CAMBRIDGE, MA., Aug 29 (IPS) – As the adage goes, when you find yourself stuck in a hole, stop digging. As African leaders and their philanthropic and bilateral sponsors prepare for another glitzy African Green Revolution Forum, convening September 5-8 in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, they are instead handing out new shovels to dig the continent deeper into a hunger crisis caused in part by their failing obsession with corporate-led industrialized agriculture.
Instead of cutting food insecurity in half, as the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) promised at its founding in 2006, the continent has spiraled in the opposite direction. The number of chronically “undernourished” people in AGRA’s 13 focus countries has increased nearly 50%, not decreased, according to recent hunger data from the United Nations.
AGRA’s corporate cheerleaders will try to blame the continent’s deepening cavern of hunger on disruptions from the COVID pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war, but chronic hunger had already risen 31% by 2018 in AGRA countries, as I documented in my 2020 Tufts University study. The hole was already getting deeper.
Summit host Tanzania is a case in point. As the government readies another Green Revolution festival of self-congratulation, refusing to allow Tanzanian farm groups to offer a more critical perspective and more effective solutions, UN figures show a 34% increase in number of undernourished Tanzanians since 2006. An estimated 59% of Tanzanians suffer moderate or severe levels of food insecurity, according to survey data from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.
African farmers: “Put down the Green Revolution shovels”
Once again, African farmer organizations are calling on African leaders and the donors who support them to put down the Green Revolution shovels, climb out of the hole, survey the damage their failing agricultural development model has wrought, and change course to more farmer-centered and sustainable ecological agriculture.
The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa concluded its recent continental meeting on seed rights denouncing “AGRA and other corporate actors’ continued pressure to influence African government seed policies and biosafety regulations to increase corporate capture and control of seed on the continent.” They have scheduled a virtual press conference August 30, demanding “No Decisions About Us Without Us!”
In calling for a strategic reset, they are not ignoring the complex causes of hunger on the continent – climate change, conflict and corruption exacerbated by pandemic disruptions and rising costs of fertilizers and food imports from Russia and Ukraine. They are recognizing that the Green Revolution’s corporate-driven, technology-based strategy for rural uplift has proven unfit to help small-scale farmers cope with such challenges.
In 2006, AGRA offered a coherent strategy and admirably ambitious goals. Its aggressive promotion of commercial seeds and synthetic fertilizers would catalyze a virtuous cycle of agricultural development. Rising yields would feed the hungry and stimulate further investments in productivity-enhancing farm technologies. AGRA’s self-proclaimed “theory of change” would double food-crop productivity and incomes for 30 million small-scale farming households by 2020 while cutting hunger in half.
Seventeen years – and more than one billion dollars – later, the evidence shows that AGRA’s theory of change was flawed at every turn. Those seeds and fertilizers did not produce a productivity revolution. Yields rose only 18% over 14 years, barely faster than before the new Green Revolution push. Maize yields grew only 29% despite billions of dollars in government subsidies to allow farmers to buy – and corporations to sell – the inputs. Meanwhile, more nutritious and climate-resilient traditional crops such as millet and sorghum saw yields stagnate or decline as farmers planted more subsidized maize.
With limited yield improvements, farmers didn’t see more food or higher incomes from sales of their promised new surplus production. They saw a losing proposition, with the costs of seeds and fertilizers outpacing the expected returns from crop sales. When the subsidies were cut as government budgets were squeezed, farmers stopped buying the seeds and fertilizers and went back to their old seeds, if they had managed to save any. Many found themselves in debt after input purchases failed to pay off their investment.
Most found farmland that was now less fertile than before, the nutrients drained by monocultures of maize. The fertilizers fed the maize, not the soil, which continued to lose fertility, starved for the organic matter provided by more ecological methods such as intercropping and manure applications.
So no one should be surprised to find hunger on the rise. Farmers were not growing much more food. What food they were growing – mostly starchy staples like maize and rice – were less nutritious than the mix of crops they used to grow. And they had little new cash income to purchase more food, never mind a diverse and nutritious diet. Many had less cash as they tried to pay off debts from their failed investments in commercial seeds and fertilizers.
Cosmetic changes, less transparency
International donors have failed to heed African farmers’ calls to change course. Instead, AGRA rolls out new corporate branding, a facelift not the full makeover Africa needs.
At last year’s Green Revolution Forum, attendees were treated to a slick set of videos announcing that the forum was removing the term “green revolution” from its name. Indeed, this year’s gathering calls itself the African Food Systems Summit. And AGRA itself dropped “green revolution” from its name, declaring with no real explanation that it would now just go by its acronym, AGRA.
AGRA literally stands for nothing at this point. Calling its new five-year strategy “AGRA 3.0,” leaders refuse to acknowledge the failures of their Green Revolution model. They keep promoting new versions of the same failed approaches. AGRA continues to foster pro-business policy changes within African governments, like the one it has helped push in Zambia this year. It promotes “agro-poles” – 250,000 acre “farm blocks,” often located on land grabbed from local communities so corporate investors can establish industrial-scale farms.
Like many tech upgrades, AGRA 3.0 gives African farmers less of what they really need, not more.
This year, AGRA’s cosmetic changes include a newly redesigned web site, replete with AGRA’s new logo but missing even the rudimentary progress reports it used to make available to the public. Scrubbed from the site – or conveniently buried in it – is last year’s damning donor-commissioned evaluation, which highlighted AGRA’s many failures to deliver on its promises.
African farmers have a different vision. They want donors and governments to stop supporting the failing Green Revolution initiative and instead shift their support to lower cost, farmer-centered, ecological agriculture. Farmers are producing their own organic fertilizers and pesticides from local materials, with excellent results. The simple and low-cost innovation of “green manure-cover-cropping” has scientists working with some 15 million small-scale maize farmers in Africa to plant local varieties of trees and nitrogen-fixing food crops in their maize fields, tripling maize yields at no cost to the farmer.
The solutions are at hand. It is past time for Green Revolution promoters to put down the shovels and stop digging Africa deeper into hunger.
Anti-government protest in Sri Lanka on April 13, 2022. Credit: Wikipedia
Opinion by Asoka Bandarage (washington dc)
Inter Press Service
WASHINGTON DC, Aug 25 (IPS) – Sri Lanka has been faced with an unprecedented political and economic crisis since the beginning of 2022.
The dominant narrative attributes the crisis to the confluence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Ukraine conflict, China’s ‘debt trap diplomacy’ and – most importantly – the corruption and mismanagement of the ruling Rajapaksa family.
Western mainstream media celebrated the so-called aragalaya (struggle, in Sinhala) protest movement that led to the ouster of the Rajapaksas and upholds the IMF bail-out as the only solution to the dire economic situation.
The aragalaya protests emerged from genuine economic grievances, but failed to develop an analysis beyond the ‘Gota, Go Home’ demand for Gotabaya Rajapaksa to resign. Influenced by local and external interests with their own agendas, the protestors exhibited little-to-no awareness or critique of the global political economy and the financial system at the root of the country’s crisis.
In 2022, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) reported that 60 percent of low-income countries and 30 percent of emerging market economies are ‘in or near debt distress.’ While the details differ from country to country, the historical patterns of subordination that have given rise to global crises are the same.
