Tag: IPS UN: Inside the Glasshouse

Gaza Spells Jungle — Global Issues

Missile strikes continue through the night in Gaza. Credit: UNICEF/Eyad El Baba
  • Opinion by Tisaranee Gunasekara (colombo, sri lanka)
  • Inter Press Service

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka, Nov 03 (IPS) – During her 2013 visit to Sri Lanka, then UN Human Rights Commissioner Navi Pillay wanted to lay a wreath to commemorate the war-dead. “When I go to a country, I like to honour the victims, all victims, victims of LTTE, soldiers, families,” she explained.

“How much past tomorrow holds.” – Mahmoud Darwish (A rhyme for the odes Mu’allaquat)

The Rajapaksa regime refused permission and launched a campaign of lies against her. “Informed sources said that Pillay had initially informed of her desire to offer a floral tribute to the late LTTE terrorist leader Vellupillai Prabhakaran,” The Daily News wrote.

The Rajapaksas dubbed the final Eelam War a humanitarian offensive with zero-civilian casualties. Acknowledging civilian Tamil deaths was equated with playing the Tiger game. Mourning was a crime, criticising Lankan forces treachery, and referring to the root causes of the conflict justifying Tiger-atrocities. In this us-vs.-them universe, Ms. Pillay’s condemnation of the LTTE as a ‘murderous organisation’ counted for nothing.

Ms. Pillay, like UN agencies and humanitarian organisations, based her stance on International Humanitarian Law (IHL). IHL is premised on the concept of jus in bello, just conduct of war, which includes principles such as non-combatant immunity and proportionality. The Rajapaksas practiced the antithesis of IHL.

As Prof. Rajan Hoole wrote, “From 2006, the government began to do what would have been unthinkable after 1987. Intense shelling and deliberate displacement of Tamil populations became integral to its military strategy… (Himal – February 2009). Before launching the final offensive, the Rajapaksas ordered all UN agencies, INGOs, and media to leave the war-zone.

During the 2014 Gaza War, a pro-Netanyahu columnist in The Jerusalem Post urged the Israeli PM to learn from Lanka’s example of ‘resolute use of military force’ and give Hamas ‘the thrashing it deserves’ https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Fundamentally-Freund-Defeating-terrorists-From-Sri-Lanka-to-Gaza-371428).

Today Israel is waging a total war in Gaza, a war that has killed more than 3000 children so far (one child killed every 15 minutes). According to Save the Children, more children have been killed in Gaza in three weeks than in global conflicts annually in the last 4 years (2985 children 2022, 2515 in 2021, and 2674 in 2020). Oxfam has accused Israel of using starvation as a weapon of war. The UN is warning of hunger and desperation in Gaza leading to societal collapse.

How many Palestinian children must die for Israel to feel safe, or the West to say enough?

The targeting of Israeli civilians by Hamas was an act of barbarism. Israel’s retaliatory war against the entire population of Gaza is no less barbaric. As Karim Khan, a prosecutor at the International Criminal Court said, “Whether a child is born Jewish in Israel or is a Christian or Muslim in Gaza – they’re children and we should have that sense of humanity – that legal, ethical, and moral responsibility to do right by them.”

For Hamas and their supporters, Israeli children are not children. For Israel and its Western backers, Palestinian children are not children. Hamas committed war crimes. Israel is committing war crimes. And the West, the self-appointed guardians of International Humanitarian Law, is enabling Israel to go on committing war crimes. US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has descended so low as to ask Qatar to ‘moderate Al Jazeera’s coverage’ of Israel’s air strikes against Gaza, according to a Guardian report.

The repercussions of this abandonment of jus in bello are likely to be both global and long-lasting. The world could regress to a time when anything was permissible in and during war. The UN and international humanitarian organisations could become totally irrelevant. The credibility of a legal system depends on its fair application. When laws are applied selectively, they lose legitimacy. One law for friends and another for foes results in jungle for all.

By permitting, indeed helping, Israel to violate IHL, the US and the West are opening the door to a world of complete lawlessness and injustice. They are not ending terrorism but birthing it, in ever more gruesome forms.

Allied powers did nothing to impede the Holocaust. Dresden which had no military value, was fire-bombed while railway lines to Auschwitz were not. From that civilisational failure was born the cry, Never Again. But as a Jewish protestor at the anti-war demonstration near the Capitol building said, “Never again means never again for anyone.”

The world needs impartial application of IHL to Israel and Hamas, to Russia and Ukraine. The failure to do so will push humanity back to an age when life for most humans was solitary, nasty, and brutish.

Marriages made in Hell

Conception was the name given to Benjamin Netanyahu’s decades-old policy of using Hamas to divide and weaken Palestinians. Addressing Likud party Knesset members in March 2019, he explained his rationale for favouring Hamas and permitting Qatar to fund it. “Whoever opposes a Palestinian state must approve the delivery of funds to Gaza because maintaining the difference between the PA in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza will prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.”

Hamas, an acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya (Islamic Resistance Movement) does not accept Israel’s right to existence and wants to install an Islamic Caliphate in all Palestinian lands. Such an organisation would be the best excuse for Israel right’s own plans for a theocratic and non-pluralist Greater Israel.

As retired general Yair Golan pointed out, Netanyahu “created a situation in which, so long as the Palestinian Authority was weak, he could create the overall perception that the best thing to do was to annex West Bank. We weakened the very institution that we could have worked with, and strengthened Hamas” (The New Yorker – 28.10.2023). In pursuant of this, weapons were reportedly taken away from the Gaza border and given to settlers in West Bank.

Mr. Netanyahu’s Conception indirectly enabled Hamas’ October 7th attack just as his war will turn the Arab world into a breeding ground for Hamas. As Palestinian philosopher Sari Nusseibeh said, “It is a mistake to think that Hamas is an alien being – it is part of the national tapestry. It grows bigger or smaller depending on other factors. You can eliminate the guys running Hamas now, but you cannot eliminate it entirely. It will stay as a way of thinking, as an idea so long as there is a Palestinian-Israeli conflict” (ibid).

Had the Oslo Accords worked, had there been an independent democratic Palestinian state, Hamas could have been marginalised. The Accord’s monumental failure, and the resultant disillusionment in peaceful solutions (not to mention Fatah’s incompetent and corrupt practices in West Bank) helped Hamas thrive. As Hamas founder Sheik Ahmad Yassen once said, “When oppression increases people start looking for God.”

The plan to ethnic-cleanse West Bank piecemeal, using low intensity violence by Israeli settlers and the Israeli army, continues, empowered by Western indifference. As human rights lawyer Raja Shehadeh wrote, even such a quotidian activity like olive picking has been politicised by expansionist settlers who attack Palestinian olive-pickers, preventing them from reaching their lands and sometimes stealing the harvest.

In the West Bank village of Deir Istiya, those returning home from harvesting olives found notices under car windshield-wipers telling them to wait for the Great Nakba – to leave or be forcefully evicted, Israeli columnist Hagar Shezaf wrote in Haaretz on October 27th.

The pursuit of Greater Israel is a threat to Palestinian Christians as well. Settler expansionists want a Jewish state in which Christians will have little or no space. In 2012, extremist settlers attacked the Trappist Monastery in Latroun, setting its door on fire and writing anti-Christian graffiti such as Jesus is a monkey on its walls. Jerusalem’s Monastery of the Cross too has been attacked.

Again in 2012, Israel politician Michael Ben Ari tore a copy of the New Testament in the Knesset and threw it into a rubbish bin after denouncing it as an abhorrent book. A second legislator wanted bible to be burnt. Neither was officially sanctioned.

As Father Pierbatista Pizzaballa, Custodian of the Holy Land, pointed out, “Israel has failed to address the practice of some ultra-Orthodox Jewish schools that it is a doctrinal obligation to abuse anyone in Holy Orders they encounter in public” (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/9529123/Vatican-official-says-Israel-fostering-intolerance-of-Christianity.html).

In Sri Lanka too, political monks, extremist politicians, and retired military officers have stepped up their campaign to incite ethnic/religious tensions. Now that Kurundi has been neutralised by the government, these motley combos have shifted focus to Batticaloa. They are abusing even Buddha statues, using them as weapons of war and markers of territorial possession. Omalpe Sobitha thero, a bit-actor in the drama, asked, “If you can’t keep a Buddhist statue in places like Batticaloa, has a separate country come into being?”

