By Aprille Muscara
WASHINGTON, May 2 2011 (IPS)

The shutdown was surprisingly swift and almost total. In the midst of a popular revolution – one that was blogged, YouTubed, and Twittered in minute-by-minute cyber blasts – the Egyptian regime tightened its Internet spigot in late January, choking the free flow of information down to a trickle.

After a caustic domestic and international backlash, the North African country’s Internet Service Providers eventually restored connectivity. However, media analysts warn that ex-dictator Hosni Mubarak’s desperate deployment of information control – a time-tested tactic of repressive regimes – adapted to today’s new technologies of communication is but part of a growing global trend.

Indeed, a “Freedom on the ‘Net” study released by the U.S.-based Freedom House in late April warned that efforts to control and censor the cyber commons – from blocking Web sites to imprisoning bloggers – by a growing number of governments around the world have ramped up in recent years.

“In authoritarian states, such efforts are partly rooted in the existing legal frameworks, which already limit the freedom of the traditional media,” the study states. The usual suspects – China, with the world’s most sophisticated state censorship apparatus, Iran, Venezuela, Egypt, and Tunisia – are among those fingered as guilty.

But “[e]ven in more democratic countries – such as Brazil, India, Indonesia, South Korea, Turkey, and the United Kingdom – Internet freedom is increasingly undermined by legal harassment, opaque censorship procedures, or expanding surveillance,” the study continues.

On Monday, the U.S.-based Committee to Protect Journalists released a report on the “Top 10 Tools of Online Oppressors” in commemoration of World Press Freedom day on May 3.

“These techniques go well beyond Web censorship,” said Danny O’Brien, CPJ Internet Advocacy Coordinator and author of the report. “Combined, these digital attacks undermine our universal right to seek information.”

The list includes such good old-fashioned tactics as imprisonment and violence against independent and opposition journalists, to high-tech methods of censorship like Denial of Service cyber-attacks and so- called Internet “kill switches” similar to Egypt’s.

Press freedom in the networked world

With the amplification of citizen voices through the proliferation and penetration of information and communication technologies (ICTs) worldwide – according to Freedom House, more than two billion people have access to the Internet, a number that has doubled since 2006 – the once well-defined journalistic lines between spectator and contributor, source and correspondent are blurring, equally amplifying the threat of online censorship to press freedom.

“[T]he increased user participation facilitated by the new platforms has exposed ordinary people to some of the same punishments faced by well-known bloggers, online journalists, and human rights activists,” the Freedom House study said.

This overwhelming number of active voices contributing to the dissemination of news – some with questionable intents or identities – has also demanded a re-evaluation of the profession of journalism itself, with some arguing that crowd-sourcing can muddle the quality and accuracy of news.

Others, like media analyst and New York University-based journalism professor Jay Rosen, find value in mass participation in the reporting process. “The news system is stronger for it,” he wrote in a recent blog post, arguing that more contributions from friends and followers make for better news.

“We have an influx of material – videos, photos, testimonies and tweets – and we can weave a story on the ground just from people who are breaking this curfew and risking everything they have to tell their story,” North Africa and Middle East editor for Global Voices Amira Hussaini echoed in an interview with IPS during the Egyptian revolution.

“[T]he ability to hear from participants in a people power movement is a massive improvement from how we’ve generally covered public uprising, where we hear primarily from government spokespeople and professional talking heads,” Ethan Zuckerman, senior researcher at the Berkman Centre for Internet and Society at Harvard University, told IPS. “You want biased coverage from elites – there you have it.”

Subsequently, in this new model of participatory journalism, where the inputs of citizens can be as important as those of veteran reporters and traditional agenda-setters, the impact of increased online censorship is thus multiplied, as it can affect the layperson casually tweeting about the day’s events as much as the prolific opposition blogger.

In “The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom”, author Evgeny Morozov debunks the predominant narrative and initial techno-euphoria surrounding Iran’s restive summer of 2009 as a revolution purported to have been borne out of Twitter.

“If anything, Iran’s Twitter Revolution revealed the intense Western longing for a world where information technology is the liberator rather than the oppressor, a world where technology could be harvested to spread democracy around the globe rather than entrench existing autocracies,” he writes.

Indeed, as the Internet and other ICTs are ostensibly lauded for their potential to democratise the processes of news-making and news- gathering, technology can equally be harnessed for repression, as the Freedom House and CPJ publications illustrate.

Adapting old strategies to new technologies

“What is most surprising about these Online Oppressors is not who they are – they are all nations with long records of repression – but how swiftly they adapted old strategies to the online world,” O’Brien writes in the CPJ report.

Despite the seeming deftness with which regimes adjust to and co-opt ICTs – from filtering search results to employing fleets of online commenters with nimble fingers paid per pro-regime post – a host of tools also exist for circumventing censorship.

These tactics are as new as they are old, including the use of code words in Chinese blogs, proxies to mask an Internet user’s location and surely the next, yet-to-be-developed crowd sourced tactic created with the intent to gather and disseminate information – a fundamental requisite of the public sphere, whether online or off.

When the Internet was “killed” in Egypt, bloggers and journalists found workarounds to ensure that the voices of people on the ground were not wholly muted.

“On the first day, there was a total blackout,” Hussaini told IPS. “By the second day, we went back to basics. People were using phones, calling people abroad, while other people were transcribing.”

IPS’s own Emad MacKay and Adam Morrow in Cairo relayed dispatches via landline to colleagues in New York and London, who rendered their words for publication.

“Other people were glued to their TV screens, watching Al-Jazeera,” Hussaini said. “People were tweeting and blogging based on what they saw.”

“We saw the masses in the squares. We saw the demonstrations. We saw the police beating them up and spraying them,” she recalled. “All the images were streamed live in our living rooms.”

But as creative and inspiring as circumvention methods may be, the sobering reality is that they shouldn’t be necessary in the first place, says Zuckerman.

“Circumvention tools can be helpful and valuable,” Zuckerman told IPS, “but the shutdown of the Egyptian Internet shows that a truly determined government can always ‘pull the plug’ if they’re willing to suffer the fiscal and PR consequences.”

*Follow Aprille on Twitter at @aprilledaughn.

Excerpt:

By Aprille Muscara
WASHINGTON, May 2 2011 (IPS)

In the middle of the night, in an affluent suburb a little over 50 kilometres north of Islamabad, Pakistan, Osama bin Laden was gunned down in a compound shielded by barbed wire-topped walls up to five-and-a-half metres high. He resisted, United States officials say, fighting till the death as he had vowed he would.

Celebrations in Washington after news of the killing of Osama bin Laden. Credit: Aprille Muscara/IPS

“Yet his death does not mark the end of our effort,” he continued. “There’s no doubt that Al-Qaeda will continue to pursue attacks against us. We must – and we will – remain vigilant at home and abroad.”

Initial reactions by politicians, lawmakers, and observers here portray bin Laden’s death as a “victory”, with spontaneous street celebrations erupting in places like the White House, Times Square and Ground Zero.

“The fight against terror goes on, but tonight America has sent an unmistakable message: No matter how long it takes, justice will be done,” former president George W. Bush said.

The operation that killed bin Laden – a helicopter assault carried out by a small team of U.S. personnel – was years in the making; indeed, a decade. But, ten years after the September 11, 2001 attacks changed the calculus of U.S. foreign policy and launched a global “war on terror”, the abiding consequences of bin Laden’s demise remain to be seen.

Senior White House officials conceded that reprisal strikes by Al-Qaeda to avenge bin Laden’s death are possible, but stressed that the U.S. is taking “every possible precaution” to protect its citizens.

Some pundits, however, have been quick to note the largely figurehead role the Al-Qaeda chief has played in recent years, and are doubtful that bin Laden’s now permanent absence will change the organisation’s operations in any significant way.

Another outstanding question is the impact of the U.S.-led operation “deep inside Pakistan”, as Obama described it, on an already strained U.S.-Pakistan relationship.

Senior administration officials said that Islamabad was kept in the dark about the pre-dawn raid that killed bin Laden in order to ensure the safety and success of the operation.

“We shared this with no other country, including Pakistan,” a White House official told reporters after Obama’s speech. “We believed it was essential to the security of our personnel. Shortly after the raid, we contacted senior Pakistani leaders to brief them.”

“Over the years, I’ve repeatedly made clear that we would take action within Pakistan if we knew where bin Laden was,” Obama said in his speech. “That is what we’ve done.”

Obama green-lit the operation on Friday, Apr. 29, eight months after U.S. intelligence pinpointed the location of a courier known to be a protégé of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and considered to be among bin Laden’s trusted few.

The courier was tracked to an unusually well-protected compound in Abbotabad just 700 metres from the Pakistan Military Academy, the symbolic heart of the country’s armed forces and its focal training centre.

“We were shocked by what we saw,” a senior administration official said, recalling the “extraordinarily unique compound” housed on a plot of land about eight times larger than those nearby, located at the end of a narrow, dirt road in a relatively secluded area.

Worth one million dollars, the compound was protected by a series of walls three-anda-half to five- and-a-half metres tall, but had no Internet or telephone services, the official said.

“The final conclusion from an intelligence standpoint was two-fold,” another official said. First, a “high- value asset” was housed within the compound; and second, “there was strong probability that that person was Osama bin Laden.”

“Our best assessment, based on a large body of reporting based on several sources, was that bin Laden was living there with several family members,” the official added.

Islamabad was not given prior notice of the Abbotabad raid, which also resulted in the deaths of three other adult men and one woman and injuries to two women, according to senior White House officials. But “it’s important to note that our counterterrorism cooperation with Pakistan helped lead us to bin Laden and the compound where he was hiding,” Obama noted in his speech.

“Indeed, bin Laden had declared war against Pakistan as well, and ordered attacks against the Pakistani people,” he added.

“Tonight, I called President Zardari, and my team has also spoken with their Pakistani counterparts,” Obama said. “They agree that this is a good and historic day for both of our nations. And going forward, it is essential that Pakistan continue to join us in the fight against Al-Qaeda and its affiliates.”

But the response in Pakistan has been less than celebratory. Bilateral relations remain shaky, with the case of CIA operative Raymond Davis still fresh, reports of civilian casualties due to U.S. drone strikes continuing, and protests gathering pace in recent months over U.S. military operations in the country.

Meanwhile, Afghan President Hamid Karzai, as well as opposition leader Abdullah Abdullah, took the opportunity to distance Kabul from its association with bin Laden.

“Now it’s proven that Al-Qaeda and other terrorist organisations are not based in Afghanistan, and Pakistan is a haven for them,” Abdullah said.

Excerpt:

By Aprille Muscara
WASHINGTON, Apr 14 2011 (IPS)

Finance ministers of the G24 group of developing and emerging countries met on the sidelines the World Bank and International Monetary Fund spring meetings here on Thursday, warning against continued risks to their economies, despite largely “strong” growth as the world climbs out of the global financial crisis.

“[T]he nature of that recovery and the very expansionary monetary policies in advanced economies have had important spill-over effects on developing countries, contributing to a surge in capital flows and overheating pressures,” Lesetja Kganyago, the G24‘s current chairperson, told reporters after the meeting.

The cost and price volatility of commodities was also high on the group’s agenda. While improved trade terms benefit commodity- exporters, they said, high food and fuel prices partly driven by excessive financial speculation are a pressing concern for developing countries, who are most vulnerable to price shocks.

“The sharp increases will…accentuate inflationary pressures, pose a renewed threat to the poor and vulnerable, exacerbate social tensions, and add significantly to fiscal and import burdens, endangering growth prospects, especially of low income countries,” the group warned in a communiqué.

“Beyond the recovery, the environment for growth and development in the post-crisis period will be characterised by major structural changes. A major challenge is how to ensure that growth in the future is inclusive and employment-intensive,” Kganyago, director-general of South Africa’s National Treasury, added.

“A push to raise investment, including for infrastructure improvement, can help sustain and broaden growth poles in the developing world, but this will require a reinvigoration of development finance,” he said.

In their communiqué, the G24 ministers called for a “shift towards multi-polar sources of growth”, noting, “[T]he most dynamic sources [are] now centred in the developing world.”

Notably on Thursday, South Africa officially joined the so-called alliance of powerhouse emerging market BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) nations.

The group also continued discussion on climate financing and again called for “even-handed surveillance” of not only developing countries but also advanced economies and the expansion of the SDR basket to include emerging market currencies.

The G24 ministers also rejected two proposed IMF policies that would provide greater oversight and that they consider to be restrictive.

These include a new method of determining whether a developing country’s given level of foreign currency reserves is “adequate”. Although reserve build-ups can lend to exchange rate manipulation and global imbalances, they are a necessary line of defence against potential crises, the group said.

Another sticky matter is a newly planned framework for staff to advise countries on managing capital flows – much of which streams from developed to developing nations.

“[T]he idea of having a toolkit is a good one,” Kganyago said. “What we had a problem with is to then say that these things get integrated into the surveillance programme of the IMF and will form the basis of the advice of the IMF staff.”

“The second issue where we had a problem with the Fund’s approach was the fact that the focus tended to be on receiving countries,” he added. “You cannot just say that there are these inflows that are coming into developing countries without dealing with the source of the problem.”

“Certainly, the question of capital flows will still create some debate, but it is a very important, very interesting one, and it shows that the institution doesn’t shy away from difficult problems,” IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn told reporters on Thursday. “On the contrary, we want to address this problem directly and try to find collective solution.”

Meanwhile, the France-chaired G20 of advanced and emerging economies are slated to meet here on Friday, when they are expected to grapple with commodities concerns and the thorny issue of global economic imbalances as well as assess the world economy and prospects for growth more broadly.

On Wednesday, 1,000 economists from over 50 countries penned a letter to G20 policymakers urging them to adopt a so-called “Robin Hood Tax,” which would impose a minimal levy on financial transactions and could potentially raise hundreds of billions of dollars for development financing.

“[T]here can’t be a business as usual approach to growth,” Oxfam spokesperson Luc Lamprière said, echoing a sentiment expressed by Strauss-Kahn. “The G20 talks about inclusive sustainable growth but it’s going to have to turn the rhetoric into action on a whole range of policies including fair tax systems.”

*Follow Aprille Muscara on Twitter at @aprilledaughn.

Excerpt:

As the World Bank and International Monetary Fund convene for their annual Spring Meetings here, soaring food prices are high on the agenda, prompting some analysts to fast-forward to 2050 and the question of how to nourish the mid-century’s estimated world population of 8.9 billion people – the majority of whom will live in developing countries.

About 35 percent of the world's grains go toward feeding livestock. Credit: ILRI/creative commons license

“More poor people are suffering and more people could become poor because of high and volatile food prices,” warned World Bank chief Robert Zoellick on Thursday, who noted that some 44 million people have already been driven into poverty since last June alone due to the skyrocketing cost of food.

“We have to put food first and protect the poor and vulnerable, who spend most of their money on food,” he said.

While Zoellick characterised high and volatile food prices as “the biggest threat to the poor around the world” today, global food scarcity is not yet a problem for the world populace, which is expected to exceed seven billion this year.

But analysts warn that the demand for food – driven not only by the greater number of mouths to feed but also by rising incomes in emerging economies – will outpace agricultural production in the coming decades.

“The world is not short of food today,” said Hafez Ghanem, assistant director-general for Economic and Social Development at the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation. However, “[O]verall demand is growing at about two percent while yields are growing at one percent.”

The urgency to “do something” is especially intensified in the developing world, where 30 to 80 percent of disposable incomes are spent on food, highlighting an extreme vulnerability to high prices; where the bulk of today’s two billion malnourished people and one billion hungry people live; where food insecurity is common; and where analysts predict those two to three billion additional people in 2050 will have been born.

At the same time, many emerging economies are predicted to grow at poverty-level-busting speed, namely China and India with well over one billion residents each. This will multiply the demand for food, experts say, because families with higher incomes tend to consume more protein; and even those animals, prior to ending up on dinner tables, need to be fed.

Already today, experts estimate that about 35 percent of the world’s grains go toward feeding livestock.

Additionally, continued urbanisation in the coming decades – the U.N. estimates that by 2050, there will be 560 million fewer rural inhabitants than in 2009 – will pull people away from the agricultural sector, compounding the demand for food.

To meet this expected rapid growth in demand, analysts estimate that global food production will have to double over the next 40 years.

But many supply-side stumbling blocks are in place for the road to 2050, including the growing incidence of crop-destroying weather due to climate change; the potential of a diminished share of water for agriculture as a result of increased demand for drinking water; the lack of agricultural diversity in some places, heightening susceptibility to crop-destroying pests; and the limited amount of arable land in the world, coupled with a growing awareness of the problems of deforestation in order to plant fields.

Yet another potential limiter, some experts argue, is the existence of government policies that de-incentivise investments in agriculture for consumption, such as biofuel targets that necessitate crops be grown for fuel instead of food, and tariffs and subsidies that favour production in advanced economies, which discourage developing countries, who are most vulnerable to food insecurity and high food prices, from prioritising agriculture at home.

While no quick solution exists, in order to prevent a seemingly impending Malthusian catastrophe, experts argue, there needs to be a global re-prioritisation of agriculture to boost food production, from ramping up investments in basic irrigation and storage to boosting investments in the research and development of innovative, high-yield techniques and technologies.

“If you invest enough, we have enough resources to feed everybody in the world in 2050,” Ghanem said.

But absolute numbers of food supply is just one aspect of nourishing the world’s populace. A more pressing concern than production, some contend, is consumption – how and what kinds of food will be distributed among the future’s nine billion people.

“We’re talking about the global level,” Ghanem continued. “There are certain regions of the world who will not be able to feed themselves in 2050, regions with huge populations – South Asia as an example, the Middle East and North Africa as another example.”

“[T]hinking about people’s access to the food and the quality of the food they get is central rather than just the total quantity available,” echoed Will Martin, the World Bank’s top Agriculture and Rural Development researcher, at the same discussion.

Even now, both the under- and over-nourishment of populations are of critical concern, with their attendant health effects, such as rickets and starvation on one end and diabetes and heart disease on the other.

This only emphasises the importance of R&D investments in the hopes of spurring a “new green revolution” of the likes that fortified crops with nutrients and multiplied yields in the middle of this century, technology optimists insist.

Equally, if not more imperative is the need to make the delivery of food more equitable, with pro-poor trade, the strengthening of social safety nets, a rethinking of donor food aid practices, and increased South-South linkages.

*Follow Aprille on Twitter at @aprilledaughn.

By Jim Lobe and Aprille Muscara
WASHINGTON, Apr 7 2011 (IPS)

Contrary to claims by Chiquita Brands International that its payments to Colombian paramilitary and guerrilla groups over more than a decade were extorted, internal company documents released here Thursday strongly suggest that the transactions provided specific benefits to the banana giant.

The documents, which were published by the National Security Archive (NSA), an independent research group, raised questions about the factual basis for a 2007 plea agreement between Chiquita and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) under which the company was fined 25 million dollars for paying the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC), which was designated a terrorist group by the State Department in 2001.

Under the agreement, which capped a four-year investigation, government attorneys accepted the company’s contention that the payments to the AUC paramilitaries, which began in 1997, amounted to “protection” money and that Chiquita never received any actual services in exchange for them.

But some of the documents released by the NSA appeared to contradict that contention. They detail Chiquita’s handling of what the company referred to as “sensitive payments” from 1990, when it was paying left-wing guerrilla groups active in Uraba, to 2003 when a PowerPoint presentation obtained by the NSA presents options for how to conceal improper payments.

A March 2000 memo, for example, recorded a conversation between Chiquita Senior Counsel Robert Thomas, the memo’s author, and managers from the company’s wholly-owned subsidiary, Banadex, in which the latter indicate that Santa Marta-based paramilitaries formed a front company to disguise “the real purpose of providing security” to Banadex’s local operations.

Thomas quotes one participant, whose name is deleted from the document, as saying “we should continue making the payments; we can’t get the same level of support from the military.”

“Chiquita’s apparent quid pro quo with guerrillas and paramilitaries responsible for countless killings belies the company’s 2007 plea deal with the Justice Department,” Michael Evans, NSA’s chief researcher on Colombia, told IPS. “What we still don’t know is why U.S. prosecutors overlooked what appears to be clear evidence that Chiquita benefited from these transactions.”

The Justice Department did not return calls about the case. Ed Loyd, a company spokesman, insisted that “Chiquita made payments solely out of a well-grounded fear of retaliation against its employees if the company refused” and defended the plea agreement.

“The Department of Justice, which …is charged with objectively analysing the facts, reviewed ALL of these documents as part of an exhaustive investigation that lasted nearly four years,” he wrote in an email to IPS. “[It] found NO evidence that Chiquita shared any of the murderous goals of the terrorist groups it was forced to pay.”

The document dump took place on the same day as a meeting between Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos and U.S. President Barack Obama to finalise a so-called “Action Plan on Labour Rights” – a deal meant to secure Congressional approval of the countries’ long pending Free Trade Agreement (FTA).