The Sri Lankan crisis is an illustrative example of convergent global debt, food, fuel and energy crises facing much of the world. It is corporate media bias and narrative control that deflects from this analysis.
The island’s severe debt and economic crisis must be seen in a broader global context as the culmination of several centuries of colonial and neo-colonial developments, and the disastrous and inevitably self-destructive capitalist paradigm of endless growth and profit. Debt is not “a straightforward number but a social relation embedded in unequal power relations, discourses and moralities…and…institutionalized power.”.
Colonialism and Neocolonialism
The development of export agriculture and the import of food and other essentials under British colonialism turned Sri Lanka into a dependent ‘peripheral’ unit of the global capitalist economy.
Adopting ideologies of modernization and development and theories of comparative advantage, the capitalist imperative integrated self-sustaining indigenous, peasant, and regional economies into the growing global economy, through the appropriation of land, natural resources, and labor for export production.
Monocultural agriculture, mining, and other export-based production disturbed traditional patterns of crop rotation and small-scale subsistence production that were more harmonious with the regional ecosystems and cycles of nature.
Plantation development contributed to deforestation, loss of biodiversity and animal habitats. While a small local elite prospered through their collaboration with colonialism, most people became poor, indebted, and dependent on the vagaries of the global market for their sustenance.
Although colonized countries including Sri Lanka gained political independence following World War II, unequal exchange continued under neo-colonialism. Terms of trade disadvantaged the ‘Third World’ with their labor, resources and exports grossly undervalued and imports overvalued.
The dynamic is better understood as poorer countries being over-exploited rather than under-developed. Rising populations combined with corruption and inefficiency of local governments gave rise to endemic foreign exchange shortages and economic crises in Sri Lanka and many other countries.
The debt relief and aid given by the IMF, the World Bank and bilateral institutions from the Global North have been mere band-aids to keep the ex-colonial countries tethered to the global financial and economic structures. Post-independent Sri Lanka went to the IMF 16 times before the current 2023 bail-out which seeks to further perpetuate the county’s cycle of debt dependence.
The transfer of financial and resource wealth from poor countries in the global South to the rich countries in the North is not a new phenomenon. It has been an enduring feature throughout centuries of both classical and neo-colonialism. Between 1980 and 2017, developing countries paid out over $4.2 trillion solely in interest payments, dwarfing the financial aid they received from the developed countries during that period.
Currently, international financial institutions – notably the IMF and the World Bank – remain outside political and legal control without even ‘elementary accountability’. As critics from the Global South point out, “The overwhelming power of financial institutions makes a mockery of any serious effort for democratization and addressing the deteriorating socioeconomic living conditions of the people in Sri Lanka and elsewhere in the Global South.”
Financialization and Debt
Corporate and financial deregulation which accompanied the rise of neoliberalism starting in the 1970s has given rise to financialization, and the increasing importance of finance capital. As more and more aspects of social and planetary life are commoditized and subjected to digitalization and financial speculation, the real value of nature and human activity are further lost.
As a 2022 United Nations Report points out; food prices are soaring today not due to a problem with supply and demand but due to price speculation in highly financialized commodity markets.
A handful of the largest asset management companies, notably BlackRock (currently worth USD $ 10 trillion) control very large shares in companies operating in practically all the major sectors of the global economy: banking, technology, media, defense, energy, pharmaceuticals, food, agribusiness including seeds, and agrochemicals.
Financial liberalization advanced when interest rates dropped in the richer countries after the global 2008 financial crisis. Developing countries were encouraged to borrow from private international capital markets through International Sovereign Bonds (ISBs) which come with high interest rates and short maturation periods.
Although details are not available to the public, BlackRock is reportedly the biggest ISB creditor of Sri Lanka. Most of Sri Lanka’s foreign debt is ISBs, with over 80% of Sri Lanka’s debt owed to western creditors, and not – as projected in the mainstream narrative – to China.
IMF debt financing requires countries to meet its familiar structural adjustment conditions: privatization of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), cutbacks of social safety nets and labor rights, increased export production, decreased import substitution and alignment of local economic policy with US and other Western interests.
These are the same aims as classical colonialism, they are just better hidden in the more complex modern system and language of global finance, diplomacy and aid.
A vast array of policies exacting these aims are well under way in Sri Lanka, including the sale of state-owned energy, telecommunications and transportation enterprises to foreign owners, with grave implications for Sri Lanka’s economic independence, sovereignty, national security and the wellbeing of her people and the environment.
The IMF approach does not address long-term needs for bioregionalism, sustainable development, local autonomy and welfare. A small vulnerable country such as Sri Lanka cannot change the trajectory of global capitalist development on its own.
Regional and global solidarity and social movements are necessary to challenge the deranged global financial and economic system that is at the root of the current crisis.
Global South Resistance
Since the 1970s, major collaborative projects have been initiated by developing countries and the UNCTAD to develop a multilateral legal framework for sovereign debt restructuring. Yet they are futile in the face of the powerful opposition of creditors and the protection given to them by wealthy countries and their multilateral institutions, and the UN has failed to uphold commitment and implement a debt restructuring mechanism.
Sri Lanka was a global leader in efforts to create a New International Economic Order, the Non-Aligned Movement and the Indian Ocean as a Zone of Peace in the 1960s and 70s. In the early years of their political independence, countries throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America sought to forge their own paths of economic and political development, independent of both capitalism and communism and the Cold War.
These included African socialist projects such as Tanzania’s Ujamma, import substitution programs in Latin America and left-wing nationalism and decolonization efforts in Sri Lanka and many other countries.
Almost without exception, these nationalist efforts failed, not only due to internal corruption and mismanagement but also due to persistent external pressure and intervention. Massive efforts have been taken by the Global North to stop the Global South from moving out of the established world order.
A case in point is the nationalization of oil companies owned by western countries in Sri Lanka in 1961 and the backlash against the left-nationalist Sri Lankan government which dared to take such a bold move.
The western response included the 1962 Hickenlooper Amendment passed in the U.S. Senate stopping foreign aid to Sri Lanka and to “any country expropriating American property without compensation.” As a result, Sri Lanka lost its credit worthiness, the domestic economic situation worsened, and the left-nationalist government lost the 1965 elections (with some covert US election support).
Observing those developments, political economist Richard Stuart Olsen wrote: “…the coerciveness of economic sanctions against a dependent, vulnerable country resides in the fact that an economic downturn can be induced and intensified from the outside, with the resulting development of politically explosive ‘relative deprivation’…”
These observations resonate with Sri Lanka’s current repetition of the same vicious cycle: an externally dependent export-import economy; worsening terms of trade; foreign exchange shortage; policy mismanagement; external political pressure; debt crisis; shortages of food, fuel and other essentials; mass suffering; and political turmoil.
Geopolitical Rivalry
Sri Lanka’s present economic crisis – the worst since the country’s political independence from the British – must be seen in the context of the accelerating neocolonial geopolitical conflict between China and the USA in the Indian Ocean. Many other countries across the world are also caught in the neocolonial superpower competition to control their natural resources and strategic locations.
