Reporters say journalism is "not more fun" in the Philippines. Credit: Keith Bacongco/CC-BY-2.0

By Dennis Engbarth
MANILA, May 10 2012 (IPS)

Reporters working in the Philippines, the world’s third most dangerous nation for journalists, are having difficulty identifying with the “It’s More Fun in the Philippines” tourism promotion campaign launched by the Liberal Party-led government of President Benigno Aquino III.

The Southeast Asian nation’s reputation for press freedom and safety has yet to recover from the notorious Ampatuan Massacre of Nov. 23, 2009 in Maguindanao, Mindanao, in which 58 persons, including 32 reporters, were slaughtered by the private army of a local political clan chief, Andal Ampatuan Sr.

A total of 196 persons have been charged in the massacre, including clan patriarch Andal and his grandson, Anwar Ampatuan Jr, but less than 100 have been arrested and not a single one convicted of any crimes.

While the government attempts to paint over the tragedy with billboards proclaiming the joys of holidaying in the Philippines, media workers are continuing the fight for accountability.

A formal statement issued by the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP) to mark World Press Freedom Day on May 3 declared, “There is little reason for celebration since not a single mastermind in any of the 152 murders of journalists since 1986 has been arrested, prosecuted and convicted.”

Most of these killings occurred during the nine years of rule from 2001 to 2010 under former president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who is now in detention on charges of electoral sabotage, but at least 12 have occurred in the past two years under the Aquino administration.

“Murders of media workers, just like all other extrajudicial killings, are a matter of State accountability,” declared the NUJP. “If the Philippine press remains free despite all the threats against it, it is not because of the government but because the press insists on being free.”

Nevertheless, the presidential office in the Malacañang Palace publically marked the country’s improved ranking in the annual Freedom of the Press index, published by the Washington-based human rights advocacy group Freedom House on May 1.

The index cited a reduction in violence against journalists, attempts by the government to address impunity and expanded diversity in media ownership among its reasons for the improved rating.

Communications Development Secretary Ramon Carandang acknowledged on May 2 that “more needs to be done”, but stated that the improved ranking had recognised the Philippine government’s attempts to strengthen press freedom.

On the following day, presidential spokesman Edwin Lacierda vowed that the Aquino administration would not tolerate extralegal killings, especially attacks on journalists.

Beneath the façade

NUJP Vice Chair Joseph Alwyn Alburo disputed the presidential spin on press freedom during an interview with IPS.

“After the Ampatuan Massacre, there has been no improvement on the issue of journalist killings or in the overall plight of journalists in our country,” he said.

Alburo told IPS that 124 Filipino journalists have been killed on the job since the end of the former dictatorship of the late Ferdinand Marcos in 1986, but only 10 of those cases have been solved.

“We are one year away from mid-term legislative and local elections next May and, based on our information, the family that perpetrated the (2009) massacre still have relatives in power and are still amassing private armies even as their patriarch and other senior clan members are facing trial,” he added.

“The Philippines has the (unfortunate) distinction of being rated the third most dangerous country for journalists, behind Iraq and Somalia and the only one of the three which is a democracy. Nov. 23 has been designated as the World Day Against Impunity, but the current president (has not even blinked) an eye about the impact of these notorious distinctions on our country.”

“It is with great sadness that I say things are not going to improve because all the factors that give rise to a culture of impunity are still present. Journalists in this country are still very much in danger.”

Another channel for powerful politicians and tycoons to restrict media freedom is through frequent filing of criminal libel charges against journalists, he said. The NUJP and other media unions and associations are currently leading the movement to decriminalise these charges.

Significantly, on Jan. 28, the Geneva-based United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) resolved that the laws in the Philippines that criminalise libel are incompatible with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).

The decision came in response to an appeal by Davao broadcaster Alex Adonis, who was jailed from 2007-2008 for reporting correctly that a leading local politician had been caught in bed with his alleged mistress by the latter’s husband.

Another major concern for reporters is the concentration of media ownership. Alburo confirmed that NUJP is “closely watching” the widely reported drive by First Pacific Group Chief Executive Officer Manuel Pangilinan to acquire the television network ‘GMA 7’ for approximately 1.2 billion dollars.

The businessman already owns one TV network, telecommunication and power utilities and shares in three major newspapers.

“Such a concentration (of the media) often compromises journalist ethics and editorial independence,” Alburo said.

NUJP aims to “jump start” campaigns to stop the killing of journalists, push for the decriminalisation of libel against journalists and promote passage of a robust Freedom of Information Act in May, when the UNHRC is conducting a review of the Philippines’ human rights record under the ICCPR.

The NUJP and other newspaper, television and broadcast journalist unions held a meeting on May 3, which resulted in the ‘Manila Declaration on Media Workers’ Rights and Welfare’, to be used as a platform for future unity and campaigns.

Despite a pervasive mood that there is very little to celebrate, over 40 NUJP members gathered at the fifth consecutive annual ‘Press Jam’ to commemorate World Press Freedom Day at the Skarlet Jazz Club in Quezon City on the evening of May 2.

“It has always been a trait of Filipinos to be able to laugh amidst very serious situations and troubles, so we hold a Press Jam (where) we can sing and be carefree for at least one night,” said Alburo.

Still, the festivities were not completely lighthearted; the event featured drawings by the children of journalists who were murdered in the Ampatuan Massacre and other incidents.

The artwork expressed the fear and sadness that still surrounds the tragedy, such as a drawing with the plaintive question, ‘Why is Daddy sleeping so long?’

On an ironic poster asking ‘Is it more fun in the Philippines to be a journalist?’ one NUJP member wrote, ‘Yes, you feel like a survivor all the time’.

Another pundit had added, ‘With criminal libel, 152 killed since 1986, what more can you ask for?’

A more hopeful note was stuck by one NUJP member, who wrote, ‘Yes, so much to write about, so much to change’.

Lingering violence, intolerance and oppression in Tunisia, following the ousting of former dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in January 2011, tells the revolutionaries who sparked the Arab Spring that their work is just beginning.

With extremist violence on the rise, many Tunisians believe the revolution never ended, and that a second wave of protest is not far off. Credit: scossargilbert/CC-BY-2.0

Islamic fundamentalists represented by Salafists have presented themselves as the biggest challenge to Tunisian democracy.

By sanctioning and inciting violence against more progressive forces in the country, they are filling the cultural and political vacuum left by Ben Ali, whose regime effectively shackled freedom of expression, especially among the youth.

On Apr. 21 and 22, Jawhar Ben M’barek, the speaker for the social democratic group Doustourna, was violently assaulted by fanatics in the southern towns of Douz and Souk El Ahad, with the perpetrators going so far as to call for his death.

An undefined group of Salafists and others, acting in the name of ‘Muslim identity’, are responsible for these acts of aggression, which are becoming increasingly commonplace as traditionalists try desperately to steer the country’s post-revolutionary development with conservative reins.

Adnan Hajji, a member of the national trade union UGTT and former coordinator of the upheaval in the Gafsa mines in 2008, told IPS that “the situation is blocked because this government doesn’t want to listen and to negotiate with representatives of the different regions or with the “outraged”. The police are aggressive; the Salafists, supported by the (recently elected Islamist) Ennahda party, attack the media and civil society activists,” he lamented.

“You cannot yet call this a revolution, because it did not go till the end. It was an upheaval and we are going to have a second one.”

Freedom for all, or freedom for none

Tunisia has long boasted a very progressive family code and Tunisian women are seen as some of the most liberated in the region.

Now these freedoms are at risk, with Salafists clamouring for a return to a more “traditional” society.

“The way Tunisian society is evolving is worrisome because some are trying to impose limits to individual freedoms. The biggest threat is the expression of violence,” Tunisian filmmaker Salma Baccar, currently in Geneva to chair the International Oriental Film Festival, told IPS.

“The situation of women is not isolated from… society as a whole. If we manage to strike a balance between those who want the veil and those who don’t, those who want to drink alcohol and those who don’t, then we will have an equilibrated society where everybody can exercise his or her rights.”

The renowned artist – whose movie ‘Fatma 19’ has been censored for 36 years because it attributed Tunisian women’s progressive status not to the statesman Habib Burguiba but to a long cultural evolution – had never before been tempted by politics.

In February 2011, when 280,000 sub-Saharan African migrants fled worn-torn Libya to seek refuge in southern Tunisia, she decided to build a “cultural tent” to play music and movies, for which she was assaulted by the Islamic fundamentalist Salafists.

It was then that she realised that culture needed to go hand in hand with politics. She joined the Democratic Pole and in October 2011 was elected to the constitutional assembly.

She considers the progressive status of Tunisian women to be “irreversible”, but admits to being “a bit worried” by the situation in the country, particularly after Ennahda won the constitutional assembly elections.

“But you cannot stop history. Our real gain is the mentality of the people, not the laws. If a woman wants to wear a veil, or even a niqab, she is free to do it as long as she is an adult. For secular people like me, accepting (that) is a good exercise in democracy. But imposing it on children is a completely different story. And if someone physically assaults me in the name of his ideas, then it is not acceptable any more.”

Baccar says she would like to see another revolution, but a cultural one this time.

“The worst aspect of Ben Ali’s regime was that it deprived people of culture and education.”

Because this fundamental right was violated for so long, young people today are starting to express themselves exclusively through violence. Most of those who resort to aggression and attacks come from neglected regions and impoverished neighbourhoods, she added.

For her, these “cultural losers” are the biggest problem in today’s Tunisia, more of a liability than the 800,000 unemployed. Even the youngsters who went to colleges and universities were not truly educated – rather, their minds were emptied of any form of free expression, and some have turned into fanatics.

“This (was) Ben Ali’s worst crime against our society and remedying it will be a long term task.” She warned that society should also keep a close watch on primary schools, where many children are indoctrinated with reactionary ideas at a very early stage.

“In some maternal schools, mothers are encouraged to veil their daughters. That is where the fight starts: we have to invest in childhood and in the youngsters,” she stressed.

Ennahda’s limitations

For Hajji, nothing has changed since January 14, 2011, the legendary day when Ben Ali was forced to flee the country. In fact, things are actually getting worse, “which is normal after an upheaval where people are allowed to speak out for the first time; but something must be done to cool down a social situation that has been rotting since independence.”

“This government doesn’t know where it is going,” he complained. The constitutional assembly, which was supposed to complete its work by March 2013, has to act quickly.

“Ennahda doesn’t have a clear social or economic programme. They have never dealt with economic issues, never supported any social movement. I personally negotiate with the government and I can see how scared they are of taking any decision.”

The lack of a strict time frame within which to draft the constitution worries him, since the initial date of March 2013 has not been confirmed.

Hajji believes Ennahda is quickly losing the trust and support of its voter base. Though the party won the elections quite comfortably, only 46 percent of eligible voters turned out on polling day, while the majority abstained.

Next time around, Ennahda might not be first in line if they fail to deliver concrete solutions in the post-revolutionary period.

By Giuliana Sgrena
ALGIERS, May 8 2012 (IPS)

“Is that your photo on the poster?” a policeman asked a woman standing in front of an electoral campaign board in Algiers. “Why do you ask?” she inquired. “Because only the candidates are interested in these elections,” he replied.

The woman was Cherifa Kheddar, president of Djazairouna or ‘Our Algeria’, an association formed to support victims of terrorism. She was, in fact, proposed as a candidate for the general elections slated to be held on May 10, but refused to participate in what many commentators, citizens and activists are describing as a ‘sham’.

When Tunisia went up in flames in December 2010, the unrest quickly spread to neighbouring Algeria, where a population of 36 million people was already simmering over the lack of proper housing, rising food prices and widespread political corruption.

As polling day inches closer, many of Algeria’s 21.6 million eligible voters are expressing discontent and scepticism that elections will bring any lasting change.

Kheddar, a resident of the Islamist stronghold of Blida, located 40 kilometres from the capital city of Algiers, told IPS, “In my electoral district alone there are 44 lists for just 13 deputies.”

Anyone who wanted to be a candidate but wasn’t able to find a place on a party list simply created a new civil list and ran as an independent candidate, she added; but nobody has a clear programme of action.

A staggering 44 parties and 183 independent candidates will compete for the 462 seats in parliament, 30 percent of which are reserved for women.

Rubber stamp elections?

“These elections are just a comedy,” Djamal, a shopkeeper on the central Didouche Mourad Street, told IPS. The customers around him agreed.

“Nothing is changing, the politicians are all the same, they make promises when they want to get votes but when they are elected they (act) only on their interests,” added Sidi Ali, an unemployed youth.

“We are a rich oil country but the money is only for a few people. The majority of us are poor people – I will not vote,” he said.

Algeria is the world’s sixth largest natural gas producer, behind Russia, the United States, Canada, Iran, and Norway. A member of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), the country has raked in substantial oil revenues since 2010, but few besides the country’s elite see the benefits of this wealth.

The official unemployment rate in Algeria is 9.8 percent, a figure that rises to more than 20 percent for young people.

State officers echoed the sentiments of people in the streets – many told IPS, under condition of anonymity, they wouldn’t vote in the upcoming election.

This common feeling of apathy towards the ballot has prompted politicians to call off ill-attended meetings, while opposition rallies or assemblies draw only a handful of activists.

Many politicians have taken to holding their meetings in villages or small towns where they have a higher chance of drawing a crowd, since most people in the capital have grown indifferent to politics.

In the popular neighbourhood of Bab al Oued, a former Islamist stronghold back in the 1990s, most election propaganda has been scratched off the walls.

Election observers fear that voter turnout will not exceed the 35 percent who graced the 2007 polls.

Islamists regroup

Inspired by the success of Islamist parties in Egypt and in Tunisia, three Algerian Islamist forces merged to form the Islamic Green Alliance, a coalition comprised of the Society for Peace Movement (MPS) – an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood – Ennahda and el Islah, in the hopes of snagging a majority of the Islamic vote.

The Green Alliance has the support of numerous Gulf countries including Qatar and Saudi Arabia, as well as the Doha-based Al Jazeera broadcasting network.

But their local support base is fractured. “MPS has been in power for long time now, and is not reliable as an opposition force. I think that Abdallah Djaballah (leader of the new Islamic Justice and Development Front or JDF) is more appreciated by the (population),” sociologist Nacer Djabi told IPS.

Opposed to an alliance with MPS, Djaballah left el Islah to form the JDF, thereby weakening what would otherwise have been a united Islamic front and lessening its chances of victory at the polls.

Still, the result depends on the turnout at the ballot boxes this Thursday.

One secular party, the Rally for Culture and Democracy (RCD), has decided to boycott the elections altogether because “it is impossible to reform the system in power.”

And in an ironic twist, the party that was famous for boycotting elections in the past, the Socialist Forces Front (FFS), has announced it will run this time, “for tactical reasons,” according to its leader Hocine Ait Ahmed, who is hopeful that the presence of 500 international election observers is a step in the right direction for democracy in the country.

Mustapha Bouchachi, who served as chairman of the Algerian League for the Defence of Human Rights before heading the FFS list in Algiers, says his party rejects the system in power but “wants a peaceful change; violence does not allow us to build a democracy,” he told IPS.

Widespread corruption

A low turnout will be a disaster for the current government, the National Liberation Front (FLN) and the National Democratic Rally (RND). Both parties have thrown the full power of the state behind their electoral campaign, including the rampant use of state television and promises of distributing houses to voters.

They are not the only parties defying electoral laws and regulations. Amar Ghoul, minister of Public Works and head of the Green Alliance list in Algiers is offering ten iPads to voters who will contribute to his campaign.

Nearly 400 complaints, most of them related to the wasteful use of state resources, have been lodged at the National Independent Commission for Election Monitoring (CNISEL) since the launch of the campaign on Apr. 15.

Both the FLN and RND have been harkening back to the pre-independence period, when the FLN was instrumental in toppling French colonial rule and ushering in a ‘liberated’ Algeria; but in a country where 70 percent of the population is under the age of 30, such rhetoric pales in comparison to the harsh reality of unemployment and poverty.

Mexico city freeways. Credit: Government of Mexico City's Federal District

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, May 8 2012 (IPS)

In his book “La Ville Radieuse” (The Radiant City), architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris (1887-1965), known worldwide as Le Corbusier, proposed a city filled with skyscrapers, wide streets, cement and cars, but decorated with gardens. The Mexican capital seems to be following these principles.

In recent years the authorities in Mexico City have adopted policies that have favoured the mushrooming of apartment towers and the multiplication of automobiles – an approach that threatens long-term sustainability, according to experts.

The more than 20 million people who live in greater Mexico City face pressing problems like traffic congestion, over-exploitation of aquifers, enormous amounts of garbage, and poor air quality.

“You can’t talk about sustainable development without combining social, environmental and economic sustainability,” Sergio Martínez, an academic at the Faculty of Economics of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), told IPS. “The U.N. considers DF (the Mexico City federal district) to be a danger zone; it is shrouded in smog, and major action needs to be taken.

“There are well-designed plans for the city, but they are not implemented,” said the expert, who has studied comparative urbanisation in Mexico and China.

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) describes a sustainable city as one whose achievements in terms of social, economic and physical development are made to last, and that has a supply of environmental resources on which it draws in a sustainable fashion.

The left-wing Mexico City government has been carrying out a Green Plan since 2007 – a set of strategies based on ideas such as fomenting the use of public transport and citizen participation.

The programme arose from a “green consultation” or popular environmental referendum carried out in 2007, with questions related to transport, water and waste management. But the results have been criticised by experts.

In the view of Arnold Ricalde, the founder of Organi-K, a local NGO, the city’s most serious problems are water, waste management and mobility.

“Wells are drying up, and it is becoming necessary to drill at ever deeper levels, which worries us. It is a serious mistake, like bringing water in from the surrounding areas. We need to have a long-term vision of the entire basin,” said Ricalde.

The water supply for the metropolitan area is 67,000 cubic metres per second, of which 43,000 are taken from the Valley of Mexico aquifer, which is already overexploited, according to the National Water Commission (CONAGUA).

Water consumption in Mexico City, which has 2,500 wells, is 350 litres per person per day, one of the highest levels in Latin America.

Waste water production is 431 cubic metres per second, only six percent of which is treated. Furthermore, the aging water system leaks like a sieve, and rainwater from storm drains goes to waste.

“Environmental concerns continue to be secondary to political and economic interests. The Green Plan does not take social and economic aspects into account. Urban aspects, which need to be included in a sustainable policy, are still missing,” Martínez said.

The government of Mayor Marcelo Ebrard, of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), promotes public transport, but at the same time builds arterial roads and viaducts that foment the use of private cars. There are 4.6 million vehicles a day in circulation in the metropolitan area.

Public transport in the city includes the Metrobús rapid transit system, with four routes covering 95 km of dedicated bus lanes.

A new 24-km line is also being built for the city’s subway system, which already has 11 lines. It will connect the east and west of the city, and is expected to start operating this year.

Bicycles have also received attention from the authorities. Ecobici, a bike-sharing programme, got under way in 2010, and has an average of 30,000 users a day with 1,200 bikes available at 90 stations.

“The policy is contradictory. Mobility is declining and building more roads does not solve the problem. More roads just mean more traffic. Private vehicles should be restricted. We do not understand how public and alternative transport can be promoted on the one hand, while on the other, viaducts are being built that encourage the opposite,” said Ricalde.

In the last few years, many people have started to grow vegetables or ornamental plants on the rooftops of condominium and apartment buildings, as well as vertical gardens or “living walls”, usually on the first few floors of the buildings.

Urban agriculture, which has flourished for decades in the south of Mexico City, is growing, and providing the city with more and more fresh produce.

Since Bordo Poniente, the capital’s largest garbage dump, was closed down in December, waste management has become a more challenging problem. Mexico City produces 12,600 tonnes a day of solid waste.

Of this amount, 3,000 tonnes are used to make compost, 800 tonnes are recycled, including plastic bottles, cardboard and metals, and 600 tonnes are converted into alternative fuels, according to the city secretariat of works and services.

The sustainability of the Mexican capital will be one of the biggest challenges for the next mayor, to be elected Jul. 1 and to take office in December.

However, the issue is completely marginal to the political platforms of the main contenders, Miguel Mancera of the PRD, and Beatriz Paredes of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

“None of the candidates views the issue holistically; they just brush the surface,” said Ricalde, whose organisation carries out projects to foster environmental responsibility, the use of eco-friendly technologies, recycling, and reforestation, and to change consumption habits.

“The path to sustainability begins with cultural change. It is a way of life that requires a complete re-orientation of the entire lifestyle, and it is not going to be achieved just by using recycled paper or driving a hybrid car,” Martínez concluded.

By Dennis Engbarth
MANILA, May 7 2012 (IPS)

The exclusion of certified labour union delegates from the official opening ceremony of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) meeting here on May 4 revealed a wide gap between the Manila-based development bank’s promises and practices on labour rights.

Over 70 members of the Global Union Federations (GUFs) held a silent protest at the official opening ceremony of the annual meeting of ADB governors at the Philippine International Convention Centre (PICC), after being prevented by police from entering the complex even though they were all certified delegates.

The delegates were mostly members of unions affiliated with the GUF, such as the Public Services International (PSI), the Building and Wood Workers International (BWI), the Union Network International (UNI) and the International Transport Federation (ITF).

Of the record 5,033 participants in the Manila assembly, 452 delegates represented civil society organisations, including trade unions, also a record turnout according to ADB data.

Unionists had originally intended to hold a silent protest within the plenary hall, but were prevented from entering the convention centre by security guards of Philippine President Benigno Aquino, who attended and delivered an address at the ceremony along with ADB President Haruhiko Kuroda.

“ADB officials later allowed us to enter since we were all delegates, but we had to walk around the PICC and by the time we got to the reception hall, the ceremony was over,” Laksmi Vaidhiyanathan, regional secretary of PSI told IPS.

