Creativity pioneers in Milan, group Photo. Credit: Luca Dimoon/Moleskine Foundation

By Elena L. Pasquini
MILAN, Italy, Oct 31 2023 (IPS)

It all fits into an off-road vehicle that can reach even the most remote parts of Southern Africa to bring cinema where the essentials are lacking, where there’s no electricity to power a projector, and where perhaps no one has ever sat in front of a screen to watch a movie. With just the sun and a solar panel, a theater can be set up in areas where people struggle to access food and water and make a decent living. But what it truly requires is the courage to not view creativity as a luxury. Sydelle and Rowand, the founders of Sunshine Cinema, a network of mobile movie theaters, are not just entertaining people; they are crossing a bridge.

Crossing a bridge. That’s what creativity leaders do, according to Lwando Xaso. She is a lawyer, writer, and storyteller from South Africa, and in mid-October, she was in Milan moderating a panel that posed a challenging question: “Can creativity change the world?” She was present at “A Creativity Revival,” an “un-conference” whose participants shape the agenda and content. They are the “Creativity Pioneers,” women and men whose work is supported by a fund from the Moleskine Foundation and who had gathered in Italy from various corners of the world. Much like Rowand and Sydelle, they answered that challenging question with a resounding “yes.” “Creativity is not just something cute. It’s not just something nice. But creativity is something relevant. That is the key element nowadays to transform society for the better,” said Adama Sanneh, CEO of the Moleskine Foundation.

Adama Sanneh, CEO of Moleskine Foundation. Credit: Luca Dimoon/Moleskine Foundation

Crossing a bridge. That’s what South Africa is doing as well. “Our starting point is a place of violence. We come from a history of inequality, injustice, indignity, and oppression … We are moving across the bridge towards freedom, human dignity, equality, and justice. We’re moving away from trauma toward healing,” Xaso said. The tool her country is employing is its democratic Constitution, its “transformative constitutionalism.” But how does creativity relate to this transformation?

According to “Assessing the Impact of Culture and Creativity in Society,” a course and publication from the Impact Research Center of Erasmus University in Rotterdam, one of the most significant challenges in effecting social change is changing people’s behavior. Or, perhaps, their “hearts,” as Xaso emphasized. “A revolution can change regimes, but for transformation, we need to change hearts.” Xaso also explained: “Creativity and art were instruments of liberation. At the core of the anti-apartheid movement lay creativity. The majority of the country was never going to win the war against the apartheid government with arms alone … It was never going to happen. So, what are the other tools that can change the world? There was music. There was poetry. The ANC built a culture and a department for culture because they saw it as an instrument that can liberate the country …Art and justice reinforce each other.”

Rowand Roydon Pybus is also in Milan, sharing his experiences in crossing bridges. His tool is a network of solar-powered theaters that screen films made in Africa for those who lack access or cannot afford it. These films spark conversations on critical issues such as land rights and gender rights, thereby fostering change. They shed light on often-overlooked subjects. It’s not about just screening; Sunshine Cinema engages young people and train them as facilitators for these discussions. They use a vast collection of African movies to address vital questions in hyper-local environments, where the impact is most significant.

Moments of the conference “A creativity revival”. Credit: Luca Dimoon/Moleskine Foundation

However, assessing the scale of creativity’s social impact remains a challenge. As Eva Langerak writes in Erasmus University’s magazine, “The assumption that the cultural and creative sector adds substantial value to society is widely debated, and the discussion on how that value takes shape is quite controversial.” The social impact of arts, culture, and creativity can be defined as “those effects that go beyond the artifacts and the enactment of the event or performance itself and have a continuing influence on people’s lives.” This definition draws from the 1993 multi-authored work “The Social Impact of the Arts: A Discussion Document.” Measuring the social impact of creativity is not a straightforward task, but the significance of the cultural dimension has been recognized to the extent that participation in cultural life is considered a human right, as outlined in Article 27 of the Universal Declaration. This participation is crucial as it underpins ‘the ability to represent oneself and exercise other rights, including freedom of expression.’

Representing oneself is closely tied to identity, which is one of the questions that “creative pioneers” in Palestine are addressing through the “Wonder Cabinet,” a project in Bethlehem. Designed by architects Elias and Yousef Anastas, the Wonder Cabinet is a space for creative communities to come together and establish a safe place for Palestinian voices to express themselves, not only with regard to creative fields but also to share, learn, and gain exposure to different experiences. As Ilaria Speri, managing director, explained, “It brings together communities that have been physically separated over decades of occupation, with 65% of the West Bank under military rule, including checkpoints and segregated roads with different access permits.” This space offers the Palestinian community machinery, tools, knowledge, and an opportunity for reflection on identity and self-representation, thereby ensuring that the regional and local versions of their story are heard.

Art and creativity have a profound impact on society, encouraging critical thinking and prompting individuals to question their own experiences as well as those of others. This perspective is championed by authors such as François Matarasso, an artist, writer, and policy advisor, as well as Pascal Gielen. These insights hold particular significance in regions affected by conflict and warfare. In the words of Olena Rosstalna, the founder and manager of the Youth Drama Theater “Ama Tea” in Chernihiv, a city in northern Ukraine near the Russian border, the impact of art transcends the physical battlefronts. She observed, “It’s not just the war on the land; it’s also the war in the minds and for the minds, because the propaganda is very big. Brainwashing has persisted for decades.” Countering propaganda is among Ama Tea’s actions devoted to engaging the youth. Olena explained the genesis of their project: “We conceived this project in the early days of April or late March 2022, when the full-scale invasion by the Russian Federation happened. We were in a bomb shelter, thinking about what we could do to help in this dire situation.” Teaching critical thinking through a “fresh perspective” on art and literature has been a central focus for her team: “We manage to show the cases of propaganda not only in Ukrainian history, but in European history, in Polish, in Germany, [and] also taken in the context of World War Two,” she said. Olena’s work is geared primarily toward the youth. She stressed the importance of nurturing “the small seeds of creativity, conscientiousness, and responsibility” in the young generation, firmly believing that by doing so, they can secure a future for their country.

Olena describes herself as a “very small fish in a very big ocean,” yet she believes that everything starts from the ground up. “That’s why I’m deeply involved in grassroots initiatives in my work. Supporting local initiatives worldwide is crucial. It all begins with small steps and grassroots efforts. If we have a world of pioneers, one by one, all these initiatives will flourish into a beautiful garden,” she said. Communities often play a pivotal role in propelling social change. Community-led art projects, unite people to brainstorm solutions for local issues, according scholars. Solutions even where it seems impossible – that’s the essence of creativity, as Adama Sanneh eloquently wrote in Folios, the Moleskine Foundation’s periodical: “Revealing and exploring what is possible in seemingly impossible contexts. It’s about radical imagination and enlightenment during times of ignorance and resignation”.

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Colosseum at the Prayer with the Pope and the representatives of the workd’s religions. Credit: Elena L. Pasquini

By Elena L. Pasquini
ROME, Nov 7 2022 (IPS)

Arms are raised, stretched out towards the sky, holding white cards with the word “peace” written in different languages. A girl, a refugee from Syria, reads the Rome’s “Appeal for peace”: “With firm conviction, we say: no more war! Let’s stop all conflicts […] Let dialogue be resumed to nullify the threat of nuclear weapons.” Pope Francis singed it in front of the people gathered at the Colosseum, holding the word “peace” in their hands, as representatives of the world’s religions did as well. Shortly before, members of those different religions gathered for prayer to invoke peace in their different traditions—a prayer that is “a cry” inside the ancient amphitheater.

