The armed group Séléka recently reinforced its position in the northern provinces of the Central African Republic, notably in the northwest city of Paoua. Credit: Simon Davis/UK DFID/CC by 2.0

By Edith Drouin-Rousseau
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 19 2013 (IPS)

As Michel Djotodia took his oath as the new president of the Central African Republic (CAR) on Aug. 18, Séléka, the coalition of rebel groups that he led and that helped him overthrow the government on Mar. 23, were still looting and killing civilians.

Already among the poorest nations in the world, this landlocked Central African country has seen its humanitarian crisis intensify over the last month as attacks by the Séléka multiplied in areas outside Bangui, CAR’s capital.

Order was partially restored in the capital as the international community convinced Djotodia to back down and change his title to interim president as well as establish a transitional council to hold elections in the next 18 months.

Uncontrolled elements of the rebel coalition consequently retreated to provinces to continue “business as usual”. The outcome was an unprecedented peak in violence against civilians, particularly in the north.

Communities have started to take up guns against armed groups, provoking even worse retributions and reprisals. Internal division within the Séléka also contributed to the exacerbation of the crisis, with several clashes taking place."The Central African Republic is not yet a failed state but has the potential to become one if swift action is not taken."
-- Valerie Amos

As the crisis was brought to the attention of the United Nations Security Council on Jul. 14, Valerie Amos, under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, warned, “The Central African Republic is not yet a failed state but has the potential to become one if swift action is not taken.”

Non-governmental organisations and U.N. agencies were forced to reduce their staff in the interior of the country when the clashes started and they, along with the civilian population, were targeted by the Séléka.

“Our offices have been looted and pillaged to a point where we have to start from zero, and [it] takes us a long time to mobilise the resources to do that,” Amy Martin, head of office for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), told IPS.

A population living in fear

Outside Bangui, rebels are acting with total impunity as the rule of law has disappeared along with the government officials. Courts and offices are being violently pillaged, and police officers hide in civilian clothes for fear of being targeted by the Séléka.

A number of villages have become ghost towns since rebels passed through, with schools, hospitals and houses deserted. The few who remain hide in the bushes, living in unsanitary conditions and vulnerable to diseases such as malaria.

Rising tensions in the north have displaced 4,000 people along the Chadian border, and 206,000 Central Africans have been displaced since the beginning of the conflict.

According to OCHA’s most recent report, 1.6 million out of CAR’s 5.1 million inhabitants are now categorised as “vulnerable”.

At a Security Council session dedicated to CAR on Aug. 14, Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights Ivan Šimonović listed  numerous ongoing abuses, including extrajudicial killings, summary executions, arbitrary detentions, torture, enforced disappearances, gender-based violence and rape, and recruitment of child soldiers.

Many aid organisations have retreated to the safety of Bangui, although some NGOs such as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and the Red Cross, never left the provinces and instead reduced staff when insecurity was peaking. Now they are rehabilitating their installations and sending new workers into the field.

As of Aug. 10, U.N. workers also began to be redeployed in all parts of the country. Full capacity will be reached, however, only when funding is sufficient and the entire state is secure.

A conflict that does not “sell” well

Funding has always been a problem in CAR, even before the Mar. 23 coup. Being a former French colony, the country is still perceived as being a “French problem”, Lewis Mudge, a researcher with Human Rights Watch (HRW), told IPS.

In addition to CAR’s low international profile, several foreign donors have withdrawn aid to the country, fearing that their money would end up in the wrong hands. The losses have been concentrated in the area of development aid, a domain deemed less “urgent” than humanitarian aid.

“At the moment we reach a very high intensity in terms of human rights violations, [but] we have no means to support ourselves,” said Joseph Bindoumi, president of the Central African League for the Defence of Human Rights (LCDH), which was affected by the cuts, in an interview with IPS.

CAR’s traditional humanitarian donors, however, did not remove or reduce their aid, Martin told IPS. Rather, their donations stagnated as demand increased.

Of the 195 million U.S. dollars needed to cope with the crisis, an unevenly distributed 32 percent of funding has been raised. Emergency shelter and early recovery did not receive a single penny, while water, sanitation and hygiene received only eight percent of the amount required.

Security: The first step towards recovery

“The most pressing issue remains security,” Bindoumi stressed to IPS, deploring that insecurity prevents his organisation from providing a sufficient humanitarian response outside Bangui.

Securing the country was a task left to the African Union until Jul. 19, when the international community decided to upgrade the peacekeeping force to the African-Led International Support Mission in CAR (AFISM-CAR). A total of 3,600 units will be dispatched, of which one third will act as civilian police and two thirds as military.

Still, “3,600 is not nearly enough,” Mudge told IPS. With about 20,000 of Séléka’s fighters scattered around the country, the U.N. troops will need to be strategically organised and have a strong mandate to succeed. Otherwise, it will be a never ending “cat and mouse game”.

Yet CAR cannot expect much more, Mudge added, allowing that “a small amount of peacekeepers can still make a difference”. With only 60 peacekeepers from the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, the northern town of Kaga-Bondoro has shown significantly more stability than neighbouring towns.

A canoe trip brought together 200 indigenous and non-indigenous paddlers on the Hudson River for a hundred mile trip on Aug 9, the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples. The commemoration honoured the first treaty between the Dutch immigrants and the Haudenosaunee people 400 years ago, the Two Row Wampum.

Manhattan was the final destination of paddlers and horse riders, where part of the celebration was hosted at the United Nations Headquarters in New York.

Members of the U.N. and representatives of various Indigenous tribes gathered together to discuss this year’s anniversary theme: the capacity of Indigenous Peoples to build alliances through the honouring of treaties, agreements and other constructive arrangements.

Estimated at 370 million, Indigenous Peoples make up five percent of world’s population. The protection of their rights was officialised in 2007, with the U.N. declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The first World Conference on the World’s indigenous Peoples is yet to come, taking place in September 2014.

In a statement released here, Coordinator of the Second International Decade of the World’s Indigenous Peoples Shamshad Akhtar noted that there are still many challenges related to “widespread historical wrongs, including broken treaties and acts of oppression.”

The U.N. must go forward, monitor the implementation of treaties, and find mechanism to remedy treaty violations, agreed the majority of panellists present on Aug 9.

More involvement was even concretely required by Chief of the Ermineskin Cree Nation in Canada Craig Mackinaw. The leader condemned the attitude of Canadian government and called on the U.N. to play a role in overseeing negotiations between them.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged the assembly to “ensure the participation of Indigenous Peoples – women and men – in decision-making at all levels,” pointing specifically at Member-States.

Ban reiterated the importance of including rights and perspectives of Indigenous Peoples in the post-2015 agenda, as development needs to “take in account their identity.”

The question of environmental protection later became the main focus of attention as Native American Onondaga Leader Oren Lyons and other Indigenous speakers took the floor.

Sporadically interrupted by bursts of applause, Lyons recalled the audience that the Two Row Wampum’s treaty was symbolically concluded between the Indigenous and non-Indigenous vessels on the Hudson River. On the river, they were in “nature’s hands,” just as we still are.

The native American voiced concern over the protection of the common good, and more specifically, about the commodification of water. Questions about the environmental impact of fracking, dwelling and the use of pipelines were also raised.

“Will they come to life, or are they only going to be destined to live on paper?” asked U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry during a meeting of the U.N. Security Council last week. He was referring to  resolution 2098 on Peace, Security and Cooperation (PSC) relating to the multi-level Peace framework adopted by the U.N. in March 2013.

The initiatives constitute two of the many attempts to reinstate peace in the Great Lakes region of Africa, a region comprising Burundi, Rwanda, and part of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Kenya and Tanzania.

The March 23 movement (M23) rebels, as well as other armed groups, have been cyclically attacking the mineral-rich eastern provinces of the DRC in the last two decades.

The conflict was sporadically fuelled by DRC’s eastern neighbours, meddling in its internal affairs and being the origin or destination of flows of refugees through the years.

The war has had devastating results on the population, particularly women and children. The death toll is set at 3.5 million (with some estimates at over 5.4 million)  And, as of 1998, 2.6 millions of people are internally displaced and 6.4 million are in immediate need of food assistance.

Despite ongoing peace talks and the presence of the U.N. Stabilisation Mission in the Congo (MONUSCO), clashes between the Congolese army and the M23 resumed on July 14th.
The events of July cast doubt on recent U.N.‘s initiatives.

