Entitled “Iran After the Bomb: How Would a Nuclear-Armed Tehran Behave?“, the report asserts that the acquisition by Tehran of nuclear weapons  would above all be intended to deter an attack by hostile powers, presumably including Israel and the United States, rather than for aggressive purposes.

And while its acquisition may indeed lead to greater tension between Iran and its Sunni-led neighbours, the 50-page report concludes that Tehran would be unlikely to use nuclear weapons against other Muslim countries. Nor would it be able to halt its diminishing influence in the region resulting from the Arab Spring and its support for the Syrian government, according to the author, Alireza Nader.

“Iran’s development of nuclear weapons will enhance its ability to deter an external attack, but it will not enable it to change the Middle East’s geopolitical order in its own favour,” Nader, an international policy analyst at RAND, told IPS. “The Islamic Republic’s challenge to the region is constrained by its declining popularity, a weak economy, and a limited conventional military capability. An Iran with nukes will still be a declining power.”

The report reaches several conclusions all of which generally portray Iran as a rational actor in its international relations.

While Nader calls it a “revisionist state” that tries to undermine what it sees as a U.S.-dominated order in the Middle East, his report stresses that “it does not have territorial ambitions and does not seek to invade, conquer, or occupy other nations.”

Further, the report identifies the Islamic Republic’s military doctrine as defensive in nature.  This posture is presumably a result of the volatile and unstable region in which it exists and is exacerbated by its status as a Shi’a and Persian-majority nation in a Sunni and Arab-majority region.

Iran is also scarred by its traumatic eight-year war with Iraq in which as many as one million Iranians lost their lives.

The new report comes amidst a growing controversy here over whether a nuclear-armed Iran could itself be successfully “contained” by the U.S. and its allies and deterred both from pursuing a more aggressive policy in the region and actually using nuclear weapons against its foes.

Iran itself has vehemently denied it intends to build a weapon, and the U.S. intelligence community has reported consistently over the last six years that Tehran’s leadership has not yet decided to do so, although the increasing sophistication and infrastructure of its nuclear programme will make it possible to build one more quickly if such a decision is made.

Official U.S. policy, as enunciated repeatedly by top officials, including President Barack Obama, is to “prevent” Iran from obtaining a weapon, even by military means if ongoing diplomatic efforts and “crippling” economic sanctions fail to persuade Iran to substantially curb its nuclear programme.

A nuclear-armed Iran, in the administration’s view – which is held even more fervently by the U.S. Congress where the Israel lobby exerts its greatest influence – represents an “existential threat” to the Jewish state.

In addition, according to the administration, Iran’s acquisition of a weapon would likely embolden it and its allies – notably Lebanon’s Hezbollah – to pursue more aggressive actions against their foes and could well set off a regional “cascade effect” in which other powers, particulary Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt, would feel obliged to launch nuclear-weapons programmes of their own.

But a growing number of critics of the prevention strategy – particularly that part of it that would resort to military action against Iran – argue that a nuclear Iran will not be nearly as dangerous as the reigning orthodoxy assumes.

A year ago, for example, Paul Pillar, a veteran CIA analyst who served as National Intelligence Officer for the Middle East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, published a lengthy essay in ‘The Washington Monthly’, “We Can Live With a Nuclear Iran: Fears of a Bomb in Tehran’s Hands Are Overhyped, and a War to Prevent It Would Be a Disaster.”

More recently, Colin Kahl, an analyst at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) who also served as the Pentagon’s top Middle East policy adviser for much of Obama’s first term, published two reports – the first questioning the “cascade effect” in the region, and the second, published earlier this week and entitled “If All Else Fails: The Challenges of Containing a Nuclear-Armed Iran,” outlining a detailed “containment strategy” — including extending Washington’s nuclear umbrella over states that feel threatened by a nuclear Iran — the U.S. could follow to deter Tehran’s use of a nuclear bomb or its transfer to non-state actors, like Hezbollah, and persuade regional states not to develop their own nuclear arms capabilities.

In addition, Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA analyst at the Brookings Institution whose 2002 book, “The Threatening Storm” helped persuade many liberals and Democrats to support the U.S. invasion of Iraq, will publish a new book, “Unthinkable: Iran, the Bomb, and American Strategy”, that is also expected to argue for a containment strategy if Iran acquires a nuclear weapon.

Because both Brookings and CNAS are regarded as close to the administration, some neo-conservative commentators have expressed alarm that these reports are “trial balloons” designed to set the stage for Obama’s abandonment of the prevention strategy in favour of containment, albeit by another name.

It is likely that Nader’s study – coming as it does from RAND, a think tank with historically close ties to the Pentagon – will be seen in a similar light.

His report concedes that Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons would lead to greater tension with the Gulf Arab monarchies and thus to greater instability in the region. Moreover, an inadvertent or accidental nuclear exchange between Israel and Iran would be a “dangerous possibility”, according to Nader who also notes that the “cascade effect”, while outside the scope of his study, warrants “careful consideration”.

Despite Iran’s strong ideological antipathy toward Israel, the report does not argue that Tehran would attack the Jewish state with nuclear weapons, as that would almost certainly lead to the regime’s destruction.

Israel, in Nader’s view, fears that Iran’s nuclear capability could serve as an “umbrella” for Tehran’s allies that could significantly hamper Israel’s military operations in the Palestinian territories, the Levant, and the wider region.

But the report concludes that Tehran is unlikely to extend its nuclear deterrent to its allies, including Hezbollah, noting that the interests of those groups do not always – or even often – co-incide with Iran’s.  Iran would also be highly unlikely to transfer nuclear weapons to them in any event, according to the report.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

Jorge Rafael Videla swears in as the head of the military junta on Mar. 24, 1976. Credit: Public Domain

Thirty-seven years after leading the coup d’etat that ushered in the most brutal dictatorship in the history of Argentina, former army commander Jorge Rafael Videla died in a common prison Friday.

Convicted in several cases for crimes against humanity, the former dictator was found in his cell without a pulse, according to the medical report from the Federal Penitentiary Service. He was 87 years old.

Videla was serving several sentences in the Complejo Penitenciario Federal Número 2 in the city of Marcos Paz in the eastern province of Buenos Aires, in a section of the prison where he was held with dozens of other human rights violators from the 1976-1983 dictatorship.

“I never killed anyone,” Videla stated. In every conviction against him he was found to be the “intellectual author” of crimes against humanity. He himself admitted as much in the book “The Dictator” by journalists María Seoane and Vicente Muleiro. “There was no lack of control. I was above everyone,” he told the writers.