“This year our prayer has become a heartfelt plea, because today peace has been gravely violated, assaulted and trampled upon, and this in Europe, on the very continent that in the last century endured the horrors of the two world wars – and we are experiencing a third. Sadly, since then, wars have continued to cause bloodshed and to impoverish the earth. Yet the situation that we are presently experiencing is particularly dramatic…”, the Pontiff warned. “We are not neutral, but allied for peace, and for that reason we invoke the ius pacis as the right of all to settle conflicts without violence,” he added.

The same “raised hands” marched for peace on Saturday in Rome when around 100.000 people from different organizations called for a ceasefire in Ukraine and in all the other armed conflicts.

The prayer with the Pope was the last act of a three-day interreligious dialogue, held at the end of October in the Italian capital and introduced by the presidents of the French and Italian republics, Emmanuel Macron and Sergio Mattarella. The first convocation was in Assisi, in 1986, willed by John Paul II. Since then, it has been promoted by the Community of Sant’Egidio, a Christian community whose fundamentals are prayer, serving the poor and marginalized, and peace. For the role it has played in mediating conflicts, it has been named the “UN of Trastevere” after the city center neighborhood where it is headquartered and where the peace agreement in Mozambique was signed thirty years ago.

Flags at the rally for peace in Rome on Saturday. Credit: Elena L. Pasquini

Leaders and believers of various religions and secular humanists have woven relationships, prayed, and confronted each other. They hand over a map drawn by many voices, too many to account for in the space of an article. “The cry for peace” meeting is also an invitation to “do”. It offers a map of concrete steps, things done and to do, best practices, imagination, with a key word: dialogue. “And dialogue does not make all reasons equal at all, it does not avoid the question of responsibility and never mistakes the aggressor with the attacked. Indeed, precisely because it knows them well, it can look for ways to stop the geometric and implacable logic of war, which is [escalation] if other solution are not found”, explained Cardinal Matteo Maria Zuppi, president of the Italian Episcopal Conference.

World scenarios are made even more worrying by the risk of nuclear escalation in the Ukrainian war—a war on the doorstep of that part of Europe that has cultivated peace inside, but that has let armed conflict flourish elsewhere. “The lack of this commitment [outside Europe] let the war reach its borders, indeed—in some ways—penetrate within it, even in its deepest fibers,” said Agostino Giovagnoli, historian of the Community of Sant’Egidio. “Today war threatens Europe also because it threatens the alternative imagination which is at the basis of the European architecture. War, in fact, is banal: it does not consist only of a fight on the ground but it is also a form of ‘single thought,’” he added.

This “single thought” has changed the European attitude, according to Nico Piro, special correspondent and war journalist of the RAI, the Italian national public broadcasting company. “After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in Europe as in Italy, a political monobloc in favor of [fighting] has emerged from right to left. It is standing out what I named ‘PUB’ [Pensiero Unico Bellicista], a Bellicist-Single-Thought … [It] projects a stigma on anyone who asks for peace, on anyone who has a doubt or raises a criticism of the idea that fueling the war serves to end it […],” he said. “What has peace become then? No longer a tool to stop and prevent armed conflicts but a by-product of war.”

Yet, among the many voices that met in Rome, one word resounds, whispered and then said: kairos. The “critical moment” is now. The war in Ukraine is the “wake-up call” that must be grasped, that cannot be missed, widening our view from Europe to those never-ending conflicts all over the world. Among the many lessons from Sant’Egidio’s dialogue, two should be learned to grasp that kairos: working together daily to build peace in every single life and returning to working together as a community of states, relaunching the multilateral message.

Sant’Egidio’s interreligious dialogue “The cry for peace”. Credit: Elena L. Pasquini

“Whoever saves a single life saves the whole world,” the Talmud says. Or “an entire world” as Riccardo di Segni, chief rabbi of Rome, suggested, since every human being has the potential to create “a new, unique world.” Thus, peace means recognizing the value of each single life, in sharp contrast to the logic of war, in which “the life of the enemy is no longer life. It’s not the same. [That’s] war, [which] dehumanizes everyone a priori in the name of life,” according to Mario Marazziti, member of the Sant’Egidio community. This also happens here, in Europe, where those fleeing wars, hunger, and persecution are allowed to die at sea, “dehumanized,” reduced to numbers.

Unique are the lives to be saved, but also unique are the lives of those who save and of those who build peace by “taking care.”

Gégoire Ahongbonon has a chain in his hand. He puts it around his neck and shows the heavy metal rings to the audience. There was a man chained with that same metal, naked, tied to a tree, like many others. His only fault was a psychiatric disorder. Ahongbonon saved over 70,000 people, “sentenced to death” because they were ill. He is the founder of the Association Saint Camille de Lellis that works in five countries of sub-Saharan Africa. He asked a tough question: “Are we different from them? Are we different from this person, we? […] What did they do wrong? They were born like all of us.”

Saving those lives is already making peace, eradicating the roots of violence and discrimination and planting those of peace, as Mjid Noorjehan Adbul is doing in Mozambique. She is the clinical head of the network of centers for the prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV, opened by Sant’Egidio’s DREAM program, a program of excellence operating in 10 countries. She, a Muslim, is surprised when people ask her why she works with Catholics: “We all have the same goal,” she replies. For twenty years, she has been working to ensure health care for those who cannot afford it. In fact, she was the first one to use antiretroviral therapy in her country. “There is no peace without care,” she said, quoting Pope Francis – “care” for eradicating “the culture of waste, of indifference, of confrontation.” Ex-patients, like those “women who have experienced the stigma firsthand and put themselves at the service of other ill people,” are now helping to build a new health culture – she explained.

Saving lives, restoring hope, choosing the paths of dialogue, and designing an architecture of peaceful coexistence should also be the aim of politics. The multilateral message, legacy of the twentieth century’s “unitary tensions,” however, needs new impetus.

“Those who work for peace are realistic, not naive!” Cardinal Zuppi said. Realistic as it was Pope Bendetto XV that called for an end to the “useless slaughter” that was the First World War. He had a very clear vision of the need for a multilateral architecture, a league among nations that could guarantee lasting peace. A realistic way to design the future still seems to be the one built on a permanent, global agorà that creates space for dialogue. “No multilateralism, no survival,” argued Jeffery Sachs, a speaker at one of the fourteen forums that shaped the meeting agenda. However, the United Nations – the organization founded on the ruins of the Second World War to make the “no more war” reality – risks to be “delegitimized”. That’s something to be avoided, according to Zuppi. “… We are aware that the United Nations is a community of nations. Its every failure represents a weakening of international determination and makes us all losers,” warned Shayk Muhammad bin Abdul Karim al Issa, general secretary of the Muslim World League.

Today, however, multilateralism needs to adapt: “We need a multilateralism that is just and inclusive, with equitable representation and voice for developing countries”, said Martha Ama Akyaa Pobee, Undersecretary for Africa in the Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affaris and Peace operations. “At heart of [UN’s effort to adapt] is the need to engage earlier and proactively, and not to wait react to a crisis after it has escalated”, she added. A multilateralism that does not act only after a conflict breaks out, but that is able to prevent it and to build peace also by supporting “the resilience of local communities”.

The Kairos, the right moment, is now even if there is war in Ukraine and elsewhere because peace must be built even when war is raging. “How to live now?” wonder those who have seen the destruction and the ferocity of an armed conflict, like Olga Makar, who took care of Sant’Egidio school of peace in Ukraine. “This is the question every Ukrainian asks him or herself. In those first days of war, when I felt my life was broken, I found an answer: our houses are destroyed, our cities are in ruins, but our love, our solidarity, our ability to help others, our dreams cannot be destroyed”.