The FTA, negotiated under the last George W. Bush administration, has been stalled precisely over charges by the pact’s critics that Bogota has not done enough to dismantle paramilitary groups responsible for killing thousands of labour activists over the past two decades. Nearly 150 unionists have been murdered in the past three years alone, according to Colombia’s main labour rights group Escuela Nacional Sindical (ENS).

“I think it’s important for people to bear in mind that there’s a serious cost to doing business in Colombia that goes beyond simple extortion payments, or whatever you want to call them, and can be counted by the number of people killed by these illegal armed groups,” Evans said.

The AUC are supposed to have been disbanded from 2003-2006, but successor groups and criminal bands, or “bacrim”, continue to dominate large swathes of the country.

“It is of great concern that the U.S. is moving forward with an FTA with Colombia without addressing the full dismantlement of Colombian paramilitary groups,” Gimena Sanchez, an Andean expert at the Washington Office on Latin America, told IPS.

“As such, we worry about the proliferation of more Chiquita- like cases,” she continued. “Currently in the Choco region, 23 oil palm industrialists are under indictment for links to paramilitarism and violent displacement.”

Also concerning to critics of the Washington-Bogota trade pact is a history of complicity by Colombian police, military, judicial, and political officials with these illegal armed groups. Indeed, the NSA documents suggest that state security forces encouraged and facilitated Chiquita’s payments to the AUC, and were even recipients of such funds.

While most payments in the early 1990’s were paid to guerrilla groups, an August 1993 memo indicates that the company subsidiary in Turbo had begun channelling security payments to the Colombian Army through a “banana association” known as “Agura” at a price of three cents per box of bananas shipped.

By 1998, the documents suggest that the company had begun paying the AUC through legal Convivir militias that then- governor of Antoquia Department – and future president – Alvaro Uribe was actively promoting. One 1997 memo also notes that Convivir militias “operate under military supervision (and have offices at the military bases)” and that “their sole function is to provide information on guerrilla movements.”

Another 2000 memo by Thomas described a 1997 meeting in which the AUC’s notorious leader, Carlos Castano first suggested to Banadex managers that they support a new Convivir, called La Tagua del Darien.

According to the memo, the Banadex officials said they had “no choice but to attend the meeting,” because “refusing to meet would antagonise the Colombia military, local and state government officials, and Autodefensas.”

The newly released documents consist of more than 5,500 pages of internal Chiquita memos obtained by the NSA from the Justice Department under the Freedom of Information Act.

They are also likely to be used by plaintiffs in an ongoing civil lawsuit here against Chiquita on behalf of dozens of Colombians killed by right-wing paramilitaries, notably the AUC.

In addition to fuelling the FTA debate, the newly disclosed documents are also likely to bolster half a dozen federal lawsuits against Chiquita on behalf of the families of hundreds of AUC victims in the banana-growing region of Uraba where Chiquita and its affiliates are active.

“They reinforce the claim…that the company was knowingly complicit in, and thus liable for, the atrocities committed by the AUC in Uraba while on the Chiquita payroll,” said Arturo Carrillo, director of George Washington University’s International Human Rights Clinic, which is representing plaintiffs in one of the suits.

“One can only hope that the revealing information obtained and published by the NSA will lead to greater accountability for Chiquita’s criminal actions in Colombia,” Carillo said, “since the company’s plea agreement with the Justice Department, which has refused to prosecute Chiquita executives for wrongdoing, amounts to little more than a slap on the corporate wrist.”

Excerpt:

By Aprille Muscara
WASHINGTON, Apr 6 2011 (IPS)

On the eve of a meeting between U.S. President Barack Obama and Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos here on Thursday, the White House announced that a deal has been reached on key labour issues upholding the countries’ stalled bilateral trade pact.

Largely hailed by Republican lawmakers, the preliminary details of the deal, dubbed an “Action Plan for Labour Rights”, were received sceptically by some Democrat representatives, while labour and rights groups noted that they lacked breadth, depth, and accountability measures.

The U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement (FTA) was negotiated under the last George W. Bush administration and has been log-jammed in the pipeline since due to serious concerns about the South American country’s lax labour laws, history of violence against union leaders, and shaky human rights record.

“Trade union and labour rights violations are taking place within a broader context that is not addressed by this action plan,” Gimena Sanchez, an Andean expert at the Washington Office on Latin America, told IPS.

“That context includes a continued internal armed conflict, re-grouped and reconstituted paramilitarism that operate throughout the country, and alarming impunity on labour and all other human rights cases,” she explained.

Meanwhile, Republicans in the House of Representatives, who favour the FTA’s boost of U.S. exports and creation of domestic jobs, have been pushing for the Colombia pact to be approved in a batch along with the also pending Panama and South Korea agreements, ostensibly to fast-track the deals, as the latter has been pegged a priority by the White House.

“Free Trade Agreements like this one have huge potential to help American ranchers, farmers and manufactures grow and create jobs by expanding into foreign markets,” said Republican Max Baucus in a statement reacting to the Colombia agreement on Wednesday.

“The administration should immediately begin working with Congress on the implementing legislation so the president can submit and Congress can approve the agreement in the coming months,” he urged.

Republicans have set a desired date of Jul. 1 for the pacts to be introduced into Congress, while U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in January that the Colombia FTA would be sent to lawmakers “this year”.

The deal announced on Wednesday, and expected to be formally approved during the presidents’ meeting on Thursday, seems to somewhat smooth the pact’s still bumpy path toward passage, but a concrete timeline for the Colombian trade agreement remains unclear.

A possible clue lies in the particulars of the labour deal released thus far (the full action plan has yet to be made public); namely, in a set of dated benchmarks that the Colombian government will pledge to meet.

“President Obama insisted that a number of serious and immediate labour concerns be addressed before he would be willing to send the Agreement to Congress,” the fact sheets said. “Successful implementation of key elements of the Action Plan will be a precondition for the Agreement to enter into effect.”

The targets include steps to protect the safety and rights of workers, union leaders, and labour activists, with “due dates” set as early as Apr. 22 and one as late as December of this year.

Given that almost all of the published benchmarks must be met by July, rights groups are concerned about the rapid timeframe for the listed reforms and their feasibility.

“The concern we have is that you just won’t know if any of these steps will actually reduce violence against trade unionists because it moves far too quickly for anyone to actually evaluate and ensure that these steps are carried out,” Lisa Haugaard, executive director of the Washington- based Latin America Working Group, told IPS.

“These are very fundamental changes and I don’t think that the Colombian government, even with goodwill, can carry this out that quickly,” she continued.

Six House Democrats – Representatives Jim McGovern, George Miller, Rosa DeLauro, Mike Michaud, Linda Sanchez, and Jan Schakowsky – echoed these timeline concerns in their reaction to the announced action plan on Wednesday.

“While we welcome these initiatives, we are particularly concerned that we will not have time to determine whether they have been fully carried out – let alone resulted in a dramatic decrease of violence against unionists, increased ability by Colombian workers to exercise their rights to organise and bargain collectively, and a breaking of the culture of impunity that has so characterised justice and the rule of law in Colombia,” they said.

And once the FTA finally enters into force, Haugaard noted, there is no clear mechanism for or guarantee of follow-up, as the targets listed in the action plan are not tied to the trade pact itself.

Ultimately, rights groups argue, the action plan does not go far enough in addressing the systemic problems that underlie the labour violence, impunity, and human rights violations in Colombia.

“Unless significant steps are taken to address the impunity and illegal armed groups prior to movement on the agreement, we are likely to see deterioration in labour and human rights once the FTA is implemented,” Sanchez told IPS.

Excerpt:

By Aprille Muscara
WASHINGTON, Apr 5 2011 (IPS)

As Cote d’Ivoire enters its fourth month of post-election violence with intensified fighting and bloodshed, the White House is defending its efforts thus far to shepherd a solution to the stalemate between incumbent Laurent Gbagbo and Alassane Ouattara, the internationally-recognised winner of last fall’s elections.

“For the past four months, the United States has been working closely with its African and other international partners to achieve a peaceful outcome to the Ivorian crisis,” contended U.S. assistant secretary for African Affairs Johnnie Carson at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars here on Tuesday.

While the Barack Obama administration’s attention has been gripped by turbulence in other parts of the world, rights groups and regional observers have been raising the alarm about Cote d’Ivoire for months, warning of a relapse into the civil war that ravaged the country for decades and a building humanitarian crisis.

More than 100,000 refugees have streamed to next-door Liberia, Oxfam estimates, while according to the United Nations, over one million residents have been displaced from their homes.

News of massacres and mass graves, the targeting of U.N. personnel on the ground, and accusations of violence by both sides have been consistent since at least January, with the latest mass atrocity of more than 800 gruesome civilian deaths by small arms and machete in the town of Duekoue reported by the International Red Cross over the weekend, apparently as a result of inter-ethnic fighting.

“Tragically, the violence that we are seeing could have been averted had Laurent Gbagbo respected the results of last year’s presidential election,” Obama said in a statement on Tuesday, in which he once again called for the embattled incumbent to cede power to Ouattara and urged all parties to cease bloodshed.

“When the crisis in the Ivory Coast started to unfold…the entire upper level of the administration was engaged,” Carson noted. “President Obama called President Gbagbo not once, but twice.” The phone calls, he said, were followed by a letter to Gbagbo, which offered him refuge in the United States and a fellowship at a prestigious university in exchange for his resignation.

“We did in fact take a pro-active and engaged policy,” Carson continued. “All of these overtures – all of these overtures – have been rejected.”

Given Gbagbo’s obstinate defiance of the election results – he garnered 46 percent of the vote, while 54 percent went to his opponent – Ouattara, whose own forces are accused by rights groups and refugees of civilian killings and reprisal attacks, was calling for his removal by military might as early as the New Year, warning of continued carnage should the stalemate of power persist.

Two regime-changes and a no-fly zone in North Africa later, critics are wondering whether the deaths of hundreds, perhaps thousands, and the displacement of over a million civilians in Cote d’Ivoire could have been avoided with more urgent international attention and stronger force behind the widespread calls for Gbagbo to step down and violence to end.

Why Libya and not Cote d’Ivoire?

“The situation in the Ivory Coast is frequently compared to that of Libya in terms of the international community’s response and responsibilities to protect innocent civilians. That notion is simply wrong,” Carson argued.

The comparisons to the situation in the Maghreb are obvious: A strongman clings stubbornly to power and the opposition takes up arms as civilians are massacred and flee the country en masse, while the stability of the region is threatened with the precedent-setting potential of a bulldozed attempt at something that might resemble a democracy.

With some 20 countries in Africa slated to hold elections this year – including in neighbouring Liberia, the lion’s share recipient of Ivorian refugees – observers saw Cote d’Ivoire as a test of the continent’s commitment to democratise. If the results of an internationally-deemed legitimate election were flouted and yet another strongman was allowed to remain in power, the effect would be demoralising to would-be African democrats, the thinking went.

“This was a test case, not only for the Ivory Coast, this was a test case also for Africa,” Carson said. “The ballot must be respected.”

Similarly, it was feared that Muammar Gaddafi’s crackdown on civilians would threaten the Arab Spring of popular uprisings sweeping the Middle East and wilt the fragile bloom of its post-revolution Egyptian and Tunisian neighbours – a rationale that helped buoy the arguments for military intervention in Libya.

“The democratic impulses that are dawning across the region would be eclipsed by the darkest form of dictatorship, as repressive leaders concluded that violence is the best strategy to cling to power,” Obama said in his speech defending U.S. military action in Libya.

But beneath the quick comparisons are important differences, analysts contend. Some 11,000 U.N. blue helmets are on the ground in Cote d’Ivoire, supplemented by French forces, while Gbagbo lacks the airborne military force that Gaddafi deployed against his people.

“Without the presence of these peacekeepers, there is absolutely no doubt that the situation in Cote d’Ivoire would be far worse than it is now,” Carson argued. “Overall, the international community’s responses in Cote d’Ivoire thus far have been appropriately matched to the political and military circumstances on the ground.”

In response to escalating violence and a reported uptick in U.N.-targeted attacks, four U.N. helicopters fired missiles at two military camps and the presidential palace in the capital of Abidjan, where Gbagbo is housed and headquartered, on Monday – a rare and extraordinary move for the world body with its sparse history of military action.

“The ballot must be respected…and the international community will act if the situation warrants,” Carson reiterated, issuing a warning to other would-be incumbent strongmen bent on clinging to power through violent means.

But Carson also issued a caveat: “We should nonetheless be humbled about what can be expected of external intervention in general.”

*Follow Aprille Muscara on Twitter at @aprilledaughn.

Excerpt:

As the Arab world continues to pitch and heave with flashes of popular uprisings here and sparks of brutal crackdowns there, analysts are painting a grim picture of the regional unrest’s economic consequences, predicting the persistence of high oil prices in the coming years.

Political turmoil in Arab nations that hold about two-thirds of the world's proven oil reserves will likely keep prices above 100 dollars per barrel. Credit: Public domain

“We are now going not just into a period of uncertainty, but a period of big uncertainty and protracted uncertainty, and our instruments for actually influencing the outcome – political instruments – are very, very limited,” pronounced Uri Dadush at a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) discussion on the Middle East uprisings’ impact on oil prices.

“We’re talking about a medium-term problem,” said the director of the global think tank’s economics programme here on Thursday. “We’re talking about a multi-year problem.”

Rising oil demand from economies climbing slowly out of the global financial crisis and emerging markets growing rapidly pushed prices to 90 dollars per barrel by December 2010.

Then, in the Arab Spring of the past 90-some days, communities from the Maghreb to the Persian Gulf took to the streets with banners and bullhorns, clamouring for reform and basic rights and ushering in the demise of decades-old regimes in two countries and the delivery of war in another.

So far, especially with leading producer Saudi Arabia’s deployment of its traditional trifecta of ramped up force, religious ideology, and cash payments to appease its restive population, analysts say that the world’s oil supply is safe.

But ongoing political turmoil in the Arab Street – much of which winds atop about one-third of the world’s oil output and two-thirds of the world’s proven oil reserves – will keep prices above 100 dollars per barrel, experts predict, while uncertainty about when the dust will settle and what it will reveal, coupled with oil demand continuing to outpace supply, will sustain these high prices.

A plausible bad scenario

“Our assumption is that the risks are only upwards,” said Hans Timmer, director of the World Bank’s economic monitoring and forecasting arm, at the discussion. ” (T)here’s no relief in oil prices,” he speculated, “while there are scenarios possible where oil prices could go much higher.”

The CEIP panellists, which included prominent economists and regional experts, concluded that oil prices over the next two or three years could range from a floor of 75 dollars per barrel – an unlikely hope, they agreed – with a baseline of 100 to 110 dollars per barrel, hovering around current prices for the rest of the year, and the “plausible bad scenario” of spiking to 140 to 150 dollars per barrel with continued shocks.

With this bleak forecast, analysts fear that global economic growth will take a hit, impacting the world’s most vulnerable markets. “Any increase in oil prices is harmful for the global economy,” Timmer said.

“Every 10-percent increase in oil prices from their current levels will mean some three-tenths of a percent less growth in the world economy,” he continued. “So if you’re taking about 50-percent increase in oil prices, you’re talking about (almost) one and a half percentage points less growth in the economy.”

Should the price of a barrel surge another 50 dollars from current levels, for high-income countries that are expected to grow at a low two and a half percent, a one-percent slash would have a significant impact. In places like Italy and Spain, which face massive debt, towering interest rates, and near-zero growth rates, the effect would be even more deeply felt.

And for developing countries, although many are expected to grow much rapidly, the prospect of sustained, higher oil prices could mean tens of millions more people descending into poverty.

“For poor people, the share of energy in their consumption pattern is much higher than for the rich people,” Timmer said. “Also, what is very important, oil price increases is one of the key factors behind the food price increase that we have seen recently. Food prices would go up also, so it could push a lot of people into extreme poverty.”

As the cost of food – partly driven by the cost of oil – continues to rise in equal measure, the World Bank has estimated that some 44 million people have already fallen below the extreme poverty line of living on 1.25 dollar per day or less since last June.

No relief

Unfortunately, the panellists concluded, there is little that can be done in the short-term to alleviate these record-high prices.

“If you’re not a producer, you’re only a demander,” said panellist Mohsin Khan, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and former director of the Middle East and Central Asia department at the International Monetary Fund.

“I’m not sure what the G20 can do other than sort of wring their hands and…point fingers at Saudi Arabia and say, ‘Look, you’ve got to do something about oil prices’,” Khan noted.

Although oil producers have an obvious interest in protecting the flow of crude – as evidenced, for instance, by Muammar Gaddafi’s conspicuous avoidance of oil-related infrastructure in his assaults, Saudi Arabia’s uptick in production to compensate for Libya’s deserted oil fields, or the Al Saud’s boost of direct payments to citizens in an attempt to placate reformist sentiments – the costs of that protection mean they also have an interest in keeping prices high.

“To have enough revenue to cover that spending, they need (prices to be) between 80 to 90 dollars a barrel,” Khan said. “So it’s no longer a case that the Saudis would prefer to have fair oil prices. They always say they want fair oil prices.”

The long-term solution, the consensus goes, is to reduce the world’s dependence on fossil fuels. But, Timmer warned, “There are two dangers there. First of all, long-term means that it will never happen because we are only engaged now in short-term problems, so we always postpone it.”

“And secondly, if it is true that the oil markets are very forward-looking and that incorporate now the crisis, then announcing bold and very plausible alternative energy plans can actually worsen the price now,” he continued.

Clearing the rubble, rebuilding institutions, and finding a foothold – and then staying -on a successful development path is key, Timmer argued, advocating for the spotlight to be refocused on post-revolution countries like Tunisia and Egypt and not just on oil producers like Algeria and Bahrain where revolutionary fervour is swelling, bolstering fears of supply disruption.

“Ultimately, the key problem in the Middle East is the inability of creating jobs,” he said. “When will there be real stability in the Middle East? It will be when they can solve that problem.”

“Some things are systemic challenges that need to be addressed and there’s not an American or a European or a G20 answer to these problems and that’s how it is,” echoed Christopher Boucek, a Middle East specialist at Carnegie.

“Not only will the current situation be going on much longer,” he said, “but the effects of what this has had on the region will be years. I think we’re still only in the very, very beginning of all this.”

*Follow Aprille Muscara on Twitter @aprilledaughn

By Aprille Muscara
WASHINGTON, Mar 30 2011 (IPS)

On the heels of U.S. President Barack Obama’s trip to Latin America, Washington’s traditional role as “regional hegemon” is being reevaluated as its attention focuses on the Arab Spring and an emerging commercial competitor – China – focuses on the U.S.’s backyard.

“Washington continues to ignore, misapprehend, or minimise the threat that’s happening right under our noses,” argued former assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere Affairs Robert Noriega, now a visiting fellow at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, at a panel discussion held by AEI earlier this year.

“That passivity has been read by the Chinese as an indifference to what they were up to in the Western hemisphere and the results…are to the detriment of U.S. interests and security,” he said.

Others see Beijing’s growing role in Central and South America as merely symptomatic of the region’s overall diversification of economic ties.

“While the China-Latin America relationship has clearly grown enormously – it’s become very important for the region – it’s…part of this broader panorama of globalisation of Latin America as a whole,” commented Dan Erikson, a senior adviser for Western Hemisphere Affairs in the U.S. State Department, at the discussion.

The Sino-Latin Trade Boom

In the last decade, economic relations between resource- hungry China and the nations of Central and South America have exploded – from 10 billion dollars worth of bilateral trade in 2000 to nearly 120 billion in 2009 – eating away at the United States’ commercial dominance in the region.

China is expected to supplant the European Union as Latin America’s second largest trading partner in the coming years and has already displaced the U.S. as the top trading partner to Brazil and Chile, with Peru anticipated to be next.

Beyond commerce, Beijing has also emerged as one of the region’s – and the world’s – biggest bankers, dispensing more money than the World Bank in the past two years to other developing countries, including 11-figure loans to Venezuela, Brazil and Argentina.

Most worrisome to China-hawks in Washington, however, is the Asian giant’s ramping up of military ties in Latin America – from interchanges among students, officers, and defence ministers to equipment and arms sales, including to the government of Venezuela’s strongly anti-U.S. Hugo Chavez.

These connections, they claim, not only threaten U.S. regional influence and interests, but also its national security. Others, meanwhile, are sceptical of the idea that China’s current military aims in Latin America put its northern neighbour in direct peril.

“The way I see that is getting to know each other,” argued Eric Farnsworth, vice president of the U.S.-based Council of the Americas, referring to Sino-Latin military relations. “One has to watch it, I suppose, but we don’t have to go crazy” in our speculations, he added.

In Farnsworth’s view, Chinese pronouncements and actions in the region have suggested a relationship built on commerce, not political or strategic engagement.