There is much speculation as to whether the debt default on April 12, 2022 and political destabilization in Sri Lanka were ‘staged’ or intentionally precipitated to further the US’s ‘Pivot to Asia’ policy, the Indo-Pacific Strategy and the Quadrilateral Alliance (USA, India, Australia and Japan) in its competition to confront China’s $1 trillion Belt and Road Initiative and counter China’s presence in Sri Lanka.
It is widely recognized in Sri Lanka that ‘The policy of neutrality is the best defence Sri Lanka has to deter global powers from attempting to get control of Sri Lanka because of its strategic location.’ Although President Gotabaya Rajapaksa claimed to pursue a ‘neutral’ foreign policy, the Rajapaksas were seen as closer to China than the west. After Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa and President Gotabaya Rajapaksa were forced to resign, Ranil Wickramasinghe – a politician who was resoundingly rejected in the previous elections by the electorate but is a close ally of the west – was appointed as President in an undemocratic transition of power.
To what extent were Sri Lanka and her people victims of an externally manipulated ‘shock doctrine’ and a regime change operation, sold to the world as internal disintegration caused by local corruption and incapability?
While it is not possible to provide definitive answers to these issues, it is necessary to consider the available credible evidence and the geopolitics of debt and economic crises in Sri Lanka and the world at large.
Paradigm Shift
As the locus of global power shifts from the west and a multipolar world arises, new multilateral partnerships are emerging for development financing, such as the New Development Bank (NDB) – formerly referred to as the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) Development Bank – as alternatives to the Bretton Woods and other western dominated institutions.
However, given controversial projects, such as China’s Port City and India’s Adani Company investments in Sri Lanka as well as their projects elsewhere, it is necessary to ask if the BRICS represent a genuine alternative to the prevailing political-economic model based on domination, profit and power?
Dominant political power in our era is about propaganda, control of narratives and exploiting ignorance and fear. In the face of worsening environmental and social collapse across the world, there is a practical need for a fundamental questioning of the values, assumptions and misrepresentations of the dominant neoliberal model and its manifestations in Sri Lanka and the world.
At the root of the crisis, we face is a disconnect between the exponential growth of the profit-driven economy and a lack of development in human consciousness, i.e., in morality, empathy, and wisdom.
Ultimately, dualism, domination and the unregulated market paradigm need to be questioned to find a balanced path of human development, based on interdependence, partnership and ecological consciousness. Such a path of development would uphold the ethical principles necessary for long-term survival: rational use of natural resources, appropriate use of technology, balanced consumption, equitable distribution of wealth, and livelihoods for all.
This article is derived from the author’s new book: Asoka Bandarage, CRISIS IN SRI LANKA AND THE WORLD: COLONIAL AND NEOLIBERAL ORIGINS: ECOLOGICAL AND COLLECTIVE ALTERNATIVES (Berlin: De Gruyter,2023) https://www.degruyter.com/document/isbn/9783111203454/html?lang=en]
There are still tens of thousands of people in need of health services including surgical interventions from the previous war that left almost 600,000 people dead. Credit: James Jeffrey/IPS
Opinion by Abdo Husen (addis ababa)
Inter Press Service
ADDIS ABABA, Aug 23 (IPS) – Less than a year since warring parties in Ethiopia signed a peace agreement, the country is on the brink of renewed bloodshed following escalating hostilities between government forces and the Fano militia in the Amhara region.
Government forces accuse the militant group of plotting a coup; while the militia maintain their marginalization in the post-war reconstruction arrangements including the peace process itself. Additionally, conflict in the Oromia region remains active and unresolved.
As the poignant African adage goes, when mighty elephants fight, the grass gets trampled. Indeed, the common Ethiopian continues to get caught in the crossfire. They suffer the deleterious effects of a brutal conflict on all sectors of the economy including health. Unless a long-term solution is found, post-war reconstruction efforts in the past 9 months will be negated.
The Ministry of Health in collaboration with development partners had begun rebuilding health infrastructure and resourcing facilities. These include the rehabilitation of 69 hospitals and 709 health centers. The destruction of these facilities is imminent if hostilities between parties to the conflict continue to escalate.
Today, there are still tens of thousands of people in need of health services including surgical interventions from the previous war that left almost 600,000 people dead.
My recent visit to Tigray and Afar regions helped me see firsthand the current reality regarding the dire need for surgical services emanating from conflict. At Ayder Comprehensive Specialized Hospital, I met 9-year-old Selam* (not her real name) who is suffering leg bone fractures and an open wound on her knee. She is a blast survivor. Unable to extend her leg due to immense pain, she had to limp her way to the hospital using two canes taller than her height. It took her two years to make it to the hospital due to the long distance and transportation costs. Sadly, she must still wait for hospital admission as the waiting list is very long.
For Selam and patients like her, the next best time to provide surgical care to restore functionality to their limbs and improve their shot at returning to school is now. There is a potential to leave tens of thousands disabled if they do not access surgical services and associated therapies. Yet, these disabilities are preventable.
In Mekelle – the regional capital of Tigray, unpublished health and regional administration records show that there are over 20,000 patients waiting for plastic and orthopaedic surgery from injuries sustained in the previous war. Compare this to the supply-side that points to only two plastic and reconstructive surgeons available to cover the demand.
With their current weekly surgical output, it is going to take 8-10 years to provide much-needed surgery to all their patients. These depressing statistics will only get worse if a lasting resolution to the conflict in other parts of the country is not urgently arrived at.
Additionally, surgical care for congenital anomalies – including cleft conditions- have long been relegated since the COVID-19 pandemic hit as most elective surgeries were pushed back. Furthermore, the previous conflict in Tigray made them less priority as the health system faced a total collapse and every effort was directed towards emergency trauma care.
At one Hospital alone – Ayder, there are over 500 registered cleft patients waiting for surgery. The hospital has recently restarted providing cleft correction surgeries. However, the workforce is overstretched, and stockouts of essential supplies hamper their ability to provide the services at scale. With the new outburst of hostilities in Amhara and unresolved conflict in Oromiya, this situation is set to worsen.
In the previous Tigrayan war that spilled over to other parts of the country, sexual and gender-based violence was highly reported. There are often breakdowns of social and legal protections in conflict situations. Consequently, perpetrators take advantage of vulnerable women and children.
In fact, United Nations investigators reported that rape was used a weapon of war. This has far-reaching negative health repercussions including mental health disorders. If this new war between the federal government and the Fano militia is not curtailed, the human cost, particularly borne by women and girls, could be even worse than previous conflicts.
Moreover, conflicts result in the disruption of health systems and delivery, resulting in preventable morbidity and mortality. The lack of well-resourced health facilities also increases the chances of maternal complications such as obstetric fistula that require surgical interventions.
Additionally, consider the long distances that pregnant women are forced to cover due to the destruction of their nearest health facilities. This exerts negative pressure on their physiological and psychological health. Furthermore, the long transit exposes them to added risks emanating from the breakdown of peace and security.
It is a depressing situation. It is important that the federal government and regional administrations in areas that are experiencing peace, prioritize access to health services as a matter of urgency. This prioritization is not only towards catering for the healthcare needs of their populations but also in response to the increased demand from conflict-affected areas including surgical care.
It could be argued that singling out the health sector as a priority for domestic investment is not realistic given the limited resources available to the government for security and the operation of other sectors of the economy.
However, ensuring health is the foundation of efforts to rebuild a functional society that can work towards comprehensive national development.
Therefore, the Ethiopian government must leverage international systems and structures to mobilize external investment for healthcare, including quality and safe surgical care. A good starting point would be right at home with the African Union (AU). The AU has the power and influence to marshal financial and diplomatic support for its host country.
Secondly, the United Nations must step up to its role in this crisis. In September, world leaders convene in New York for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Midpoint Summit. To fulfil these goals by 2030, the UN must act on its clarion call of leaving no one behind by ensuring that seemingly challenged nations like Ethiopia that are deep in a poly-crisis are brought along. This can be done by facilitating neutral party-led talks with the government and the rebels.
Additionally, the United States as a key governmental partner whose geopolitical interests in Ethiopia are vast and have long been secured must be reciprocal with goodwill in this time of need. However, the onus remains on the government towards preventing a total collapse of the peace and its attendant consequences.
Ethiopia cannot do it all on its own.
All parties to the current conflict have a responsibility to respect international humanitarian law and the right to health. Above all it is not long ago that we have seen the power of dialogue to peacefully resolve conflicts in Ethiopia. In the same vein, the peaceful resolution for the renewed conflict has importance going beyond the health care and surgical services. Without this, innocent civilians will continue to suffer preventable injury and deaths.
Abdo Husen is a Program Coordinator at Operation Smile Ethiopia and a Global Surgery Advocacy Fellow
Hilina Berhanu Degefa, researcher, gender policy expert and co-founder of the Yellow Movement AAU, addresses the UN Security Council. CREDIT: UN Photo/Loey Felipe
by Francis Kokutse (accra)
Inter Press Service
ACCRA, Aug 22 (IPS) – The war in Tigray, northern Ethiopian, led to sexual and gender-based violence against women, but when Hilina Berhanu Degefa, researcher, gender policy expert and co-founder of the Yellow Movement AAU, appeared before the UN Security Council Open Debate on Sexual Violence in Conflict last year, and catalogued the problems that the victims of the war faced, it didn’t shock the world.
Giving a background, Degefa said, “When the war first started, Blen, a 21-year-old waitress from Badme, along with around 30 other Tigrayan women, was held against her will and subjected to sexual slavery, starvation, and gang rape by a group of Eritrean and Ethiopian soldiers who took turns with her.”
“I documented many other stories like Blen’s during multiple visits to the Tigray region before June 2021. Sexual violence was used to terrorize communities and build camaraderie amongst allied forces of the Eritrean Defence Forces, Ethiopian National Defence Force, Amhara regional militia, and special forces through the shared experience of exploiting women’s bodies.
“The consistency across victims’ accounts shows that these crimes were committed with a degree of organization, planning, and intent to dehumanize individuals and communities,” she said.
Now, a new study has confirmed that 99 percent of the survivors of sexual and gender-based violence during the conflict have not received medical or psychological care because most health facilities were destroyed and looted.
Girmatsion Fisseha – Lead Author
The authors have, therefore, suggested the establishment of an urgent survivor centre approach with medical and psychological services, together with sustained community support, to reduce the lifelong impact on the behavioural, emotional, sexual, social, and economic fortunes of the victims.
Published by BMJ Global Health journal, the study, “War-related sexual and gender-based violence in Tigray, Northern Ethiopia: a community-based study,” is a survey conducted in six zones of Tigray after the Eritrean, Ethiopian and Amhara forces left Mekelle, the capital of Tigray.
The western zone of Tigray and the districts bordering Eritrea were not included for security reasons. Women of reproductive age (i.e., 15–49 years) recruited from the study communities were included as primary respondents in this survey. Information on girls under 15 years and women above 50 years of age was also collected from the primary respondents, and the period of the SGBV incidents covered from 4 November 2020 to 28 June 2021.
Findings from this study indicate a higher incidence, nearly 10 percent more of rape, than those reported in other studies during conflicts, such as in Northern Uganda, 4.2 percent; Sierra Leone, 8 percent and Ukraine, 2.6 percent. In the case of physical violence, 28.6 percent observed in this study was higher than the findings for East Timor, Indonesia, where 22.7 percent of the women were physically assaulted.
Co-author of the study, Kiros Berhane, professor at the Cynthia and Robert Citron-Roslyn and Leslie Goldstein, and Chair, Department of Biostatistics Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University in the U.S. told the IPS why they were motivated to conduct the study. “During the war period in Tigray, there were unprecedently high incidents of SGBV reported by various humanitarian agencies, local and international media, including gang-rape and other extreme types of abuses such as insertion of foreign objectives to the victims’ private parts.
Kiros Berhane Professor of Biostatistics at Columbia University
“Most of the reports were coming from health facilities around big towns. Health professionals working at university hospitals (including many on the author list of this manuscript) observed many rape survivors admitted to Mekelle Hospital and Ayder Comprehensive Specialized Hospital (one-stop centre),” he said.
Berhane said the main objective of the study was to scientifically and thoroughly document the level and severity of war-related SGBV in Tigray beyond the sporadic and incomplete (but still shocking) reports in hopes that policies and actions could be activated to help rape survivors and further prevent the rape incidence in the community, adding that, “this study provides first-of-its-kind objectively/carefully collected primary data on scale/level of SGBV in Tigray.”
Degefa gave a chilling account of a Tigrayan woman who was fleeing the conflict zone with her children, and encountered the Amhara militia, who separated her from her family, gang-raped her and inserted a hot metal rod into her uterus and declared that a Tigrayan should never give birth.”
“Similar incidents of rape with claims of cleansing “Tigrayan blood” and mutilating women’s bodies to prevent the birth of more generations of Tigrayans have been extensively covered by different human rights reports,” she said.
Degefa said sexual violence was also used to humiliate survivors and their families and cited a case of an Amhara woman who was beaten and raped in the presence of her husband and child by two members of Tigrayan forces. Men and boys were also sexually assaulted, she said, adding that the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission found in Samre town, in Tigray, 600 men and boys who were stripped and forcibly paraded, some completely naked, while Eritrean female soldiers mocked them and took pictures.
She said women with disabilities and other vulnerable communities were also at particular risk during this conflict. “Many women with disabilities were specifically targeted in the Tigray region as they were presumed to be fighters in the previous war. Girls, older women, and women belonging to a minority or indigenous communities also faced higher risks, Degefa added.
The lack of access to the region for independent human rights monitoring means it has been tough to document the impact of the conflict in minority communities and especially those living in disputed areas on the Eritrean border, such as the Irob and Kunama in Tigray.
In her opinion, the conflict in Northern Ethiopia, and the effective siege of the Tigray region, in particular, has undermined women’s rights, including access to reproductive healthcare and psychosocial support, exacerbating the impacts of sexual violence.
Degefa said the lack of access to psychosocial support services means that the mental health of survivors of sexual violence hangs in the balance. Many have already died by suicide, adding that the story of a 50-year-old Amhara woman from Shewa-Robit in central Ethiopia, who was gang-raped by Tigrayan fighters in the presence of her son in the next room and later died of suicide.
Following their study, Berhane said he would expect the Ethiopian government and the international community “to provide immediate action such as supporting survivors, their children and provide the opportunity for medical, psychological and economic rehabilitation.”
In addition, there is a need for the supply of adequate medical supplies and medications to health facilities in the war zone. The government must also work with all partners and NGOs to try and trace survivors at the community level for further medical and psychological support.
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 11 (IPS) – Going back to the 16th century and continuing through the late 1960s, France was described as the world’s second largest colonial power—just behind the British Empire.
As the old saying goes: The sun would never set over the British Empire because God wouldn’t trust an Englishman in the dark. But would that also apply to the French colonial empire?
The military coups in three former French colonies — Burkina Faso, Mali and more recently Niger – are perhaps an indication of the beginning of the end of French post-colonial and neo-colonial ties to West Africa.
The three military leaders are turning towards Russia and the Russian mercenary group Wagner for new political, economic and military alliances.
The headline in a New York Times article last week read: “Waning Influence for France, the Colonizer that Stayed in West Africa “
The coup in Niger, a landlocked country of about 25 million people, is likely to result in the departure of more than 2,500 Western troops, including 1,100 Americans, who were stationed in the West African country to battle anti-US and anti-Western militant groups.
In Niger, there was also strong public support for the Russians, with demonstrators waving Russian flags.
Stephen Zunes, Professor of Politics at the University of San Francisco, told IPS many Africans harbor understandable resentment towards French neocolonialism and their local collaborators.
“Unfortunately, despite the lack of a colonial legacy, the Russian influence is even worse. They are backing some of the region’s worst warlords, reactionary military leaders, and criminal elements,” he said.
Asked for his comments, US State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters: “I have heard questions about these protests, sometimes in this briefing room, and sometimes you see people assume that because you see people on the streets it is an expression of actual support rather than people who might have been paid to show up at protests”.
Playing down the pro-Russian demonstrators, he said: “It does seem odd to me that if your country is suffering an attempted military takeover, the idea that the first thing anyone would do is run to a store and buy a Russian flag. That strikes me as somewhat an unlikely scenario.”
Miller also said that Yevgeniy Prigozhin, head of the Wagner Group, was publicly celebrating the events in Niger and “we certainly see Wagner take advantage of this type of situation whenever it occurs in Africa”.
“We, as I’ve stated before, did not see any role by Wagner in the instigation of this attempted takeover, and we have not seen any Wagner military presence as of yet in Niger. I don’t have any specific Wagner activities to – that I can make public at this point, but we saw Yevgeniy Prigozhin publicly celebrating what’s happened. And as I said, it did seem a very odd event that we had a bunch of Russian flags show up at so-called protests – in support of the junta leaders,” he added..
Perhaps the longest and bitterest battles against French colonialism took place in North Africa during the Algerian war of independence.
That battle was a major armed conflict between France and the Algerian National Liberation Front (NLF) from 1954 to 1962, which led to Algeria winning its independence from France and represented “the most recent and bloodiest example of France’s colonial history on the African continent”, with approximately 1.5 million Algerians killed and millions more displaced in the eight-year struggle for independence.
A posting on the Foreign Policy website August 8 said Niger’s coup leaders had one week to relinquish power and reinstate ousted President Mohamed Bazoum or else face military intervention by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).
At midnight on Sunday, that deadline expired without Bazoum being reinstated. Now, Niger and its neighbors are preparing for possible war—and ECOWAS, which plans to hold a second emergency summit is questioning whether issuing its unprecedented threat was a smart idea to begin with.
On Sunday, Niger’s junta government sent troop reinforcements to the capital, Niamey, and closed Niger’s airspace to brace for ECOWAS’s potential invasion. A senior U.S. diplomat held “frank and at times quite difficult” talks on Monday with junta leaders, who rejected calls to restore democracy, according to Foreign Policy.
Asked about the Russian influence in Niger, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters August 7 “for sure we have concerns when we see something like the Wagner Group possibly manifesting itself in different parts of the Sahel, and here’s why we’re concerned: because every single place that this group, Wagner Group, has gone, death, destruction, and exploitation have followed.”
He said insecurity has gone up, not down. It hasn’t been a response to the needs of the countries in question for greater security.
“I think what happened and what continues to happen in Niger was not instigated by Russia or by Wagner, but to the extent that they try to take advantage of it – and we see a repeat of what’s happened in other countries, where they’ve brought nothing but bad things in their wake – that wouldn’t be good,” Blinken declared.
Tiruppur, Tamil Nadu, India, December 17, 2021: No Food Waste (NFW) staff serve a nutritious meal to community members in Eswaran Koil Street. Credit: The Global FoodBanking Network / Narayana Swamy Subbaraman
Opinion by Lisa Moon (chicago, usa)
Inter Press Service
CHICAGO, USA, Aug 08 (IPS) – The writer is President & CEO, The Global Food Banking NetworkWith the ongoing global food crisis—triggered by the COVID pandemic, disasters, supply chain disruptions, and conflict in Ukraine—food security should be at the top of the G20 agenda when countries gather in India in September 2023.
Food security and national security are closely intertwined. Throughout history, countries that have suffered from extreme hunger and malnutrition have been vulnerable to civil unrest, along with diminished economic productivity and exacerbated inequity.
Having a robust and resilient food system is critical for G20 countries, which together represent around 85 percent of global gross domestic product and are home to two-thirds of the world’s population. In addition, G20 countries produce as much as 80 percent of the world’s cereals and account for a similar proportion of global agricultural exports.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has recognized this imperative, recently saying in a message to G20 Agricultural Ministers: “I urge you to deliberate on how to undertake collective action to achieve global food security.”
Yet, with more than 735 million people facing food insecurity in 2022, about half of whom are in G20 countries, the food system clearly needs repair.
While a multi-dimensional approach is essential, there is a solution that brings immediate benefit to people, while reducing food waste and helping address climate change. That solution is food banking.
Food banks collect surplus food in large volumes, often donated or purchased from food manufacturers, retailers or farmers, and get it to those who need it most. Working in concert with other community-led organizations to reduce hunger and food insecurity, food banks help address the paradox at the heart of the global food system: the unconscionable amount of food that is lost or wasted that could – and should – instead be used to feed people.
Tiruppur, Tamil Nadu, India, December 17, 2021: No Food Waste (NFW) staff serve a nutritious meal to community members in Eswaran Koil Street. Credit: The Global FoodBanking Network / Narayana Swamy Subbaraman
Food banks are already present in every G20 market, providing nutritious meals to people who need them most. They often complement the work of governments to get food to people who are underfed or undernourished. And they can reach those who are often left out of other forms of social protection. Food bankers are embedded in their communities and can respond quickly when disasters strike.
Last year, members of The Global FoodBanking Network in nearly 50 countries helped feed 32 million people, distributing more than 650 million kilograms of food and groceries and mitigating 1.5 billion kilograms of CO2e through avoided food loss and waste. Many of these countries faced civil unrest and disasters caused by climate change and conflict.
India is already setting a strong example in mobilizing food banks as part of its efforts to address food waste. Having implemented Surplus Food Regulations in 2019 to ensure unused food could be donated, India saw a 250 percent increase in the volume of food distributed through food banks last year compared to pre-pandemic levels.
The food banks No Food Waste, India FoodBanking Network and Feeding India provided 13.5 million kilograms of food to 6.4 million people in 2022. These food banks provide nutrition to school children, migrant workers and other vulnerable populations. With supportive government policies and financing, these efforts have the potential to expand rapidly in the coming years.
A growing number of G20 countries, such as Brazil and Indonesia, are also adopting food banks to strengthen their food security and reduce hunger. Last year, Brazil’s national network of nearly 100 food banks served 2.5 million people in the country. And food banks in Indonesia provided food to about 1.2 million people in 2022, an increase of nearly 40 percent compared to 2021.
By working with food producers, retailers and farmers, food banks bridge public and private sectors, providing a vital service that complements social welfare programs and helps minimize food waste and the associated emissions, contributing to multiple human development goals.
When G20 leaders come to the table to discuss the urgency of food security, they will look for solutions that are already available and have proven track records. India has already made it clear that food security is a priority for its G20 presidency. The government now has the opportunity to leverage its experiences and insights to build effective collaboration among countries on this issue.
By developing comprehensive food security strategies, G20 countries can make a sound investment to create a stronger future.
UN inspectors of the Joint Coordination Centre go to inspect a grain shipment aboard the merchant vessel LADY SPERANZA under the Black Sea Grain Initiative, Istanbul, 17 February 2023. Credit: UN/Duncan Moore
Opinion by John R. Bryson (birmingham, uk)
Inter Press Service
BIRMINGHAM, UK, Aug 04 (IPS) – Russia’s special military or colonization operation in Ukraine continues to surprise. These surprises come from a decided absence of strategic thinking by Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin.
“Russia is now deliberately targeting Ukraine’s grain storage and export infrastructure… There is a form of madness here as Putin has decided to weaponise food and perhaps his plan is to create a global food crisis.”
Fundamentally, a paradox sits behind Putin’s war with Ukraine. This paradox reflects the tension between Putin’s desire to demonstrate that Russia is still a major power on the world stage and actions that continue to undermine Russia’s economy and international standing.
Central to this tension are differences between Russia and Ukraine regarding the value of human life. A recent battlefield incident highlights this difference.
Serhiy had been wounded and separated from his Ukrainian unit. He was spotted by a Ukrainian drone operator who reacted rapidly to save him. The drone operator from the 15th National Guard stated that they did not want to leave Serhiy as “every life is important to us”.
Putin and the Kremlin place no value on life. Whilst Serhiy was been rescued a Russian priest from the orthodox church proclaimed on Russian state television that Russian forces “came to war not to kill but to die” as a form of sacrifice.
This type of statement reflects the value placed by the Russian establishment on the life of Russian citizens. This then reflects Putin’s paradox as his war with Ukraine has made matters much worse for nearly all Russian citizens.
Putin’s decision to leave the UN-brokered grain export arrangement is another indicator of the value that the Kremlin places on human life. This is another paradoxical decision.
On the one hand, Russia is now deliberately targeting Ukraine’s grain storage and export infrastructure. This is civilian infrastructure, and moreover it is infrastructure that plays a critical role in world food markets and in feeding some of the most vulnerable people living on this planet.
There is a form of madness here as Putin has decided to weaponise food and perhaps his plan is to create a global food crisis. On Wednesday 2 August, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy stated that “Moscow is waging a battle for a global catastrophe. In their madness, they need world food markets to collapse, they need a price crisis, they need disruptions in supplies”.
On the other hand, it is important to explore which countries benefited the most from the Black Sea grain deal. The answer is perhaps surprising – China. Ukraine exported 7.9 million tonnes of grain or just under a quarter of the grain involved in the Black Sea initiative to China.
Putin’s decision to prevent grain from being exported from Ukraine to China raises some interesting questions regarding the special relationship that is supposed to exist between these countries.
Putin’s war with Ukraine has led to Russia’s on-going isolation from international affairs. Putin is trying to address this isolation by trying to make friends. This process includes his intention that Russia “will be ready to provide Burkina Faso, Zimbabwe, Mali, Somalia, Central African Republic and Eritrea with 25-50,000 tonnes of free grain each in the next three to four months”.
There is a problem here in that Putin’s offer of between 150,000 and 300,000 tonnes of grain does not compensate for the 750,000 tonnes of Ukrainian grain that was purchased by the World Food Programme (WFP) and shipped immediately to countries like Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, and Sudan.
The WFP is the largest humanitarian organization in the world and importantly this is not controlled by a single nation but was established by the United Nations.
There are rather too many Putin paradoxes. This includes his proclamation regarding the end of “neo-colonialism” and the emergence of a multi-polar global order.
There is the obvious tension here in that Putin states that he is against the application of power and influence to subjugate other countries, but then offers ‘free food’ to some countries and yet free food always comes with strings attached.
Evidently, Putin favours colonialism but also practices neo-colonialism.
Putin’s rhetoric regarding his vision of a new multipolar world must be treated with caution. Putin’s imaginary new world has much in common with George Orwell’s novel ‘Animal Farm’ in that all nations would be equal, but Russia would be more equal than others.
A truly multi-polar world would be one in which initiatives led by organisations like the UN take priority over any initiatives led by any one country. It is time to shift away from one nation trying to dominate global affairs to a world in which effective supranational organisations try to ensure that all living on planet earth are treated equably.
Of course, this is a utopian vision. The realty will be a continued struggle between competing politicians/nations, and this will result in negative outcomes for all.
John R. Bryson is Professor of Enterprise and Economic Geography – University of Birmingham
The University of Birmingham is ranked amongst the world’s top 100 institutions, and its work brings people from across the world to Birmingham, including researchers and teachers and more than 8,000 international students from over 150 countries.
Humanitarian Coordinator for Ukraine, Denise Brown. Credit: UN
by Abigail Van Neely (united nations)
Inter Press Service
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 01 (IPS) – Civilian infrastructure is under attack in cities across Ukraine, and the need for long-term aid grows. However, the United Nations’ 2023 Humanitarian Response Plan for Ukraine is only 30 percent funded, the Humanitarian Coordinator for Ukraine, Denise Brown, told journalists.
The response plan for the year calls for USD 3.9 billion to continue frontline deliveries several times a week, prepare Ukraine for winter, and support long-term recovery and rebuilding in the country. Brown said that funding meant to help at least 11 million Ukrainians has been inadequate due to unexpected demands.
Access to water for drinking and irrigation has become a key issue following the destruction of Ukraine’s Kakhovka Dam. Top-floor residents have watched their downstairs neighbors evacuate flooded apartments. Several thousand people have been displaced due to water damage. Brown said that while the situation has been managed in the short term, the UN team continues searching for long-term solutions to water contamination.
Brown highlighted that the need for trauma support is growing at a fast pace. While it is too early to assess the long-term psychological effects of the current war, a 2019 study found a high prevalence of PTSD and depression in Ukrainians displaced by the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014.
The Black Sea city of Odesa has been attacked by Russia several times in the past weeks. The city is an important hub for the UN and the humanitarian community because it acts as a staging area for frontline responses, Brown explained. She recently traveled there to check on UN staff.
In Odesa, Brown visited the historical Orthodox cathedral. The Transfiguration Cathedral is in the center of a protected part of the city and within 700 meters of where most UN staff live and work. Brown learned that neighboring civilians had taken shelter in a bunker in the cathedral when an air siren went off, not knowing it would be hit. There was damage throughout the building, with one wing completely destroyed. A team of UNESCO experts has been deployed to further assess the condition of the cathedral. Brown said she was heartened to see community members gather to clean up broken glass.
“What I saw in Odesa last week with my own eyes is being repeated across many big cities in Ukraine,” Brown said.
According to Brown, big cities with a UN presence nearby are regularly targeted. Whole neighborhood blocks have been struck, and entire buildings have come down. Attacks on infrastructure like critical ports have hurt civilian workers, Ukrainian farmers, and vulnerable people in the Global South who rely on grain from the region. Access to resources has been a particular concern since Russia’s termination of the Black Sea Grain Initiative.
The UN continues to advocate for access to Russian-occupied territories for the purpose of providing aid. Brown said they have been denied due to “security concerns.”
“The humanitarian situation hasn’t changed… the only thing that’s going to relieve that situation is if the war stops,” Brown said.
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 31 (IPS) – A rash of military coups in African countries — including Burkina Faso, Sudan, Guinea, Mali, and most recently Niger– has raised a legitimate question: What should be the response of the United Nations, a world body that swears by multi-party democracy, on army take-overs?
Condemnation? Yes.
Last week, the strong denunciations of the coup in Niger came not only from Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk — but also from all 15 members of the Security Council in a rare unanimity on a seemingly politically divisive issue.
But what if these military leaders seek to exercise their right to address the upcoming General Assembly sessions, come September?
As the New York Times pointed out July 30, Africa’s coup belt stretches the continent from coast-to-coast that has become “the longest corridor of military rule on Earth”
In a bygone era, the UN provided a platform to at least four such leaders, including Fidel Castro of Cuba, Col Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya, Amadou Toure of Mali (who assumed power following a coup in 1991 but later served as a democratically elected President), and Jerry Rawlings of Ghana (who seized power in 1979, executed former political leaders but later served as a civilian president voted into power in democratic elections).:
But ironically, there was at least one instance of a Prime Minister from Thailand – a country where military coups once arrived with clockwork frequency — being ousted from power when he was addressing the UN General Assembly rendering him homeless and sending him into political exile in a Middle Eastern country.
The 2006 Thai coup d’état took place on 19 September 2006, when the Royal Thai Army engineered a military take-over against the elected caretaker government of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra.
As a result, there was an unsolicited piece of advice to world leaders visiting New York: If you are heading a politically unstable government, make sure to bring all your military leaders—army, navy and air force chiefs—as members of your delegation to prevent a coup back home during your absence from the country.
Ambassador Anwarul K. Chowdhury, Permanent Representative of Bangladesh to the UN (1996-2001) and Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations (2002-2007), told IPS any group of a few well-meaning countries at the UN, having respect for participatory democracy, should come together proposing a resolution of the General Assembly disbarring leaders of military coups, who overthrew democratically elected governments, from addressing any of the major organs of the UN system, particularly the General Assembly, Security Council, Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and the Human Rights Council in Geneva.
“I believe such a resolution would pass with a big majority. We need only a few Member States, believing in democracy. to take that much-needed courageous, resolute, and forward-looking first step. I would look forward to welcoming such a history-making decision by the General Assembly,” he said.
“I would also add that the military leaders should know that the UN would not allow their countries to join any of its peace operations and/or to hold any high office in the UN system. There should be a price that those leaders should pay for their anti-democratic actions,” said Ambassador Chowdhury, President of the UN Security Council (2000 and 2001) and Chairman of the UN’s Budgetary and Administrative Committee (1997-1998).
“In many of my public speeches on multilateralism and effectiveness of the United Nations, which is its most universal manifestation”, he said, “I have repeatedly alerted that ”… I have seen time and again the centrality of the culture of peace and women’s equality in our lives. This realization has now become more pertinent amid the ever-increasing militarism, militarization and weaponization that is destroying both our planet and our people.”
“I believe wholeheartedly that only participatory democracy can effectively and appropriately reflect the true spirit of the UN Charter which begins with the words, “We the peoples …”. Yes, understandably the democratic system has its deficiencies”.
“But is there anything more effective and have more legitimacy in representing the opinion of the peoples of various Member States in this deliberative global parliament?” he asked.
Stephen Zunes, Professor of Politics at the University of San Francisco, told IPS the United Nations was originally founded by the victorious allies in the war against fascism.
While having a democratic government was never a prerequisite for UN membership, the principle that there should be a rule-based international order implied that such principles should also apply to those of member states, he pointed out.
Similarly, the human rights provisions adopted by the United Nations also imply the necessity of democratic governance.
An important first step in living up to its democratic underpinnings would be for the United Nations to bar leaders of military regimes from speaking before the United Nations, said Dr Zunes who has written extensively on the politics of the UN and the Security Council.
“Unfortunately, powerful autocratic governments—like permanent UN Security Council members Russia and China—would likely oppose such a rule”, he said. And the United States, despite its pro-democracy rhetoric, could very well have objections, as well.
“The Biden administration is the world’s biggest supporter of autocratic regimes, providing arms to 57% of the world’s dictatorships. Indeed, Egypt’s General Sisi is the second largest recipient of U.S. military aid, with U.S. taxpayers spending over one billion dollars annually to prop up his military regime which seized power in a bloody military coup in 2013,” declared Dr Zunes.
Meanwhile, in 2004, when the then Organization for African Unity (later African Union) barred coup leaders from participating in African summits, Secretary-General Kofi Annan of Ghana went one step further and said he was hopeful that one day the UN General Assembly would follow in the footsteps of the OAU, and bar leaders of military governments from addressing the General Assembly.
Annan’s proposal was a historic first.
But it never came to pass in an institution where member states, not the Secretary-General, rule the Organization. However, any such move could also come back to haunt member states if, one day, they find themselves representing a country headed by a military leader.
The outspoken Annan, a national of Ghana, also said that “billions of dollars of public funds continue to be stashed away by some African leaders — even while roads are crumbling, health systems are failing, school children have neither books nor desks nor teachers, and phones do not work.”
Needless to say, the UN does not make any distinctions between “benevolent dictators” and “ruthless dictators.” But as an international institution preaching multiparty democracy and free elections, it still condones military leaders by offering them a platform to speak — while wining and dining them during the annual General Assembly sessions.
Asked whether the UN General Assembly should set a new standard, Ambassador Chowdhury said: “yes, of course!”
“This should have been done long ago when our much-loved, much-respected Secretary-General Kofi Annan suggested it at the outset of the new millennium”
That was the appropriate time for such a landmark decision as the African Group, the biggest regional group of UN Member States, would have championed it not only because the African Union’s predecessor OAU had decided in 2004 to bar coup leaders from African summits, but also because the proposal came from a Secretary-General who was a son of Africa, he said.
“We missed that opportunity when a visionary leader of the UN had the courage to suggest that the UN General Assembly should follow Africa’s lead. Two decades have gone by. I cannot envisage any other Secretary-General would have the guts to suggest that publicly,” declared Ambassador Chowdhury.
This article contains excerpts from the recently-released book on the United Nations titled “No Comment – and Don’t Quote Me on That,” available on Amazon. Thalif Deen, who authored the book, is Senior Editor at IPS, an ex-UN staffer and a former member of the Sri Lanka delegation to the UN General Assembly sessions. A Fulbright scholar with a Master’s Degree (MSc) in Journalism from Columbia University, New York, he shared the gold medal twice (2012-2013) for excellence in UN reporting awarded by the UN Correspondents Association (UNCA). The link to Amazon via the author’s website follows:
Shu’fat refugee camp is home to 120,000 Palestinian refugees on the outskirts of East Jerusalem in the occupied West Bank. Photo credit: Jawad Al Malhi
by Catherine Wilson (sydney)
Inter Press Service
SYDNEY, Jul 28 (IPS) – The likelihood of further confrontations remains high following a major Israeli military assault on an impoverished camp of more than 23,500 Palestinian refugees in Jenin in the north of the occupied West Bank earlier this month. The landlocked Palestinian territory, located between Israel to the west and Jordan to the east, has been illegally occupied, according to international law, following the invasion by Israel 56 years ago.
“The destruction I saw was shocking. Some houses were completely burned down; cars had been crushed against walls …I saw the trauma in the eyes of camp residents who had witnessed the violence. I heard them speak about their exhaustion and fear,” Leni Stenseth, Deputy Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the near East (UNRWA), stated after visiting Jenin on 9 July.
There have been numerous Israeli incursions into Jenin this year, and authorities claim the air and ground invasion on 3-5 July was to target Palestinian militant groups believed responsible for attacks on Israelis. Twelve Palestinians and one Israeli were killed, 900 homes damaged or destroyed, services decimated, and thousands displaced.
The military raid followed the death of four Israeli settlers by an armed Palestinian in the region in June. “Over the past hours, our security forces have been operating against terror hotspots in the city of Jenin,” Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said on 3 July. Palestinian resistance groups have since strengthened their rhetoric. Israel intended “to kill any resistance, and they have failed in that 100 percent”, a Jenin Brigades spokesperson told the international media. Both Israelis and Palestinians claim the West Bank as part of their homelands.
Palestinian armed resistance groups have grown in the region in response to Israel’s harsh military occupation. Most Palestinians in the West Bank are refugees living with chronic poverty, unemployment, human rights abuses, deprivation of civil liberties and statelessness. All of this is especially acute for youth in long-term displacement camps.
“I am not surprised at what happened in Jenin. After 30 years , there is no plan for them , no development and no political agreement. They are losing the future and losing hope,” Jawad Al Malhi, a Palestinian living in the West Bank, said in an interview with IPS.
The overcrowded Jenin camp, established in 1953, is home to three generations of Palestinians who were evicted from their home villages during the ‘Nakba’ of 1948. The ‘Nakba’ refers to the widespread dispossession of Palestinians of their traditional lands and villages during the formation of the Israeli state. It has a population density of 56,000 people per square kilometre.
Shu’fat refugee camp is home to 120,000 Palestinian refugees on the outskirts of East Jerusalem in the occupied West Bank. Credit: Jawad Al Malhi
In June, a United Nations special committee on Palestinian human rights in occupied territories reported that Palestinian fatalities at the hands of Israeli authorities in the West Bank in the first five months of this year had skyrocketed by 124 percent compared to the same period last year.
The Israel-Palestine conflict, in its 75th year, is one of the world’s longest. But the West Bank, which was governed by Jordan, became a battleground when Israel seized it and annexed East Jerusalem during the Six Day War in 1967. Successive Israeli governments have ignored condemnation of its occupation by the international community.
In further defiance, Israeli settlers have been encouraged to build permanent homes in the West Bank. And settler attacks on neighbouring Palestinian communities, involving physical assault and desecration of homes and property, have occurred with impunity for years. From 2020-2022, Israeli settler violence against Palestinians rose by 137 percent, reports the UN. The trend is unlikely to reverse following the election last year of a new hardline Israeli Government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which has pledged to harden its hold on the West Bank.
The erosion of Palestinian rights and hope of the West Bank becoming the site of their future state has deepened the loss felt by those living in its many refugee camps. One of these is Shu’fat, a sprawling warren of congested buildings that are being built higher as each generation tries to live within its boundaries on the outskirts of Jerusalem. It was established as a refugee camp in 1965 and is now flanked on one side by the Israeli separation or ‘apartheid’ wall.
Jawad Al Malhi was born in Shu’fat after his family, who were evicted from their village, moved there in 1966. His home is a few hundred metres from the narrow checkpoint, manned by armed Israeli soldiers, which he and other residents are forced to negotiate daily to go to the shops, the hospital and access public services and schools for their children.
The challenges of life have only intensified with the rapid growth of Shu’fat’s population. “In the 1980s, there were about 10,000 people living in Shu’fat, but now there are 120,000 people here. So, you no longer see the light; you don’t see the sun because of the higher buildings. There is no space, and it is difficult to walk anywhere. There are no places for cars and no places for people,” Al Malhi described, adding that life in the camp “has definitely got a lot worse over the last decade.”
The video, ‘Gas Station’ (2009), created by Jawad Al Malhi, portrays the reality of young Palestinian lives within the confines of Shu’fat camp. Credit: Jawad Al Malhi
Now in his fifties, Jawad has spent most of his life making art about life in the camp and the human experience of occupation. And he has been a dedicated art teacher to children in the camp. He described a video he made in Shu’fat, called the ‘Gas Station’, which gave an insight into the lives of Palestinian youth today. The video records the lives of young men working in a small gas station on the camp’s margins. As the hours pass and the day turns to night, their interactions around a pre-fabricated cabin and petrol tank unfold in an endless cycle of waiting. Time changes, but crucially nothing else does.
“Among the younger generation, there is now more distrust and suspicion . Young people have a dream to leave the camp, but they can’t leave. It is very difficult for youths to build healthy social lives and relationships,” Al Malhi said. Unemployment among Palestinian youth is estimated at 30 percent.
Haneen Kinani of the Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy in Brussels told IPS that most of the younger generation “have never seen life without siege, raids and a brutal Israeli military regime that dehumanises them.”
Evidence of growing discontent among younger Palestinians is fuelled by numerous factors, including the failure of the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords, the absence of any tangible peace process and the ineffectiveness of the Palestinian Authority, responsible for administering Palestinian-held areas of the West Bank, to address Israel’s actions.
“At present, there are no prospects of a political solution. The Israeli Government has no willingness to engage and has no policy beyond possible formal annexation of parts of the West Bank. At the same time, the Palestinian Authority is too weak to be able to negotiate anything,” John Strawson, a Law Professor at the University of East London, told IPS.
Some nations, such as the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia, have called for Israel to cease its aggressive settlement building, seen as a spur to violence. But commentators point to the unwavering support Israel receives from the United States as a major factor in its ongoing impunity.
Nasser Mashni, President of the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network, said it was time for this to change. “The UN and individual countries should be taking immediate and decisive action, as it has shown is possible with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Israel must be subject to UN and international sanctions until it abides by and meets its obligations under international law,” he told IPS.
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