Words that echo in those of Pope Francis: “Let us not be infected by the perverse rationale of war; let us not fall into the trap of hatred for the enemy. Let us once more put peace at the heart of our vision for the future, as the primary goal of our personal, social and political activity at every level. Let us defuse conflicts by the weapon of dialogue”.

IPS UN Bureau

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Ship "Life Support" in the port of Genoa. Credit: Emergency

By Elena L. Pasquini
ROME, Oct 20 2022 (IPS)

That’s why a new ship with a big white “E” will navigate the Mediterranean Sea. The vessel has a red hull, is more than fifty meters long and has low decks. Soon, it will leave the port of Genoa and go out into the open sea. If those living on the north shore of that ‘water cemetery’ bearing the name of Mediterranean had chosen life, the “Life Support” would not have been greeted by the applause of a people packed square, on a late summer night, in the Italian city of Reggio Emilia. It would not be ready to sail now; . if they had chosen life, that ship would have another job.

“Mom, I’m thirsty.” That’s how Loujin died, asking for water. She was four years old and had been at sea for ten days on a boat that launched an SOS to which no one responded until was too late on a still-very-hot September. She and her family were fleeing the war in Syria with the impossible hope of a refugee camp in Lebanon. She died along with six other refugees: “They died of thirst, hunger and severe burns,” said Chiara Cardoletti, Representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Italy, on Twitter. “According to the reports of the survivors who are being verified by the police […] the corpses were thrown into the sea when they began to be stockpiled,” according to the newspaper Avvenire. The sea took at least eighty, dead off the coasts of Lebanon and Syria, just a few days later. Eleven other decaying bodies were recovered in the first half of October off the coast of Tunisia. Before that, water had snatched away so many lives that we are not even able to count them and cry for them.

If there had been a ship, such as the one with a large white “E” on its red sides, perhaps Loujin would be alive. The “E” is that of Emergency, an Italian NGO founded in 1994 to bring aid to civilian victims of war and poverty.

Emergency has made its choice: It will sail the Mediterranean, fishing for human beings regardless of the “barriers” erected in that water. Barriers created by laws, rules, and sometimes arbitrarily, do not prevent women and men in search of a future; instead, all too often, they turn into dead bodies – those that wars and starvation weren’t able to make.

Ten thousand people were in Reggio Emilia at the annual meeting of Emergency, an organization that has turned the defense of human rights and its radical “No war” policy into concrete actions in the most difficult places on the planet. Those numbers, doubled compared to the previous year, portray a country, Italy, which longs for peace and hospitality.

“Seeing and knowing that there are thousands of people dying off our shores is absolutely not acceptable. With [the ship project] we believe to represent many people in Italy who do not want to see this happen,” Pietro Parrino, Emergency’s director of the Field Operations Department, explained to us.

From 2014 to the day of this writing, i.e., mid-October this year, 25,034 people have died or gone missing in the Mediterranean Sea. “They were more than 1,100 just [this year] in the absence of a coordinated search and rescue operation at [the] European level,” a statement from the NGO said. “We must be at sea to save people’s lives,” Parrino stressed. Whatever the reason why those women and men have decided to take the most dangerous of journeys: “They simply need help and we are, and we try to be, in the places where help is needed,” he added.

Being there, however, is a hard choice. There are very few NGO search and rescue ships, constrained by laws and bureaucracy that prevent them from getting to where they are needed, leaving migrants in the hands of the Libyan coast guards or forcing the vessels to wait days before docking at safe ports. Their work is not easy and they have even been accused of being “sea taxis” or “accomplices” of traffickers in a country where the call for a “naval blockade” has been a slogan for those who won the last political election.

It takes courage to choose life, anyway.

The last stretch

Barriers, “walls” within the sea, ancient Romans called Mare Nostrum, built by other choices, political choices, such as the bilateral Memorandum of Understanding that Italy signed with Libya in 2017 or the Malta Declaration issued shortly after. Agreements “that form the basis of a close cooperation that entrusts the patrolling of the central Mediterranean to Libyan coastguards,” followed by the establishment of the Libyan SAR, a large maritime area where the responsibility for coordinating search and rescue activities was assigned to Libya, Amnesty International explained. The human rights organization is among those calling for the suspension of the Memorandum: “In the last five years, over 85 thousand people have been intercepted at sea and sent back to Libya: men, women and children who have faced arbitrary detention, torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, rape and sexual violence, forced labor and illegal killings.”

Any attempt to pull out those barriers, even if made up of boats, is doomed to fail; instead, it will produce pain. Migrations do not stop, new routes open up, and the old ones close and then reopen as the laws or European policies change. Crossing the sea is just the last stretch of a long journey in which human trafficking is a business built on desperation and managed by the same organizations that smuggle drugs and oil. Trips are a commodity sold on a market where the currency can be money or one’s body.

The Mediterranean route will continue to be worth a lot of money. Dirty money, cash, mobilized in a very sophisticated way, ends up in the pockets of those we do not know, or rather, of those about whom we know what they do, financing other illicit businesses. It is not just a question of the “passage” [across the sea], but it is a much more complicated mechanism.

NGOs’ search and rescue operations were said to have increased the number of people who decided to travel to Europe. However, data from the Italian Ministry of the Interior show that this is false, as reported by the Huffington Post last year. In 2021, there were many more arrivals than the previous year even though there was not a greater number of vessels in the Mediterranean, as some of them were blocked by “bureaucracy.” There were few ships but a greater number of arrivals because those who flee wars and hunger always find new ways to organize the journey.

“People who [decide] to leave countries like Afghanistan or the Horn of Africa and have thousands and thousands of kilometers in front of them to be covered on foot with little or no money, are people who have courage and determination unimaginable for us,” Parrino said. Desperation moves them, a desperation that puts them in the hands of those who promise a place in a rust bucket. “The story these people tell is that few get a simple ride. Many are enslaved for years, in the fields or as prostitutes, because the traffickers earn tens of thousands of euros by selling them and reselling them before setting them free again. The trafficking is not to let people cross the Mediterranean; the trafficking is the management of these thousands of desperate people who are exploited as labor slaves and sex slaves for months, for years, before receiving the green light to take the boat,” he added. “People do it because they have even less than the [little] hope that lies ahead. They are people who accept a risk they already know”, Parrino stressed.

Gabriele Baratto, a criminologist at the University of Trento, studied that market for a research project. He investigated the “digitization” of human trafficking.

Smugglers use social media, especially Facebook, to find migrants who want to leave. Then Baratto and his team contacted them. They thought it would be difficult, that they would have to turn to the dark web, that they would have to use secret jargon. But no, everything happens in the light of day. It was enough to type simple keywords, questions such as: “how to get to Europe.”

“[There are] hundreds of posts, pages, and groups dedicated to promoting travel for migrants and these posts contained and contain basic information on the [route], point of departure, point of arrival and some indication on the price, date, [and] month of departure. And the thing that left us most bewildered was that there was the phone number of the traffickers,” Baratto explained at Emergency’s meeting in Reggio Emilia.

They are “tour operators” of pain, who ask to be reached by phone, WhatsApp, or Skype, which are more difficult to intercept. “We came up with scripts, stories saying: ‘I am in Italy but I have my sister, I have my brother, I have my parents [who have to leave].’ They answer, and if they don’t answer, they write to you. Within a maximum of half an hour you can talk to them on the phone and they give you all the information.” The more you pay, the safer, more “comfortable,” and more direct the journey is, and traffickers know how laws and policies of states in Europe change.

“‘If you did this, why don’t the police do the same?’ [people ask us],” Baratto added. It is just too difficult to arrest traffickers one by one. The solution is only “a new approach to immigration,” he believes.

Behind that market in the sunlight, there is hell – the hell that Emergency knows.

“Is it possible to open a humanitarian corridor and decide with what means (to intervene)? … We know very well from where they come…”, Parrino told us. The only answer to those questions has been Europe’s agreement with Libya, providing patrol boats, money, preventing migrants and refugees from leaving the north african country.

“The flows from the countries of departure have not changed, the flows in the countries of arrival have greatly decreased. Where do all these people go? How do traffickers use them?”, he said.

To halt the chain of deaths, it would be necessary to eradicate the factors that force people to leave or to decide that it can’t be fate to open the doors of Europe: “Access […] cannot be by chance for [those] who are saved at sea or manage to land on our shores by boat. We think that it should be much better structured, without launching ‘invasion’ alarms,” he said.

Legal and safe access for those who must leave their countries: That’s the call of the NGO Emergency. Until then, it will be at sea because the sea swallows everything. “After a few minutes the sea is flat and you don’t realize that there has been a tragedy, there are no pieces left, nothing remains …” Parrino said from the Reggio Emilia stage.

No one answered the SOS of the boat that took away the souls of those eighty people who died in mid-September, as happened to Loujin. No one listened to their cries, betraying the ancient law of the sea that imposes that obligation. Instead, Emergency wants to be there with its “Life Support” to respond to those ships that cry out. It will be one of the few of that small fleet of NGOs that resists the obstacles dictated by a guilty and inhuman bureaucracy that pulls invisible barbed wires straight into the water.

A “bureaucracy,” the Italian one, to which the European Court of Justice replied in August, giving reason to the NGO’s Sea Watch vessels blocked for months in the ports of Palermo and Porto Empedocle in 2020. Ships subjected to inspections, prevented from operating for reasons such as “missing certifications” or “too many people on board.” Laws, political choices, and administrative stops that over time have forced NGOs to rethink even “how” help is brought.

Emergency has already been operating since 2016 with other partners offering health and social assistance, a type of aid that was not so common in the past because search and rescue operations were quick and disembarkation never too long. But now, docking in Italy can be timeless.

“The longest mission I can remember was fifty days. Fifty days at sea, of which at least thirty [were] with the refugees on board because [they were] stuck in the harbor, with people jumping off the ship [and] psychologists who had to get on,” Parrino remembered.

There are no well-defined rules, he explained, but a lot of arbitrariness, differences according to the ports or the “political climate. There were moments that three or four days passed from identification at sea to disembarkation and moments when thirty or forty days passed,” he added.

That’s why Life Support’s mission will be about fifteen days, as it could be necessary to stay on board longer. “If I had to leave and return from Sicily, it takes about a day to go patrolling in front of the Libyan coast, and you go there when there are good weather windows because in bad weather there are clearly no departures. Within two or three days you should be able to identify the target, so within four or five days the mission should be over.”

That’s just theory. More often, boat persons must share the little space of the ship for days, and over time that forced coexistence can become hard. “Those vessels are clearly not cruise ships. We are renovating the one we bought to the fullest with the experience we have gained over the years, but there are certainly no one hundred and seventy cabins … so things get heavy.”

Two or three days after the rescue, adrenaline turns into other fears, and “everything returns to memory: hunger, despair, what you have left … what you have suffered, the [fear] for what has been and for what will happen.” This is why keeping people on board for a long time has profound repercussions for everyone. We need to work “on empathy” and we need to increase the staff, doctors, [and] nurses, “we need to have psychologists ready to board in case the ship has to stop, you have a crew under pressure,” Parrino explained.

Search and rescue at sea by NGOs is often a divisive topic but saving lives cannot be divisive, ever. This is Energency’s starting point, also this time. That’s why the “Life Support” will go out into the open sea. On its red hull, it will take, off the shores of Genoa, the words of Gino Strada, its founder, who in 2017 won the SunHak Peace Prize and who passed away last year: “If the rights are not for every single person, you’d better call them privileges.”

Life can’t be a privilege.

IPS UN Bureau

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A Village in Ituri, DRC. Credit: Elena L. Pasquini

By Elena L. Pasquini
ROME, Mar 1 2022 (IPS)

A small yellow puppet hangs from the butt of a gun. The eyes and shorts of the figure that children love are just traces of faded black.

“It’s a detail, but it tells what the war is.”

The sunlight of spring is a promise. It covers the joyful space of the restaurant where I am sharing lunch with friends on an April day. Rome is blindingly beautiful.

I am displaying a photograph taken by a colleague reporting from the field while we are wine tasting and calmly discussing how the world can be revealed through an image.

The small yellow puppet is the gift of a son to a soldier father. The father has brought it with him to the frontline, a remembrance of playtime and maybe hugs.

“Where was that photo taken?” asks a young woman sitting at the table.

“Donetsk.”

“Where is Donetsk?”

“It is a city close to the border with Russia. Self-proclaimed republic of Donetsk or Ukraine. There is a war there,” I answer.

“Is there a war in Europe?” she says, astonished.

It is 2019 and no one at the table is aware that the country no more than a day’s drive from us has been fighting for five years. They do not know it, or they have forgotten it, because very few journalists are still covering the crisis after its eruption in 2014.

Elena L. Pasquini

“On the frontline of Europe’s forgotten war in Ukraine,” read a 2017 headline in The Guardian.
“Ukraine: the forgotten war,” Al Jazeera warned in 2019.

“While Russia masses troops and the West warns against escalation, in Ukraine the fighting grinds on as it has for years,” Politico reminded us in December of last year.

According to the humanitarian organization CARE, which publishes an annual ranking of the most underreported humanitarian crises, in 2021 Ukraine was second among the ten most neglected. Last year, about 3.5 million people were already in need of humanitarian assistance; 68 percent of them were women and children.

Out of 1.8 million online articles analyzed, only 801 worldwide were devoted to that crisis.

Today, the mortar rounds have awakened Rome. Afraid, we wonder how far those almost 1,700 kilometers that separate Trieste, the last strip of Italy, from Kiev really are. The Ukrainians flee, terrified. Their pain upsets us. We feel close to them, we empathize.

Is it their pain or our fear that moves us?

We ask ourselves how this conflict will impact us here, in the middle of the Mediterranean; if Russian money will no longer be fueling our economy; if the sanctions will be a boomerang; if and how much the cost of our food will increase; if heating our homes will become a privilege. We hear the roar, we hear the violent noise of war, but we didn’t listen to the Ukrainian war whispering on our doorstep. Nor do we hear the whispering of conflicts in other parts of the planet, which should frighten us as well.

“Where are you? Are you OK?” Messages swooped like avalanches while I was at the Italian Embassy in Kinshasa. They wanted to know if the news were true. “I’m fine, I’m on the other side of the country, far from the war.”

A war that whispered the one being fought in the East of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). It roared when a diplomat, Luca Attanasio, was killed. Then it quickly returned to oblivion.

I was there when the World Food Program’s convoy was attacked on the road leading from Goma, the capital of North Kivu, to Uganda. I had traveled along National Route 2 just two days before the assault. I slept where for decades people have died at night, slaughtered, shot. I went there to report from a place where lives are swallowed by silence, while, also in silence, an ocean of gold, minerals, and cocoa invades global markets.