“I think it’s in the Chinese interests to have a stable region where the rules of the game are known, where they are one of many actors [in the market],” he told a small group of reporters at the National Foreign Trade Council here on Monday.

“At one level, the U.S. security presence in the region is making things much more secure for other investors,” he said. “Why would China want to disrupt that?”

At the same time, he admitted, Chinese soft power in the region is undeniably growing, with an increase in high-level bilateral visits and with Beijing investing not only in raw materials and infrastructure development but also in educational and cultural exchanges.

Tellingly, while Brazil was the first of three stops in Obama’s whirlwind five-day regional tour, the second international destination of Dilma Rousseff’s presidency will be China, where she will pay a visit next month (the first was Portugal).

Still, Farnsworth argued, Beijing’s underlying motives in the Sino-Latin relationship are economic.

“The reason why China is doing this is not for development purposes…It’s not to gain influence…It’s not to replace the United States militarily and politically…It is to goose the Chinese economy,” he pronounced.

Tensing ties

For China, Latin America, with its abundance of natural resources and growing markets for Chinese goods, is an attractive region with which to do business.

But trade asymmetries between the two – Latin America largely exports raw materials like copper and iron to Asia, while China inundates their markets with more value-added products like cell phones and cars – have caused ties to tense.

“Countries are beginning to re-examine whether this relationship is really equal and really beneficial,” Farnsworth said.

Earlier this year, the Sao Paulo Industrial Federation (known by its Portuguese acronym as FIESP) issued a statement criticising Beijing’s commercial ties to Brazil. “The relationship with China is important but from an industrial perspective, it is extremely negative,” it said.

With growth in the appreciation of the real and China’s continued undervaluation of its renminbi, Brazilian manufacturers complain that their goods can no longer compete with the flood of cheaper products from the East, exacerbating the trade imbalance between the two countries.

Brasilia thus broke from its rhetoric of South-South cooperation earlier this year, when finance minister Guido Mantega called for its East Asian partner in the so-called BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) alliance to revalue its currency.

“Now the United States isn’t the only country…complaining about currency,” Farnsworth noted. “Now, it’s another BRIC country. Now, it’s another emerging market.”

Although trade with China has been critical to the growth of Latin American economies over recent years and their ability to stay afloat through the global financial crisis, analysts from across the ideological spectrum – including both Noriega and Farnsworth – argue that China’s mercantilist commercial strategy also stunts economic gains in some of the region’s countries.

“Frankly, [growth rates] should be two to three percentage points higher than they are,” Farnsworth said.

With this recent rock in trade relations between China and Latin America, Washington is now being pushed to build on the momentum from Obama’s south of the border trip to strengthen its regional ties, starting with the passage of the still-pending Colombia and Panama free trade agreements.

“We need to start thinking strategically about the Western hemisphere,” Farnsworth argued, advocating for a broader trade agenda for the region. “I don’t think we can put the Chinese genie back in the bottle.”

Excerpt:

By Aprille Muscara
WASHINGTON, Mar 25 2011 (IPS)

As the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) prepares to assume command and control of military operations in Libya after five days of the United States at the helm, U.S. President Barack Obama’s doctrine of multilateralism is on the line.

Obama takes questions on Libya during a visit to El Salvador, Mar. 22, 2011. Credit: White House Photo, Pete Souza

In the contentious lead-up to intervention, Obama was unwavering in his message that any U.S. action would have to be in concert with the international community. He especially insisted on “Arab leadership and participation” in military strikes against the North African country, where more than 330,000 people have been displaced by fighting between pro-democracy rebels and soldiers loyal to long-time Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

Domestic debate raged about imposing a no-fly zone (NFZ), as some sceptics warned that U.S. influence abroad would suffer if Washington mired itself militarily in yet another Muslim country.

“With two wars going in Iraq and Afghanistan, with huge deficits at home, with neo-isolationist voices rising from the Tea Party and other parts of the political spectrum, you might have guessed that intervention would not have occurred,” Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), told IPS.

While allies like France and Britain were early supporters of military action, Washington was hesitant until the Arab League’s last-minute endorsement. Then, within days, the U.S. helped to negotiate the passage of United Nations Security Council resolution 1973 authorising an NFZ, ostensibly to avert mass civilian casualties, and the hawks triumphed.

“The episode constitutes a victory for liberal interventionists” and “a sign of a continuing [domestic] appetite to expend blood and treasure in crises abroad – including a crisis like this, which does not pose a direct threat to the U.S.,” Kupchan argued.

But as Obama’s demands for international participation were met and public opinion polls showed popular support for U.S. action, the reluctant president was left with little choice, according to some observers.

“Not only do I think that this is a successful bout of multilateralism, but I think that the consensus-building that occurred elsewhere to some extent forced Obama’s hand,” Kupchan added.

“From the beginning, he said he would like other partners to do more in the world,” he continued. “In many respects, they gave Obama what he wanted.”

Writing in his ‘Foreign Policy’ blog Thursday, Rothkopf characterised the “abstainers” of resolution 1973 as being among the Libyan war’s “victors” – a coalition with the potential to be an “alternative to the old trans-Atlantic alliance”.

“The group, the BRICs [Brazil, Russia, India and China] plus Germany, may have sat on the sidelines for the vote but by imagining the outcome had they not done so, their potential power is made clear,” he argued.

“China and Russia have veto power. And of the four countries most likely to join them as Security Council permanent members in the years ahead, three of them rounded out this group,” he explained.

For some, Washington’s late addition to the cacophony of voices calling for military intervention could be fodder for American declinists. For others, it is proof of the capitol’s enduring influence.

“[I]f something is going to get done, [the U.S. is] going to have to be in the lead,” Max Boot, a neoconservative foreign policy analyst at CFR, argued Wednesday, expressing scepticism about the transition to coalition command of military operations in Libya.

“And we saw that simply with the authorisation at the U.N. where, you know, Sarkozy, for example, was way out front in talking about the need to intervene, but it didn’t happen until last week when Obama said, OK, now we’re on board,” he continued.

As one of NATO’s 28 members and as part of the international coalition participating in the enforcement of Libya’s NFZ and arms embargo – which now includes Arab League members Qatar and the United Arab Emirates – the White House says it will play a mere support role in subsequent phases of the operation.

But, Boot argued, “we’re going to have the biggest say in terms of what happens no matter how Obama tries to camouflage it.”

“[E]verybody knows we’re the top dog here,” he contended. ” [Obama] can try to be, you know, humble and try to put the U.S. in the background as much as possible, but the reality is we are the number one power in the world.”

Excerpt:

By Aprille Muscara
WASHINGTON, Mar 21 2011 (IPS)

The fate of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi remains up in the air after the United States and its allied partners began missile strikes over the weekend to impose a no-fly zone (NFZ) in the North African country.

“[T]he six-million-dollar question is where is this heading and I don’t think we have a clear sense of it,” Charles Kupchan, U.S. foreign policy expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, told IPS.

U.S. President Barack Obama reiterated his prior calls for regime change in Libya on Monday during a televised press conference from Chile, the second stop of his three-country visit to Latin America this week.

“It is U.S. policy that Gaddafi needs to go,” he said. “We’ve got a wide range of tools in addition to our military efforts to support that policy.”

“[W]e will continue to pursue those, but when it comes to our military action, we are doing so in support of United Nations Security Council resolution 1973 that specifically talks about humanitarian efforts, and we are going to make sure that we stick to that mandate,” Obama continued.

While some analysts criticise Washington’s military involvement in Libya, questioning the justification that it preempts a humanitarian crisis and instead intervenes in a civil war, others call for Gaddafi’s ouster through military might, arguing that it is permitted under the UNSC resolution.

Top Pentagon officials – like Vice Admiral Bill Gortney, director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and General Carter Ham, U.S. Africa commander – have stressed in recent days that Gaddafi is not among the targets of what the U.S. is calling “Operation Odyssey Dawn.”

Although current military operations in Libya are restricted to the protection of civilians, U.S. allies, notably Britain and France, have also been vocal in calling for regime change.

“[W]hat the U.S., at this point, is trying to focus specifically on is humanitarian objectives – that is to say, to stop the killing of the opposition by Gaddafi’s forces – and is leaving in a more ambiguous state what comes after that objective,” Kupchan explained.

Bombs Over Benghazi

“The military mission here…is very clear, frankly, and what is expected of us to do: to establish this no-fly zone, to protect civilians, to…get the withdrawal of regime ground forces out of Benghazi,” Ham reiterated Monday.

“[W]e are so far achieving our military objectives consistent with our mission,” Ham said, adding that U.S. and British ships and submarines in the Mediterranean Sea have launched 136 tomahawk missiles since the start of military operations on Saturday.

According to the general, no Libyan military aircraft has been observed operating since, Libyan naval activity has ceased, and pro-regime ground forces have halted their advance on the opposition-stronghold of Benghazi.

“[W]e know that regime ground forces that were in the vicinity of Benghazi now possess little will or capability to resume offensive operations,” Ham announced.

The U.S. is leading this initial phase of military operations, which is aimed at disabling Gaddafi’s air defences and implementing and patrolling a no-fly zone, which will extend south- and west-ward from Benghazi to eventually encompass about 1,000 kilometres along the top third of the country.

Subsequent phases, which Obama said will come in a manner of “days, not weeks”, will operate under a coalition leadership.

Partners active in the operations now include the British, Danish, French, Italian and Spanish, with Belgian and Canadian allies beginning to participate on Monday and Qatari forces en route to the area, Ham said.

Additional countries – including those from the Arab League – are expected to add their names to the list in the coming days.

The White House has insisted on “Arab leadership and participation” in international efforts to contain Gaddafi’s attacks against his people, with the Arab League’s endorsement of a NFZ in Libya one of the key contributing factors in the U.S.’s involvement.

But Arab support wavered on Saturday, when the League’s Secretary-General condemned the intensity of the missile strikes. Then on Sunday, the League issued a second endorsement of the NFZ.

As details of how the coalition leadership will be structured are defined, it is clear that parties must tread carefully to accommodate the policies and intentions of the nations involved.

“[T]here are a couple of possibilities – one is British and French leadership, another is the use of the NATO machinery,” U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates told reporters Sunday.

“I think there is a sensitivity on the part of the Arab League to being seen to be operating under a NATO umbrella, and so the question is if there is a way we can work out NATO’s command and control machinery without it being a NATO mission and without a NATO flag and so on.”

Ultimately, Gates said, “this is basically going to have to be resolved by the Libyans themselves.”

Excerpt:

By Daniela Pastrana and Aprille Muscara
CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico/WASHINGTON, Mar 18 2011 (IPS)

In the U.S. city of El Paso, Texas the media sounded the alarm: six murders committed in just two months, more than the 2010 total of five. Just across the Mexican border, in the sprawling border city of Ciudad Juárez, no one doubts that this year’s homicide rate will surpass last year’s record: 3,111.

The lights of El Paso, seen from Ciudad Juárez. Credit: Daniela Pastrana/IPS

The extremely different levels of violence between Ciudad Juárez, dubbed the murder capital of the world, and El Paso, one of the safest big cities in the U.S., is the latest and most persistent gap between two cities that just a few decades ago enjoyed brisk trade across the Rio Grande.

The increasingly tight border here is selectively porous: while drugs continue making their way northwards, drug-related killings occur almost exclusively on the Mexican side.

In Ciudad Juárez people explain it simply. “People can do anything they want here. In the United States you can’t, you’ll be arrested,” says local journalist Josefina Martínez.

In the last decade, the Mexican cartels have taken over many cocaine distribution routes formerly dominated by Colombian drug syndicates, while tightening their grip on the production and distribution of marijuana and getting more heavily involved in the production of synthetic drugs – all of which has bolstered their earnings and, thus, their economic clout and firepower.

But drug-related homicides have soared since the government of conservative President Felipe Calderón militarised the war on drugs in 2007: in just four years, there have been more than 35,000 “narco-deaths” in Mexico.

“It is a mistake to see the violence as a perplexing isolated phenomenon, rather than as a problem caused by the weakness of the state,” Samuel González Ruiz, former Mexican chief prosecutor in the special unit against organised crime and a former expert in the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), told IPS.

“All governments in the world ‘manage’ licit or illicit markets, by action or omission,” he said. “The fundamental difference is that in Mexico, public employees and officials are relatively free to be involved in corruption, while other countries have law enforcement policies.

“Think of a big garden. The U.S. garden is green, green, green…there are drugs in every corner, and every once in a while the grass is mowed and plants are pruned, and the grass is short and neat again. In countries like Mexico, the garden is abandoned, overgrown with shrubs, whose roots are growing and spread under the house until they even jeopardise the foundations,” he said.

Little spillover

Waging war where their customers are located is not good business for the drug syndicates.

Moreover, foreign workers and tourists are not typically targeted in the drug violence that runs rampant in Mexico’s border towns – unless they have cartel connections, which most victims do. Many of the victims meet their fate as a result of battles between rival syndicates over control of key turf where major routes are located, funnelling narcotics northward to nationwide networks of distributors in the U.S.

“Spillover violence, in which DTOs (drug trafficking organisations) bring their fight to American soil, is a remote worst-case scenario,” David Shirk, a prominent expert on U.S.-Mexico relations and border issues, argues in a report released early this month by the U.S.-based Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). “Officials have documented few cases of actual ‘spillover’.

“Reacting to public concerns, the United States has deployed massive amounts of manpower and funding to the U.S.-Mexican border to prevent undocumented immigration and stave off ‘spillover’ violence,” Shirk explains in the report, ‘The Drug War in Mexico: Confronting a Shared Threat’.

Over 20,000 Border Patrol agents and more than 3,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) personnel manned the 3,200 kilometres dividing Mexico and the U.S. last year, while 2010 funding for these agencies totalled some 11.5 and 5.7 billion dollars, respectively – amounts that have nearly doubled since 2004.

“In short, today the border has a greater security presence than at any point since the 1910 Mexican revolution, when (the U.S.) sent half (of its) military forces to protect against possible incursion by insurgent groups,” wrote Shirk and colleague Eric Olson in a post for the Washington-based Immigration Policy Centre in February.

The U.S. has recently ramped up its efforts to crack down on drug- and gang-related violence, including rounding up U.S. associates of Mexican drug trafficking organisations. From December 2010 to February 2011, in an ICE operation dubbed ‘Project Southern Tempest’, almost 700 people were arrested in a 168-city sweep of gang members and affiliated individuals.

The ICE reports that almost half of those apprehended are believed to have connections with Mexican drug cartels, including the notorious Zetas, who are reported to have been behind a Feb. 15 attack on two ICE agents, Jaime Zapata and Victor Ávila, who were shot as they drove on a Mexican highway towards the capital. Zapata died and Ávila was wounded.

The sweep resulted in the confiscation of cash and illegal drugs and weapons from Los Angeles, California to Houston, Texas and Newark, New Jersey. It is typically in major urban centres like these, some far from the border, where drug-related crimes are manifested in inner-city gang violence.

But despite the unprecedented amount of manpower and money devoted yearly to U.S. border security for the purposes of combating illegal flows of people, funds, weapons and narcotics – and the violence that may accompany the latter – “as the world’s largest consumer of drugs and its largest supplier of firearms, the United States is a direct contributor to Mexico’s drug violence,” Shirk declares in the CFR report.

Weapons and drugs evade controls

The latest UNODC report estimates that in 2008, 865 tons of pure cocaine was produced in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia. Some 309 tons were shipped out of South America towards the U.S., and after “purity-adjusted seizures along the route,” 165 tons of pure cocaine made it to consumers in that country, the report says.

In Europe, 124 tons were consumed that year, out of 212 tons that left South America.

But in neither of these markets has the fight against drugs been militarised, as it has been in Colombia and Mexico with U.S. support.

However, impunity is not total in Europe or the United States. While an estimated 80 percent of murders are solved in France or Spain, for example, the rate is only four percent in Mexico and as low as one percent in places like Ciudad Juárez.

Despite tightened controls along the U.S.-Mexico border, plenty of weapons make it into Mexico from the U.S.

According to a 2009 report by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of the U.S. Congress, more than 20,000, or around 87 percent, of guns confiscated by Mexican authorities and traced over the previous five years originated in the United States.

Weapons, like the favoured AK-47 and AR-15 rifles, that end up arming Mexico’s cartels are “often imported legally to the United States from Europe, then sold illegally and in large numbers to surrogate or ‘straw’ purchasers in the United States,” which “is a convenient point of purchase for Mexican DTOs, given that an estimated ten percent of U.S. gun dealers are located along the U.S.-Mexico border,” Shirk writes.

Hugo Almada, a researcher at the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juárez and a member of the Juárez Citizen Observatory for Public Safety and Social Security, puts it this way: “Mexico is providing the victims in a war that isn’t taking us anywhere and isn’t possible to win.”

María Idalia Gómez, a reporter who specialises in organised crime, said “drug consumption levels in Mexico have not changed.

“Cocaine use has gone down a bit, but consumption of marijuana and black tar heroin remain the same. So what ‘war’ are we talking about?” Gómez, co-author of the book ‘Con la muerte en el bolsillo – Seis desaforadas historias del narcotráfico en México’ (roughly, Carrying Death in the Pocket – Six Outrageous Stories of Drug Trafficking in Mexico), told IPS.

Of the 309 tons of cocaine shipped from South America en route to the U.S. in 2008, 17 tons stayed in Mexico, UNODC reported.

The start of a debate?

When Presidents Calderón and Barack Obama met Mar. 3 in Washington, the Mexican leader pushed for increased resources while his U.S. counterpart pledged once more to “combat the southbound flow of guns and money” and to strengthen and deepen bilateral cooperation.

But neither questioned “the war on drugs” or the Merida Initiative, a 1.4-billion-dollar assistance package to Mexico and Central America to fight organised crime and drug trafficking that was approved by the government of George W. Bush (2001-2009) and has similarities with Plan Colombia, through which the U.S. government has channelled eight billion dollars in aid since 2000 to a country that is still the world’s top producer of cocaine.

“No one knows what happens to the drugs once they cross the border,” Almada said. “It’s like a river of s**t that is running and isn’t going to stop, and that is killing people here; and I don’t know where it’s going to end.

“But it’s not up to us here in Mexico to combat it,” he said. “If the people who have the huge drug consumption problem don’t do it, why should we?”

While there have been U.S.-wide sweeps like ‘Project Southern Tempest’ and major local drug busts that have sought to cripple transnational drug networks in the past, the overall U.S. anti-drug strategy seems, historically, to have focused more on locking up junkies and common drug dealers – a strategy that Shirk argues has been overwhelmingly unsuccessful.

“The assumption that punishing suppliers and users can effectively combat a large market for illicit drugs has proven to be utterly false,” he writes in the CFR report.

According to a joint Zogby International and Inter American Dialogue (IAD) survey conducted in 2008, 75 percent of respondents in the U.S. said the “war on drugs” has failed. With this level of public support and a potentially warm climate for a change in drug policy in Washington, observers argue that the time is ripe for reform.

A February report by the Washington-based IAD argues that the past twenty years of U.S. drug policy, which have been enforcement-based and supply-focused, have found scant success in tackling the problems they were aimed to address and, in some cases, have actually had a detrimental effect.

“Recent Congressional initiatives to review U.S. anti-drug strategy suggest that lawmakers recognise the need to re-think current policies,” says the report, ‘Rethinking U.S. Drug Policy’.

“It’s not just okay to criticise and raise questions about drug reform; it’s irresponsible not to,” John Walsh, senior associate for drug policy and the Andes at the Washington Office on Latin America, told IPS.

“To imagine an overhaul from one day to the next is not going to happen,” Walsh admitted. “There are real obstacles and they won’t be overcome easily. On the other hand, the climate of openness and willingness to confront the real dilemmas in drug policy is perceptibly shifting.”

Excerpt:

By Aprille Muscara
WASHINGTON, Mar 18 2011 (IPS)

U.S. President Barack Obama issued an ultimatum to Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi on Friday, less than 24 hours after the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution to “take all necessary measures” short of deploying an “occupation force”.

“Gaddafi has a choice,” Obama said in a televised statement. “All attacks against civilians must stop. Gaddafi must stop his troops from advancing on Benghazi, pull them back from Ajdabiya, Misurata, and Az Zawiya, and establish water, electricity and gas supplies to all areas. Humanitarian assistance must be allowed to reach the people of Libya.”

“Let me be clear, these terms are not negotiable,” he stressed. “If Gaddafi does not comply with the resolution, the international community will impose consequences, and the resolution will be enforced through military action.”

Meanwhile, Libyan Foreign Minister Moussa Koussa reportedly declared an immediate cessation of all military operations on Friday, although opposition forces claimed that shelling continued despite the ceasefire announcement.

“The United States will not stand idly by in the face of actions that undermine global peace and security,” Obama declared. “I’ve taken this decision with the confidence that action is necessary but we will not be acting alone.”