“We were very unhappy, but they were probably doing this because of the president’s security,” observed Vaidhiyanathan, who added that union delegates planned to write a collective letter of protest to the ADB president, calling on the regional bank to “walk the talk” and “respect workers’ rights.”

Participants in the protest wore white T-shirts bearing the “Global Unions” logo and sported red and white headbands with the slogans, “ADB, Respect Workers’ Rights” and “ADB, Promote Pro-Poor, Pro- Worker Growth.”

Ironically, the delegates had worn similar headbands during a dialogue meeting held between ADB President Kuroda and other senior ADB officials and representatives of civil society organisations (CSOs) attending the conference on May 2.

Jacques Ferreira, a consultant for environmental CSOs and a former senior ADB staff member, told IPS, “The ADB has come a long way from seeing CSOs as things from another planet, to recognising them as useful partners, but the dialogue with labour groups is relatively new compared to environmental and development organisations.”

“The most important condition for partnership is trust and for that to be effective, each side must speak the same language,” Ferreira said.

Whether ADB management and labour representatives speak the same language remains uncertain even though there is considerable dialogue.

During the May 2 meeting, the trade union delegation raised four issues, including a proposal for the Manila-based development bank to assist trade union federations and include CSOs in the regional Asian financial stabilisation dialogue recently announced by the ADB.

Kuroda replied that ensuring that the ADB financial dialogue and other projects in critical areas such as climate change “be inclusive and well-governed” was “very important” and should take a tripartite form, including finance ministers, central bankers and financial supervisors; but he did not respond directly to the question of whether or how labour unions or CSOs could be involved.

On May 3, union delegates and ADB officials also appeared to talk past each other during a seminar on socially inclusive growth and core labour standards.

“Our key message is very straight forward,” said PSI Vice President Annie Geron.

“It is very important for us that core labour standards approved by the ADB under its Social Protection Strategy in 2001 should be faithfully complied and observed,” she stated during a seminar on socially inclusive growth on May 3.

According to Geron, the ADB should define an action plan with global targets for its social protection strategy, specify how the bank can contribute to the protection and respect of core labour rights, define how the bank can assist in targeting equality of outcomes and not only equality of access and support the adoption of financial transaction taxes to fund job intensive recoveries.

Geron related that in several power plant projects financed by the ADB, researchers found numerous violations of core labor standards including denial of collective bargaining, harassment of unionists, retrenchements and rehiring of workers at lower wage rates and, in at least one case, the use of bonded labor at power plant projects financed by ADB in India, Indonesia and the Philippines.

“We are raising these issues again and again because there has been no improvement,” related Geron, who cited numerous examples of violations of core labour standards in ADB financed projects.

“Inclusive growth cannot occur without protection and respect for worker rights,” commented Ariel Castro, a senior specialist with the International Labor Office (ILO) based in New Delhi, adding that the ILO supports promotion of employment-intensive investment and green growth initiatives.

But Castro warned that while Asia has been the most dynamic region, “this region has not seen enough jobs and decent work from this growth,” adding that “there has only been an increase of one to two percent in employment expansion in the six to seven percent annual economic growth.”

In response, ADB Deputy Chief Economist Zhuang Juzhong acknowledged that Asia’s high rates of growth had witnessed higher levels of inequality, but also maintained “more growth would lead to more employment” and, in turn, higher wages and a higher income share for labour, which would in turn “reduce inequality.”

In the closing press conference on May 5, Kuroda said “It is unfortunate that some members from civil society organisations could not join the opening session,” but affirmed that the ADB annual meeting is open to CSOs.

Kuroda added that ADB is in close contact with experts on labour market issues and trade union issues through the ILO and did not respond on the question of whether the Bank should establish a specific department for labour issues.

IBON International’s director Antonio Tujan told IPS, “ADB should be responsible for ensuring that the corporations (they deal with) on investment and construction projects abide by these core labour standards but unfortunately this appears not to be the case in practice.”

Aggeliki Anagnostopoulou (30) sits in a corner of the huge room that volunteers from the new party, Independent Greeks, are using as a headquarters for their pre-election campaign in the lead up to polling day on May 6.

A New Democracy (ND) voter until the last election in 2009, she recently joined the Independent Greeks, led by former ND minister Panos Kammenos who broke away from his old party when it entered a pro-bailout coalition government at the end of last year.

“Greek voters are disappointed with the two big parties. They are trying to find a new perspective. I (used) to vote for Panos Kammenos in New Democracy but I was disenchanted with the party so I followed him to this new beginning,” said Anagnostopoulou, who used to work as an external auditor for a United States-based multinational but was made redundant in 2011.

At the two-month-old, improvised party headquarters, modern techniques like the use of social media are being fused with the traditional practice of citizens registering with the party, in the hope of attracting new supporters while keeping the old voter base happy.

With elections just around the corner, the Independent Greeks’ headquarters has become increasingly populated.

Former supporters of ND and PASOK, the two parties that dominated Greek politics from the beginning of the 1980s up until the last election in 2009, have thrown their lot in with Kammenos in what appears to be the biggest protest vote the country has experienced in the last 30 years.

Kammenos, known for his explosive speeches in parliament, has capitalised heavily on anti-bailout rhetoric with nationalist undertones, in a campaign that blames PASOK and New Democracy politicians for betraying the country and conspiring against the nation.

Recent polls show him climbing up to 10 percent support in the national election this Sunday.

Creditors hold the reigns

Greece all but handed over its public finances to its creditors – led by the Troika, an administrative structure consisting of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund – when it became all too clear in May 2010 that the country was unable to repay its huge public debt.

Since then it has implement a severe austerity programme of raising taxes and cutting pensions and state salaries across the board, deregulating the labour market and pushing ahead with pro-market reforms in exchange for billions of ‘bailout euros’.

The programme of slashing public spending has sunk the country into three years of recession and pushed unemployment up to 21 percent.

The austerity policy has also damaged political parties associated with its implementation and sent an enormous wave of protest votes fleeing towards leftist and right-wing parties.

Pre-election polls have highlighted the fragmentation of political forces, showing ten parties from across the political spectrum climbing above the three percent support threshold.

“It is evident now that the old political system that nurtured Greece’s public finance issues is meeting the beginning of its end,” said Nick Malkoutzis, a renowned journalist and political analyst who has gained recognition covering the crisis on his popular blog ‘Inside Greece’.

Increased support for leftists or the appearance of extremist groups like the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party are not yet proof of a change in political culture; still, “It is evident that people are looking for something different. Plenty of them think that a vote for the neo-Nazis is a way to punish traditional politicians,” said Malkoutzis.

“Real change might come not in this but the next election,” he told IPS.

Given that the Troika plans to return to Greece right after the elections, to determine an economic plan that will cut a further 11.5 billion euros in public spending, “it is unlikely that the new parliament will live long,” Stavros Lygeros, a senior Greek political analyst, commented a few days ago.

“It is in fact one of the major paradoxes of this election that ND and PASOK fight each other, when they have both signed (onto) the austerity programme to be implemented after elections.”

He added that the mainstream political establishment is hopeful that the two parties will survive the election only to form a new coalition government that will carry on under the Troika’s command.

During the announcement of elections at the beginning of April, Troika officials publicly exerted pressure on the leaders of PASOK and ND in order to prevent them from straying too far from the rhetoric of bailout commitments.

Paul Thomsen, head of the IMF mission in Greece, has specified measures the new government will have to implement, irrelevant of which party wins the election.

“It is very negative for Europe that technocrats were able to express opinions in international media that elections should not take place in Greece, or that the country must carry out its commitments irrelevant of the outcome of this election. It is obvious that the Troika would prefer a PASOK and ND government that implements further austerity measures,” says Malkoutzis.

ND and PASOK leaders have employed a pre-election rhetoric that borders on blackmail, explicitly warning the nation in their latest speeches and articles about the chaos that will surely follow if they do not survive the election.

Though “this blackmail worked for the last two years, it wont be of use for much longer,” said Zeza Zikou, an economic analyst for the biggest national political newspaper, Kathimerini.

Gradually, she said, people will understand that the bailout agreements have condemned ordinary people to work forever to repay a debt that can never be settled.

Women in one of the poorest neighbourhoods of this city 40 km north of Rio de Janeiro no longer have to spend money on vegetables, because they have learned to grow their own, as organic urban gardening takes off in Brazil.

Cooperative member Rosinéia Soares displays the aubergines growing in her garden in Parque Genesiano da Luz. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

The land here is not fertile, like it is in the hilly region of the state of Rio de Janeiro that supplies the city’s markets. And the climate is sometimes too hot for vegetables to grow without stress or pests.

But in the poor neighbourhood of Parque Genesiano da Luz in the city of Nova Iguaçu, local women can now proudly say they eat what they themselves have grown.

The women sell the rest of what they produce – 70 percent – through the Univerde cooperative they set up, which comprises 22 families who put five percent of what they earn back in, to run the cooperative.

Production is carried out on an individual basis, but everything else, including the sales of produce, is done collectively.

“It’s wonderful to see what you grow in the garden, bring everything home fresh, and give your children such healthy food,” Joyce da Silva, one of the members of the cooperative, told IPS. “So much so that when the low-production season arrives, we don’t even buy outside, because now we know that conventional products have a lot of poison. And I don’t want to eat that anymore.”

The gardens, which are each about 1,000 square metres in size, are located on what once were empty lots. Below them lie pipelines of the state oil company, Petrobras, which financed the project when it got under way in 2007.

When the financing dried up, many of the more than 50 families taking part at the time dropped out, due to a lack of resources.

But a group of women decided to continue, against all odds: they didn’t have funds, tools, or transportation to haul seeds and seedlings or take their products to the street markets to sell them.

But they were determined not to give up the independence they had achieved.

“Before getting involved in the cooperative, I only looked after my home,” da Silva said. “But afterwards, I gained economic independence. Another kind of independence is the health I achieved for my family. And also the improved living conditions. Things at home improved in general.”

The Urban Agriculture Programme, which now provides the women with technical assistance, was created in 1999, and was expanded into peri-urban areas in 2011 by AS-PTA, a non-governmental organisation that promotes urban family gardening and agroecology.

This programme is aimed at boosting the incomes of families in peri-urban areas – poor neighbourhoods on the outskirts of the cities of Rio de Janeiro, Queimados and Magé, where it benefits a total of 650 people.

The urban farmers do not use chemicals. Both the fertilisers and pesticides they use are homemade and non-toxic.

The majority of the food consumed in the city comes from far away, which means prices are driven up by transport costs, Marcio Mattos de Mendonça, the coordinator of the Urban Agriculture Programme, told IPS.

“The people who live in these communities need food from nearby areas,” he said. “Fresh vegetables are often left off the menu, and unhealthy kinds of food are given priority.”

In line with the global demographic trend, Brazil’s population of more than 192 million people is increasingly urban.

In 2000, 81 percent of Brazilians lived in urban areas, and 10 years later the proportion has risen to over 84 percent, according to the 2010 census.

But the growing urbanisation has not snuffed out the vocation for farming passed down through the generations, Mendonça said. In many poor urban areas like the favelas or shantytowns lining the hills of Rio de Janeiro, people have kept alive the custom of growing vegetables and medicinal herbs, and raising small animals like pigs, goats or barnyard fowl.

Aldeni Fausto, who always grew vegetables in her yard, inherited that practice which has been kept alive by migrants from rural areas and which she is now successfully reproducing within the city limits.

“Living in nature is what I like the most,” she said. “The pleasure of planting, harvesting and feeding ourselves, reviving our family’s roots and traditions and teaching them to our children; that is so important, so we don’t forget our history.”

Fausto, the president of the Univerde cooperative, said the distancing of rural migrants from their land led to “an increase in diseases, an imbalance in nature, and financial problems, because these people have nothing to eat and no interest in producing food.”

But “if people planted a little bit in every corner, they wouldn’t suffer from a lack of food,” she said.

Da Silva looks at it from another angle. “I never imagined producing food in the middle of the city. This area didn’t even have a market. And sometimes we couldn’t even afford to go somewhere else to buy things,” she said.

The visit to the cooperative was one of the field trips organised by World Nutrition Rio 2012, an international nutrition congress organised in Rio de Janeiro Apr. 27-30 by the World Public Health Nutrition Association and the Brazilian Association of Collective Health.

Among other issues, the congress discussed healthy eating habits, the planet’s resources, and the need to recognise and support traditional food systems – three core concepts that underlie the activities of the Univerde cooperative.

Da Silva said her family had various health-related problems linked to eating habits that she now understands were harmful.

Her daughter, for example, had anaemia. “Even though she is dark-skinned like I am, she looked sort of yellowish and was very weak. But with this food, she is now in good health, her skin shines, and her lips and gums are nice and red; this was the best thing about it, for me,” da Silva said.

Fausto also noticed improvements in her family’s quality of life. “Although I don’t look like it, I used to be fat. I have seen changes in my body, in my health, in my children’s diet. My mind now is more at ease, and I have found an equilibrium,” she said, pointing out that she is now free of obesity-related health problems like back pain and hypertension.

But the route these women chose is not an easy one. Without strong support, like the funding they received at first, the sustainability of the cooperative is always an issue of concern.

Of the more than 50 plots of land available for urban farming in Nova Iguaçu, only 22 are currently in use, said one of the visitors from the congress, Angélica Siqueira, a student in her final year of coursework for a degree in nutrition at the alternative economy centre of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul.

“There is still a prejudice that the countryside is poor,” Siqueira told IPS. Her team is attempting to apply urban and peri-urban farming techniques in poor neighbourhoods in her state, in southern Brazil, through the Technological Incubator of Popular Cooperatives.

The hope of the cooperative members is that now they have official certification, they will be able to sell their produce to the federal government’s school meals programme, which stimulates purchases by public schools of food produced by family farmers.

“Before, we didn’t even know how to run a company, and now we administer our own cooperative,” said Fausto, a true convert to urban gardening. “It’s therapy. One little plant gives you back gratitude and love.”

Students at the new secondary school that caters to members of sexual minorities. Credit: Courtesy Bachillerato Popular "Mocha Celis"

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Apr 27 2012 (IPS)

With 35 students, the first secondary school specifically for transvestites and other members of sexual minorities who face discrimination in mainstream schools opened in March in the Argentine capital.

The “Mocha Celis” Popular Baccalaureate is the name of the tuition-free school supported by nonprofit organisations, which caters especially – but not exclusively – to transvestites, transsexuals and transgender persons over the age of 16.

The school is named after an illiterate transvestite who worked as a prostitute and was an activist with the Association of Argentine Transvestites. A week after Celis went missing, her body was found, showing signs that she had been beaten and shot to death.

Activists suspect that Celis was killed by a federal police officer who had previously threatened her.

In an interview with IPS, Francisco Quiñones, the head of the new school, explained that the idea was “to create an inclusive school, free of discrimination, that takes into account and values the different trans identities, where they can manage to finish secondary school.

“Public schools, which are governed by rules that cater to heterosexuals, drive these people away,” and they end up dropping out of school at much higher rates than the rest of the population due to discrimination, which can even go as far as physical violence, he said.

Quiñones said transvestite students in the new school have talked about their own past experiences, such as being forced to go to the boy’s rest room, where they were sometimes attacked. “Some never went to the bathroom because they were too terrified,” he said.

For that reason, the Mocha Celis school was welcome news. “For me it’s like a door to the world,” said Laura Barrionuevo, 29, who had to drop out at the age of 15 from the vocational high school she was attending.

“I was from Ituzaingó, in the (northeastern) province of Corrientes. When I started to dress as a transvestite, a tsunami was unleashed in the school and in the town, and I had to leave. When I was older, I registered in other schools, but I felt like people looked at me as if I were a monster,” she told IPS.

She now rents a room 35 km from the Mocha Celis school in Ezeiza, a district in the southern part of Greater Buenos Aires. It takes her a total of nearly six hours a day to commute to and from school, Monday through Thursday, but she says she is happy.

Barrionuevo enjoys sewing, and she and other students plan to save up money to buy sewing machines and material to make their own clothes. “I wasn’t made to work standing on a street corner; if I was any good at that I would have earned a fortune by now,” she said, alluding to prostitution.

Once the school gains recognition from the Education Ministry of the City of Buenos Aires – a process that is taking longer than it should, according to Quiñones – the students will be able to graduate after three years, with a high school diploma showing that they specialised in community development.

The coursework at the school prepares the students to be community leaders or to set up cooperatives. But once the school gains official recognition, the diploma will also allow them to continue their studies.

“I like radiology, and journalism too,” Barrionuevo said.

The school is operating in a building that is on loan from the Asociación Mutual Sentimiento, a community development NGO, and was registered by the Fundación Diversidad Divino Tesoro, a non-profit organisation that defends the interests of sexual minorities.

Classes are taught by 25 teachers, who also helped refurbish the building.

The symbol chosen for the school was Argentine statesman Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811-1888), a former president who was the driving force behind the development of public education in this South American country. But the painting of him on the wall has undergone a transformation: he is wearing a blond wig and pink lipstick.

In the first-year classroom, the seats are arranged in a circle rather than straight rows of desks. “Here, what the students know is as valid as the teacher’s knowledge,” Quiñones said.

The curriculum is the same one that is used in conventional adult education classes, but “with a broader focus,” he clarified. There are a few additional courses, such as classes on cooperatives or “trans history”, that take a look at the activism of the trans community.

The idea for the school emerged from an assessment of the conditions faced by transvestites in Argentina, which was published in a 2005 book, “La Gesta del Nombre Propio” (roughly, “the epic struggle for a name of one’s own”). The book described the intolerance, humiliation, marginalisation and attacks suffered by transvestites.

One of the chilling statistics provided by the book was that 64 percent of the 302 transvestites interviewed had not completed primary school. And of those who had managed to finish, only 20 percent graduated from high school.

That lack of education effectively bars members of the trans community from gaining access to quality jobs, and pushes the majority (79 percent of the study sample) into prostitution as their main source of income.

The study also found that while only 11 percent of the respondents were studying at the time, 70 percent said that they would have liked to, but that they were not willing to hide or deny their true sexual identity.

The report showed that as a result of the discrimination they face on so many fronts, many members of the trans community die young. Of 420 who had died in recent years, mainly of AIDS or murder, 69 percent were between the ages of 22 and 41.

But the idea is not to limit the school to members of the trans community. “Of the 35 students registered in the Mocha Celis school, there are 10 who do not identify as trans, but are people who live on the streets or are very poor, who feel excluded from mainstream schools,” Quiñones explained.

“Although we made it clear to them that they would have to take classes like ‘trans history’, they told us that for them it wasn’t easy to find a warm place free of discrimination where they could finish secondary school, which is why they have come here,” he added.

By Estrella Gutiérrez
CARACAS, Apr 27 2012 (IPS)

“It changed our lives” is a sentiment frequently heard from commuters who use Metrocable, the aerial cable car system that connects one of the poor hillside neighbourhoods in the Venezuelan capital with the city’s public transport system.

The Metrocable system that has connected the hilltop neighbourhood of San Agustín with the Caracas metro since January 2010 is the second mass transit aerial tramway in Latin America, after the one that has been operating in Medellín, Colombia since 2006. And in July 2011, a third system began to operate in Rio de Janeiro, linking hillside favelas or shantytowns with the rest of the city.

“Metrocable has boosted our dignity,” María Eugenia Ramírez, 51, a cable car security guard who lives in San Agustín, told IPS. The poorest part of her neighbourhood lines a steep slope in the hills that surround the valley where Caracas is located at 1,000 metres above sea level.

“I wasn’t prepared to walk through the air,” says Ramírez, who has seven grandchildren and has already lost two of her four children.

Naiger Hernández and Doralis Viera also remember their first vertigo-inducing rides in the cabins that carry commuters between the system’s five stations in nine minutes.

“In the cabins you run into people you didn’t know and people you knew before but had lost touch with. Now we have that day-to-day contact again, neighbourly relations,” said Ramírez, one of the neighbourhood leaders, at a weekly meeting of community councils held to organise activities around Metrocable.

Since 2006, the community councils have been the key component of “people’s power”, promoted by the government of populist left-wing President Hugo Chávez, who has been in office since 1999.

There are already 35 community councils in the district, and the plan is to reach 38, Alfredo Mariño, an architect who coordinates the San Agustín integral development plan, which is associated with a Brazil-Venezuela presidential agreement signed in 2009, told IPS.

The plan is aimed at creating a methodology for tackling the issue of informal or unplanned neighbourhoods, in contrast with “the ‘formal city’,” he said.

“These neighbourhoods are urban manifestations of a highly unequal system, which relegates large segments of the population to living conditions that at times are subhuman, where they have to subsist by creating their own habitat,” Mariño said.

The hilly southern part of the neighbourhood, San Agustín del Sur, was the site of the first self-construction project in Caracas, and offers favourable conditions for implementing a broad experimental multi-project plan like the one coordinated by Mariño, or a new transportation system such as Metrocable.

The neighbourhood, which is home to just over 45,000 people, has a population density far lower than that of other poor districts lining the hillsides. It also preserves part of the original greenery, and its soils are relatively uneroded.

At the same time, Mariño pointed out, the neighbourhood has “a strong urban cultural and social tradition.” San Agustín was settled mainly by people from a region with a large black population, which helped strengthen the community’s sense of identity, in its efforts to reinforce the dignity of a marginalised culture.

Before the cable car system began to operate, local commuters had to climb down hundreds of steps every day, or ride in jeeps that operate as collective transport on the neighbourhood’s steep roads, to reach the metro station or the largely unregulated system of often rickety buses and vans that wind their way through the chaotic traffic in Caracas.

“I used to get up at 5:00 in the morning to reach work at 8:00. Now I rise at 6:30, and I don’t come home exhausted from climbing the stairs,” said Viera.