The main actor in the unfolding Diwulpathana teledrama, the infamous Ampitiye Sumanarathana thero, set out a clear warning. “The country is angry and awake… They are ready to reply the President, Rasamannikam, Senthil Thondaman. The entire Sinhala nation is ready to reply to all of them anytime… I don’t know who sired Ranil Wickremesinghe. I don’t know if Tamil people have traditional properties in this Sri Lanka… There is a history going back beyond 2500 years for these properties… These are traditional properties of Sinhalese…

When Mahinda Rajapaksa became the president and the war ended, these people got back their rights… They lost their rights when Maithripala became the president, and regained them again when Gotabaya became the president and lost them again when Gotabaya was driven out. It’s after Ranil Wickremesinghe came to power that politicians like Shanakyam shout like this…” The monks and lay cohorts are acting with total impunity while the government looks away and the Opposition evades the issue. The moderate centre is unoccupied territory while the two antipodes are teeming with actual and would be owners.

Rational Resistance

When a policeman shot dead unarmed teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, USA, in 2014, mass protests erupted. Confronted by policemen armed as if for war, some demonstrators drew comparisons between themselves and the Gazans. Many Palestinians responded by tweeting practical advice (for instance, Mariam Barghouti from West Bank tweeted, “Always make sure to run against the wind/to keep calm when you are tear gassed, the pain will pass, don’t rub your eyes.”) When an American social-media user objected to the Ferguson-Gaza comparison, another responded, “I don’t think anyone is trying to compare Ferguson to Gaza; the point is solidarity and justice.”

Now also, the point is solidarity and justice, with Gazans and all Palestinians, with hostages, and the Israelis who lost their loved ones, with Palestinian journalist Wael Al-Dahdouh whose wife, daughter, and son were killed in Israeli bombings, and with the mother of Shani Louk, the German-Israeli tattoo artist murdered by Hamas. For solidarity with Palestinians to grown into a moral and political force, resistance needs to move out of the violent theocratic paradigm represented by Hamas. The locus should be not Islamic or Arab but global.

What is at issue is not the right to violent resistance but the efficacy of that path. Arab and Islamic leaders might breathe fire, but they are not even going to suspend diplomatic relations with Israel, let alone wage war against Israel, not even if every inch of Gaza is flattened and every Gazan perish under the rubble. The only way out is to do what national liberation movements did in the old days, from Vietnam to South Africa: gain and occupy the moral highground.

The repugnancy of Israel’s policies and actions cannot be showcased, if resistance to Israel is dominated by Hamas and its equally repugnant brand of violence. Just as it is possible to support Israel’s right to existence without supporting the Greater Israel project, it is possible to resist Israel occupation and expansion without descending to the depth of barbarism. To find that radically moderate path all Palestine has to do is to reach back to its own history.

As Palestinian cleric Munib Younan, Bishop emeritus of the Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land pointed out last month, “We have lived with the Jews all the time. Jews were persecuted in Europe. Never in Palestine. Anti-Semitism is a European construct.” Tolerating anti-Semitism, even in the face of the murderous attacks by Israel, is morally wrong and strategically counter-productive. Had Tamil struggle not succumbed to extremism, had the LTTE not targeted Sinhala and Muslim civilians and Tamil critics, it wouldn’t have gone down to utter defeat.

While October 7th attack was happening, Hamas exhorted Palestinians in the West Bank to rise against Israeli settlers, violently. West Bank Palestinians refused to heed that deadly call. Outside Israel, and even within, some Jews have endorsed the growing global call for a ceasefire in Gaza.

Last week, hundreds of mostly Jewish demonstrators, members of Jewish Voice for Peace NY, took over the main hall of the Grand Central Station, protesting against the bombing of Gaza, shouting that Palestinians will be free. The sentiment of one of the young demonstrators provides a glimpse of a path out of the looming jungle of violent lawlessness: Mourn the dead. Fight like hell for the living.

Tisaranee Gunasekara is a Sri Lankan political commentator based in Colombo.

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Transitional Justice to the Fore — Global Issues

UN Resident Coordinator Hanaa Singer-Hamdy presenting a file of communications from Nepali victims of conflict on the transitional justice process. Credit: UN, Nepal
  • Opinion by Kanak Mani Dixit (kathmandu, nepal)
  • Inter Press Service

KATHMANDU, Nepal, Nov 02 (IPS) – Many observers found it intriguing that UN Secretary-General António Guterres would want to spend three full days in Nepal even as Israel was carpet-bombing Gaza.

He did speak out from the Security Council floor, for which he was rewarded with a demand for resignation by the Israeli ambassador, but there was obviously much more to be done against the ongoing mass-murder of Palestinians.

A Nepali commentator asked on Twitter, “Is this the time for UN Sec Gen to be anywhere other than the Middle East?”

Perhaps it was the prospect of visiting Lumbini, birthplace of Sakyamuni Siddhartha Gautam – the Buddha, Asia’s ‘prince of peace’ – that brought Mr. Guterres to Nepal. He did use his time at the nativity site, which has been visited by all five Secretaries-General since Dag Hammarskjold in 1959, to highlight urgency of world peace.

The Secretary-General might also have wanted to laud Nepal’s role as the second-largest contributor to UN peacekeeping operations, a position it holds despite being kept off the command responsibilities it deserves.

UN Resident Coordinator Hanaa Singer-Hamdy presenting a file of communications from Nepali victims of conflict on the transitional justice process. Credit: UN, Nepal

But there were two issues besides world peace that Mr. Guterres clearly wanted to highlight: the transforming world climate and Nepal as a path-breaker in arena of transitional justice.

In separate helicopter trips to the base of Mount Everest and to the Annapurna Sanctuary, the Secretary-General relied on the experience of the mountain people to sound the alarm on climate crisis, three weeks before COP-28 is to start in Dubai. The highly populated ‘third pole’ of the planet indeed serves as a barometer of global warming, and the receding glaciers of an inhabited Himalaya are a more potent bellwether of climate catastrophe than the Arctic or Antarctica.

Joint Session of Parliament

For Nepal, the most significant aspect of the Secretary-General’s visit was the suspended transitional justice (TJ) process, which began with the end of the decade-long Maoist insurgency in 2006.

The matter languishes even though the Maoists rebels have long since joined mainstream politics and commandant of the Maoist force is presently the prime minister. He is in that position despite holding no more than 11 percent of seats in Parliament, but that is another story.

Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal (nom de guerre: ‘Prachanda’) had hoped to use the Secretary-General’s trip to show off his international standing to the Nepali populace, and to get a green signal from the Secretary-General for his tendentious plans to push a perpetrator-friendly TJ draft law through Parliament.

Despite an overwhelming show of obsequiousness from Mr. Dahal who followed him at practically every step around the country, the Secretary-General did not oblige his host. Instead, Mr. Guterres used every pulpit during his trip to insist that Nepal’s TJ process be concluded within three parameters: a) concurrence of the victims of conflict; b) concordance with relevant international law and principles; and, c) follow the precedence-setting judgements on transitional justice by the Supreme Court of Nepal.

While the victims of Nepal’s conflict did not get to meet the Secretary-General, as requested, their various submissions were put together in a file and presented to Mr. Guterres as he departed for the airport on the morning of 11 October by Hanaa Singer-Hamdy, the UN Resident Coordinator to Nepal. She said in her comment on X (Twitter): “The needs and priorities of the conflict victims are at the heart of Transitional Justice-related discussion in Nepal.”

Making of An Exemplary Process

The Secretary-General clearly understands that, worldwide, the fraught arena of transitional justice has had too few successes, whereas it provides the pathway for post-conflict societies to heal and recover – through reparation, memorialisation, truth and reconciliation, not to forget accountability for extreme cases of human rights abuse.

Herein lies the importance of Nepal, where the Nepali-led transitional justice process is presently stuck, but the victims and rights defenders have not let go. The international community, and especially the United Nations, can help by ensuring that there is principled monitoring.

That the Nepalis players are capable of moving the boat to the other shore was what Mr. Guterres emphasised in his address on 10 October to a joint session of Parliament.