The White House has been unwavering in its message that the U.S. response to the situation in Libya, which has witnessed a descent into near-civil war over the past month, must be in concert with the international community, despite some prominent lawmakers’ and analysts’ calls here for unilateral military intervention.

The president said that he had instructed Defence Secretary Robert Gates to coordinate contingency plans with his international counterparts, while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will be meeting this weekend with U.S. allies and Arab partners on the enforcement of the 10-0 Security Council resolution.

Five countries abstained from Thursday’s vote – Brazil, China, Germany, India and Russia – which perhaps serves as an indication of who will not participate in the multilateral coalition that would take action. Italy and Turkey, NATO allies, were also early voices against military intervention in Libya.

What seems to have finally turned the tide in the weeks-long lull after the Security Council’s end of February resolution on Libya, which imposed sanctions and an arms embargo, was endorsement by the Gulf Cooperation Council, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, Libya’s National Transition Council and namely, the Arab League, in the face of continued attacks against civilians.

“[T]he importance of the Arab League’s position supporting robust action in Libya cannot be overstated,” wrote foreign policy expert John Norris in an analysis for the Washington- based Centre for American Progress. “We need to keep a close eye on how this support holds up if allied aerial attacks against Libya commence and things get messier on the ground.” According to Qatar’s state news agency, the small Persian Gulf country announced Friday that it would take part in the multilateral effort to protect civilians in Libya. Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are also said to be among the countries willing to participate.

On the United States’ part, “We will provide the unique capabilities that we can bring to bear…including enabling our international allies and Arab partners to enforce a no- fly zone,” Obama said.

In the preceding debate over military action in Libya, critics feared that the U.S. would be expected to shoulder the lion’s share of any operation. High-level Pentagon officials, like Gates and Chairman of the Joints Chief of Staff Adm. Michael Mullen, warned that imposing a no-fly zone was no easy task and would require significant investment – not just in dollars but also in equipment and manpower.

In interviews with media outlets this week, Clinton stressed the need for “Arab leadership and participation” in the endeavour to contain the Gaddafi regime’s violence against his people.

Obama said that Britain and France, in addition to the Arab League, had already committed to take a central role in these efforts. “This is precisely how the international community should work, as more nations bear both the responsibility and the cost of enforcing international law,” Obama said.

Excerpt:

By Aprille Muscara
WASHINGTON, Mar 16 2011 (IPS)

As the White House and its partners in the international community inch closer to a decision over military action in Libya, while Muammar Gaddafi’s forces advance steadily into rebel-controlled territory, some analysts argue that the intervention debate is nearing irrelevance after raging unabated for almost a month.

Up to now, Washington has engaged in fence-sitting, while its G8, NATO and United Nations Security Council allies have been divided over the knotty no-fly zone (NFZ) issue – even after endorsements by the Arab League, the Gulf Cooperation Council, Libya’s National Transitional Council and the Organisation of the Islamic Conference.

“It seems to me that the debate may soon be moot in that Gaddafi’s forces seem to be taking back ground at a rate that may make it too late for the international community to really turn the tide,” explained Charles Kupchan, a foreign policy expert at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), in an interview with IPS.

The strongman’s loyalists are setting their sights on the opposition-stronghold of Benghazi and his son, Saif Gaddafi, predicted its fall within 48 hours, according to a televised interview he gave to France-based Euronews on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, the U.N. Security Council convened behind closed doors for the third day in a row on Wednesday to confer on the situation in Libya – this time meeting over a France, Lebanon and Britain co-sponsored draft resolution that invokes the council’s Chapter VII enforcement powers.

Key outstanding issues reportedly revolve around the breadth and depth of military action – such as if and how airstrikes should be used to protect civilians and whether all or just military flights should be grounded.

With reservations from seat-holder Germany and veto-wielding China and Russia, the resolution remains up in the air. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told reporters in Cairo that a vote is hoped for “no later than” Thursday.

“[W]e do think that among the actions that have to be considered by the United Nations, the no-fly zone is one of them, but it’s not the only one,” Clinton said in an interview with NBC on Wednesday. “There are other actions that need to be also evaluated. And we are putting everything on the table.”

Some analysts are also pushing for alternatives – if not compliments – to a NFZ, such as imposing more restrictive sanctions on the Gaddafi regime, arming the opposition – with weapons and intelligence, and jamming Gaddafi’s communication systems.

“All of these measures would have a lighter footprint than ships, planes, bombs, and other weapons systems that would remind and brand this revolution as delivered by Western forces,” argued Steve Clemons, foreign policy analyst for the New America Foundation who is against direct military action, in his blog ‘The Washington Note’ on Monday.

“As urgently as they want the international community to come to the aid of the Libyan people, the U.S. would be better served focusing on rapid moves toward non-military means of supporting the Libyan opposition,” echoed Middle East analyst Marc Lynch in his ‘Foreign Policy’ blog Tuesday.

Lynch, once among the proponents of a Libyan NFZ – who include former U.S. president Bill Clinton, recently departed U.S. State Department policy planning chief Anne- Marie Slaughter, France and the UK – has joined the likes of U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates, European Union foreign minister Catherine Ashton, Italy and Turkey in cautioning against such a move.

“Any direct American military presence in Libya would be politically catastrophic, even if requested by the Libyan opposition and given Arab League cover,” he wrote from an Al-Jazeera-sponsored forum in Doha, which Clemons also attended.

Others continue to push for military involvement, with some advocating for action of a different stripe: namely, a task that is “more no-drive zone than no-fly zone using strikes on the coast roads to confine the movement of Col. Gaddafi’s mobile columns within designated areas,” proposed former U.S. State Department official Philip Zelikow.

“[N]either sanctions nor a no-fly zone may suffice,” he argued in the ‘Financial Times’ on Wednesday, pushing for more aggressive measures given the tide-turning momentum of pro-regime forces. “Gaddafi has hoarded cash and supplies for this very contingency.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. remains wary of taking the lead lest it finds itself in yet another military quagmire in the region – a risky move, some critics argue, as passivity puts U.S. influence and standing on the line.

“[U]nilateral action would not be the best approach,” Clinton said. “It would have all kinds of unintended consequences.”

“The Arab countries, with their statement through the Arab League last Saturday, made it very clear that they wanted to see action, so we need Arab leadership and Arab participation in whatever the U.N. decides to do,” she stressed.

The Barack Obama administration has been unwavering in its message that no options are off the table in the case of Libya and that whatever path is taken must be in concert with the international community.

But after successfully imposing targeted sanctions and referring the situation to the International Criminal Court in a U.N. Security Council resolution along with its world allies some three weeks ago, the White House – along with the international community – seems to have been frozen since, gripped by NFZ deliberations and stalled by prerequisites like Arab League approval.

“[I]t is time to recognise that there are things we can do immediately and with a small footprint that help those who want to get rid of Gaddafi,” Clemons argued. “These steps would be welcomed by the Arab League, who want to see order return to the region and who also want to see Gaddafi moved out.”

Excerpt:

By Aprille Muscara
WASHINGTON, Mar 14 2011 (IPS)

Monday’s arrival of 1,200 Saudi and 500 Emirati security forces with a mandate from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) to support King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa’s regime in Sunni- ruled, Shiite-majority Bahrain only stokes sectarian conflict and fuels the regional power politics between U.S.-Saudi hegemony and an increasingly influential Shiite-led Iran, analysts here argue.

“Although it is clearly too early to know the outcome of this decision, or perhaps even the purpose – to crack down on the protesters? to intimidate the opposition into joining the national dialogue? – I will hazard to predict that the impact will be negative, even on the stability they hope to preserve,” Kristin Diwan, an expert on the Arab Gulf at the American University, told IPS.

The highest-ranking member of Bahrain’s Shia religious establishment, Sheik Isa Qassim, criticised al-Khalifa’s claims that the mobilisation of GCC troops is a broader effort to ensure regional stability, rather than what Qassim considers to be Sunni entrenchment and a veiled challenge to Shia representation in the government.

“[T]he narrative of preserving order will be insufficient,” Diwan said. “Sectarian tensions are already on the rise in the Gulf since the Iraq intervention, with Shia populations throughout the Gulf facing the rising influence of anti-Shia Salafi Islamist movements. Inflaming these communal tensions hardly qualifies as a recipe for stability.”

Ultimately, a dialogue that avoids answering Bahraini protesters’ most significant demands – which include the formation of a genuinely representative government, an acceptable solution to public property and naturalisation disputes, and a concerted effort to mitigate sectarian conflicts – will only erode the already cascading “capacity and legitimacy” of the U.S. to encourage changes similar to those witnessed in Egypt and Tunisia, observers say.

In a seemingly unmistakable rejection of al-Khalifa and the U.S.’s proposals, the main opposition party, al-Wefaq, has refused to participate in a national dialogue and, along with other opposition groups, denounced the arrival of the GCC troops as barefaced “occupation” and an affront to unarmed citizens in a statement Monday.

“The presence of the foreign troops plays strongly into the hard-line opposition conviction that the al Khalifa-led government is illegitimate and cannot be trusted,” Diwan noted. “Inviting foreign troops to put down protesting citizens only reinforces this view. The work of the seven- party opposition and especially al-Wefaq to bring the bulk of the opposition to the table just got harder.”

Iranian Encroachment

The GCC mobilisation into Bahrain follows an unannounced visit by U.S. Secretary of Defence Robert Gates to the country Saturday, in which he urged the ruling family to enact sweeping reforms – not “baby steps” – to accommodate opposition protesters.

According to media reports, Gates warned the al-Khalifa government that, although there was no evidence that Iran inflamed the demonstrations in their country, continued unrest would provide fodder for exploitation by the Iranians.

Two days later, following a request by al-Khalifa, the GCC deployed troops to the island kingdom, which some observers see as a message for both Washington and Tehran to stay out of the Gulf’s affairs and an expression of support for the besieged regime.

“Ironically, the decision by the al-Khalifa government may be opening the door for greater Iranian influence,” Diwan noted. “By inviting in external troops, the al-Khalifa just took the first step to broadening the conflict beyond the national context.”

While raising the prospect of Iranian involvement, the move could also signal an affront to U.S. influence – both symptoms of a larger trend, observers note.

“Beyond the shift in the relative distribution of power among important regional actors, the very essence of power politics in Middle East is shifting from hard military power, where America has the advantage, to soft power, where the Islamic Republic [of Iran and] its allies have the advantage,” Hillary Mann Leverett, a former U.S. State Department and National Security Council official, argued at a conference here last week.

U.S. Response

Although the U.S. did not explicitly condone nor condemn the GCC’s latest decision to sanction the deployment of its forces into the island kingdom, the Barack Obama administration has taken a cautious approach to the growing protests there so as not to undermine the opposition parties’ demands or inadvertently strengthen Iran’s ability, real or imagined, to leverage the opposition leaders of Bahrain’s roughly 70 percent Shia majority.

“We urge the government of Bahrain to pursue a peaceful and meaningful dialogue with the opposition rather than resorting to the use of force,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said in a statement Sunday. “In particular, we urge our GCC partners…to act in a way that supports dialogue instead of undermining it.”

Critics point out that the GCC mandate was designed to protect the council members from foreign invasion and not for intervening in a nation’s domestic affairs.

“This is not an invasion of a country,” Carney argued at a press conference Monday.

However, he stressed, “stability in the region will be brought about by dialogue and political reform and it is counterproductive to that goal to, in any way, repress the expression of those desires.”

Excerpt:

By Aprille Muscara
WASHINGTON, Mar 10 2011 (IPS)

The past-due leader of this resource-rich African nation remains bent on clinging to power, despite calls by his opposition and the wider international community to leave office immediately.

Meanwhile, the country inches closer to civil war, violence against peaceful protestors and innocent civilians is escalating, and a humanitarian crisis involving hundreds of thousands of refugees and internally displaced residents deepens.

In light of the continuing turmoil, the regime has been accused of war crimes, sanctions have been imposed and the opposition has called for the international community to use military force to end the bloodshed and remove the strongman who refuses to step down.

Although the unrest in Cote d’Ivoire has divided the country for the last three months, the West African nation has lacked the public, high-level attention that Libya has received.

“One is being reported minute by minute by international media, twitter and on blogs,” wrote Nigerian social justice activist and author Sokari Ekine in Pambazuka Wednesday. “The other is just beginning to emerge from the margins of international consciousness.”

“Unlike Libya, Cote d’Ivoire has no strategic importance and the possible loss of its main resource – cocoa – doesn’t have the world financial markets and governments in a panic,” she argued.

Although cocoa prices have experienced 30-year highs in recent months as a result of the number-one cocoa-exporting country’s conflict – making “shelves empty of chocolate bars…much more likely than queues for petrol” – the truth is, “oil is more important to modern life than cocoa”, the Financial Times echoed Thursday.

“But for Cote d’Ivoire’s subsistence cocoa pickers, farmers and the country’s economy, cocoa is a lifesaver and very much worth fighting over,” reminded Ekine.

Before the Arab world erupted in popular revolt, drawing headlines and Western leaders’ attention away from the Maghreb’s southern neighbours, analysts were pinning the future of the entire continent on the outcome of Cote d’Ivoire’s stalemate.

“If Cote d’Ivoire doesn’t get resolved properly, then… democrats across the African continent can…go home,” Dr. Christopher Fomunyoh, senior associate at the National Democratic Institute, argued at a panel discussion here some two months ago.

“The votes of citizens must count after they are cast, or democracy will not hold in the continent,” Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan said around the same time.

With around 20 African elections scheduled this year, observers saw Cote d’Ivoire as a test of Africa’s commitment to democratisation.

Yet, despite an initial surge of verbal support by world leaders, some 90 days after the country’s disputed presidential elections, the situation seems to have only worsened.

Failing Grades

It was only after a recent escalation of attacks against civilians that U.S. President Barack Obama finally issued a statement – albeit written – of condemnation on Wednesday after nearly two months of silence and again urged former President Laurent Gbagbo to cede power.

“I am particularly appalled by the indiscriminate killing of unarmed civilians during peaceful rallies, many of them women,” Obama said. “All armed parties in Cote d’Ivoire must make every effort to protect civilians from being targeted, harmed or killed.”

The United Nations estimates that in the past week alone, 27 people have been killed in the post-election violence, bringing the death toll to nearly 400 since mid-December. The opposition claims that the number is much higher.

The statement comes at the same time as a two-day African Union (AU) summit taking place this week, where a dispute resolution panel of seven heads of state met once again in an attempt to negotiate an end to the years-long rivalry between incumbent Gbagbo and Alassane Ouattara, the internationally-recognised winner of last winter’s elections.

If the Ivorian elections were a test for African democracy, the AU’s – along with other regional bodies’ – ability to end the ensuing power struggle is itself a test of the continent’s commitment to democratise and the strength of its regional integration institutions – a test they seem to be failing.

According to media reports, Gbagbo’s representatives swiftly rejected the panel’s first-day proposal to end the stalemate. By Thursday, the high-profile group reportedly reached a decision to call for Gbagbo’s departure and insist on Ouattara’s legitimacy.

Up to this week, some on the panel were said to prefer a power-sharing agreement of the same stripe that has enabled the likes of Zimbabwe’s strongman Robert Mugabe to maintain authority after refusing to step down.

Panel members include the presidents of Burkina Faso, Chad, Mauritania, South Africa and Tanzania as well as Jonathan, current chairperson of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), and AU chairperson Teodoro Obiang, who, after Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, is the continent’s second-longest standing ruler and whose own regime is accused of corruption, torture and murder.

While the AU and ECOWAS seem to be fumbling their attempts to normalise the situation in Cote d’Ivoire – at the same time that the former must carefully shape its policy on Libya – observers warn of further escalation in violence as Gbagbo entrenches.

“There is a risk of resurgence of the civil war in the country,” the United Nations Human Rights chief Navi Pillay warned Thursday, urging an end to the conflict.

“Overall, the situation appears to be deteriorating alarmingly, with a sharp increase in inter-communal and inter-ethnic confrontations,” she noted. “Human rights abuses, including rapes, abductions and killings, are being committed by people supporting both sides.”

Excerpt:

By Aprille Muscara
WASHINGTON, Mar 9 2011 (IPS)

On the eve of a controversial hearing by lawmakers on extremist Islam in the United States, civil rights and Muslim- American groups are warning of its potential repercussions, which they say may undermine the very intent of the proceeding.

The House of Representatives’ Committee on Homeland Security, spearheaded by Republican Peter King, will meet here Thursday morning to discuss the “The Extent of Radicalisation in the American Muslim Community and that Community’s Response” in the first of a series of contentious hearings about home-grown terrorist threats.

“His [King’s] approach is going to radicalise the young people,” said Muhammad Salim Akhtar, head of the American Muslim Taskforce on Civil Rights and Elections, at a press conference Wednesday, which included 11 Muslim-American and civil liberties groups.

“The focus of the hearings should be of greater concern for the message they send overseas as well as to communities at home,” echoed Paul Pillar, director of graduate studies at Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program and a former CIA analyst for the Middle East and South Asia, in a blog post Tuesday.

“They will be widely read as an indication that U.S. postures and policies that are ostensibly aimed at combating terrorism are really more about combating Muslims,” he warned in the ‘National Interest’. “And that reading will in turn stir more anti-Americanism among Muslims.”

President Barack Obama’s administration dispatched deputy national security advisor Denis McDonough to the All Dulles Area Muslim Society on Sunday, where he made statements that seemed designed to counter these potential readings.

“[O]f the violent extremists we’ve captured or arrested, and who falsely claim to be fighting in the name of Islam, we know that they all share one thing: They all believe that the United States is somehow at war with Islam, and that this justifies violence against Americans,” he told the audience of about 200.

“[W]e are actively and aggressively undermining that ideology,” McDonough declared. “We’re exposing the lie that America and Islam are somehow in conflict. That is why President Obama has stated time and again that the United States is not and never will be at war with Islam.”

Stoking Xenophobia

“[I]nstead of condemning whole communities, we need to join with those communities to help them protect themselves as well,” McDonough continued. “We must resolve that, in our determination to protect our nation, we will not stigmatise or demonise entire communities because of the actions of a few.”

Critics have called Thursday’s meeting “inappropriate”, “counterproductive” and a “witch-hunt”.

Alejandro Beutel, Government and Policy Analyst for the Muslim Public Affairs Council, said at the same press conference Wednesday that the hearing was “political theatre rather than actual problem-solving”, with King “putting an entire religion on trial”.

Critics fear that the hearings will fuel the rising tide of xenophobia that has flooded the nation recently, which last year contributed to highly-publicised hostility against an Islamic community centre to be built near Ground Zero, malicious attacks against mosques throughout the country and the proposal of a “Burn the Koran Day”.

“[The] hearings, as currently proposed, do a disservice to the seriousness of the topic of ‘domestic terrorism’ and are likely to contribute to a public backlash against Muslim Americans,” wrote the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights – a coalition of over 200 organisations – in a letter to King dated Feb. 4.

In prior statements and in a series of media interviews leading up to Thursday’s hearing, King has erroneously claimed that 80 to 85 percent of mosques are controlled by radical Islamists – a claim that has been widely debunked. He has also alleged that Muslim community leaders are uncooperative with law enforcement and impede the process of finding and exposing potential extremists.

“Our community organisations have, for a long time, been playing a frontline role,” countered Beutel. Instead of rhetoric, “[w]e need to let the data lead the discourse,” he argued, citing a joint Duke University and University of North Carolina report that found that 40 percent of terrorist suspects apprehended since the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks were reported to authorities by fellow Muslims.

“We believe that these [King’s] baseless accusations…will put the Muslim population in danger,” Naeem Baig, vice president of Public Affairs for the Islamic Circle of North America, told reporters Wednesday.

Misplaced Priorities

Many groups have urged that the hearings be cancelled. Instead, Akbar Ahmed, professor of Islamic studies at American University, argued in the New York Times Tuesday that the proceedings should take place and be used as “an opportunity to educate Americans about [the Muslim] community’s diversity and faith”.

“Muslims should embrace the chance to explain their beliefs fully and clearly. We have nothing to hide,” Ahmed said. “But members of Congress also need to act responsibly. They should avoid broad accusations, and be aware that the hearings will be closely followed worldwide.”

“We’re not in denial in our community that something is going on…There are bad elements in every community” explained Imam Johari Abdul-Malik, representing the Council of Muslim Organisations in Wednesday’s press conference. The issue is King’s approach, the speakers contended.

“Congress simply has no business examining Americans’ religious or political beliefs in official hearings – even if these beliefs are considered ‘radical’ by some,” 42 civil liberties and free speech organisations wrote in a letter to King and other leading lawmakers dated Tuesday.

“Fear and misunderstanding should not drive our government policies,” asserted the rights groups, which included the ACLU, Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and Friends of the Earth.

Meanwhile, accused of scape-goating and fear-mongering, King defends the hearings as “essential”, while supporters claim they are overdue.

