An organisation of restaurant workers is suing Darden Restaurants, the largest full-service restaurant group in the world, in U.S. federal court, alleging widespread racial discrimination and illegal labour practices.

Activists and employees accuse Darden of racism and violations of state and federal labour practices. Credit: Sam Lewis/IPS

Darden Restaurants employs 179,000 workers in 1,900 locations in the U.S. and Canada. It owns, among other chains, Olive Garden, Red Lobster and Longhorn Steaks. The focal chain in the suit is Capital Grille, the finest and most expensive of Darden’s restaurants.

“Workers from the Capital Grille have decided to raise their collective voice and tell Darden that they deserve dignity on the job,” John Cronan Jr., lead organiser for the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York, told IPS.

“Darden has the ability and resources to provide, good, just, and fair working conditions and jobs for thousands of workers. We are saying that it should do so,” Cronan said.

“The top one percent and Wall Street are doing better than ever,” Stephanie Mueller, a spokesperson for ROC, added.

“Darden made profits last year of more than a half billion dollars for their big stockholders like J.P. Morgan and State Street Bank,” she told IPS. “The money is there, the problem is that it is not going to those who do the work and cook and serve the food every day.”

The Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC) served Darden with a formal complaint at the main Capital Grille location in midtown New York City on Monday. Workers, organisers and supporters crowded into the high- end restaurant in a show of support, while Omar Camara, a line cook at Capital Grille, handed the letter to his manager.

“I was pretty nervous at first, and thought they might just fire me,” Camara said after the letter drop, “But all of these people here with me made me feel strong, and I know this is an important thing.”

ROC accuses Darden of racism and various violations of state and federal labour practices. According to ROC and workers at Capital Grille locations in New York, Chicago and Washington D.C., high-paying “front-of-the-house” jobs such as waiters, bartenders and hosts are reserved for white employees, while more rigorous and lower-paying “back-of-the-house” jobs are given to black and Latino workers, who are rarely seen by customers.

The lawsuit also details allegations of wage-theft, including among other charges, taking tips from employees, requiring front-of-the- house workers to contribute portions of their tips to pay the salaries of back-of-the-house workers, and at times requiring employees to work for less than minimum wage or even “off the clock” and without pay altogether.

“Workers from The Capital Grille came to ROC with issues of racial discrimination and wage and hour violations,” Cronan told IPS.

“It is important we support them 100 percent,” he explained, “because ROC is the only national restaurant workers organisation that is actively organising workers in the industry.”

“Restaurant workers deserve a living wage and to be treated with dignity,” said Daisy Chung, co-director of ROC-NY, in a statement. According to ROC, one in 12 American workers is employed at a restaurant, and 75 percent of Americans eat out at restaurants at least once a week.

ROC announced their national campaign to better conditions at Darden Restaurants on Tuesday at the release of their annual Diners’ Guide, a booklet ROC researches and produces detailing the restaurants with the best labour practices. Restaurants are rated in several categories, including paying over minimum wage, paid sick days off, medical coverage, and “high road” practices, which involve training and promoting from within.

The workers organisation also cooperates with university researchers to expand the understanding of the nature of restaurant work and its impact on communities and the economy.

ROC was founded in New York City after Sep. 11, 2001 to provide support to restaurant workers affected by the attack on the World Trade Center. It has since grown into a national restaurant workers organisation fighting for labour rights, anti-discrimination and fair employment practices in the food service industry, with almost 10,000 members in nine cities across the U.S.

Protestors face off with riot police early Tuesday morning. Credit: Nick Gulotta/CC BY 2.0

By Ben Case
NEW YORK, Nov 15 2011 (IPS)

After two months of holding New York City’s Zuccotti Park despite repeated threats of eviction, Occupy Wall Street (OWS) activists were forcibly removed from the site by hundreds of police in riot gear early Tuesday morning.

OWS media teams managed to send out alerts via text and email, but by 1:00 a.m. police moved into the park, which had been occupied by protestors since Sep. 17, to clear it out for a “cleaning”.

Police say protestors will be allowed to return, but without any of their equipment, sleeping bags or tents. The move was widely seen by organisers as a permanent eviction.

Reinforcements of protestors arrived by the hundreds to defend the park, but by the time they arrived police had barricaded all of the streets leading to Zuccotti Park, and shut down subways stops nearby. Unable to get in, large groups of protestors massed on street corners, and sometimes in streets, both north and south of the park.

Media crews were not allowed into the park during the raid, and the NYPD prevented news helicopters from entering the airspace over downtown New York. Reports of arrests and violence vary, but both in and around the park police appeared to favour force over arrests.

Pepper spray was widely used on protestors in the park as well as those demonstrating in solidarity on surrounding streets.

“We were on the sidewalk, on public space, standing in solidarity with our sisters and brothers in the park when we were pepper sprayed,” John Cronan, a member of the Restaurant Opportunity Center and an OWS protestor, told IPS.

“We were running half blind down the street, holding each other’s hands, until someone got us to a convenience store where we were able to wash it out,” he said, adding, “It really shows you who’s side the police are on – the side of the one percent.”

Inside the park police manage to move many protestors out without force, while around 100 people remained in what had served as the kitchen area, barricading themselves in. Police eventually broke through and cleared out the remaining activists using pepper spray and batons, and arresting 142 people, including a New York City Councilman. Between 50 and 60 arrests were reported in the surrounding streets.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg defended the police action in a statement on Tuesday morning, saying, “I have become increasingly concerned… that the occupation was coming to pose a health and fire safety hazard to the protestors and to the surrounding community.”

Bloomberg’s rhetorical concern for the health and safety of protestors appeared to stand in stark contrast to the aggressive actions taken by police.

“I was grabbed by the throat and thrown to the ground by an officer,” Amanda Vodola, an organiser with OWS, told IPS.

“They kept shoving me and yelling at me to stop resisting, but I was only trying to get to my feet,” she said. “We are peaceful protestors, but they definitely didn’t treat us like it.”

By 4:00 a.m., some demonstrators remained on street corners near the park, but most streets were filled only with police and the garbage trucks they were using to dispose of OWS equipment. Most protestors had moved to Foley Square, a public park a short distance away, to regroup, where they were joined by a labour solidarity march later that morning.

“We are going to take new space, if they drag us out of one place, we will occupy another, and another,” Cronan told IPS.

But before protestors could make good on that promise, they achieved a surprise legal victory. National Lawyers Guild attorneys, who have defended OWS under the name Liberty Park Legal Working Group (LPLWG), convinced a judge to issue a temporary restraining order against the police and Brookfield Properties, the company that owns Zuccotti Park.

“The occupiers’ right to free speech is based in our most core legal principles and we will be here till the end to fight for those rights,” said LPLWG attorney Gideon Oliver in a statement, after the restraining order was signed.

The order would prevent the city from enforcing new rules on what equipment could be brought into the Zuccotti Park, and allow OWS protestors back into their camp with all of their belongings.

Police have yet to allow protestors back, however, as the order has been challenged by Bloomberg and is currently in a state Supreme Court hearing.

Tuesday’s raid came amidst similar crackdowns in other cities with large occupations, like Oakland, Portland and Denver, and two days before Nov. 17, the two-month anniversary of OWS, on which protestors have called for a “day of action”.

“It’s pretty likely that this was timed to try to take the wind out of the sails of the planned march to shut down Wall Street on Thursday. That’s the kind of thing Bloomberg has done in the past,” said Nathan Schneider, editor of the website Waging Non-Violence.

“But from the feeling on the streets today, it will have the opposite effect and strengthen the numbers on Thursday,” he said.

Excerpt:

The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement has withstood political pressure, bad weather, police violence, and over a thousand arrests, and is continuing to grow in New York City a month in.

The four-page Occupied Wall Street Journal is just one of the collaborative efforts produced by OWS members. Credit: Sam Lewis/IPS

It has spread to over 100 cities in the U.S. and many more worldwide, and is linking up with popular movements in Europe and the Arab World, and connecting itself to long-existing community organisations.

By now OWS has been featured on the news all around the world, and there is no shortage of analysis regarding its potential political impact. But the internal organisation, structure and functioning of the occupations are at least as noteworthy.

The story here is centred on the original Liberty Plaza, a.k.a. Zucotti Park, occupation, but there are many commonalities between this and other occupations, and most of them have similar structure. Still, each occupation is autonomous and run uniquely based on its own area, issues, demographics and situation.

OWS is open, both literally and figuratively, and voluntary. People come and stay either because they believe in the message – that the economic system of the U.S. is fundamentally flawed and in need of radical change – or because they are victims of that system who are less able to live elsewhere, but either way the sense of community felt at Liberty Plaza is palpable.

“The way you become part of the occupation is by showing up and taking on a role – you can join any committee or come up with an idea of your own and organise people around that,” she said.

A cash-free economy

And it’s free. This might seem obvious or unimportant, but possibly at the heart of many activists’ critique of the current system is the ubiquity of money. Money is necessary for virtually every transaction that makes life possible and enjoyable – from food and medical care, to living space and relaxing space, to communication tools, education, and entertainment.

At OWS there is no money, other than donations. You can stay, eat, drink, relax, listen to music, read, talk politics, hang out, sleep or get a band-aid without having to worry about the monetary cost. To OWS activists, egalitarianism isn’t about everyone having the same amount of money, it’s about not needing money in the first place.

Lily White, an emergency medical technician, founded the medical committee. “I started the medical tent on the second day when we had just a few people and a trash bag full of random supplies,” White told IPS.

“Now we have doctors and nurses and two tents full of quality medical gear capable of treating people on the level of a clinic or an ER where patients are seen and treated quickly and for free,” she said, adding, “Most of what we treat is police brutality wounds from batons and pepper spray, but we also treat other illness and injury, and now that its cold we try to prevent hypothermia.”

Organizational structure and decision-making in OWS are also constructed along egalitarian lines – so that everyone gets a say, no one’s voice is left out and everyone participates.

Building a cooperative democracy

The central structure to the occupation is the general assembly (GA). The GA is run at least once daily, and is an open gathering, discussion and the main decision-making body.

But most of what goes on at OWS gets done in committees. Anyone can form a committee, and anyone can join a committee – their meeting times and places are posted publicly every morning.

“At first, OWS can seem overwhelming because there are so many people, but you soon realize there are systems at work,” Shlomo Roth, originally from Toronto, told IPS. “It’s disconcerting growing up in a world where we are used to being given orders to come to something so participatory – it’s liberating!”

“I was traveling with family and sort of walked into OWS, agreed with it, and asked what needed to be done,” Roth said. “They asked what my skill sets were and handed a bunch of potential jobs at me. It’s very open and anyone can participate.”

Examples of internal committees are food, which collects, purchases, stores and distributes food; sanitation, which takes on cleaning and hygiene; medical, which collects medical supplies, recruits professionals to give physical and mental care, and trains others to do the same; comfort, which organizes and distributes donated clothing, blankets, sleeping bags, pillows and the like; security, which ensures a safe environment for everyone; and facilitation, which gathers and trains people to be facilitators and stack-takers in GAs.

Of these the food and medical committees are particularly salient, as they not only allow people to literally live at OWS, but because they provide services to the public that U.S. society at large does not, highlighting the way an alternative society could be geared.

“This is an example of the type of healthcare our country could be providing to people, and we’ve organised it on the street in less than a month,” explained White.

There are also external committees for organising actions, creating media and contacting media sources, internet outreach, coordination with community and labour groups, and so on. Then there are informal groups that make art and music, meditate, do street theatre, teach yoga, and all kinds of other fun things that contribute to a holistic life.

More than a month old, OWS feels like a town of its own, one governed intentionally by institutions and actions based on empathetic, egalitarian principles. As a protest, the occupation tactic is successful because of its constant presence and as a base for organising actions.

But at least as important to participants is the opportunity the occupied space provides to organise a microcosm of the society they want to live in. As the movement continues to grow, it is clear that this new society resonates with many people disaffected with the failures of society at large.

“We’re dismantling capitalism and building something better right here,” said Sheik.

New York City police arrested 10 people who refused to leave a vacant lot in a demonstration for homeless people’s rights in East Harlem on Thursday. Early in the day, dozens of homeless people had occupied the lot, which is currently not being used, setting up tents and a makeshift kitchen.

A young boy named Anthony participates in the Harlem "tent city". Credit: Sam Lewis

The “tent city”, a reference to the Great Depression, was intended to temporarily house the homeless, but was also a publicity tactic, designed to draw attention to the increasingly dire crisis of homelessness.

“We are here to send a message,” Jean Rice, a board member of Picture the Homeless (PTH), which organised the action, told IPS.

Picture the Homeless is an advocacy group founded and run by homeless and formerly homeless people. Rice says the occupation of this vacant lot represents an escalation in the housing problem that is sweeping New York City.

Picture the Homeless is demanding that the City convert vacant lots and buildings into low-cost housing.

Homelessness in New York City has reached its highest levels since the 1930s. Precise estimates of the number of homeless in the city elude researchers, but more than 109,000 homeless people have turned to shelters over the past year, a two-thirds increase over the past decade, and many homeless people still refuse to use shelters.

“So many people feel threatened in shelters because New York’s shelters are violent,” PTH member Lorenzo Diggs told IPS.

“There is more control and better chances for a person in prison than there are in New York City shelters, and that is a fact I can attest to,” he said.

According to PTH, there are currently more empty housing units in abandoned buildings in New York City than there are families living in shelters. They say 24,000 apartments exist in standing buildings that developers are intentionally keeping empty because of real estate prices.

“They are warehousing vacant lots like this, and then taking homeless people and warehousing them in the shelter,” Sophia Bryant, head of PTH’s Housing Project, told IPS. “Take just half of the 750 million dollars the city spends each year to keep homeless people in deplorable shelters and spend it on fixing up these buildings and putting up new ones.”

Bryant went on to question why the city continues to award building contracts to large developers.

“These developers are supposed to reserve 20 percent of housing for poor and disabled people, but of course they don’t. They sit on the empty buildings until the city isn’t looking, and then they turn them into expensive apartments and condos and sell them at market rate,” she explained.

New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg had promised to move thousands of families out of shelters and into permanent housing, but the plans appear to have stalled, while studies continue to show homelessness in New York is increasing.

“They haven’t been helping people, just been warehousing them,” Bryant, told IPS. “I got into this new programme and then it came out they were selling people’s vouchers. I got no explanation or apology, and now my voucher, which I never got, has expired.”

Bryant further described the conditions of those who do get permanent housing from the city as less than livable. “The inspection process is non-existent,” she said.

“The housing they’ve moved people into is contaminated with chemicals and has lead paint and ceilings that are falling down. The city has millions and millions of dollars in lawsuits now because so many children have lead poisoning.”

After organisers took over the lot, which is owned by the bank JPMorgan Chase, they set up tents, a pair of food tables from which they offered meals to poor and homeless people as well as neighborhood passers by, and a stage. Hundreds of New Yorkers rallied to support the action, chanting “They say gentrify, we say occupy!”

“It is manifestly unjust that trillions of bailout dollars are given to Chase Manhattan, who owns this empty lot, while the ranks of the homeless are endlessly swelling,” said Joshua Nessen, executive director of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ), one of the many organisations that showed up to support the PTH action.

“If Bloomberg and Obama will not provide enough affordable housing, we the people must build affordable housing for ourselves. This is not a crime – people have the inalienable right to housing,” he said.

The occupation took on a festive tone, as a drum circle formed and musicians and spoken word poets performed, led by the local band, Welfare Poets. Participants in the attempted takeover even put together an impromptu “homeless fashion show”.

But dozens of police, who had gathered in the streets surrounding the lot, became increasingly firm in their demand that the group abandon their new home.

Around 5:00 PM, the “tent city” ended when NYPD dragged people out, arresting 10 organisers.

“We never gave (the police) any reason to be anything but courteous,” Rice, one of those arrested, told IPS.

“You’ll see people have their parking spots on the other side of that lot, and we put this orange partitioning up to let the police and owners of those vehicles know that we are not about destroying property, we are about a more equitable distribution of the property that is in the public domain,” he said.

Picture the Homeless continues to aspire to find or create housing for every person in New York, and connects their struggle to those going on around the world.

“There is a connection between the townships is South Africa, the favelas in Brazil and the gentrification and displacement in Harlem,” Rice told IPS.

“A few years back I was privileged to go to Porto Alegre to attend the World Social Forum, and I brought back to my organisation the concept of participatory democracy,” he explained.

“I was so impressed that the people in Porto Alegre actually play a real part in the budgeting process. Much of what you see here with the way PTH organises, from the town hall meetings to the way we interact with the legislature, is a product of our experience in Porto Alegre.”

Porto Alegre, Brazil, employs a “participatory budgeting” process in which everyone contributes to the formation of the city budget through citizens councils and elected representatives.

“I think participatory budgeting isn’t just possible here, it’s inevitable,” Rice said with a smile.

“They’ve gotten comfortable in a situation where 10 percent of America is absorbing over 80 percent of the wealth. So here you see the beginning of a grass roots struggle that is going to make what they call ‘the impossible’ happen.”

Workers at a munitions factory in Almosnino walked out last Wednesday, joining an anti-war protest nearby. The combined strikers and protesters later stormed the factory after a scuffle with police who were trying to arrest a crowd that was blocking a truck from leaving the factory.

"Workers" fight "police" attempting to arrest them as they blockade their factory. Credit: Ben Case/IPS

Workers immediately held a meeting inside their occupied factory and unanimously voted to suspend production of weapons and switch to the production of solar panels.

Later that day, the people of Almosnino, reeling from economic woes and unable to pay for food, convinced the chief of police to cede power and allow a population without money to eat for free.

This was the culmination of a daylong social experiment, practiced once a year by Shomria summer camp.

Shomria, located outside the small town of Liberty, New York and open to children aged eight to 15, is run by Hashomer Hatzair, a Socialist Zionist youth movement in Israel, the U.S. and Canada.

Once per summer, the camp runs a ‘Yom Capitalism’ (Hebrew for ‘Capitalism Day’) in which the entire camp simulates a town with a free market economy. The remarkably realistic exercise comes complete with a bank, government offices and printed money in a make-believe town named Almosnino.

“It might seem weird to think about a ‘capitalism day’ in a capitalist society. But what we normally do here at camp is live in a kibbutz-style socialist village,” explained Yotam Marom, head of continuing education for Hashomer Hatzair, and facilitator for the oldest age groups at Shomria.

“This day has meaning in contrast with the way we run things on a day-to-day basis. It gives us the ability to reflect on capitalism in a way that you don’t get just living in a capitalist society,” Marom told IPS.

Shomria is run according to egalitarian philosophies. Work is shared evenly, issues are discussed collectively and everything is decided by consensus.

“We do all of our own work,” Marom told IPS. “Aside from a few support staff, the camp is run exclusively by youth.”

Central to the camp’s ideology is the concept of youth leading youth. The youngest camper is eight years old and the oldest counselor is 23. “Everyone is connected to each other, everyone is an educator and everyone learns,” Marom added.

When campers wake up on Capitalism Day, they are handed an envelope containing their starting financial situation. Most will start with both some money and some debt, a few will start with a lot of money and even fewer will start with land and a business.

Throughout the day, kids are able to get jobs, acquire loans from the bank, and start businesses. Everything that goes on in the day, including eating, requires money, which is printed up the night before and available through the bank or through their labour.

Some counselors were also workers and business owners, but many were pre-set ‘characters’ such as the mayor, the factory owner, chamber of commerce and bank officials, and police officers.

Early in the day, a multitude of businesses opened, ranging from lemonade stands to massage parlors and salons to a sign shop, selling advertising materials to other businesses.

Most campers found jobs working in the factory, making ‘bombs’ out of plastic bottles, water and food coloring. A truck picked up the finished products and delivered them to an imaginary military buyer.

“We used a munitions factory this year because we wanted to connect labour issues to the war,” said Adam Bresgi, a 20-year-old counselor who played the part of the mayor.

The day also included politics. An election pitted Bresgi, a socially liberal, fiscally conservative, pro-war incumbent, against a green, pro-worker’s rights, anti-war challenger, played by a 23-year-old counselor.

Throughout the day, two ‘TV anchors’ put on periodic live news shows to inform everyone about what was happening all over the camp, even holding a debate between mayoral candidates.

By the afternoon, when the bank began calling back loans, nearly all businesses defaulted and closed, leading to an economic crisis in Almosnino. The mayor proceeded to simulate a bailout, giving government money to the factory and several other businesses deemed ‘too big to fail’.

This, along with divisions that had been forming throughout the day, sparked protests and a strike that led to the eventual ‘revolution’.

As interesting as the outcome, though, was the social dynamics throughout the experiment. “The most educational part of Capitalism Day is watching relationships transform,” Marom told IPS.

“Normally everything is collective: They pool their candy and share. Their counselors care about their feelings. They work to understand each other and really try to provide for each other,” he said.

“But on Capitalism Day the relationships get flipped on their heads in a moment,” he continued. “Kids wake up and have money or don’t, and that creates class divisions on the spot that in turn create divisions between the kids in reality not in the game.” Indeed, many campers reported having serious feelings about what happened on Capitalism Day.

“It was much harder than I thought to get money,” Gal Gelbard, age 10, told IPS. “When you don’t have money today, you don’t have fun. You can work hard all day and still not have enough money.”

Nine-year-old Idan Cohen told IPS he enjoyed the experience even though it wasn’t easy. “Today taught you how to take care of yourself with no parents and just your own money,” he said. “It taught you how to be responsible.”

“If you have no money now you know how it feels, how it can be for our parents,” Cohen went on. “You are sometimes being a little spoiled to your mom, but now we get it and we know.”

Tamar Golan, at age 23 one of the oldest people at Shomria, said she distinctly remembered her first experience with Capitalism Day as a camper.

“I just remember walking around and having all of my interactions with other people be through money,” she told IPS. “That’s when it clicked for me what the social influence of capitalism is – isolating.”

Golan played the part of the opposition mayoral candidate, who beat the pro-business incumbent mayor by a landslide in a late afternoon election as the economy crumbled.

Despite not knowing Capitalism Day was happening until the morning of, campers were astonishingly clever and resourceful. Prime examples were workers organising a class action lawsuit against the factory owner and police putting undercover agents in spontaneously forming organised crime gangs.

“People acted just like their roles, it was amazing,” Marom told IPS. “Cops acted like cops. Bosses acted like bosses. Workers acted like workers,” he said.

Perhaps the most important question raised by Yom Capitalism was: Why do people in society behave the ways that they do – are there certain roles because people are just different from one another or do power relationships inherently create such dynamics?

Shomria was founded in 1946, then serving as a training farm for people to learn how to live on kibbutzim before they would move to Israel, and later developed into a summer camp.

The United Nations concluded an open-ended working group for an international Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) Thursday, part of a lengthy and politically contentious process to nail down a basic framework for curbing deadly illegal weapons sales.

“An open-ended working group in the U.N. is where all states can come to a meeting, it’s an open invitation,” Amnesty International spokesperson Brian Wood explained to IPS. “They are trying to get a better idea of what the realistic scope and parameters for this treaty are.”

Firearms kill over 1,000 people every day, and severely injure three times that number. Many more are raped, forced from their homes and threatened by people with guns.

In 2006, U.N. member states voted on a proposal to target illegal and illicit small arms trafficking and create the ATT. One hundred and fifty-three countries voted in favour of the proposal, named Resolution 61/89, while 24 countries abstained with only one – the United States – voting against it.

Abstaining countries included major arms exporters like China and Russia, and major importers like Pakistan and Egypt.

The U.S. is the largest producer, supplier and importer of small arms in the world.

The U.S. also accounts for one in 10 of the gun-related deaths in the world, about 31,000 per year according to a USA Today study, more than half of which are suicides.

The problem in most affected countries, many of which are poor or underdeveloped, are illegally and illicitly procured weapons. Ninety percent of casualties in conflict areas are caused by small arms, according to the Red Cross.

Small arms include pistols, assault rifles, light machine guns, submachine guns, mortars, portable anti-aircraft guns, grenade launchers, anti-tank missiles and rocket systems, hand grenades and anti-personnel landmines.

Control Arms, a coalition group formed by Amnesty International, Oxfam, the International Action Network on Small Arms and hundreds of smaller non-profits, has been working closely with the U.N. to produce a treaty strengthening and enforcing international laws on weapons trade.

The Arms Trade Treaty would set up a risk assessment system to determine the legality of an arms transfer on a case-by-case basis, based on the likelihood the weapons would be used to harm civilians or in some way other than national defense or law enforcement.

The ATT would also function as a legal agreement to enforce laws and treaties that already exist. Many laws are in writing already, but are not enforced, and national laws differ just enough to make cross-border enforcement very difficult, experts say.

“You can only talk about legal transfers of arms when you’ve got a law,” Wood told IPS.

“If the law is not very good, you can say the transfers are legal but it doesn’t really mean much. For example, the arms that went to Rwanda leading up to the genocide and even during the genocide were never designated illegal even though there were acts of genocide.”

“Arguably the people who did the supplying, if they did it knowingly, should be complicit in acts of genocide,” he added.

One of the clearest examples demonstrating the need for such a treaty was the business of the recently arrested Israeli arms dealer, Leonid Minin. Minin relied on legal companies in many countries to illegally ferry arms to conflict zones around the world in such a way that made him immune to prosecution in any one country.

According to Control Arms, one 1999 transaction alone involved using separate shell companies based in Gibraltar and the British Virgin Islands, a bank in Hungary and a plane from England to traffic 68 tonnes of Ukrainian weapons through Burkina Faso to government forces in Sierra Leonne and rebels in Liberia, both accused of egregious human rights abuses.

Despite his machinations, Minin had to use phony end user certificates and these would have been exposed as illegal in any of the countries involved in the scheme if authorities had bothered to check, but under current international law they are not required to do so.

Amnesty cites Minin’s arrest and subsequent release in Italy in 2000 as a prime reason this treaty is needed. Minin was arrested near Milan but could not be prosecuted because Italian authorities did not have jurisdiction over places where actual crimes were committed.

Minin was combined with Russian arms dealer Viktor “Merchant of Death” Bout to form the main character in the 2005 Hollywood movie ‘Lord of War’.

Bout helped states ship arms and other supplies to war zones, notably working for the United States government in Iraq, but was accused of using his connection to cover a massive illegal arms trafficking business. Bout was arrested in Thailand in 2008.

Resolution 61/89 recognises the legitimate right of countries to defend themselves, and the development and manufacture of weapons to that end, but stresses the dangers posed to that same right of defense if those weapons are illegally trafficked to conflict zones.

According to Oxfam, the illicit weapons trade also exasperates poverty.

“The Millennium Development Goals are the basic targets for ensuring our fellow human beings can live decently. Many countries are failing to meet those goals, and the uncontrolled arms trade is one of the reasons why,” said Jeremy Hobbs, head of Oxfam International.

Two-thirds of countries most likely to miss the Millennium Development Goals are involved in current armed conflict or are emerging from a recent conflict.

States are still debating the parameters and scope of the ATT, with major sticking points including the consequences for violators. Control Arms hopes to have these ironed out and present a proposal to the General Assembly in October.

“This is not rocket science,” Wood said. “These systems are by and large in place, the problem is the systems are different in different states, in some places there is a lack of political will to implement them, and some states just don’t have the capacity yet. The big deal is cooperation,” he said.

“If they get into negotiations next year we might have a treaty by 2012 if we’re lucky,” Wood told IPS, stressing that every year it is delayed costs hundreds of thousands of lives.

By Ben Case
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 9 2009 (IPS)

Nafissatou Diop has worked for decades on issues of reproductive health, HIV/AIDS and development in West Africa, including designing and implementing many studies and programmes.

Nafissatou Diop Credit: Ben Case/IPS

An associate with the Dakar bureau of the Population Council, an international NGO, she holds a Ph.D. in demographics as well as masters degrees in the socioeconomics of development and sociology.

She spoke with IPS correspondent Ben Case about the many obstacles to reproductive health education, and the importance of involving men in issues of contraception and family planning.

IPS: So what are some of the main issues surrounding family planning? NAFISSATOU DIOP: I think that the biggest issue is really to overcome some social cultural barriers and open family planning programmes and services to young people.

In most developing countries we need to recognise that opposition to family planning programmes is higher when it is addressing young people under the age of 20 years because those people are not supposed to have sex, and if they have sex this is within the marriage, and if they are married and have sex, then they should be having children. So they argue there is no reason young people should have family planning.

We need to really push and make sure we say more and more that sexual activity is happening within and without of marriage and those girls – even if they are married – they sometimes don’t want to have children rapidly. Some people find that they’re young and they just don’t want to have the responsibility of having a child.

The other thing is we need to realise is that the circumstance of marriage in a lot of cases in Sub-Saharan Africa is not voluntary, it is some kind of forced marriage. In these cases there is no love or emotional positive engagement. So most of those girls do not want children as soon as they get married.

And there are a lot of young people who are not married and who are sexually active and they need to be protected also.

IPS: Why is education alone not enough? Why do we need family planning? ND: We have to realise that people are having sex. Education is good, but we need to deal with the reality that people need other methods. I think that we need family planning because we do not want unwanted pregnancy.

We want people to have children, great, but we want people to have children when they are ready to have them, and ready means they have to be emotionally mature and economically able to raise a child, which is not always the case when you are young and in school.

We need family planning because we don’t want dropout of girls from school because of pregnancy. We are already fighting to have those girls in school. There are even more inequities here because the girl will stop school if there is a pregnancy but the boy will continue.

We need family planning because many unwanted pregnancies end in self abortion and we don’t want this. This is something very unsafe, particularly in countries where abortion is illegal, so when people do unsafe abortions it we see a lot of trauma and even maternal mortality.

IPS: So you are saying it is less about reducing population growth than it is about health and quality of raising children? ND: Exactly. This is really the argument that we want to use at field level because if you talk about population growth, of course as a demographer there is a real issue of population growth, but for a lot of people this is not really an important issue.

Africa, as you know, went through centuries of slavery. So we believe we lost a lot of our population and people are still thinking that there is some replacement needed in terms of population. So the population argument is one that is not really used even at the policy level because they think that we are missing some of our population who were taken to America.

Then they are given examples like India and China, which are really growing and expanding their economies and they have huge populations. So when you get more into maternal mortality and morbidity, those elements are more important to people and that’s when people start to think they should put in their effort and invest their money.

So at the field level we need to keep this argument really present in the way we are talking about family planning. But that may not be the case for U.S. agencies, who are looking at it from a different perspective.

IPS: How do gender inequities play into this? How do you get men to care and participate in family planning? ND: This is a main issue. Men are very important and so far I have not seen good male involvement programmes. There are small pilots being tested here and there to see how to bring those men in and make them interested in family planning programmes and make them interested in the health of women, but most times it isn’t really working.

The main indicator we can see is the ideal number of children. You can see that men have higher ideal number of children than women. When they want six children, women want four. So we really need to build programmes that increase the participation of men.

But of course the problem then is how. They tend to be very interested in economics. Men are looking for money. And football, they are very interested in football and basketball and sports in general and they don’t want to go to clinics or take classes. So the issue is where you can target them, where you can touch them and talk and communicate with them.

This is where religious leaders can be used. Often, congregations are made of men, either Christian or Muslim, and this is where we are doing a lot of activities to get male involvement, because at least you know how to get them in one place. For the rest of the population you can try to use targeted messages.

IPS: You brought up religion. In parts of sub-Saharan Africa, the church has been pushing for abstention. Has that been an issue? ND: This is a very big issue. Countries where a large percentage of the population is Christian, primarily Catholic, we are really facing a lot of problems. Then of course when you have Protestant or Muslim communities, they tend to be much more open. Islam is even more open to family planning and contraception for the beauty of the woman as well as for her health and this is written in the Qur’an.

The Catholic Church is really where we are getting the problems. In countries like Kenya and Ghana, contraception is taboo and there we are still struggling with churches over this. Recently we had the visit of the pope in Africa and he again made strong statements against condoms. This is really something we are struggling with. We want to work with them but I really don’t think we will get any kind of commitment from them.

What is interesting though is in other parts you can see that Catholic nurses, for example, they are giving pills and everything because they are looking at the situation and they are recognising that this is important. Their first rule is to preserve lives and by giving that pill or that condom they are achieving that. So we do see some Catholics who are facing the reality and helping as opposed to listening to the pope.

IPS: What do you think the best next step would be? ND: I think the next step would be to raise awareness and increase funding for family planning. Over the last 20 years these programmes have become more weak and under-funded.

The second thing is I hope that the marginalised people we have identified (in a recent UNFPA conference) will be more taken into account in our programmes, particularly in UNFPA programmes in the field. We really need to look at the data and find the vulnerable groups and what their needs are and respond to that.

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The world’s population – already at least 6.7 billion people – will double in the next 40 years if current growth rates are left unchecked, warns the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).

An internally displaced persons camp in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Credit: UN Photo/Marie Frechon

The effects of overpopulation are being felt across the globe, but the fastest growing regions are also some of the poorest. Sub-Saharan Africa has the most rapid overall growth, exacerbating existing problems like famine, disease and violent conflict over resources.

“What we see is countries like Kenya, which had stabilised its growth, are now growing faster again,” Alex Ezeh, executive director of the Africa Population and Health Research Centre, told IPS. “By 2050 Kenya is projected to have 87 million people.”

Kenya currently has a population of 39 million.

The countries with the fastest individual growth rates also have marked concentrations of urban poor populations, such as India, Pakistan, Nigeria and Indonesia.

“We are looking at tens of millions more mouths to feed, children to school, and people to house in the countries that are least able to accommodate that,” Ezeh said.

While fertility rates overall have fallen in every region in the past 30 years, they have fallen the slowest in Africa.

A week ahead of the 20th anniversary of World Population Day on Jul. 11, UNFPA sponsored a three-day conference on access to family planning in developing countries.

Thirty experts in the field convened to discuss improving access to contraceptives and services to the world’s poor. Family planning methods include birth control, emergency contraception, abortion, abstinence and sexual and reproductive health education.

UNFPA says family planning programmes are vital to boost women’s economic and social well-being, especially during the current global economic crisis, and to reduce endemic poverty and high rates of maternal and infant death.

Despite the agreement of 179 countries on the importance of family planning at the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in 1994, the funding for family planning programmes targeted at the poor has stagnated over the past 15 years.

Some participants even suggested the ICPD agreement served as a false indicator of actual progress, providing justification for countries to pull resources from family planning programmes under the pretext of progress, thereby allowing the problem to fester.

“Because of the momentum of growth that has been created because of the past high levels of fertility we have seen since the ICPD, the people that will drive the population growth over the next 50 years are already alive today, they have been born,” said Ezeh. “Now there needs to be a real sense of urgency.”

“If we introduce effective family planning programmes now, we are able to actually forestall the continuing high rates of population growth 15, 20, 30 years from now,” he went on.

“So the more we look at it and ask questions like ‘oh, should we promote condoms?’ or ‘should we involve adolescents?’ the worse situation is getting,” he said. But curbing population growth was far from the only goal of the UNFPA conference.

“Family planning is important because it has been shown with absolutely no doubt to empower women,” Fatima Mrisho of the Tanzania Commission for AIDS, who attended the conference, told IPS.

“It gives women more opportunities for development, it makes herself as an individual survive better, it makes her children survive better, but as importantly, it also improves the general condition of a country,” she stressed.

Worldwide, over 500,000 women die every year during pregnancy and childbirth, many of them from preventable or treatable medical problems. And for every death, another 20 women suffer lifelong injuries and disabilities.

Maternal mortality rates in Africa are at least 100 times those in developed countries.

The conference cited the HIV/AIDS pandemic as another important factor in family planning needs. Both family planning and HIV/AIDS programmes seek increased sexual and reproductive health education and condom distribution to primarily young and poor populations.

“HIV has been a curse, but I think one positive aspect about it is the fact that is has to a large extent de-mystified the issues of sex and opened up and allowed sex and sexuality issues to come to the table much more,” Mrisho told IPS.

Family planning is not only important for less developed countries but for marginalised communities within countries as well.

Indigenous populations have some of the most acute needs of family planning programmes, and also have the least access to it.

“Physicians believe that indigenous women do not want to plan their families because they do not understand the language, they do not understand the culture,” said Nadine Gasman, who heads UNFPA in Guatemala. “But when you ask these women, they want.”

Indigenous people still make up a large population in many parts of the world, particularly Latin America. According to UNFPA, more than half of indigenous girls have a pregnancy before age 20.

There is a high demand for family planning services, but also a lack of culturally appropriate family planning education materials and services in indigenous areas.

“We need to do our homework because indigenous women have specific beliefs and needs and these need to be taken into account,” said Gasman.

“One Quechuan women told me there is a set number of babies in your body when you are born and using contraceptives will kill those babies. What we must understand is people with these beliefs can be very intelligent and even educated,” she explained.

“We need to take anthropology into account. There is no recipe or magic bullet, but family planning can fit into their world view, and there is a real demand.”

Much of the conference focused on providing clear, abundant and accurate information to communities that are difficult to reach so that women can make informed decisions for themselves.

Another common theme was the struggle to involve men in family planning programmes.

Many family planning programmes are work-based, inadvertently targeting men since men make up a large percentage of the formal workforce in many countries. Yet men make up the vast minority of active participants in those programmes worldwide.

The challenge is appealing to men and increasing the understanding that family planning is not a women’s issue but is relevant to men as well.

“Sports,” Mrisho said with a smile. “Sports that attract young, old, usually men but also women. And increasingly we have effective examples of using sports, particularly football in Africa, to try to link men with sexual reproductive health programmes.”

“The world needs to know that family planning is alive and kicking and is ready for expansion for services for young people for older people for women of reproductive ages, for married, for unmarried, for people in prisons, for people in offices,” she went on.

“I wish I could say family planning for all by the end of the next five years,” Mrisho said.

By Ben Case
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 16 2009 (IPS)

Nomboniso Gasa chairs South Africa’s Commission for Gender Equality and is an independent gender research analyst. A committed feminist and political activist, she was first imprisoned in apartheid-era South Africa at age 14.

Nomboniso Gasa Credit: Save Zimbabwe Now!

Gasa now works on issues such as cultural identity, gender inequalities and human rights. She just ended a three-week hunger strike in solidarity with the people of Zimbabwe and travelled to the United States to publicise the political and economic crisis there.

The hunger strike was part of an international relay fast aimed at pressuring other African governments to intervene in Zimbabwe’s impasse, called by the Save Zimbabwe Now! Solidarity Campaign.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

IPS: A big part of your hunger strike was to encourage other African governments to put pressure on Zimbabwe to release political prisoners. What is the status of political prisoners there? NG: Some have been released, but there are many political prisoners still in Zimbabwe. The prisoners are MDC [opposition Movement for Democratic Change] people, activists, journalists, women’s organisations, everything. They have broken no laws and have been given no trials.

Even the ones who have been released, their condition is bad. In order to get out they have been made to waive their rights to any compensation or legal recourse about what had been done to them.

IPS: Last year’s disputed presidential election between long-time incumbent Robert Mugabe and the MDC’s Morgan Tsvangirai received a lot of international attention. Do you think the resulting power-sharing deal has been successful at all? NG: It is very clear Zimbabwe is not moving anywhere. A different approach to change is needed. The power-sharing deal is not working because many of the agreements have not been honoured. This situation is now of great concern to many other African governments because it is so unstable.

[Ruling party] ZANU-PF undermines human rights and has now broken the power-sharing deal. [There is] no real recognition from the government of the deal or that it has to be upheld or respected at all. There is also no transparency, so people do not know what is going on.

IPS: What is the situation for women in Zimbabwe now? How do the economic, political and health crises affect the status of women? NG: All of the crises affect women more severely. One important issue is the widespread use of rape as a political weapon. And there has recently been a noticeable change in the way security forces relate to women.

When Jestina Mokoko was arrested she was in only a nightdress. She asked if she could get dressed before she was taken but security denied her the right to her dignity by not allowing her to change clothing or take her female medication with her.

And of course widespread shortage of food affects women more because they are always the last to eat. Even though they forage more food, after the men and the children eat it is the women’s turn, but by then there is nothing left.

IPS: Another issue caused by the crises in Zimbabwe is that of refugees in South Africa and elsewhere. What is the human rights situation in the camps? What is the impact on women? NG: Of course the refugees are one of the biggest problems. There are so many, and the conditions are so bad. Sexual violence is very common and there are no provisions for pregnant women.

There have been no attempts to remedy this by the South African government [which is hosting most of the refugees]. Also many camps are unsafe. Many are technically not camps, but “open grounds” where people just settle, and there is no security and no protection.

Local government in South Africa is not helpful because even though the national government may make promises to protect and help the refugees, the local governments do not honour these promises. The law says the refugees have the right to go to clinics and get treatment, but in reality they can get no assistance.

IPS: Joyce Mujuru, the current vice president of Zimbabwe, was a freedom fighter in the war of independence and is one of the highest-ranking women in governments in Africa. How does her position affect women in Zimbabwe and the perception of gender roles? NG: Many women in Zimbabwe have become much more strident in pushing for women’s rights, but Mujuru is not one of them. In inter-party politics the women who make it to the top and to positions like Mujuru’s are the ones who will not rock the boat. They are traditional in the sense of supporting their husbands and not advancing the women’s agenda.

After the war of independence, women soldiers for liberation by and large did not continue fighting for women’s rights, but settled back into their family roles. Mujuru is in her position because the people in power feel comfortable with her. Because of this courageous women fighting for their rights have taken a lot of strain and pain.

IPS: How do you rate the efforts of the international community and the African Union (AU) to end the crisis? NG: Frankly the AU is better, but not much. Right now, all of us who are interested in an equitable, just and stable Zimbabwe have to support the current agreement, but we have to be vigilant that it is what it is supposed to be.

The international community must not be complacent here. It is more complicated than we would like to acknowledge, so we must be careful and creative. There must be a flow of aid into Zimbabwe that is not able to be manipulated or misused on a large scale.

We are hopeful that the new administration of the United States will grant a special envoy to Zimbabwe talk to local people, average people who are suffering and understand their perspective and what they actually need. Then it is time to talk about lifting sanctions and how to aid Zimbabwe responsibly.

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