Nepal’s transitional justice process could become an example for post-conflict societies the way Colombia, South Africa and Sierra Leone are today held out for their relative success. Within South Asia, a region awash in long-term conflict from Kashmir to Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Balochistan to the Arakan, transitional justice is not ‘deployed’ anywhere else other than in Nepal.

All the more reason for the Nepali process to succeed in order to provide a model for the rest of the region to consider, and for Mr. Guterres to dwell on the matter during his visit.

Ironically, the main roadblock to a proper conclusion of the peace process was the Secretary-General’s host, the prime minister. While the Mr. Dahal used the conflict and the ensuing peace process to build his personal political career, he understands that a genuine transitional justice exercise would jeapordise his trajectory and pre-eminent position in Nepali politics.

The entire superstructure of his Maoist party would collapse were he to submit his colleagues to an accountability process, even if only ‘emblematic cases’ were to be investigated. Hence, the formula used on the TJ over a decade and more has been prevarication and duplicity.

The government security personnel who would have been involved in atrocities during the conflict of 1995-2006 are all retired by now, whereas the Maoist leadership is today part of Nepal’s political establishment, ruling the roost.

They are loathe to be held accountable, which is why their supremo Mr. Dahal cannot countenance an honest exercise, and which is why he was hoping to bamboozle Mr. Guterres with pomp and flattery.

Victims and Spoilers

While there has historically been ferocious bloodletting in the Kathmandu Court among clans and factions vying for power, the villages of Nepal have been largely free of internecine violence until the decade of insurgency and state response.

The villagers of Nepal were caught in a pincer between the Maoist rebels who specialised in hit-and-run raids and the security forces that meted out harsh treatment to local level political leaders, teachers and development workers.

The role of Mr. Dahal himself may be held up for scrutiny in a genuine Truth and Reconciliation process, for he headed the chain of command of the Maoist insurgents. His attitude to atrocities including murder, torture, rape and abduction conducted by his cadre has always been ambiguous, and there has been no expression of remorse throughout his years in open politics.

If anything, there has been gleeful celebration of extra-judicial killing and physical violence generally, and he has even expressed satisfaction on how he personally fooled the United Nations Mission in Nepal (UNMIN) into tripling the number of Maoist combatants in a verification exercise.

In 2007, upon coming above ground, Mr. Dahal told a BBC interlocutor that in a personal circular during the conflict, he had instructed that “you may eliminate individual if required, but without torture”. Over the years, Mr. Dahal has been the key leader who ensured that successive Truth and Reconciliation Commissions were designed for failure, with their membership padded with Maoists.

Most recently, Mr. Dahal’s attempt has been to push through legislation that would make it easy for the next Truth and Reconciliation to let perpetrators (of both sides, rebels and state security) off the hook by, among other things, creating two categories of murder: ‘normal murder’ and ‘extreme murder’.

What makes the Secretary-General’s interest on Nepal’s transitional justice efforts vitally important is that the Western governments and INGOs who introduced the concept and funded the Nepal’s engagement with TJ are now losing interest. This seems to have to do with ‘TJ fatigue’, a paucity of funding, as well as certain geopolitical considerations.

Some Western policy-makers see Mr. Dahal as a pliable head-of-government of a strategically important Asian country who they must have ‘on their side’ as China proceeds with a more aggressive continental policy of its own.

Nepal’s victims of conflict, in coordination with human rights defenders, have been fighting a lonely battle against a political class and polity that has been in thrall of the Maoists’ momentum and their attempt to create a ‘new normal’ in the polity, with a forced attempt to ensure past atrocities are forgotten.

Whereas, the victims of conflict are united in not letting the perpetrators get the better of memory. The UN Secretary-General has come up with a powerful position of support for a transitional justice process that is just and humane, and the victim representatives and rights defenders of Kathmandu are heartened. Their worst fears that bubbled to the surface when the Secretary-General’s visit was hurriedly announced were not borne out.

What is required now is to keep watch for ‘spoilers’ of the peace process, and they include many influential Nepalis who have over the past decade developed political and inter-personal relationships with the perpetrators of the conflict years.

Likewise, there is a Western diplomat (or two) who seem to have a low opinion of the Nepali yearnings for a just peace, rather than the peace of the cemetery.

A group of civil society actors cautioned the Secretary-General in a letter delivered as he departed Kathmandu: “There are national and international ‘spoilers’ wanting to foist a perpetrator-friendly ending to the peace process in the name of elapsed time and geopolitical expediency.”

Kathmandu-based writer and journalist Kanak Mani Dixit is founder-editor of the magazine Himal Southasian, and was a UN Secretariat staffer from 1982-1990.

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The Killings in Gaza Should Stain Our Moral Conscience — Global Issues

  • Opinion by Lana Nusseibeh (united nations)
  • Inter Press Service

UNITED NATIONS, Nov 01 (IPS) – In an address to the UN Security CouncilThank you for your presence here with us in New York, and for the special dedication that Brazil has given to peace in our region.

I also pay special tribute to our briefers, and to their teams’ dedicated work in the most unimaginable circumstances on the ground in the Gaza Strip.

Commissioner-General Lazzarini, I was very shaken by your recent words to your staff over the weekend, in which you said, “I am constantly hoping that this hell on earth will soon come to an end.” I want to extend the UAE’s deep condolences for the 64 UNRWA workers killed in this war.

They paid the ultimate sacrifice for the lifesaving work the United Nations does every day around the world, and we have failed to protect them.

Last Friday, 121 countries – representing an overwhelming majority of the world – issued an unambiguous call for an immediate, durable, and sustained humanitarian truce in Gaza.

They stood up for the humanitarian imperative, for human rights, for international law, and most importantly, for the self-evident truth that Palestinian life is precious, equal, and deserving of the full protection of the law.

We have heard many say that the 2.2 million Palestinians in Gaza are not Hamas, that this is not a war against them. And while these are welcome words, it is time that action reflected them.

The more than 8,000 people that have been killed in Gaza, and as we heard today, 70 percent of whom were women and children, were surely not all Hamas.

Nearly 1,000 children are missing and may be trapped or dead under the rubble. They are not Hamas. Will we help them?

The number of Palestinian children killed in just three weeks of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza exceeds the total number of children killed in conflicts worldwide in each of the last four years.

As Ms. Russell has so eloquently said, that should stain our moral conscience, if nothing else does. Children do deserve our special protection, and are entitled to it today. If we lean on the General Assembly’s moral authority in other settings, we must also respect it in this one.

Indeed, members of this Council have repeatedly expressed their concerns about the fraying of the international order. This Council ignoring the expressed will of the majority of the world may be what breaks it.

Colleagues, we need a ceasefire now. As Foreign Minister Vieira said, we need to ensure that safe, sustained, and at scale humanitarian aid reaches Gaza, now. And that access to electricity, clean water, and fuel is restored now.

The shutdown of cellular and internet services over the weekend as part of the offensive meant that wounded civilians were searching for help in the dark. As we have heard today, there have been 76 attacks on healthcare, including 20 hospitals and clinics damaged or destroyed. More than 650,000 people are sheltering in UNRWA facilities.

Let me be absolutely clear on this point: these sites are protected by international humanitarian law. Announcements that they are targets or warnings for them to evacuate do not, I repeat, do not alter their protected status. We need to see the rescission of dangerous unrealistic evacuation orders.

On Saturday, the Palestinian Red Crescent reported warnings from Israel to immediately evacuate al-Quds Hospital which hosts hundreds of patients, including new-born babies in incubators.

Around 12,000 civilians are also seeking refuge there right now as we sit here in this chamber in New York speaking to each other again and again, and debating the language of our humanitarian resolution and response.

An evacuation order in these conditions is cruel. It is reckless. And so is our delay as a Security Council. All of Gaza’s civilian population is at risk by the escalating hostilities, as are the Israeli and international hostages taken by Hamas. Wrongly taken by Hamas.

While our eyes have been trained on Gaza, the occupied West Bank has not been spared from violence either. Israeli settlers are escalating their attacks against Palestinian civilians, and forcing their displacement. These attacks must be prevented by the State of Israel.

Across the region, there have been several credible warnings of a wider escalation. The drums of war are beating.

Colleagues, taking these warnings seriously begins with stopping this war in Gaza. We do not serve Israel’s security by enabling it to go on. We cannot reverse the heinous October 7th attacks by condoning this war in which civilians are paying the price.