“It should…be no surprise that such [critical] groups have been aggressively vilifying the chairman as a ‘racist’ and ‘bigot’, assailing his choice of witnesses, including an authentic Muslim reformer, Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, and denouncing the whole hearing enterprise as an example of ‘Islamophobia’ and McCarthyism,” wrote Frank Gaffney, president of the Centre for Security Policy, in the ‘Washington Times’ Tuesday.

Excerpt:

By Aprille Muscara
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 7 2011 (IPS)

The international community is ramping up efforts to alleviate the growing humanitarian crisis in Libya, which has affected over 200,000 people since the Muammar Gaddafi regime first began a violent crackdown on opposition forces some three weeks ago.

Thousands restless to leave Libya swarm the Tunisian border. Credit: UN Photo/UNHCR/A. Duclos

According to the United Nations’ latest figures, donors have pledged some 22 million dollars of humanitarian aid for the besieged North African country, out of a total 160 million requested Monday by the world body in a ‘flash appeal’ for the next three months.

The funds will be funnelled to 17 aid organisations and are intended to support 400,000 refugees and evacuees, half of whom have already fled, and 600,000 others inside Libya’s borders who are expected to need assistance, the world body reports.

On Sunday, Libyan Foreign Minister Musa Kusa agreed to allow a U.N. humanitarian assessment – to be dispatched “immediate[ly]” – into the country. Donor nations, like the United States, France and Italy, have sent refugee assistance teams to the Libyan borders, while local and international aid groups have been conducting relief efforts within Libyan borders.

U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon also appointed Abdelilah Al-Khatib as his special envoy “to undertake urgent consultations with the authorities in Tripoli and in the region on the immediate humanitarian situation as well as the wider dimensions of the crisis,” Martin Nesirky, Ban’s spokesperson, said Sunday.

Al-Khatib will meet with Ban this week before departing for the region. It is not yet clear where the special envoy will set up camp or whether he will meet with opposition forces, but Nesirky said Monday that the former Jordanian foreign minister would not be based inside Libya.

The scope of these assistance efforts reflects the urgency of the situation, with aid groups and U.N. agencies warning of dwindling medical supplies and food stocks and reports of difficulties accessing those in need.

The U.N. refugee agency was able to deliver a total of 53 tonnes of food and medical supplies to the port city of Tubruq, via the Egyptian Red Crescent Society, in the East and to Salloum on the Egypt-Libya border on Monday

But last Thursday, the World Food Programme chartered-ship carrying 1,000 tonnes of flour destined for opposition- controlled Benghazi, the country’s second largest city, had to turn back as a result of reported aerial attacks by pro- government forces in the vicinity.

And in the west, Valerie Amos, the U.N.’s top humanitarian affairs and emergency relief official, reported from the border Sunday that aid groups were having difficulty accessing the city of Misrata.

“Humanitarian organisations need urgent access now,” she said. “People are injured and dying and need help immediately. I call on the authorities to provide access without delay to allow aid workers to help save lives.”

The United Nations estimates that between 600 and 2,000 peaceful protesters and innocent bystanders have been killed at the command of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime since the violence began.

The majority of the refugees, mostly foreign labourers, have fled to Tunisia and Egypt. While tens of thousands of these workers have been able to return home, tens of thousands more – especially those from poorer Asian and African countries – are stranded in tent camps.

As of Sunday, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) reports that 22,500 migrants, mostly from Bangladesh, await evacuation.

“IOM is greatly concerned at the plight of Libyans and migrants who are still stranded inside Libya,” the organisation’s director general William Lacy Swing said. “Those managing to get out, in particular Sub-Saharan Africans, are recounting to us terrible stories of targeting, physical violence and of being held back from leaving.”

Excerpt:

By Aprille Muscara
WASHINGTON, Mar 3 2011 (IPS)

As violent unrest continues unabated in Libya, with the potential to descend into what U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called a “protracted civil war” in statements to lawmakers here this week, international rights groups are raising the alarm over the resulting humanitarian crisis and the particularly desperate plight of stranded immigrant labourers.

“Thousands upon thousands of foreign workers remain stuck in Benghazi, after being forced from their factories and losing their possessions in last week’s tumultuous events,” said Human Rights Watch’s emergencies director Peter Bouckaert, who is in the opposition-held city.

The United Nations estimates that between 600 and 2,000 peaceful protesters and innocent bystanders have been killed at the command of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime since its brutal crackdown on anti-government demonstrations began over a fortnight ago.

In the midst of this bloodshed, some 75,000 refugees have fled to Tunisia and 69,000 to Egypt, with about 40,000 others unable to leave Libya, according to the latest figures from the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

Among those stranded within the North African country’s borders are tens of thousands of immigrant workers from developing nations.

“The people most in need are mainly from poorer countries in Asia and Africa, who remain stuck in Benghazi and on the border with Tunisia and whose governments have apparently to date been unable or unwilling to rescue them,” Bouckaert noted, urging for an international effort to help these “highly vulnerable” populations flee for their safety.

Amnesty International says that 30,000 to 150,000 Filipino OFWs (overseas foreign workers), 60,000 Bangladeshis, 2,000 to 5,000 Nepalis and over one million refugees, asylum- seekers and migrants, mostly from sub-Saharan Africa, were in the country prior to the current crisis – with many of them now trapped in the tumult.

About 3,500 of these non-Africans – including labourers from Bangladesh, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam – are awaiting departure in two Benghazi camps, with thousands of others in company compounds, according to Human Rights Watch.

But of greatest concern to these rights groups and UNHCR is the reported discrimination against African immigrant workers from south of the Sahara who are attempting, and being denied, escape from the country’s bloody turmoil due to misguided suspicions that they are among the regime- contracted mercenaries.

Libya’s ambassador to the U.N., Ibrahim Dabbashi, said Saturday that Gaddafi’s hired guns, who are accused of participating in the attacks against innocent civilians, were imported from Chad, Ethiopia, Guinea, Kenya and Niger, in addition to the North African countries of Algeria and Tunisia.

“All those fleeing the chaos in Libya must be given sanctuary by neighbouring states without discrimination – not refused entry and put at risk of falling victim to further violence,” said Michael Bochenek, AI’s director of Law and Policy.

“Day after day, some governments are managing to send boats to evacuate thousands of their nationals, but Africans, who are most vulnerable and destitute, are being left behind,” Bouckaert echoed.

While these migrants remain marooned, thousands of foreigners from Algeria, Bosnia, Britain, Bulgaria, Canada, China, Croatia, Greece, India, Jordan, Lebanon, Macedonia, Morocco, the Netherlands, Nigeria, South Korea, Syria, Turkey, the U.S., Vietnam and other countries have been evacuated in recent days by their companies or governments, according to rights groups and media reports.

“If the European countries and the United States are serious about their pledges of humanitarian assistance, they should assist in getting these threatened and trapped African migrants back home,” Bouckaert insisted.

Meanwhile, the U.N. has expressed concern about what it deems to be a dearth of medical supplies and limited food stocks in the oil-producing country.

On Monday, the U.S. announced that it has allocated 10 million dollars of emergency humanitarian assistance for Libya and is dispatching two teams to assist refugees at the Egyptian and Tunisian borders, while France pledged to send two planes with medical staff and equipment to Benghazi – what will be the West’s first instance of direct aid inside the country.

Western governments, including that in Washington, have come under some recent scrutiny by hawkish critics, who have argued that their response to the violent developments in Libya hasn’t been forceful enough.

In light of the government-sanctioned crackdown and its resulting humanitarian crisis, some arguments for military options – from establishing a “no-fly zone” to direct intervention – invoke the doctrine of the “responsibility to protect” (R2P) against crimes against humanity, genocide and war crimes, urging action by the international community.

R2P was mentioned in a U.N. Security Council resolution adopted Saturday that referred the situation in Libya to the International Criminal Court, which prosecutes individuals accused of these three mass crimes.

“The regime of Gaddafi has already started the genocide against the Libyan people,” Dabbashi charged last week, eliciting some debate over his controversial word choice.

While some folks advocate for armed action – drawing comparisons between the estimated 1,000 deaths-too-many by the Gaddafi regime and the Rwandan and Bosnian crises of the 1990s, which witnessed the mass murders of some 800,000 and over 100,000 people, respectively – other observers, referencing this decade’s Iraq invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, warn against the consequences of heavy-handed involvement.

“The U.S. would…be committing its military to violent regime change in another Muslim nation,” wrote Ron Capps, director of Refugees International’s peacekeeping programme, in a blog post Tuesday, adding: “The potential backlash is impossible to gauge.”

In addition to mobilising humanitarian assistance, Washington announced Monday that it was repositioning some naval and air forces closer to Libya. In testimonies to lawmakers this week, Clinton declared, “[W]e are taking no option off the table so long as the Libyan government continues to turn its guns on its own people.”

Excerpt:

By Aprille Muscara
WASHINGTON, Feb 28 2011 (IPS)

International efforts to strangle Muammar Gaddafi’s regime are intensifying, as Western leaders, including U.S. President Barack Obama, call for the autocrat’s immediate departure, while the Pentagon and key allies consider contingency plans for a potential no-fly zone over the North African nation.

The United Nations estimates that between 600 and 2,000 peaceful protesters and innocent bystanders have been killed at the order of Gaddafi’s regime since its violent crackdown on anti-government demonstrations began 13 days ago.

“Colonel Gaddafi and those around him must be held accountable for these acts, which violate international legal obligations and common decency,” U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said at a meeting of the Geneva-based Human Rights Council, of which Libya is a member, on Monday.

“Through their actions, they have lost the legitimacy to govern,” she said. “And the people of Libya have made themselves clear: It is time for Gaddafi to go – now, without further violence or delay.” Obama said much the same in a telephone conversation with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Saturday.

Following a recommendation in a Human Rights Council resolution passed Friday, the U.N. General Assembly in New York is expected to expel Libya from the Council on Tuesday.

And over the weekend, the U.N. Security Council passed a landmark resolution imposing an arms embargo on the oil- producing country and targeted sanctions against key members of the Gaddafi regime – including a travel ban and an assets freeze, which build on similar unilateral measures already underway.

The White House announced Monday that it had seized 30 billion dollars of the regime’s assets since Washington enforced its own sanctions on Friday.

The unanimously-passed Security Council resolution also referred the ongoing violence in Libya to the International Criminal Court – the second time the council has referred a case to the ICC since the prosecutorial body was established and the first time it has done so with all 15 members on board.

“It is vital for the international community to speak with one voice and it has done so,” Susan Rice, Washington’s top diplomat at the U.N., told reporters here Monday. “These sanctions and accountability mechanisms should make all members of the Libyan regime think about the choice they have before them: Violate human rights and be held accountable or stop the violence and respect the Libyan people’s call for change. There is no escaping that critical choice.”

This ultimatum, and similar statements echoed by other administration officials in recent days, raises the question of potential military action against the Libyan regime and its leader, who U.S. diplomats have described as “mercurial and eccentric” in leaked cables and Rice called “delusional” on Monday.

“As we move forward on these fronts, we will continue to explore all possible options for action,” Clinton said at the Human Rights Council. “As we have said, nothing is off the table so long as the Libyan Government continues to threaten and kill Libyans.”

As Washington continues its talks with allies, including in the collective security organisation NATO, Rice told reporters that a no-fly zone was one of these options the U.S. is “considering actively and seriously”. On Monday, the Pentagon announced that it was moving naval and air forces to the region.

“We have planners working various contingency plans,” Defence Department spokesman Colonel Dave Lapan told reporters here. “[T]hose forces could be used in any number of ways. Re-positioning them provides that flexibility so they can be used if needed.”

In the midst of the bloodshed, observers warn that a humanitarian crisis is developing. According to U.N. figures released Monday, some 61,000 Libyan refugees have fled to Egypt, 40,000 to Tunisia and 1,000 to Niger, with many internally displaced residents unable to leave. The world body has also expressed concern about what it deems to be a dearth of medical supplies and limited food stocks in the country.

“The United Nations has begun to mount a very robust humanitarian response that will include resources to the various concerned agencies like the High Commissioner for Refugees, like the International Organisation for Migration,” Rice said. She was in Washington Monday to attend a meeting with Obama and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

Ban will appoint a senior-level official to coordinate the U.N.’s humanitarian and political response in the country, she added. At the same time, Washington has sent assistance teams to the Libyan borders to aid in the relief effort, while USAID, the United States’ development agency, has allocated 10 million dollars for humanitarian assistance to Libya, the State Department announced Monday.

Meanwhile, in an interview with U.S.-based ABC, Britain’s BBC and the Times of London on Monday, the 68-year-old leader, who has ruled for the past 42 years, denied that his own civilians were protesting against him and blamed the unrest on Al Qaeda.

“When he can laugh when talking to American and international journalists while he is slaughtering his own people, it only underscores how unfit he is to lead and how disconnected he is from reality,” Rice said of Gaddafi’s interview, adding: “We’re going to continue to keep the pressure on.”

Excerpt:

By Aprille Muscara
WASHINGTON, Feb 25 2011 (IPS)

As the bloodshed of protestors in Libya continues unabated for the eighth day in a row, the White House took its strongest stance against Muammar Gaddafi’s regime Friday, announcing that the United States will impose unilateral sanctions and has suspended its embassy operations in the oil-producing country.

“We are initiating a series of steps at the unilateral level and the multilateral level to pressure the regime in Libya to stop killing its own people,” White House spokesperson Jay Carney told reporters Friday.

“Additionally, the United States has suspended the very limited military cooperation it had with Libya,” freezing pending military sales and bilateral events, he said.

The Pentagon began re-engaging with its Libyan counterparts in 2009, when Tripoli promised to cease its weapons of mass destruction programmes and compensate terrorism victims.

The Treasury Department also instructed U.S. banks to closely monitor the movement of assets related to the events in Libya for any misappropriation of state funds or illegal payments, Carney said. Switzerland announced Thursday that it had ordered a freeze of the Gaddafi regime’s assets.

“Finally, the U.S. is using the full extent of its intelligence capabilities to monitor the Gaddafi regime’s actions and we are particularly vigilant for evidence of further violence or atrocities committed against the Libyan people,” Carney announced.

“This is a first step and, obviously, we continue to review our options going forward, he said, adding “[T]he steps that we take in the near future are not the only steps we’re prepared to take.”

When asked whether military action was being considered, Carney said that all options are on the table. The Barack Obama administration has come under some scrutiny by hawkish critics this week, who have argued that its response to the violent developments in the North African country has been delayed and hasn’t been forceful enough.

“There has never been a time when this much has been done this quickly,” Carney argued. “The U.S. has acted in concert with our international partners and with great deliberation and haste.”

The press secretary said he waited to announce Washington’s decision to impose sanctions and temporarily suspend its diplomatic activities until after it was confirmed that a ferry carrying U.S. citizens and embassy staff arrived in Malta and a chartered plane headed to Istanbul containing more Americans and the remaining embassy employees safely departed Tripoli Friday.

In addition to measures Washington is taking on its own, ” [w]e have decided to move forward with…coordinated sanctions with our European allies and multilateral efforts to hold the Libyan government accountable through the United Nations,” Carney noted.

Obama spoke with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan Friday morning and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, British Prime Minister David Cameron and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi Thursday in an effort to coordinate an allied response.

“He will continue these consultations to build international consensus for strong measures in the days to come,” Carney said.

On Monday, Obama will meet with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon here to “discuss the diplomatic, legal and other actions needed to put a stop to violence against civilians in Libya.”

U.N. figures place the Libyan death toll at over 1,000, with some approximations as high as 2,000 protestors killed at the order of Gaddafi’s regime.

Obama and Ban “will also discuss the range of activities that U.N. agencies and the international community can undertake to address the significant humanitarian needs created by this crisis,” Carney added.

The world body estimates that some 22,000 Libyan refugees have fled to Tunisia and 15,000 to Egypt, with many internally displaced residents unable to leave. Meanwhile, the U.N.’s World Food Programme has expressed concern about the country’s food supplies.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will travel to Geneva this weekend, where she will address the U.N. Human Rights Council on Monday.

The UNHRC adopted a highly critical resolution Friday morning that strongly condemned the “gross and systematic human rights violations committed in Libya, including indiscriminate armed attacks against civilians, extrajudicial killings, arbitrary arrests, detention and torture of peaceful demonstrators, some of which may amount to crimes against humanity.”

Before its adoption, the entire Libyan delegation in Geneva resigned in protest of the Gaddafi regime’s violence against its citizens.

The resolution, adopted by consensus, also launched an independent commission of inquiry to investigate these alleged violations of international human rights law and recommends that the U.N. General Assembly suspend Libya’s membership in the council.

“The United States strongly supports these efforts and is already closely working with our international partners to carry out this suspension, which will be acted on by the General Assembly early next week,” Carney noted.

The U.N. Security Council also met Friday to discuss a draft resolution that could include an arms embargo, targeted sanctions and a recommendation for the International Criminal Court to investigate whether the Libyan government is carrying out crimes against humanity in its attacks on peaceful protestors.

Excerpt:

In less than two decades, all of the world’s coral reefs will be threatened if global climate change and local pressures like overfishing and pollution remain unaddressed, disproportionately impacting the livelihoods of some of the world’s most impoverished people, a report warned Wednesday.

According to the report, most of the inhabited areas in close proximity to coral reefs are located in developing countries, while many communities that depend on these reefs for food and work are in poverty.

“The people at greatest risk are those who depend heavily on threatened reefs, and who have limited capacity to adapt to the loss of the valuable resources and service reefs provide,” said co-author Allison Perry, project scientist at the World Fish Centre, in a statement Wednesday.

According to WRI, over 275 million people live within 30 kilometres of reefs, which protect 150,000 kilometres of shoreline in more than 100 countries and territories. In 23 of these, reef-associated tourism accounts for over 15 percent of the nation’s GDP. And 19 of the 27 nations most vulnerable to reef degradation and its consequences are Least Developed Countries. (See sidebar for the nine most vulnerable nations.)

“From the fisherman in Indonesia or Tanzania who relies on local fish to feed his family, to the scientist in Panama who investigates the medicinal potential of reef-compounds, reefs provide jobs, livelihoods, food, shelter and protection for coastal communities and the shorelines along which they live,” wrote former United States Vice President and prominent environmentalist Al Gore in the report’s foreword.

Currently, 75 percent of the world’s coral reefs are at risk – a category that includes those that appear to be in good health but could soon be spoiled, those that are already degraded and those that are already “lost”, Mark Spalding, president of the Ocean Foundation and co-author of the report, explained in an interview with the Nature Conservancy on Wednesday.

Local threats – such as unsustainable fishing, irresponsible coastal development and watershed- and marine-based pollution – currently threaten 60 percent of coral reefs. Meanwhile, warmer seas and carbon dioxide pollution from global greenhouse gas emissions lead to weakened reefs due to coral bleaching and stunted growth due to increased ocean acidity, the report states.

By 2030, if these unbridled pressures continue, over 90 percent of the world’s reefs will be at risk, it predicts; by 2050, all of these ecosystems will be threatened. As a result, their development and the diversity of species residing in them will be severely hampered, negatively affecting the peoples and economies that depend on them.

Noting significant variability across regions – depending on, say, remoteness to large population centres or intensity of overall tourism – some estimates value reef-associated tourism worldwide at 1.2 billion to 25.0 billion dollars annually.

Southeast Asia, which the WRI says “is home to the most extensive and diverse coral reefs in the world”, is the region whose reefs are most at risk, with a coastal population higher than that of every other region combined. Australia, with the greatest abundance of reefs – most of which are within designated protected areas – is the region least threatened. (See sidebar for regional comparison of risk.)

The report advocates for a multi-faceted approach to address the risks to reefs. These include mitigating threats at the local level – like reducing unsustainable fishing and pollution and checking irresponsible coastal development – and at the global level – such as through expanding designated areas of protection and reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

But it also argues for the need to reduce coastal populations’ reliance on coral reefs – potentially through social and economic development – at least partially in order to help protect their livelihoods from the negative consequences of reef degradation.

“For highly vulnerable nations – including many island nations – there is a pressing need for development efforts to reduce dependence on reefs and build adaptive capacity, in addition to protecting reefs from threats,” Perry said.

“Recognising the needs of reef-dependent communities within [national development] efforts may bring opportunities for reducing their vulnerability to future reef loss, as well as identifying the role that sustainable use of reef resources can play in poverty reduction and economic development,” the report states.

In their recommendations, the authors also stress the importance of involving the local populace in decision- making processes and resource management.

“Activities such as agriculture, aquaculture, tourism, or trade may represent viable [alternative livelihoods], but will only be sustainable where their development takes into account local aspirations, needs, perceptions and cultural ties to coral reefs,” the report argues. “For millions of reef-dependent people, it is critical that such efforts succeed.”