Human rights groups, the families of victims and observers of the fight against impunity for the de facto regime’s crimes said Videla’s death in a common prison was a powerful symbol, but did not represent the end of a cycle and was merely one more landmark in the process.

The executive director of Amnesty International in Argentina, Mariela Belski, told IPS that Videla “will be remembered for the (dictatorship’s) most brutal and appalling excesses.”

“But the most important thing here is that justice was done, Videla was convicted, and he died in prison,” she said, stressing that Argentina “took a major stride forward in bringing these crimes to trial, and became a model for the region and for the global South.”

But Belski warned that the death of the dictator “does not bring the process to a close. This is an ongoing process, which Argentina is spearheading, but which must continue in the country and in the region.”

Videla’s death in prison “is a very important symbolic development,” Víctor Abramovich, executive secretary of the Institute of Public Policies on Human Rights of South America’s Mercosur (Southern Common Market) trade bloc, told IPS.

“Ten years ago this was unthinkable. Today it is the result of a process of regional scope, a process that is moving forward at different speeds, under different laws, but is generating very interesting debates throughout Latin America,” said the representative of the bloc made up of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela.

Abramovich, a former vice president of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, said the fact that the former dictator died in a common jail “reaffirms the principle of equality before the law.”

“This process, which is moving ahead at varying rates, is occurring in Chile, Brazil, Peru, Colombia and Uruguay, as well as Guatemala, where (former dictator José Efraín) Ríos Montt was sentenced to 80 years in prison (on May 10),” he said.

In Argentina, 422 human rights violators, mainly members of the military, have been tried since 1983. Of that total, 378 were convicted and 44 acquitted, according to the prosecution unit for the coordination and monitoring of cases involving human rights violations.

In the last two years, trials have picked up speed, thanks to measures such as the accumulation of cases committed in each torture centre. In 2012, 24 trials ended in 134 convictions and 17 acquittals.

As part of the fight against impunity, the organisation Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo has managed to identify more than 100 sons and daughters of political prisoners who had been kidnapped as children along with their parents or were born in captivity.

Some of those stolen children now hold public posts – as national legislators, city councillors or executive branch officials, like the secretary of human rights, Martín Fresneda.

In 1976, then army chief Videla led the junta made up of the commanders of the three military forces after the coup that overthrew the democratic government of Isabel Perón.

Under his leadership (1976-1981), thousands of people were kidnapped, tortured, killed and forcibly disappeared. Government records that are gradually being updated account for more than 11,000 victims of forced disappearance, while human rights organisations put the total number at 30,000.

When the regime collapsed in 1983, the former junta members were tried. In 1985, Videla was sentenced to life in prison for 66 murders, 306 kidnappings, 93 cases of torture and 26 cases of theft.

He spent five years in a military prison along with other officers, enjoying privileges that were denounced by the media and human rights groups. But in 1990 they were pardoned by then president Carlos Menem (1989-1999).

However, Videla was arrested again in 1998 in connection with the theft of children born to political prisoners – a crime he had never been convicted of and thus was never pardoned for.

But it was the declaration of the presidential pardon and the two late 1980s amnesty laws as unconstitutional that reactivated a number of human rights cases against him over the last decade. In 2010 he was handed a live sentence for crimes committed in the central province of Córdoba and in 2012 he was sentenced to 50 years for the theft of children.

He was also tried for crimes against humanity committed by the regime in the central province of Santa Fe and the northern province of Tucumán.

In the trials, Videla did not recognise the authority of the civilian courts to try him, and complained that he was a “political prisoner.”

He did so once again on Tuesday May 14, in another case related to Operation Condor, a coordinated plan among the military governments that ruled Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay in the 1970s and 1980s, aimed at tracking down, capturing, exchanging and eliminating left-wing opponents.

On his last appearance in court he looked unwell, with difficulty walking and a trembling voice.

But he never repented in public. On the contrary, he said he gave the orders for the crimes committed by his subordinates.

In his last statements to the press, to the Spanish magazine Cambio 16 in March, he urged young officers to rise up against the government of Cristina Fernández “in defence of the institutions of the republic.”

The first launch of a Trident missile on Jan. 18, 1977 at Cape Canaveral, Florida. Credit: U.S. Air Force

But Chekhov’s storytelling trope is troubling if applied to the world’s weapons technology today, which include an estimated 17,300 nukes – used primarily by nations as props to leverage international power.

According to the Ploughshares Fund’s World Nuclear Stockpile Report, an estimated 8,500 nukes belong to Russia and 7,700 to the U.S. The seven other nations with a nuclear arsenal trail far behind: they include France (300), China (240), the U.K. (225), Pakistan (90-110), India (60-110), Israel (60-80) and most recently North Korea (<10).

“It’s hard to imagine any military mission that will require the use of one nuclear weapon. The use of 10 weapons would be a catastrophe beyond human experience, and 50 is unthinkable,” said Joe Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, a global security foundation based in the U.S.

“The number you need to actually deter an enemy from attacking the U.S. with or without nuclear weapons is very, very low. To be on the safe side, you might want a couple of hundred,” he told IPS.

“The idea that we need thousands of nuclear weapons… is an outmoded, irrational, expensive legacy of the Cold War,” he said.

While the U.S.’s nuke budget is secret, Cirincione estimates that in the next decade, the U.S. will spend 640 billion dollars on nukes and its related programmes – such as missile defence systems, environmental clean-up of nuclear activity and the technological upgrade of the current nuclear arsenal.

Asked about the U.S.’s role in pushing for nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation on the international scale, Cirincione said, “The U.S. is probably the most influential voice in this debate, but it can’t do it alone. Most importantly, it needs Russia to reduce the arsenals with them.”

On Feb. 5, 2011, the U.S. and Russia entered into force a New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), in which both nations agreed by 2018 to limit the number of their warheads to 1,550; and the number of their combined intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) and heavy bombers equipped for nuclear armaments to 800.

“If the U.S. and Russia can agree to cut their arsenals in half, for example, as they did in the 1980s and the 1990s… it would be universally applauded, and it would be very difficult for bureaucracies and political opponents to resist that in either country,” said Cirincione.

But U.S. progress for disarmament and non-proliferation has stalled in the past few years. George Perkovich, director of the Nuclear Policy Programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, attributes the U.S.’s balk partly to internal politics in Washington.