The support of Rwanda to the M23 could be one of the reasons. Without addressing the country directly, Kerry told the Council “All parties must immediately end their support for armed rebel groups.”

But Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Special Envoy for the Great Lakes Region Mary Robinson remain optimistic.

Addressing the Security Council Wednesday, Ban said that “The prospects for durable peace in eastern DRC remain better than they have been for many years.”

Robinson reported initial progress in the PSC framework, implemented only five months ago, namely, a national mineral certification programme to prevent rebel group to illegally benefit from it and more generally, a regional willingness to provide technical support to monitor the implementation of the framework.

“it may appear minor, but it is important for people on the ground,” she added, also reminding the signatories that they had to respect their engagement for the framework to bear fruit.

DRC Foreign Affairs Minister Raymond Tshibanda Tunga Mulongo said although the intervention of MONUSCO is a blessing, especially as resolution 2098 allows the forces to “neutralize” armed group, he reminded the Council that “it is not a solution in itself.”

The problem “must be solved by dialogue between all the parties in good faith.” Tshibanda said. He then specified that the DRC would not give away any part of its territory or allow impunity.

One way out of the crisis, along with serious peace talks, is to reinvigorate the economy of the region. World Bank President Dr. Jim Yong Kim visited DRC in May and committed to invest an additional one  billion dollars in economic projects ranging from health and education to hydro-electricity.

Cross-border trade and regional economic integration would create interdependence among the countries in the region and provide a new incentive for peace.

Seventy-two journalists were killed in 2012, an increase of 49 percent since 2011, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

“Combat-related deaths in Syria and targeted murders in Somalia, Pakistan, and Brazil are the driving forces behind a sharp rise in press fatalities in 2012,” CPJ Advocacy and Communications Director Gypsy Guillén Kaiser told IPS.

Twenty-eight of the 72 casualties lost their lives in Syria, and 12 in Somalia.

“They call me a dead man walking,” Somali journalist Mustafa Haji Abdinur told the United Nations Security Council Wednesday, at a special session convened to discuss press freedom and evaluate progress on protecting journalists since the 15-member body last discussed the issue back in 2006.

Though the discussion focused on the protection of journalists in armed conflict, Abdinur’s story – and the stories of countless others – highlight the fact that most attacks on the press happen outside of war zones.

Addressing the council, Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson stressed that the vast majority of the 600 journalists murdered in the last decade were local reporters, who came under attack for exposing corruption and other illegal activities within the political system.

The assembled U.N. representatives agreed almost unanimously that the number one cause for the rising death toll of media personnel was impunity, with 90 percent of assassinations going unpunished.

In 2012, not a single aggressor was prosecuted for attacks on the press, sending a strong signal to political groups, criminal organisations, the military and governments that they are free to torture and even kill reporters without fearing any consequences.

Professionals in the field say that semantics are part of the problem. While covering the on-going protests in Turkey’s Taksim Square, NBC correspondent Richard Engel found himself questioning who exactly counted as a “journalist.”

As most people in the crowd possessed cameras, it was “confusing for police officers to identify who was a journalist, and who was not,” Engel told the Council on Wednesday.

Once an exclusive profession, with members of the “press” easily distinguishable from others in the crowd, the notion of journalism has today been blurred by technology such as cameras with cell phones, and the proliferation of blogs and social media sites that often double up as news portals.

Statistics on press freedom reflect this confusion: last year, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) put the death toll at 121, while Reporters Without Borders (MSF) only counted 89 deaths. CPJ recorded the lowest number, 72.

So far the most promising solution to the problem takes the form of the U.N. Plan of Action on the Safety of Journalists and the Issues of Impunity, approved in April 2012 by the U.N. Chief Executives Board.

Several states reaffirmed their support of the action plan Wednesday, signalling a positive step forward as government cooperation is crucial for success.

The use of technology to fight gender-related violence is encapsulated in the “four Ps”: prevention, protection, prosecution and provision of multi-sector services, according to Lakshmi Puri, assistant secretary-general of the United Nations and acting head of U.N. Women.

Speaking at an event at the Permanent Mission of Japan to the United Nations on Jul. 15, Puri stressed the need for the global community to take a “holistic view of the problem” of gender-based violence, and see technology as “a means to an end”, not an end in itself.

Alejandra Colom, programme coordinator of the Population Council, oversaw an eight-year project in the Central American nation of Guatemala to improve the safety of young girls in several rural communities across the country through the use of a global positioning system (GPS).

Girls were asked to rate their level of safety on a GPS device while wandering through the village. The scale went from green (meaning that a particular area felt very safe) to red (indicating a danger zone). The places where men congregate to drink, for instance, were reported as being some of the more unsafe spots for women and girls.

Using inputs from the girls’ responses, and with the help of Google Earth, the project coordinators created a gender-sensitive safety map of several Guatemalan villagers.

The coordinators of the project presented the maps to local authorities to encourage the implementation of policies to protect women and girls in unsafe areas.

But the experience proved that the project had to go further than the usage of technology. Many representatives of local authorities showed a deep inability and unwillingness to understand women’s safety concerns. They interpreted the project as an attempt to map out which areas girls should avoid, rather than seeking to make those areas less dangerous.

Speakers at the event on Jul. 15 also stressed that much of the violence against women occurs inside the home. According to a World Health Organisation (WHO) study conducted in ten countries, 13 to 61 percent of girls and women who suffer domestic violence do so at the hands of intimate partners and relatives, which makes the use of technology as a tool for combating gender-based violence slightly more complicated.

Another project conducted by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in Central Africa seeks to document evidence of sexual violence, and to facilitate communication between victims, police officers, physicians and judicial experts by using a non-specialised vocabulary that all actors can easily understand.

The main tools in this project include a medical chart on which women can document evidence of sexual violence and Medicapt, a mobile phone application that allows victims to take pictures of their wounds and share them with law enforcement officials and medical practitioners.

PHR Programme Director Karen Naimer explains that even though a majority of “people in the DRC do not have running water and electricity, most have access to a mobile phone.”

According to her, the downside of the project is the difficulty of transferring data, as mobile phone and Internet connections are very unstable in the DRC.

“Cooperative enterprises remain strong in time of crisis.” This was the mantra heard echoing around the world on Jul. 6, the International Day of Cooperatives.

The division for social policy and development at the U.N.’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA), in collaboration with the Permanent Mission of Mongolia, organised a special event on Jul. 8 to discuss this year’s theme and look back at 2012, the International Year of Cooperatives.

The assessment was unanimous: last year was extremely successful for cooperatives all over the world. According to the latest Vital Signs Online publication of the Worldwatch Institute, no less than one billion people are currently members of cooperatives.

The United Nations estimates that cooperatives secure the livelihood of about three billion people, nearly half of the current world population.

More importantly, community-based enterprises performed surprisingly well in the face of the 2008 financial crisis, suggesting that cooperatives offer a successful alternative model to the system of free market capitalism.

The key to their success? Resilience.

In a statement released Saturday,  U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stated, “Over the course of the ongoing global financial and economic crises, financial cooperatives have proven their strength and resilience, benefiting members, employees and customers.  They have maintained high credit ratings, increased assets and turnover, and expanded their membership and customer base.”

Resilience is built into the very DNA of a cooperative, which, according to Javier Molina Cruz, a liaison officer for the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), “is concerned with community, rather than… profits.”

A recent report issued by the International Labor Organisation (ILO), authored by Professor Johnston Birchall, points in the same direction, concluding that financial cooperatives were less at risk during the crisis than traditional financial institutions.

The surpluses of the former went to the reserves of the cooperatives or were reinvested in the community, rather than being absorbed by shareholders, which was the case with the latter.

Empowering the poor, excluded and marginalised lies at the heart of community-based business models. Youth stand out as a particularly excluded population, facing widespread unemployment across the world.

Daniela Bas, the director of the division of social policy and development within the UN DESA, told IPS cooperatives can help remedy the issue by acting as new tools for young people to find or create their job.

Cooperatives are also a way out the crisis for the population as a whole. As unemployment rate reaches 27 per cent in Spain, the community-based enterprises increased their percentage of workers by 7.2 in the third quarter of 2012.

Food security is also an outcome of farmers’ cooperatives, producing no less than half of the global agricultural output. The supportive framework of this type of enterprises allows farmers to be more effective, to anticipate better and to recover faster from difficult time.

But even though successful cooperatives tend not to sink in turbulent waters, they sometimes have trouble simply building the boat, as securing the initial funds or start-up loans remains a huge challenge.