With a 2015 deadline fast approaching to meet a collective global promise to tackle poverty and improve education, health and environmental sustainability around the world, development and humanitarian advocates are up in arms over conservative lawmakers’ proposals to slash and burn entire chunks of the United States’ foreign aid budget.

After days of heated floor debate and some 600 amendments, the U.S. Republican- controlled House of Representatives passed what is called a “Continuing Resolution” (CR) Friday that allocates government funding from the first week of March until the end of the fiscal year, which ends on Sep. 30, 2011. The final vote was 235 to 189, with just three Republicans joining Democrats in opposition.

The CR makes over 61 billion dollars worth of cuts – including about 19 percent to international affairs accounts, according to calculations by the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition, and 41 percent to humanitarian aid, according the State Department, compared to FY 2010 enacted funds. Spread over six months, these reductions would be “devastating” critics say.

As the CR now moves to the Democrat-led Senate, where it is likely to get watered down some, and with President Barack Obama’s threat to veto the House’s proposal if it lands on his desk, the massive purges in their current form are unlikely. Still, observers worry that deep slashes will remain and predict an equally contentious battle over the administration’s FY 2012 budget proposal released Monday.

“Let me be clear, the United States of America has been, and will remain, the global leader in providing assistance,” U.S. President Barack Obama said in his speech at the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) summit at the United Nations last fall. “We will not abandon those who depend on us for life- saving help. We keep our promises, and honour our commitments.”

Most promising are advances made in global health. According to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, deaths due to malaria could be eradicated and a new generation born without HIV by 2015. If achieved, these successes would represent two of the greatest health triumphs of our lifetime.

The U.S. is one of the world’s top donors. “Because of U.S. aid, over the last 60 years, maternal and child mortality have dropped sharply, literacy rates have increased and economic opportunities have expanded in the developing world,” said CARE president and CEO Dr. Helene D. Gayle in a statement Wednesday.

If colossal cuts are made to Washington’s foreign aid budget, observers are concerned about the impact this could have on global health and development and also fear a potential ripple effect to other donor countries’ provision of aid if the U.S. reneges on its commitments as a result of these budget cuts.

“The House FY 2011 funding bill would have a devastating impact on U.S. foreign affairs funding, and if adopted could be a serious setback to U.S support for the Millennial Development Goals (MGDs),” Don Kraus, chief executive officer for Citizens for Global Solutions, told IPS by e- mail.

“The legislation would cut funding for critical poverty fighting food aid programs by up to 50 percent, decimate support for refugees in Africa, Burma, Iraq and other places, and shrink funding for fighting AIDS, Malaria and Tuberculosis,” he explained. “This legislation represents a serious retreat for U.S. poverty reduction efforts.”

Some analysts argue that the House’s CR will threaten U.S. interests, security and reputation abroad, don’t create the jobs that were promised and do little to tackle this year’s 1.4 trillion dollar deficit.

“The House FY11 funding bill targets U.S. spending on international affairs and poverty relief, calling it ‘deficit reduction’,” Kraus told IPS. “But fiscally this would have the same impact as withholding my daughter’s allowance to pay down our family’s mortgage.”

Kraus cited a November 2010 public opinion poll conducted by the Programme on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland. “Americans and many politicians do not understand how little we actually spend and believe 25 percent of the federal budget is spent on foreign aid,” he said.

“When asked what would be a reasonable amount to spend, the median response is 10 percent. In fact, only a little over one percent of our budget goes to foreign assistance,” Kraus explained.

In contrast, the defence budget amounts to about 22 percent of federal spending. In the House’s CR, about 526 billion dollars would be allocated to the Pentagon, just slightly below the 540 billion Secretary Robert Gates requested.

“These were hard decisions, and I know many people will not be happy with everything we’ve proposed in this package,” House Appropriations Committee chair Hal Rogers said in a statement last Friday, when the CR was introduced. “That’s understandable and not unexpected, but I believe these reductions are necessary to show that we are serious about returning our nation to a sustainable financial path.”

By Aprille Muscara
WASHINGTON, Feb 18 2011 (IPS)

As popular protests escalated in some restive Arab countries Friday, U.S. President Barack Obama criticised the regime- sanctioned blood- letting of innocent demonstrators mobilising against government corruption and repression.

“The United States condemns the use of violence by governments against peaceful protesters in those countries and wherever else it may occur,” Obama said in a statement read by White House Press Secretary Jay Carney.

“Wherever they are, people have certain universal rights, including the right to peaceful assembly,” he declared. “The United States urges the governments of Bahrain, Libya, and Yemen to show restraint in responding to peaceful protests and to respect the rights of their people.”

In a telephone call with King Hamad bin Isa Al-Khalifa of Bahrain on Friday, Obama “reiterated his condemnation of the violence used against peaceful protesters, and strongly urged the government of Bahrain to show restraint, and to hold those responsible for the violence accountable.”

On Friday, security forces fired rounds, reportedly live, on hundreds of demonstrators near Pearl Square in Manama, the epicentre of Bahrain’s protests, leaving some 50 people wounded, according to officials at its main hospital. Media reports and tweets from people on the ground also claim that a helicopter hovering overhead opened fire on the fleeing crowds.

Many were returning from funerals of fallen protestors, victims of a night-time raid by security forces Thursday, in which those sleeping in Pearl Square were attacked with live fire. Since the demonstrations began Monday, the number killed has reportedly risen to eight, while hundreds have been injured.

Meanwhile, protests continued in Libya, where human rights groups say at least 24 people have died since country-wide demonstrations against longstanding leader Muammar Al- Gaddafi began Thursday.

And in Yemen, capping eight days of violence- wracked demonstrations, at least three protestors were reportedly killed – with a total death toll rumoured to be in the dozens – and scores others injured by autocrat Ali Abdullah Saleh’s security forces.

“There is a commonality, clearly, to some of the demonstrations and the unrest we’ve seen, and it’s reflective of a yearning by the peoples of the region, the peoples of these countries, to have a greater participation in the political process in their countries,” Carney told reporters at a briefing Thursday. “And we support that.”

But analysts here also acknowledge the specific and varying contexts of each country witnessing popular uprisings from the Maghreb to the Gulf.

While pro-democracy demonstrators in Tunis and Cairo were received by modest restraint by their respective governments – most observers agree that potential massacres of Tiananmen Square proportions were averted, despite some brutal attacks on protestors – the wave of revolts in neighbouring countries seen since have been marked by unsettling violence.

“One of the big differences between Bahrain and Tunisia or Egypt is that the security forces, when confronted with crowds in Tunisia and Egypt, said ‘those people are us’,” F. Gregory Gause III, political scientist and Gulf expert at the University of Vermont, said in an interview with the Council on Foreign Relations Friday.

Manama, with its Sunni minority rule headed by King Hamad bin Isa al- Khalifa, has a 70 percent majority Shia population.

“But when you have this strong sectarian division and the security forces are composed of a minority group, they look at these protestors and say, ‘Those people are them, not us – if they win, we lose,” Gause argued.

The Khalifa family, which has ruled Bahrain for 300 years, has been a longtime U.S. ally, with administration officials praising Bahrain’s modest reforms put in place in the last decade – although advocacy groups remain critical of the regime’s repression of political and social rights.

And with Washington’s fifth fleet – composed of three thousand military personnel, 30 naval ships and 30 thousand soldiers – is based in the small but resource- rich Gulf country, the administration must now walk a tightrope in its condemnation of violence by a key regional partner.

Manama also has the support of its neighbours. On Thursday, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) – composed of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – held an emergency meeting and issued a statement of support. “Any threat [to one country] is a collective responsibility,” it read.

Saudi Arabia, just across a causeway to the east, is an especially key ally. Some security forces used to quell demonstrations are rumoured to have been imported from the influential Gulf state.

With protestors now demanding a regime change, observers wonder whether the people power that toppled dictators in Egypt and Tunisia is enough to do the same in the face of the GCC’s collective alliance.

“It certainly has the support of the Saudis, who would see any collapse of the Al Khalifa regime as a serious threat because the Saudis would perceive a Shiite government coming to power and they would see it as being aligned with Iran,” Gauss explained.

“That causeway is there in some large part to facilitate the movement of Saudi security forces if thy think Bahrain is going under,” he said, adding “This is a regime [Al Khalifa’s] that’s proven it’s willing to be brutal to stay in power.”

*With additional reporting by David Elkins.

Excerpt:

With U.S. President Barack Obama’s release of his Fiscal Year (FY) 2012 foreign affairs budget Monday and a proposal currently in the U.S. House of Representatives for massive cuts in FY 2011 international spending, the fight to sustain U.S. aid abroad is intensifying.

Development and foreign policy analysts largely praised the administration’s funding appeal for reflecting conscientious adjustments in this constrained economic environment and for maximising returns by focusing spending on strategic areas such as global health, food security and climate change.

“The U.S. Global Leadership Coalition (USGLC) today rallied behind the Obama administration’s FY 2012 international affairs budget request for 53.1 billion dollars and urged Congress to fully fund the request,” said the bipartisan network of some 400 development- and diplomacy- minded organisations and experts chaired by former Secretary of State Colin Powell in a statement Monday.

“At just over 1 percent of the federal budget and 7.1 percent of security funding, the international affairs budget is a critical investment in America’s national security and economy,” it noted.

The USGLC’s 53.1-billion-dollar figure includes spending appropriated for international programmes under the Departments of State, Treasury, Labour and Health and Human Services as well as USAID, the country’s development agency.

Compared to FY 2010 enacted funds, the FY 2012 foreign affairs budget thus represents an increase of 3.1 percent, while the OCO account boosts spending levels by 71 percent, according to the USGLC’s number-crunching.

While the overall FY 2012 core international spending proposal represents just a marginal increase from FY 2010, significant amounts are shuffled from one account to another. This redirection of funds is reflected in double- digit percent increases and decreases in key areas.

Spending Slashes

Major cuts include a 115-million-dollar, 15-percent reduction in assistance for Europe, Eurasia and Central Asia; a 250-million-dollar, 22-percent reduction in United Nations and non-U.N. peacekeeping operations; and a 105- million-dollar, 15-percent reduction in voluntary and non- voluntary contributions to international organisations and programmes, according to USGLC figures.

“We don’t like to see cuts, but they’re made based on a logic of what are the most important investments that we can make right now,” Gregory Adams, Oxfam America’s director of aid effectiveness, told IPS in a telephone interview. “If it’s going to be a tough budget year, we’d rather have these decisions made based on a thoughtful strategic approach and that’s what we think we see here.”

Bilateral assistance for six countries – Iceland, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tonga and the United Arab Emirates – has also been eliminated completely, while Foreign Military Financing programmes for five countries and International Military Education and Training programmes for nine have been zeroed out.

“[W]e’re trying to move… our budget towards less very, very small programmes, because we’re going to… have less money down the road to allocate, and we want to make sure we allocate it to the highest priorities,” a senior State Department official told reporters Monday in reference to these bilateral programme eliminations, which represent less than a three-million-dollar reduction.

“[T]he savings that these cuts generate are very, very small, but you have to start somewhere,” the official added.

Spending Spikes

Major funding hikes include an 850-million-dollar, 10.8- percent raise for global health and child survival programmes; a 400-million-dollar, 16-percent raise for development assistance – which includes a 1.1-billion- dollar, 23-percent boost to the Feed the Future Initiative and a 651-million-dollar, 28-percent boost to the Global Climate Change Initiative – and a 1.28-billion-dollar, 63- percent raise in contributions to International Financial Institutions.

This movement of funds represents increased selectivity, Adams told IPS. “At the same time we’re doing that, we’re increasing investments to a lot of the multilateral development banks… partially because in light of the global financial crisis a couple of years ago, we urged a lot of these international development banks to up their funding… to try to push back on the global recession – and it worked,” he argued. “Now the bill is coming due for that and a lot of these institutions need replenishment.”

A new Global Security Contingency Fund worth 50 million dollars has also been created in the proposal and pools money from the Department of Defence for security crises that involve both the civilian and military sectors. Adams expressed caution over this joint account. “We just don’t know enough about it [yet],” he explained.

Last week, Oxfam released a report cautioning against the militarisation of development aid, which can often lead to ineffective and even dangerous policies if not implemented and monitored in an appropriate way, the advocacy group said.

“When you’ve got those situations where you’ve got multiple priorities – like security and development – what’s the criteria by which you’re measuring success?” he asked. “Are your development [policies] being held to a development standard? … [T]hat sometimes gets muddied when you have these pooled resource funds.”

A Looming Budget Battle

In her letter introducing the foreign affairs funding proposal released Monday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the request a “lean budget for lean times”, adding, “We have scrubbed it for every dollar of savings, because we know we have to make the most of our resources.”

But if a current proposal in the House to slash total FY 2011 spending by 100 billion dollars – which includes a steep 19-percent drop from FY 2010 core international affairs spending levels, according to USGLC figures – is any indication, the administration’s FY 2012 request is likely to be pared down significantly once Congress gets its hands on it.

In his State of the Union speech last month, Obama pledged to freeze domestic, non-security discretionary funding for the next five years. While the foreign affairs budget has been categorised as security spending by the last two administrations, largely protecting it from cuts, conservative lawmakers are moving to lump the international budget with non-security accounts in a bid to make massive reductions.

“Cuts of this magnitude will be devastating to our national security, will render us unable to respond to unanticipated disasters, and will damage our leadership around the world,” Clinton argued in a letter to Representative Harold Rogers Monday. Rogers is the chair of the House Appropriations Committee, which allocates funding.

With an estimated 1.4-trillion-dollar deficit for FY 2011 and a national debt of over 14 trillion dollars and climbing, officials are scrambling to curb spending.

“[T]he president’s budget appears to be long on rhetoric and lean on spending cuts,” claimed Rogers in a statement Monday. “We must go much further than this anaemic effort of symbolic reductions and additional spending.”

By Aprille Muscara
WASHINGTON, Feb 11 2011 (IPS)

After 30 years in power, a handful of assassination attempts, the historical backing of five United States presidencies, 68 billion dollars in U.S. aid and 18 consecutive days of massive, pro-democracy demonstrations, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak finally ceded power Friday, leaving observers in Washington wondering what happens next.

“[T]his is not the end of Egypt’s transition,” said U.S. President Barack Obama hours after Mubarak’s resignation was announced. “It’s a beginning. I’m sure there will be difficult days ahead and many questions remain unanswered.”

“But I am confident that the people of Egypt can find the answers and do so peacefully, constructively and in the spirit of unity that has defined these last few weeks, for Egyptians have made it clear that nothing less than genuine democracy will carry the day,” he added.

In a statement made on state television Friday evening local time, Vice President Omar Suleiman announced that Mubarak had decided to “waive” his presidency and had “instructed the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces to run the affairs of the country.”

Arab media outlets also reported that the military leadership dismissed Mubarak’s cabinet and both houses of parliament.

The council issued a communiqué shortly after Suleiman’s announcement – its third in three days – stating that the legitimacy of the Egyptian people is placed above all else and that further statements would be issued outlining the next steps in the transition process.

It also paid tribute to the martyrs of the popular unrest – the United Nations estimates that some 300 people have been killed in the demonstrations – and saluted Mubarak for his service.

“The military has served patriotically and responsibly as a caretaker to the state and will now have to ensure a transition that is credible in the eyes of the Egyptian people,” Obama said. “That means protecting the rights of Egypt’s citizens, lifting the emergency law, revising the constitution and other laws to make this change irreversible and laying out a clear path to elections that are fair and free.”

In a communiqué released Thursday, after a speech by Mubarak in which he vowed to remain in power until the fall elections despite mounting expectations that he would resign that evening, the council pledged to guarantee such steps.

“We must also urge the unequivocal rejection of any involvement by the Muslim Brotherhood and other extremists who may seek to exploit and hijack these events to gain power, oppress the Egyptian people, and do great harm to Egypt’s relationship with the United States, Israel, and other free nations,” said Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, chairwoman of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, in a statement Friday.

While some conservative lawmakers and commentators have warned against the role of the Muslim Brotherhood, fearing an Islamist takeover, others claim that this alarm is exaggerated and unfounded.

Protesters have repeatedly stressed the non-violent, decentralised and secular nature of their demonstrations, while administration officials and analysts have urged wide and representative participation in discussions about political reform.

“Above all, this transition must bring all of Egypt’s voices to the table,” Obama said in his televised statement.

But after Friday’s apparent coup, all eyes seem to be on the junta in charge and how it plans to move forward. Will it allow civilian participation in the governance of the country? Will it accelerate or delay the fall presidential elections? Will it permit new parliamentary elections?

Prominent members of the Supreme Council include Suleiman, former intelligence chief and overseer of the CIA’s controversial extraordinary renditions programme in Egypt; defence minister Hussein Tantawi, who visited Tahrir (Liberation) Square on Feb. 4 and was the first government official to do so; and Sami Hafez Anan, chief of staff of the armed forces who was in Washington meeting with senior U.S. defence officials when the protests first began.

“The West may be worried that the crisis will bring democracy too quickly to Egypt and empower the Muslim Brotherhood,” wrote Ellis Goldberg, political scientist at the University of Washington and the American University in Cairo, in ‘Foreign Affairs’ Friday. “But the real concern is that the regime will only shed its corrupt civilians, leaving its military component as the only player left standing.”

“Today, the army presents itself as a force of order and a neutral arbiter between contending opponents, but it has significant interests of its own to defend, and it is not, in fact, neutral,” Goldberg argued.

“A more open political system and a responsive government that ensures its own safety by trimming back the power and privileges of the military could still emerge,” he predicted. “More likely, however, is the culmination of the slow-motion coup and the return of the somewhat austere military authoritarianism of decades past.”

But Steve Clemons, founder and senior fellow of the New America Foundation’s American Strategy Programme, noted that the Egyptian military is “an institution in which the public has faith” in a statement Friday.

“Now the command staff of Egypt’s army must move immediately to create a broadly inclusive political ‘stewardship council’ that includes previously branded opponents of the regime in order to maintain public trust,” he said.

Opposition figure Mohamed ElBaradei told media outlets Friday that he supported a one-year transitional period ruled by a power-sharing council composed of civilians and military officials.

“This is the liberation of the Egyptian people,” he told Al Jazeera English. “[W]e should be a stable country, a democratic country… Unity is crucial at this stage.”

Excerpt:

By Aprille Muscara
WASHINGTON, Feb 10 2011 (IPS)

In the midst of a belt-tightening political climate in which pledges by prominent lawmakers to slash the United States’ foreign affairs budget will likely soon be realised, some rights groups and experts are concerned about the increasingly blurry distinction between security and development in the face of shrinking resources.

“The upshot of the budget situation is that we will continue to rely on the military for development efforts,” Connie Veillete, foreign assistance expert at the Centre for Global Development, warned an audience at a panel discussion here Thursday. “If the international affairs budget goes down, we will have to rely on DOD (the U.S. Department of Defence) more and more.”

Meanwhile, a new Oxfam report released Thursday titled “Whose aid is it anyway?: Politicising aid in conflicts and crises” caution against the growing trend of militarising international aid.

“Effective aid saves lives, reduces poverty, builds health and education systems and strengthens the economies of poorer countries,” said Mike Lewis, author of the report, in a statement. “Aid directed to short-term political and military objectives fails to reach the poorest people and also fails to build long-term security in fragile states and ultimately for donors, too.”

On Monday, U.S. President Barack Obama will submit his budget proposal to Congress for fiscal year (FY) 2012. With an estimated 1.4-trillion-dollar deficit for FY 2011 and a national debt of over 14 trillion dollars, officials are scrambling to curb spending.

In a bid to convince policymakers of the importance of foreign aid, administration officials have recently ramped up their rhetoric of framing development as integral to national interests in an effort to justify further funding.

“[D]evelopment is not and cannot be a sideshow,” said U.S.A.I.D. administrator Rajiv Shah in a speech at the Centre for Global Development last month. “As the President and the Secretaries of State, Treasury and Defence have all made abundantly clear, development is as critical to our economic prospects and our national security as diplomacy and defence.”

“There’s a real framing issue here,” said Gordon Adams, foreign affairs and defence budgets expert at the Stimson Centre, at the panel discussion, which was organised by the Society for International Development. Defining aid as a security versus a governance or development matter is an important distinction because each leads to two different directions in terms of leadership as well as organisation, he argued.

The Spectre of Radical Takeovers

Instead of justifying development with humanitarian reasons – in order to help alleviate the poverty and hunger of our fellow humans, for instance – observers say that the last two administrations have tended to justify development as key to national security – as a tool to prevent radical groups from gaining influence and potentially threaten the U.S., for example.

Along with this post-9/11 rhetoric came a shift whereby civilian programmes tasked with development efforts have been gradually defunded, while more of their responsibilities have become delegated to the military, observers say.

Things like “stabilisation” and “reconstruction” – once largely within the stable of these civilian programmes – thus became increasingly intertwined with the U.S. tactic of counterinsurgency in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.