San Agustín del Sur “is an enclave isolated by different barriers, a kind of ghetto,” said Mariño. “We are seeking to replace the exclusion with inclusion on multiple levels.”

“Inclusion” is a buzzword frequently used by experts and users of Metrocable when they talk about what the system has achieved – and which aspects of the project have gone unfulfilled, such as the promise of social services like day care centres and shops that were to be given a space in the stations – now that it transports an average of 15,000 people a day.

Since June 2011, riders have had to pay for a ticket, at a price equivalent to 23 cents of a dollar, integrated with the metro ticket system.

“One condition set by President Chávez was that the construction project had to include the local people from the neighbourhood, as did Metrocable itself: all of its workers are from San Agustín,” said cable car operator Jenny Álvarez, a 35-year-old mother of two.

Ramírez stressed that “many fathers and young guys who were using drugs were given the opportunity to work on the construction project, and now they are men leading decent lives.”

She added that “the community takes care of Metrocable; no one touches the installations.”

Caracas, a city of five million people, was the most violent capital in the Americas in 2011, with a murder rate of 108 per 100,000 people, according to the United Nations. Most of the homicides occur in poor neighbourhoods.

In response to criticism of the cost of the system and the relatively limited number of people using it, Ramírez replied that “if this had been built in ‘las lomas’ (the hills where the wealthier neighbourhoods are located) it would have been fine, but since it was built in the ‘cerros’ (the steeper hills) where the ‘barefoot blacks’ live, they’re opposed to it,” she said, referring to opposition-aligned media and experts in a country marked by extreme political polarisation.

In Caracas, the hills are known by different terms depending on the social strata: they are called “cerros” when they are the site of shantytowns; “colinas” when the residents are middle class; and “lomas” when the neighbourhoods are upper middle class.

Odebrecht hired paintings by Natalya Critchley, a British artist who has lived in Venezuela for over a quarter century, for display in the Metrocable stations.

Critchley, who is known for her paintings of industrial landscapes, told IPS that Metrocable is “a non-invasive transport system, with a low impact on space.

“However, it should not only be limited to that, but should serve to influence public spaces, apply green technologies, create infrastructure, like a boulevard, and generate activities to benefit the barrio, including a tourist route. The view of the city from the stations is amazing, and it is not adequately exploited,” she said.

But until all of that happens, cabins named after Venezuela’s 23 states, and basic values – like inclusion, patriotic fervour, ethics, equity, freedom, solidarity or peace – are already part of the urban landscape, visible, as they shuttle up and down, from roads and highways down below.

As the May 6 date for Serbia’s general election inches closer, two young Belgrade playwrights have capitalised on the electoral war of words between the pro-European camp and conservative nationalists to highlight the dark side of propaganda and expose the omnipotence of party membership.

For the last few months, the airwaves and newspapers in Serbia have been thick with promises of a ‘better life’ for a nation struggling with aftershocks of the economic crisis, high unemployment and a painful transition to a market economy.

Election pledges also touch on rebuilding democracy and all its attendant institutions, which came into being only after the downfall of the country’s former leader Slobodan Milosevic in 2000 and have since suffered from a lack of efficiency, transparency and accountability.

Amidst the turmoil, Maja Pelevic (31) and Milan Markovic (33), whose plays are staged in several prominent Belgrade theatres, offered what they described as a new “cultural and marketing strategy”, which was quickly snapped up by every major political party in Serbia and propelled the two young artists into positions of political authority.

What politicians and the media failed to recognise was that the duo’s text, ‘Idea, Strategy, Movement’, was lifted right out of a 1928 speech by Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, entitled ‘Knowledge and Propaganda’.

“Everyone reacted positively,” Pelevic told IPS. “The nationalists and conservatives were the most open to us, as they have few young people in their parties. Others put us on their ‘cadre lists’,” she added.

The two presented their work to the broader public last week in Belgrade and in return were offered high positions in the various cultural councils of ruling coalition members including the centrist Democratic Party (DS), the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS), and the pro-European Union Social Democratic Party (SDP).

The playwrights were also invite to advise the nationalist, opposition Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS) and the biggest opposition group, the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS). The newly formed United Regions of Serbia (URS) also took them in, as did the increasingly popular leftist Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).

The LDP even put the young dramatists’ strategy on its website.

Culture trumps politics

The playwrights said it would be intriguing to see if anyone would recognise Goebbel’s text.

“We replaced Hitler’s name with Vojislav Kostunica (the DSS leader), as his party asked for a text to explain our ideas on development of culture,” Pelevic said.

“We also replaced the words ‘national socialism’ with ‘democracy’ and ‘propaganda’ with ‘political marketing’ and it worked fine,” she added.

The excerpts the playwrights chose to pull from the speech deal with Goebbels’ ‘theory’ of propaganda, in which he stresses that people are drawn together and then slowly indoctrinated with “creative ideas”; a theory that rests largely on the importance of political power to get ideas across to mass audiences.

None of the parties seemed disturbed by the text’s totalitarian ideology that most democratic societies now fight against, “such as gaining power at any cost; spreading one’s idea into the very pores of society and (carrying) out a ruthless propaganda campaign,” Markovic said.

“Another of our aims (with the social experiment) was to see if we could move up (the economic ladder) if we joined political parties,” Markovic said, since “it is impossible to work in Serbia now as an art director, or even a writer without the support of the party.”

For many years, Serbian culture has fallen victim to the tough economic climate, constantly side- tracked by one regime after another since Milosevic’s downfall. Budgetary cuts for culture are huge, with dozens of theatres, movies production houses and even the Philharmonic orchestra being left with small sums of money, barely enough to cover staff salaries.

On the other hand, party membership has become extremely important, swallowing up various aspects of social and economic life. Employment has been tied so tightly to party membership that, now, some of the biggest opposition parties are brandishing slogans such as ‘Jobs for all, not only party members’, or ‘No more employment through party membership’.

For sociologists, the link between party membership and the playwrights’ success comes as no surprise.

“Old habits die hard,” cultural sociologist Stjepan Gredelj told IPS. “In the communist era, party membership was important for employment. Although we have had a multi-party system for more than 20 years now, the line of thought remains much the same in the generation of new politicians as well.”

“Party loyalty works two ways,” added sociology professor Ratko Bozovic. First, by placing its own members and supporters in key positions, the party ensures its line is followed closely, while also “keeping an eye on its workers”.

Secondly, “party members are safe in their positions and privileges. Democracy is a feeble plant that has yet to develop and grow here…we still live in partocracy. The cultural (stunt pulled) by Pelevic and Markovic has only confirmed that,” he added.

Both sociologists agree that the situation is the same in nations of former Yugoslavia, such as Croatia or Bosnia-Herzegovina and even Slovenia, the only country from the former bloc to become a member of the European Union (EU).

Ivan Tasovac, director of the Belgrade Philharmonic, has also seized on the moment of controversy to expose just how far politics have infringed on cultural space in the country.

Tasovac, who has been selected as “man of the year” several times in the past decade by media workers, promised the votes of all 100 musicians from the prominent cultural institution to the political party that could provide the most money for the new Philharmonic concert hall – a promise that every regime has made for two decades – and prove that one of its top officials attended a single Philharmonic concert in the past four years, since the last elections were held.

In times of political and financial crisis, the rights women thought they had secured decades ago are once again under attack. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

By Jennifer Hattam
ISTANBUL, Apr 23 2012 (IPS)

The world’s recent financial and political upheavals have not been kind to women. In Libya’s Tripoli, female suicide rates increased tenfold during the revolution, while dismal job prospects have young Greek women abandoning their career aspirations, participants in a global forum on women’s rights said over the weekend. “Many people say this is a time for transformation and moving forward but we know from our work that it’s also a time of instability and uncertainty,” Jamaican activist Mariama Williams, a senior programme officer at the South Centre, said at the closing session of the 12th International Forum on Women’s Rights and Development in Istanbul. “In times of crisis, the solidarity we thought we had, the rights we thought were secured are again being questioned. Whatever is not convenient for growth is being questioned,” Williams said. Participants in the Apr. 19-22 forum, organised by the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) around the theme of transforming economic power, engaged in questioning, among other things, how economic growth and development should be measured and defined. “If we were to account for inequality, the average Human Development Index would be 23 percent less than it is currently,” Associate Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and former Vice-President of Costa Rica, Rebeca Grynspan, told the more than 2,000 attendees from 140 countries. From national budgets to financial-stimulus packages, economic policy typically fails to address women’s needs – or to recognise the contributions they make through their unpaid labour, participants said.

But forum organisers also expressed optimism that amid these challenges, the global climate is becoming more receptive to the demands for gender and social justice that activists have been making for decades. “What the financial crisis has provided is an (environment) where even mainstream actors have begun questioning the dominant economic model, (asking) whether there is a way to regulate the financial sector so it works in the service of everything else,” Lydia Alpízar Durán, executive director for AWID, told IPS. “Before, the system’s failures were only felt by the very poor. Now they’re starting to create a new poor, to hit the middle class, and people are beginning to wake up,” AWID Board President Lina Abou-Habib, the director of the Collective for Research and Training on Development-Action in Lebanon, told IPS. Durán cautioned, however, that women, especially women activists, face an elevated risk of backlash in many parts of the world. “One of the biggest challenges is increased violence and repression; those struggling for change are becoming targets of attacks,” she told IPS. One area of the conference venue was adorned with dozens of memorial photographs of women the movement has lost over the years – some dead of natural causes, many others mysteriously vanished or violently murdered. In another corner, the face of Galila Khamis Toto, a Sudanese activist from the Nuba mountain region, stared out from a poster, the text informing participants that she was supposed to be there among them but was instead being detained in inhumane conditions in her home country. During the forum, activists from Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Morocco, Libya, and other countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) spoke about their ongoing battles to enshrine women’s rights into new constitutions and increase female participation in new political systems – while often facing renewed challenges to their personal freedoms. “Polygamy has been abolished for more than 50 years in Tunisia, but now we’re talking about it again. Traditional marriages, how women dress, abortion limitations, even female circumcision, which we never had before, are all being discussed,” said Ahlem Belhadj, the president of the Tunisian Association of Democratic Women.

“These are all things happening after the revolution.” Creating solidarity with women’s movements in the MENA region was one of the reasons AWID chose Istanbul as the 2012 location for its triennial forum, Durán said on the opening day of the event. “In the post-Arab-Spring phase, we need to be clear that what happens in this region has major implications for women around the world,” she told attendees. “Cultural relativism is growing and we cannot allow respect for cultural traditions to justify the violation of women’s rights.” Woman who participated in toppling Arab regimes sometimes think their countrywide struggles should take precedence over stronger pushes for women’s rights, speakers from the region admitted, adding that there can be no democracy without equality between men and women. Neither can there be “economic rights without also looking at bodily rights, at political rights,” Durán told IPS. “Women’s realities are determined by their ability to make decisions.” Tying all these different threads together into a cohesive movement is no small task. “What we see all around us at this conference, civil society, the women’s movement – that resource has to be really fostered and advanced,” U.N. Women Deputy Executive Director Lakshmi Puri told IPS.

“We’re trying to get resources directly into the hands of women who are working to bring changes about in their own areas.” At the AWID forum, those areas ranged from demilitarisation to the rights of domestic workers, religious fundamentalism to climate change, topics covered in the more than 200 different sessions on the conference program. Participants’ diverse interests were also represented in the hallways of the Haliç Conference Centre, where indigenous crafts, black-and-white nude portraits of Chilean transsexuals, and Egyptian graffiti art were all on display. The coming together of what one speaker called “the most diverse group of women outside the U.N.” is the most important outcome of the forum, Abou-Habib told IPS. “The idea of the ‘one percent’ is such a powerful one because the rest of us let it happen. We give them that power by not resisting,” she said. “There is a strong body of critical feminist economic analysis but we need to take it out of the journals and the classrooms and onto the streets,” Radhika Balakrishnan, the executive director of the Centre for Women’s Global Leadership, said at the forum’s closing session. Following her remarks, attendees did just that, massing in Istanbul’s central Taksim Square for a protest march in solidarity with their Turkish counterparts.

A government plan to reform Morocco’s dilapidated justice system, the details of which are still a mystery to the general public, has become the subject of much scepticism, especially from justice professionals around the country.

Justice Minister Mustapha Erramid told journalists on Apr. 6, “The national plan on justice reform will be launched this month,” but failed to specify what the reforms would entail.

Huge swathes of the population have long called for sweeping reforms of Morocco’s corrupt justice system. Following a wave of protests on Feb. 20, 2011, a group of magistrates that would later become the Club of the Magistrates of Morocco (CMC) created a Facebook page to address judges’ long-standing resentment about the clampdown on freedom of expression.

Furthermore, they claimed, the law allowed them no clear structure of professional organisation.

Last August, shortly after the CMC went viral, the police forbade judges from entering the premises on which they were scheduled to hold their association’s founding assembly. Undeterred, the judges simply held their meeting in the street, under the harsh summer sun.

On the virtual page and out in the street, the judges made their demands clear: freedom of expression and their own independent association, two requests that the country’s new constitution, approved on Jul. 1, 2011, had already acknowledged.

Still, the gap between rights on paper and rights in practice is very wide.

In a press declaration issued on Feb. 29, the president of the CMC in Casablanca, Abdelaziz El Baâli, said, ” (Improving) the material and social situation of the magistrates is a (necessary step) towards reform”, referring to the fact that Morocco’s magistrates have not had a salary increase since 1996.

Tensions are running high between the executive and judicial branches of the government, with the CMC threatening to “resort to unprecedented protests” and fixing May 15 as the final deadline for the government to answer judges’ demands.

The ‘Assabah’ daily newspaper reported, without clearly citing its sources, that the reform plan contains 13 strategic removals of existing laws, 28 action plans, and 174 measures all aimed at renewing the country’s legal infrastructure and computerising and modernising the judicial administration.

For citizens, these big promises say nothing about the justice system, which, they believe, must first and foremost be purged of corruption.

“A corrupt justice (system) cannot contribute anything to the fight against corruption,” Mohammed Jallab Elbouamri, a 55-year-old citizen from Casablanca, told IPS.

Various members of the political opposition share this view. Fouzia El Bayed, deputy of the Constitutional Union (UC), which holds 17 of the 379 seats in parliament, told IPS that Morocco’s legal system is blighted by malpractice and the abuse of power, which have eroded citizens’ trust in the rule of law.

Just last month, police arrested a judge in Tangier, 300 kilometres north of Casablanca, for corruption. According to the Justice Minister, the judge in question was caught red-handed receiving a sum of 70,000 dirham (approximately 663 euros) from a citizen.

Erramid revealed that the sting operation had been organised under the official direction of the Justice Ministry, following a tip-off from a conscientious citizen.

Simply increasing judges’ salaries, therefore, will not lead the way out of the crisis, El Bayed said, since the sector also suffers from a major shortage in human resources.

“We need more than 2,600 new magistrates to be able to handle the (ever-increasing) number of cases. At present, the country has just 3,400 magistrates handling three million cases every year.”

She stressed that it would also be necessary to do away with “administrative centralism and set up a new penal policy, whose philosophy is based on the realisation of justice.”

Anass Saadoun, another member of CMC, has published several articles on justice reform in various local newspapers, where he stresses that Moroccan society must abandon the idea that judges are entitled to a luxurious lifestyle, beyond the reach of their modest incomes. This widespread perception, he says, has laid the groundwork for corruption throughout the legal system.

Though hope in the efficacy of judicial reform still persists among the political class, most ordinary citizens are pessimistic, to say the least.

”We all know that the barons of dirty money manipulate everything in this country. They are corrupt and sabotage all those who resist them,” Abderrafie Lwali, a 27-year-old citizen from Asilah, 230 kilometres north of Casablanca, told IPS.

The country will have to act fast in order to withstand winds from the Arab Spring that are still blowing around the kingdom. Thus far the Moroccan government has been able to appease its citizens with satisfactory reforms, thereby warding off more incendiary protests; but the judges’ rancour will not be easily abated.

“We are no longer in the era of miracles,” acknowledged Elbouamri. Rather, people are counting on the balance of power between the government and its citizens to bring about much-needed change.

Like others, he believes reforms are a matter of political will. Currently, the government “has the necessary support to lead (an overhaul) of the justice system.”

Whether it will use this support for positive change remains to be seen.

By Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, Apr 20 2012 (IPS)

The history, daily life and folk artistry as well as spectacular views of this southeastern Brazilian city are all part of a living museum created by community leaders in a favela that is displaying its cultural heritage as well as its wounds.

“At one time, before there was electricity in the favela (shantytown), the local people would come out on the street at night to talk to each other by moonlight,” Rita de Cassia Santos Pinto told IPS, seated in front of a mural that is part of a series painted on the walls of local houses.

As a journalist, Santos Pinto says she doesn’t normally like to be interviewed. But when the topic is the history of her community, she is enthusiastic and her words flow freely. As we tour every corner of the Morro do Cantagalo favela’s crowded dwellings clinging to valleys and hillsides, the walls and houses also start to speak.

One mural depicts the history of samba, the musical genre that originated in the favelas; another shows episodes from the 1964-1985 military dictatorship against the backdrop of bare brick, tin-roofed dwellings.

The series of more than 20 murals by graffiti artists from Cantagalo and other parts of Rio de Janeiro tells the story of the community in colourful pictures.

The houses-cum-canvases are on the circuit of a fee-paying tour of the favela which includes, depending on the interests of the tourists, kite-making and -flying workshops, lessons on playing the “cavaquinho” (an instrument similar to the ukulele and the key to producing rhythm and harmony in Brazilian samba and choro music), visits to stores selling arts and crafts, and local eateries.

“We want to break down the barriers of national museums that only exhibit the works of famous artists,” said Santos Pinto, who as well as being a reporter is a tour guide, social facilitator, “curator of memories”, and one of the community leaders who founded the Museu de Favela (MUF – Favela Museum).

The first ever all-encompassing favela museum seeks to depict and value the identity of Cantagalo’s 20,000 people on the basis of their own accounts of their lives, and to integrate them into the society that has kept them at arm’s length for so long.

From the impoverished Northeast to the favela

One of the posters on display at the MUF – part of an itinerant collection which is also touring traditional museums in Brazil – tells the story of Santos Pinto’s parents, who are now in their eighties, in their own words.

Her father, Feliciano da Silva Pinto, a migrant from the northeastern state of Bahia who worked in the city of Rio de Janeiro as an electrician, fell in love with Eunice Santos whom he used to see coming down from the “morro” (hill) every day to fetch water and carry it home in a jerry can on her head.

“To win her heart, he started giving her water himself,” to shorten her journey, Santos Pinto said, breaking into laughter.

This is one of many stories about the migrants from poor areas of the country who built the humble dwellings in Cantagalo, now numbering 5,300, that are connected by what seems to the outsider to be an endless and unfathomable maze of alleys and steep stairways.

An elevator, recently constructed under the Growth Acceleration Programme (PAC) launched by the left-wing government of former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011), now eases the climb and saves favela residents and visitors over 60 metres of climbing, up hundreds of steps.

“Everybody’s memories are worth recording,” said the journalist, who takes down people’s oral histories to try to reconstruct the earliest history of the favela and “give a voice to those who have never had one.”

The history of Cantagalo and two adjacent favelas, Pavão and Pavãozinho, which have merged into one complex, is bound up with the origins of Brazil’s major cities, and includes fugitive slaves hiding in the Cantagalo hills, as well as the flimsy shacks built in the first decade of the 20th century by migrants from poor regions seeking work in Rio.

The trio of favelas grew up as an enclave between Ipanema and Copacabana, upmarket residential districts of Rio that are a tourist magnet for visitors, where the grand houses and skyscrapers have often been built by poor and illiterate migrants like the parents of MUF cultural director Marcia de Souza.

Souza described another of the museum’s initiatives: every year 12 “warrior women” are elected from the favela, women who “overcame difficulties in their lives, like violence and educating their kids, and who, even if one of their children was in prison for drug trafficking, managed to save the rest of their family and keep them away from violence and drugs,” she told IPS.

The symbolic prize for these women is the celebration of their lives, which are reconstructed on the walls through photographs, personal objects and stories.

Peace time

The Cantagalo-Pavão-Pavãozinho group of favelas used to be one of the most violent areas in the south of Rio de Janeiro, with daily shootouts between drug trafficking gangs, until three years ago when police pacification units (UPP) were introduced as part of a campaign to increase security, improve infrastructure and implement social programmes.

MUF was founded as an independent community NGO in 2008, before the arrival of the UPPs, and according to its founding members its early days were an uphill struggle.

Now their complaint is the lack of public funding for their initiative, and they are seeking individuals and organisations or agencies willing to invest in what they describe as their vision of the future.

The museum’s supporters see its future as a collection of open-air galleries, “whose stakeholders will be the residents themselves, who contribute the walls of their homes, their knowledge and their activities.”

The idea is to transform Cantagalo-Pavão-Pavãozinho into a significant tourist attraction in Rio, a must-visit “monument” to the history of the favelas, the cultural roots of samba, the culture of Afro-Brazilians and of migrants from the Northeast, and the visual and performance arts.

In that spirit, architects and architecture students from other Brazilian states, and from Argentina and France, are participating in the activities of the living museum.

The group of architects is planning interventions to improve areas of the favela. The solutions need to be creative and inexpensive, such as the installation of a giant screen for projecting movies for the community to be located on the MUF rooftop, which also houses a large water tank.

Thousands of centre-left demonstrators violently clashed with police in street battles that completely shut down central Tunis last week, left scores seriously injured and underlined the persistent divisions in Tunisian society.

Thousands of Tunisians have protested against a government ban on street demonstrations. Credit: Jake Lippincott/IPS.