We discovered the Congo war when it struck Europe through the flesh of that young ambassador and of the men who were with him. However, we still do not understand that this conflict in the heart of Africa whispers at our doors every day, too.

When I left Rome for DRC, no one thought I was going to write about war.

War announces itself. It stems from a seed that slowly germinates. It is the seed of a weed that suffocates every flower and becomes hard as a bramble.

If we talked about what happens far from us, if we paid attention, we would see that weed growing. If we paid attention, we could eradicate it. We could judge those in power by how they uproot it before it becomes too vast.

Credit: Nico Piro

In 2019, while a father measured the space of his life in a trench just one day’s journey from us, I was travelling to Ethiopia for the last time. Ethiopia was still the country of the African miracle, a story of hope led by a young prime minister, Aby Ahmed, who was freeing political prisoners and making peace with Eritrea. That peace earned him a Nobel Prize.

No one noticed the checkpoints along the road connecting the airport to the city of Macalle. No one was aware that controls had tightened like never before. The war was whispering, the seeds were sprouting, the arrests were starting, the tensions between the ethnic communities were growing, but Europe was distracted – a Europe that does not feel the pain of millions of besieged people, sealed off for over a year in the Tigray plateau where not even humanitarian aid arrives. “Since 12 July, only 8 per cent of the 16,000 trucks with the needed humanitarian supplies entered Tigray,” stated the latest UNHOCA report.

Ethiopia is in the heart of the strategic Horn of Africa overlooking the Gulf of Aden, the cradle of Islamist fundamentalism, the land of arms trafficking and commercial penetration by more or less large powers. The region of the Great Lakes where Luca Attanasio died is strategic, too.

As it is Kabul, which fell into the hands of the Taliban after twenty years of war: if we had listened to the few journalists who had visited that country in recent years, we would have predicted what happened.

Are Africa and Ukraine really that far apart? Does the Sahel, with its wars and coups, have anything to do with the conflict in Europe, with the roar of Kyiv? Where are the stress points between countries?

The alphabet of war goes from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe and is filled with a pain that does not affect us until it becomes fear. What happened before Russia invaded Ukraine? What was living in that disputed piece of Europe?

We do not know anything about those women, men, and children who flee. We do not know if and how our frightened country has contributed to making the lives of the Ukrainian people so desperate. We do not know anything about them, like the Ethiopians or the Afghans.

Yet we know everything about working from home. In 2021, there were 1,636,992 online articles about smart-working, 239,422 pieces on Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk’s space travels, and 362,522 on Harry and Meghan’s interview with Oprah Winfrey.

What is not reported does not exist, and if it does not exist, nothing can be done to change it. Ukraine has not existed until today. There is no Ethiopia, just as there are no Congo, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Burundi.

We all bear the brunt of wars, however distant they seem. Fear, too, is the same, in the African night as in the dawn of Europe. A daily and uninterrupted fear.

We have the duty of reporting before a conflict erupts, of eradicating the seeds of war and planting those of peace, of keeping the spotlight on them. But the pain of the world hardly makes the headlines until it’s too late.

This feature was first published by Degrees of Latitude

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Credit: Elena L. Pasquini

By Elena L. Pasquini
ROME, Aug 24 2021 (IPS)

It is a metallic sound, harmless. It lasts just over a second, but it can become as sharp as a machete blade or as devastating as the burst from an assault rifle. It is a beep, just the beep of a phone notification. A woman is on the ground, her belly open, her intestines exposed and her severed head resting on her arm. A pagne of colorful fabric still girds her hips. Where? Why? Then, a video. Do you hear those voices? It happened there, in that village. It was them who did it, it was them.

Forwarded many times, the message overwhelms anyone who has enough courage to look at it. However, here, in Ituri, in the East of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, looking at horror is not a choice. Even so, with just a beep, terror spreads. It grows at each sharing, like water swelling along muddy roads. An instant and it is everywhere, ready to be turned into hatred.

In the villages, as in Bunia, the provincial capital, everyone seems to know who those “them” are. Yet no “them” is ever equal to another in a war that is stubbornly narrated, at home and abroad, as the eternal struggle between Cain and Abel, between the Lendu and the Hema, a war between farmers and herders.

It is said to have started again with the death of a Catholic priest in December 2017—a mystery for many, like the mystery hiding the reasons and hands behind a conflict that is blood from an open wound. Ituri has forgotten peace. It remembers only fragile truces.

“We fled because our brothers made war on us,” says François. “The bandits, whom we always consider our brothers, always our brothers, came to us,” says Jean de Dieu. “We shared meals, and the same market,” Emmanuel recalls. They fled, joining the over 1.7 million internally displaced people in this province of just over 65,000 square kilometers in the Great Lakes region.

Michael Barongo Kiza doesn’t use the word Lendu. Sitting with his hands on his legs and wearing a large golden watch, which shines against his brown trousers, he lives in the IDP camp of Kigonze, on the outskirts of Bunia: “The problem is the CODECO who kill people. When I was the chief of Fataki, almost twenty-seven people were killed at the minor seminary, including a priest from Jeiba.”

Irumu. Credit: Elena L. Pasquini

The Ituri war is one of armed groups, a guerrilla war. Irregular fighters, rebels, sometimes hidden in the forest, increasingly confused among their people. The CODECO, Cooperative for the Development of the Congo, is an association of militias founded in the 1970s and described as a sect where animist rituals and Christianity fade into each other. To the CODECO is ascribed most of the violence in the North, in the territories of Djugu and Mahagi. The majority of its militiamen belong to the Lendu ethnic group.

The ADF, the Allied Democratic Forces, an Islamist formation that is threatening North Kivu, began operating in the South, in Irumu. However, Irumu is the territory of the FPIC, the Patriotic force and integrationist of Congo. It is a group related to another tribe, the Bira, and its organization is still obscure. Its main target is the Hema community, which would constitute the majority of the fighters of Zaïre—a militia to which a limited number of attacks have been attributed. However, the geography of the conflict is much more complex: Mai Mai in the Mambasa area, factions, self-defense groups, dissidents of the FRPI (the Front for Patriotic Resistance in Ituri, which, in February 2020, concluded a peace agreement with the government), and many others. What they share is the strategy: targeting civilians.

That’s who “them” is—the perpetrators. That’s the easy narrative of violence generated from ethnic hatred. Yet, in the ISP camp of Bunia, Jean de Dieu Amani Paye looks out of his earthen house. He just knows that had to flee, suddenly. He farmed the land and taught at a school in a rural center, but he can’t say why it happened. “We lived well,” he says. “Someone you were with yesterday is now burning your house. It wasn’t easy. Searching for the cause was difficult for us. What prompted them to do so? We would like to ask them this question so that they can answer and we are reassured.”

Jean de Dieu’s question leads to a look into the eyes of a “many-headed monster,” as this war of multiple roots could be defined, according to Rehema Mussanzi, executive director of the Center for Conflict Resolution in Bunia. “If you go within the communities, communities will tell you different things depending on what has affected them most,” he explains. However, the roots lie in the wounds inflicted by an uninterrupted chain of conflicts.

Before the Congo became a possession of Leopold II, King of Belgium, in 1885, the tribes who migrated in Ituri had a history of clashes over land and resources that time had taught them to manage. It was the white colonizer, with his racist system, who laid the foundations for the hatred that would fuel future violence. It was said that there were superior and inferior races—races that would receive power and races for menial jobs; friends and enemies of Belgium. An “encyclopedia of the black races” crystallized the discrimination.

