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The Philippines has the highest incidence of leprosy of any country in the region – about 1,700 new cases have been identified in each of the last three years. Credit: moyerphotos/CC by 2.0

By Ben Kritz
MANILA, Mar 2 2019 (IPS)

The stubborn challenge of diagnosis and treatment of leprosy among difficult to reach populations in the Philippines should soon become easier with the rollout of a mobile app connecting field health workers with physicians and clinics.

Officially launched at the end of January after years of testing, the app was created by Philippine developer MetaHelix in cooperation with the Department of Health (DOH) and pharmaceutical company Novartis. It will allow barangay (village) health workers to connect remotely with specialists to confirm diagnoses and plan treatment of isolated leprosy patients.

First launched as a pilot in 2014, the Leprosy Alert and Response Network System (LEARNS) app allows healthcare workers to “send images of suspect leprosy lesions and symptoms to a specialist”.

“LEARNS promotes early case finding and helps reduce delays in diagnosis and treatment,” Novartis said in a statement when the app was launched. “LEARNS also provides data for disease surveillance, patient education, and report generation.”

The new mobile application that was tested in the Philippines for more than a year highlights ongoing efforts against leprosy, or Hansen’s Disease, which is sometimes called “the world’s oldest diagnosed disease”.

In most of the world leprosy is largely considered a disease of the past. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), leprosy was eliminated as a global public health problem in 2000 because it had a prevalence of less than 1 case per 10,000 people.

However, one of the few remaining places where the disease remains an elevated public concern is the Philippines, which makes the country an appropriate venue for the “Regional Assembly of Organisations of People Affected by Leprosy in Asia,” being held in Manila from Mar. 3 to 5.

The conference is a joint project of the Philippine government-run Culion Sanitarium and General Hospital (CSGH), the Coalition of Leprosy Advocate of the Philippines (CLAP), and the Sasakawa Memorial Health Foundation (SMHF), and seeks to find ways to overcome the last stubborn obstacles to completely eradicating leprosy.

The issues faced by public health advocates and victims of the disease in the Philippines are emblematic of problems faced throughout the region: Difficult detection and treatment of often isolated sufferers, a lack of public awareness and understanding of leprosy, and low prioritisation of public health efforts to treat leprosy and its social impact on the part of governments.

Hidden in plain sight

The treatment of leprosy in the Philippines throughout most of the country’s history has been typical of the way societies everywhere have handled it. Largely ostracised by communities and even their own families, leprosy sufferers were isolated in dedicated facilities and kept out of sight. The two best-known facilities in the Philippines are the CSGH, once the largest facility of its kind in the world, located on Culion Island in the Western Philippines; and the Tala Sanitarium – officially known as the Dr. Jose N. Rodriguez Memorial Hospital – located in Caloocan, a distant suburb of Manila.

Although both facilities are still technically operational, better understanding of the disease and its low communicability has allowed health officials to shift most of their efforts to community-based treatment. According to Dr. Mary Ann Navarro, a Department of Health administrator in Palawan, where a minor outbreak of leprosy among indigenous people was detected in late 2017, in sitio treatment is often the only feasible approach.

“Better treatment options and the relatively low risk of transmission means that it’s not necessary to isolate patients,” Navarro told IPS. “Many cases, such as the ones discovered last year here [in Palawan] are among people with little access to healthcare, so our best option is to bring treatment to them.”

“That also helps to reduce some of the social stigma patients face, by giving us a chance to educate their communities and eliminate some of the fear of the disease,” she added. “Changing social attitudes still is a big challenge, however.”

Situations like the outbreak in Palawan, where eight cases were discovered among an indigenous community in the southern part of the island, are relatively rare. Most cases, according to a local government official, are individuals who remain in the community, but often struggle for acceptance.

“To our knowledge, we have about 10 people from this barangay who come to the health centre for treatment,” Alexander “Bong” Medina, chairman of a barangay in San Jose Del Monte in Bulacan Province north of Manila told IPS.

“The treatment is provided free, and we do our best to assist them socially, but it’s difficult,” Medina explained. “These are poor, what you might call marginalised people to begin with, and they often don’t realise there is assistance available until it’s too late, or they are afraid to come in because of the shame. And we don’t really have resources to go seek them out.”

Persistent problem

The Western Pacific Regional Office of the WHO views the Philippines as somewhat of an outlier in terms of leprosy incidence. The Philippines has the highest incidence of leprosy of any country in the region – about 1,700 new cases have been identified in each of the last three years, although that rate is half what it was a decade ago – and is largely responsible for the region being behind the rest of the world in achieving the 1 in 10,000 benchmark.

According to data from the Philippines’ Department of Health, although the overall prevalence of leprosy is less than 0.4 cases per 10,000, 1,660 new cases were identified in 2017 alone, with about 6.7 percent of those being children under the age of 15. This Southeast Asian nation, which comprises some 7,000 islands, has a population of over 104 million.

To address the problem, the Philippine government in 2016 launched the National Leprosy Control Programme (NLCP), a multi-agency effort involving the DOH, WHO, and a number of private sector and NGO partners with the goal of “a leprosy-free Philippines by 2022.”

To better calibrate the programme’s response and identify pockets where leprosy is still prevalent, the first major initiative of the NLCP is the completion of a baseline population survey, being conducted in cooperation with the Regional Institute for Tropical Medicine and expected to be completed sometime this year.

The programme is also working to raise public awareness and understanding of the disease by promoting various activities, such as World Leprosy Day in January, a national-level Leprosy Control Week in February, and National Skin Disease Detection and Prevention Week, which is held the second week of November.

Related Articles

• Q&A: Leprosy Increases as World Gives Attention to Newer Endemic Diseases
• Eradicating Leprosy in Mozambique, a Complicated Task

The post Leprosy Remains a Stubborn, Unseen Problem in the Philippines appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Vijay Prashad
Mar 1 2019 (IPS-Partners)

(Tricontinental) – The mood in Caracas (Venezuela) is sombre. It appears that the attempted coup against the government that began on 23 January is now substantially over (as the Venezuelan Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza tells me). The Lima Cartel is divided. The Europeans have cold feet. On the one-month anniversary of that attempt, a massive crowd of the poor gathered in the centre of Caracas to demonstrate their support for the Bolivarian Revolution. An elderly couple carried a sign which captured the mood – Somos los Invisibles. Somos los Invensibles. Venceremos (We are the Invisible. We are the Invincible. We will Overcome).

It is hard to gauge the numbers of people at that rally. A picture from a drone suggests a large crowd, but it misleads. Most crowd counting software assumes a certain body size and a certain amount of space between people in a crowd. Those assumptions do not apply in this case. The supporters of the government and of the Bolivarian Revolution bear the marks of their history on their bodies. They are small and thin, darker skinned and worn by decades of work that has earned them just about enough to survive. The reason why they adore Hugo Chavez – his image everywhere – and why they call themselves Chavistas is that it was the arrival of Chavez in the 1990s that gave them hope and that inspired their political activity. Not for them the accusations that this government – led by Nicolas Maduro – is responsible for their hunger. They know that their Bolivarian Revolution is a process and that they are active in that process.

This Wednesday, thirty years ago, thousands of Venezuela’s poor felt maligned by the increase in bus fares. They ran across their country, their rage captured in the disorder they produced. That event is called the Caracazo. It is this event that inaugurates the Bolivarian Revolution. A few days before the anniversary, I visited Mariela Machado, a Black, poor, working-class woman who leads a community in one of the many self-organised housing projects in Caracas. It was the Caracazo and Chavez that gave her the strength to overcome the centuries of disparagement and poverty that weighed on her. She, and her neighbours, had done their best to build a community – with a common kitchen, a bakery, a meeting hall and shared space that is clean and decent. Most of the leaders of such neighbourhoods are women – all are poor, most are workers, many are Afro-Venezuelans. I asked Mariela what would happen to her and her neighbourhood if this government fell. ‘We would be evicted,’ she told me. The fierce defence of the Chavistas against the overthrow of their government is linked to their fear that whatever changes had come in their lives would now be reversed. The old humiliation would return.

Even if the attempt to overthrow the government in Caracas is now mostly over, there is fragility in the Venezuelan government. It is a fragility shared with most countries of the tricontinent – of Africa, Asia and Latin America. Public finances across the world have been damaged by the departure of trillions of dollars away from the reach of governments and of productive activity. It is estimated that there is between $21 and $32 trillion in the tax havens. Global financial stock markets toy with over $200 trillion. This is social wealth diverted to unproductive uses. No schools are built with this money. No hospitals are built with this money. Profits on financial investment race to the rich, who have ceased to pay taxation and have ceased to risk their wealth in productive investments. The billionaires are on a tax strike and an investment strike. These two strikes – tax strike and investment strike – are their weapons in the class struggle (as laid out in our first Working Document, In the Ruins of the Present). Because of these strikes and the fragile global commodity chain, almost a billion people cannot find work that sustains them, while those who have work find their humanity broken by their jobs.

There is fragility in Venezuela’s reliance upon oil and its lack of food sovereignty. There are some long-term fundamental problems of the Venezuelan economy that long predate the arrival of Chavez and that will continue for some time yet. These are problems common to most countries – such as Nigeria – that have large populations, that rely upon oil exports that finance the imports of just about everything. The vulnerabilities are many. Burkina Faso’s Thomas Sankara would say, ‘he who feeds you, controls you’. It is an important reminder. Talk of increasing food production in Venezuela is important – and urgent (take a quick journey with Ricardo Vaz to Mérida, where the native potato is being rescued). All this will require deeper land reform, but also changes in the culture of consumption that have been produced by the inflow of oil rent. Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonso – one of Venezuela’s great oil ministers – called oil the ‘devil’s excrement’. He remains correct.

Over the course of the past week, almost five hundred people from 87 countries representing political groups and movements came to Caracas for the International Assembly of the Peoples – a new initiative that aims to create a platform for solidarity campaigns and to better connect sections of the Left. Reports of the deliberations – which were smart and imperative – made it to no mainstream press. Reporters from People’s Dispatch and ALBA as well as a few other services covered the discussions, which ranged from solidarity for the Venezuelan people to serious consideration of the way money and fake news has subverted electoral democracy. It will take time to digest the implications of these discussions – and it will take time to see what kinds of common actions develop. Certainly, the first common action is to make sure that there is no military intervention in Venezuela and to push for an end to the strangulation of the Venezuelan economy.

The governments of India and Pakistan are playing with fire. Aerial attacks on each other’s territory threatens to widen the conflict. The majority of Indians and Pakistanis – like the majority of Venezuelans – will not gain from a war. Suffering will be their coin. There are so many real problems that bedevil the countries of South Asia – hunger being one of them. Just before the aircraft fired across the border, hundreds of workers marched to the Indian parliament to demand higher wages and pensions and to prevent the privatisation of the child care centres. They handed over a petition that had 40 million signatures to the government.

The protest of the child care (anganwadi) workers brought to mind Wislawa Szymborska’s poem, The End and the Beginning (translated by Johanna Trzeciak):

After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble
to the side of the road,
so the corpse-filled wagons
can pass.

Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.

Someone has to drag in a girder
to prop up a wall.
Someone has to glaze a window,
rehang a door.

Photogenic it’s not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left
for another war.

We’ll need the bridges back,
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.

Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls the way it was.
Someone else listens
and nods with unsevered head.
But already there are those nearby
starting to mill about
who will find it dull.

From out of the bushes
sometimes someone still unearths
rusted-out arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew
what was going on here
must make way for
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass that has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out
blade of grass in his mouth
gazing at the clouds.

The post We Are the Invisible. We Are the Invincible. We Will Overcome. appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

From the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research

The post We Are the Invisible. We Are the Invincible. We Will Overcome. appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Illustration: Michael Waraksa

By Christine Lagarde
WASHINGTON DC, Mar 1 2019 (IPS)

March 8 marks International Women’s Day, which provides a chance to reflect on the struggle for greater gender equality.

The roots of this annual event reach back more than a century, yet its focus on respect and opportunities for women remains strikingly relevant today—from sexual harassment and violence to unequal laws and unfairness in the workplace, where women are too often underemployed, underpaid, and underpromoted.

Unequal or unfair treatment can marginalize women and hinder their participation as productive individuals contributing to society and the economy in invaluable ways.

Yet when I consider the rich tapestry of organizations and individuals who can make a difference to ensure women have equal opportunities, I also see a crucial role for policymakers.

They can use their positions to design policies that help women and girls access what they need for a fulfilling life—including education, health services, safe transportation, legal protection against harassment, finance, and flexible working arrangements.

The IMF recommends these kinds of policy measures to its member countries—and works with many governments to examine how policies affect women.

In recent years we have increased our emphasis on women’s empowerment precisely because, beyond the important ethical considerations, it also represents a missed opportunity in the pursuit of macroeconomic stability and inclusive growth—where the IMF’s expertise lies.

Our research has shown, for example, that if women’s employment equaled men’s, economies would be more resilient and economic growth would be higher.

Our new estimates show that, for the bottom half of countries in our sample in terms of gender inequality, closing the gender gap in employment could increase GDP by an average of 35 percent—of which 7–8 percentage points are productivity gains due to gender diversity.

Adding one more woman in a firm’s senior management or corporate board—while keeping the size of the board unchanged—is associated with an 8–13 basis point higher return on assets. If banks and financial supervisors increased the share of women in senior positions, the banking sector would be more stable too.

The IMF’s 189 member countries face many different challenges, but empowering women remains a common denominator and a global imperative for all those who care about fairness and diversity, but also productivity and growth of societies and economies that are more inclusive. If we can achieve this, we all gain.

*Opinions expressed in articles and other materials are those of the authors; they do not necessarily reflect IMF policy.

The post A Global Imperative: Empowering Women is Critical for World’s Economy & People appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Christine Lagarde* is Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF)

The post A Global Imperative: Empowering Women is Critical for World’s Economy & People appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana
BANGKOK, Thailand, Mar 1 2019 (IPS)

Equal rights have been demanded and promised for generations, but last year a shift occurred in the women’s movement. Across Asia and the Pacific and around the world, women demonstrated to condemn a status quo which continues to deprive too many women and girls of respect and equal opportunity.

This is a momentum we must maintain to achieve gender equality in Asia and the Pacific, an ambition which lies at the heart of the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Education is key. It remains the passport to better jobs, higher incomes and improved life chances. Progress in our region has been made and rightly celebrated, but equal numbers of boys and girls enrolled in education belies high dropout rates and lower attendance and attainment levels for girls.

This is particularly acute in rural areas, where in many countries only very few girls from poor households complete secondary education. Improving health care coverage, particularly sexual and reproductive health, is another imperative.

Again, women living in rural and remote areas are particularly disadvantaged, contributing to high maternal mortality rates in parts of Asia and the Pacific and teenage pregnancies with enduring societal consequences.

Executive Secretary Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana

This inequality of opportunity contributes to placing women at a considerable disadvantage in the labour market. Over the past thirty years, female labour market participation has declined in Asia and the Pacific, where only half of all women are economically active.

This is in part because women are relied on to give up to six hours of unpaid care work a day, stifling careers and ambitions and undermining equal political representation. Corporate leadership positions remain the preserve of men.

Today, for every ten men in work in the Asia-Pacific region there are only six women, the majority of whom are trapped in precarious, informal employment, characterised by low wages and hazardous working conditions.

With such considerable barriers remaining to gender equality, the United Nations Economic Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific is supporting a bold coordinated response, which must include gender responsive budgeting.

This approach ensures the different needs of women and men are part of budgetary decisions for the public expenditure which underpins the design of government programmes and activities. This is particularly important in shaping the provision of social protection, education and health care and the design of infrastructure.

By placing a greater focus on women’s needs, gender responsive budgeting has been shown to make a major contribution to reducing the burden of unpaid work and enhancing women’s opportunities for leadership in the workplace and in political and public life.

Gender responsive budgeting could also be used to create a more supportive environment for women entrepreneurs who are proven catalysts for change and a reliable means of increasing women’s share of the workforce.

Women employ other women, who in turn, are known to spend more on their families, helping give children a healthy diet, a solid education and reliable health care. As potential GDP gains from gender equality in work and society are enormous in our region, up to eighteen percent in parts of South Asia, this is an opportunity we cannot afford to miss.

Yet this entrepreneurial potential is currently frustrated by a lack of access to finance and ICT tools for business development. Seventy percent of women-owned micro, small and medium enterprises are underserved by financial institutions in developing countries.

Women-owned enterprises are consistently smaller and concentrated in less profitable sectors. Innovative technology could be deployed to reduce gender barriers and promote digital inclusion.

This requires support for businesswomen to mainstream ICT across business operations, make their financial management more robust and their outlook more responsive to new technologies.

Put simply, women’s empowerment requires action on all fronts. It begins with equal opportunity to education and health care services, delivered through targeted investments, better attuned to women’s needs.

Supporting women entrepreneurs with better access to finance and ICT can then keep women in work, enabling their businesses to innovate, remain competitive and expand.

These businesses are essential incubators for future generations of women’s leaders, but will also contribute to a more gender equal environment today. Women’s empowerment cannot wait in Asia and the Pacific.

The post Education Key to Gender Equality in Asia & the Pacific appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana is UN Under-Secretary-General and Executive Secretary of the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP).

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Condom use is low among youth aged 15-19. Credit: M.Sayagues/IPS

By Tharanga Yakupitiyage
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 1 2019 (IPS)

In light of rates of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and unintended pregnancies, governments are exploring ways to tackle taboos around condoms.

In a new study, the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) reviews the availability and accessibility of condoms, hoping to dismantle potentially harmful misconceptions.

“Many countries want to implement [CAP], but they are very anxious because they will be asked where the evidence is,” UNFPA’s senior HIV prevention advisor Bidia Deperthes told IPS.

“We don’t put enough money to really understand the behavior and to have this study that can really guide us and put condoms in places where people really need them…the condoms in terms of volumes seems to be out there, but are they really reaching the people who need to use them?” she added.

Increasingly, it is youth that need them the most.

According to the UN Children’s Fund, HIV rates among adolescents and young people aged 15-19 are rising. In 2016 alone, 260,000 young people of the same age were newly infected with HIV.

With a new generation who did not face the HIV epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s, Eda Algur, who headed the research, pointed to the importance of condoms.

“Because of things like pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) and the fact that we have so many medications for [HIV], it may be less on people’s minds,” she told IPS.

“Rates are going down in all other age groups but teenagers of high school age are particularly at risk in 2019. It should be a main concern and a main reason for advocating for condoms,” Algur added.

Beyond HIV, more than 1 million STIs are acquired everyday worldwide with the second highest rate occurring among 15-19 year olds.

However, a majority of adolescents do not have access to any adequate or affordable STI services.

While male condoms are among the most effective methods against HIV and STIs, misconceptions around contraception have resulted in backlash.

“The contention comes from a lot of civil society and parents and students voicing concerns that making condoms available would kind of be a green light for students—almost telling them that it is ok to have sex,” Algur said.

Deperthes echoed similar sentiments, noting that governments also shy away despite the statistics.

For instance, when countries such as the Philippines and South Africa considered implementing condom availability programs (CAP) in secondary schools, communities pushed back, noting that it will promote students to initiate sex.

UNFPA also found that opponents of CAP believe such programs will increase promiscuity and sexual activity among students as well as adopt other risky sexual behaviors.

“This stems from view of condoms as a device for sex, rather than for protection during sex,” the study states.

However, upon reviewing existing research across seven countries, UNFPA observed that such fears are unfounded.

Data overwhelming show that CAP does not increase sexual activity nor does it lead to more sexual partners.

Rather, CAP has lead to an increase in condom acquisition and use, suggesting safer sex among students.

In fact, some were up to three times more likely to acquire condoms with CAP than without.

All studies also found a decrease in STI rates for students with CAP compared to those without.

In New York City, CAP has been implemented since the early 1990s, largely as a result of the HIV epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s. Similar programs can be seen across the United States, and it has led to a decrease in risk of HIV infection.

Surveys also showed that a majority of students and parents believed CAP would not increase sexual activity, and 60 percent of parents in one study thought that condoms should be made available in high schools.

While condom use has generally increased over recent decades, there is still a gap between availability and need in sub-Saharan Africa. In 47 countries in the region, the estimated male condom need in 2015 was 6 billion but only approximately 3 billion were distributed.

Algur highlighted the effectiveness of CAP, especially when combined with comprehensive sexuality education.

Two studies revealed that combining CAP with sex education programs resulted in the greatest uptake of condoms.

But the lack of published data on the subject is a missed opportunity for countries to understand and tailor programs.

“I think this study showed us that there is a real value to evaluating these programs when they exist…by presenting in that fashion that this is a program worth investing money into because it does have a positive outcome on students’ health will be the way to go,” Algur told IPS.

Deperthes stressed the need to be inclusive, starting with the parents who must be involved at every step of the way in order to ensure the success and effectiveness of such programs.

“You educate them, you advocate them, you show them the data—they will be your partners, not opponents. If you don’t do that, then of course it will backfire,” Deperthes said.

The post The Misconceptions of Contraception appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Hassan Hussein, a refugee from Syria, pleads with police to allow his family into a registration centre for migrants and refugees in Preševo, southern Serbia. Credit: Sam Tarling/Oxfam

By Shannon Scribner
WASHINGTON, Feb 28 2019 (IPS)

While natural hazards like hurricanes, exacerbated by climate change, are causing people to migrate, it’s conflict, violence and persecution that have forced more than 68.5 million people from their homes today, exposing them to higher risks and increased vulnerability, especially women and children.

Vulnerable people on the move face massive risks and uncertainty to find safety and opportunity for themselves and their families. Unfortunately, in many cases they are taken advantage of and their rights ignored, forced to work in terrible conditions for little, or in some cases, no money.

Elsewhere, 120,000 people crossed the Central Mediterranean in 2017 – the migrant route with most deaths recorded in the world, and nearly 2,900 migrants recorded killed or missing on that route in the same year.

Most of them traveled on smugglers’ boats departing from Libya, Tunisia or Egypt, risking their lives in search of safety and opportunity in Italy and beyond.

The reality of the harrowing journey in search of safety in Europe came into sharp focus when three-year-old Alan Kurdi’s [initially reported as Aylan Kurdi] image made headlines when he drowned in the Mediterranean after fleeing Syria with his family.

Recently, a little refugee boy from Mali also drowned in the Mediterranean. In preparation for the ill-fated trip, he had stitched a school report to his clothes to show European authorities what a good student he was.

In the Northern Triangle of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, thousands of Central Americans are arriving at the U.S.-Mexican border, fleeing domestic and gang violence, state corruption and impunity, climate induced droughts, and economic hardship in their home countries.

We see women bearing the brunt of violence and poverty with high levels of sexual and gender-based violence, and alarming levels of femicide. It is not uncommon for a girl and her family to be targeted and even killed by gangs if she refuses to become a gang member’s sex slave.

And once at the border, children have died due to the difficult journey they are taking and as a result of medical care not being available on time.

In the US, there are countless examples of workers being exploited, many of whom are migrants. Oxfam published a report detailing how the poultry industry exploits vulnerable people who have few other options to take on the most dangerous and thankless jobs in the poultry plants.

Because of their precarious situations, most workers are afraid to speak out or do anything that might jeopardize their jobs. Oxfam reported that some workers were forced to wear adult diapers because they did not have adequate bathroom breaks.

As part of Oxfam’s Behind the Barcodes campaign, Oxfam has also worked with laborers in Southeast Asia and elsewhere for more rights and protections. In the seafood industry, workers find themselves in conditions akin to modern slavery.

Female migrant workers especially, who perform jobs like peeling the shrimps for cheap shrimp cocktail you can buy at your grocery store, are often subjected to illegal recruitment and have their travel documents and wages confiscated.

The UN and the international community do acknowledge the plight of modern slavery and the challenges migrant workers face around the world, but more needs to be done.

Unfortunately, instead of helping address and resolve the displacement crisis with thoughtful, humane policies, and a genuine sense of shared responsibility,too many leaders are using scare tactics and depicting migrants and refugees as violent criminals and terrorists, when they are in fact the ones fleeing violence and also have much to offer to their new communities.

These leaders around the globe are doing this with a blatant disregard for international humanitarian law, human rights and global norms that are meant to protect the most vulnerable amongst us.

This was demonstrated in the Trump Administration’s inhumane policies separating children from their families and in trying to deny women who are victims of domestic violence from seeking asylum in the United States.

There has been some progress to help migrants and refugees from the UN. In 2016, President Obama hosted a UN Summit for Refugees and Migrants. The Summit led to countries committing to a $4.5 billion increase in global humanitarian funding. Following the Summit at the UN General Assembly, 193 UN member states agreed to coordinate and cooperate to improve the global response to the migration crisis.

They agreed to do such things as ease pressures on countries that host most refugees, like Bangladesh, Uganda, Ethiopia, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. They committed to building refugees’ self-reliance through access to education and livelihoods, expanding access to resettlement and other complementary pathways, and fostering conditions for refugees to voluntarily return home.

They also agreed to start working on a Global Compact for Refugees and a Global Compact for Migration that was recently endorsed at the end of last year.

The compacts include such things as recognition of the need for meaningful participation by refugees and host communities in decision making and commitments to uphold the human rights of all migrants regardless of status.

On the downside, the compacts aren’t binding so there is no way to legally hold endorsers accountable. And, the United States retreated from its leadership role in protecting refugees and withdrew from the Global Compact on Migration.

Overall, the mass migration taking place globally presents opportunities but also huge risks for those who aren’t protected along the way or when they arrive.

Many think of slavery as a thing of the past, but it still exists today, affecting millions around the world, as people make desperate decisions for a better life.

We need more protections and more implementation of the systems we have in place to achieve a more safe and just world for everyone.

The post Slavery is Not a Thing of the Past, It Still Exists Today Affecting Millions appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Shannon Scribner is Associate Director of Humanitarian Programs and Policy at Oxfam America

The post Slavery is Not a Thing of the Past, It Still Exists Today Affecting Millions appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Diego Garcia island, which hosts a United States military base in the Indian Ocean. (Photo: NASA)

By Arul Louis
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 28 2019 (IPS)

Mauritius has scored a victory over Britain at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in a case involving the decolonisation of the strategically important island of Diego Garcia that is home to a United States military base.

The ICJ said on Monday that Britain must give up to Mauritius control of the Chagos Archipelago where the Indian Ocean military base is located on the Diego Garcia island.

The opinion issued in The Hague by the court’s majority that included Judge Dalveer Bhandari of India said that the decolonisation of Mauritius “was not lawfully completed” when it attained independence because Britain carved away the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius and retained control of it.

The opinion handed down by the majority of 13 judges said Britain “is under an obligation to bring to an end its administration of the Chagos Archipelago as rapidly as possible.”

The sole dissenter was American Judge Joan E. Donoghue. Britain is not represented on the bench after it withdrew the nomination of Judge Christopher Greenwood for re-election in 2017 when he could not get a majority of the votes in the General Assembly against Bhandari.

The court gave the opinion, which is non-binding, at the request the United Nations General Assembly made in a 2017 resolution.

Vehemently opposed by the US and Britain, the resolution received the vote of 94 countries while 15 voted against it and 65 abstained.

Britain has opposed the referral to the court saying it was a bilateral matter with Mauritius and indicated it would reject it.

There is unlikely to be any challenges to the US Diego Garcia base from Mauritius, either.

“We are not asking for the dismantling of the base”, Prime Minister Pravind Jugnauth Mauritian said after the ICJ opinion, according the Mauritian newspaper L’Express.

It reported that he did not want to reveal the next step that his country was going to take but said he wanted Britain “to recognise the unity of Mauritius”.

Britain cut off the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius in 1965 before granting it independence in 1968.

The people living on Diego Garcia were forcibly removed from there by the colonial administration and it was leased to the US, which set up its strategic Indian Ocean military base on the island.

About 50 countries gave the court written statements, some against Britain and other in support of it.

Vishnu Dutt Sharma, the Legal Adviser of the External Affairs Ministry submitted India’s statement that said that the process of decolonisation was not completed because Britain had not complied with UN resolutions for it.

In the 1970s and 1980s India had vehemently opposed the US base in Diego Garcia.

Then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi called the base 2,000 kilometres from India as a threat to India.

Since then the strategic environment and India’s interests have changed due the rise of China and the threats to navigation from piracy. India is now developing close defence ties with the US and toned down its rhetoric.

When the resolution to refer matter to the court was taken up at the UN in 2017, India’s Permanent Representative Syed Akbaruddin said that while supporting the position of Mauritius as “a matter of principle” to uphold the process of decolonisation and the respect for sovereignty of nations, “India shares with the international community, security concerns relating to the Indian Ocean”.

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In a new report, Amnesty International reviewed the state of human rights in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and found a bleak landscape of repression. UN Photo/Iason Foounten

By Tharanga Yakupitiyage
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 28 2019 (IPS)

Human rights violations are at an all-time high in the Middle East and North Africa, and global indifference is only making it worse.

In a new report, Amnesty International reviewed the state of human rights in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and found a bleak landscape of repression.

“Across MENA throughout 2018, thousands of dissidents and peaceful critics have been victims of shameless government violations on a shocking scale, amid deafening silence from the international community,” said Amnesty International’s Regional Director for MENA Heba Morayef.

“The international community’s chilling complacency…has emboldened governments to commit appalling violations during 2018 by giving them the sense that they need never fear facing justice,” Amnesty International added.

Since crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman took power, Saudi Arabia has seen mass detention of government critics and human rights defenders (HRDs).

By the end of 2018, all Saudi Arabian HRDs were in detention or serving prison terms, or had been forced to flee the country, Amnesty International found.

In February, Issa al-Nukheifi and Essam Koshak were sentenced to six and four years in prison respectively for their twitter posts criticising authorities and calling for human rights reforms.

The government also launched a wave of arrests targeting many prominent women’s human rights defenders including Loujain al-Hathloul and Aziza al-Yousef who campaigned against the ban on women driving and the male guardianship system.

Others even faced death for their work including Jamal Khashoggi whose brutal death prompted a global outcry.

Human rights violations committed by Saudi Arabia also extends past their borders to Yemen where the coalition forces indiscriminately target civilian areas, committing serious violations of international human rights law.

In one case, the Saudi Arabia coalition attacked a bus in Sa’da governorate, killing 29 children and injuring 30 others.

Despite the many violations in international law and human rights, the United States, United Kingdom, and France continue to export weapons, enabling the Middle Eastern nation to commit even more violations.

While some countries such as Denmark and Finland suspended their arms sales, the action was only prompted by the killing of Khashoggi which still has not resulted in justice.

“Time and again, allies of governments in the region have put lucrative business deals, security co-operation or billions of dollars’ wroth of arms sales before human rights, fueling abuses and creating a climate where MENA governments feel ‘untouchable’ and above the law,” said Amnesty International’s Research and Advocacy Director for MENA Philip Luther.

“It’s time the world followed in the footsteps of states such as Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands and Norway which have announced suspensions…sending a clear message that flouting human rights has clear consequences,” he added.

Similarly, France and the U.S. continue to supply Egypt with weapons which have been used in the country’s widespread repression and crackdown on human rights.

According to Amnesty International, Egyptian authorities have arbitrarily arrested at least 113 people for peacefully expressing critical opinions, making it the most dangerous time and place in the country’s recent history.

Among those arrested were many senior political figures including the military’s former chief of staff Sami Anan who was arrested after he announced his candidacy in the presidential elections.

After speaking out against sexual harassment on social media, HRD Amal Fathy was sentenced to two years in prison and faces further charges including “membership of a terrorist group.”

Some have also been subject to enforced disappearances.

Human rights lawyers Ezzat Ghoniem and Azzoz Mahgoub were detained in March for their role in supporting families of forcibly disappeared individuals.

Though they were released six months later, they were forcibly disappeared and did not resurface until February when Ghoniem was brought to court wearing the same clothes he had on in trial in September. He told the court that he was kept in a hidden place and prevented from contacting his lawyers and family.

Amnesty International highlighted the need for international accountability and an end to human rights violations.

“For too long, the lack of international pressure to ensure that warring parties committing war crimes and other violations of international law are held to account has allowed perpetrators of atrocities across MENA to escape unpunished,” Luther said.

“Accountability is essential—not only to secure justice for victims of these crimes, but to help prevent an endless cycle of violations and yet more victims,” he added.

There have been some limited positive developments including the a lift on the ban on women drivers in Saudi Arabia but more needs to be done, said Morayef.

“These improvements are a tribute to courageous human rights defenders across MENA and serve as a reminder to those who regularly risk their freedom to stand up against tyranny and speak truth to power that they are planting true seeds of change for the years to come,” she continued.

Related Articles

• Don’t “Whitewash” Khashoggi’s Murder
• Truth Never Dies: Justice for Slain Journalists

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This report is produced by UNB United News of Bangladesh and IPS Inter Press Service.

By Muhammad Syfullah
DHAKA, Bangladesh, Feb 27 2019 (IPS-Partners)

(UNB/IPS) – Bangladesh needs intensive surveys in the Bay of Bengal, complemented by proper interpretation of the findings and appropriate research to gauge the potential of its ‘blue economy’ as the country largely depends on the stocks of living and non-living marine resources falling within its Exclusive Economic Zone, experts said.

In case of marine fisheries, they stressed the need for effective management to ensure the sustainability of marine fisheries resources by avoiding overfishing and fishing during breeding period, otherwise fish stock might severely decline here like the Gulf of Thailand.

The newly formed Awami League government also pledged in its 2018 election manifesto that oil and gas exploration will be intensified as part of its plans for ensuring optimum utilisation of the blue economy or marine resources.

In 2016, Bangladesh procured a research vessel, equipped with the latest technology for fisheries and other oceanographic research, from Malaysia to assess the country’s marine living resources, having obtained a vast tract of the northern Indian Ocean following the disposal of longstanding disputes with two neighboring countries.

The 37.8-meter-long multipurpose research vessel started its assessment in the Bay in November, 2016.

Though the survey vessel has so far completed 16 cruises, it will take more time to gain a complete picture of fisheries resources in Bangladeshi waters in the Bay of Bengal.

Prof Sayedur Rahman Chowdhury of the Institute of Marine Sciences and Fisheries at Chittagong University said the fisheries resources in the Bay of Bengal have long been showing several indications of decline for lack of effective fisheries management in the past decades, particularly resulting in overfishing.

He said different data indicate that many large fish species like Lakkha (Indian Salmon) and Coral fish, which were available in past years, are hardly found in the country’s waters now.

“If this trend continues, the marine areas are likely to be turned into an almost barren zone for fish within 10 years or so. So, immediate measures are required for effective fisheries management,” he said adding that the Gulf of Thailand had lost all its fish in the space of just 40 years.

Prof Chowdhury said Bangladesh may focus on producing highly skilled maritime human resources, including marine engineers, navigators and in other highly technical trades, targeting the international employment market to boost remittances.

Besides, a lot of foreign currency goes outside the country against container transports as more than 90 percent carriers used in this sector are owned by foreign companies.

Prof Chowdhury said the sheer size of the fishing fleet consisting of more than 50,000 boats and some 270 industrial trawlers, is possibly contributing to the long-term overfishing in Bangladeshi waters.

He said Bangladesh should concentrate more on tapping marine fish as there is a better potential of sustained supply of fish, if managed properly, than that of other mineral resources—petroleum and non-petroleum ones—in the Bay of Bengal, which will eventually dry up no matter how carefully we extract those resources.

Dr Kawser Ahmed, a professor at the Oceanography Department of Dhaka University, said Bangladesh is yet to fix the level of maximum sustainable yield (MSY) of marine fisheries resources.

“We need proper coastal and ocean governance for the sustainability of marine resources,” he said adding that overfishing is dangerous for the sustainability of marine fisheries as the fish productivity is comparatively low in the northern Bay of Bengal. The coast is also being used indiscriminately, he added.

Mentioning that there are now 16-18 ministries related to the blue economy, he said Bangladesh needs to form a separate ocean or marine resources ministry and bring all wings and cells of the ministries under it for unlocking the potential of the blue economy.

Prof Kawser emphasised procurement of an oil-gas survey vessel to explore hydrocarbon deposits in the Bay of Bengal saying that it will be cost effective alongside helping create skilled manpower by facilitating students to conduct research in this area.

Fisheries and Livestock Secretary Md Raisul Alam Mondal said they have taken various initiatives to enhance harvesting fisheries in a sustainable way for implementing the government’s plan.

The initiatives include installation of effective communication tools to communicate with sea fishing vessels, ensuring fishing monitoring system and purchasing longline fishing boats and purse seine fishing boats for enhancing the harvesting capacity of the private sector.

Purse-seine fishing in open water is generally considered to be an efficient form of fishing. It has no contact with the seabed and can have low levels of bycatch (accidental catch of unwanted species).

The secretary said the contribution of marine fish in the country’s total fish production is now around 9-10 percent, which needs to be increased.

The survey vessel, purchased from Malaysia, in its 16 cruises so far detected 300-350 fish species in the Bay of Bengal. But more time is needed to get a complete picture of the stock of marine fisheries resources there, he said.

Secretary Mondal said it is important to know the breeding period of each fish species for the sake of sustainable fishing in the sea. Now the government keeps fishing banned for 65 specific days every year in Bangladesh’s exclusive economic zone in the Bay of Bengal.

Bangladesh won a total of 131,098 square kilometers of sea areas –111,631sq km against Myanmar in 2012 and 19,467sq km against India in 2014 — following the disposal of longstanding disputes with the two neighbouring countries — India and Myanmar — by two international courts.

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Excerpt:

This report is produced by UNB United News of Bangladesh and IPS Inter Press Service.

The post Bangladesh Needs Intensive Surveys to Gauge Potential of Its ‘Blue Economy’ appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Geneva Centre
GENEVA, Feb 27 2019 (IPS-Partners)

On the occasion of the launch of two new publications on topics related to women’s rights and gender equality, and in order to mark International Women’s Day, the Geneva Centre will organize a panel discussion and book presentation. The discussion will expand on the themes of the two publication, namely the status of women’s rights and gender equality in the Arab region, but also more generally, across the world, and the history and the true symbolism of the headscarf in Christianity, Judaism and Islam, the stereotypes and controversy surrounding this topic, and the recent developments in Western societies with regard to the headscarf.

Moderator and Opening remarks
Ambassador Idriss Jazairy, Executive Director of the Geneva Centre for Human Rights Advancement and Global Dialogue.

Speakers

• HE Ms Nassima Baghli, Ambassador, Permanent Observer of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation to the United Nations Office and other international organizations in Geneva;
• Dr. Elisa Banfi, Research Assistant at the Institute of Citizenship Studies (ICite) at the Department of Political Science, University of Geneva;
• Dr. Amir Dziri, Director of the Swiss Centre for Islam and Society at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland.

For further information on the event, please see the attached concept note.

Register by email: info@gchragd.org

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Excerpt:

Debate and Book Presentation

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Although has over 80 million hectares of good fertile soil to grow any kind of crop, it is a net importer of food. Credit: Sam Olukoya/IPS

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Feb 27 2019 (IPS)

When Lawrence Afere told his parents he was going into farming rather than getting a job in Nigeria’s lucrative oil and gas sector, they swore he was bewitched.

“After saving to put me through the top university in Nigeria with an eye for a job in oil and gas, my parents had no explanation for my career choice. They were convinced I had been bewitched,” says the 35-year-old Afere who started a group that brings together unemployed youth to grow, sell and add value to agricultural produce in Nigeria.

Given the entrenched beliefs across Africa about sorcery, the idea that Afere was bewitched seemed a plausible one to his parents. In fact, Afere’s parents had it on the advice of a traditional herbalist that he was going to be rich. But his parents didn’t believe that he could ever become wealthy through agriculture.

Nigeria, a net food importer, has the double challenge of providing enough food and jobs for its bulging population, especially the youth.  It spends 22 billion dollars in food imports, almost 60 percent of Africa’s 35 billion dollar annual food import bill, according to the African Development Bank.

The country is Africa’s largest producer and consumer of rice. However, it also one of the largest importers of the cereal in the world buying about two million tonnes annually to offset local consumption of five million tonnes against a production of three million tonnes.

The West African nation also has over 80 million hectares of good fertile soil to grow any kind of crop.

Afere had a solution: get the youth to start farming and to make agriculture a profitable and appetising career prospect for young people aged 15-24. This demographic makes up about 26 percent of 20.9 million unemployed Nigerians.

“I read an article that every year in Nigeria we will graduate one million young people with a high school qualification but with no prospects to go university,” said Afere.

“This is one million highly frustrated youth and by 2030 Nigeria will have over 30 million highly skilled – not doctors, not lawyers, farmers or entrepreneurs – but skilled criminals that could devour the entire country. At that moment I had mindset shift.” So he founded Springboard, a social enterprise growing organic produce through a social media network of farmers. It also aims to create jobs for women and youth in Nigeria.

To date, Springboard Nigeria has over 3,000 members in its network of organic farmers and village women entrepreneurs who grow plantain, banana, beans, rice, vegetables, pepper, cocoa, corn, pineapple and pawpaw. The agriprenuers also add value to the produce with emphasis on producing healthy food accessible to rural communities.

Fighting unemployment and malnutrition with food production 

Springboard uses social media to raise awareness about opportunities in agriculture. It has over 5,000 followers on its Facebook page, which it uses to create a market and to supply produce to vendors and customers. This is how it brings together farmers and consumers.

“We also use it to provide continuous mentoring and extension services to our farmers, youth farmers especially,” Afere told IPS. 

The social enterprise is currently developing a farmer’s helpline that will give farmers access to agricultural information via a toll-free number in four of Nigeria’s major languages.

Springboard has sought to stop young people emigrating from rural areas to urban centres in search of jobs, which are hard to get, Afere said. 

“We know young people want to be successful and rich, the idea is how do we help them to be successful by identifying livelihood opportunities in the agriculture sector where they live,” said Afere.

Through the social enterprise, youth and women work across the agriculture value chain in production, processing, value addition, storage, distribution and marketing. They are trained in agriculture production and management and given inputs to kick start their own farming enterprises.

“Small scale farmers often make the hard choice of not consuming most of what they grow but sell it to pay for school fees and other needs and eat what is left. Their nutrition suffers and families are sick because they do not have healthy and quality food, our programme focuses on production and raising nutrition,” said Afere. “That way the youth and young women, see agriculture as having multiple benefits and not just providing them a job.”

Recently, the social enterprise started a Farm to School programme, which is supported by the Mitsubishi Foundation for Africa and Europe. Through the programme, Springboard partners with schools to establish school farms where students learn to grow their own food within their communities, thereby raising their interest agriculture.  

“When we project farming as a viable economic opportunity for the youth, we also tell them that farming is a process, which comes with a lot of hard work,” he said. “I tell young people to start with what they have and bootstrapping themselves into business. Gradually customers, investors and donors take notice and support your farming business.”

So has he become wealthy? As his parents had pictured?

Afere laughs about it now. He is rich, he feels in other ways other than monetary. “I”m not wealthy with money in the bank. I’m wealthy in fulfilment of purpose. Helping farmers become prosperous and real youth and women start farm enterprises brings me fulfilment. In the process I am able to take care of my family and their basic needs. That is wealth for me.”

Technology transforming farming business

While Afere has combined the lure of technology and the economic prospects in agriculture, training and mentorship are important in fostering the adoption of farming as a business by young people.  

One Nigerian technology hub is helping groom and support entrepreneurs tackle development challenges across Africa, but specifically in Nigeria.

“That agriculture, which employs most of our parents, does not provide [enough] money is something that worries a lot of young entrepreneurs,” says Wole Odetayo, executive director of Wennovation Hub.

Wennovation Hub is a pioneer technology accelerator and incubation programme that helps start-ups develop and validate their ideas and innovations using basic business tools in the social impact sectors in agriculture, healthcare, clean energy and social infrastructure.

“We are leveraging on their interests, ideas and background of young people to help them think through the process of making the most out of agriculture through technology to solve different challenges across the agriculture value chain,” Odetayo told IPS. He urged governments to support incubators and accelerators by including start up and small business in the procurement policies.

To date, Wennovation Hub has supported over 300 startup teams and more than 6,000 youths running startsups valued up to 2.5 million dollars through its network across Nigeria. 

The digitalisation of agriculture offers young entrepreneurs the opportunity to create disruptive business models that accelerate modernisation of the sector, says Michael Hailu, Director of the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) a joint international institution of the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) Group of States and the European Union based in the Netherlands.  

“Achieving this kind of transformation requires that young people engage in agriculture; we need their capacity for innovation, for doing things differently, for harnessing the exciting developments we are seeing within and outside the realms of agribusiness,” Hailu told IPS.

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By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 27 2019 (IPS)

The United Nations, which prides itself with a “zero tolerance” policy on sexual exploitation and abuse, has come under relentless fire for failing to match its words with deeds—specifically in relation to some of the high-profile cases that have jolted the Organization.

There have been several cases where no action has been taken either to investigate abuses -– or even release the results of in-house investigations – including accusations against three senior officials holding the rank of Under-Secretary-General (USG).

And one of them, who headed the International Civil Service Commission (ICSC), abruptly resigned last December—described as “the one that got away” — following the results of an internal report which is still under wraps and hidden from public view.

Asked whether women staffers would get a more positive response if the UN was headed by a female Secretary-General, Ian Richards, President, Coordinating Committee of International Staff Unions and Associations (CCISUA), told IPS there are plenty of reasons for the next Secretary-General to be a woman.

Women make up half the world’s population but so far they have been kept out of the top UN job, he pointed out.

“But on your question: if we go back to 2016, when the elections for Secretary-General were being run, I don’t recall, sadly, any of the candidates, some of whom had run large organizations, distinguishing themselves in the fight against sexual harassment and abuse.”

In some cases, it was quite the opposite, he added.

“Nor have I seen a difference in how female and male managers deal with complaints, nor how female and male directors react in meetings when allegations of sexual harassment cannot be ignored,” said Richards, whose staff unions and associations represent over 60,000 staffers worldwide.

Again, sexual harassment is a form of abuse of power and stopping it means sticking your neck out, taking a stand and tackling entrenched interests, argued Richards.

“There are only a few women and men who will do that, and we need more of them,” he added.

Paula Donovan, a women’s rights activist and co-Director of AIDS-Free World and Code Blue Campaign, said UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres announced, back in April 2018, that he was initiating a new investigation, through UN Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS), into sexual assault and harassment charges lodged against the former Deputy Executive Director of UNAIDS, Luiz Loures.

“Nothing has been announced since about this “new investigation’ she said in an interview last January.

She said the Secretary-General has also never commented on any of the recent public reports of sexual misconduct in several other UN organizations —including the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), the World Food Programme (WFP), and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) while the Secretary-General’s senior-level Task Force is headed by Jan Beagle, who was promoted to Under-Secretary-General by Guterres while she herself was under investigation for workplace harassment at UNAIDS.

Meanwhile, Guterres last week announced a new advisory board of civil society leaders who’ll recommend fresh solutions to the UN’s long-running crisis of sexual abuse by its own personnel.

“After two years, an advisory board has been formed. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the group Guterres has assembled is not the one he promised”, said Code Blue, a civil society organization protective of women’s rights, in a statement released last week.

A “civil society” advisory board, especially on a matter as complex as sexual exploitation and abuse by UN personnel, must be made up of bona fide representatives of civil society, said Code Blue.

But a board of six legal academics and a medical doctor, each with UN pedigrees, should be given a different name and assigned to work under a mandate that fits.

“We await a Civil Society Advisory Board that truly deserves its name—and fulfills Mr. Guterres’ two years’ worth of promises”.

Richards told IPS that civil society has been quite active in calling the UN out when it comes to sexual harassment and abuse.

“I presume Guterres now wants to put the ball in their court. Of course, being an advisory board, it can only offer advice. I hope that in providing advice it will consider the bigger problem of abuse of power at the UN, of which sexual harassment constitutes according to our survey just 16 percent. If the board can support Guterres in tackling this, then I think we might get somewhere,” he added.

Excerpts from the interview with Richards:

IPS: Has the UN taken action against some of the high-profile cases of sexual abuse and harassment in the UN system? Or are the accused still in the employ of the UN?

RICHARDS: Once the cases become high profile, it’s hard not to take action. The media starts asking questions and donors threaten to pull the plug. The question should really be about the many low-profile cases where managers are made aware of harassment but are afraid to take action. Crossing the wrong person or nationality could end their career, and some who have tried to take action have suffered retaliation.

We should also remember that the UN is made up of many different organizations. Guterres can’t do that much about the specialized agencies such as UNAIDS or FAO as they don’t report to him.

But this isn’t just about action at the top. I was recently at a big UN meeting. One of the speakers was a staff member who has been accused multiple times of sexual harassment but had not yet been investigated. There were many senior managers there, men and women.

None of them spoke out against his presence and appeared to take it in their stride. This goes to show that policies in themselves don’t stop sexual harassment. Guterres needs to work on changing attitudes, perhaps by actively promoting staff who have stuck their necks out to fight harassment and abuse in the workplace. Then only can we start getting to zero tolerance.

IPS: Are there any UN staffers who have been fired following investigations on sexual abuse?

RICHARDS: Yes. And this is documented in a report on disciplinary practices that is sent every year to the General Assembly. But the investigation process remains extremely slow, and with a shortage of professional investigators, some harassment complaints are reviewed by panels of lay staff members, who have to juggle this task with their normal jobs. And of course, in peer review panels there is plenty of scope for conflicts of interest.

IPS: Has the UN at any time co-opted your 60,000 strong staff union — the CCISUA– to solicit your views on the protection of staffers from sexual abuse? Or are staff unions being treated as bystanders?

RICHARDS: We’ve been involved in reviewing the policy on preventing harassment, discrimination and abuse of authority, and we are keen to analyse the findings of both the survey that staff unions conducted on harassment in general and the survey that the organization contracted Deloitte to conduct on sexual harassment in particular.

The surveys showed that staff don’t trust the investigation system and some suffered retaliation when they reported harassment. These are shocking findings and we hope that the administration will give us the necessary time to get to the bottom of these problems and get through the individual comments that were made in the surveys.

However, as I mentioned, a policy doesn’t amount to much if there isn’t a will to implement it and managers turn a blind eye.

IPS: Do you think the UN should have acted against a USG who abruptly resigned — weeks ahead of his retirement — following a report by the Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) probing allegations of sexual abuse by him? And should the OIOS make this report public?

RICHARDS: I understand that Guterres manoeuvred behind the scenes to hasten the investigation process so that the report could be issued before the USG reached retirement.

However, once the report was out, the USG resigned, and there was not much the UN could do. Of course, in a private company there would be the possibility for the case to be taken through the national criminal system, which would lead to greater public scrutiny, and is perhaps an area that the advisory board should look at.

A bigger concern is the way the complainants were allowed to be treated over the many months that the case was investigated. They had work taken away from them and a group of women where they worked published a letter disowning their complaints.

Last summer, one of them was publicly humiliated by the USG at a meeting in front of human resources directors, women and men, from across the system. I told the USG that this behavior was wrong. I hope others did the same. At the same time, an investigation into how the case was handled, with lessons drawn for the future, would be a good idea.

IPS: Is there a role for member states and the General Assembly to pressure the Secretary-General to take more drastic action — beyond the much-publicized “zero tolerance” policy– against sexual harassment?

RICHARDS: Yes, they could ask for reports of investigations, where harassment and abuse are proven. These would of course have to be suitably redacted in order to protect the identities of the complainants and witnesses. It could bring much-needed transparency to the process and create a push to change attitudes.

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@ips.org

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A young man wounded by a bullet during protests in Santa Elena de Uairén is transported on a motorcycle by other young opposition demonstrators during protests after food and medical aid was prevented on Feb. 23 from entering the country from nearby Brazil, 1,260 kilometers southeast of Caracas. Credit: Courtesy of local residents of Santa Elena de Uairén

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Feb 26 2019 (IPS)

The violent repression that prevented food and medical aid from crossing into Venezuela, which left at least four people dead and 58 with gunshot wounds, has distanced solutions to what is today Latin America’s biggest political crisis, although 10 countries in the hemisphere are stepping up the pressure while at the same time ruling out the use of force.

But for the United States, “all options are on the table,” including the use of military force, according to President Donald Trump, and as his Vice President Mike Pence reminded the 10 governments of the Lima Group that met on Feb. 25 in Bogotá to discuss the situation in Venezuela.

Venezuela’s neighbors “don’t want war but continue to struggle for a political solution that would involve the departure from power of President Nicolás Maduro. By repressing the entry of humanitarian aid trucks, we have an excuse to increase political, economic and diplomatic pressure on the regime,” said Carlos Romero, a postgraduate professor of political science at two public universities in Caracas.

The international aid accumulated in border areas of Colombia, Brazil and the neighboring Dutch island of Curacao consisted of a few hundred tons of medical supplies, some emergency medicines and food supplements that opposition Juan Guaidó ordered across the border on Feb. 23.

Venezuela, with a population of 32 million people, more than three million of whom have left the country in the last five years, according to United Nations sources, is in the grip of an economic and social crisis marked by hyperinflation measured in millions of percent annually, as well as the collapse of its public health system and of other essential public services.

Figures from a study by the three main universities in Caracas indicate – in the absence of official figures over the past three years – that poverty affects 80 percent of the population, and GDP has plunged 56 percent in the last five years.

The Maduro administration militarised and closed the borders, arguing that the aid was a pretext for foreign military intervention supported by the opposition led by Guaidó, the president of the parliament, who declared himself “acting president” on Jan. 23.

Two trucks that made it partly across one of the bridges on the border with Colombia, some 860 kilometers from Caracas, caught fire as Venezuelan security forces repelled young men advancing next to the vehicles, while in the neighboring cities of Ureña and San Antonio members of the security forces and armed civilians used gunfire to disperse opposition marches aimed at receiving the aid.

In the extreme southeast of the country, where the Pemón indigenous people live, hundreds of native people have been trying since Feb. 22 to keep out military personnel attempting to prevent the entrance of trucks carrying aid from Brazil.

Alfredo Romero, director of the human rights group Foro Penal, said the military shot their way through, according to indigenous leaders, leaving four dead and 25 with bullet wounds.

Indigenous groups seized and held several of the commanding officers for more than 24 hours, but then “some 70 vehicles, including buses full of members of the security forces, secured their release on their way to Santa Elena de Uairén,” a local resident of that city near the border with Brazil, 1,260 km from Caracas, told IPS.

Indigenous leaders are hiding in the countryside and in Santa Elena there is a de facto curfew, according to local residents who provided IPS with harsh photos and videos showing what happened there, while the opposition leadership and the media were focusing on the events on the border with Colombia.

Opposition leaders denounced the murders of at least 15 people in the area and the Foro Penal recorded nine cases of missing persons since Feb. 23.

In Ureña and San Antonio, in southwest Venezuela on the border with Colombia, more than 20 people were wounded by bullets fired by members of the security forces or armed civilians wearing ski masks, according to reports from journalists in the area. Several opposition demonstrations in support of the entry of international aid were also cracked down on heavily in the country’s hinterland.

Meanwhile, at least 326 members of Venezuela’s military and police, including several mid-level officers, have deserted since Feb. 23, fleeing mainly to Colombia.

The Lima Group – ad-hoc, this time made up of Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, Paraguay, Peru and Venezuela-Guaidó- and the United States urged the military to stop supporting Maduro and to recognise and obey Guaidó as their commander.

The Lima Group stated that “the transition to democracy must be conducted by Venezuelans themselves peacefully and within the framework of the Constitution and international law, supported by political and diplomatic means, without the use of force.”

That renunciation for now of the use of force “runs counter to radical people in the Venezuelan opposition who are desperate because they have not found a quick solution,” Romero said.

The call for the use of force “has gained ground, because of the way the government has dug in its heels and refused to consider any alternative path that would involve giving up power, in a kind of existential struggle,” Luis Salamanca, also a postgraduate professor of political science at the Central University, told IPS.

He quoted Maduro’s Vice President Delcy Rodriguez, who said, hours after the violent events at the borders, that the government’s determination “is a small part of what we are willing to do.”

Washington increased the financial and asset blockade against the Venezuelan State, as well as measures on visas and assets of its authorities, while the Lima Group decided to increase international denunciations and tighten the diplomatic and political noose around Maduro.

Romero warned, however, that in the acceleration of the crisis so far in 2019 “no element of moderation has worked: the compromise initiative set forth by Mexico and Uruguay, the European Union contact group and some countries of the Americas died at birth, as did Pope Francis’s insinuation that he would mediate if requested by the parties.”

While the government digs in its heels, the Venezuelan opposition “has to imagine and develop actions that keep people’s hope alive, to fight the discouragement that set in after the goal of bringing trucks in with aid was not achieved,” Félix Seijas, director of the pollster Delphos, told IPS.

The experts who spoke to IPS agreed that the opposition led by Guaidó made a mistake in making the entrance of aid on Feb. 23 a decisive battle, arguing instead that the call for the re-establishment of democracy is a gradual process with many steps.

Salamanca stressed that “the government seems firm, but with each passing hour new pieces are moved, and there is an underground current that is crumbling the bases on which it is sustained. The desertion of the members of the military is a very striking sign in this regard.”

But for now, the leadership of Venezuela’s armed forces remains completely loyal to Maduro.

Meanwhile, on the international stage, the United States, the country with the greatest capacity to exert pressure in the hemisphere, requested a new meeting on Venezuela at the United Nations Security Council, this time with the backing of the Lima Group, which described the crisis in the oil-producing country as “an unprecedented threat to security, peace, freedom and prosperity throughout the region.”

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Racquel Moses was appointed in January as CEO of the Caribbean Climate Smart Accelerator, an initiative backed by the World Bank and Virgin's Richard Branson to make the region resilient in the face of climate change. Credit: Jewel Fraser/IPS

By Jewel Fraser
PORT-OF-SPAIN , Feb 26 2019 (IPS)

The Caribbean Climate Smart Accelerator launched last year June with the backing of Virgin’s Richard Branson has given itself five years to help the region become climate resilient.

Its CEO Racquel Moses, who was appointed in January of this year, told IPS the climate smart accelerator sees itself as an enabler in paving the path towards climate resilience for the region. “The horizon for the climate smart accelerator is just five years. We are meant to be a catalyst to get things started. Governments will have the ability to take things forward after that,” she said.

Their primary agenda during that five-year period will be to launch five major,“transformational” projects that will move the region forward towards becoming a climate smart zone, she said.

The idea for the accelerator was floated following the devastating 2017 hurricane season which saw two Category Five hurricanes that severely damaged a number of islands, including Necker Island owned by Richard Branson, and left scores dead.

In the wake of that devastation, an interim team comprising management of Branson’s charitable foundation, Virgin Unite, and Inter-American Development Bank staff members got together and hammered out the idea to make the Caribbean a climate smart zone, said Neil Parsan, public sector lead for the climate smart accelerator. They defined a climate smart Caribbean as one that “modernises digital, physical and social infrastructure to integrate essential activities that are climate adaptive, mitigative and secure a low-carbon future for the region,” he said.

Despite the Caribbean being responsible for less than five percent of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, its growth in emissions between 1990 and 2011 was three times the global average, according to a 2017 USAID report. So 28 governments in Latin America and the Caribbean have eagerly aligned themselves with the accelerator’s objective of making the region a climate smart zone, as have major institutions including the World Bank, the Organisation of American States, the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States and the Caribbean Community, Parsan said.

Moses said the accelerator was “working in tandem” with regional governments to coordinate activities related to climate change. “I have been surprised at how aggressively regional governments have been working on the issue of climate change. We are further along with some governments than with others,” she said. But generally, “they have been quite excited to get involved.”

The five transformational projects she is seeking to have completed over the next five years would also be carried out with governmental support, she said. To qualify as one of the five, a project has to be low carbon, make use of renewable energy, have an impact on a large number of people, be scalable across several countries in the region, create climate-related jobs, and have the potential to be exported outside of the region, she added.

Parsan said dozens of projects are currently under consideration, but the challenge for the Accelerator’s team was “being able to identify mature, bankable, investable, impactful projects that align themselves to the strategic goals of the accelerator.” Though most of the projects under consideration meet some of the criteria, all do not meet every single criterion.

Once the five major projects that the accelerator will be working on are identified, the team will need to source funding to help them get up and running. “We are actually working at putting together teams that can address this funding,” Moses said. She noted that Barbados’ Prime Minister Mia Mottley had expressed the desire to see a regional climate investment fund created that would bankroll climate change projects while giving investors a better return on their investments than the current market rate.

The accelerator’s team had met with managers of global funds “to find out legally how they work, and how to get multiple funders, multiple countries, multiple companies working together.” Though she declined to specify what types of projects are currently under consideration, for reasons of confidentiality, Moses said all projects identified must move the region forward to achieving its climate smart goals, including having a low carbon footprint.

At the same time, in the light of the region’s relatively small contribution to GHG emissions, the accelerator is also hoping to facilitate the region’s export of climate professionals whose expertise would have been developed while working on climate-related jobs in the Caribbean. Moses said the accelerator also wants to help provide grants for smaller, climate-related projects and will be announcing awards soon for some of these.

Momentum is continuing to build around the accelerator, Parsan said. “There is definitely an uptick and daily I am taking calls. A lot of interest comes from the Caribbean, which is great, a lot of young entrepreneurs. We also have a lot of U.S. companies expressing interest.” He said about 50 percent of the companies reaching out to the Accelerator are outside of the Caribbean, including some multinational companies. Among these Is AirBnB which was mentioned in the announcement of the launch as providing free housing to relief workers during natural disasters.

Energy companies also are reaching out to the accelerator. “They say they are perceived as being part of the problem. They ask, how can we be part of the solution?” Parsan said.

And though Moses does not believe being female helped her to get the top job, the accelerator is also concerned about issues of gender parity in the execution of its projects, she said.

Also on her wishlist as CEO of the accelerator is seeing the Caribbean play its part in reducing carbon emissions by becoming more energy efficient, and doing more to protect its marine environment.

But mostly, “the thing that keeps me up at at night is ensuring we are working fast enough…to make sure everything we do benefits the region,” she told IPS.

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By Divya Srinivasan
NEW DELHI, Feb 26 2019 (IPS)

In an historic first, thousands of people participated in a 10,000-kilometre long Dignity March across India to raise awareness about sexual violence, bring an end to stigma faced by survivors, and highlight the barriers women and children face in accessing justice.

Covering 200 districts in 24 states, the March began in Mumbai on December 20 and ended on Feb 22, with around 5000 gathering at the Ramlila Maidan in New Delhi, a ground famous for hosting protests and political rallies. On this warm February afternoon, they were present for a momentous gathering of sexual assault survivors, many of whom had travelled across India to attend.

The ambitious idea was originated and organized by Rashtriya Garima Abhiyan (National Campaign for Dignity), an Indian human rights group which explained, “The Dignity March is a call for women and children to speak out their experiences of sexual abuse without shame. It is also an appeal for the stakeholders and the larger community to create a healthy, non-judgmental and a safe environment to support the voices of the survivors and to take the fight for justice forward.”

“It is time to speak up, condemn the act of sexual violence and to end the culture of victim shaming/blaming and shift the blame. Collectively, we must hold the state actors accountable to ensure justice to survivors.”

Numerous community events were held along the route, with survivors of sexual violence joined by family members, activists, lawyers, police, actors and politicians, who have come forward in support.

Rashtriya Garima Abhiyan estimates that during the Dignity March – also called the ‘Garima Yatra’ or ‘journey’ – they interacted with 25,000 survivors of sexual violence, 2000 lawyers, 3000 journalists and 200 policy makers and government officials.

It has attracted widespread media coverage, with sexual assault survivors welcoming the opportunity to come together and share their stories. Many are from communities that are marginalized because of caste, class and religion, and their experiences have previously been largely ignored by mainstream women’s movements.

One of the numerous survivors who participated in the March is Bhanwari Devi, a social worker who was gang raped in 1992 by “upper” caste men for attempting to stop a child marriage.

Her fight for justice was a pivotal moment in India’s women’s rights movement as her case prompted the Supreme Court to issue the Vishakha Guidelines for combating sexual harassment at the workplace, and it eventually led to the introduction of a national law in 2013 prohibiting it.

Despite this, in her own gang rape case, Bhanwari Devi is still fighting for justice 26 years later, as her appeal languishes in the Rajasthan High Court.

Bhanwari Devi’s case is representative of the problems survivors of sexual violence in India face in accessing justice. The first-hand accounts shared by women participating in the March demonstrate that every day, survivors are silenced, threatened and intimidated.

They face discrimination and inaction from the police and other legal authorities, and are often coerced into settling or compromising their cases even though this is not permitted under Indian law.

Survivors are even being harmed instead of helped by doctors. The two-finger test continues to be widely practiced today despite being unscientific, traumatizing, illegal, and a violation of human rights. It involves a medical practitioner inserting two fingers into the vagina in an attempt to determine if the hymen is broken and to test laxity.

As the WHO states, the two-finger test has no scientific or clinical basis, and there is no examination that can prove a girl or woman has had sex or is sexually active.

The procedure was banned by India’s Supreme Court and guidelines were released by the Government clarifying that it has no bearing on cases of sexual violence.

Despite this, it is still being performed to assert whether sexual assault survivors are “habituated to sex”, although sexual history is irrelevant in a rape trial.

These are just some of the many reasons why rape is one of the most under-reported crimes in India, which has a population of over 1.33 billion. Some estimates indicating that over 90% of rape cases in the country remain unreported.

To make matters worse, the conviction rate for crimes against women in India remain abysmally low – only 18.9% according to statistics by the National Crime Records Bureau from 2016 (the lowest percentage in a decade). Comparatively, the average conviction rate for all crimes is around 47%.

The result is that perpetrators of sexual assault are in the main able to act with impunity as they are not held to account for their actions, and are therefore able to reoffend without fear of consequence.

In contrast, the women and children being harmed are denied the justice they deserve and remain at risk. This is totally unacceptable and change is urgently needed.

The Dignity March has attempted to address some of these issues by calling upon stakeholders and the community in general to provide a healthy and supportive environment for survivors of sexual violence.

Rashtriya Garima Abhiyan and activists working alongside are aiming to create a national network of survivors in order to ensure their voices are heard in policymaking.

They have also interacted with the police and other officials to advocate for better implementation of laws, and allocation of more financial resources towards supporting survivors, included equipping One Stop Crisis Centers.

Their efforts are already bearing fruit. Ashif Shaikh, founder of the Rashtriya Garima Abhiyan, told the crowd at Ramlila Maidan: “The Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh, after hearing the survivors and our demands, has committed to taking steps to set up a special police force to investigate crimes against women, as well as fast-track courts to try such crimes.”

Another key aim of the Dignity March has been to end the culture of victim shaming and blaming, which has enabled perpetrators to go unpunished.

As a survivor from Raipur noted, “When we are in our villages, and something happens, we feel alone. Who is going to listen to our experiences, who will consider it important? But in this yatra, we have met others who have gone through the same experience. We understand each other’s pain and sorrow. I am leaving this yatra feeling less alone.”

The thousands of people who came out to support survivors during the March have only taken the first, important step. There is a lot more work to be done to change societal and national attitudes, and to ensure that survivors receive support instead of shame and blame when they break the silence and speak out. It is now time for others to listen and take positive action.

 

 

 

 
*Divya Srinivasan is a qualified attorney with a background in women’s rights, including work on sexual harassment in the workplace and sexual violence against women. You can follow her on Twitter @sdivya91.

**Equality Now is an international human rights organization that works to protect and promote the rights of women and girls around the world by combining grassroots activism with international, regional and national legal advocacy. It’s international network of lawyers, activists, and supporters achieve legal and systemic change by holding governments responsible for enacting and enforcing laws and policies that end legal inequality, sexual trafficking, sexual violence, and harmful practices such as female genital mutilation and “child” marriage. For details of current campaigns, go to www.equalitynow.org, Facebook @equalitynoworg, and Twitter @equalitynow.

Photo Credit: Rashtriya Garima Abhiyan.

The post Sexual Assault Survivors March to End Gender Violence in India appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Divya Srinivasan* is South Asia Consultant for international women’s rights organisation Equality Now**

The post Sexual Assault Survivors March to End Gender Violence in India appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By M. Nadarajah and Jomo Kwame Sundaram
BHUBANESWAR, India and KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 26 2019 (IPS)

Do politicians’ words matter? Since becoming US President, Donald J Trump has dismissed his opponents and others he does not like as evil, stupid or both. He has referred to undocumented immigrants as animals, and to poor countries as shitholes.

Fostering culture of hate
Around the world, such harsh words have become normalized as part of the rhetoric of leaders, against perceived and manufactured enemies, to mobilize the intended ‘imagined community’ against ‘ the other’.

M. Nadarajah

Such rhetoric, increasingly emulated by political, religious and community leaders the world over, has contributed greatly to the growing climate of resentment and hatred of the ‘other’, the ‘outsider’, the ‘stranger’.

Hate words and speech have become widespread globally. They have become part of dominant cultures, spreading meanings, worldviews and beliefs, all with considerable impact. When dominant, they are amplified by authority and power – political, economic, social, and cultural, increasingly recognised as ‘soft’ power.

The rhetoric of hatred has been echoed and thus amplified by traditional as well as social media, including the increasingly vicious culture online, as rivals compete to outdo one another, vying for attention.

But often, even more aggressive and vicious is the hate rhetoric of the rising cultural populists, as they manufacture new language to outdo one another and the incumbents, while trying to unify their ‘imagined communities’ behind them.

Cultural populism for imagined communities
Ethno-populists, jingoist nationalists, other chauvinists and their enablers try to convince their followers that they are victims facing threats from exaggerated or even imagined dangers, such as conspiracies by enemy ‘others’ of which they are ignorant due to obfuscation by fake news.

Around the world, they use cultural ignorance, unfamiliarity, suspicions, prejudices, animosity and fear-mongering to mobilize their followings, typically with ‘half-truths’, rather than less credible, outright fabrications.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

In the era of fake news, fake alerts and ‘post-truth’, such half-truths have become more effective, and hence, more dangerous in abetting the power to demean, displace and destroy, especially when driven by ambition seeking greater influence and power.

The recent popularity, mainstreaming and legitimization of ethno-populism and jingoism in the West as well as other parts of the world, demand attention to how cultural analysis, social psychology and neuroscience can help us better understand the effects of such rhetoric.

Normalizing hate speech
Unsurprisingly, continuous or frequent exposure to hate speech is known to increase prejudice, resentment and animosity. Such influences desensitize people to verbal and even other forms of aggression, by ‘normalizing’ actions and behaviour which might otherwise be socially condemned. The culture of hate seems to thrive in the human ‘ecosystem’.

Leaders inspiring prejudice, anger and fear among their supporters, stimulate surges of stress hormones, such as norepinephrine and cortisol, affecting the amygdala, the brain centre for threat. Threatening language directly stimulates the amygdala, making it difficult for humans to ‘wind down’ their passions and emotions in order to ‘think’ before acting.

One does not have to be mentally defective or unstable to be ‘inspired’ to aggression and violence by such rhetoric. Most of us are susceptible to such ‘motivational’ speeches, especially when conditions are conducive.

Legitimizing violence against others
A study, led by Princeton psychologist Susan Fiske, has linked anger and violent impulses to distrust of ‘outsiders’ or ‘others’, especially when economic difficulties encourage viewing them as competing ‘unfairly’ for better opportunities.

By inducing or exaggerating a sense of external threat by the ‘other’, they can be thought of as not only different, but even as threatening. It is generally easier to think of outsiders as less than human, and hence, undeserving of empathy or compassion; both are cultural and socio-psychological conditions conducive to hate, aggression and violence.

A Harvard psychologist co-author of the study reportedly noted, “when a group is put on the defensive and made to feel threatened, they begin to believe that anything, including violence, is justified.”

Dehumanizing others
Cultural chauvinists also encourage antagonism to and violence against others by demonizing and dehumanizing them as sub-human or even non-human, so that they are not deemed worthy of treatment and consideration as fellow humans.

Earlier, Fiske and a colleague had found that their study subjects were so unempathetic to images of drug addicts and the homeless that they could not imagine how they felt or thought; the brain regions required to empathize with them as human beings deserving of ‘moral treatment’ could not be activated.

Instead, the brain region associated with feelings of disgust were activated. As Fiske has argued, “Both science and history suggest that people will nurture and act on their prejudices in the worst ways when these people are put under stress, pressured by peers, or receive approval from authority figures to do so.”

Thus, when a politician or some other socially influential person dehumanizes others, they are being put beyond the range of empathy, depriving them of moral protection and legitimizing inhuman treatment against them.

In another famous 1960s’ study by Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram, not knowing that the shocks were fake, most study subjects were willing to obey an authority figure’s instructions to give electric shocks to other participants.

Sixty-five per cent – almost two out of three — did as told, delivering the maximum shock, which could have been fatal, if real. Clearly, people can easily be influenced by authority to terribly harm others. Followers thus follow the leader in dehumanising others.

Positive agenda needed too
People are being continuously influenced by hate speech. But as dehumanisation becomes the norm, tolerated and sustained, not only by individual actions, but also by a socioeconomic culture promoting, even needing dehumanisation, then the culture of hatred, including hate speech, becomes normalized.

Hence, it is necessary to take measures to deter, delegitimize and even disallow hate speech in view of its likely consequences and the normalization of hate it thrives on and contributes to.

These threaten not only to undermine social solidarity, peaceful coexistence and mutual respect, but also to do far more damage, not only for international relations, but also for social peace, especially in multicultural societies.

As hate becomes part and parcel of our ‘way of life’, it becomes increasingly difficult to reverse these processes to recapture our lost ability to build reason, empathy and compassion.

While difficult but necessary, this is hardly sufficient as we revisit, mobilize and augment our remaining cultural resources for a positive agenda to rediscover the best in our common humanity, drawing on mutual respect and the universal ethos underlying our rich cultural diversity.

While the current culture of hate has a supportive ‘ecosystem’ of sorts in some aspects of neuroscience, human biology and social psychology also recognise our ‘compassion instinct’, an orientation of mind that recognises pain, the universality of pain and suffering, and the ‘instinctive’ need, indeed desire to help others.

M. Nadarajah is Chair Professor, Xavier Centre for New Humanities and Compassion Studies, Xavier University, Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India.
Jomo Kwame Sundaram, a former economics professor and United Nations Assistant Secretary-General, was a member of the new Malaysian Government’s Council of Eminent Persons.

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Reviewed by: Blerim Mustafa, Postgraduate researcher (Ph.D candidate) at the University of Leicester (Department of Politics and International Relations)

By Blerim Mustafa
GENEVA, Feb 25 2019 (IPS-Partners)

When Donald Trump was elected as the 45th President of the United States on 8 November 2016, the electoral triumph defied poll estimates and came as a surprise to observers and pundits. President Trump’s “America First” agenda succeeded in winning the hearts and minds of many Americans and the allocation of votes pursuant to the electoral college gave Trump the edge, although he received nearly three million votes less than Hillary Clinton. With Trump at the helm, how would Washington’s new political direction affect international peace and stability?

To answer this question, Professor and Chair of the International and Comparative Politics Department at the American University of Paris, Hall Gardner, pens an honest and timely book entitled “World War Trump: The Risks of America’s New Nationalism” to assess the repercussions of President Trump’s “America First” foreign policy agenda. Professor Gardner foresees that President’s Trump unpredictable foreign policy agenda will contribute to reverse and undermine multilateralism, pave the way for the rise of Washington’s political rivals and weaken the status and credibility of the US as the world’s leading Great Power. In other words, an insecure political future that could accelerate the demise of the Pax Americana, put regional powers at loggerheads and throw the world into a new Cold War that could develop into World War III.

The backlash of this ominous precedent could contribute to spur the growth of a more assertive alliance composed of Washington’s political rivals – such as China, Russia, Turkey, Iran, Turkey and South Africa – that decide to confront Washington as they become more self-assertive owing to their growing political, financial and military influence. Through the lens of offensive realism, it is predicted that power projection, military aggression and “might is right” will dominate the scene of the 21st century’s international order. From this point of view, the author argues that President Trump’s confrontational and alienating relationship with political adversaries and allies will pave the way for Washington to pursue unilateralism and a self-isolationist approach to settle international security issues. Professor Gardner predicts this could throw the world one step closer towards an Orwellian future.

Against this ominous background, it is urgent to reinvigorate multilateralism and foster an atmosphere conducive to peace and stability. This will rest on the ability to defuse geopolitical rivalries – it is argued by the author – through consensus-building, compromises and concessions on political matters with alienated regional powers such as China and Russia. “Global peace and human development can only be achieved by redefining the US national interest in such a way to reach compromises not just with US allies and friends but also with American rivals (…),” suggests Professor Gardner (2018, p. 280). In other words, without engaged and concerted diplomacy to defuse political disputes, international stability and peace will not prevail. From this perspective, “World War Trump: The Risks of America’s New Nationalism” offers food for thought for world decision-makers to steer away from pursuing political outcomes that could threaten international stability. The book provides realistic solutions for the current global political landscape and framing the future of the international world order.

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Excerpt:

Reviewed by: Blerim Mustafa, Postgraduate researcher (Ph.D candidate) at the University of Leicester (Department of Politics and International Relations)

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Imran Khan

By Imran Khan
ISLAMABAD, Feb 25 2019 (IPS)

My generation grew up at a time when colonial hang up was at its peak. Our older generation had been slaves and had a huge inferiority complex of the British. The school I went to was similar to all elite schools in Pakistan.

Despite gaining independence, they were, and still are, producing replicas of public schoolboys rather than Pakistanis.I read Shakespeare, which was fine, but no Allama Iqbal – the national poet of Pakistan.

The class on Islamic studies was not taken seriously, and when I left school I was considered among the elite of the country because I could speak English and wore Western clothes.

Despite periodically shouting ‘Pakistan Zindabad’ in school functions, I considered my own culture backward and religion outdated. Among our group if any one talked about religion, prayed or kept a beard he was immediately branded a Mullah.

Because of the power of the Western media, our heroes were Western movie stars or pop stars. When I went to Oxford already burdened with this hang up, things didn’t get any easier. At Oxford, not just Islam, but all religions were considered anachronism.

Science had replaced religion and if something couldn’t be logically proved it did not exist. All supernatural stuff was confined to the movies. Philosophers like Darwin, who with his half-baked theory of evolution had supposedly disproved the creation of men and hence religion, were read and revered.

Moreover, European history reflected its awful experience with religion. The horrors committed by the Christian clergy during the Inquisition era had left a powerful impact on the Western mind.

To understand why the West is so keen on secularism, one should go to places like Cordoba in Spain and see the torture apparatus used during the Spanish Inquisition. Also the persecution of scientists as heretics by the clergy had convinced the Europeans that all religions are regressive.

However, the biggest factor that drove people like me away from religion was the selective Islam practiced by most of its preachers. In short, there was a huge difference between what they practiced and what they preached. Also, rather than explaining the philosophy behind the religion, there was an overemphasis on rituals.

I feel that humans are different to animals. While, the latter can be drilled, humans need to be intellectually convinced. That is why the Qur’an constantly appeals to reason. The worst, of course, was the exploitation of Islam for political gains by various individuals or groups.

Hence, it was a miracle I did not become an atheist. The only reason why I did not was the powerful religious influence my mother wielded on me since my childhood. It was not so much out of conviction but love for her that I stayed a Muslim.

However, my Islam was selective. I accepted only parts of the religion that suited me. Prayers were restricted to Eid days and occasionally on Fridays, when my father insisted on taking me to the mosque with him.

All in all I was smoothly moving to becoming a pukka Brown Sahib. After all I had the right credentials in terms of school, university and, above all, acceptability in the English aristocracy, something that our brown sahibs would give their lives for. So what led me to do a ‘lota’ on the Brown Sahib culture and instead become a ‘desi’?

Well it did not just happen overnight.

Firstly, the inferiority complex that my generation had inherited gradually went as I developed into a world-class athlete. Secondly, I was in the unique position of living between two cultures. I began to see the advantages and the disadvantages of both societies.

In Western societies, institutions were strong while they were collapsing in our country. However, there was an area where we were and still are superior, and that is our family life.

I began to realize that this was the Western society’s biggest loss. In trying to free itself from the oppression of the clergy, they had removed both God and religion from their lives.

While science, no matter how much it progresses, can answer a lot of questions – two questions it will never be able to answer: One, what is the purpose of our existence; and two, what happens to us when we die?

It is this vacuum that I felt created the materialistic and the hedonistic culture. If this is the only life then one must make hay while the sun shines – and in order to do so one needs money. Such a culture is bound to cause psychological problems in a human being, as there was going to be an imbalance between the body and the soul.

Consequently, in the US, which has shown the greatest materialistic progress while giving its citizens numerous rights, almost 60 percent of the population consult psychiatrists.

Yet, amazingly in modern psychology, there is no study of the human soul. Sweden and Switzerland, who provide the most welfare to their citizens, also have the highest suicide rates. Hence, man is not necessarily content with material well being and needs something more.

Since all morality has it roots in religion, once religion was removed, immorality has progressively grown since the 70s. Its direct impact has been on family life. In the UK the divorce rate is 60 percent, while it is estimated that there are over 35 percent single mothers.

The crime rate is rising in almost all Western societies, but the most
disturbing fact is the alarming increase in racism. While science always tries to prove the inequality of man (recent survey showing the American Black to be genetically less intelligent than whites) it is only religion that preaches the equality of man.

Between 1991 and 1997, it was estimated that total immigration into Europe was around 520,000, and there were racially motivated attacks all over, especially in Britain, France and Germany. In Pakistan during the Afghan war, we had over four million refugees, and despite the people being so much poorer, there was no racial tension.

There was a sequence of events in the 80s that moved me toward God as the Qur’an says: ‘There are signs for people of understanding.’ One of them was cricket. As I was a student of the game, the more I understood the game, the more I began to realize that what I considered to be chance was, in fact, the will of Allah.

A pattern which became clearer with time. But it was not until Salman Rushdie’s ‘Satanic Verses’ that my understanding of Islam began to develop.

People like me who were living in the Western world bore the brunt of anti-Islam prejudice that followed the Muslim reaction to the book. We were left with two choices: fight or flight.

Since I felt strongly that the attacks on Islam were unfair, I decided to fight. It was then I realized that I was not equipped to do so as my knowledge of Islam was inadequate.

Hence I started my research and for me a period of my greatest enlightenment. I read scholars like Ali Shariati, Muhammad Asad, Iqbal, Gai Eaton, plus of course, a study of Qur’an.

I will try to explain as concisely as is possible, what ‘discovering the truth’ meant for me. When the believers are addressed in the Qur’an, it always says ‘Those who believe and do good deeds.’ In other
words, a Muslim has dual function, one toward God and the other toward fellow human beings.

The greatest impact of believing in God for me, meant that I lost all fear of human beings. The Qur’an liberates man from man when it says that life and death and respect and humiliation are God’s jurisdiction, so we do not have to bow before other human beings.

Moreover, since this is a transitory world where we prepare for the eternal one, I broke out of the self-imposed prisons, such as growing old (such a curse in the Western world, as a result of which, plastic surgeons are having a field day), materialism, ego, what people say and so on.

It is important to note that one does not eliminate earthly desires. But instead of being controlled by them, one controls them.

By following the second part of believing in Islam, I have become a better human being. Rather than being self-centered and living for the self, I feel that because the Almighty gave so much to me, in turn I must use that blessing to help the less privileged.

This I did by following the fundamentals of Islam rather than becoming a Kalashnikov-wielding fanatic. I have become a tolerant and a giving human being who feels compassion for the underprivileged.

Instead of attributing success to myself, I know it is because of God’s will, hence I learned humility instead of arrogance.

Also, instead of the snobbish Brown Sahib attitude toward our masses, I believe in egalitarianism and strongly feel against the injustice done to the weak in our society.

According to the Qur’an, ‘Oppression is worse than killing.’ In fact only now do I understand the true meaning of Islam, if you submit to the will of Allah, you have inner peace. Through my faith, I have discovered strength within me that I never knew existed and that has released my potential in life.

I feel that in Pakistan we have selective Islam. Just believing in God and going through the rituals is not enough. One also has to be a good human being.

I feel there are certain Western countries with far more Islamic traits than us in Pakistan, especially in the way they protect the rights of their citizens, or for that matter their justice system. In fact some of the finest individuals I know live there.

What I dislike about them is their double standards in the way they protect the rights of their citizens but consider citizens of other countries as being somehow inferior to them as human being, e.g. dumping toxic waste in the Third World, advertising cigarettes that are not allowed in the West and selling drugs that are banned in the West.

One of the problems facing Pakistan is the polarization of two reactionary groups. On the one side is the Westernized group that looks upon Islam through Western eyes and has inadequate knowledge about the subject. It reacts strongly to anyone trying to impose Islam in society and wants only a selective part of the religion.

On the other extreme is the group that reacts to this Westernized elite and in trying to become a defender of the faith, takes up such intolerant and self-righteous attitudes that are repugnant to the spirit of Islam.

What needs to be done is to somehow start a dialogue between the two extreme. In order for this to happen, the group on whom the greatest proportion of our educational resources are spent in this country must study Islam properly. Whether they become practicing Muslims or believe in God is entirely a personal choice.

As the Qur’an tells us there is ‘no compulsion in religion.’ However, they must arm themselves with knowledge as a weapon to fight extremism. Just by turning up their noses at extremism the problem is not going to be solved.

The Qur’an calls Muslims ‘the middle nation’, not of extremes. The Holy Prophet (peace be upon him) was told to simply give the message and not worry whether people converted or not, therefore, there is no question in Islam of forcing your opinions on anyone else.

Moreover, we are told to respect other religions, their places of worship and their prophets.

It should be noted that no Muslim missionaries or armies ever went to Malaysia or Indonesia. The people converted to Islam due to the high principles and impeccable character of the Muslim traders.

At the moment, the worst advertisements for Islam are the countries with their selective Islam, especially where religion is used to deprive people of their rights. In fact, a society that obeys fundamentals of Islam has to be a liberal one.

If Pakistan’s Westernized class starts to study Islam, not only will it be able to help society fight sectarianism and extremism, but it will also make them realize what a progressive religion Islam is.

They will also be able to help the Western world by articulating Islamic concepts. Recently, Prince Charles accepted that the Western world can learn from Islam.

But how can this happen if the group that is in the best position to project Islam gets its attitudes from the West and considers Islam backward? Islam is a universal religion and that is why our Prophet (peace be upon him) was called a Mercy for all mankind.

*This article first appeared in Arab News; a leading English daily in Saudi Arabia

The post Why West Craves Materialism & East Sticks To Religion appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Imran Khan is the Prime Minister of Pakistan

The post Why West Craves Materialism & East Sticks To Religion appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Jan Lundius
STOCKHOLM / ROME, Feb 25 2019 (IPS)

On January 25, 2017, the Trump administration signed Executive Order 13767, instructing the Government to begin new constructions and replacements of walls between the US and Mexico. From December 22, 2018 to January 25, 2019, the federal government was partially shut down due to President Trump’s declared intention to veto any spending bill that did not include $5 billion in funding for a border wall. It was with good reason the Congress withheld such an enormous sum of money. As the European experience indicates, building walls between countries has proven to be both obsolete and disastrous.

On the 3rd of March, 30 years have has passed since a wall splitting Europe in two parts began to crumble. This happened after a US president had pleaded with his Soviet counterpart: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” After receiving an informal clearance from Mikhail Gorbachev, the seventh and last leader of the Soviet Union, the Hungarian Government did on the 3rd of March 1989 initiate the lifting of the Iron Curtain by ordering the demolition of border barriers. This was the beginning of the disappearance of a dark shadow that for almost four decades had haunted the minds of all Europeans.

I grew up within a divided Europe and after several times having visited the Soviet satellites I was well acquainted with the control and repression that reigned there before the opening of their borders. Nevertheless, back then I could not have imagined another world order. In those days the so called Iron Curtain was not only a physical boundary dividing Europe into two separate areas, it was also a mental division between us and them. An open wound stretching straight across the continent. A visible proof that World War II had not really ended, that the suffering it caused was far from healed and forgotten.

Physically, the Iron Curtain took the form of border defences cutting through Europe. After World War II the Soviet Union had annexed Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, turning them into parts of The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Eastern parts of Poland and Finland, as well as northern Romania had been incorporated into Soviet republics. Furthermore, between 1945 and 1949, The People´s Republic of Bulgaria, the People´s Republic of Poland, the Hungarian People´s Republic, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, and the People´s Republic of Romania had all been turned into Soviet satellite states.

It was after 1950, when over 15 million people had emigrated from Soviet-occupied countries, that boundaries between East and West became fortified and almost impenetrable. For example, the border zone in Hungary started 15 kilometres from the actual frontier. A double, barbed-wire fence was installed 50 metres from the border line and the space between the fences were laden with land mines. Similar structures were erected along the borders of East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Norway, Finland and Greece.

The change came sudden and the relief felt all over Europe was exhilarating. In April 1989, after the Hungarian Government had opened up the nation´s western borders, the Polish Government legalised the Solidarity movement, which in June captured 99 per cent of available parliamentary seats, culminating in the fall of Communism. On 9 November tens of thousands of East Berliners flooded the checkpoints into West Berlin and began tearing down the wall. The same day as the Berlin wall was broken through, the Communist leader Todor Zhikov was ousted from power in Bulgaria. On the 25th of November Ladislav Adamee, the Czechoslovak prime minister, resigned. The only former Soviet satellite state in which the demolishment of the Iron Curtain resulted in violence was Romania, where approximately 1 000 protesters were killed in the country´s third biggest town, Timoşoara. However, on 22 December 1989, the Romanian military sided with the protesters and turned against Communist ruler Nicolae Ceauşescu, who was executed after a brief trial three days later.

I was reminded of these eventful months when I came across the paperback magazine Granta, which in December 1989 had asked several European writers about their impressions of that tumultuous year.1 The contributions could all be headed by the Polish Noble Prize winner Czesław Miłosz´s question: “What will happen next?”

Several of the authors´ fears have actually come true. The Russian dissident Andrei Sinyavskij wrote that when a multi-national empire like the Soviet Union disintegrates and its satellite states suddenly become “liberated”, it will result in xenophobia and ethnic conflicts. The old Communist myth of “bourgeois encirclement” might be supplanted by nationalism and fears of infiltration from unwanted immigrants. Others, like the East German Jurek Becker, wrote that the fall of Communism and an increasing distrust of Socialism, Religion and State Power might result in a lack of guiding principles, something to believe in, and people might lose themselves in consumerism and alienation.

Josef Škvorecký declared that as a Czech he could not avoid doubting the outcome of the radical changes – when he was fourteen years old he had experienced how the Nazis occupied his country, ten years later Czechoslovakia´s Communist party staged a coup and assumed undisputed control over the Government, marking the onset of four decades of Soviet backed communist rule. Twenty years later Czech hopes for a change were thwarted by a Soviet invasion, and twenty years after that Škvorecký feared that ethnic tensions between Czechs and Slovaks would rip the nation apart.

The French-born American critic George Steiner foretold that Yugoslavia would become fragmented and suffer from ethnic violence, while the “prim neo-isolation of Thatcherite Britain” might have disastrous results. The German Hans Magnus Enzenberger warned that “Western democracies are facing an unprecedented dissolution” and that they could not expect that a crumbling Soviet Union would remain weak and powerless. Enzenberger also reminded the “new Europeans” that:

We must also withdraw from our untenable position in the war of debt against the Third World, and the most difficult retreat of all will be in the war against the biosphere, which we have been waging since the industrial revolution.

The Russian-British historian of ideas, Isaiah Berlin, wrote that it was quite possible that the European euphoria might prove to be illusionary. Change must reach the depths of the human mind. The people of Eastern Europe did not rebel in the name of a great cause. They rebelled against the regimentation and dreariness of life. They wanted the consumer goods, the entertainment and freedom from arbitrary authorities offered by the West. They were raging at a system that had cheated them all their lives. According to Isaiah Berlin a sudden, overwhelming change like the fall of Communism had to be analysed, felt and understood by as many people as possible, not only by intellectuals and a privileged elite. What happened in Europe 1989 could not be allowed to become a “Revolution of the Intellectuals”, like the upsurge of liberal and democratic feelings that in 1848 toppled governments in Paris, Rome, Venice, Berlin, Dresden, Vienna and Budapest, only to be crushed by armies of conservative forces, which thus maintained the status quo. Berlin´s observation reminded me of the mainly unsuccessful Arab Spring, which in many places resulted in thwarted hopes and bloodshed.

All contributors to the Granta magazine wished that the euphoria created by the fall of European walls would not be a temporary phase, but encourage a free market, freedom of speech, compassion and human interaction. The Iron Curtain had hindered people from leaving their country, while it was promoted as a protection from Western capitalism. The raison d´étre of the Mexico-US barrier is the opposite – to keep people out.

Several of the prognostications presented in Granta proved to be accurate. Sinyavskij predicted that when a political ideology ceases to be considered as a threat, we will embrace other fears, like dangerous immigrants threatening our lives and culture. Enzenberger assumed that Russia would expand again, something that has been demonstrated by its annexation of Crimea and claims to other territories. It would have been fortunate if the Europeans after the demise of the Iron Curtain instead of embracing xenophobia and nationalism, had been able to remove mental and tangible barriers while embarking on a joint effort to foment sustainable development, reverse climate change, stop the predatory use of natural resources and other threats to humanity´s survival. We continue to hope for a better future, then and now.

1 New Europé! Granta No. 30, 1990.

Jan Lundius holds a PhD. on History of Religion from Lund University and has served as a development expert, researcher and advisor at SIDA, UNESCO, FAO and other international organisations.

The post The Wall: Thirty Years Ago European Walls Were Destroyed, but Others Are Being Built appeared first on Inter Press Service.