As a result of this shift, the Department of Defence must now be able to do everything from overthrowing governments to changing diapers in New Orleans, said Doug Brooks, an expert on the role of the private sector in international stabilisation operations, at the discussion. But the latter is better left to humanitarian and development workers, he argued.

“We need to take a more realistic approach in what we are asking DOD to do,” he said. “Things like poverty reduction should be left to the civilian side… We need to re- civilianise things, not push everything to DOD.”

“Over the years, we’ve just allowed too many [military] actors… into the development field,” Veillete echoed, adding that this trend has often led to incoherence in policy and even agencies working at cross-purposes. The Oxfam report argues much the same.

“While effective aid has helped save lives, protect rights and build livelihoods, some donors’ military and security interests have skewed global aid spending; and amidst conflict, disasters and political instability have too often led to uncoordinated, unsustainable, expensive and even dangerous aid projects,” the report stated.

“U.S. aid funds allocated to front-line military commanders to win ‘hearts and minds’ in Iraq and Afghanistan are now almost as large as the worldwide Development Assistance budget of the U.S. government’s aid agency, U.S.A.I.D.,” it also noted.

Fuelling the Military Budget

Although foreign affairs spending is in the crosshairs of many Republican lawmakers, it only constitutes about one percent of the total budget, the panellists said.

For FY 2011, the budget requested for the Department of State and “Other International Programmes” was 56.8 billion dollars, while a whopping 708 billion dollars for military spending was proposed, according to the Office of Management and Budget.

But analysts say that in this penny-pinching climate, even the long-protected defence budget is threatened. “Everything should be on the table, and I mean everything – including defence,” Adams argued.

Brooks noted that so far, the defence cuts that have been promised are merely cuts in rises. Defence Secretary Gates announced last month that the Pentagon would be spending 78 billion dollars – a figure greater than the total foreign affairs budget – less, over five years, than it had previously proposed. Even with these savings, military spending is projected to grow by three percent next year.

Excerpt:

By Aprille Muscara
WASHINGTON, Feb 7 2011 (IPS)

Amid renewed pockets of unrest throughout Sudan and continuing violence in Darfur, government officials in Khartoum announced Monday that a whopping 98.83 percent of southern voters – numbering more than 3.8 million in a country of over 42.3 million – cast their ballots in favour of secession during last month’s highly anticipated referendum.

The results were received positively by Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir – a seemingly encouraging sign for the country’s potential normalisation of relations with the international community.

“[W]e accept and welcome these results because they represent the will of the southern people,” al-Bashir, who is under indictment by the International Criminal Court for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Darfur, said in an address aired on state television.

“Now, all parties have a responsibility to ensure that this historic moment of promise becomes a moment of lasting progress,” U.S. President Barack Obama said in a statement Monday.

With the successful completion of the referendum and al- Bashir’s acceptance of the results, the road to peaceful secession seems to be paved, but many contentious issues remain unresolved.

“The peaceful conclusion of the southern Sudan referendum for independence is an historic accomplishment, but recent troubling events underscore the importance of continued U.S. engagement in the north and the south,” said Amir Osman, senior director for policy and government relations for the Genocide Intervention Network/Save Darfur Coalition (GI- NET/SDC), in a statement Monday.

Last week, seemingly inspired by the mass demonstrations of Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere, hundreds of restive Sudanese youth took to the streets in protest of rising food and fuel prices and human rights abuses. Many were beaten, tear- gassed and arrested by police.

And in the volatile region of north Darfur, which is in the western part of the country, renewed fighting between government and opposition groups have prompted thousands of families to flee their villages, according to rights groups.

“The Comprehensive Peace Agreement must be fully implemented and outstanding disputes must be resolved peacefully. At the same time, there must be an end to attacks on civilians in Darfur and a definitive end to that conflict,” Obama said.

“For those who meet all of their obligations, there is a path to greater prosperity and normal relations with the United States, including examining Sudan’s designation as a State Sponsor of Terrorism,” Obama said.

With the stakes of the referendum so high – namely, the threat of a recommenced civil war, which raged for over two decades, took an estimated two million, mostly southern, lives, and was finally halted by a Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) six years ago – Western policymakers have incentivised the full implementation of the CPA.

In seeming exchange for Khartoum’s lawful and peaceful compliance in allowing the embattled, resource-rich south to break away if it so desired, a number of compelling carrots are being dangled.

One of them is the promise to reconsider Sudan’s classification as a country that systematically supports international terrorism. As a result of this designation, the eastern African nation is subject to a series of restrictive sanctions.

“Removal of the State Sponsor of Terrorism designation will take place if and when Sudan meets all criteria spelled out in U.S. law, including not supporting international terrorism for the preceding six months and providing assurance it will not support such acts in the future, and fully implements the 2005 [CPA], including reaching a political solution on Abyei [a contentious region bordering Darfur, south Sudan and the rest of the country] and key post-referendum arrangements,” added Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a separate statement.

The Financial Times also reported Sunday that French and U.S. officials agreed to a summit to be hosted by the African Union, in which a one-year deferral of al-Bashir’s ICC indictment would be considered.

Any postponement would have to be mandated by the United Nations Security Council and be made on the grounds that a delay is required to preserve international peace and security, according to article 16 of the Rome Statute, which established the ICC.

Rights groups argue that suspension sets a dangerous precedent, threatens the Council’s credibility, and robs victims and their families who have been subjected to heinous crimes of potential justice.

“A deferral of the ICC’s judicial role risks denying redress to the victims of horrific abuses and must be invoked with extreme caution,” three Human Rights Watch officials wrote in a letter to the U.N. Security Council in September 2008, amidst a diplomatic campaign by Khartoum for an article 16 delay for al-Bashir, whose warrant was requested that year and issued the following spring.

“Khartoum has time and again made commitments to Security Council members and the international community that have proven to be worthless,” they said at the time.

With the CPA set to expire in July of this year, pressure is mounting on all parties to comply fully for a peaceful transition.

Excerpt:

By Aprille Muscara
WASHINGTON, Feb 4 2011 (IPS)

As food prices rose for the seventh month in a row in January, contributing to recent popular unrest in the Middle East and a spike in commodities purchases by developing countries last week, some analysts are quick to make comparisons to the dry years of 2007-2008.

But others warn against panic and oversimplified predictions of an impending food crisis, which contribute to price volatility.

“It is important to underline – and we’ve been trying this rather unsuccessfully – a high food price index doesn’t necessarily mean a food crisis,” Abdolreza Abbassian, senior economist at the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), told IPS in a telephone interview.

After a crisis in 1974, world food prices fell steadily over the following decades and hit an all-time low in the early 2000s. But beginning in 2005, food prices soared, ushering in the crisis of 2007-2008.

In post-mortem studies and short-term forward-looking simulations, including those conducted by the United States Department of Agriculture and jointly by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the FAO, researchers largely concluded that the steep prices would continue.

“It is reasonable to expect prices to remain high in the years to come (especially as economies recover from the financial crisis),” stated a 122-page report published last year by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) titled ‘Reflections on the Global Food Crisis’.

Although the high prices documented today were essentially predicted, similarities to 2007-2008 seem to be fuelling observers’ panic.

What is similar this time around?

“The underlying drivers of the 2007-2008 crisis were interlinked macro factors: a weak U.S. dollar, rising oil prices, increased bio fuels demand and strong economic growth worldwide,” Derek Headey, senior researcher at IFPRI and co-author of ‘Reflections’, told IPS in an e-mail interview.

“What is broadly the same [now] is that the macroeconomic environment is still conducive to higher prices and whenever you get higher prices, it only takes some small shocks to set off short-run volatility,” he explained.

The U.S. dollar remains weak, oil prices have exceeded 100 dollars per barrel, high demand for biofuels continues and strong growth in China, India and other large developing countries are creating some inflationary pressures, Headey noted.

Some short-term characteristics also seem to be similar. Once prices surged in 2007, interlinked factors created a food price bubble. The most important of these were crop failures, trade restrictions and panic buying – and likely speculation and hoarding, although those are difficult to measure – he argued.

Ongoing droughts in places like China, Somalia, Kenya and Niger threaten food security and unusually large wheat and rice purchases by Algeria and Bangladesh, respectively, last week – and last month’s announcement by Saudi Arabia of plans to double its wheat supply – are leading some to fear the prospect of panic buying.

Jayati Ghosh, agricultural economist and professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, told IPS’s Stephen Leahy in a recent article that we are in the midst of a new, bigger food bubble.

“The 2010-2011 food price bubble is blamed on last summer’s Russian drought and increased consumption by India and China,” Ghosh told IPS in an e-mail interview.

“However, FAO figures clearly show grain consumption by those latter two countries has actually fallen, mainly because many simply can’t afford to buy as much grain.” Instead, she argues, the current bubble is largely fuelled by financial speculation.

Despite these resemblances, analysts point out that important differences exist. “The situation – as volatile as it is – really, in many aspects, is still very different from what we saw in 2007-2008,” Abbassian told IPS.

What is different?

For one, wheat stocks are higher now than they were before the recent crisis, Headey noted, suggesting that we are better able to cope in case of lost production. And although Russia instituted an export ban on wheat following its drought last year, “We haven’t seen the spread of export restrictions in other countries or other commodities.”

As for recent cases of accelerated buying, Abbassian interpreted them as opportunism. “[There was] a relief in prices at the end of last week, so people took advantage of that,” he told IPS. “The moment prices come down a bit… people try to jump in and buy more.”

“[S]mall countries are price-takers,” he explained. “I wouldn’t really yet call this panic buying.”

While food prices overall, as measured by FAO’s monthly index, are at their highest levels since the organisation began monitoring them in 1990, variations exist across crops and regions.

“[R]ice is still even slightly below last year and half as high as in 2008,” Abbassian noted. “Wheat and corn are at least 50 percent higher than last year but still at least 10 to 20 percent lower than 2008.”

Additionally, “rice, corn and wheat are very critical in food commodities and we should look at them differently than things like cereals, sugars and soy,” he said, highlighting the variability of commodities, prices and trends measured in FAO’s index.

“If you look at countries in Africa that had problems in 2008 who had to import a lot, most had near-record if not record corn crops” last year, Abbassian told IPS. “[A]nd corn, especially white corn, is very important in sub- Saharan countries.”

Jennifer Parmelee, spokesperson for the U.N. World Food Programme, noted that the staple foods consumed by the very poor, namely cereals and rice, have been thus far largely insulated by the price spikes.

“We do closely follow the rise of international food prices because we’re also buying,” she said. In case of a crisis, “those who we support are those who are worst hit.”

“While food prices are high globally, in many of the regions where we work, prices have remained stable and in some cases have fallen,” she told IPS. The price of beans in Central America, for instance, fell in December.

And after a bumper 2010 harvest, prices of maize, sorghum and millet – main staple crops of sub-Saharan Africa – declined steadily at the end of last year and remain at relatively low levels, according to the FAO.

Uncertainty and Volatility

We can’t exactly know whether or not we are heading into another food crisis, but what we are seeing is a self- perpetuating pattern of price volatility and uncertainty – and it will continue until the summer harvests, Abbassian told IPS.

“Price volatility is one of the reasons for uncertainty in decision-making processes, be it the farmer or consumer,” he said. “Volatility invites volatility.”

The unrest in North Africa seems to be feeding this cycle. Egypt, for instance, which is in the midst of a revolution – driven partially by high food prices – is the world’s number one wheat importer. “When uncertainty prevails in these countries in this extent and depth, the market pays particular attention,” Abbassian said.

“I think market actors will be very prudent and pay more attention to bad news than good news,” he added. “Good news will be discarded, bad news will be amplified… Until crops are actually harvested this summer and they can see it, feel it, smell it, then they will say, ‘okay.'”

Looking forward, Abbassian told IPS that, barring any major exogenous events, such as crop-devastating weather disasters, “We are not so concerned about 2010 to 2011”, especially because global food stocks are “very high” compared to 2008.

“Our concern will be what will happen in 2011-2012,” he said. However, “[p]eople should not discard chances of good weather… We [could] get a bumper crop in 2011 and see prices correct themselves.”

“There is a positive note to all this,” Abbassian noted, admitting, “but no one will put their money on it.”

Excerpt:

By Jim Lobe and Aprille Muscara
WASHINGTON, Feb 3 2011 (IPS)

On the eve of massive planned protests dubbed “Day of Departure” in Egypt, continuing attacks by pro-government conspirators on anti-government protestors and roundups of human rights activists and foreign journalists are contributing to pressures on the administration of President Barack Obama to take a tougher line, including withholding military aid, toward the regime of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

During a phone call between U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden and his Egyptian counterpart Omar Suleiman Thursday, Washington’s number two “stressed that the Egyptian government is responsible for ensuring that peaceful demonstrations don’t lead to violence and intimidation,” according to a statement released by the White House.

Calls for slashing Cairo’s military aid are becoming more compelling as the role of the armed forces has become increasingly ambiguous. Early in the week, the Army was largely seen as being on the side of the demonstrators, pledging to protect the citizens of Egypt.

But when nine days of peaceful protests plunged into violence Wednesday, the Army reportedly stood by as pro- government protestors attacked peaceful demonstrators with sticks, knives and Molotov cocktails in and around Tahrir Square. And Thursday, human rights organisations and media agencies reported the systematic arrests of their personnel by military police.

Worrying Developments

Rights groups say that at approximately 2:30pm local time, a raid of their offices resulted in the arrest of eight individuals, including Ahmed Seif, director of the Hisham Mubarak Law Center and Khaled Ali, director of the Center for Economic and Social Rights.

“We are extremely worried about the fate of these human rights defenders who have been providing critical legal aid and support to their people over the past days of protest,” said Catherine Essoyan, Oxfam Regional Manager for the Middle East and Maghreb in a statement. “We call for the safe and immediate release of those detained.”

Meanwhile, foreign journalists are reporting that they are being targeted, assaulted, beaten and detained without provocation. Most of those arrested are released after a few hours, but some, like the Washington Post’s Cairo bureau chief Leila Fadel and photographer Linda Davidson, remain in custody.

According to CBS, about two-dozen reporters have been arrested between Wednesday and Thursday, as of late Thursday morning Eastern Standard Time.

“[T]he systematic targeting of journalists in Egypt… is also completely and totally unacceptable. Any journalist that has been detained should be released immediately,” U.S. Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters Thursday. “We continue to call for restraint and nonviolence.”

“I can’t imagine that, basically, kidnappings of American journalists working for prominent American media outlets are done without the knowledge and probably active complicity of the Army,” Chris Toensing, director of the Middle East Research and Information Project, told IPS.

Time reports that warrants for the arrest of international journalists were issued by Egypt’s Ministry of Defence. In an interview aired on state television Thursday, Suleiman blamed rogue elements and foreign operatives for the protests’ descent into violence, perhaps fuelling these attacks and detentions.

Human rights activists on the ground are worried about the implications of such roundups. Hossam Bahgat, founder of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, warned Democracy Now! Thursday of impending catastrophe, as further mass protests are planned for Friday.

“[W]hat is causing the biggest alarm today is that there seems to be a series of attempts by the Army itself, for the first time, of going after foreign journalists and going after human rights organisations, both Egyptian and foreign,” Baghat said.

“And with the lack of access to Tahrir Square, we fear that the worst is about to happen and that there is something that the Army does not want anyone from the outside world to witness.”

At the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Thursday, Bahey al-Din Hassan, considered to be the father of Egypt’s human rights movement, painted a picture of fracture and discord in the military structure.

“Today marks the appearance of a new party: the military police,” al-Din Hassan announced, referring to their reported involvement in the arrests of human rights activists and journalists. “This is the first time they’ve been so involved.”

“No one knows who controls what and whom,” he said. “It seems there is no consistent coordination between military police, security police and the armed militia… This is worrying.”

Clamping the Military Aid Pipeline

“One of the things the Egyptian military values most is its relationship with the U.S. military,” Neil Hicks, advisor for Human Rights First and expert on the Egyptian human rights movement, told IPS. “That is an interest that we can use.”

In a statement released here Thursday, the non-partisan Working Group on Egypt, members of which met with senior White House officials earlier this week, called for Washington to “immediately freeze all military assistance to Egypt” if violence against unarmed demonstrators continues.

The Group, whose membership spans much of the political spectrum in the foreign-policy establishment, also called on Obama to press Mubarak to leave the presidency well before next September’s presidential elections; the time he had set – and Obama subsequently appeared to endorse – in his speech Tuesday night.

“[I]t is the Working Group’s conclusion that the sooner Mubarak leaves office, the sooner Egypt can begin a peaceful transition to a democratic government that respects human rights,” the Group stated.

“The United States government should affirm the urgency of this transition by explicitly stating that, after today’s violence, it is clear that Mubarak has no place in a process leading to meaningful change,” the Group, which ranges from former President George W. Bush’s chief Mideast aide, Elliott Abrams to Brian Katulis, a Mideast specialist at the Center for American Progress (CAP), a think tank close to the more-liberal sectors of the administration.

“The administration needs to fire all the bullets it has right now, without delay,” the Group’s co-chair, Robert Kagan, like Abrams, a prominent neo-conservative, currently based at the Brookings Institution, told ‘Politico’, adding that the administration should make a “public call for Mubarak to leave, in light of the violence.”

“And cut-off of all military assistance within days if the violence continues. There’s nothing left to save it for. Mubarak is going for broke,” he added.

The Group’s appeal was joined by several independent analysts who have generally supported the past week’s slowly-slowly approach to the massive anti-government demonstrations that have engulfed Cairo and other Egyptian cities over the past nine days.

“[T]he time has come for the Obama administration to escalate to the next step of actively trying to push Mubarak out,” wrote Marc Lynch, a Mideast specialist on his much- read blog at foreignpolicy.com Thursday morning. “They were right not to do so earlier, …[but] yesterday’s orgy of state-sanctioned violence should be the moment to make clear that there is now no alternative.”

“[The administration] must now make clear that an Egyptian regime headed by Hosni Mubarak is no longer one with which the United States can do business, and that a military which sanctions such internal violence is not one with which the United States can continue to partner,” added Lynch, who participated in the White House meeting last Monday.

Pressure to cut military aid, which amounts to approximately 1.3 million dollars and comprises about one-third of Egypt’s defence budget, is also mounting in Congress. Senator Patrick Leahy, chair of the subcommittee that controls the foreign assistance budget, told media outlets Wednesday that he would sever Cairo’s funding if Mubarak remains in power and the regime-sanctioned violence continues.

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

Excerpt:

By Aprille Muscara
WASHINGTON, Feb 3 2011 (IPS)

As the world watched nine days of largely peaceful demonstrations in Egypt degenerate into bedlam fueled by confrontational pro-government hoodlums wielding Molotov cocktails Wednesday, observers are tracking the regional contagion of popular, reform-driven uprisings and wondering whether they are enough to usher in real change.

“We’re still in a moment where things hang in the balance,” Chris Toensing, director of the Middle East Research and Information Project, told IPS. “But for the first time in my career studying the Middle East… for the Arab world, this is the first time where people power is a significant political actor in its own right. In the calculus of regimes, it has to be taken seriously.”

The message seems to be getting across. President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen announced Wednesday that he would step down before the end of his term in 2013. And on Tuesday, King Abdullah II of Jordan dismissed his government, while the Palestinian Authority pledged to hold new elections.

Last December, Mohamed Bouazizi – an unemployed, college- educated 26-year-old making ends meet by vending produce on Sidi Bouzid’s dusty streets – set himself ablaze and became a catalyst for Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution, which climaxed with the collapse of dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali.

“There’s not a single ruler in the Arab world that thinks, ‘it can’t happen to me,'” Shibley Telhami, senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and Middle East expert, told IPS. “Every ruler is going to have to be more sensitive to their public’s opinion than they have before.”

Tunisia was the spark that ignited Egypt’s flame, analysts say. “[One] thing we should not underestimate for a moment is that when Ben Ali fell, it broke the seal,” Toensing said.

“People just didn’t believe that things could change from people power, from below. It lifted a psychological barrier,” he said.

One Big Powder Keg

For some, this points to a domino effect in the Arab world, evidenced by protests witnessed and planned in such countries as Algeria, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. Rising food prices, high unemployment and years of repression have galvanised the youth – and in some places, whole populations – and pushed them into the streets with banners and bullhorns.

But despite the recent spate of promises for reform and announcements of band-aid appeasements – such as pledges to boost government-paid salaries and vows to expand food subsidies – observers are sceptical about these seemingly shallow concessions.

“It’s like putting the iPod on the one song replay,” Joshua Stacher, political scientist and Middle East scholar at Kent State University, told IPS. “It’s old and boring and we’ve heard it before.”

“There’s a crisis of trust,” Telhami explained. “There is no trust in promises. People want to see real change. When you remove one prime minister and [install] another, but still under the same rules of the game, it’s not enough… That’s been a pattern and people know it and that’s not what they’re looking for.