Ignoring what could happen day after day, will have devastating consequences, not only for Israelis and Palestinians, but for the prospects of peace and stability in our region.

As we work on responding to the General Assembly’s clear call on this body to live up to its responsibilities under the UN Charter, we should also keep in mind, always, the dying words of the dead so that their memories are a blessing to us.

I’d like to speak today of an Arab poet, Heba Abu Nada, a Palestinian woman killed in Khan Yunis several days ago.

“My friend circle diminishes, turning into little coffins scattered everywhere. As missiles launch, I can’t grasp the fleeting moments with my friends. These aren’t just names, they are reflections of us, each with a unique face and identity.”

Colleagues, we may have failed the dead, but we must channel our sorrow into saving the living. The time to reverse course is running out. What we, and 121 countries, are advocating for may be the harder road, but history warns us of the consequences of not taking it.

Lana Nusseibeh is Ambassador and Permanent Representative of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to the United Nations.

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Biden Is a Genocide Denier and Enabler in Chief for Israels Ongoing War Crimes — Global Issues

  • Opinion by Norman Solomon (san francisco, usa)
  • Inter Press Service

SAN FRANCISCO, USA, Oct 31 (IPS) – For three weeks, President Biden has played a key role in backing Israel’s war crimes while touting himself as a compassionate advocate of restraint. That pretense is lethal nonsense as Israel persists with mass killing of civilians in Gaza.

The same crucial standards that fully condemned Hamas’s murders of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7 should apply to Israel’s ongoing murders that have already taken the lives of at least several times as many Palestinian civilians. And Israel is just getting started.

“We need an immediate ceasefire,” Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib wrote in an email Saturday evening, “but the White House and Congress continue to unconditionally support the Israeli government’s genocidal actions.”

That unconditional support makes Biden and the vast majority of Congress directly complicit with mass murder and genocide, defined as “the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.” The definition clearly fits the words and deeds of Israel’s leaders.

“Israel has dropped approximately 12,000 tons of explosives on Gaza so far and has reportedly killed multiple senior Hamas commanders, but the majority of the casualties have been women and children,” Time magazine summed up at the end of last week.

Israel’s military has been shamelessly slaughtering civilians in homes, stores, markets, mosques, refugee camps and healthcare facilities. Imagine what can be expected now that communications between Gaza and the outside world are even less possible.

For reporters, being on the ground in Gaza is very dangerous; Israel’s assault has already killed at least 29 journalists. For the Israeli government, the fewer journalists alive in Gaza the better; media reliance on Israeli handouts, news conferences and interviews is ideal.

Pro-Israel frames of reference and word choices are routine in U.S. mainstream media. Yet some exceptional reporting has shed light on the merciless cruelty of Israel’s actions in Gaza, where 2.2 million people live.

For example, on Oct. 28, PBS News Weekend provided a human reality check as Israel began a ground assault while stepping up its bombing of Gaza. “As Israeli ground operations intensified there, suddenly the phone and internet signal went out,” correspondent Leila Molana-Allen reported.

“So, people in Gaza, voiceless through the night as they were under these intense bombardments. People were unable to call ambulances, and we’ve heard this morning that ambulance drivers were standing at high points throughout, trying to see where the explosions were, so they could just drive directly there. People unable to communicate with their families to see if they’re alright. People this morning saying ‘we’ve been digging children out of the rubble with our bare hands because we can’t call for help.’”

While people in Gaza “are under some of the most intense bombardment we’ve ever seen,” Molana-Allen added, they have no safe place to go: “Even though they’re still being told to move to the south, in fact most people can’t get to the south because they have no fuel for their cars, they can’t travel, and even in the south bombardment continues.”

Meanwhile, Biden has continued to publicly express his unequivocal support for what Israel is doing. After he spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week, the White House issued a statement without the slightest mention of concern about what Israel’s bombing was inflicting on civilians.

Instead, the statement said, “the President reiterated that Israel has every right and responsibility to defend its citizens from terrorism and to do so in a manner consistent with international humanitarian law.”

Biden’s support for continuing the carnage in Gaza is matched by Congress. As Israel began its fourth week of terrorizing and killing, only 18 members of the House were on the list of lawmakers cosponsoring H.Res. 786, “Calling for an immediate de-escalation and cease-fire in Israel and occupied Palestine.” All of those 18 cosponsors are people of color.

While Israel kills large numbers of Palestinian civilians each day — and clearly intends to kill many thousands more — we can see “progressive” masks falling away from numerous members of Congress who remain cravenly frozen in political conformity.

“In a dark time,” poet Theodore Roethke wrote, “the eye begins to see.”

Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of many books including War Made Easy. His latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, was published in summer 2023 by The New Press.

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Violent Conflict in Sudan Has Impacted on Nearly Every Aspect of Womens Lives — Global Issues

  • Opinion by Hala al-Karib (united nations)
  • Inter Press Service

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 30 (IPS) – I had the privilege to speak at the UN Security Council open debate last week on Women, Peace, and Security (WPS), an important opportunity to reflect on the urgency of this work and why women’s rights must be central to addressing any conflict or crisis.

Sadly, my country, Sudan, which is currently going through one of the most gruesome atrocities in Africa, illustrates the consequences of failing to do so. The current violent conflict in Sudan is a result of decades of violence against civilians, violence that has impacted nearly every aspect of women’s lives.

During this time, mass atrocities, including sexual violence, rape, and other forms of gender-based violence, have been used against my people. These atrocities took place under former president Omar al-Bashir, who led a militarized regime reliant on the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) and armed militias like the Janjaweed in Darfur, which later became the Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

The mass protests led by women and youth that began in December 2018 and led to the fall of al-Bashir were, in part, a direct response to how women’s bodies and voices have been systematically under attack for over 30 years.

In 2019, the Security Council celebrated Sudan’s transition and heard from Sudanese women such as Alaa Salah, whose voice was one of many calling for freedom, peace, and justice. Al-Bashir was forced out of office by this women-led movement.

The transition between August 2019 and October 2021 saw popular support for inclusive civilian governance, increased attention to women’s rights and space for women’s civil society, and the adoption of a National Action Plan on WPS. Most important, is the space that women activists and rights defenders have managed to occupy and reflect on our demands as Sudanese women.

The transition, however, was short-lived, and further change did not come. Violence continued against civilians in Darfur and the women and youth protestors across the country. Transition authorities failed to address systemic violence, discrimination against women, and the impunity that has plagued Sudan. Perpetrators, in some instances, were appointed to top government positions.

The subsequent military takeover illustrates how only paying lip service to the Women Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, without insisting on women’s rights and women’s meaningful participation in peace and political processes, is not enough to overcome the repressive, patriarchal, and dangerous status quo.

War erupted again in April, this time reaching Khartoum. The gendered nature of the conflict became obvious mere hours after the fighting began. The first case of gang rape was reported at noon on April 15 inside a woman’s home in Khartoum. Alerted by her screams, neighbors started gathering, and the perpetrators, identified as RSF soldiers, quickly fled. The same day, two other women were gang-raped inside their homes in the same area.

From that day on, reports of sexual violence and kidnapping flooded human rights and women’s organizations. Women were subject to brutal atrocities, torture, and trafficking by the RSF in greater Khartoum and Nyala in South Darfur.

The RSF’s brutality was in full display in El Geneina city in West Darfur, where they raped women from Masalit and other native African tribes in front of their families, whom they then killed. More than 4 million women and girls are now at risk of sexual violence in Sudan, and countless others have been slaughtered.

Both the SAF and RSF have committed serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law. While calling on both parties to end such acts, UN experts have expressed concern at consistent reports of widespread violations by the RSF, including subjecting women and girls to enforced disappearance, sexual assault, exploitation and slavery, forced work, and detention in inhuman or degrading conditions.

Fear of stigma and reprisals means that we do not even know the full scale of violations. This pattern of widespread, ethnically motivated attacks, including sexual violence, could amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity. In my view, the targeted attacks on specific communities in El Geneina also poses a serious risk of genocide.

Life after experiencing violence and torture at the hands of the RSF is unbearable—a number of these women and girls have died by suicide. Moreover, women’s access to health care, especially comprehensive sexual and reproductive health care, is limited, in part due to the lack of skilled medical service providers and attacks and occupation of hospitals.