The demonstrations were organised by several political parties, unions and human rights groups. Ostensibly meant to mark the national Martyrs Day celebration, their more immediate aim was to challenge the recent government ban on protests in central Tunis.

The police response was violent and seemingly disorganised, and called into question both the government’s democratic credentials and its ability to maintain order even in the heart of Tunis.

The trouble started when the Tunisian government, which is dominated by the moderate Islamist party Ennahda, justified its ban on all demonstrations late last month, by painting it as an effort to ‘maintain order’ on the eve of the economically vital summer tourist season here.

However, the centre-left opposition saw this ban as a blatant attack on political freedom. After a small protest against unemployment was violently crushed by police on Apr. 7, the opposition began organising a massive protest to challenge the ban and the government.

The demonstration began on the morning of Apr. 9 and was attacked almost immediately by police wielding truncheons and tear gas guns. The uniformed police were supported by masked young men in plain clothes (generally known in Tunisia as “militia”) who also enthusiastically attacked protesters and journalists with sticks and stones.

Several hundred protesters built barricades and threw stones at security forces. By the end of the day scores of people, including French journalist Julie Schneider, had been hospitalised.

The excessive use of tear gas, involvement of militia and intentional attacks on journalists and bystanders with cameras brought to mind the worst excesses of the former dictator Zine el Abidine Ben Ali and has proved to be a public relations disaster for the governing coalition here.

Due to extensive public backlash, the government rescinded the protest ban. Recent polls have indicated that the Tunisian government is still popular, but facing increasing challenges.

According to the Tunisian National Association of Statistics, total unemployment here has risen 0.6 percent, going from 18.3 percent in the second quarter of 2011 to 18.9 this February. The unemployment rate for college graduates is even worse, rising from 29.2 to 30.5 in the same period.

While continued economic problems could be eroding Ennahda’s support, they have also been caught in the middle of an increasingly vicious cultural conflict between hard-line Salafis on the one hand, who want to scrap the Tunisian constitution and replace it with sharia law, and leftists who want to preserve Tunisia’s socially liberal traditions and increase protections for women and minorities.

Ennahda’s official ideology calls for inclusive parliamentary democracy loosely guided by moderate Islamic principles. During the election this mix allowed Ennahda to gain the support of a broad swathe of Tunisian society, from hard-line Salafis to non-practising Muslims.

However, now that it has to govern this sprawling voter base, Ennahda and its coalition allies are struggling to keep disparate constituents happy.

Earlier this month, in what was seen as a nod to the party’s more conservative supporters, the government spoke approvingly of a decision by a provincial judge to sentence two young men to over seven years each in prison for insulting the Prophet Muhammad on their facebook pages.

This decision to punish the two men was supported by many mainstream Tunisians but outraged intellectuals and many sexual and religious minorities who fear that this is the first step in a broader campaign of intolerance.

Furthermore, in recent months Salafi vigilante groups have been attacking people they see as ‘un-Islamic’. While the Salafis are not officially supported by the government, many leftist Tunisians accuse the authorities of turning a blind eye to their violence.

Saif Bjaoui is a young queer activist who participated in the Apr. 9 protest. When asked what motivated him to attend the demonstration, he told IPS more than anything else it was opposition to Ennahda and what he sees as their intolerant policies.

He mentioned the recent court case and added, “I’m afraid of Ennahda, because they are trying to take our rights, Samir Dilou (the current Tunisian minister for human rights, and an Ennahda party member) said last month that gays are ‘sick’,” he said.

Early last February, Dilou told a local talk show that gay people do not deserve freedom of expression because they are mentally ill.

As a result, Bjaoui is not very optimistic about minority rights in the new democratic believing that, “things will get worse before they get better.”

Two days after the protest, Rached Cherif, a member of the Tunisian League of Humanists, told IPS that the actions of the Ennahda government were putting certain segments of Tunisian society in danger.

“The government is tolerant of Salafi activism which is aimed directly at minorities like Christians, Jews and gays – this puts these minorities directly in danger,” he said.

“The government is friendly with the Salifists but they brutally suppressed the peaceful leftist protest (on Apr. 9),” he lamented.

Despite the significant number of Tunisians who support leftist parties and minority rights, it is clear that many people here also support Ennahda’s conservative policies and oppose increased rights for sexual and religious minorities.

Cherif believes that many Tunisians are frankly “intolerant” of social liberalism, which might hurt the new democracy’s chances at survival.

“Democracy without minority rights is not democracy,” Bjaoui added.

On Apr. 10, a day after the repression, demonstrators returned to the main drag in downtown Tunis accompanied by a group of opposition assembly members. Many of the rank and file protesters wore bandages from injuries sustained the day before. This time, however, both demonstrators and police showed restraint and the protest went on loudly but peacefully.

The next day, the government officially declared that protests were once again legal in central Tunis. The immediate crisis caused by the protest ban seems to have abated.

Still, Tunisian society remains starkly divided on social issues and plagued with economic problems. If the new democracy here is to survive, there must be some steps towards reconciliation.

Recent research has found that over 90 percent of haemophilia patients across Kashmir are also affected by hepatitis due to the dearth of safe Anti- Haemophilic Factor (AHF) in the Valley.

Haemophiliac children receive treatment at Srinagar hospital. Credit: Sana Altaf/IPS

The long-term use of Fresh Frozen Plasma (FFP) as a substitute for AHF has put hundreds of haemophilia patients at high risk of contracting deadly infections, mainly hepatitis.

A survey conducted by members of the Haemophilia Society of Kashmir in 2011 found that out of 137 haemophilia patients registered at Srinagar’s Shri Maharaja Hari Singh (SMHS) hospital, 115 were affected by hepatitis.

“I have been a part of the survey and found that over 90 percent of haemophilia patients in Kashmir are infected with hepatitis,” said Syed Majid, a member of the Haemophilia Society of Kashmir, adding, “There are many more haemophiliacs who are hepatitis-infected but are not ready to talk about it publicly.”

Thirty-year-old Majid, a student of political science at the University of Kashmir, is himself affected by hepatitis. It cost him a month of treatment and over half a million rupees (about 9,700 dollars) to get himself cured outside the state.

Haemophilia refers to a group of hereditary, genetic bleeding disorders that impair the body’s ability to control blood clotting or coagulation when a vessel is ruptured. Haemophiliacs are prone to excessive external bleeding as a result of even small wounds or cuts, as well as heavy internal bleeding.

The AHF injection surgically inserts the protein substance in blood plasma that is essential for the blood-clotting process, and is regarded as the safest mode of treatment.

FFP, on the other hand, is a frozen and preserved form of human blood also used to treat haemophilia, which experts say poses risks of infecting patients.

Javaid Rasool, a haematologist at Sher-e-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences (SKIMS), said FFP involves the highest risk of transmitted hepatitis of all categories.

Rampant and untreated

The state of Jammu and Kashmir has 223 registered haemophiliacs, most of them children. According to World Health Organisation (WHO) standards, the most common form of the disorder, haemophilia A, occurs in about one in every 5,000–10,000 male births.

Haemophilia B, on the other hand, is much more rare, occurring once in every 20,000–34,000 male births. Within the WHO parameters, the Valley is home to roughly 1200 males suffering from this disorder.

Until 2011, FFP was widely used by haemophiliacs in Kashmir, as a substitute for AHF, which was not available at government hospitals or pharmacies.

After the state High Court directed the government to ensure safe AHF to patients, treatment was readily available for six months – but only at the SMHS hospital, not at any other hospital in Srinagar or even at the district level.

Over the last month, haemophilia patients have stopped using even the small quantities of AHF available at the city hospital, alleging that the injections, procured through a new process, are unpurified and thus unsafe. Most patients are now back using FFP.

“AHF has to be purified. Initially the one that was being used here was of the best quality and purified. But now the hospital authorities have (linked up) with a company that does not sell purified AHF,” said Majid, adding that the unsafe injection poses the danger of all kinds of lethal infections.

Manzoor Ahmad, father of an 11-year-old haemophilia patient, is forced to order AHF for his son from New Delhi.

“For a few months, we had safe AHF available free of cost. But now, what is being sold is unpurified, which has high risks for patients,” said Manzoor.

“Luckily I can afford to buy AHF from outside the state. Most patients have to stick to FFP.”

Manzoor says even approaching the authorities about the issue yielded no results. “No one is ready to listen to us. The government is being insensitive to our grave (suffering),” he lamented.

Forty-three year-old Altaf Hussain Shah was infected by hepatitis after using FFP for years. He was diagnosed with hepatitis C in 2005 but no amount of treatment has brought any improvement. Shah is an employee at the records department of SKIMS, the Valley’s leading medical institute, which only runs a consultation clinic for haemophiliacs.

“We have no facilities (and so) patients are forced to use FFP, as the AHF sold by the government is not safe,” he stressed.

Haemophiliacs have even staged protests against the non-availability of safe AHF but still the government has failed to take action.

Senior haematologist at SKIMS, Samoon Jeelani, told IPS that a good number of people continue using FFP, despite awareness that it is a risky treatment. He said more efforts should be made to improve health care for haemophilia patients.

An official at the SMHS hospital, however, declined to comment on the issue.

“I cannot talk on the issue. You will have to seek permission from higher officials, only then can I say something,” Ruby Reshi, associate professor and head of the department of pathology at the Government Medical College, told IPS.

Two young women in brightly coloured hijabs and tight jeans stand on the edge of a freeway as cars whiz by. They watch the traffic, heavy in Amman where car ownership is skyrocketing by 10-15 percent a year. When there’s a break in the steady flow of vehicles, the women hold hands and race across the road.

Amman’s streets are more for cars than for women. Credit: Michael Coghlan/CC-BY-SA-2.0.

It’s an odd sight here. The city is not pedestrian-friendly. Nor is it common to see women walking, much less darting, across freeways.

Though Western media has praised Amman’s urban planning as a step towards egalitarianism, highlighting the fact that the ‘Amman 2025’ urban master plan won the 2007 World Leadership Award in Town Planning, a visit to Amman, home to nearly three million people, reveals a starkly different picture.

Poor public transportation keeps women isolated from city life; low-income families are dependent on cars; and, ironically, the Arab Spring has sidelined urban development.

One of the women, Sandra Hiari, is an architect, urban planner, and founder of Tareeq (Arabic for street), a website that focuses on city design in the Middle East.

“If you want to know if a place is safe or not, count how many women are walking on the street,” she said, adding that in Amman, women are visible only “in limited areas, like Rainbow (Street).”

Located in a bourgeois neighbourhood, the avenue is filled with chic cafes, bars, and restaurants, drawing enough of a crowd for women to feel safe, Hiari explained. But the street is not an example of the city’s planning. It is a rare exception. Because women often face harassment and catcalls, many avoid public spaces including Amman’s public transportation system, relying on cars and taxis instead.

Women, Hiari said, have been forced to “resort to structures –buildings – and to stay there rather than to use the street as a safe place where they can navigate through the city. I think we women are captured in bubbles,” she reflected. “We move from one bubble to another in the city.”

Despite closing the education gap, with girls and women attending schools and universities in slightly higher rates than boys and men, Jordanian women comprise a smaller percentage of the workforce than their male counterparts.

According to Hazem Zureiqat, a transportation planner and economist at Engicon, the lack of transportation options in Amman – home to half of the country’s population – is largely to blame for this discrepancy.

Zureiqat pointed to a recent survey that asked Jordanian women why they don’t work. “Many of them cited mobility and transportation (issues),” he stressed, meaning that, often, women simply cannot get to work.

While at least half of Jordan’s low-income households have a car, the male usually drives it, leaving women, who might otherwise work, stuck at home.

When asked if creating separate bus lines for women is the answer to their transportation troubles, Zureiqat quickly answered, “No, no. I don’t support that…you have to fix the (social issue) rather than just separating women (from men).”

He added that service needs to be improved in general, not just for women. Amman’s few bus lines run infrequently and are very unreliable. Up until some shelters were erected at bus stops recently, Zureiqat lamented that there had been “barely any shelter from the sun and rain” for commuters.

The Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system was an ambitious project that sought to correct many of these issues with 32 kilometres of new, bus-only lanes. Each BRT lane would have carried three times the amount of people than a regular traffic lane.

Zureiqat said that the BRT wasn’t just about improving the movement of people throughout the city. It was also about “human dignity.”

Ironically, however, the Arab Spring led officials to scrap the project.

Zureiqat explained, “Fighting corruption became the buzzword here and everything (was called into) question.”

Former Amman mayor Omar Maani came under particularly intense scrutiny, as did the projects that the municipality had a hand in during his tenure from 2006 to 2011. That included the BRT; the Amman Institute for Urban Development, a city-funded “think and do tank” that sought, among other goals, to help reverse the country’s brain drain; and the Amman 2025 master plan, which emphasised public transportation and fostering a more pedestrian-friendly city.

Although the BRT passed an intensive governmental review that probed every aspect of the project – including its finances – it was sidelined in September of 2011.

In December 2011 Maani was arrested on unrelated fraud charges. He is currently out on bail.

While the Amman Institute for Urban Development was beset with problems from the get-go, the Arab Spring spelt the end for the inefficient organisation, including what many considered its “overinflated” wages.

Hiari, who was employed by the Amman Institute, explained that there’s a stigma attached now to the Amman 2025 master plan as well as projects that were born of the Amman Institute.

“Officials (at the Greater Amman Municipality) are afraid to sign off on anything associated with the Amman Institute and the master plan,” Hiari said, because they don’t want to be “associated with corruption.”

These reactionary changes have left the city as unplanned, chaotic and isolating as ever.

As foreign troops trickle out of Afghanistan, local police or private security contractors have filled the gaps in Kabul. Credit: Giuliana Sgrena/IPS

By Giuliana Sgrena
KABUL, Apr 7 2012 (IPS)

Though the United States’ announcement to pull its troops from Afghanistan by 2014 was celebrated by most Afghans as the imminent end of a protracted and controversial foreign occupation, there are lingering questions about the outcome of such a withdrawal.

Specifically, experts and lay people alike are asking whether it will make the country safer for democracy or more vulnerable than ever to violence and extremism. Others are sceptical that the country will ever be free of U.S. presence in a geographically strategic country, close to Iran, Pakistan and Central Asia.

More than ten years since the arrival of foreign troops to ‘fight terrorism’, Afghan people are openly questioning the U.S’ ‘real goal’ when it entered the country.

“The goal of the (U.S) was not to fight terrorism, even though they killed (former Al-Qaeda chief) Osama bin Laden. Al-Qaeda is still here and spreading throughout the region (into Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, etc), which is useful for the U.S. because they will be asked for help and can use it as an excuse to remain in the region,” Naseer Fayaz, a renowned journalist, told IPS.

Though U.S. President Barack Obama announced the withdrawal of a portion of the stationed troops by the end of 2014, few are hopeful that this will lead to any lasting change on the ground.

“They (the U.S.) will never leave Afghanistan because it is very important from geographic and strategic points of view. The U.S. strategy is a long term one, they are here to control the area from Iran to Central Asia,” Fayaz stressed.

“They use Al-Qaeda to stay here, while negotiating with some jihadists to reach their goals,” he added.

Wadeer Safi, a law professor in the Kabul University, believes that foreign troops will remain on Afghan soil for another reason, one that is actually relevant to the country’s civil society.

“The U.S. will not leave Afghanistan before realising their goal of putting a government based on transparency and social justice into place. This is not the case up to now; criminals are still in power. They should be put on trial,” Safi told IPS.

If “foreign troops leave the country in the hand of fundamentalists, Afghanistan will become a narco state linked to Pakistan,” the professor said, a speculation supported by the fact that the majority of global opium poppy – 123,000 of 195,000 hectares in 2010 – was cultivated in Afghanistan. The country also relies on the drug trade for a third of its gross domestic product (GDP).

Furthermore, Afghanistan is the second most corrupt nation in the world after Somalia, making many people pessimistic about the country’s political future.

Regardless of this concern, the majority of the country is in favour of a withdrawal of all troops. After the massacre in Kandahar and outrage over the Quran burnings at the U.S.-run Bagram military base, tensions swept through the country, penetrating even Kabul, where foreign troops have been replaced by the Afghan army and police.

But “few people trust the Afghan police, who are divided based on ethnic groups,” said Fayaz, adding that diplomats and businessmen have turned to private, often foreign, security contractors for protection.

Embassies are completely surrounded by cement walls and entry is forbidden to Afghans who do not have a special permit.

The presence of warlords and their militias is a danger that could be exacerbated by the exit of foreign troops; though for now, hostilities have been suspended due to power sharing.

Some experts believe that a full withdrawal will lead to the outbreak of civil war; others doggedly hold onto the view that according U.S. troops the label of ‘saviour’ is mere propaganda.

“The U.S. wants to sell more weapons to the Afghans. But the origin of the Afghan problems is the occupation and the warlords in power. Only corrupt people want the troops to stay. Foreign occupations never bring democracy. The people (of a country) must struggle for freedom,” Malalai Joya, a member of the previous Loya Jirga (the Afghan parliament), told IPS.

“But it is not easy to struggle against occupation,” said Baseer, chief of the shura (tribal council) of Khewa in Dar-e-Noor (the village of light), close to the city of Jalalabad.

“Even if 99 percent of the people are against occupation, it is difficult to show your opposition because you will be labelled by the government as Taliban,” with all the consequences such a denouncement entails, Baseer told IPS.

“We need time, we have struggled against the soviet occupation, against jihadis, the Taliban and now we are facing (another) new occupation. We are with the people and we try to solve their problems, that is why we are still here,” he stressed.

He added that if a civil war breaks out, it will be the result of billions of dollars arriving in Afghanistan from outside the country “for a few rich people to build their villas”, not because of the departure of U.S. troops from Afghan soil.

Kabul bears all the signs of this new ‘blood money’, where massive villas have sprung up alongside traditional mud house surrounded by open sewers, highlighting the increasing gap between a handful of wealthy people and the vast majority of the country’s poor.

Hafiz Rashid, leader of the secular Solidarity Party of Afghanistan, told IPS, “People want peace, they don’t want more fighting and for that reason they will accept any puppet government the U.S. will impose on Afghanistan.”

In any case, he added, the U.S. will not retreat completely, but simply reduce the number of their troops remaining in the military bases.

During a meeting with a group of war victims held in the old city of Shari-kua and attended mostly by war widows who are asking for justice, it became clear these groups are willing to accept the presence of foreign troops “if that means peace,” said Fatma, a widow whose husband was killed by a rocket during the post 1992 civil war that shook the country.

“I am worried about the last events (at the Bagram Air Base) where the U.S. soldiers burned the Quran. But if they respect our religion and they can help us, we are not against them,” she said.

In some parts of Colombo, informal housing structures, or slums, are built right on waterways. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
COLOMBO, Apr 4 2012 (IPS)

Sri Lanka’s capital city Colombo, the vibrant economic and administrative heart of the bustling island nation, is rapidly turning into a city of slums. Home to over 30 percent of the country’s population, one in every two people living in the Greater Colombo Area is a slum dweller.

Sadly, Colombo’s bulging urban population is not a rarity in South Asia, where most of the region’s major metropolises are scrambling to stitch up their bursting seams.

Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital, is home to 34 percent of the country’s population and is the fastest growing city in Asia – around 40 percent of those living in Dhaka are slum dwellers. A quarter of Nepal’s population lives in cities, while 36 percent of Pakistan’s population is now concentrated in urban centres. In India 93 million people are estimated to be living in slums; fully half the population of the capital, New Delhi, lives in slums, while the figure could be as high as 60 percent in glittering Mumbai.

Indu Weerasooriya, deputy director general at the Sri Lankan Urban Development Authority, told a recent World Bank symposium on regional cities and sustainability, “Forty-three percent of the Greater Colombo (population) lives in slums and shanties.”

Ming Zhang, the World Bank sector manager for Urban Water and Disaster Management for South Asia, predicted that the urban population in South Asia would double in the next 25 years. Already one in every four persons is categorised under ‘informal population’ or living in shanties or slums in the urban areas of the region, Zhang warned.

The expansions are so rapid that in Dhaka, according to Nazrul Islam, chairman of the Centre for Urban Studies in Dhaka, one of the most profitable businesses nowadays is developing and renting out ‘slums’ that stand on stilts near waterways.

And when unannounced floods come, like they did in Colombo in November 2010 and May last year, it is the low-lying areas where most of the slums are located that go under first. A similar situation was experienced in Bangladesh in July last year.

Urgent need for urban planning

Regional experts and those from the World Bank agree that most of the problems faced by the cities are man-made, primarily due to lack of proper planning.

“If we thought about proper urban planning, institutional coherence and community participation, we would be able to address a big chunk of this (problem),” Abha Joshi-Ghani, the World Bank’s Sector Manager for Finance Economics and Urban Planning, told IPS.

Colombo, particularly, knows the ramifications of haphazard expansion. When the rains come down in buckets, even for short periods, parts of Colombo go under in double-quick time.

Gotabaya Rajapaksa, secretary to the Ministry of Urban Development and Defense, told the World Bank workshop that the flooding is mainly due to informal housing structures coming up on or near water retention areas, canals and other climate-sensitive spots.

In some parts of Colombo, like along the sections of the Hamilton Canal and connecting waterways north of the city, the structures are not near but actually on the water. Weerasooriya said that rain patterns affected by climate change – resulting in shorter rainy days with intense downpours – have exacerbated the problem.

Joshi-Ghani told IPS that cities like Colombo sitting near the coast now face the added risk of coastal erosion.

“In South Asia we have a large number of coastal cities threatened with inundation,” she said.

Drinking water is also becoming a major issue in other regional cities like Dhaka. Islam told IPS that overuse has already made the water supply from two of the four rivers that feed the city unreliable, because “they are running dry,” he said.

Climate change experts warn that cities need to adapt fast.

“Most of these places have seen unplanned development take place for decades, they need to change that,” Rutu Dave, a climate change expert at the Washington-based World Bank Institute, told IPS.

Her colleague Joshi-Ghani added urban centres have to fix the problem of overuse of limited resources. “We are depleting our resources by inefficient and indiscriminate use of resources.”

Secretary Rajapaksa told the World Bank workshop that authorities have launched a massive programme to relocate 70,000 families living under poor conditions in Colombo and to clear blocked waterways. “Providing proper housing for the under-served settlements is a significant problem for town planners and architects,” Rajapaksa said.

With space at a premium, the project envisions resettling slum dwellers in high-rise buildings.

Joshi-Ghani told IPS that any relocation has to take into consideration the incomes and lifestyles of those affected, which, if disrupted, could turn the solution itself turns into a problem. “Many think that cities make people poor, when in fact cities attract the poor who think they can make a better living (there),” she said.

Dave told IPS that awareness was growing among authorities as well as ordinary people on the dangers faced by unplanned urban development. “Some of the best awareness campaigns have been at schools. Children can be drivers of change,” she said.

But as long as city planners lack the political will, at national and local levels, to go head with strong decisions, cities like Colombo, Dhaka and others in the region will have to deal with more chaos as nature’s fury increasingly joins hands with man’s ignorance.

“The scary thing is that natural disasters don’t honour geographical boundaries, they hurt the poor most,” said Jesse Robredo, secretary of the Department of Interior and Local Governments in the Philippines, who travelled to Colombo to advise his South Asian colleagues on the issue.

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The recent dramatic rise of youth unemployment across Europe – particularly in the Mediterranean member countries of the Eurozone most affected by the sovereign debt crisis and so-called ‘remedial’ austerity programmes – indicates that the continent is sacrificing its future on the altar of short-term budget consolidation.

According to official figures, the unemployment rate affecting people under 25 years of age has reached 50 percent in Spain, 48 percent in Greece, 35 percent in Portugal, and 31 percent in Italy. Youth unemployment is also high in Ireland (30 percent), France (23 per cent), and Britain (22 percent).

On average, 25 percent of European’s youth labour force is unemployed and yet another 25 percent only has a precarious, low paid job, even though most of unemployed young people possess high educational qualifications, including university diplomas.

In all these countries affected by high sovereign debt and economic recession, conservative governments have imposed drastic cuts in public spending, reduced social welfare programmes and pensions and increased taxes, especially those paid by consumers, among other austerity measures.

These programmes have deepened economic slumps and fiscal difficulties across Europe.

As the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) announced on Mar. 29 in its more recent economic assessment for the G7, the seven most industrialised countries of the world, “Our forecast for the first half of 2012 points to robust growth in the United States and Canada, but much weaker activity in Europe, where the outlook remains fragile.”

“We may have stepped back from the edge of the cliff,” the OECD’s chief economist Pier Carlo Padoan cautioned, “but there’s still no room for complacency.”

Padoan also warned that the eurozone’s three largest economies – Germany, France and Italy – may have shrunk by an average of 0.4 percent during the first quarter of the year.

The German economy already suffered a slowdown of 0.2 percent during the last quarter of 2011. Given the OECD forecast, such figures suggest that even Germany, the last standing economic powerhouse in an otherwise lethargic continent, might have fallen into recession – experiencing a negative growth rate for two consecutive quarters.

To confirm the crisis, the European Commission’s office for youth announced that youth unemployment across the continent went up to 5.5 million in January 2012, a 37.7 percent growth rate since the spring of 2008, at the beginning of the global financial crisis.

Other sources put this youth unemployment growth at a staggering 48 percent since 2008.

The office said that “Overall, young people account for one-fifth (21.3 percent) of the total increase in unemployment since 2008” in the EU.

Small wonder then that social scientists and politicians across the continent are talking about “a lost generation”.

In an editorial comment for the daily Saarlaendische Zeitung, German economist Fred Schmid described the European youth as the “zero generation – zero employment, zero income, zero perspectives.”

Ian Wright, a Labour Party member of parliament in Britain, also warned “that we … face a lost generation … if we don’t act now. If people don’t get a job, long-term unemployment leads to higher rates of depression, more divorces, and more cases of alcoholism. If there is one single thing which contributes to a declining and depressingly low quality of life, it is not having a job.”

Lack of prospects in Spain, Greece, Portugal and other European countries has forced youth to emigrate. The Spanish ministry of labour estimates that some 300,000 young university graduates left the country last year.

“Such a dramatic exodus of university graduates is a first in modern Spain,” minister Fátima Bañez told local press.

Indeed, during the past 15 to 20 years, Spain was a magnet for workers from developing countries, particularly from Latin America and Africa, but also from Asia. In two years, however, since the outbreak of the sovereign debt crisis and the collapse of the local real estate market, Spanish youth have either been demonstrating against local politics and austerity economics, or fleeing the country.

Thanks to this migration, Spanish has become the fourth most-spoken language in the German capital Berlin, after German, English, and Turkish.

The youth unemployment crisis is so severe, and affecting such a broad portion of the world, that the International Labour Organisation (ILO) has scheduled a youth employment forum next May.

The ILO estimates that young people are three times more likely to be unemployed than adults. “Over 75 million youth worldwide are looking for work,” the organization says.

The ILO has also warned of a “scarred” generation of young workers facing a dangerous mix of high unemployment, increased inactivity and precarious work in developed countries, as well as persistently high working poverty in the developing world.

The ILO’s general director Juan Somavia warned that this “labour market recession may last for a whole decade – it would be then a lost decade, with catastrophic social and political consequences.”

The crisis is affecting famiy lives in other unexpected ways. In Italy, for instance, youth end up living longer at their parents’ homes. Low incomes prevent youth from renting their own apartments, or financing their own households.

So far, there are no signs of change. All governments in Europe are insisting on pushing ahead with austerity programmes to stop international financial speculation against their credit-worthiness, and allegedly to consolidate their public budgets. At the same time, they continue to ignore the worrying social symptoms emerging all over the continent.

Only these symptoms, which erupt in the form of widespread protest, from the occupy movement in Germany to the Spanish indignados, suggest that the European youth, victims of a crisis they did not create and of counterproductive ‘solutions’, is not ready to give up its own future.

Maldivian women brave water cannon at a protest rally. Credit:

By Feizal Samath
COLOMBO, Apr 3 2012 (IPS)

Maldivian women, long used to taking a backseat in the Muslim-dominated Indian Ocean country, say they are determined to ensure that they are not deprived of their rights under the new regime of President Mohammed Waheed Hassan.

Television footage of women battling police, soon after the Feb. 7 resignation of president Mohammed Nasheed, showed the new assertiveness of Maldivian women, even while wearing the ‘hijab’ or head-cover traditionally worn by Muslim women. Nasheed later claimed it was a coup against his elected government.

“Yes, life is changing in the Maldives with women asserting their rights more aggressively than before,” Mauroof Zakir, a young trade union activist, told IPS over telephone. “This is a new and exciting development.”

Zakir said Nasheed’s policy of providing free health insurance and allowances for single mothers was not lost on the women who have been taking to the streets in large numbers, confronting police and demanding reinstatement of his government.

“After the coup women want to express their views. They are very angry and disappointed at the sudden removal of an elected president and his government,” said Aishath Aniya, a prominent female activist and former secretary-general of Nasheed’s Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP).

“Women never took part in rallies or came onto the streets before, but now they readily attend rallies or speak in public to demand change,” said Aniya, who was among a group of female protestors who were arrested and stripped naked by a group of policewomen after one protest.

“We were able to muster as many as 8,000 women at some of the rallies,” Aniya told IPS in a telephone interview.

Females account for slightly less than half of the estimated 350,000-strong Maldivian population.

Nasheed, a former journalist educated in Britain, led the MDP during a massive campaign for democracy in the Maldives before winning the elections held in November 2008 and defeating Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, 74, who had ruled the country with an iron fist for 30 years.

Nasheed’s ouster is widely believed to have been orchestrated by Gayoom and his allies, though the former president has repeatedly denied involvement.

Waheed’s cabinet is packed with Gayoom supporters. The former dictator’s youngest son, Ghassan Maumoon, is minister of state for human resources, and his daughter, Dhunya Maumoon, is junior minister for foreign affairs in Waheed’s cabinet.

Also, Abdul Samad Abdulla, Maldivian envoy to Bangladesh during Gayoom’s rule, is foreign minister while the finance minister is Abdulla Jihad, who held the same portfolio under Gayoom.

Shifa Mohamed, a frontline women’s leader of the MDP, says quite a few women work in the country’s civil service but not at policy or decision-making levels. “Men have traditionally dominated these positions,” she said.

Shifa told IPS that Nasheed understood the issues facing women and tried to address their concerns by coming up with schemes like health insurance and improving transportation to schools and health clinics.

Aniya believes women became more empowered under Nasheed’s governance and points to how he improved transportation, an important issue on the islands. “Earlier when someone fell ill residents were forced to plead with boat owners for a ride to the nearest clinic or hospital – and often refused.”

Today under a state-subsidised system, there are regular ferries between the islands, she said. “Women being the main caregivers felt the difference in approach.”

Shifa said women are anxious that there is no return to the past. “During Gayoom’s rule, even if women voted massively against him, the results would show 100 percent support.

“That was the kind of repression felt not just by women but by everyone and that is why women feel compelled to stand up for their rights and for the benefit of the next generation of Maldivians.”

Nasheed, while in power, had openly advocated a moderate brand of Islam and spoken up against such practices as female genital mutilation, child marriage and the public flogging of women for adultery.

Nasheed had also backed a controversial domestic violence bill aimed at providing female victims emergency protection and easing a woman’s ability to resort to divorce. The bill has remained in the Majlis or parliament for over a year.

A government spokesman contacted by IPS disputed the claim of large numbers of women turning out for protests against the Waheed regime, saying they consist mostly of relatives or friends of Nasheed.

“Their (MDP) claims are all nonsense. I would reckon the numbers taking part are around 200 to 300 or less. The problem is that the capital has many small alleys and even a small number of women looks like a large crowd and provides nice video,” said Imad Mazood, spokesman for President Waheed. “Male is like a studio.”

Foreign media began converging on Male a few days before Nasheed resigned and, as tensions rose, footage unflattering to the new regime was carried on social media networks like YouTube and by international TV channels.

Mazood said with Male’s population comprising a sizable number of foreigners, mostly Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans and Indians, it is impossible to muster 8,000 women for a rally. “You won’t get even half that number.”

There are over 100,000 foreign workers in the Maldives, the majority employed in the country’s main industry of international tourism.

Mohamed Latheef, a founder of the MDP and widely seen as Nasheed’s mentor, admits that it is difficult to accurately estimate the number of women involved in protests and rallies.

“Society in Male is so polarised that it is an ‘us versus them’ situation,” he said, speaking to IPS in Colombo where he lives in exile.

Amnesty International (AI), the London-based rights group, has voiced concern over attacks against women protestors, referring in particular to a Feb. 26 march.

AI said a group of peaceful women protestors was “charged by soldiers who wielded batons and used pepper spray, pushed them around, and kicked them on their legs and ribs,” as they moved towards a public meeting on Addu island, addressed by President Waheed.

Aniya said, after a protest march on Mar. 19, she and 12 other women were body-searched and stripped naked. “They took urine samples and wanted to pin charges of drugs use on us, similar to the kind of false charges earlier used against opponents of the Gayoom regime.”

But, Aniya said, such tactics are not going to deter the women from joining the rallies against the new regime. “Many of them are determined to protest for 24 hours, even daily, till president Nasheed is reinstated.”

Mursal, a beautiful 19-year-old girl who has run away from home to escape a mentally ill husband, is just one of many Afghan women and girls who are now considered criminals under the country’s laws on ‘morality.’

Running away from one’s husband is considered a ‘moral crime’, for which hundreds of Afghan women have already been jailed, with hundreds more at risk of been sentenced to a similar fate.

“I was forced to marry a mentally sick man when I was 11 years old, I was still a child and had no information about sex and marriage. I had just run away from my house because my father’s second wife used to beat me,” Mursal told IPS.

The memory of those early years is obviously still fresh in her mind, though she recounted the story from a women’s shelter in Kabul, far away from her old home.

“My mother died when I was one year old and since than my life has been hell. That’s why I came here to this shelter nine years ago. A year later, my father arrived and forced me to go to Maidan Shar to live with my cousin. A month later I was married.”

“Because my husband has many mental problems, people started to say that I was a prostitute. One night they started shouting in front of my house, so I left and have been here for the last three days,” she said.

Dressed in a beautifully embroidered dress and scarf that is out of place with her humble surroundings, one can’t help but think that Mursal fled with her most precious possessions on her back, and little else.

Now she says she wants a divorce but that will not be easy to obtain without her husband’s consent, which changes according to his unstable moods and the opinions of those around him. Still, she is certain she wants to remarry, this time to a man from Kabul.

“In the city men are better than in the villages,” she says hopefully with tears in her eyes.

Live with abuse, or die

Women like Mursal don’t have many alternatives to marriage because a woman living alone in Afghanistan is considered a prostitute even if she works another job.

Luckily the shelter she lives in, run by Humanitarian Assistance for the Women and Children of Afghanistan (HAWCA), a local non-governmental organisation, provides classes in literacy and courses in tailoring. Two of the women from the shelter even became police officers.

Two years ago state legislation came close to shutting down all the private shelters and placing them under government control but huge protests brought a compromise that the government would run the “open shelters” and the NGOs the “closed” ones.

Up to now the government hasn’t opened any shelters of its own, so the ministries and police continue to send women in danger to the NGO-run centres. In Kabul there are only three such shelters in operation and a total of 14 in all of Afghanistan – hardly adequate to meet the needs of increasing numbers of survivors of domestic violence.

Women have also turned to self-immolation as a way of avoiding domestic abuse – preferring to die a horrifically painful death than continue a life of acute suffering. The Istiqlal hospital in Kabul opened a special department for burned patients, 90 percent of whom are women. Most of these victims succumb to the severity of their burns; only a tiny minority survive.

But burn patients are not always victims of self-immolation. Quite often women are set ablaze by their own husbands or in-laws so that now, according to Harir, a doctor at the Istiqlal hospital, police are informed about all burn patients so that appropriate investigations can be opened.

Sadly, most members of the police force are ill-equipped to handle domestic violence complaints lodged by women; and women themselves have expressed concern over the risk of rape at the hands of the police. To address the situation, HAWCA conducts trainings to educate the police officers, “but it is not easy to change a cultural legacy,” Selay Ghaffar, the president of HAWCA, told IPS.

Ghaffar also admitted that honour killings continue to be a major problem that “in many cases are hidden by the tribe or the community (and never brought to light). The girl or the woman just disappears.”

“In other cases the Taliban takes charge of the execution by stoning the girl (to death),” she added.

There are also widespread cases of torture.

“Sarah Gul was tortured by her husband because she refused to become a prostitute,” Malalai Joya, herself a victim of state violence in retaliation for earning a seat in the Loya jirga (council of elders) for the Farah region, told IPS.

After a speech against the Taliban warlords she was beaten while some members of the parliament shouted, “rape her.” Her case is now famous across the country.

Recently, Gulnaz, a 21-year-old woman, also gained national recognition by lodging a complaint with the police after she was raped by her cousin-in-law, who happened to be a powerful man in the local community.

Instead of arresting the perpetrator, the police condemned Gulnaz for adultery. The alternative to her three-year prison sentence was to marry the man who raped her, which Gulnaz refused.

Unconstitutional treatment

These ‘moral crimes’ are determined by an illegal procedure that is not upheld in the constitution but rather determined by vague religious concepts. As a result, running away from home now earns women a prison sentence, denouncing rape labelled them adulterers and refusing a forced marriage is a crime.

The Afghan Ulema (religious leaders) recently issued a declaration to limit women’s already scant freedoms: for example, a woman can’t speak to an unknown man, and the husband is authorised to beat his wife if she doesn’t obey. This document is supported by president Hamid Karzai, who banned the English version of the Ulema document from the government website.

All this is happening under the “control” of the international community and various armed forces that are still very much present and engaged in Afghanistan.

“Ten years after the fall of the Taliban, the situation for women is worsening by the day,” Bilqis Roshan, a senator who receives bad news about women from her region of Farah every single day, told IPS.

“The majority of senators are warlords and religious fundamentalists so it is very difficult to take positions in favour of women’s rights. But at the very least, I can raise the issue and lift the voice of my people,” she added.

By Manipadma Jena and - -
BANGKOK, Mar 27 2012 (IPS)

India, like other Asian countries, has focused its climate change adaptation strategies on rural and urban areas while neglecting the urban fringes, say experts.

Peri-urban areas are characterised by haphazard, accelerated expansion and are farthest from basic urban services and infrastructure, according to United Nations-Habitat’s ‘The State of Asian Cities 2010-11’. By 2020, of the projected 4.2 billion urban population of the world, 2.2 billion will be living in Asia, many in peri-urban areas, the U.N. report says.

“These are places where nobody is in charge,” said Stephen Tyler of the United States-based Institute of Social and Environmental Transition (ISET), while in the Thai capital to attend the Mar. 12–13 Asia Pacific Climate Change Adaptation Forum.

“Populations residing in peri-urban areas are most vulnerable to climate change because they have neither the modern infrastructure, clean water, and sanitation available in urban areas nor the ecosystems that rural folks fall back on,” Tyler told IPS.

“Climate change exacerbates land and resettlement issues in Asia,” said Youssef Nassef, coordinator of the adaptation programme with the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and a delegate.

“In India, while the municipality’s administration area is demarcated, responsibility for peri-urban areas is fragmented. Where are the policy levers for peri-urban areas, for example, in India’s policy?” Nassef asks.

India is not alone in neglecting peri-urban areas. Last year’s devastating floods in Thailand provided a good example of such neglect.

“What is Bangkok and what is not Bangkok is the question being asked after the flood,” said Jonathan Shaw, executive director of the Bangkok-based Asian Institute of Technology.

“Bangkok’s urban sprawl spreads seamlessly to its suburbs, yet the business district with large foreign direct investment got priority flood protection,” Shaw said. “The flood manifested the fissures in the urban and peri-urban.”

“People here think the political factor played a major role in flood intervention. While two-tonne sand bags were available to prevent flooding into Bangkok city, the suburban provinces got only small sandbags which failed to keep the water out,” Shaw said.

Cities that are not socially sustainable can never be environmentally sustainable, said Marcus Moench, who heads ISET. “The vulnerability of any city is directly proportional to the quantum of marginalised populations and to the exposure.”

“As India urbanises, we see more and more poverty pockets because it is urbanising in an unorganised way,” ISET researcher Shashikant Chopde told IPS.

According to India’s federal ministry of urban development, by 2051, 48 percent or 820 million people of its estimated 1.7 billion will be living in 6,500 urban settlements.

For these new arrivals from ‘push migration’ dynamics with low-skill sets and earning ability, peri-urban areas are preferable to the crowded and expensive city cores.

In a report launched at the Bangkok forum, the Asian Development Bank (AsDB) said that by 2050 some 1.4 billion Indians will be living in areas experiencing negative climate change impacts.

India’s coastal region will become “further vulnerable to climate change impacts due to high urbanisation, rural–urban migration and dwindling agricultural productivity,” says the AsDB report titled ‘Addressing Climate Change and Migration in Asia and the Pacific’.

“If migration is not carefully planned and assisted, there is a serious risk that it can turn into maladaption, i.e. leave people more vulnerable to environmental changes,” AsDB report warns.

Chopde says that in India while many city slum dwellers are eligible, under the National Mission on Sustainable Habitat, for low-cost safe shelters, clean water and sanitation, inhabitants on the city fringes are unable to avail of the schemes thanks to blurred administrative boundaries.

“This is because they are included neither under rural nor within urban local governance systems,” says Chopde. “As cities grow, peripheral lands are becoming increasingly attractive to commercial developers, and once again, low-income informal settlements are pushed away to cities’ new outer periphery.”

“If a city’s master plans are strictly followed, peri-urban areas could be developed for climate-smart farming, helping to prevent city water logging.

“Since much of the vegetable supply comes from a city’s fringes, livelihood security for peri-urban inhabitants and food security for city dwellers could be ensured.” Chopde suggests.

Experts at the Bangkok meet said that the challenge of building climate resilient societies could no longer be the responsibility of governments alone.

Saleemul Huq, who heads the Dhaka-based International Centre for Climate Change and Development, said at a media roundtable here that countries need to “build social capital by training a wide cross-section of people to better prepare for climate change at a time of unprecedented urbanisation.”

While there is no cookie-cutter solution, Anna Lindstedt, Sweden’s ambassador for climate change, stressed that planning and adaptation strategies should be context- specific and tailored to localities.

“The process of engaging diverse partners, of building a shared understanding of climate risks and urban vulnerability, of developing joint and separate interventions and building a shared platform for ongoing learning is more valuable to the resilience building effort than any other strategy itself,” states ISET’s 2011 publication ‘Catalysing Urban Climate Resilience’.

The report discusses study-based climate vulnerability and resilience -building strategies of a network of cities in India, Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand supported the by Rockefeller Foundation through Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network.

For India, the best bet is still community-driven development, says Bharat Dahiya, researcher on peri- urban areas at U.N.-Habitat’s Asia-Pacific regional office in Bangkok. “In India, self-help, voluntarily initiated by civil society, even if ad hoc in nature, is of crucial importance,” Dahiya said.

Excerpt:

By Mona Alami
BEIRUT, Mar 26 2012 (IPS)

The Druze stronghold of Sweida, Syria, witnessed several pro-democracy protests last week. While the movement remains marginal, it is charged with symbolism: the Druze have long been considered the “spiritual cousins” of the Alawites, the religious group to which the Assad family belongs.

The question now on the table is whether or not the recent outbursts of Druze opposition to the regime could be a tipping point in favour of the Syrian revolutionaries.

Over the centuries the Druze minority, which make up about three percent of the Syrian population and are located primarily in the Sweida area, also known as Jabal al-Druze (the Druze mountain), has spearheaded various Syrian revolutions, including battling Ottoman rule and the authority of the French mandate system.

Over the last decade, the community developed excellent relations with president Bashar al-Assad, who could sometimes be spotted visiting local Druze families.

These close ties, however, did not make Sweida immune to the pro-democracy uprising, which has claimed almost 7,500 lives in Syria since Jan. 2011.

“Demonstrations are taking place more frequently although on a much smaller scale than in other regions. Last week, fifteen protests took place in several Druze villages,” Rima Fleyhan, a member of the Syrian opposition, told IPS.

Protests are mostly taking place in the Sweida capital and Qraya – the birthplace of the historical Druze revolutionary figure, Sultan Pacha al-Atrash, who led the Syrian Revolution from 1925–1927 – and springing up more regularly in Chahba, another city in the Druze region.

“While still marginal, the protest movement is essentially comprised of students, lawyers and engineers as well as leftists. Since its inception, it always consisted of the community’s elite,” acknowledged Talal el-Atrache, author of ‘When Syria awakes’, who spoke to IPS over the phone from Sweida.

Conversely, elsewhere in the country, the overwhelming majority of protestors have been from farming communities and impoverished areas, with the movement slowly expanding into the upper echelons of society.

“When the pro-democracy movement first started, Bashar al-Assad met with the (Druze) community’s three (highest ranking) sheikhs (clerics) and warned: ‘We are both Druze and Alawites, minorities in this country. Do not get involved in the protests’,” activist Muntaha al-Atrash, daughter of Sultan Pasha al- Atrash, told IPS.

According to several sources, Druze sheikhs tried to contain the movement before things got out of hand by intervening personally to quell demonstrations in order to avoid violent repercussion from the government.

In spite of such efforts, two local ‘popular committees’ have been formed, affiliated with the opposition’s Local Coordination Committee (LCC). “We have also formed a unit comprised of Druze military men,” added colonel Aref Hamoud from the Free Syrian Army (FSA), who spoke to IPS on the phone from Turkey.

According to a post by the LCC, the FSA’s Sultan Pasha Al-Atrash Brigades attacked a military outpost yesterday, resulting in the killing of one officer from the national army and the defection of 28 soldiers, though this information is difficult to verify independently, due to the media ban enforced in Syria.

Several obstacles continue to hamper the Sweida-based pro-democracy movement. Security police and “shabiha” (thugs) loyal to President Assad have been able to disperse most protests rapidly. According to Fleyhan, the absence of religious centres poses a major logistical problem for the Druze, since mosques have served as convenient rallying points for protestors elsewhere in the country.

Another factor accounting for lower turnout at protests can be attributed to the massive emigration of Druze youth, leaving the region devoid of a group that has been at the very core of the revolution in other parts of Syria.

Experts like Talal el-Atrache cite several other reasons as possible causes, “mainly, the ongoing militarisation of the rebellion resulting from repression, which is diverting the popular uprising from its initial goals,” he said.

Ashraf Jaramani, a local resident also involved in politics believes that the deadly threat of civil strife as well as the Islamist dimension of the protests may have discouraged the Druze from plunging into the movement.

“If Syria follows Egypt and Libya, who will guarantee the Druze that the Muslim Brotherhood will not govern the country? What will happen to minorities rights then?” Jaramani asked IPS.

The community is also wary of an internationalisation of the conflict, in which Syria could become a battleground for the rivalry between Shiite and Sunni countries.

“The Druze do not want Syria to follow in Lebanese footsteps,” stressed Talal el-Atrache, referring to the decade and a half long civil war that plagued Lebanon from 1975 to 1990.

The Druze community in Lebanon has attempted to inflame their coreligionists. In several editorials in his weekly newspaper, Walid Joumblatt, the most prominent leader of the community, urged the Druze in Syria to take the side of the revolution.

“Beware you Arab strugglers in the Druze Mountain against yielding to the Shabbiha in confronting your brothers in Syria,” he said. The Druze leader had also previously called on young Druze soldiers in the Syrian army to “disobey military commands to kill their brothers.”

The Center for Documenting Violations in Syria, run by activists in the LCC, puts the number of slain soldiers from Sweida at 31, as of Jan. 25. Others believe the most recent figure is likely closer to 80.

For Muntaha al-Atrash, the Druze playing a larger role in the protests will be a major drawback for the regime, as Sweida, together with the Daraa province, form the District of Hauran.

The Assad regime, wary of the threat such a united front might pose, is still attempting to court the minority. Security forces have avoided killing any Druze demonstrators while activists say that detained prisoners were given preferential treatment. The regime is avoiding a violent crackdown in regions inhabited by religious minorities, in order to preserve the ‘Islamic label’ given to the Syrian revolution, said Fleyhan.

But some activists believe that security forces are losing patience and will end up making tactical mistakes, which will backfire as pressures mounts in the region.

“When (the whole) of Hauran rises,” predicts Muntaha al-Atrash, “it will be difficult to bring it down.”

Excerpt:

By Danilo Valladares and - -
GUATEMALA CITY, Mar 26 2012 (IPS)

“It benefits both our finances and our health, because the vegetables help prevent illness while they nourish our children,” says Lesbia Huertas, standing in the middle of her yard filled with containers sprouting vegetables in Palencia, 28 km northeast of the Guatemalan capital.

“I grow radishes, beets, parsley, leeks, carrots, tomatoes, bell peppers…this way I save around 15 quetzals (two dollars) a week on vegetables,” she says proudly.

As she waters the plants in her recycled plastic containers, Huertas explains to IPS that here in the front yard of her modest home she has planted 16 kinds of vegetables, which she harvests every day when she prepares the meals for her husband and two children.

For irrigation and household use, she has a 4,000-litre tank for harvesting rainwater, which she has learned to disinfect to prevent diseases.

Huertas is one of 562 women participating in a programme aimed at the supply and use of good quality water in urban and peri-urban agriculture to improve food and nutritional security, in the small towns of Chinautla and Palencia on the outskirts of Guatemala City.

The project has been run since June 2010 by the agriculture ministry with support from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID).

In Latin America, the initiative is also being carried out in Ecuador, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua.

According to FAO, one billion people now suffer chronic hunger worldwide. And by 2025, 1.8 billion people will be living in countries or regions with absolute water scarcity.

Against this backdrop, protecting water and food security is crucial.

“What we are doing is training low-income people so they can plant family gardens in areas ranging from 12 to 15 square metres,” says Elder Berduo, with FAO Guatemala.

“Using a manual, we explain to them the basics of nutrition, which elements different foods contain and why they are nutritious, what each vegetable offers. And then we show them how to plant and care for a garden,” he explains to IPS.

Besides training, the project provides inputs like seeds, organic compost, and rainwater collection and storage tanks.

According to Berduo, the initial goal of the project is for the families to produce vegetables for their own consumption, while the second stage will focus on growing a surplus, which the families can sell to boost their incomes.

The results speak for themselves. “Everything I know I learned in the training, because I had never planted a garden before. All I grew before were mint and cilantro,” says Olga Foronda, who now grows 13 kinds of vegetables in cut-off soft drink bottles, trays, old pots and pans and other improvised containers.

“This benefits me in many ways, because the kids need to eat many different kinds of vegetables, and growing them at home means they’re healthier because we don’t use chemicals,” Foronda adds, chatting with IPS in her yard, in the middle of artichoke, carrot, onion and spinach plants.

The success of her garden has awakened the curiosity of neighbour women, who often stop by and ask her how to grow vegetables.

“They always come and ask me what they would need in order to do this,” says Foronda, who has learned how to garden, make compost and use water efficiently, while learning about the nutrients and benefits offered by each kind of vegetable.

This initiative is just one of a variety of efforts to fight hunger in Guatemala, where one out of two children are chronically malnourished – the highest rate in Latin America, according to UNICEF, the U.N. children’s fund.

Beatriz Juárez, the project’s nutritionist, tells IPS that before the families involved in the project began to plant their gardens, their nutritional levels were measured, and 33 percent of the project’s beneficiaries were found to suffer from chronic malnutrition.

“They used to eat perulero and güisquil squash, and oranges, which were the only things they grew. Also, they have limited access to markets, where at any rate there is only a narrow variety of food available,” the nutritionist said.

The project has focused on production of red vegetables, like tomatoes, which contain lycopene, a carotenoid and antioxidant that may lower the risk of cancer; leafy greens, which are rich in glucosinolates, which also protect against cancer; and white vegetables like onions, which have powerful antioxidants.

“The more varied our diet, the better we can avoid cancer and chronic diseases like diabetes, hypertension and obesity,” said Juárez. “And we can do that by eating more fruits and vegetables.

“In late April, we’ll carry out an evaluation of how people are eating, to gauge the impact of the project on the families, who so far have 531 gardens, and to assess the benefits for their health,” she said.

According to FAO, the project will end in November, and the goal is to have 800 urban gardens up and running by that time.

Excerpt:

By Edgardo Ayala and - -
SAN SALVADOR, Mar 23 2012 (IPS)

“You see? That’s where they were going to put the antenna,” says Alicia Suncín, pointing to a spot in the middle of a park in the Salvadoran capital where a private company was planning to erect a cell phone tower, 10 metres away from swings and see-saws where children play.

Local residents in the Salvadoran capital are fighting the installation of cell phone towers in their neighbourhoods. Credit: Karl Baron/CC BY 2.0

Some 1,000 families from Suncín’s Santa Fe neighbourhood in the north of the capital of El Salvador and from other parts of the city are taking part in the protests, because they fear the potentially harmful health effects of the electromagnetic radiation emitted by the cell phone towers.

“How can I live next to a 33-metre tall antenna that emits radiation, which is a health hazard?” Suncín remarked to IPS.

After years of debate and international scientific studies producing results both for and against this claim, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), part of the World Health Organisation (WHO), said in a May 2011 communiqué that radiofrequency electromagnetic fields emitted by wireless communication devices are “possibly carcinogenic to humans.”

“They are a danger to our health and that of our children; we don’t want these cell phone towers here,” said Zulma Handal, also a member of the Coordinating Committee.

A number of studies have found evidence of symptoms of ill-health such as fatigue, headaches, sleep disturbances and memory loss among people who live within 100 metres of mobile phone towers.

At present, dozens of cell phone towers are scattered across the urban landscape of the Salvadoran capital, which is home to 1.5 million people.

Some of the antennas were built after telecommunications were privatised in 1999, but in recent years their number has multiplied in line with the telecoms companies’ need to expand their networks and provide wireless internet services.

About 7.5 million cell phones are in use in this Central American nation of 6.2 million people.

One of the transnational corporations involved in the mobile telephony sector in El Salvador is América Móvil, owned by Mexican magnate Carlos Slim, the richest man in the world according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Under its trademark Claro, the company operates the largest mobile phone network in the Americas. América Móvil is the privatised successor to El Salvador’s state-run National Telecommunications Administration (ANTEL), which was sold to France Telecom in 1999 and acquired by Slim in 2003.

Also present in the Salvadoran market are the Spanish firm Telefónica and the Jamaican company Digicel.

When the metal towers were first installed in San Salvador, they were purportedly to be used for closed circuit video surveillance cameras in parks and recreation areas, as part of a public safety initiative by the mayor of the capital city, Norman Quijano of the rightwing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA).

However, in several communities and neighbourhoods IPS was able to verify that the towers are in fact being used for wireless telephone services, including one in a park in Centroamérica, a neighbourhood in northwest San Salvador.

In a document dated Nov. 24, 2011, signed by Rafael Henríquez, the city councillor for San Salvador’s District 2, the municipality gave permission to Collocation Technologies of El Salvador “to carry out the installation of towers or telecommunications structures in Centroamérica Park.”

Local residents say this company is subcontracted by one or other of the telecoms companies to install cell phone towers. “They put one in Centroamérica Park and now they want to put one in our neighbourhood, but we won’t let them,” said Suncín.

The San Salvador mayor’s office responded that no one was available to be interviewed by IPS.

Residents of the areas where telecoms towers have been located are calling for their removal. “Fortunately there is a social movement of citizens who are against them and are not just waiting until cancer victims appear,” Gregorio Ramírez, an activist with the Salvadoran Ecological Unit (UNES), told IPS.

Human rights ombudsman Oscar Luna added his voice to the criticism, complaining that the structures were built without informing or consulting the local population.

The conflict between protesters and the city government of San Salvador occurred during the election campaign for mayors and city councillors which led to Quijano’s re-election as mayor Mar. 11. Quijano said the protests were politically motivated and designed to prevent his re-election.

Article 11 of the municipal regulations for mobile phone tower installation empowers the mayor to authorise their placement, on condition that they do not obstruct any right of way and are not placed on median strips or traffic islands, or on land adjacent to houses.

This last requirement was in danger of being violated in the case of the tower planned for construction in Santa Fe, because the chosen site is only a few metres away from several houses, as IPS was able to confirm.

So far, the national government has remained silent.

“State institutions ought to issue a statement, including an investigation into what regulations the mayor’s office followed when it granted permission for the towers, backed up by the WHO reports that say the radiation is harmful,” Nayda Medrano, the executive director of the Consumer Defence Centre (CDC), told IPS.

Many consumers have complained about the telephone service since it was privatised, citing overcharging and other problems.

The CDC reported that fixed charges for a residential landline in El Salvador amount to nearly 10 dollars a month, compared to just 2.10 dollars in neighbouring Honduras, 3.58 dollars in Nicaragua, and 5.36 dollars in Guatemala.

Although El Salvador has a telecommunications law and a regulatory agency, analysts say foreign companies have raked in profits during the wave of privatisations that swept the country, and the rest of Latin America, in the 1990s.

But although the country’s first leftwing government took office in June 2009 with the victory of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (the FMLN guerrilla movement-turned political party), very few changes have occurred, the local residents complained to IPS.

The Coordinating Committee for Communities Affected by the Installation of Cell Phone Towers has asked parliament to ban the installation of mobile phone towers close to population centres.

Activists want the legal ban to include the precautionary principle formulated by the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in 1992, which has been taken into account by countries like Argentina and Chile.

The precautionary principle states that, even if a cause-and-effect relationship has not been fully established scientifically, if the product or activity poses a threat to health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken.

Although the families in Santa Fe are optimistic, they know they are up against powerful economic and political groups. “It’s a case of David against Goliath,” Suncín said.

Excerpt:

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic and - -
VRANJE, Serbia, Mar 15 2012 (IPS)

The region of former Yugoslavia has developed a new phenomenon in response to economic hardships that continue to linger in Europe years after the climax of the global financial crash in 2008.

Serbs travel up to 100 kilometres to the Bulgarian open-air market Ilijanci to buy cheap clothes and shoes. Credit: Vesna Peric Zimonjic/IPS

“Once a month I go to Macedonia to fill my fridge,” Milan Jankovic (72), a pensioner from Vranje, told IPS. “The bus ticket is only 300 dinars (3.5 dollars) and for 20,000 dinars (roughly 284 dollars) I bring home two full bags of processed cheese, preserved meat, Pâté and long lasting diary products that would cost me my whole pension, 30,000 dinars (351 dollars), here,” he added.

The Macedonian town of Kumanovo, located only 50 kilometres away from Vranje, is the primary target for shoppers like Jankovic and many others.

“With current sales of winter clothes (sometimes marked down by as much as 70 percent) I think my wife and I will get at least one new coat each,” Jankovic said.

His story is typical for many Serbs who live in towns close to neighbouring countries. But even people from southern Serbian towns such as Nis and Pirot travel some 100 kilometres to the Bulgarian open-air market Ilijanci, close to the border with Serbia, while Bulgarians travel to neighbouring Serbian towns as well.

Serbs say that clothes and shoes are 30 percent cheaper in Bulgaria, while Bulgarians find Serbian food much more affordable.

“Even when I calculate the cost of petrol from Sofia (the Bulgarian capital) to Pirot, it’s cheaper to buy fresh meat or preserved meat products; everything has become so expensive in Bulgaria,” Ivan Mitev (39) told IPS.

A local butcher who declined to give his name said, “On Saturdays or Sundays we only see Bulgarians in our shops; that saves our business, as our people (Serbs) have less and less money.”

Apart from the lure of cheap food, Croats come to Serbia very often in order to buy cigarettes, which are the cheapest in the region at an average price per package of between one and 1.5 dollars. In Croatia, which is poised to join the EU next year, the price could be anything upwards of 2.6 dollars.

Vladimir Stojanovic, head of the Serbian customs office for Gradina, the biggest border crossing into Bulgaria, confirmed that shopping tourism is flourishing.

“Bulgarians buy food here, while our people buy textiles and leather products there. Also, Serbs buy LED TVs in Bulgaria for about 300 euros (390 dollars), while their regular price in Serbia is between 450 (585) to 500 euros (650 dollars),” he said.

Customs regulations for cross-border trade with all Serbian neighbours state that taxes are only paid on purchases exceeding ‘private purposes’. So most people bringing in single TVs, a few bags of food or a couple pairs of shoes are able to shop tax-free.

Furthermore, regulations in Bulgaria and Hungary – members of the European Union (EU) – allow for local value added tax (VAT) to be deducted from the price of goods if the total purchase exceeds 150 euros (195 dollars); shoppers get their money back at special exit counters on the borders.

“That’s what makes it worth it to go to Szeged,” Slobodan Kordic (52) from the Northern Serbian town of Subotica, told IPS. Szeged is the first Hungarian town across the border, only 40 kilometres away from Subotica.

“I bought my teenage son a pair of winter shoes for only 2700 dinars (31 dollars) at a sale, while at home I’d pay 10,000 dinars (117 dollars),” Kordic said, adding that this represented a huge saving on household income.

People from the Western Serbian town of Loznica found that buying spare car parts and tyres in the Bosnian town of Bijeljina is worth the effort. The prices are 20 percent lower, and the 17 percent VAT return makes the idea very attractive for many.

“Besides, filling the petrol tank in Bosnia is also much cheaper,” said Zoran Smijanovic (34) from Loznica. The price per litre of top quality Euro-premium petrol is 1.6 dollars in Bosnia while in Serbia it has been 1.95 dollars as of March 12.

“It doesn’t look like much, but saving several thousand dinars a month on petrol or much more on clothes and shoes for children means a lot,” Brkic said. “This helps people manage, particularly in the border regions of the South, which are among the poorest (parts of the country),” he added.

Serbia has the lowest average income in the region, about 390 dollars per month. The introduction of the market economy in 2000 meant an influx of foreign goods, to which the state attached high taxes in order to fill its own coffers.

A return to the visa-free travel system for the EU countries in 2009 provided many Serbs with the opportunity to go across the border and shop for less money.

Although taxes have been gradually decreasing since 2008, particularly since Serbia gained candidate status for EU membership this year, prices remain high in a nation that has grown poorer in the past years.

Since the downturn of the economy in 2008, individual purchasing power has declined to its lowest level since 2000.

“Purchasing power in Serbia declined by at least a third in 2011, with huge loss of jobs and limited family incomes,” economic analyst Misa Brkic told IPS. “Most of the prices here have remained the same, while people have less and less money to buy anything besides the (basic) necessities, such as food. That is why Serbia is so cheap for neighbours,” he added.

Average net salaries stand at 956 dollars in Croatia, 455 dollars in Bulgaria and 520 in Bosnia- Herzegovina.

Excerpt:

By Apostolis Fotiadis
ATHENS, Mar 14 2012 (IPS)

Last January, several pupils coming out of a high school in Kallithea, a central residential neigbourhood in Athens, attacked a Pakistani passer-by.

The nature of the assault alarmed Maria Daneil and Artemis Kalofuri, as well as other teachers in schools around the area, who consider this to be just the latest in a sequence of racially charged confrontations in Greece’s economically fraught urban areas.

“There has been a deteriorating picture including anti-migrant attacks, the attack on a makeshift mosque, harassment of students, as well as the appearance of people flaunting neo-Nazi paraphernalia around the schools. We felt that passive observation is not effective anymore, we had to do something,” Kalofuri told IPS.

With support from the local branch of the association of teachers (ELME), the educators formed a student discussion group, where questions on migration, racism and fascism, as well as current social issues arising from those problems, could be raised and analysed by pupils themselves.

Kalofuri said, “Between 60 or 70 people showed up the third time we met.”

Both teachers mentioned links between a very small number of pupils and radical nationalist groups as well as the establishment of a culture of fear and silence regarding the issue.

Fear, particularly, is what Yunus Mohammedi, an Afghan immigrant residing in Greece for over ten years, has begun to notice in the city, as public aggression has almost become a daily issue.

In order to alert fellow Afghan immigrants, Mohammedi circulated a map of Athens, marking in red the zones where most violent incidents take place.

“This is how we used to warn people about the places they ought to avoid in Afghanistan when I worked there for Doctors Without Borders,” he recalled to IPS.

“We explain to new-comers as well as people for who have been in Athens for longer, which places to avoid when it gets dark and advise them not to walk around alone if possible.”

A trained pathologist and one of the few Afghans that speaks fluent Greek, Mohammedi has become a person with whom many Afghans consult when they are in trouble.

“Ten years ago things were very different. Back then you had to worry about having a job and making ends meet. Now it is dangerous, we often have to care for people stabbed or violently beaten. I often receive phone calls from people threatening me for getting involved,” he said.

Hardships fuel racial hatred

The economic crisis has altered significantly the social rules between Greeks and immigrants and asylum seekers, mostly from Asia and Africa.

Since 2005 Greece has become the main influx point for undocumented migrants, with more than 80 percent entering Europe coming from Turkey through the Aegean Sea or the Northeast mainland boundary of the river Evros.

The vast majority of these migrants hope to move towards Northern Europe. However, clauses in the Dublin II regulations that dictate the returns of irregular immigrants to the country they entered have effectively condemned scores of immigrants to remain stuck in limbo in Greece.

This has transformed the country, and Athens in particular, into a depot of hundreds of thousand of irregular immigrants and asylum seekers, who survive on below-subsistence incomes won in a vast black market.

Certain areas of the capital have been morphing slowly into semi-permanent migrant quarters with the municipality estimating that in certain central areas, Greeks number less than four percent of the population.

Since 2008, the worsening economic crisis replaced most Greek’s passive understanding of migrant workers’ plights with xenophobic intolerance.

According to Eurostat, Greece’s economy is retracting at the alarming rate of 7.5 percent, while unemployment climbed to 21 percent last December.

Moreover, increasing involvement of migrants in violent thefts and organised criminal activity has inflated antipathies. Greek police have registered an increase in the involvement of migrants in violent crime rates from 24 -25 percent in 2000 to over 65 percent today.

Lack of employment in the regular and irregular markets has increased antagonisms not only between Greeks and foreigners but also between various migrant groups.

Far-right groups have capitalised on this situation to increase their popularity and recruit membership around the run-down areas of the city, leading to an explosion of anti-migrant rhetoric and violent attacks against Asian and African migrants.

Marianna Tzeferakoy, a lawyer with the Greek Council for Refugees (GCR), told IPS, “Many people referring to the GCR for assistance have reported violent behavior, but given that no structure for monitoring the situation is available, we have no picture of the scale of the problem. We know only that is it worsening very quickly.”

Tzeferaku as well as Mohammedi have alleged that Greek police personnel are systematically discouraging migrants from reporting violent incidents.

Judith Sunderland, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, added that a recently completed fact- finding mission in Athens supported fears of a brewing crisis.

“The testimonies we have collected so far from victims and associations providing services to migrants and asylum seekers suggest that the violence has increased significantly over the last several years,” Sunderland told IPS.

“We have collected numerous testimonies indicating that the police have failed to intervene rapidly or have discouraged victims from filing official complaints. We are similarly concerned that the government has not yet acknowledged the gravity of the situation. Neither consistent condemnations of attacks, nor a clear plan of action to prevent attacks and punish those responsible, have been articulated.”

Greek police spokesman Athanasios Kokkalakis, who has opposed these allegations, told IPS, “Whenever the Greek police has received a detailed report about incidents related to racially motivated violence it has intervened and arrested anyone responsible, even in cases where the accused have been police officers themselves,” he stressed.

The combination of a relentless migration wave and the deteriorating economic crisis fuelled by austerity measures is giving birth to complicated social issues says, Kokkalakis added.

“Migrants are at the same moment victims and perpetrators of crime. They arrive in a country in which social cohesion is challenged and welfare and social structures that could support them are on the point of collapse. At the same time they are under enormous pressure from international trafficking networks that push more and more of these people into criminal activity.”

Last week the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) completed a three-month-long pilot project of documenting xenophobic aggression.

A representative told IPS, “It is early to talk about specific results; yet it is obvious that a pattern of violent aggression has started forming in certain areas of the capital.”

After the results are examined the agency will try to put in place a permanent observatory of racial and anti-migrant violence.

Excerpt:

Suicide rates, particularly among teenagers, have soared in Kashmir since the insurrection began in 1989. Credit: Sana Altaf/IPS

By Sana Altaf
SRINAGAR, Mar 2 2012 (IPS)

On Feb. 6, a young girl committed suicide by swallowing poison at her home in Kashmir. A few weeks later a teenaged girl from Srinagar hung herself at her residence.

On Feb. 24, two girls from the Budgam district committed suicide by consuming poisonous substances. A few days later, on Feb. 28, a youth ended his life by jumping into the Jhelum River in the Sopore district of North Kashmir on the same day that a 40-year-old man killed himself.

Feb. 29 saw the death, by poison, of another teenaged girl in the same area.

In the month of February alone, over 10 suicide attempts were reported in the Valley, giving just a glimpse of the roughly 17,000 suicides that have been reported in the past 21 years, experts say.

Research on suicides conducted by B.A. Dabla, a sociologist at the University of Kashmir, indicates that an average of 227 suicides have been reported in 27 months in Kashmir, based on medical reports.

The study, which is yet to be made public, says that 62 percent of all suicide cases involve females. Youth in the age group of 17-26 are found most likely to take their own lives, though teenagers as young as 13 years old have also committed suicide over the last two decades.

Suicide rates in Kashmir were negligible before insurgency hit in 1989. The past 21 years of conflict have seen a sudden surge in suicides, with researchers at Kashmir’s sole Psychiatric Disease Hospital indicating an increase from 0.5 deaths per 100,000 people in 1989 to 20 deaths per 100,000 in 2007.

The National Crime Bureau Records (NCBR) of India states that Kashmir has a higher suicide rate than the Indian states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, since one person in the Valley commits suicide every day.

The Sher-e-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences (SKIMS), Kashmir’s premier medical institute, recorded 248 suicides in 2010.

In 2011, over 1000 suicides cases were registered with SKIMS and the Shri Maharaja Hari Singh (SMHS) hospital of Srinagar.

However, experts believe these numbers are conservative estimates, since media reports and police and hospital records do not present the real scenario of just how rampant suicide has become in Kashmir.

“The actual rate is higher than what is being reported. Because of the social stigma (and shame attached to the act), people do not report suicide attempts or death,” psychiatrist Mushtaq Margoob told IPS.

Particularly in rural areas, suicide cases go largely unreported.

“It is an unfortunate fact that the suicide rate is higher than what we know and (steadily) mounting,” Margoob said.

Along with the increase has come more “efficient” ways of committing suicide.

Earlier, Dabla said, people would threaten their families with suicide, without actually doing themselves any harm. They would jump out of first floor windows or slash their hands – adopting measures that, though harmful, still left them alive.

“But now, the most deadly substances are being used for suicides.”

In urban areas, hanging, jumping into rivers and consuming poison are some of the most common methods. In villages pesticides are often used. Women commonly set themselves ablaze during suicide attempts.

There are many reasons for this surging rate; besides conflict, the level of life-or-death desperation in the Valley has been linked to the drastic rise of psychiatric disorders, which currently affects roughly 800,000 people across Kashmir.

“Impulse control disorders, psychiatric disorders, materialist lifestyles, psycho-social and socio- economic problems are some of the major causes for the increase,” said Mushtaq.

Depression, panic disorder and anxiety are all linked to suicides as well.

Independent psychologist A.G. Madhosh categorises the causes of suicides in Kashmir into social, psychological and anticipatory.

“Social” causes are mostly linked to family pressure, marital status, career, strained relationships and the inability to compete at social levels.

“In urban areas, employment and education are compounding factors,” said Madhosh.

“When students commit suicide after appearing for an examination, it is an ‘anticipatory’ cause,” she explained.

Amongst teenagers, poor impulse control, examination stress, love affairs and parental pressures are found to be prominent reasons for suicides. Experts suggest adoption of a practical system of education, counseling and religious education for preventing suicides.

The epidemic has not only plagued the local population of Kashmir but has endangered hundreds of Indian paramilitary troops deployed in the Valley as well. A recent report issued by the Indian Defense Ministry found that 780 Indian paramilitary troops have committed suicide since 2005, mostly by shooting themselves.

The study shows that 38.56 percent of Indian forces are schizophrenic, 14.17 percent suffer from alcoholism and 9.8 per cent are struggling with depression.

Tremendous psychological stress, loneliness, short leaves and hostile conditions are stated to be major reasons for the rise in suicides amongst troops.

Excerpt:

By Francesca Dziadek
BERLIN, Mar 1 2012 (IPS)

The Arab world is talking about a revolution; not just out on the streets but in films, in newspapers, in songs – using any means necessary to document events, expose the horrors of war and explore the struggles and possibilities that lie ahead as the Arab Spring feels the wintry chill of post-revolutionary democratic challenges.

During Arab Spring World Cinema day at Berlin’s 62nd international film festival, Arab filmmakers expressed hope, fear, defiance, resolve and resilience.

Caught between repression and the struggle for change, filmmakers have been documenting the tidal wave of transformation sweeping across Arab countries and creating a new, collective culture of resistance.

Many feel the artistic process has been a personal and political quest for reconciling the tensions between Islam, faith, freedom and democracy, but by far the strongest consensus among media makers has been – as Julius Caesar famously remarked while leading his armies across the River Rubicon in Northern Italy – “the die has been cast.”

Image production in war-torn Syria

This was no accident – most authoritarian regimes thrive on placing severe restrictions on the collective imagination of their populations, limiting their ability to conjure up alternatives to the daily routine of repression.

While working on a documentary about the ‘caricature scandal’, a story about freedom of expression circumventing censorship, Syrian producer and film activist Hala Al Alabdallah unearthed a law forbidding the use of “images devoid of commentary”. The discovery highlighted just how insidious repression can be.

But while state forces attempt to control everything from free association to artistic production, resistance and creativity have come together in the squares or “agoras” of the Middle East and North Africa, opening up new public spaces for social solidarity, overcoming collective fears and expressing hope and a new sense of belonging.

For the first time, it seems, the feeling of being a citizen of one’s own country is proliferating among the Syrian masses, buoyed by a cultural resurgence that includes street dancing and turning old folksongs into revolutionary anthems.

“People came to the streets asking for freedom; even in a (muzzled) country like Syria we hear slogans chanting that Syrian people are one. I see the incarnation of freedom in poetry,” said Al Alabdallah pointing out the powerful nexus at work between insurgency, culture and engagement.

Mohamed Ali Atassi, a cultural producer in exile, turned to filmmaking out of psychological necessity, “when I realized I could no longer express the complexity I was feeling without picking up a camera,” Atassi, whose “creative solutions” include obtaining footage from inside the country using the internet and Skype interviews, told IPS.

As revolution and the struggle for change spreads across the Arab World “witness-filmmaking” is emerging, as a formidable art enabled by YouTube – a new form of dissent-inspired ‘auteur’ film. Increasingly, a generation of mobile-savvy youth are becoming gatekeepers of the visual world, archiving that which cannot be denied to people rising up against state power.

Despite her fear, Younis felt compelled to order her newly trained team of young video journalists to “get out there and keep the cameras rolling.” In their toughest assignment yet, the 20-year-olds had to get on the streets and ‘learn by doing’ the dangerous process of reporting a revolution.

One of the video journalists reporters, Ahmed Abdel Fatah, was shot in the eye while filming people being killed on the Qsr el-Nil bridge during the Internet blackout of the 18-day-long Cairo revolution last January.

The resulting dramatic footage was edited into a documentary entitled “Reporting… a Revolution” – a powerful example of witness-filmmaking by six young reporters including Abdel Fatah.

“I am a videographer, my eye is my most precious asset,” he said. “But we will never stop. This is our job, it’s what we know how to do best and we’ll keep doing it.”

Well aware of the contradictions implicit in “guerrilla journalism”, Younis faces a daily struggle with the ethics of journalistic objectivity, as the lines between documenting revolution and revolutionary documentary filmmaking blurred into non-existence.

Arab women face the camera

Many acts of defiance amongst women are increasingly poignant expressions of a new readiness to speak up without fearing the consequences of being heard.

Examples like Aliaa Magda Elmahdy’s subversive act of posting a nude photo of herself was seen as a groundbreaking statement on the dignity of the naked female body trapped in a gender power struggle.

“The nude picture is indicative of a new state of fearlessness and this gives me hope because an incident of this kind would not have occurred before the revolution,” pointed out Viola Safik, a German- Egyptian documentary filmmaker talking in Berlin about changing perspectives in the Arab world.

Safik also warned that the opening up of cultural frontiers could lead to an era where art will become more aggressive, potentially engendering violent backlashes, like the power of the regime to label cultural producers as “traitors” or “unbelievers”.

Undeterred, women are slowly and tentatively facing the camera. Long-repressed controversial issues like marriage freedom, the meaning and implications of financial independence, tradition, what to accept and what to refuse, were all central questions in Hanan Abdalla’s debut documentary “In the Shadow of a Man”.

Born in the backstreets of Cairo, 69-year-old Wafaa, the documentary’s protagonist, looks back at the “honour” check she was forced to submit to on her wedding night and has no qualms or regrets about her divorce, though she sadly never recovers a sense of respect for men.

As violence rages throughout the Arab world, with the spotlight largely on Syria and Bahrain, Berlinale Festival jury-member Boualem Sansal, the Algerian novelist and poet, pointed out that Algeria has somehow escaped scrutiny, despite the fact that president Abdelaziz Bouteflika “strangles his people morally and culturally, an act that is tantamount to cultural genocide,” Sansal said on the last day of the Berlin film festival.

His words are a sombre reminder that the die may be cast but crucial dominoes in the Arab world have yet to fall; and when they do, the cameras will be rolling.

Excerpt:

By Jake Lippincott
TUNIS, Feb 29 2012 (IPS)

In the Friends of Syria meeting held in Tunis last week, Gulf Arab monarchies offered nearly unqualified support for the Syrian opposition, while the democratic states were more cautious.

Representatives of 60 nations and members of Syria’s largest opposition group, the Syrian National Congress (SNC), met here Friday to discuss a possible resolution to escalating conflict in Syria.

The nations present were all generally in support of Syria’s opposition and opposed to the authoritarian regime of Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad. Iran, China and Russia, all high-profile international backers of the Assad regime, were notably absent.

The meeting in Tunis was designed to be a space in which the SNC and their international supporters could formulate a unified plan of action to stop the atrocities in Syria.

However, despite the absence of any Assad supporters, disagreements among the different parties present were more striking then any agreements reached.

While every participant offered rhetorical support to the Syrian rebels and universal condemnation of the Syrian regime, many important delegates were unwilling to back their expressed sympathies with concrete offers of military aid.

A serious rupture between Gulf Arab monarchies calling explicitly for regime change and immediate military support for the opposition, and democracies (including the United States and host nation Tunisia), who stressed caution and stopped short of demanding that Assad leave the country, proved to be a major obstacle to the conference.

The current Tunisian government came to power as the result of a revolution against a dictator similar to Assad, and most senior officials are former dissidents who spent decades imprisoned or in exile.

Thus it came as no surprise earlier this month when Tunisia expelled the Syrian ambassador in response to the violence in the country.

However, at this meeting the Tunisian President Moncef Marzouki said that Assad should receive immunity from prosecution and that international military intervention in Syria would be a “serious mistake.”

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton struck a similar tone, condemning the Assad regime and praising the opposition, but not offering any explicit military support.

The Syrian opposition came to this meeting hoping for tangible military promises in what is now an increasingly brutal and one-sided civil war; the measured language of Marzouki and Clinton was anathema to what the SNC and broader Syrian opposition wanted to hear.

Achraf al Moqdad, Syrian opposition activist and member of the Current for National Change, told IPS, “This isnt what the Syrian people want, they want a concrete resolution with the threat of military action, or (real) military action, to stop the crimes against humanity that are happening everyday, every night in Syria,” he said.

SNC’s press spokesman Mouayad AlKiblawi was even more direct. “(Marzouki and Clinton) never talked about self defense. We want to keep the peaceful image of our revolution but (the regime doesnt) allow us. What (does the international community) want us to do, do they want to exterminate the Syrian people, must there be 100,000 victims before the international community intervenes?” he asked IPS.

When asked what kind of international intervention the SNC wanted, AlKiblawi emphasised that the opposition wanted the international community to treat Syria like Libya, where air-strikes and direct military aid were instrumental in toppling the Qaddafi regime, and not like Yemen, where slow international pressure and promises of immunity finally caused the regime to relinquish power.

“The Syrian streets want any kind of intervention that (ends the) killing here, they don’t care about the method….We’re not Yemen, we have already gone (far) beyond that….it’s nonsense to apply the Yemeni solution in Syria, we don’t agree with that. We won’t live with killers (linked to the regime),” he said.

Clinton and Marzouki’s reluctance to offer military backing disappointed the opposition so much that at one point it looked like SNC representatives were going to walk out of the conference.

Meanwhile, the Gulf Arab dictatorships present at the meeting gave nearly unconditional backing to the democratic aspirations of the Syrian opposition.

Both Qatar and Saudi Arabia called for immediate shipments of arms to the Syrian opposition and explicitly advocated broader military support and the prosecution of Assad and his entourage.

Both these nations are absolute monarchies with few democratic freedoms. The fact that they are throwing their support behind the Syrian democracy movement may have more to do with their longstanding loathing of the Assad regime and his Iranian backers than to any principled commitment to democratisation.

The very fact that Qatar and Saudi Arab are dictatorships may allow them to support intervention in Syria, an idea that is extremely divisive in the Arab world and beyond, whereas Clinton and Marzouki have to be cognizant of the public opinion of their country’s citizens.

Most analysts in Washington believe that the U.S. public will not accept any more costly, uncertain military adventures in the Middle East and while many Tunisians support the Syrian revolution, there is a strong undercurrent of support for Assad because of his rhetorical stance against Israel and his vocal opposition to the United States.

The hard fact that foreign intervention in Syria is still extremely controversial in the international community was not lost on any of the conference’s attendees.

As the first delegates began filing into the hotel, a crowd of about two hundred pro-Assad protesters amassed in front of the conference waving Ba’athist and Palestinian flags and shouting slogans denouncing the U.S. and Gulf Arabs.

Minutes before Marzouki and Clinton arrived at the meeting, the protest turned violent, and demonstrators were beaten back by police.

While this meeting was supposed to present a unified front against Assad, it did anything but. For now, it seems that the bloodshed in Syria will continue.

Excerpt:

According to European mainstream economists and politicians, the solution to the Greek debt crisis, and the only option for returning the country to a path of progress, is ‘fiscal consolidation’.

Demonstrators flood Athens on Feb. 12, 2012, in protest against public spending cuts. Credit: Katerina Stauroula/IPS

In a last ditch attempt to secure an additional bailout loan of 130 billion dollars from the Troika (a mechanism comprised of the International Monetary Found, the European Central Bank and the European Commission), Greece has capitulated to the austerity plan forced upon it by the international community, hoping to escape bankruptcy.

The latest phase of the plan included cutting 150,000 public sector jobs, overturning existing labour laws, slashing pensions and reducing monthly minimum wages by 20 percent, from 751 euros to 600 euros.

Workers under 25 years of age have been asked to take a bigger – 30 percent – salary cut.

Parliament ushered in the fresh ‘bout of austerity’ on Feb. 12 amid increasing violence across the city. Mobs of newly impoverished Greeks took to the streets, setting Athens ablaze and offering yet another spectacle to the international media.

Meropi Andriopoulou, a medical officer involved in the national health system since 1989, who often joins the demonstrators, believes that ordinary Greeks only stand to lose more from the neoliberal structural adjustment policies (SAPs) imposed on the country.

“Greece was a country with universal healthcare. Now, many of the people who show up in public hospitals can’t even afford the five-euro general admission fee introduced two years ago. Ten percent of patients don’t even have insurance,” she told IPS.

“Spending your days in a public hospital (highlights the degree of) social exclusion. Our healthcare system has collapsed and there is no political will to get it back on track,” she added.

Having taken a salary decrease of over one thousand euro herself, Andriopoulou, a mother of two, decided to join ‘Doctors of the World’, a volunteer team in the remote Athenian district of Perama, which has weathered unemployment rates of nearly 50 percent since the collapse of the local vessel reconstruction port.

The group of medical officers provides free treatment, medical supplies and foodstuffs to people lacking social insurance.

“You can’t imagine that this kind of social exclusion exists until you show up there,” Andriopoulou told IPS. “Moreover, I was surprised to see that most volunteers were unemployed doctors or people under serious financial hardships themselves.”

“Like many of them, I don’t believe in philanthropy, I believe that poverty is a social issue, not the result of bad fate. I have spent over two decades working for the National Healthcare System, which I believe has been the victim of clientelism and political interests. The only response to it is a political one,” she added.

Greeks brace for tidal wave of poverty

On Feb. 8, Eurostat published a report estimating that 27.7 percent of the active workforce, aged 18-64 years old, currently lives on the poverty line.

The rapidly increasing numbers of homeless people sleeping around central Athens prove that this report is not unfounded.

Over the last two weeks, rising homelessness has caused friction between socially active citizens and the municipality, as sub-zero temperatures compelled authorities to take urgent action to prevent people from freezing to death.

Giorgos Apostolopoulos, the deputy mayor responsible for the homeless food centre of Athens’ municipality, admitted that over the last few months, urban social infrastructure has been stretched to its limit trying to provide for the needy.

Various NGOs focused on poverty reduction and homelessness, many of which attacked the mayor on political grounds last month, have since stepped in to fill the state’s distribution gaps.

Among scores of volunteers was Tonia Katerini, an architect active in the civil rights movements through Open City, a leftist municipality organisation who believes the issue of poverty is severely politicised in Greece.

“The municipality, in cooperation with private entrepreneurs, plans to open big hotels that had previously been shut down because of the crisis and transform them into one-night shelters.”

She believes this process will be fast-tracked and happen in a non-transparent manner, raising questions about how municipal authorities open up space to private entities and tackle social issues like poverty.

“Furthermore, the ministry of health has moved to prohibit the distribution of food by ‘unlicensed’ groups of people. They say this is because of ‘hygiene standards’ but it’s obvious that the issue is about controlling who will get involved with the exploding (crisis) of poverty in the capital. While the poor and needy multiply, the well-connected will discover new fields of business,” she said.

Katerini predicted that the number of people in need of shelters would continue to grow throughout the year.

SAPs have caused the Greek economy to contract by about four percent, though the rate of decline could increase to seven percent in the near future, analysts say.

This would add thousands more to the ranks of the unemployed, which swelled to over a million Greeks last October.

However, two years ago, ex-finance minister George Papakostadinou – the man responsible for initiating the austerity reforms – described the spring of 2011, which saw scores of workers dismissed from their jobs, as the moment when the country would experience recovery and “growth”.

Goerge Barkouris (62), who found himself homeless for the first time in his life during the massive wave of unemployment in 2010, lost his home last November.

Barkuris had worked for over 25 years in music and radio production but lost a contract with the public sector due to cuts in 2001. He then worked as a freelancer until 2008, but “when the crisis hit it was impossible to make money to pay for my house,” he said.

He has now found shelter in Klimaka’s hostel for homeless people in exchange for contributing to its street work programme, which consists of riding Klimaka’s van around the streets of Athens, handing out food and other assistance to people in need.

While discussing Greece’s sudden conversion to a country of mass impoverishment, he expressed opposition to the prevailing political and economic order.

He says the politicians presiding over the crisis “are not stupid. They know what their politics are going to do to the rest of us but they do not care about their people anymore.”

“I was lucky to find this solution but for many others the physiological pressure is intolerable. The days out in the street are long and hard and the nights are full of fear. I have experienced very few days of (despair); the thought of people who are out there for years makes me wonder how they manage to deal with it,” Barkuris said.

“I cannot describe what one sees out there in the streets of Athens during the night, the violence, the deprivation, the dehumanisation.”

Klimaka’s representative Anta Alamanou told IPS that despite skyrocketing poverty rates, the authorities have proved shockingly indifferent to utilising European funds assigned specifically for dealing with homelessness in Greece.

A knock on her front door throws Beenish, a 28-year-old housewife from Lahore, into a fix: should she allow the female volunteer vaccinators to administer the oral polio vaccine (OPV) to her two-year-old son, or not?

The decision has not always been this hard. Last year, Beenish had no qualms about hosting the service providers in her home to perform the simple procedure.

But now she is gripped with anxiety about the potentially harmful nature of the vaccine.

Her fears are not unfounded.

Lahore, the capital of Pakistan’s populous Punjab province, is still reeling from the deaths of over 125 people who suffered an adverse reaction to Isotab, distributed by the government-run Punjab Institute of Cardiology (PIC) to a large number of cardiac patients.

Subsequent laboratory tests revealed that each tablet contained the antimalarial substance Pyrimethamine in quantities over 14 times the recommended weekly dose for malaria patients.

“I can’t afford to trust these people (with) my child’s life. The government’s inefficiency and the harms associated with free medicine are (dangerous) to us all,” Beenish told IPS.

The tragedy over the cardiac patients ignited severe criticism of the government from various corners of society.

The absence of a sufficient drug regulatory mechanism at the provincial level has also been dragged into the spotlight as a major health concern.

Obstacles to the eradication campaign

Outright distrust in the public health system has taken a crippling toll on the anti-polio initiative, especially in Punjab.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimates that roughly 700,000 children in the province already miss immunisation drives for various reasons. With fears of contamination now proliferating, and scores of households resisting the vaccination, medical experts fear this number will now rise.

Pakistan is one of just four countries in the world where the wild poliovirus is still circulating freely; the other three are India, Nigeria and Afghanistan.

Of the 326 polio cases reported in these countries in 2011, only one was detected in India, 52 in Nigeria, 76 in Afghanistan, and an alarming 197 in Pakistan.

According to UNICEF, “The annual incidence of polio in Pakistan, which was estimated to be more than 20,000 cases annually in the early 1990s, had decreased to around thirty cases in 2005. Just a few years ago Pakistan was on the verge of polio eradication. It seemed that we had made it.”

But a resurgence of infection rates has turned the country into a site of global concern, as it is now responsible for well over 60 percent of polio cases worldwide.

Global polio watchdogs recently found that the particular strain of poliovirus endemic to Pakistan has traveled to other countries and caused outbreaks in China and Afghanistan.

While UNICEF, the World Health Organisation (WHO) and federal and provincial governments have been urging mass media to minimise negative coverage of anti-polio drives, a recent political scandal involving the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) appears to have undone several years’ worth of efforts in that regard.

Towards the end of Jan. 2011, U.S. defence secretary Leon Panetta urged Pakistan to release a doctor named Shakil Afridi who was under arrest on charges of treason.

At the behest of CIA officials, Afridi reportedly launched a fake polio vaccination campaign in Abbottabad last year, using it as a front to gather DNA samples from people thought to be relatives of the elusive Osama Bin Laden. This elaborate scheme would later contribute to the frenetic manhunt for and subsequent assassination of the Al Qaeda leader.

“(Before this) happened, one could brush aside negative perceptions about the polio vaccine, terming them baseless and ‘agenda-driven’, but not this time,” Fazal Shah, a development sector professional based in the northern district of Mardan, told IPS.

“How can anybody deny something confirmed by the U.S. itself, including in its own media?” he asked.

Religious leaders and tribal elders who had hitherto been highly successful in generating public support for the polio vaccine – by breaking myths about the vaccine being life-threatening, made of haram (forbidden) ingredients or causing infertility among both male and female recipients – found their efforts seriously hampered by Afridi’s hoax vaccination drive.

In fact, as news of the CIA’s scheme filtered into thousands of households across Pakistan via sensational newspaper and TV reports, Pakistan’s entire polio eradication campaign began to suffer a major setback.

In an effort to form a joint front against the barrage of negative media coverage, individuals and groups working to exterminate the poliovirus have identified key partners in the fight and are approaching the media together, hoping for strength in numbers.

The timing of such a united front is crucial as the polio vaccine is currently being distributed in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and, for the first time in the past three years, in the lower part of Orakzai Agency – areas that had, for years, been inaccessible due to rampant militancy and military confrontations between rebels and state armed forces.

In a statement drafted exclusively for IPS, UNICEF claimed, “Pakistani journalists, being the major pillar of (this) nation, have both a moral and professional responsibility to ensure that polio eradication is set on top of the public agenda.”

“Balanced coverage, accurate reporting, due verification of facts, critical analysis of rumors, segregation of individual opinion from expert knowledge (and) avoiding unnecessary sensationalism are of the utmost importance in reporting about polio,” it added. “Recently, the media has contributed to numerous unwarranted speculations about the alleged side effects of the polio vaccine. The oral polio vaccine used in Pakistan is potent, safe, and efficacious; it is exactly the same vaccine that brought the number of polio cases down to just over 30 in 2007,” the statement concluded.

Mueen Ahmed, a Lahore-based investigative reporter with Pakistan’s premier Geo TV, agrees headlines like “Polio Vaccine Claims Child’s Life” should be carried only if autopsy reports confirm the claim.

However, he says the media cannot be stopped from calling a spade a spade.

“If the government engages untrained vaccinators for less than five dollars a day and stores vaccines out in the open, how can the media remain silent?” he asked.

Mueen believes the disease cannot be treated without simultaneously bringing about a complete paradigm shift.

“The day people all over the country start chasing vaccinators, rather than (vice versa), we will achieve our goal,” he said, adding the media could be instrumental in bringing about such a fundamental change in public thinking. Azhar Mahmood Bhatti, director of the Punjab’s Expanded Programme on Immunisation (EPI), went a step further to suggest that legislation be implemented along with responsible media coverage.

“Laws should be (on the books) to make immunisation mandatory, and birth certificates should be issued to children only on verification of their polio vaccination cards,” he told IPS.

The short, one-minute video is grainy but the poor picture quality makes the scene no less chilling. Shot from a balcony, it shows the recently ousted Maldivian President Mohamed Nasheed walking out of a building, pleading with military officers to stop rioting police.

Once a tourists' paradise, Maldives has been rocked by political violence since the ouster of President Mohamed Nasheed on Tuesday, Feb. 7, 2012. Credit: Dying Regime/CC-BY-2.0

At one point Nasheed, the country’s first democratically elected president, is seen shouting to motionless officials, “Please do something, please do something.”

A few seconds later, he prophecies that the whole of the Maldives will be destroyed unless the officers, some of whom are standing immobile right in front of him, intervene. In the end, there was no intervention and later that same day, Feb. 7, Nasheed resigned, telling the country through a nationally televised address that he did not wish to use force on his own people.

Nasheed’s resignation was the culmination of weeks of protests by police infuriated by the president’s refusal to release an arrested judge.

The ouster was a sad end to a presidency that had ushered in multi-party democracy to Maldives in 2008, ending Maumoon Abdul Gayoom’s three-decades-long reign.

Since last Tuesday this small South Asian nation, comprised of roughly 1,200 atolls, and particularly its capital Male, has been rocked with violence.

A day after his resignation the former president led a march through Male, which was met by teargas- firing, baton-wielding police. In the days following, courthouses, police stations and other public property in outlying islands have been set on fire.

“It is a very volatile situation, very fluid and very dangerous,” Mohamed Anil, a former legal reforms commissioner under Nasheed’s predecessor and currently head of the Democracy House, a prominent human rights organisation in Male, told IPS. With both police and political activists indulging in violence, Anil claimed Maldives was sitting atop a powder keg with sparks flying all round it.

“For now only (the president’s) Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) have taken to the streets; but what if other parties opposed to (the situation) also do the same?” he asked.

Other civil rights activists talking to IPS observed that the immediate future of the beautiful islands – known as the world’s favourite honeymoon getaway, which annually play host to three times as many tourists as its total population of 315,000 people – will depend largely on actions pursued by Nasheed and his MDP in the following weeks.

“They can determine what happens, whether they continue to clash on the streets, or agree to seek an end to this mess through peaceful dialogue,” said Ahmed Zahir, head of the Maldives Journalists Association, which has protested Nasheed’s crackdown on democratic institutions in the past.

Since his unceremonious resignation, Nasheed has cut a defiant picture, leading protests through the streets of Male soaked in sweat. He sent his wife and daughter to safety in Sri Lanka two days after the ouster, but has since refused offers of asylum by India and reportedly by Sri Lanka as well.

Enter the diplomats

A slew of diplomats from the United States, Bahrain, the United Nations, India and the Commonwealth arrived in the country Saturday, all pushing for an independent inquiry into the circumstances of Nasheed’s departure from office on Tuesday, which remain shrouded in mystery.

At first he claimed he resigned voluntary, but recanted the story a day later, insisting that he was forced to leave at gunpoint.

He has since called on his successor, Mohammed Waheed Hassan, to resign and call snap elections, threatening mass street protests if his demands were not heeded immediately.

Waheed Hassan has rejected the call, arguing that the situation in the country is not conducive to elections.

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia, Robert Blake, backed the new president, claiming that “the police, the election commission and judiciary are not sufficiently prepared for a free and fair election.”

But high-ranking officials from the MDP told IPS that they had not given up hope.

“(Elections) are the bottom line for us,” stressed Eva Abbdulah, an MDP parliamentarian and relative of Nasheed.

In a further effort to broker a peaceful end to the turmoil, M. Ganapathi, a special envoy from India, held discussions with Nasheed and his successors, along with Blake and U.N. Assistant Secretary- General for Political Affairs, Oscar Fernandez-Taranco.

However, if Nasheed expected the weekend visits to shift the power balance onto his side, he would have been disappointed by the outcome of the diplomatic talks.

India indicated that it would not intervene, with Ganapathi adding rather vaguely, “The political process will continue to evolve and we will continue to monitor the situation.”

According to some of Nasheed’s top aides, the former president sought New Delhi’s help to quell the rebellion when the army first refused to take his orders – perhaps buoyed by memories of India’s military intervention in 1998 to douse an attempted coup led by Sri Lankan mercenaries – but was unsuccessful.

Blake echoed similar sentiments to the Indian envoy, stressing, “Police and defence forces need to restore their credibility with the Maldivian people.”

Both New Delhi and Washington have expressed their desire for a credible investigation into how power was transferred from Nasheed to his successor but stopped short of calling the ouster a coup.

The new president has agreed to such an investigation, though Ahmed Nasheed, the former president’s foreign minister, stressed that any such inquiry must be chaired by international personnel.

“It was a police coup, it would be very difficult to hold an impartial (home-grown) inquiry,” he said.

But Anil told IPS that he did not see international pressure bringing the parties at loggerhead to a compromise anytime soon.

“That is the hope, but so far I have not seen any move towards such a dialogue,” he said. The activist warned that the longer Nasheed and other parties failed to engage in talks, the threat of violence remained high. “You need to defuse this situation sooner rather than later.”

Zahir said that though Nasheed was not widely popularly – he only won a quarter of the votes in the first round of the 2008 election before all opposition parties rallied around him in the run-off against Gayoom – he still had significant pockets of support, especially among the youth. “They can (maintain) protests for a long time,” he said.

On the day of the diplomatic visits, however, many parts of the Maldives remained calm. “Our resorts and other tourist facilities (have been) peaceful,” Sim Ibrahim Mohamed, Secretary General of the Maldives Association of Tourism Industry.

However, this relative calm must not be confused with a cooling of tensions. Much will depend on whether Nasheed stays true to his Feb. 10 declaration that Maldives’ ‘medicine’ is out on the streets or instead adopt a much more peaceful approach to the problem.

Deadly clashes between police and youth in the Northeastern town of Taza last week suggest that, far from bringing change and stability, Morocco’s new government is simply repeating mistakes of the past, stoking tensions and fuelling a spate of protests against the regime.

Demonstrators outside the court in Taza. Credit: Abderrahim El Ouali/IPS.

In an effort to keep its population in check during the Arab Spring, the regime launched a process of reforms last February and brandished what it called ‘the Moroccan exception’, boasting of relative calm during a period of intense regional turmoil.

A new constitution took effect on Jul. 1, 2011, granting wider powers to the executive of the new government while supposedly cutting back the authority of the monarch.

This was followed by general elections last September, which were snapped up by the Islamists of the Justice and Development Party (PJD), whose general secretary, Abdelilah Benkirane, was subsequently named the head of the new government.

But Benkirane, who presented his programme to parliament last month, has thus far failed to deliver on his election pledges.

For instance, the promise to completely eradicate unemployment, which currently touches 19 percent of the working population, evaporated soon after his appointment, giving way to a negligible decrease in joblessness of a single percentage point.

Habib El Maliki, president of the Moroccan Centre for Conjuncture (CMC), told journalists on Jan. 20, “The government’s plans to fight joblessness were not strong enough. The programme determined objectives without means, and any programme without means is doomed to failure.”

Public opposition to political procrastination has been swift and the streets of Morocco have become a veritable minefield of tension.

Following a violent police clampdown on a demonstration by graduates demanding jobs outside the ministry of education in Rabat on Jan. 21, a 27-year-old unemployed graduate named Abdelwahab Zaidoun set himself ablaze in the streets.

Once a rare occurrence, self-immolation has become a much more frequent tactic in the Arab world, after Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian vegetable seller, burned himself alive last year, igniting from his simmering remains the revolutions known as the Arab Spring.

Zaidoun succumbed to his burns on Jan. 24, his tearful 25-year-old wife told the Associated Press last month, adding, “I accuse the makhzen (the ruling elite) of killing him.”

Zaidoun’s death, five days after the government’s inauguration in front of the parliament, triggered a wave of protest throughout the country. In several cities, protesters have called for the abolition of the monarchy.

One of the most incendiary protests so far sprang up in the city of Taza, one of the kingdom’s poorest regions, located 340 kilometres Northeast of Casablanca, on Feb. 1.

Here, the new Islamic government exposed its true colours, lashing out savagely in a police-protester confrontation that left about 100 people on both sides injured.

Rahim Moktafi, an activist from the ‘February 20th’ movement, was an eyewitness to the events.

“At first, the protests were peaceful. The police surrounded the city. They blocked Internet connections and cut off the telephone lines before beginning to club everybody,” he told IPS.

“The police even entered the houses of citizens to club them,” he added.

Videos shared on social networks showed civilians claiming that they were threatened with beatings and rape in their own homes.

“Morocco has always been one of the most violent regimes in the world, and the Islamist government is the best mask for the regime to go on with its same old practices,” Moktafi said.

Far from bringing much-needed change, “This government will only extend the tyranny for five more years,” he said.

Anger against the “bearded government”, as it is referred to in the local press, does not come only from the fields of confrontation with police.

In Marrakesh, 250 kilometres south of Casablanca, where demonstrations were held in solidarity with Taza, public anger is no less palpable.

Abou Zahrah, a Marrakesh-based activist with the February 20th movement, told IPS, “The arrival of the Islamists in the government is only a political manipulation by the regime.”

Another of Benkirane’s election campaign promises was a guaranteed minimum wage increase to 3000 dirham, approximately 465 dollars.

Once promised by the king, the wage increase has now been postponed to 2016, leaving the current minimum wage at 2300 dirham, roughly 290 dollars, per month.

According to Rachid Abou Zahrah, “the Islamist government will have no positive impact on citizens’ lives. The only increase we shall see will be in the number of veiled women.”

He is not being ironic. The fate of women’s rights in the era of the bearded government is a major cause for concern across huge swathes of the population.

During the presentation of his governmental declaration before parliament earlier this year, Benkirane was overshadowing a protest by women MPs against the lack of female representation in his government. Despite the ‘four women’ quota, only one was allowed to serve in the last government.

“The government is crushed between a modernist pole, represented by the revolutionary February 20th movement, and the traditionalists,” Aziz Nidae, a political activist from the city of Fez, nearly 300 kilometres north of Casablanca, told IPS.

But judging from the government’s recent actions and according to the analysis of the local press, the government has shown that its allegiances lie with the conservatives.

In fact Akhbar Al Yaoum, a local daily newspaper, remarked that the word ‘modernity’ was completely absent from the new government’s programme of action.

Months of protest across the European Union, sparked by ‘indignant’ youth demanding an end to the brand of free market capitalism that has blighted the continent with an unemployment epidemic, finally bore fruit on Jan. 30 when Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, proposed an ambitious jobs scheme.

Protesters at an anti-G20 rally in Nice, France, in November 2011 demanded an end to Europe's austerity programme. Credit: Cléo Fatoorehchi/IPS

“We cannot accept that almost a quarter of Europe’s young people are unemployed,” he stressed during the last informal EU summit, referring to Eurostat’s Dec. 2011 proclamation that 22 percent of the youth labour force – roughly five and a half million young people in the region – are without work.

The details of the estimates are alarming: youth unemployment stands at 48.7 percent in Spain, 47.2 percent in Greece and 35.6 percent in Slovakia.

Barroso sent a letter to the eight member states with the highest levels of youth unemployment – Spain, Greece, Slovakia, Lithuania, Italy, Portugal, Latvia and Ireland – requesting their special cooperation with the Commission’s proposal.

“I will be proposing the creation of joint ‘action teams’ comprised of the Commission, member states and national social partners, to come up with targeted plans by April to help tackle youth unemployment. I also want member states to commit to a ‘Youth on the Move’ pact to ensure that all our young people are either in a job, in education or in training within four months of leaving school,” he said at the EU summit.

Though many consider the proposed solutions inadequate compared to the magnitude of the problem, ‘los indignados’ nevertheless commended the move as a long-overdue acknowledgment of the crisis.

“They (the decision-makers) understood they cannot continue to overlook this burning issue of youth unemployment,” Kim Le Quang, a young Belgian “indignado,” and one of the country’s coordinators, told IPS.

He explained to IPS that the movement is motivated by the change in policies and actually sees it as a sign of hope.

Since the Anti-G20 Summit in Nice last November, the indignados met regularly to discuss and devise new strategies for mobilisations against the austerity plans in Europe that gutted – and continue to slash – public spending.

Many hope that Barroso’s announcement is only the beginning of greater change.

“As soon as March arrives, and with it spring, we will go into the parks again to put into place (people’s) assemblies,” Kim said, adding that numerous actions will take place throughout May in commemoration of the one-year anniversary of the 15-M movement in Madrid.

Meanwhile, plans for an international activist conference, scheduled for February at the European Central Bank headquarters in Frankfurt, are well underway. The conference will double up as a platform for protest against “austerity measures dictated by the profiteers of the financial and economic crisis,” according to a Jan. 22 press release.

Though these preparatory meetings still gather at least a hundred of activists from all over Europe, Kim acknowledged that the movement’s lack of organisation might hinder its growth.

He recalled a mobilisation in Brussels becoming too technical and suffering from faulty translation, thus driving most of the attendees away early, though he hastened to add that the horizontal mode of operation was key to the movement’s success.

“There is the will to make this the most horizontal and the most democratic movement possible; and democracy takes time,” he said.

He justified these organisational problems as a result of careful attempts to guard against co-optation by a union or political party. The protesters believe that change will come from the people themselves and have refused to let the occasional lack of clarity impede their momentum.

“The movement has been built on a long-term basis,” a Parisian ‘indignado’ named Gary, told IPS. “We are waiting for results to come. For now, we are focused on some core issues,” such as expanding the mobilisation and fight against economic austerity in Europe.

Gary, though not one of the most active indignados, has not abandoned the movement.

“For the moment, this is the only alternative we have,” he said.

Another French activist, Zum, insisted: “to protest, to demonstrate to political leaders that society does not agree with them …is the only way to change the world.”

Both are convinced this is the main reason why the movement could go on for years, until governments take the necessary measures to dress deep social wounds.

Kim also believes that the movement’s success is derived partially from its global scope.

Still going strong in over 1000 cities around the world from the Occupiers to the Arab Spring activists, the persistence and successes of each movement seem to fuel the others.

The next issue the indignados plan to fight is the privatisation of water, at the next World Water Forum in Marseille from March 12-17.

For two years, organisers have been planning an Alternative World Water Forum, which will take place during the same week as the official meeting, just a few kilometres away. The people’s convergence plans to draw together numerous associations, experts and citizens to address the critical water issues that, Kim concluded, governments and international organisations have so far failed to solve.