Regarding Saleh’s assurance that he would self-terminate his thus far 33 years in power, Stacher noted that he’s made the same claim previously. “Is he scared now? Or is he just saying that to buy more time until the next election when he’ll again say, ‘oh, never mind?'”

Because of insignificant gains in livelihoods and unfulfilled promises like these, “There’s not a single Arab state that’s been able to win the trust of its citizens,” Stacher said.

“This is a revolt against specific Arab leaders and governing elites who have implemented policies that have seen the majority of Arabs dehumanised, pauperised, victimised and marginalised by their own power structure,” wrote respected Arab commentator Rami Khouri in the Beirut- based Daily Star Wednesday.

“But it is also a revolt against the tradition of major Western powers that created the modern Arab states and then fortified and maintained them as security states.”

If the current regional unrest leads to the disbanding of decades-old regimes and the departure of Western-backed heads of state, analysts say that U.S. influence in the Arab world could also be displaced.

While some see this is as a geopolitical crisis, others see it as an opportunity for Washington to make good on its rhetoric of democracy-promotion and espousal of universal rights.

“This is not a moment that U.S. policymakers should be afraid of,” Stacher told IPS. “They need to redesign what their interests are in the region and come to some sort of conclusion that… sees Arab states as peer nations.”

Next Chapter Remains Unwritten

It’s not yet clear whether democracy will take hold when the dust settles if today’s dictators are toppled.

Toensing noted similar moments in recent years when popular movements feigned to have pushed autocratic regimes to tipping points: Lebanon in the spring of 2005 and Iran in the summer of 2009. With the fervor that began in Tunisia seemingly spreading, will reform stick this time around?

“With this, the winter of 2011… the crucial difference is that things began in places that are typical of the region: Western-allied, autocratic, corrupt regimes with a similar relationship not only to U.S. geo-strategy but also to U.S. and Western backed neoliberal economic reforms,” Toensing said.

“In most countries in the region that aren’t oil rich… those are the things that most affect the daily lives of the people and those are the things that make them feel oppressed: the ever deepening police state and economic dislocation caused by privatisation,” he explained.

Despite these resemblances, some analysts are also quick to point to the obvious variability in the Arab world and wonder whether Tunisia was a one-off. After all, Mubarak – and Saleh and Abdullah and Gaddafi and others – remain stubbornly stuck in their seats of longstanding power.

“No one expected this would happen in Tunisia. No one expected this is going to happen in Egypt,” Telhami told IPS. “You cannot assume it’s going to happen somewhere else… Tunisia is not like Egypt, either. They’re not identical.”

“Small countries, enormous countries, oil-rich countries, countries where foreign communities outnumber citizens… obviously, there are different dynamics,” he explained.

And then there are the structural variations on the theme of absolute power from the Maghreb to the Gulf – between those that call themselves republics and those that call themselves monarchies.

Even though “every country is different,” Telhami noted, “The question is whether there is anger. And we know there’s anger. The [disconnect] between leaders and their peoples have been increasing over the past decade”

“We have to be modest in our predictions. We have never seen uprisings of this type in this scale in the contemporary Middle East,” he said. “Whether or not they spill over – in theory, they can; in practice, we don’t know.”

“The crowd has a hand in, but also it doesn’t mean that they’ll prevail,” Toensing admitted. “We’re still in early days I think. The fact that we don’t know is in itself very good news because in the past it hasn’t been so hard to predict.”

Excerpt:

By Aprille Muscara
WASHINGTON, Feb 1 2011 (IPS)

Despite the Hosni Mubarak regime’s attempts at muzzling communication and dissent, and the reportedly government- sanctioned shutdown of Egypt’s last standing Internet service provider to individual users Monday, Egyptians are still managing to get their voices heard and mobilise – both through advanced technical workarounds and older, traditional technologies.

“We’re seeing that this is a country, a regime, which is hell-bent on trying to silence the people and not let the word get out,” Middle East and North Africa regional editor of Global Voices Amira al Hussaini told IPS in a telephone interview from Bahrain.

Late last week, almost all web access was disconnected, except for one Internet provider, Noor, which services Egypt’s stock market. But Monday, ahead of Tuesday’s planned mass demonstrations dubbed “March of a Million”, technology experts, cyber activists and sources reported that Noor was no longer accessible to its individual users, although banks and the financial sector are said to still have connectivity.

When news of the initial Internet blackout broke Friday and real-time tweets and blog posts from inside the country slowed to a trickle, netizens the world over stepped up to help ensure the voices of people on the ground were not wholly muted, while citizens in Egypt stuck to traditional means of organising themselves.

Circumventing Censorship

On the more technical end, Anonymous, a decentralised community of cyber activists, over the weekend released a crowd-sourced document outlining 20 methods of circumventing the Internet outage. On the list were workarounds to accessing social networks, loopholes to connect to Web portals set up abroad and even ways to get online via ham radio.

Meanwhile, for the majority of citizens without Internet access, sympathisers from large corporations to concerned individuals across the globe volunteered to disseminate bulletins from inside Egypt – no matter how they were received.

“The Egyptian blogosphere is very robust and dynamic,” Hussaini told IPS. “Because of the blackout, people have had to resort to ‘stone-age’ or pre-Internet era technologies to try to get [and put out] information.”

The Telecomix News Agency offered to post received faxes, Google is tweeting voicemails left at certain international numbers at @Speak2Tweet, We Re-build – a group of cyber activists – pledged to report communiqués picked up via Morse code and a host of personal Twitter accounts, including individuals in Egypt who still manage to access the Internet, are tweeting recorded phone calls and publishing spoken messages from contacts inside the country.

“As a personal motivation, I believe that the documentation of the events that took place from the perspective of average citizens tells a very interesting story as compared to the typical news,” one of these Twitter users, who is Egyptian and asked to remain anonymous, told IPS.

“If you go back through our posts, particularly the last couple of nights, it is very interesting to see the variety of emotions that are expressed – from fear, to hope, to pride – and these are occurring real-time and dynamically, giving a map of the sentiment around the city and country.”

Despite “reporters on the ground… being bullied, harassed, arrested and beaten up,” according to Hussaini, journalists also must also find ways around the Internet blackout.

IPS’s own Emad MeKay and Cam McGrath, who are currently in Cairo, have been relaying dispatches verbally via landline to a colleague in London who renders their words for publication.

“We went back to basics,” Hussaini echoed. “We have an influx of material – videos, photos, testimonies and tweets – and we can weave a story on the ground just from people who are breaking this curfew and risking everything they have to tell their story.”

Al Jazeera, whose coverage of the rising tensions in Egypt has far exceeded those of other cable channels, said that six of its English-service journalists were arrested Monday and that it was directed to cease all of its activities in the country.

According to sources in Egypt, the network continued to broadcast as of Monday night, but was subject to brief, intermittent outages. In a surprising act of solidarity, sources report that some of the channel’s competitors, such as Al Hewar, Al Jadeed, Al Karama and Aden, began streaming Al Jazeera’s Arabic-service on its own frequencies Tuesday.

Organising the Old-Fashioned Way

While the viewpoints and narratives of the Egyptian people continue to seep out despite Mubarak’s Internet blackout, similarly, the communications crackdown hasn’t prevented them from mobalising en masse.

In addition to deploying its army into the streets, declaring a 3pm curfew and effectively shutting off the web in Egypt, the regime in Cairo has also halted train service in an attempt to prevent protestors from gathering in Tahrir Square from other parts of the country for Tuesday’s march.

Given the enormous turnout – the square is filled with more than a million people at press time, sources report – Mubarak’s efforts didn’t work. People already knew about the demonstrations, sources say, and the lack of transportation just prompted them to march in the large cities closest to where they live, such as Alexandria or Suez, in addition to Cairo.

“We need to debunk the myth that all this was caused by new media,” Hussaini told IPS. “It’s not easy to change your mentality and all of a sudden say, ‘I’m going to a protest.’ A protest is something banned; it’s not allowed. New technologies did not change the whole mindset of a whole country. [Egyptians] have serious economic and political issues that need to be addressed.”

Although social media networks like Facebook and Twitter helped organise the Jan. 25 demonstrations – the first of these major, widespread protests in Egypt – the Internet blackout hasn’t prevented people from mobilising the good, old-fashioned way: “We organise by word-of-mouth, plus phones,” Shereef Abbaf, a Cairo resident, told IPS in a telephone interview.

Abbaf takes part in his community’s “Neighbourhood Watch” – civilian checkpoints that have cropped up on most roads in Cairo after Mubarak withdrew the police forces.

“We coordinate with other streets,” he said, describing a network of neighbourhoods across which information travels from person to person and small groups, like the old schoolyard game of telephone.

“Sometimes we hear rumours from nearby neighbourhoods that a suspicious car full of thugs and informants and such is out on the streets, going around and spreading chaos to make people scared,” Abbaf told IPS. “So we stay on full alert in case they pass by.”

“Whenever a car comes, we tell them to turn off their headlights, slow down and stop, and we check their IDs and see who they are,” he explained. “At the same time we have a lot of weapons on us – knives, sticks, Molotov cocktails, anything we can get our hands on and be prepared.”

Abbaf said that so far, there have been no incidents and every car he’s stopped has been very cooperative. “By the time they reach us, they’ve just passed 10 other checkpoints before us. They all understand,” he said. “We’re all for Egypt.”

Excerpt:

By Aprille Muscara
WASHINGTON, Jan 28 2011 (IPS)

On the heels of U.S. President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address Tuesday in which he focused squarely on resuscitating the economy, pressure is mounting in the nation’s capital to move forward with free trade agreements (FTAs) whose passage would promote exports and create jobs.

In his address, Obama urged Congress to act on pending trade pacts with South Korea, Colombia and Panama. On Friday, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that the administration plans to submit the U.S.-Colombia FTA to Congress this year. Obama did not initially set a timetable in Tuesday’s speech.

“There are still negotiations that are taking place,” Clinton told reporters after a meeting here on Friday with Colombian Vice President Angelino Garzón, who is in town to meet with lawmakers. “We don’t want to send an agreement just for the sake of sending an agreement. We want to send an agreement and get it passed.”

“Secretary Clinton’s remarks represent the clearest signal the administration has sent with respect to its intentions to move the Colombia agreement forward in a specific time frame,” said National Foreign Trade Council president Bill Reinsch in a statement.

Among the three deals, the U.S.-South Korea FTA seems to be first in line for passage. Seoul’s trade ministry announced Wednesday that the text of the agreement had been finalised and would be signed in mid-February, according to media reports.

“I can generally say that this agreement now has the full support of U.S. industries [and even] critical labour unions,” Han Duk-soo, South Korea’s ambassador to the U.S. and a former prime minister, told a small group at the National Foreign Trade Council Friday.

Despite some domestic political opposition and public complaints here by Rep. Max Baucus that the deal didn’t address beef exports, Han said that he was “definitely confident about passage in both countries”.

On Tuesday, the House Committee on Ways and Means held a hearing on the three FTAs. Chairperson Rep. Dave Camp pushed for a Jul. 1 deadline. “Implementation of their agreements and continued inaction on our agreements will result in further missed opportunities to create U.S. jobs,” he said in a statement.

“Other major economies, including the E.U. and Canada, have signed, or are poised to sign, agreements with Colombia, Panama, and South Korea,” he explained. “America cannot afford to fall further behind and by standing still, we are doing just that.”

If the Bogotá-Washington trade deal isn’t passed, Garzón told an audience at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre on Wednesday, bilateral relations wouldn’t suffer. But, he noted, in 2013, Colombia will have signed FTAs with Canada, Japan, China and the European Union.

“Trade relations will be weakened… as Colombia turns to others instead,” he warned.

Negotiated in 2006, the U.S.-Colombia FTA has stalled due to opposition by labour leaders in the North and concerns about the state of human and labour rights in the South American nation. But with last year’s election of President Juan Manuel Santos, rights groups have cautiously welcomed a shift in the administration’s tone and Santos’s choice in Garzón, who has a labour background.

“However, positive rhetoric, new appointments and pending legislation have yet to translate into effective actions to address Colombia’s past and present human rights violations,” said Lisa Haugaard, executive director of the Latin American Working Group in a statement on Monday.

In words at least, the Santos administration has been vocal about its commitment to improving the rights of Colombians. Garzón stressed Wednesday that Bogotá has a zero-tolerance policy, vowing to uphold universal human rights and respect international humanitarian law.

However, Haugaard noted that violence against rights defenders continues, illegal armed groups maintain their violent grip on parts of the country, investigations into extrajudicial killings remain stalled and that legislation introduced by Santos that would provide reparations and land restitution to victims does not sufficiently address sources of funding or protection for the displaced in case of reprisal.

“It is too early to judge the new administration’s commitment and capacity to resolve these challenges,” she said. “But it is the right moment to encourage the Santos administration to match its words with deeds.”

Clinton announced Friday that the next round of negotiations would take place in two months. “We’ve made considerable progress together, but we have more work to do on security and other issues,” she said. “That is why we are hosting the second round of the U.S.-Colombia High Level Partnership Dialogue in March, where we will cover so many of these issues.”

Excerpt:

By Aprille Muscara
WASHINGTON, Jan 25 2011 (IPS)

With the U.S. national debt standing at 14 trillion dollars, the Barack Obama administration pledging to tackle the monstrous deficit and a Republican-led House of Representatives pushing for a “Cut-and-Grow” Congress, budget hawks are zeroing in on international affairs spending – from diplomacy to development.

On Tuesday, the House Foreign Affairs Committee held a hearing to discuss “urgent problems” related to the United Nations. Committee Chair Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen pledged to reintroduce legislation that would make contributions by the U.S. – the world body’s largest funder – conditional on U.N. reform.

In early December Ros-Lehtinen publicly took aim at diplomacy and development expenses. “I have identified and will propose a number of cuts to the State Department and Foreign Aid budgets,” she said at the time. “There is much fat in these budgets, which makes some cuts obvious. Others will be more difficult but necessary to improve the efficiency of U.S. efforts and accomplish more with less.”

It seems that batting first on Ros-Lehtinen’s list is the United Nations. Others at Tuesday’s hearing urged the withholding of some U.S. funds, citing allegations of overall corruption and dissatisfaction with the U.N.’s Human Rights Council, while still others, like Rep. Steve Chabot, called for a complete defunding of the world body. According to the Better World Campaign, Congress approved some 4.4 billion dollars of U.N. funding last year.

“In the past, Congress has gone along by willingly paying what successive Administrations asked for – without enough oversight,” said Ros-Lehtinen in a statement read in her absence during the proceedings. “This is one of the first true U.N. reform hearings held by this Committee in almost four years, but it won’t be the last.”

Peter Yeo, vice president of public policy at the U.N. Foundation and a witness at the hearing, on the other hand argued that threatening to withhold contributions sends the wrong signal – one of unilateralism – and that it does nothing to advance Washington’s interests.

“Only by being at the table can the U.S. bring about the change that is necessary,” echoed witness Mark Quarterman, senior advisor at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.

Last week, the 165-member Republican Study Committee (RSC) submitted a drastic proposal that would reduce federal spending by 2.5 trillion dollars over 10 years – a full 1.39 billion dollars of which would come from cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

The proposal also included a 250-million-dollar reduction of economic assistance to Egypt, which totals about 1.3 billion dollars, a 17-million-dollar cut to the International Fund for Ireland, and the virtual elimination of the U.S. Trade Development Agency with a 55-million-dollar purge.

Critics say that the cuts, spearheaded by Rep. Jim Jordan, along with similar calls to radically chop elements of the international affairs budget, will cripple the administration’s tri-legged strategy of Defence, Diplomacy and Development.

The proposed GOP purge “rejects a key principle that military leaders and Presidents of both parties have clearly recognised: Foreign assistance and diplomacy are essential to United States national security,” Rep. Howard Berman, ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said Monday.

In his statement, Berman also referenced similar assertions made previously by Defence Secretary Robert Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen, which expressed the intimate links between the maintenance of national security and civilian agencies that conduct foreign assistance and diplomacy.

“For the nation’s diplomatic and development initiatives… large cuts could be devastating,” wrote political pundit Conor Williams in an article late last month. “More important, wholesale cuts to the international affairs budget could cost the United States massively in lost political and economic opportunities.”

In a policy speech at the Centre for Global Development (CGD) last Wednesday, USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah argued that his agency was worth the nation’s investment. He highlighted organisational efforts to streamline, focus more on results-oriented aid and be more cost-effective, announcing the launch of a new evaluation programme that will measure aid effectiveness.

“We need to understand that unlike other industries, unlike an enterprise, we have no interest in our own growth and our own perpetuity,” Shah also said, drawing attention to U.S.A.I.D.’s goal of graduating countries from U.S. assistance, which translates into reductions in aid spending.

Some observers point out that not all Republicans are on board with the RSC’s extreme cuts and that political wrangling within the GOP will likely tone it down going forth.

“Is there going to be debate and discussion as we move forward?” RSC chairman Rep. Jim Jordan asked at a press conference Thursday. “Certainly. But we think this is a good first step, and we’re willing to have that debate.”

Excerpt:

By Aprille Muscara
WASHINGTON, Jan 24 2011 (IPS)

The international community – from Western authorities to Southern powers – lacks courage and hides behind “soft diplomacy” in confronting human rights abusers, a leading rights group accuses in a 649-page world report released Monday.

In its annual flagship publication, Human Rights Watch slams world leaders and global institutions for “simply feigning serious participation” and “ongoing concern” for human rights, claiming that these “expected champions” use rhetoric as substitutes for concerted action.

“The quest for dialogue and cooperation becomes a charade designed more to appease critics of complacency than to secure change,” wrote Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, in the report’s introduction.

Among the guilty, Roth name-dropped multilateral organisations like ASEAN, the European Union and the United Nations as well as leaders like U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, E.U. high representative Catherine Ashton, U.S. President Barack Obama, British Prime Minister David Cameron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

“The secretary-general’s view is that diplomacy and public pressure are not mutually exclusive,” a spokesperson for Ban said Monday, defending against criticisms that the world body’s head is not outspoken enough against countries with deplorable rights records like Burma, China and Sri Lanka.

Prominent developing countries were also targeted for their timid responses to their rights-abusing neighbours.

“Brazil, India, and South Africa, strong and vibrant democracies at home, remain unsupportive of many human rights initiatives abroad, even though each benefitted from international solidarity in its struggle to end, respectively, dictatorship, colonization, and apartheid,” the publication stated.

“The international community, particularly democratic states from North and South, has an obligation to protect and promote human rights,” Ted Piccone, senior fellow and deputy director of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, told IPS. “They have influence and should exert it through a range of measures, from dialogue and cooperation to public criticism and sanctions.”

IBSA are urged in the report to use their standing as leading Southern capitals to do more to protect individuals from repression by “less progressive governments”.

“Their foreign policies are often based on building South- South political and economic ties and are bolstered by reference to Western double standards, but these rationales do not justify these emerging powers turning their backs on people who have not yet won the rights that their own citizens enjoy,” the report states.

The publication also highlights timing as key for IBSA, as all three are current members of the U.N. Security Council. Historically, the council has shied away from tackling human rights directly, with some claiming that the issue does not fall under the body’s mandate of maintaining international peace and security.

Rights advocates, on the other hand, have long argued that human rights abuses are often intimately tied to the council’s agenda.

These sorts of “excuses”, the report claims, are used to demote human rights concerns. Economic growth and development, humanitarian emergencies, the desire to build good will and abuses conducted at home are also reasons given for countries’ reluctance to promote human rights more vigorously and condemn others’ oppression.

For instance, the U.S., among others, is accused of being selective in pressuring those with poor rights records depending on its strategic and economic interests in the country, letting partners like Bahrain, India and Indonesia off relatively easy. The U.S.’s own “tolerance of torture and arbitrary detention in combating terrorism” is also criticised in the report.

“The shifting global balance of power (particularly the rise of China), an intensified competition for markets and natural resources at a time of economic turmoil, and the decline in moral standing of Western powers occasioned by their use with impunity of abusive counterterrorism techniques have made many governments less willing to take a strong public stand in favor of human rights,” the publication states.

The report argues that concerted international pressure can help bring change to these loci of repression, from Rwanda to Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia to Cambodia, Roma neighbourhoods to Guantanamo.

But public pronouncements of seeking “dialogue” and “cooperation” with these parties are not enough, the report claims – tactics like outright denunciations, conditional access to aid and targeted sanctions should be used to pressure these known abusers.

“When the parties directly responsible for human rights abuses refuse to cooperate or deny the facts, then the wider international community should take up the cause,” Piccone told IPS. “In many cases, international pressure is the catalysing force behind a change in a regime’s behaviour.”

“It also makes a difference for human rights victims and defenders on the ground who are often threatened to stay silent,” he said. “On the flip side, failure to pressure a government may lead to continued repression.”

Excerpt: