies”.

“The United States has long been, is, and always will be an Indo-Pacific nation. This is a geographic fact, from our Pacific coast states to Guam, our territories across the Pacific. And it’s a historical reality, demonstrated by our two centuries of trade and other ties with the region.”

“Today, half of the United States’ top trading partners are in the Indo-Pacific. It’s the destination for nearly one-third of our exports, the source of $900 billion in foreign direct investment in the United States, and that’s creating millions of jobs spread across all 50 of our states”.

“And more members of our military are stationed in the region than anywhere outside the continental U.S., ensuring peace and security that have been vital to prosperity in the region, benefiting us all”, he noted.

Meanwhile three ambassadors who chaired the Ad Hoc committee opted to speak only on condition of anonymity.

But Ambassador Anwarul K. Chowdhury, former Permanent Representative of Bangladesh to the UN and a one-time Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations, agreed to go on-the-record when he told IPS: “I had avoided attending the Ad Hoc Committee’s meetings both as PR and DPR (Permanent Representative and Deputy Permanent Representative) as I anticipated that there would be no worthwhile outcome of the deliberations of a committee which had “ad hoc” added to its name”.

He pointed out that countries in the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) which wanted to keep US out of the Indian Ocean area were the main force behind the Committee’s propaganda-like deliberations.

“With the end of USSR, the Committee also faded away. The political nature of the Committee can be easily understood as three Committee chairs wanted to be anonymous. More so as their countries are now eager to tilt towards the reality of one “superpower,” he declared.”

Ambassador Kshenuka Senewiratne, a former Permanent Representative of Sri Lanka to the United Nations, told IPS ” as for the Indo-Pacific region, the US seems to be now more proactive due to China’s spread across this region on many aspects through their relationships with respective countries.”

But one cannot run-away from the fact that the references to trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) vis- a-vis the US and the region, she pointed out, is due to their domination by China.

“Hence the former’s interest to work with other major economic giants like India, Australia and Japan in the region & its formalization by creating the Quad. This would be the mechanism that China is watching,” she said.

Blinken’s statement speaks of the spread of the US military in the Indo-Pacific region, which is a misplaced threat, she argued, considering China has used its economic strategy to maintain power in the region and has not wielded its military might. This is so even with regard to the South China issue.

China’s manner of making countries in the region beholden to them is an aspect for the US and other related large economies in the Indo Pacific region to watch and act in a similar manner by seeking to assist in developing those countries’ economies, she declared.

Meanwhile, a senior Sri Lankan diplomat who once chaired the 44-member UN Adhoc Committee, told IPS: “The IOPZ is a dead horse—and beating it furiously is not going to revive it.”

The concept of the IOPZ, he said, was perceived during the height of the Cold War and before the ongoing technological revolution, 24/7 news cycles and China’s rise, and India under the Soviet yoke – all of which is kind of anachronistic in modern times.

“The key players in New York, and at the UN secretariat, who pay lip service to the idea, keep flogging the dead horse– like they do with many such mandates for lack of methodology to bury it permanently,” he declared.

“I quite agree that the US-China rivalry and the growing interest in the Indo-Pacific region could trigger renewed interest in the IOPZ”, said one former UN envoy.

Striking a positive note, he added: “Keeping with the UN General Assembly mandate, the IOPZ meetings are to be convened every two years. So, it may be premature to pronounce its demise!”

 

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School children crossing the road on a pedestrian crossing in Kyrgyzstan. Credit: Victor Lacken - UNRSF.

By Nneka Henry
GENEVA, Feb 17 2022 (IPS)

When we think about global crises, road safety isn’t one that comes to mind. The reality is that unsafe roads is a health crisis gone rogue. 

Unlike the COVID-19 pandemic, road traffic injuries are the leading cause of death from people between the ages of 5-29. And, with an estimated 1.35 million fatalities and 50 million non-fatal injuries every year, unsafe vehicles and roads affect everyone and impact several areas of development – including environmental sustainability. 

Road traffic injuries are the leading cause of death from people between the ages of 5-29. And, with an estimated 1.35 million fatalities and 50 million non-fatal injuries every year, unsafe vehicles and roads affect everyone

In 2015, the United Nations raised the alarm. The 2030 Global Development Agenda expressly recognizes that road safety can be improved by governments providing access to safe, affordable and “greener” ways of moving, including public transport. (Sustainable Development Goal 11.2)

There are plenty of things that the UN is doing to solve this global crisis, but it cannot solve it alone. Here are three questions to spur action towards making roads safer for road users everywhere.

 

How committed are our governments to solving the road safety crisis?

To solve this crisis, we need a show of commitment, especially from governments. One way of doing that is for leaders across the developed and developing world to take an active role in safe and sustainable mobility.

The UN General Assembly High-Level Meeting on Improving Road Safety on 30 June 2022 in New York could be the moment in history when UN member states commit to consciously prioritize and fund a development assistance package of safe and clean mobility measures in low- and middle-income countries. 

This package could include designing and implementing safe modes of transport that are equally low-emission solutions such as affordable public transportation; accessible walking and cycling lanes; or safe and clean used vehicle standards. 

It’s time for governments to show support, attend the High-Level Meeting and make the case for why road safety is a national priority and a priority for development assistance. And, in turn, for G7 countries to include road safety as a priority in the G7 Summit Communique 26-28 June 2022, just days before the UN High-Level Meeting on Road Safety.

 

How can we collectively build capacity in countries with high road fatalities?

The WHO together with UN Regional Commissions have helped structure a targeted action plan on road safety for the global community to rally around and implement. However, with more than 90% of road traffic fatalities occurring in low- and middle-income countries, with Africa as the hardest hit region, mobilizing finances to implement the plan remains a critical challenge.  

The UN is crowding in and around a wide range of partners to ensure the transfer of technical knowledge, best practices, and financial resources to the countries that need help the most. 

Since 2018, the United Nations Road Safety Fund has been playing a coordinating role among UN agencies to support governments through projects to improve land use for walking and cycling lanes, driving licensing, vehicle inspection, speed enforcement, safe school zone design and emergency post-crash response systems. 

FIA Foundation, the World Bank’s Global Road Safety Facility, the International Federation of the Red Cross, Bloomberg Philanthropies, NGOs, regional Road Safety Observatories and major government and corporate funders are among those consulted and engaged in designing and delivering these projects. 

From Armenia to Paraguay to West Africa, UNRSF now serves 30 countries with new calls for proposals to respond to country-led priorities that catalyze investments for better road safety.

 

How do we advocate for effective road safety financing?

Awareness-raising and advocacy of road safety financing is a game changer. The UN’s Special Envoy for Road Safety, Jean Todt’s, advocacy efforts helped launch the UN Road Safety Fund and raised close to $20 million dollars for related UN road safety performance reviews in Africa and capacity building projects in developing countries across the world. 

Organisations such as the Global Alliance of NGOs for Road safety are there to support and empower local groups and community-based organisations working on road safety. And at the grassroots we can replicate and take part in global advocacy initiatives such as the biennial UN Global Road Safety Week.

The week’s 2021 edition, through a Streets for Life campaign, called for 30 km/h speed limits worldwide on streets with mixed vehicular and pedestrian traffic. Or the Global Road Safety Film Festival on 21-22 February 2022, which screens short films from all over the world to help explain the challenges and solutions to improve road safety.

For the Second Decade of Action for Road Safety 2021 – 2030, success hinges on the marriage between safe, sustainable mobility and targeted financing, which promises to bear fruit for people and the planet. Together with UN efforts, it’s time we all started doing more about it. 

Asking the right questions is the start of a positive disruption to the global road safety crisis.

 

Excerpt:

The author is Head of the UN Road Safety Fund