This war has also resulted in millions of women losing their livelihoods and savings, limiting access to food and essential health care. Women and children are also the majority of the displaced and in dire need of humanitarian assistance.

Yet lack of funding and denial of humanitarian access and security and administrative impediments imposed by the SAF, both pose serious challenges to reaching those in need. Further, humanitarian delivery is rarely informed by women’s views despite their prominent role in the response.

The suffering of women in Sudan mirrors the suffering of women across Africa—we are being treated as collateral damage rather than as agents of our own lives. The fundamental premise of the Women Peace and Security agenda is that relegating women—and their rights—to the margins of decision-making further entrenches women’s exclusion and prolongs violence. This must change now.

As I addressed the Security Council this week, I urged its members to:

    • Demand an immediate cessation of hostilities and the adoption of a comprehensive ceasefire in Sudan that will end all violence targeting civilians, ensure the safe passage of civilians, and halt the destruction of critical civilian infrastructure.
    • Reiterate that the full, equal, meaningful, and safe participation of Sudanese women and civil society is critical to any de-escalation efforts or building future peace, and further, all efforts must place respect for human rights at its center. We repeat our demand for the meaningful representation of women, including feminist movements, at 50%, at all levels, from beginning to end. We further call on the UN to ensure women’s equal and direct representation in any peace processes it supports.
    • Call on all parties to ensure safe and unhindered humanitarian access in line with international law. Urgently fund the Humanitarian Response Plan and the Regional Refugee Response Plan. Direct more resources to local civil society, including women’s groups.
    • Pursue accountability for war crimes and crimes against humanity by calling for, and/or initiating independent and impartial investigations based on the principle of universal jurisdiction. Hold all parties accountable for any acts of sexual violence, and strengthen the existing sanctions regime to include sexual and gender-based violence as a stand-alone designation criteria.
    • Update and strengthen the mandate of the United Nations Integrated Transition Assistance Mission in Sudan (UNITAMS) so that the mission is directed to take all possible actions to support protection of civilians and human rights, maintain all existing WPS-related provisions, and meaningfully consult with civil society.
    • Condemn any threats or attacks against women human rights defenders and peace activists, and remove any restrictions on civic space or their right to continue their essential work.

The current conflict in Sudan is a result of the failure to uphold women’s rights and women’s participation in shaping my country’s future. I urged the international community not to repeat this mistake in other crises, where you have the power to do things differently and demanded them to stand with courageous women human rights defenders in crises around the world and show them you will not abandon them.

Show solidarity with Palestinian women, who have suffered the world’s longest occupation and, today, an escalating crisis in Gaza, and support their calls for an immediate ceasefire.

Support the calls of Afghan women to hold the Taliban accountable for gender apartheid. Show the women of Ethiopia, Myanmar, Somalia, South Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, Yemen and so many other conflicts around the globe that their rights are not dispensable.

And demand that the UN take a principled stand by ensuring that women’s rights, and women’s full, equal and meaningful participation are always a fundamental part of any peace process it supports. Uphold the central principle of the WPS agenda, which is that there can be no peace without protection of women’s rights.

Hala al-Karib is a Sudanese women’s rights activist and the Regional Director of the Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa (SIHA). Twitter: @Halayalkarib

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Revisiting the Operational Credibility of the United Nations — Global Issues

  • Opinion by Anwarul K. Chowdhury (new york)
  • Inter Press Service

NEW YORK, Oct 30 (IPS) – I thank the United Nations Asia Network for Diversity and Inclusion (UN-ANDI) for inviting me to present the keynote speech on this special occasion for the observance of the United Nations Day.

I commend wholeheartedly the UN-ANDI and its dedicated team for their work, particularly its recent survey report on racism and racial discrimination despite the constraints of the global Covid pandemic of last few years. I am proud to be associated with the conceptualization of UN-ANDI in late 2019.

As the first ever effort to bring together the diverse group of personnel from Asia and the Pacific in the UN system, UN-ANDI needs all our support and encouragement.

In my decades of work for the United Nations, both representing my country as well as representing the organization, I have seen many faces of the world body – positive and not so positive, spirit-uplifting and also frustrating, focused and determined and also confused and politicized.

But the most enduring experience for me about the work of the United Nations in its 78 years of existence has been its contribution to making a positive difference in the lives of the millions of people of our planet.

Over the years, the United Nations has been tested time and again by conflicts, humanitarian crises and poverty and deprivation, but has always risen to live up to the challenges in a determined and inclusive way. It has been rightly called the “indispensable common house of the entire human family.” Respected global peace leader and philosopher Daisaku Ikeda describes it as the “Parliament of the World.”

It is worth reminding us that without attracting attention, the United Nations and its family of agencies and entities are engaged in a continuing gigantic endeavour against enormous odds to improve every aspect of people’s lives around the world. It is also worth remembering that the UN’s inspirational norm-setting role covers a very broad range of areas.

In my personal association with the application of my country, Bangladesh for membership of the United Nations in 1972 and since then, in my fifty-one years of collaborative involvement with the UN, I can affirm with great pride that all major aspects of Bangladesh’s development architecture reflect the stamp of the UN.

Last Tuesday, as we observed the UN Day, I received many “Happy UN Day” text messages. I did not have the intellectual and moral energy to join them. So, reflecting the current realities, I responded by saying “A not-so-happy UN Day in a conflict-ridden world where the UN is found to be helpless.” That helplessness pains me immensely.

The progressive British newspaper Guardian in its editorial on 26 October echoed that perception by saying that “The United Nations marked its 78th birthday on Tuesday but had little cause for celebration.” It went on to say that “On the same day, Israel called for António Guterres to resign over his remarks on the Israel-Hamas war, and accused him of ‘blood libel’.”

The well-meaning peoples of the world should not be cocooned in our own isolation without recognizing and understanding the reality where we are at this of time. In the most unbecoming manner and forsaking all diplomatic decency, the Israeli Permanent Representative to the UN turned on the Secretary-General at the open session of the Security Council is inconceivable and totally unacceptable.

The earlier Guardian editorial appropriately wrote that “But 10 years ago, it would have been hard to imagine the contempt radiating from the Israeli Ambassador’s announcement that UN representatives would be refused visas because ‘the time has come to teach them a lesson’. That surely reflects the UN’s reduced status.”

The conservative Wall Street Journal went even further the day before on 25 October in its editorial board’s opinion to say that “This is how the UN makes itself a fellow traveler in the advancing march of global disorder.”

We need to revisit the operational credibility of our much-cherished world body. What was needed in 1945 to be enshrined in the UN Charter is to be judged in the light of current realities. If the Charter needs to be amended to live up to the challenges of global complexities and paralyzing intergovernmental politicization, let us do that. It is high time to focus on that direction. Blindly treating the words of the Charter as sacrosanct may be self-defeating and irresponsible. The UN could be buried under its own rubble unless we set our house in order now.

I am often asked, during ‘questions and answers’ segment following my public speaking, if I want to recommend one thing that would make the UN perform better, what would it be. My clear and emphatic answer always has been “Abolish the Veto!” Veto is undemocratic, irrational and against the true spirit of the principle of sovereign equality of the United Nations.

In an opinion piece in the IPS Journal in March 2022, I wrote that “Believe me, the veto power influences not only the decisions of the Security Council but also all work of the UN, including importantly the choice of the Secretary-General.”

The same opinion piece asserted that “I believe the abolition of veto requires a greater priority attention in the reforms process than the enlargement of the Security Council membership with additional permanent ones. Such permanency is simply undemocratic. I also believe that the veto power is not ‘the cornerstone of the United Nations’ but in reality, its tombstone.”

Abolishing the veto would also release the election of the Secretary-General from the manipulating control of the veto-wielding permanent members of the Security Council.

I would also recommend that in future the Secretary-General would have only one term of seven years, as opposed to current practice of automatically renewing the Secretary-General’s tenure for a second five-year term, without even evaluating his performance.

After choosing nine men successively to be the world’s topmost diplomat, I strongly believe that it is incumbent on the United Nations to have the sanity and sagacity of electing a woman as the next Secretary-General.

Also, I am of the opinion that a formalized and mandated involvement of and genuine consultation with the civil society would enhance the UN’s credibility. The UN leadership and Member States should work diligently on that without fail for a decision by the on-going session of the General Assembly.

Transparency and accountability are essential in the budget processes of the UN and personnel recruitments at all levels. Two other areas which need more scrutiny are extra-budgetary resources received from Member States and consultancy practices including budgetary allocations for that by the organization. Special attention in these areas is needed to restore the UN’s credibility and thereby effectiveness and efficiency for the benefit of the humanity as a whole.

The international community has reached a fork in the road. One path is to resign ourselves to the idea that an effective multilateral system is beyond our grasp, with the potential for reversion to the dangerous, anarchic world order that the United Nations was set up to improve upon. The other path, also rocky but considerably more hopeful, leads to global solidarity based on shared principles, objectives, and commitments, on oneness of humanity and on a global security architecture that has a chance of commanding the genuine respect as well as the true acceptance and adherence of all States.

Let me conclude by asserting that, all said, I continue to hold on to my deep faith in multilateralism and , my belief and trust in the United Nations as the most universal organization for the people and the planet is renewed and reaffirmed!

This opinion piece is the enhanced version of the keynote address by Ambassador Anwarul K. Chowdhury, former Under-Secretary-General and High Representative of the United Nations at the virtual observance of the United Nations Day (24 October) by the United Nations Asia Network for Diversity and Inclusion (UN-ANDI) on 27 October 2023.

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What is Happening in Gaza is Inhumane, illegal, and Unacceptable — Global Issues

  • by Thalif Deen (united nations)
  • Inter Press Service

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 27 (IPS) – Last August, 91 UN member states, “in a demonstration of solidarity and commitment”, signed a U.S.-Led Joint Communiqué condemning the Use of Food as a Weapon of War.

Roughly 345 million people – in 79 countries – face acute food insecurity, often caused or exacerbated by armed conflicts, the US said, pointing out that the joint communiqué was born out of the United States’ resolve to once again use its UN Security Council presidency to draw attention to conflict-induced food insecurity.

But paradoxically, one of America’s strongest political and military allies, is now “using starvation as a weapon of war against Gaza civilians”, says Oxfam, as it renewed its call for food, water, fuel, and other essentials to be allowed to enter Gaza.

The global humanitarian organization analyzed UN data and found that “just 2 percent of food that would have been delivered has entered Gaza since the total siege—which tightened the existing blockade—was imposed on October 9 following the atrocious attacks by Hamas and the taking of Israeli civilian hostages.”

While a small amount of food aid has been allowed in, no commercial food imports have been delivered, Oxfam said.

Asked if the use of food as a weapon of war was rare– or common — in military conflicts, Scott Paul, Oxfam America’s Associate Director of Peace and Security, told IPS unfortunately, we’ve observed a marked increase in the deprivation of food and other necessities in conflicts over the past few years.

“What is happening in Gaza is inhumane, illegal, and unacceptable”, he said.

“We must see more aid reach civilians in Gaza, but more importantly we need to see an end to the violence that is destroying bakeries and other key infrastructure and an end to the siege keeping out food and other vital goods,” he declared.

In 2018, the UN Security Council adopted resolution 2417, which unanimously condemned the use of starvation against civilians as a method of warfare and declared any denial of humanitarian access a violation of international law.

Providing or withholding food during times of conflict has been described “just as potent a weapon as the guns, bombs, and explosives of opposing armies”.

As the escalation of the conflict extended to its 19th day, said Oxfam, a staggering 2.2 million people are now in urgent need of food. Prior to the hostilities, 104 trucks a day would deliver food to the besieged Gaza Strip—one truck every 14 minutes.

Despite 62 trucks of aid being allowed to enter southern Gaza via the Rafah crossing since the weekend, only 30 contained food and in some cases, not exclusively so. This amounts to just one truck every three hours and 12 minutes since Saturday.

Sally Abi Khalil, Oxfam’s Regional Middle East Director said: “The situation is nothing short of horrific—where is humanity?”

“Millions of civilians are being collectively punished in full view of the world. There can be no justification for using starvation as a weapon of war. World leaders cannot continue to sit back and watch, they have an obligation to act and to act now,” said Khalil.

“Every day the situation worsens. Children are experiencing severe trauma from the constant bombardment. Their drinking water is polluted or rationed and soon families may not be able to feed them too. How much more are the Gazans expected to endure?”

According to Oxfam, International Humanitarian Law (IHL) strictly prohibits the use of starvation as a method of warfare and as the occupying power in Gaza, Israel is bound by IHL obligations to provide for the needs and protection of the population of Gaza.

Oxfam said that it is becoming painfully clear that the unfolding humanitarian situation in Gaza squarely fits the prohibition condemned in the resolution.

Clean water has now virtually run out. It is estimated that only three liters of clean water are now available per person—the UN said that a minimum of 15 liters a day is essential for people in the most acute humanitarian emergencies as a bare minimum.

Bottled water stocks are running low and the cost of bottled water has already surged beyond the reach of an average Gaza family, with prices spiking fivefold in some places.

A spokesperson for the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNWRA) pointed out that some of the food aid allowed in—rice and lentils—is useless because people do not have clean water or fuel to prepare them.

A series of airstrikes have left several bakeries and supermarkets either destroyed or damaged. Those that are still functional can’t meet the local demand for fresh bread and are at risk of shutting down due to the shortage of essentials like flour and fuel.

Gaza’s only operative wheat mill is redundant due to the power outages. The Palestinian Water Authority says Gaza’s water production is now a mere 5 percent of its normal total, which is expected to reduce further, unless water and sanitation facilities are provided with electricity or fuel to resume its activity, Oxfam said.

“Notably, essential food items like flour, oil, and sugar are still stocked in warehouses that haven’t been destroyed. But as many of them are located in Gaza City, it is proving physically impossible to deliver items due to the lack of fuel, damaged roads, and risks from airstrikes”.

The electricity blackout has also disrupted food supplies by affecting refrigeration, crop irrigation, and crop incubation devices. Over 15,000 farmers have lost their crop production and 10,000 livestock breeders have little access to fodder, with many having lost their animals.

Oxfam said that the siege, combined with the airstrikes, has crippled the fishing industry with hundreds of people who rely on fishing losing access to the sea.

Oxfam is urging the UN Security Council and UN Member States to act immediately to prevent the situation from deteriorating even further. Oxfam is also calling for an immediate ceasefire, unfettered, equitable access to the entire Gaza Strip for humanitarian aid, and all necessary food, water, and medical and fuel supplies for the needs of the population to be met.

“We can deliver lifesaving aid to those in urgent need,” Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said during the UN Security Council High-Level Open Debate on Famine and Conflict-Induced Global Food Insecurity, last August.

“We can ensure that people around the globe are fed, now and for years to come. If we do that, if we build a healthier, more stable, more peaceful world for all, we will have at least begun to live up to the responsibility entrusted to us, entrusted to this Council, entrusted to this institution,” he pledged

U.S. Representative to the United Nations Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said, “In a world abundant with food, no one should starve to death – ever. This is a humanitarian issue, this is a moral issue, and this is a security issue. And we must address the most insidious driver of famine and food insecurity: conflict.”

But two months later, reality has set in – this time in Gaza.

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A World, Mostly Dominated by Men, in Turmoil — Global Issues

  • Opinion by Azza Karam (new york)
  • Inter Press Service

NEW YORK, Oct 27 (IPS) – This year – 2023 – started with a commemoration of one year of war in, and on Ukraine, which has dramatically impacted the price of basic needs for the world’s populations in every corner of the world. It is an ongoing calamity for a world already living its worst collective food, public health and conflict-based insecurities.

Despite the peace agreement allowing access to Tigray, the humanitarian crisis following the conflict in Ethiopia has not abated, nor has the civil conflict in the Sudan. As fighting raged on in Somalia, the country faced its worst drought in forty years, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths.

The UN warned in June, that 400,000 of the 6.6 million Somalis in need of aid are facing famine-like conditions, and 1.8 million children are at risk of acute malnutrition in 2023. To add to the disaster, the World Food Programme has been forced to drastically cut its services in the country, due to lack of funding.

While there are more conflicts brewing in Africa, we have to take note of the fact that Asia also has its painful shares thereof, with ongoing Turkish government attacks against Kurdish groups as we write this. While talks between Iran and Saudi Arabia in April 2023 (mediated by China), raised hopes of a political settlement to end the conflict in Yemen, hostility between the two warring sides remains.

Further East, the civil conflict in Myanmar is resulting in more civil strife and untold misery also for minority communities. In Iran, a uniquely women-led uprising, continues to be brutally repressed, even as the country remains heavily vested in regional conflicts.

Another continent, Latin America, is host to serious political and economic instability – as in Venezuela – sometimes compounded by violence – as in Haiti – with significant humanitarian consequences. The continent also has its fair share of rising criminal gang violence, suspected to be closely aligned with certain political, arms and drugs’ interests, which are on the rise in several countries.

On October 7, 2023 the world witnessed atrocities committed by a religiously inspired (although by no means faith-justified) group, Hamas (self-designated as the Islamic resistance movement), on Israeli land, with ongoing mourning for the deaths, the trauma, and the fate of hundreds of hostages taken.

All of which appears to be used by some (largely western) governments to justify retaliatory actions which are resulting in millions of Palestinians (in Gaza) now living even without water, thousands already killed, many of whom are women and children, and over a million of them are being pushed, by a state actor, to become forcibly displaced.

In relatively (much) more peaceful countries, the rise of those advocating right-wing xenophobic actions and hate – some of whom are elected, by millions, to serve positions of senior most executive authority – is not unusual.

So, our world is not in a good place right now.

In each of these conflicts most of the key decision makers, are – perhaps coincidentally – male leaders. In all of these contexts, the ones paying the highest price in terms of loss of life, limb, deteriorating mental health, traumas, and denial of basic dignity – let alone access to basic needs – are women, children and those living with disabilities (which includes all genders, social classes, and age groups).

Yet in very few of any of those contexts, do we hear from the women leaders who are serving humanitarian needs, struggling to keep communities surviving, still speaking with one another and helping one another across the painful chasms and divides, and speaking out against the calls, and the murderous rationales, of war.

While there is data which implicates some women leaders in conflicts and violence – from suicide bombings to mainstream army and navy leaders and officers, members of right-wing extremist groups, non-state actors and gangs – these are not the norm. In fact, there is no comparative scope. As long as the majority of world’s senior-most political and military leaders are male, one cannot compare them to the legacies of the far fewer, and much more recent, women, in similar positions of power.

Women’s organisations tend to be among the most vocal and numerous, in their rejection of any and all forms of war and violence. The women who uphold this simple, and profoundly life changing and life affirming stances, of not choosing war, are often seasoned veterans of serving their communities and their nations. Many do not only speak from a place of aspiration, but from where they are rooted in taking collective actions for the common good.

Many women human rights defenders, and veterans of peacebuilding efforts in their communities and nations, tend to put into effect, the most pragmatic rationale of all: that my safety and welfare depends on yours. That you are part of me as I am of you. That in your annihilation, is mine own. That our collective resilience, is necessary, for this very precious planet, on which we are but (seriously disrespectful) guests, graciously hosted.

Yet these very same women, and their organisations, all of which are legacy builders, have to struggle to have their voices heard in the existing diversity and cacophony of media channels. Their absence from the seats of global decision making – because they are busy serving communities who have long lost their connection to today’s multilateral elitist spaces – affords them little to no opportunity to be part of the voices mainstream media prioritises. Indeed, media sometimes makes, select leaders, who appear to speak to the angry masses – or make the masses angry – but rarely showcases the work of the women building peace.

“We would not choose war” is not a temporary motto of convenience. It is a state of mind, and a state of being, which is struggled for, often at high personal, and professional cost. Its minimal threshold is the art of compromise. Its maximal achievement is peaceful coexistence. Both of which are sorely needed. It is also what most women’s organisations, and women-led efforts in all corners of the world, would say, and mean.

Given the state of our world, we need to make sure the track record of women’s peaceful leadership is actively and systematically supported, specifically when and where such efforts revolve around partnerships, and build on grassroots multilateral engagements. Such women-led peace initiatives should be a strategic developmental priority, within nations and between them. At the same time, this support should diligently avoid the all too frequent trap of creating new, parallel , duplicative, and replicative efforts, and/or focusing on supporting the already privileged elites.

We (should) have learned after decades of international development, that effective partnerships – advocated for in the 17th Sustainable Development Goal – are not optional. Partnerships in conceptualising, addressing, planning, delivery, and all forms of service, are a sine qua non, of social inclusion, social cohesion and peaceful coexistence. Not because they are easy to effect.

Perhaps precisely because they are challenging. But the challenge of partnerships around social cohesion are far more tolerable than the destructions of war. Away from the spaces of media, pomp and ceremony, media frenzy around temporal events, and elitist noise, women-led grassroots and international efforts are already providing alternatives to the current madness.

Dr Azza Karam, Professor of Religion and Development at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, and President and CEO of the Women’s Learning Partnership, based in Washington, and working with women’s human rights organisations in the southern hemisphere. She has decades of experience serving women-led multi stakeholder coalitions for democracy, peace and security.

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A Tug of War and Peace in Yemen — Global Issues

  • Opinion by Magdalena Kirchner (amman, jordan)
  • Inter Press Service

AMMAN, Jordan, Oct 26 (IPS) – For the first time since the beginning of a war that claimed the lives of over 220,000 people, a senior Houthi delegation travelled from Yemen to Saudi Arabia’s capital Riyadh in mid-September.

The timing of the visit, just before the anniversary of the capture of the Yemeni capital, Sana’a, on 21 September 2014 and the subsequent military escalation between the rebels (also known as Ansar Allah) and a Saudi-led military coalition, marks a diplomatic success for the de facto rulers of northern Yemen.

This is despite the fact that their only significant concession so far has been the temporary cessation of cross-border attacks using missiles or drones on neighbouring states such as Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Some observers cynically suggest that Riyadh’s real motivation is not to create an inclusive and lasting peace in war-torn Yemen but ‘not to disturb the newly bought European football stars with the sound of explosions’. However, the Houthis are showing a genuine interest in continuing negotiations with Riyadh and in exploiting the advantageous momentum of an Iranian-Saudi détente.

With Tehran’s support, they have developed a credible military deterrent in recent years. Neither their internal Yemeni opponents nor the latter’s regional and international supporters have succeeded in preventing or even reversing the consolidation of their rule over large parts of the country and its population.

Yet, with the end of Saudi air strikes in April 2022 and the lifting of air and sea blockades crucial to economic prosperity in northern Yemen, the rebels now lack a key driver for mobilising and securing popular support within their own territory: an external enemy.

Normalisation efforts externally, consolidation of power internally

In the past months, critical voices have grown significantly louder, particularly about the fact that while revenues from taxes, increased tariffs on imports from government-controlled areas and the boosted activity at the port of Hodeida have increased by nearly half a billion US dollars between April and November 2022, public sector employees continue to wait for salaries and pensions that have been overdue for years.

Criticism also came from the ranks of the General People’s Congress (GPC), the former unity and ruling party, to whom, until his surprising ouster by the National Security Council on 27 September, the prime minister of the Houthi government, Abdel-Aziz bin Habtoor, had belonged.

Hence, negotiations and the prospect of a financial peace dividend (i.e. an economic boost a country will get from a peace that follows a war) could be enticing and might buy the rebels time at home — even if it remains unclear how payments from a neighbouring state or the internationally recognised government (IRG) can be reconciled with their own claim to be Yemen’s only legitimate government.

Improving relations with regional states, which could offset reduced or even suspended aid from the West, may help reduce the rulers’ dependencies.

In recent months, the Houthi leadership has therefore taken stronger and more repressive measures to consolidate their rule internally. This has been particularly evident in the area of education and through significant restrictions placed on civil society organisations and women’s freedom of movement.

The latter, in particular, has put the rebels on a confrontational course, especially with Western donor states, whose humanitarian support is the livelihood of more than 20 million people across the country. These tensions are further fuelled by the fact that aid organisations’ ability to prevent the misuse of aid by those in power through independent needs assessments is systematically and sometimes violently curtailed.

Improving relations with regional states, which could offset reduced or even suspended aid from the West, may help reduce the rulers’ dependencies. This also explains why, on the anniversary of the capture of the capital, the Houthi leadership publicly announced that it wanted to address any concerns on the part of Saudi Arabia that might stand in the way of an agreement and stated its intent to double its own combat readiness if an ‘honourable peace’ could not be achieved.

The fragility of normalisation efforts between the former adversaries was underscored when a drone strike on a patrol by the Saudi-led military coalition in the Saudi border area with Yemen killed three Bahraini soldiers on 25 September.

Stuck in the starting blocks: an intra-Yemeni peace process

Although the international conflict dimension has de-escalated, this has not yet been accompanied by significant progress in a potential intra-Yemeni peace. In late September, hundreds of Yemenis commemorating the 1962 establishment of the Yemeni Arab Republic were detained in Houthi-controlled areas.

Although military clashes between the Houthi rebels and the armed forces of the IRG and its allies, assembled in the Presidential Leadership Council (PLC), have significantly decreased, attacks on government troops have not ceased. In July 2023, the rebels employed drones, battle tanks and artillery in the southwestern governorate of Ad Dali. However, a new form of economic warfare is hitting the IRG and especially the people living in areas under its control even harder;

Since October 2022, the Houthis have been using drones to launch attacks on critical oil production and export facilities in IRG-held areas. According to its own reports, the IRG has suffered losses of more than $1 bn in revenue as a result. The Houthis have also imposed a ban on importing gas from government-controlled territory and made it difficult to trade goods within Yemen, especially those imported via the port of Aden.

Although Saudi Arabia stepped in to assist the struggling IRG by pledging $1.2 bn in economic aid at the beginning of August, the economic situation remains dire. The national currency, the Yemeni Rial, has lost a quarter of its value against the US dollar in the past year alone. Gas stations have frequently had to close in recent months, and the people in the southern city of Aden had to endure power outages of up to 17 hours — in sweltering heat.

Frustration among the population is running high, and there have been repeated roadblocks, injuries and even deaths during protests. Despite increased efforts by European partners to bolster the IRG through more frequent visits and a greater presence in Aden, the glaring weakness of state institutions and lack of unity among key actors in the south remain the government’s biggest Achilles heel.

Former allies become estranged

These intra-Yemeni dynamics make Saudi Arabia’s current negotiating strategy, as well as the support it receives from most international actors, all the more problematic. A statement by the US government on the Riyadh talks failed to mention the IRG or the fact that they, along with the United Nations, other conflict parties and civil society actors, are excluded from these ‘efforts for peace’.

The UAE, the second major regional power with high stakes in the conflict, might feel equally left out. Its allies, such as the Southern Transitional Council (STC), which pursues the goal of southern statehood, could perceive their own interests as being at risk. The once-close relationship between Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman and UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed is now widely considered to have broken down. At the same time, the former allies now find themselves separated by the tangible geopolitical conflicts of interest in Yemen and the strategically important straits surrounding the country.

The talks in Saudi Arabia offer hope for a peaceful future for Yemen as they shed light on the real political interests of the Houthis, especially in the area of economic cooperation.

It should come as no surprise then that the President of the STC, Aidarus Al Zubaidi, publicly expressed sharp criticism of Riyadh’s actions on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly. In his view, a ‘bad deal’, which could ultimately pave the way for a complete Houthi takeover, would primarily lead to Iran gaining control not only of Yemeni oil resources but also of strategically important trade routes.

He firmly rejected the notion of unilateral participation by the Houthis in the state revenues generated in the south – particularly in light of the current emergency situation in the region – as well as concessions related to salaries, seaports or the withdrawal of foreign forces in response to what he sees as blackmail tactics by the Houthis before an actual ceasefire is reached.

The talks in Saudi Arabia offer hope for a peaceful future for Yemen as they shed light on the real political interests of the Houthis, especially in the area of economic cooperation, providing a basis for substantial leverage in longer-term negotiations.

However, as long as Saudi Arabia’s primary objective remains limited to a face-saving exit from its involvement in the war and to securing its own border, there is a growing risk that former allies may disrupt the peace process. Additionally, the danger of new military expansionist efforts by the rebels, with potentially dramatic consequences for an already suffering civilian population, increases.

In view of these scenarios, international actors such as the German government should intensify their efforts to promote Yemen-Yemeni reconciliation, including in areas related to development and economic policy, and enable political institutions to regain the trust of an increasingly disillusioned population.

Dr Magdalena Kirchner heads the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung’s offices for Jordan and Yemen, based in Amman. Previously, she was the FES representative in Afghanistan.

Source: International Politics and Society (IPS)-Journal published by the International Political Analysis Unit of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Hiroshimastrasse 28, D-10785 Berlin

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The Palestinians Subject to 56 Years of Suffocating Occupation — Global Issues

UN Secretary-General addresses the Security Council 24 October 2023. Credit: UN Photo
  • by Guterres (united nations)
  • Inter Press Service

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 25 (IPS) – UN Secretary-General, in an address to the Security CouncilThe situation in the Middle East is growing more dire by the hour. The war in Gaza is raging and risks spiralling throughout the region.

Divisions are splintering societies. Tensions threaten to boil over. At a crucial moment like this, it is vital to be clear on principles — starting with the fundamental principle of respecting and protecting civilians.

I have condemned unequivocally the horrifying and unprecedented 7 October acts of terror by Hamas in Israel. Nothing can justify the deliberate killing, injuring and kidnapping of civilians – or the launching of rockets against civilian targets.

All hostages must be treated humanely and released immediately and without conditions. I respectfully note the presence among us of members of their families.

It is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum.

The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.

They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing.

UN Secretary-General addresses the Security Council 24 October 2023. Credit: UN Photo

But the grievances of the Palestinian people cannot justify the appalling attacks by Hamas. And those appalling attacks cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.

Even war has rules.

We must demand that all parties uphold and respect their obligations under international humanitarian law; take constant care in the conduct of military operations to spare civilians; and respect and protect hospitals and respect the inviolability of UN facilities which today are sheltering more than 600,000 Palestinians.

The relentless bombardment of Gaza by Israeli forces, the level of civilian casualties, and the wholesale destruction of neighborhoods continue to mount and are deeply alarming.

I mourn and honour the dozens of UN colleagues working for UNRWA – sadly, at least 35 and counting – killed in the bombardment of Gaza over the last two weeks. I owe to their families my condemnation of these and many other similar killings.

The protection of civilians is paramount in any armed conflict. Protecting civilians can never mean using them as human shields.

Protecting civilians does not mean ordering more than one million people to evacuate to the south, where there is no shelter, no food, no water, no medicine and no fuel, and then continuing to bomb the south itself.

I am deeply concerned about the clear violations of international humanitarian law that we are witnessing in Gaza. Let me be clear: No party to an armed conflict is above international humanitarian law.

Thankfully, some humanitarian relief is finally getting into Gaza. But it is a drop of aid in an ocean of need.

In addition, our UN fuel supplies in Gaza will run out in a matter of days. That would be another disaster. Without fuel, aid cannot be delivered, hospitals will not have power, and drinking water cannot be purified or even pumped.

The people of Gaza need continuous aid delivery at a level that corresponds to the enormous needs. That aid must be delivered without restrictions.

I salute our UN colleagues and humanitarian partners in Gaza working under hazardous conditions and risking their lives to provide aid to those in need. They are an inspiration.

To ease epic suffering, make the delivery of aid easier and safer, and facilitate the release of hostages, I reiterate my appeal for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire.

Even in this moment of grave and immediate danger, we cannot lose sight of the only realistic foundation for a true peace and stability: a two-State solution.

Israelis must see their legitimate needs for security materialized, and Palestinians must see their legitimate aspirations for an independent State realized, in line with United Nations resolutions, international law and previous agreements.

Finally, we must be clear on the principle of upholding human dignity.

Polarization and dehumanization are being fueled by a tsunami of disinformation. We must stand up to the forces of antisemitism, anti-Muslim bigotry and all forms of hate.

Today is United Nations Day (October 24), marking 78 years since the UN Charter entered into force.

That Charter reflects our shared commitment to advance peace, sustainable development and human rights.

On this UN Day, at this critical hour, I appeal to all to pull back from the brink before the violence claims even more lives and spreads even farther.

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