In his April 2013 monograph, Do Unto Others: Toward a Defensible Nuclear Doctrine, Perkovich writes, “A relatively small, specialized community of experts and officials shapes U.S. nuclear policy.”

Members of this community often distort nuclear threats to the U.S., as well as the best ways to respond to such threats, argues Perkovich. They do this not in the U.S.’s national security interest, but in their own career interests to prevent “their domestic rivals from attacking them as too weak to hold office”.

Nukes deter U.S.-led regime change

Perkovich also notes in his monograph that Iran, North Korea and Pakistan believe having their own nuclear arsenals deter U.S.-led regime change. They fear the fates of nuclear-free Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011.

Asked how the U.S. should respond if future world governments – oppressive or not, who are acting against U.S. interests – continue pursuing nukes to prevent regime change, Perkovich told IPS that would be a difficult problem.

“The one and only thing nuclear weapons are good for is to keep people from invading your country. So, states and leaders that worry about getting invaded tend to find nukes attractive, or alliance with the U.S. attractive,” he said.

“Non-proliferation would be easier to achieve if states didn’t worry they were going to be invaded and/ or overthrown if they didn’t have nuclear weapons.

“The problem, clearly, is that some governments are so brutal and menacing to their own people and neighbours that it is hard to foreswear trying to remove them,” he added.

Perkovich recommended that the U.S. limit pressure against repressive governments to political and moral means, as well as to sanctions; and that the U.S. clarify it won’t act militarily, if the repressive regime does not attack its neighbours or seek nukes.

Cirincione, author of Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons, argued that vying for nukes, in Iran and North Korea’s cases, may actually be counterproductive.

“I don’t think it improves their security, I think it isolates them even further,” he said. “It prevents them from forging the kind of international ties that can really aid their country, build their economies (and) increase their influence.

“That means that in order to stop those countries from getting or keeping nuclear weapons, you have to address their legitimate security concerns. A part of the engagement with those countries has got to be security assurances that guarantees then that you won’t attack them, or that their neighbours won’t attack them.”

Obama’s nuclear legacy

During his December 2012 speech at the National War College in Washington, U.S. President Barack Obama said, “Missile by missile, warhead by warhead, shell by shell, we’re putting a bygone era behind us.”

Cirincione explained that pursuing nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation has been important to Obama since his youth. Obama’s first foreign policy speech as president – in Prague in April 2009 – and his first foreign policy speech after re-election both focused on nukes.

“The president faces a multitude of pressing issues, but only two of them threaten destruction on a planetary scale: global warming and nuclear weapons,” said Cirincione.

While opposition to nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation is prevalent inside Washington, it pales in comparison to opposition facing warming, immigration, or tax reform.

“This is an opportunity for the president to make a major improvement in U.S. and global security with a relatively small investment of his time,” said Cirincione, who explained that Obama’s efforts to curb nukes may conclude a historic arc, which started with President John F. Kennedy’s efforts in the 1960s and was accelerated by President Ronald Reagan’s efforts in the 1980s.

Cirincione said, “(Obama’s) got three and a half years to do it. If he starts now, he can get the job done. He can change U.S. nuclear policy to put it irreversibly on a path to fewer nuclear weapons, and eventually (eliminate) this threat from the face of the earth.”

Twelve feature-length and 10 short films were screened at the May 13-16 festival, held in the border cities of Cúcuta in northeastern Colombia and San Cristóbal in western Venezuela.

The festival is aimed at promoting each nation’s films in the neighbouring country, especially in border areas, and at getting nationally-made films to focus more on Latin American audiences and matters of interest to them.

The binational jury gave first prize to the film by brothers Luis and Andrés Rodríguez because it was “the best film presented, area by area, due to…the original approach to the subject, the screenplay, and the noteworthy acting,” one of the jury members, Venezuelan filmmaker Rodolfo Cova, told IPS.

In the first edition of the festival held in 2012 in this border area crossed by the Andes mountains, first prize went to the Colombian film “Todos tus muertos” (All Your Dead Ones) by Carlos Moreno, about the political violence plaguing the poor rural population in the civil war-torn country.

This time, the prize went to a Venezuelan film, “not because of a principle of rotation, but because the jury analysed what it found to be the best film, just like a festival on music would select a bolero regardless of whether it came from Puerto Rico or Cuba,” another of the jury members, Colombian director and screenwriter Jorge Navas, told IPS.

While their film was winning the prize in San Cristóbal, the Rodríguez brothers, prolific documentary-makers who made their first incursion into the world of fiction with Brecha en el silencio, working as a team filming and directing, were presenting the movie at the Latin American Film Festival in Utrecht, Netherlands.

The film has won nearly a dozen prizes so far, in festivals in Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, Uruguay, and Egypt, and is showing at the Seattle International Film Festival, which kicked off Thursday May 16.

The Rodríguez brothers, “by combining a social focus with filmmaking, show the question of sexual abuse as part of the reality of Latin American poverty, and as something that should be talked about so the victims can find a way to free themselves,” Rafael Pinto, one of the film’s screenwriters along with the two brothers, commented to IPS.

In the film, 19-year-old Ana (Vanessa Di Quattro), who is deaf, takes care of her younger sister and brother in one of Caracas’s poor barrios. She does not know how to read or write, and creates her own language to communicate. She hands her weekly earnings as a textile worker over to her mother Julia, who works with her.

When Julia’s violent machista husband, who works off and on as a mechanic, tries to continue the saga of abuse against his younger stepchildren, Ana makes a decision that changes the lives of the entire family.

Di Quattro, born to a Colombian mother and an Italian father in a poor Caracas neighbourhood 26 years ago, was awarded the prize for best actress at the Colombia-Venezuela festival.

Best actor went to Gustavo Angarita for his performance in the Colombian film “Sofía y el terco” (Sofía and the Stubborn Man) by Andrés Burgos – the film that won the audience award in the Colombia-Venezuela festival, just as it had at the Biarritz International Festival of Latin American Cinema in September 2012 in southern France.

In “Sofía y el terco”, Spanish actress Carmen Maura plays a 75-year-old woman who lives in a small mountain village in Colombia and whose husband’s promise to take her to the Caribbean Sea has been postponed over and over again. Finally, she decides to make her dream of seeing the sea come true on her own, and life takes on a whole new dimension along the way.

The film is “about the struggle of women to be heard,” Burgos, who adapted a novel he was writing to a screenplay, told IPS. “It’s not your traditional film, which is why we weren’t interested in sticking to the realism of a concrete Colombian town or landscape.”

The prizes for best debut film and best screenplay went to “La Playa D.C.” by Colombian filmmaker Juan Andrés Arango, with the story of Tomás (Luis Carlos Guevara), a young black man who leaves his hometown on the Pacific coast to forge a new life for himself in Bogotá.

“Like in the case of ‘Sofía y el Terco’, ‘La Playa D.C.’ uses short, unconventional, innovative scripts that are very different from commercial films, but with strongly expressive story lines,” Nava said.

The jury also chose a Colombian film to recommend for exhibition in commercial theatres in Venezuela and a Venezuelan film to be shown in Colombia.

These were the thriller “La cara oculta” (The Hidden Face) by Colombian filmmaker Andrés Baiz, the top box-office earning nationally-produced film in Colombia last year, and “El rumor de las piedras” (Rumble of the Stones) a portrait of poverty and violence in Caracas, by Venezuelan filmmaker Alejandro Bellame.

An average of 15 to 20 films are produced every year in both Colombia and Venezuela. But regardless of the commercial success achieved by some films, they are practically unknown in the neighbouring country – something the festival was set up to counteract.

It is difficult for films from either country to recoup their production costs. In Venezuela, a country of 29 million people, ”making a film can cost nine or 10 million bolivars (1.5 million dollars), and to recover that amount it would have to be seen by 12 million people, which isn’t feasible,” Cova said.

In Colombia, according to Burgos, “there are two tendencies: making commercial films, like in the case of ‘El Cartel de los Sapos’ (The Snitch Cartel – a narco crime film that followed a popular TV series and was also seen at this week’s festival), or scrambling to find the funds for making films in genres with a poor box-office performance.”

Both countries have laws to bolster national filmmaking by committing state resources to supporting the industry and ensuring that commercial theatres show local productions as well as the standard Hollywood fare.

In Venezuela, the state provides most of the funds that national filmmakers need to produce a feature-length film. And the Villa del Cine and Amazonia, a state-owned film studio and distributor, respectively, were created in 2006.

In Colombia, the state holds open competitions that award up to 400,000 dollars in funds for film production, and grants tax exemptions to encourage the participation of private companies or foment co-productions like ‘Sofia y el terco’, which also involved Peru.

Recently reconstructed Maracaná stadium in Rio de Janeiro. Credit: Governo do Rio de Janeiro CC BY 3.0

As Brazil prepares to host several sporting mega-events, human rights abuses and authoritarian interventions by the authorities are going on behind the scenes, favouring major urbanisation projects and stadium remodelling, a study says.

The state has forced almost 30,000 families across the country to leave their homes, according to the Comité Popular da Copa e das Olimpíadas (World Cup and Olympics People’s Committee), made up of around 50 social movements, researchers, NGOs and trade unions.

The Committee’s report, “Megaeventos e Violações dos Direitos Humanos no Rio de Janeiro” (Mega-events and Human Rights Abuses in Rio de Janeiro), says that in this city alone, which will host the 2016 Olympic Games, 3,000 families have already been displaced from their homes and another 7,800 are facing eviction.

The forced displacement of thousands of people and the privatisation of public areas constitute the dark side of Brazil’s sports projects, claims the study which was presented in Rio de Janeiro on Wednesday May 15.

Brazil will host the FIFA (International Federation of Association Football) World Cup, which is to be held in 12 cities, in 2014. A dress rehearsal for this will be the ninth FIFA Confederations Cup, a tournament between the top national teams from each continent, from Jun. 15-30 this year.

“Our fears are being confirmed. The benefits and social legacy that are so widely trumpeted really hide a dark legacy: an elitist, segregated and unequal society. It is a sad thing to see,” said Orlando Alves dos Santos Jr., a sociologist and urban planner and one of the study coordinators.

In the view of dos Santos Jr., a researcher at the Observatório das Metrópoles and the Institute of Urban and Regional Planning and Research at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, the multi-million dollar investments carried out under the cloak of preparations for the World Cup and the Olympic Games go beyond the scope of sports facilities and are part of a grand project of urban reform.

Interventions in cities, like evictions, are having an immense impact in terms of social exclusion, the report says.

“We show that poor people are being relocated outside the areas of investment, which are concentrated in the centre, south and north of Rio de Janeiro. These are areas where real estate has vastly increased in value,” dos Santos Jr. said.

He said the rise in housing prices has been largely based on the displacement of the poor towards the outskirts of the city.

“All this has been accompanied by a complete lack of information for the evicted families, as well as coercion, the use of violence and human rights abuses. What is happening in the city is extremely serious,” he said.

Christopher Gaffney, a U.S. geographer who studies public policies on sports and security for big events, told IPS that evictions and the privatisation of public spaces represented a great failure of democracy in this country of over 195 million people.

“The policy is a big step backwards. It represents a reversal of values that eliminates the role of government as the guarantor of essential citizen services, like housing and culture. Forced evictions are a clear violation of the right to housing. Real estate speculation is rife in Rio,” he said.

Gaffney, who is also a member of the People’s Committee and a researcher with the Observatório das Metrópoles, said that there is no “coherent practical criterion” being applied in the eviction of thousands of families, and that those affected by the policy complain of a lack of dialogue, transparency and information.

“The uncertainty associated with being made homeless creates constant panic, and terror methods are being used to expel these people from their communities at any price,” he said.

“There have been cases where families have been told they must vacate their homes, without any time for them to collect their belongings; and others where their eviction has been negotiated right alongside the bulldozers that were ready to demolish the houses. This is enormous psychological pressure,” he said.

Only a few families received a decent house after their eviction, Gaffney said. The authorities provide indemnities for expropriation that are not enough to buy a new house, or they put families into housing plans that have requirements that many of them cannot meet, such as that the head of household must have a formal sector job and a bank account.

The report argues that the real Olympic legacy in Rio de Janeiro will be that of “an even more unequal city, which will exclude thousands of families and destroy entire communities…a project that will appropriate the majority of benefits for a select few economic and social agents.”

One of the main criticisms is the privatisation of public spaces worth millions of dollars. In Rio de Janeiro, sporting facilities like the legendary Maracaná stadium are being renovated, as well as infrastructure and transport facilities, and urban remodelling projects have mushroomed.

The initial budget for investment in the city for the upcoming events has risen by 95 percent, from 1.1 billion dollars to 2.1 billion.

Construction and renovation of stadiums represent nearly 25 percent of this total. Maracaná stadium, where the finals of the 2014 World Cup will be played and where the opening ceremony for the Olympic Games will be held two years later, is the focus of controversy because it has been granted in concession to a private consortium for 35 years.

The cost of the works undertaken was 600 million dollars, compared with the 370 million dollars initially envisaged. The concession of the stadium into private hands for the first time led the public prosecutor’s office to launch an investigation into the state’s investments for the sporting mega-events.

In Gaffney’s view, the sporting facilities will be transformed from cultural spaces into consumption centres.

“Stadiums are the platforms where local culture is expressed in football. It would be virtually cultural assassination to substitute faithful, traditional fans with ‘clients’ or higher class consumers,” he said.

Moreover, the private initiative will also lead to the demolition of a major aquatic park, a public school, an athletics track and a prison, in order to build two multi-storey car parks for 2,000 vehicles, a heliport, a shopping mall and a football museum.

“This shows the vulnerability of Brazilian democracy, even as Brazil is trying to build stronger institutions. The FIFA World Cup and the Olympic Games are accelerating anti-democratic processes,” Gaffney said.

Dos Santos Jr. said that society has taken the multi-million dollar renovation passively, and that construction of the Maracaná complex “will bring about the destruction of multi-purpose facilities that were used to practise other sports.

“It will only be a space for show and a commercial centre. Athletes in other disciplines will not have a place to train. And the entrance tickets will be too expensive,” he said.

The People’s Committee intends to present its study to public authorities, FIFA, the International Olympic Committee and international organisations such as the United Nations through its Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing.

Capannori, a rural town in the Italian province of Lucca, in Tuscany, boasts a proud history. Six years ago, it became a trendsetter and leader, not just in Italy but throughout all of Europe, as the continent’s first Zero Waste town.

Today, about 3.5 million Italian citizens carefully separate their waste into coloured bags before leaving them on their doorsteps for collection. The movement has spread further, too, to other European countries.

Giorgio del Ghingaro, the mayor of Capannori (population 46,000), defines this trend as a “cultural revolution” that began with rubbish and in time went much further. Since 2007, residents of Capannori have reduced their urban waste by 30 percent as part of a Zero Waste strategy, which calls for the elimination of all superfluous waste – anything that can be recycled – by 2020.

In Capannori, they are determined to meet this deadline. “Zero waste by 2020 is no utopia,” Del Ghingaro told IPS. “It is a concrete goal that we intend to achieve”.

Initially, the project looked quite ambitious. Its model was that of San Francisco, California, which differs from the Tuscan town in size and conformation. Nevertheless, Capannori’s midterm goal of recycling 75 percent of waste by 2015 was met long in advance; the town currently recycles 82 percent.

After Capannori tested door-to-door collection methods in one part of the town, successfully increasing waste recycling from 30 to 70 percent, “we decided to embark in the zero waste adventure”, Del Ghingaro said.

Locals leading the charge

Since then, Capannori’s waste management has become a model for all of Europe. Joan Marc Simon, executive director of Zero Waste Europe and European coordinator of the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, confirms that the Zero Waste strategy came to Spain through the Italian experience.

“When it comes to waste, Italy has given the best and worst examples. But if you look at the good practices…Italy, and Capannori in particular, was definitely the model to follow,” Simon said.

Since 2008, one hundred cities in Spain, all concentrated in Catalonia and the Basque Country, have adopted the strategy. “Southern Europe is giving a lesson on how things can and should be done in a more sustainable way,” Simon stressed.

Rossano Ercolini, Capannori resident, primary school teacher and environmental activist who is the winner of the Goldman Prize for the environment, knows well how local experience can serve the rest of Europe. After all, he is the man who introduced the Zero Waste strategy to Italy – and Europe.

It all started in 1997, when construction plans for an incinerator near the town encountered firm opposition. Ercolini, who is also president of Zero Waste Europe and of Ambiente e Futuro (Environment and Future), a local environmental movement, was part of it.

“Ambiente e Futuro engaged in a strong fight against this proposal,” he explained. Key to the movement’s success was “informing the population about the risks of incineration and offering them a viable alternative. Without the citizens’ commitment, none of this would be possible.”

In introducing the alternative method of separate collection, “we held assemblies…to explain the new system and to hear people’s doubts and concerns,” Ercolini recounted. “We worked together to find solutions.”

Luigi, 67, has lived in Capannori for over 40 years. “People always find a reason to complain,” he said of the door-to-door collection system. “But honestly, I find the system quite easy.” Residents are given different rubbish bins and coloured bags, along with an informational flyer. “If you get it wrong, they just leave a note explaining why they could not collect your bag”.

Indeed, the town decided to avoid fines, so as not to penalise residents for mistakes, and to reward residents instead. Beginning in January, they introduced something called an R-feed waste system.

“Every family has been given a fixed number of gray bags… for non-recyclable waste, with a code on it. The garbage collector has a reader which stores the data so that every family will pay waste tax according to how much non-recyclable rubbish they produced throughout the year,” Del Ghingaro explained.

Targeting the source

Zero Waste does not mean just door-to-door separate collection. It also requires a series of parallel actions aimed at reducing the production of avoidable waste. “We strongly focused on water,” Del Ghingaro told IPS. “Buying water at the supermarket means also buying a lot of plastic. Therefore we made a strong campaign in order to enhance the use of public water.”

Fifteen public water springs were restored and purified, and plastic bottles have been banned from all schools and public buildings, which now use only public water.

For now, Ercolini’s task is to analyse the 18 percent of rubbish that still requires traditional waste management and find a solution. The results so far show that the main problem lies at the roots of the production chain. “Companies need to take responsibility for what they put on the market and redesign their products in order to make them sustainable,” he says.

Following a letter of concern that the Capannori Municipality wrote to the coffee giant Lavazza, the company started a pilot project to substitute standard non-recyclable coffee capsules for espresso machines with new, reusable ones. “We are also studying a way to use the coffee grounds to grow mushrooms,” Ercolini added.

Zero Waste Europe’s Simon told IPS that he is optimistic and convinced that the Zero Waste strategy could become the standard for waste management. Indeed the EU, through the Roadmap to a Resource Efficient Strategy, has already established that by 2020 all European countries must stop using incinerators to burn anything that can be recycled.

“Our movement is nothing but the vanguard of what…needs to become the norm,” Simon concluded.

Mandeep Tiwana, policy and advocacy manager of CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation. Credit: Mandeep Tiwana

Despite the tall talk at the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid and Development Effectiveness in Busan, South Korea, today NGOs, trade unions, faith based groups, social movements and community based organisations working to expose rights violations and corruption remain in a state of siege in many parts of the world.

Reports by U.N. officials and respected civil society organisations show that false prosecutions and murderous attacks on activists are rife and threatening to derail international development objectives even as we debate a new framework to replace the Millennium Development Goals, which expire in 2015.

In fact, moves are being championed by some governments to limit civil society participation at high-level meetings of the U.N. General Assembly through a process whereby states can issue politically motivated objections to the inclusion of particular NGOs in key discussions.

Unfortunately, legal restrictions on free speech, formation of civic organisations and the right to protest peacefully appear to be on the rise despite the rhetoric of engaging civil society in global decision making forums.

In many countries civil society groups are being prevented from accessing funding from international sources, as highlighted by the U.N.’s special expert on freedom of assembly and association in his latest report.

In Russia, non-profit advocacy groups receiving international funding are being subjected to intrusive inspections to ensure compliance with a controversial law that requires NGOs to register under the highly offensive nomenclature of “foreign agents”, or face sanctions.

A draft law currently pending in Bangladesh seeks to implement a cumbersome approval process for civil society organisations receiving foreign funding, in an attempt to discourage criticism of the government.

Egypt is mulling over a new law that would allow intelligence and security agencies to exert control over independent civil society groups.

Meanwhile, Ethiopia’s most prolific blogger is serving an 18-year sentence for writing about the implications of the Arab Spring for his country. A respected Laotian activist is missing after he criticised state-sponsored displacement of local communities.

In Saudi Arabia, founders of the Saudi Association for Civil and Political Rights have been handed 10 and 11-year sentences for “breaking allegiance to the King.” China continues to incarcerate dissident writers calling for democratic reform, including Nobel Peace Laureate Liu Xiobo.

The situation is alarming in fragile and conflict-affected states. As the civil war rages on in Syria, a number of peaceful civil society activists and journalists are being imprisoned and persecuted in violation of international human rights law.

The actions of Colombian right-wing paramilitary groups have become so murderous that the country is now the deadliest place in the world for trade unionists.

Women’s rights activists challenging patriarchy and religious fundamentalism in Pakistan are gunned down with frightening regularity, while activists from Sri Lanka and Bahrain voicing concerns at the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva often face reprisals upon return to their home countries.

In Cameroon and Uganda activists seeking to advance gay rights are not only socially ostracised but also subjected to death threats on a regular basis to prevent them from carrying out their work.

Even in so-called mature democracies, expressing dissent remains an activity fraught with negative consequences. A section of the environmental group Forest Ethics Canada decided to give up its charitable status, including tax advantages, in order to protect itself from intrusive inspections after being blamed by the conservative government of “obstructing” the country’s economic development.

Julian Assange, founder of the activist website WikiLeaks, continues to be hounded for his exposé of U.S. diplomatic cables and, arguably, doing what most investigative journalists do.

In the United Kingdom, the practice of police spies penetrating the environmental movement has prompted a sharp rebuke from the U.N., whose expert on freedom of assembly and association, Maina Kiai, expressed “deep concern” in January about police officers infiltrating non-violent groups who were not engaged in any criminal activities.

As evidence from CIVICUS’ State of Civil Society Report 2013 shows, promises made in Busan about creating an “enabling” environment for CSOs were ignored as soon as the proverbial ink had dried.

With discussions on the post 2015 development agenda well underway, influential civil society groups are urging the U.N.’s High Level Panel to explicitly recognise the centrality of an enabling environment for civil society in any new formulation of internationally agreed development goals.

While politicians are currently preoccupied with kick-starting or maintaining economic growth, there is a real danger that civil society’s right and ability to engage decision makers in various forums will be further limited.

If global development goals are to succeed, civil society needs to be able to operate free from fear of reprisals for advancing legitimate if uncomfortable concerns. After all, civil society groups contribute substantially to development strategies and help find innovative solutions to complex developmental challenges.

More importantly, they help ensure the representation of a wide range of voices, in particular those of the vulnerable and marginalised in development debates. Perhaps this is why they are being persecuted.

(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

The spoon-billed sandpiper (Eurynorhynchus pygmeus), seen here in Phetchaburi, Thailand, could be extinct within a decade. Credit: J.J. Harrison/cc by 3.0

Migratory birds, which play an important role in the complex web of life known as ecosystem services, are under threat as never before, with some species facing extinction within the next decade.

Ahead of the International Day for Biological Diversity on May 22, focused this year on water resources, experts are calling for greater international cooperation to find sustainable and cost-effective solutions to the problem of species loss and environmental degradation.

“Both water management boundaries and ecosystems rarely conveniently align with geopolitical boundaries,” notes the report Natural Solutions for Water Security, published by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).

According to Francisco Rilla, information and capacity building officer at the Convention on Migratory Species (CMS), an intergovernmental treaty signed in 1979 in Bonn, Germany, “The ‘Big Five’ primary causes of biodiversity loss … are habitat destruction, overharvesting and poaching, pollution, climate change and introduction of invasive species.”

Migratory species are especially vulnerable “as they depend entirely on a network of well-functioning ecosystems to refuel, reproduce and survive in every ‘station’ they visit and upon unrestricted travel,” Rilla told IPS.

The U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) notes that many migrating birds, such as cranes, storks, shorebirds and eagles, travel thousands of kilometres across flyways that span countries, continents and even the entire globe.

These birds use wetlands to rest, feed and breed along their migration routes.

However, “half of the world’s wetlands – natural water storage systems – have been lost over the past century,” Nick Nuttall, UNEP spokesperson, told IPS.

Because of the degradation of their habitats, some migratory bird species could lose up to nine percent of their populations, while others, like the spoon-billed sandpiper, could become extinct within a decade, leading to further ecosystem changes and ultimately impacting on human development.

Putting a price on biodiversity loss

In a statement ahead of World Migratory Bird Day on May 11-12, UNEP executive director Achim Steiner underlined that migratory birds “are part of the web of life that underpins nature’s multi-trillion-dollar ecosystem services,” which are the benefits and resources that nature offers to humankind. 

“[Migratory birds’] contribution to ecosystem services is increasingly starting to be measured in monetary terms,” Rilla told IPS.

In March 2007, at the request of the Group of Eight largest economies along with several developing countries, UNEP started an initiative called ‘The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity’ (TEEB), aiming at studying the economic benefits of biodiversity and incorporating them into policy-making.

As an example of TEEB’s implementation, Nuttall explained how UNEP assisted Kenya in 2012 to calculate the economic value of the ecosystem services generated by the Mau forest northwest of the capital Nairobi.

The overall value was assessed at 1.5 billion dollars a year, a consideration that led to the restoration of the forest, as well as of other ecosystems supplying water to Kenyan cities.

The advantages of using natural infrastructure like forests and wetlands instead of human-built infrastructure, such as dams, pipelines, water treatment plants and drainage systems, are highlighted in CBD’s report.

For example, strengthened coastal ecosystems can function as buffer zones that protect coastal communities from storms; rehabilitating soil biodiversity and functions can enhance water availability to crops and hence improve food security; restoring forests can reduce erosion risks and help deliver better quality water.

This approach, known as “Ecosystem-based Adaptation” (EbA), which integrates biodiversity and ecosystem services in climate change adaptation strategies – though cheaper and more sustainable than building new artificial infrastructure – is still under-utilised, says the report.

Agricultural activities, which alone account for approximately 70 percent of global water use, could apply a similar approach.

“More sustainable forms of farming can … address water issues while enhancing biodiversity,” Nuttall told IPS. “A survey of thousands of small scale farmers in Africa by UNEP and the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development found that those who had switched to organic or near organic production had seen yields on average climb by 100 percent, in part because returning organic matter to the soils had increased water retention of the soil – like a sponge – and prolonged the growing season.”

Governance matters

“We live in an increasingly water-insecure world,” stresses the CBD report.

Although there is no global water scarcity as such, there is an imbalance in its regional distribution, with only 12 percent of the world’s population consuming 85 percent of the available water.

Sound governance and equity in the distribution of water-derived benefits seem therefore important questions in the debate.

Asked by IPS about sustainable water management strategies in South Asia, one of the most water-scarce regions of the world, Michael Kugelman, senior programme associate for South and Southeast Asia at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, cited resource mismanagement as a root cause of problems.

He stressed the lack of interregional cooperation in the area, as well as of understanding of the connections between ecosystem protection and water resources.

“I think that at a government level that linkage is not made at all,” he said, “There are a lot of environmental NGOs that are bringing attention to these issues. … In some ways governments will take the lead from the NGO community.”

Water cooperation in South Asia is limited to some bilateral initiatives, such as the Indus Water Treaty between India and Pakistan.

At a global level, the main mechanisms dealing with biodiversity and water management are the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands (signed in 1971 in Ramsar, Iran) and the above-mentioned CBD, which was created at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and in 2010 adopted its Strategic Plan for Biodiversity for the period 2011-2020.

The United Nations declared 2013 the International Year of Water Cooperation.

The view from the Al-Qatrawani shrine, a stop along the Sufi Trail in the village of 'Atara in the West Bank. Credit: Jillian Kestler-D'Amours/IPS

A reddish-brown dome sits atop an ancient stone house, used hundreds of years ago for prayer. It peeks out from the surrounding trees as the rolling green valleys and hills of the central West Bank stretch out into the distance.

This shrine, known as the Al-Khawass shrine, sits 540 metres above sea level in the Palestinian village of Deir Ghassaneh. It is one of several stops along the Sufi trail, which begins in the valley below and takes visitors and locals alike back in time to when Sufism, a mystical form of Islam, was widespread in the area.

“I want foreigners to know Palestinian culture, our culture. And I want Palestinians to take [steadfastness] from it. This is your home. Be proud of the land, of the homeland,” explained Rafat Jamil, director of tours and a guide at the Rozana Association.

Based in the West Bank town of Birzeit, near Ramallah, Rozana works to restore and refurbish historical Palestinian buildings and strengthen Palestinian cultural heritage. The organisation also established three Sufi trails in the central and northern West Bank.

Participants on the one-day hikes along these trails see half a dozen shrines along the way and take in the distinct landscape of the area. Markers painted every 30 to 40 metres in the colours of the Palestinian flag – red, green, white – tell hikers they’re on the right path.

The West Bank has about 600 Sufi shrines, including some that date back over 800 years, according to Jamil. Many were built during periods of Mamluk and Ottoman rule over historic Palestine.

“There is a struggle over history. For the Israelis, nothing is Palestinian, just Jewish and Israeli. The idea is to get people to talk about the history of Palestine, and want to see shrines or old homes from the Roman and Byzantine and Ottoman periods,” Jamil told IPS.

“Israelis say that all the culture here is theirs. But when people come, they see something else.”

Alternative tourism in Palestine is not a new phenomenon. Dozens of organisations lead tours in the West Bank and Jerusalem, including political day trips, homestays with Palestinian families, olive harvesting, and arts and cultural heritage festivals.

But the gradual expansion and development of walking paths in the occupied territories is something that Palestinians hope will draw them both tourism and international support.

“We want to bring tourism to areas that never had tourism and bring a good economic impact to the community,” explained Michel Awad, executive director and co-founder of the Siraj Centre, a non-profit tour operator based in Beit Sahour, near Bethlehem.

If people spend more time in the Palestinian territories, “they will leave with a real understanding of the Palestinian cause and become advocates for justice in their countries”, Awad added.

The Siraj Centre organizes walking, biking and political tours for international visitors throughout the West Bank. These include the Nativity Trail, a path winding from Nazareth to Bethlehem thought to follow in the footsteps of Jesus’ parents, Joseph and Mary, or the Abraham Paths, spanning about 170 kilometres from Nablus to Hebron.

Awad told IPS that Israeli tour operators handle most religious pilgrimage tours – a booming business in the Holy Land – even if these tours go to sites in Palestinian areas. Tourists often visit holy sites in Bethlehem, only to return at night to Israeli-run hotels in Jerusalem, for example.

As a result, community-based tourism is an alternative to these religious tours and plays to Palestinians’ strengths. Israelis can’t compete because these hikes encompass much more than just a walking tour, Awad said. “It’s meeting the community and meeting families. It’s totally different.”

Palestinian village and town councils provide input and direction for Siraj Centre’s walking tours, and families regularly host participants for lunch or overnight stays. Families that cook lunch for participants during weekly walking excursions, for instance, receive 40 Israeli shekels per person they host.

“Our aim is to create a new experiential tourism in Palestine that allows travellers to experience Palestinian hospitality and encounter the many landscapes. We want to create a new type of tourism that is in touch with local communities and brings benefits to the rural areas directly,” Awad said.

From January to June 2012, approximately 3.5 million visits were made to tourist sites in the occupied Palestinian territories (OPT), according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, and most visits took place in the Bethlehem governorate.

But hiking in Palestine does more than just generate tourism.

“We love the landscape: the stones, the trees, everything. It is a breath of fresh air, literally,” said Bassam Al Mohor, a photographer and member of Shat-ha hiking collective, based in Ramallah.

Each Friday, Shat-ha organises hikes in different areas of the West Bank, and occasionally to places inside Israel, Jordan, or abroad. The hikes are not difficult, free of charge, and generally last from the early morning to early afternoon.

The group tends to target local Palestinians, although international visitors are welcome, as it aims to connect Palestinian city-dwellers with their counterparts in rural villages and towns, strengthening the bonds between people and their homeland.

“The landscape in the West Bank is shrinking, vanishing, dying slowly. It’s mainly because of the occupation. If we come close to settlements, we risk being attacked. It’s really sad to see tracks that we’ve been walking nicely suddenly off limits for us,” Al Mohor explained.

“But when you walk and see old stone houses or terraces or old towns, as a traveller, what first attracts you is that heritage. We never knew that nature could be like this. You can lose yourself in this.”

A Congolese man transports charcoal on his bicycle outside Lubumbashi in the DRC. Credit: Miriam Mannak/IPS

With casualties in the long-running conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) now surpassing every conflict since World War II, U.S. policymakers and advocates are stepping up campaigns to raise awareness and push legislation aimed at encouraging new negotiations, assisting in government reforms, and pressuring the neighbouring countries that have propped up the DRC’s government.

Some advocates say the situation today could be better than at any time in recent years for a durable peace process.

The U.S. House of Representatives is currently preparing to consider a bipartisan bill, unanimously passed by a subcommittee Wednesday, aimed at supporting international efforts to forge a peace deal in the long-running crisis in Congo.

The bill is an “important step forward in raising awareness within the U.S. Congress and among all Americans of this horrific and tragic crisis in the DRC,” Representative Karen Bass, one of the bill’s lead authors, told IPS.

“To date, this legislation has the support of nearly 60 Democrats and Republicans in the House and efforts are currently underway to introduce a similar piece of legislation in the Senate. It has also received significant support from the NGO community.”

Supporters say they expect that number to increase.

Recent months have also seen a strengthening of advocacy on the part of the Congolese diaspora here in Washington, as well as from the rest of the country and Canada. Legislators say this support has been key in helping the House bill gain the legislative backing it has.

One element of the new bill would respond to a longstanding key demand, urging the creation of a special envoy from the president to the DRC and the surrounding Great Lakes region.

“This legislation calls for such an envoy, and Secretary [John] Kerry, in testimony before both the House and the Senate, has indicated his plan to make an appointment,” Bass said.

“I am pleased that this effort is making progress and urge the secretary to move swiftly to make his decision and develop a comprehensive strategy that relies on diplomacy and engagement to address the complex set of issues that stand as barriers to peace and stability in the DRC and the region.”

Conflict-free consumerism

The war in Congo has been running for almost two decades, taking the lives of nearly six million people as several peace processes have failed. Militias engaged in the war have often used rape and sexual violence as a tool of repression and intimidation.

The economics of the mineral trade have also defined this struggle, with armed groups having been able to control mines and trading routes to prop up their actions.

“DRC is potentially one of the world’s wealthiest nations, but has been unable to unlock the potential of the riches above and below the soil due to the ongoing conflict there,” Sasha Lezhnev, a senior policy analyst at the Enough Project, a Washington advocacy group that published a new report on the DRC today, told IPS.

“However, a couple of different policy windows have created the space for a peace process that today has a better chance of success than anytime in the last decade.”

Lezhnev refers to the recent emergence of international pressure on Congo’s neighbouring states – particularly Rwanda – for supporting armed groups within eastern Congo. The World Bank has now withheld 135 million dollars from Rwanda for this reason, and there has likewise been pressure on the Congo to enact greater transparency reforms.

In addition, U.N. Special Envoy to Africa Mary Robinson has been working to establish a more comprehensive and inclusive peace process that addresses the core drivers of violence in the DRC. In February, she and 11 African heads of state established a diplomatic framework to identify reforms that would enable Rwanda, Congo and Uganda to cooperate on the extraction and export of minerals.

“This is a first step, but we think this provides a good roadmap for where we think this peace process should go,” Lezhnev said.

“What needs to happen now is Mary Robinson needs to lead regional negotiations between Uganda, Rwanda and the Congo on economic, refugee and security issues so that all these interests can be put on the table and can be worked out in a transparent and legitimate way.”

Also helping to break the link between the armed groups and the minerals that have in part funded them is new U.S. legislation, enacted over the past year as part of comprehensive financial legislation known as the Dodd-Frank Act. A section of this law targets so-called “conflict minerals”, and is reported to have brought about a 65-percent drop in profits for armed groups from tin, tungsten and tantalum this year.

“The Dodd-Frank Act has resulted in armed groups and their supporters finding it significantly more difficult to profit from an illicit trade, and so there is an opportunity to take advantage of these changing incentives and create structures for legitimate cooperation,” Lezhnev says.

“This shows there is a growing global consumer movement against conflict minerals, and conflict-free products have created new momentum to say that enough is enough when it comes to buying untraceable minerals and turning a blind eye.”

Temporary window

A further sign of the weakening of the armed groups is the sight of one of the chief Rwandan warlords, Bosco “The Terminator” Ntaganda, sitting in The Hague at the International Criminal Court (ICC) after he turned himself in to law enforcement in Rwanda in March. Analysts say this turn of events has weakened his militia, known as the M23, and increased opportunities for peace.

Meanwhile, countries around the world have increasingly taken notice of the trade and investment opportunities throughout Africa, resulting in greater levels of engagement. However, groups like the Enough Project warn this policy window will not remain open indefinitely.

“We call on the Obama administration to deploy a high-level envoy and to work with Mary Robinson,” Lezhnev said.

“The administration needs to help shape this process, to incentivise the economic cooperation between the countries of the region by setting up a responsible investment initiative for working with the tech companies, metals companies and responsible investors to identify gaps and opportunities for investing in a conflict-free environment.”

Next week, World Bank President Jim Kim and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon are slated to travel to Congo and the region.