In 1998, the Second Congo War—the bloodiest contemporary war since the Second World War, with its more than five million deaths and the involvement of eight African countries—brought tension between ethnic groups to the boiling point. The following year, and up to 2003, it would have been a massacre. Then, there were new waves of acute violence until 2007. The victims of those conflicts are only estimates.

Irumu. Credit: Elena L. Pasquini

Even in the village of Sombuso, people died, and Emmanuel Kajole does not know why. “We lived very well with them. They suddenly came to attack us without us knowing what was the problem. … They kill us for no reason,” he says, sitting on a low stool, his hat on his head even though his shelter in the IDP camp of Kigonze is only half-lit.

A draped sheet separates the slightly raised mat from the corner, where the coal burns to cook the food. Emmanuel had a large house in Sombuso, with a living room and three bedrooms. He was a tailor and carpenter, but also the head of a small Hema community, traditionally herders. Seventy-six people raised goats, cows, and other animals, with someone fishing or trading. It was up to the elderly to ensure harmony between the generations. “Our ancestors ate sorghum and corn with meat. If you have a guest, you have to welcome him with meat, so kill an animal and offer him Malofu, a tea,” he says. “Life was too good before this war because the best meat in the region came from us,” he adds.

Traditionally farmers, instead, the Lendus. Today, however, shared lifestyles and intermarriages have caused one culture to fade into another to the point that, even more than in the past, what unites is now greater than what divides. Communities that in the North speak the same Central-Eastern Sudanese language, that have trod the same land for centuries, traded products, and lived with the same frugality that makes this region a place where everything is taken care of as if it were the most precious. A house, a field, or a road.

Joshua Marcus Mbitso has no doubts: “The world today talks of inter-ethnic conflict and that is what we have always rejected.” Joshua is the president of Lendu youth; he lives in Bunia, and the militiamen who perpetrate what the United Nations believes could be crimes against humanity belong mainly to his ethnic group, to his people. “We live together,” explains Joshua. “The Hema and Lendu chiefdoms are side by side, they are like leopard skin: a Lendu entity, then a Hema entity, and so on.”

Joshua talks about how it is easy to generate a fire. He tells of a young Lendu on his way to the market, stopped by the Congolese army at one of those “barriers” that can cost a headshot to those who do not pay. The soldier asks for 200 francs, but the young man has a 500 note—barely twenty cents of euro—and wants his 300 back. “There were young Hema at the barrier because it was in a Hema village. When the young Lendu claimed his 300 francs, he was mistreated by the soldier and the young Hema. They beat him … Do you understand what’s the problem?” he asks. Nobody was punished, Joshua says.

“(The war) began with individual problems. Some young people from our community and neighboring communities—I am talking about the Hema community—have had issues (with each other),” he explains. A trigger, like the death of Father Florent, a Lendu priest who died in circumstances never clarified, according to the Lendu community. The suspicion that he was murdered by a Hema member would have ignited violence. A war built on a chain of retaliation and the actions of armed groups with vague claims: “self-defense,” integration into the army, defense of the nation from “balkanization,” the protection of minerals.

Irumu. Credit: Elena L. Pasquini

“We didn’t know they were planning a war. We lived with them in goodness. In just three days, we have seen changes: No one went to the fields or to the market.” François Mwanza Lwanga talks while his son, still a child, looks at him intently, with his legs curled up. His wife sits silently beside the empty dishes in the small house at the IDP camp where they have found shelter. The space is so small that clothes are hanging from the ceiling and every object can only be neatly stacked. François explains that in 1999, the same thing happened and so, when killings began, they fled. Seventeen died in his village. The ethnicity of the authors: again, Lendu. Yet, he, like Jean, Michael, Emmanuel, and Joshua, refuses to call it an ethnic war, even though the victims are for the most part Hema, to the point that the word “genocide” has been invoked.

“It is an international media campaign (aiming at saying that) in Ituripeople are being killed for ethnic reasons,” says David Mambo Kiza, a lawyer who defends the victims, almost all of Hema, but also Mbisa and Nyali. There is no war between rival groups, only a runaway community, killed by a militia that is a “well-organized mafia, a mafia of criminals.”

The Lendu, unlike the Hema, are not targets of such widespread violence, but they live a different form of suffering in a land where their name is the one given to the slaughters. Christian Ngabo Micho is a young Lendu and lives in a small town in the Djugu area, in the region from which the Hema flee while they remain, sometimes forced to move in search of help in other villages of their community. “It is very difficult to find community members in large sites for internally displaced persons … NGOs and humanitarian workers also find it difficult to understand that the Lendus are suffering … This is why they are confused, they fail to understand that (our) community is also a victim of this war … We are really suffering and the world should know,” he says.

Militias that bring death and devastation to the villages would not be an expression of the communities to which their members belong, as happened in the previous conflicts. However, they find shelter or impose silence in those communities. “The armed groups in some cases live within these communities even when the communities attempt to distance themselves from the armed groups,” explains Rehema. They are still their children, husbands, and youth, but first of all, they are armed. “Even communities and chief of villages, in Djugu in particular, have been targeted by some of these armed groups whenever they tried to advocate against the use of force to retaliate against the other community. In many cases communities are against them, but they have very small bargaining power to convince them otherwise,” he adds. “Often (the militias) say: “We are fighting (for our community) …. This is why we are taking arms. But do they have a mandate from the community to do it? No,” says Josiah Obat, head of the Monusco of Bunia, the UN peacekeepers who have been in Ituri since the early 2000s.

The word that would explain a conflict of an ethnic nature that, however, is not ethnic, is the one that is on everyone’s lips, the one that stirs up the anger of those who do not hold a Kalashnikov or brandish a knife: “manipulation.” Those who want chaos would blow on the burning embers of ancient tribal grudges, fueled by recent wars and the memory of a colonial past that would have rewarded one tribe with spaces of power to the detriment of another—the Lendus. “If the conflict were ethnic, we would not have had to live with them since the wars of 1999,” explains François, who fled with his family, abandoning his village where he was a pharmacist and cultivated a small patch of land. “We ask ourselves whether behind these conflicts there are string-pullers who hide to create conflicts”, says Jean.

It is a genocide armed by “black hands,” internal and foreign. Wilson Mugara Komwiso, provincial deputy elected in Irumu and a notable Hema who works with the youth of his community, wants his message to reach the world. His is a cry: The narrative of the ethnic war would move the attention from the deep reasons for the violence and from finding those “black hands” that use the ancient hatred to incite fighting.

People know the Roman adage “divide et impera,” but here it becomes “divide and extract.” In Bunia, shops facing asphalt-free streets sell all kinds of goods, mostly cheap plastic, imported from China. They arrive along the road that leads to Uganda, the dirt road where trucks raise dense dust and challenge the insecurity of the region to supply a city that is an expanding bubble—the bubble of a war economy. From that street, where rickety and loaded scooters whiz by and women let colored fabrics sway over their bodies, gold reaches international markets, passing through the Emirates. “There are people who may not want the conflict to end because they are profiting from it. They are using their capability to have ammunition to exploit mineral resources.” This is from Joseph Obaith, at the head of the blue helmets.

Leaning against the entrance of one of those shops, three men wait. They lead the way to a small bare office in the back. There is little or nothing on the walls, a plastic tablecloth with geometric designs on a table, chairs also made of colored plastic. And a scale. The deal is silence; don’t even register a sigh. “Gold is brought to us from artisanal mines, small quantities at a time, always the same people,” says one of the three. Sitting down, he takes a plastic bag out of his wallet, inside crumbs of what lives under the thin crust of Ituri. No one speaks. They almost seem to hold their breaths while the camera shoots two suspended saucers with a few coins and a little gold. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, the men ask to clear the room.

You need a license to sell gold, but it is often a façade. A little of its trade goes to the state, and much more ends up in the pockets of a few. Buying it without a trace is now a habit. In 2019, Ituri and North and South Kivu declared just over 60 kg of artisanal gold production. The United Nations estimates that 1.1 tons were smuggled, in Ituri alone. “It is quite easy for gold to illicitly … leave the country into Uganda or into Sud Sudan, or going south into North Kivu and taking the road to Rwanda,” explains Rehema.

Monusco soliders. Credit: Elena L. Pasquini

This is a country where everyone digs if they can and where borders have always remained only pencil drawings on a map. That pencil has never been able to draw the right boundaries even inside, on that land under which gold never seems to run out, and which Hema and Lendu must take care of to produce meat, cheese, fruit, and cereals. It is the same land that the Belgian colonizers divided and distributed among the ethnic groups in a semi-feudal system that after independence changed the actors, but remained the same. Even for those boundaries and for their control, Ituri dies: “To my knowledge, there is no formal land registry for customary land. It is just known that the boundaries of certain collectivities are here, but formally it is really difficult to find a piece of paper that clarifies that this is land belonging to such and such tribe. Actually, it is just historical because those tribes settled on those lands,” explains Rehema.

That is the same land that Bile Luchobe cultivated. Surprised by the war, she fled to Bunia, too. “We lived in peace and security. The CODECO members knew us very well. We do not know where they got the thought of killing us.” The blue mask is lowered on her chin and she has a handkerchief on her head, as do almost all the women here, like those who return home along the road that runs to Uganda. She wears a necklace framed by the ruffles of a pink and yellow dress. “We lived in peace with our brothers. We even went to the market with them without any problems and now they are starting to kill us with machetes and guns.”

She sits in a crowded hangar with other women and children at the IDP camp. She waits to go back home. “I can’t live with them anymore. I can’t live with people who kill like that. But after the war, in peace, we will live together.” Bile is sure of that. Still, however, it is a beep that turns pain into terror and spreads a hatred fed by hunger and misery. These, too, are the heads of the monster that arms men and snatches childhood from children, leads them to pick up rifles and set houses on fire when killing seems the only way to live.

THE FORGOTTEN WAR OF ITURI
Fleeing war, weaving life in IDP camps of Bunia
Between horror and hope in the villages of Ituri
“Don’t call it ethnic. Ituri confict is a mystery”

This feature was first published by Degrees of Latitude

Akilimali Saleh Chomachoma as producer and Sahwili interpreter

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Credit: Elena L. Pasquini

By Elena L. Pasquini
ROME, Aug 6 2021 (IPS)

“We have buried twenty-eight people. I have seen them with my own eyes. We also found three bodies in the fields and buried them too. I can show them to you. It’s not far from here. We buried them there.” The man points to the hills. He doesn’t want to show his face or say his name, but he agrees that his voice can be recorded, so that his words don’t get lost. The camera can’t shoot him; it can only look at the tall grass or at the forest towards the countryside where it is no longer possible to cultivate food. The man talks while music from Lengabo’s catholic church marks the time of truce and hope.

Voices in the villages of Ituri, a northeastern province of the Democratic Republic of Congo in the heart of Africa’s Great Lake region, often remain unnamed, like the victims. A pair of blue plastic flip-flops on the floor of an earthen house is the only possible portrait of another man who leads a group of villages between the Ugandan border and the North Kivu. He is the chief of a once-large community—over 120,000 people—that is now a land of empty houses. He still lives where men who do not wear uniforms lead ordinary lives during the day, but burn houses and slaughter other men like animals during the night.

Credit: Elena L. Pasquini

Towards Uganda is the territory of Djugu. To the South, one finds Irumu, ravaged by local militias and the ferocity of the Forces démocratiques alliée, an Islamist armed group active in Beni. Since 1998, the region has been a theater of conflict that flares up in waves, the last one in 2017. More than by mountains, rivers, and lakes, the geography of Ituri is formed by armed groups that strike terror and target civilians through their areas of influence, their fleeting alliances or fights. Their acronyms—Codeco, FPIC, Zaire, ADF, and others— give the face of reason to blind violence. It is a map of horror, of charred bodies, gutted men and women, their internal organs exposed; of mothers killed with children in their wombs, opened so that their babies can be mutilated. This is what refugees describe, what images document, and what the United Nations reports. The attacks reach up to a few kilometers from Bunia, the provincial capital, where those whom the war has displaced look for shelter.

Sometimes and in some places, the conflict holds its breath. Then, some among those who fled their homes try to return to the villages. Approximately 800,000 people went back in 2020, although 1.7 million remain internally displaced and many have left the country. Those who return know that war can break out again suddenly, in a few days, weeks or months. Yet today is Sunday and Mass is being celebrated. The music plays and the corn dries in the sun at Dele and Lengabo. And at Tchunga, not far from Bunia, the village it is not a place of horror, but a place of welcoming.

To leave Bunia in the direction of Irumu, along the road leading to North Kivu, is to leave behind a safe place—as safe as a city in the middle of a war can be. Early in the morning, the sun is pale pink and the trees are not yet green, but black. The earth is not yet red. It’s a pale pink that reflects itself in the puddles of dirt roads where one can easily get bogged down, stuck between two walls of forest.

In the small town of Dele, in front of the village chief’s house, the children work: a hoe in their hands, two chickens in their arms. A group of men chat. It is Sunday and the hypnotic rhythm of the Congolese music comes from the church square across the street. “We ask for help because life has recently become too difficult. We do some rural activities to survive,” Yoshua Businiliri explains. He looks at the red, fleshy flowers that dominate the fields, whose green hue is so intense that not even the fragile sun of dawn can soften it. Land abounds in Ituri, but it does not produce enough: It can be cultivated only near the houses; no one risks going to the hills where the road thatcrosses Dele leads.

Those hills hide Lake Albert, the seventh-largest African lake, whose name recalls the time when Europe got its hands on Africa: Albert, husband of Queen Victoria. It was the British Samuel Baker who made the lake known to the continent that would decide the future of Congo. However, until 1997, the lake—“Nyanza” in the local language—bore the name of Mobutu Sese Seko, the man who, by forming a dictatorship, destroyed the dream of democracy born from independence from Belgium. Before that, the lake was known as Mwitanzige: There is a legend that says that locusts – ezige – die when they cross the lake. Today, perhaps, oil could change its fate and maybe its name—the oil discovered beneath the lake’s surface and credited with being among the causes of the new wave of violence.

Credit: Elena L. Pasquini

People arrive slowly from the village center and the countryside as the sun rises and makes the tin roofs on the damp hills iridescent. The church is small for everyone; worshippers sit outdoors on wooden benches or low, three-legged stools in front of the stone-decorated facade. The children wait silently, leaning on three poles: a football goal on a huge field of wild grass crossed by a small path. The women wear colored dresses and fabrics, almost starched, and their hair is wrapped in scarfs or skillfully styled. It is a feast day, like a summer Sunday in any small town of rural Italy, and perhaps more.

The priests wear the bright green that is worn at this time of the year. The little dancers are dressed in white. A cross is carried in the procession; hands move and hips swing. Today, the Gospel tells of the miracle of the healing of a leper. Here, where the Covid pandemic finds almost nothing to contain it and where Ebola, with its deaths and the stigma that weighs on survivors, is not yet a memory, people know that it is not only war that kills: “Children suffer from diseases but lack medicines. Especially malaria affects them the most. For this reason, we ask for help: a mosquito net because mosquitoes are too many in the villages of the territory of Dele. We need money for medical treatments,” Yoshua explains.

There is calm in Dele. The war seems far away. Here, too, those fleeing home take refuge. “The displaced need help because they sleep in the bush due to lack of security and shelter. Others stay in the schools, in the church, and elsewhere. They have lost almost everything,” he adds.

Credit: Elena L. Pasquini

It is a moment for the sun to rise, as well as a moment for it to set: The equator passes less than two hundred kilometers from here. In Lengabo, along the road that leads from Bunia to Irumu and then to Beni, the Mass is ceelbrated by the White Fathers, the Missionaries of Africa, a religious order established in Algeria at the end of the nineteenth century and that moved to the heart of the continent. Today, they have a center for vulnerable children, the School of Peace, in Bunia. Every Sunday, the fathers join the devotees in the villages.

The altar with its simple white cloth, the light of an incandescent bulb hanging from a wire above it, high wooden vaults: The church is packed here, too. People dance while the choirmaster, wearing a long green cassock edged in white, guides voices and drums. Outside, the empty and dilapidated houses offer a reminder that a fierce conflict is going on and that Lengabo has counted its deaths.

“Most of them were innocent people,” the man who hides his name and face says. “They were among the displaced. We had welcomed them here. We didn’t know they were militiamen. They had hidden their intentions. They were the ones who started fighting the loyalist army.”

He adds: “Some bodies were armed and others were tied up … We could not distinguish who they were. Even the militiamen were in civilian clothes. Most of them were civilians. There were also soldiers among the deaths, and they were buried somewhere here. Because when there is war, there are deaths on both sides.”

Even in the village led by the man in blue sandals, there is a respite, yet there are areas where he no longer dares to go or where he stops for only a few hours. “The militia has changed strategy, it is not in the bush. It is scattered among the population. Here is where it operates: It operates and then returns among the people. This is the danger,” he explains.

The same is likely to have happened in Lengabo when the village was “sealed off” by a police cordon at the beginning of the year to hunt down militiamen. The arrests were followed by violence and deaths. Esperance Mujaganyi, a thirty-eight-year-old farmer, fled. She produces corn, which becomes flour or mandro, a fermented drink.

Credit: Elena L. Pasquini

A child walks to the church alone. He is five or six years old: long, brown pants and a T-shirt resembling those of English schools, with blue, white, and red bands, and a small crest. Not far away, Esperance sits in front of her house and of what is still just the reed skeleton of a building. Her long brown skirt blends into the ground and into the walls made of earth. Her ears bear two points of gold. “We are slowly resuming the life we had before the war,” she says. But she doesn’t want to talk about that day. She jumps up when asked about the fights.

Every time there is an attack, people leave the villages “because when there is war, the bullets fall and the metal sheets get punctured,” the man explains. They know that everything will be destroyed and stolen, and they will have to start over, every time, once they return. Death can knock on the door any day and militiamen do not even need an AK-47: A match is enough to set a house of dry grass on fire. “You leave your home and all your belongings, and life gets harder and harder on the move to save yourself from war. If you have money with you, you spend that money with no other input and it’s very complicated,”Esperance says.

At least one thousand sixty-seven summary executions and arbitrary killings were committed in Ituri in 2021, as well as all kinds of human rights violations from rape to torture, according to the United Nations Joint Human Rights Office. And this is just one corner of Congo, where the most underreported crisis across the world takes place. Data probably underestimate the scale of the tragedy because the victims often remain silent for fear of being stigmatized. Verifying the facts and documenting what happens in the villages is difficult even for international organizations that often do not reach the most remote areas of the province. Congolese soldiers have been deployed in Dele and Lengabo but people don’t trust them. The soldiers ask for money at checkpoints, like bandits, they say. They are responsible for abuses and violence too, according to the United Nations.

However, villages are more than just places to flee; they can also be safe places to live. Tchunga is not far from Bunia. A rough but busy road leads there. Things are going well now, explains the village chief, Jean-Paul Risisa. Wearing a gray suit and immaculate shirt while standing with his deputy and secretary, he says that welcoming those who have been displaced is not always easy: “There are almost three thousand people just in our locality, and they are many. We welcome the displaced very well, but we do not have the means to build (enough houses) for them.” Behind him, Tchunga is an open-air construction site. “There are many people here and many are starting to build: Tchunga has become like a city,” he adds.

Life centers on a well. Yellow, pink, and blue plastic cans wait in an orderly row to be filled amid the laughter and splashes of children. The well was built by humanitarian organizations—the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and AIDES—because water, in this country that seems to float on it, is as precious as the gold in which the subsoil is rich. However, it breaks backs, especially those of women and children. Until the well was dug, the people of Tchunga had to walk at least five kilometers to get water, and they washed their clothes in the river. Today, water is essential for a community that is growing under the pressure of a humanitarian emergency. Protecting the well is key, as it, too, can become a target of violence. The community takes care of it, just as it takes care of the displaced.

“When your neighbor has a problem, you can’t deny him (help). We help them by giving space in our homes to some people,” Daniel Bakanoba, secretary of Tchunga, explains. “Others live for free in our courtyards and there is a minority who rent a house. But we are not able to respond to every need because when you leave your home, your field, your possessions or when you have children, your needs are enormous.” The houses, he says, are not all “beautiful.” “We’re doing our best.” As is Didi, a local driver. Two women live in his house; each has seven children. They arrived on foot from Bokela a few days ago, their clothes torn and their lives needing to be rebuilt. A pagne—the fabric that women wear around their waists—is always around their hips. Their beds are covered by mosquito nets attached to the walls. The semi-darkness keeps the rooms cool; a little light filters through an antique pink metal window. They were farmers and are now on the brink of starving.

Credit: Elena L. Pasquini

It is a dejavù that seems destined to be lived a thousand times in the villages of Ituri. Rumors, still without evidence, say that it all started in Djugu in 2017 with the mysterious death of a priest—a murder, according to some voices, never proved. It would have rekindled ancient hatred between the Lendu and Hema tribes. But the truth is much more complex: It is hidden in the folds of Ituri’s recent history and in the heart of a land that seems to be too rich to live in peace.

This feature was first published by Degrees of Latitude
Akilimali Saleh Chomachoma as producer and Sahwili interpreter

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The man reading is a displaced man in the IDP camp ISP in Bunia. Credit: Elena L. Pasquini

By Elena L. Pasquini
ROME, Jul 29 2021 (IPS)

He moves aside the curtain, thin as gauze, and then bends over. The darkness dazzles for a few seconds when one enters the house—actually, a den made of earth where air and light filter through the narrow entrance. Jean de Dieu Amani Paye holds her tiny baby, wrapped in an elegant fabric, in his arms. He was a teacher of French and Latin and had a small business. He also cultivated the land: cassava, corn, sorghum, and beans.

Now he is a leader of the ISP camp on the outskirts of Bunia, the capital of the province of Ituri, where internally displaced people take shelter. His struggle is not only to survive but to also help those who have nothing left except a memory of horror. His struggle is against “grudges.”

“There are always grudges that remain in people’s hearts because they see the living conditions we lead here,” he explains. “If we think about what has happened since we arrived, it throws us into regret.” He escaped, having to leave behind everything, like almost two million other people in what is one of the worst and most forgotten humanitarian crises on the planet. He left his village due to the conflict in the region’s countryside, at the extreme north-east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, on the border with Uganda, where the green of the forest blends with the ocher and red of the land.

Bile Luchobe and the men and women who have reached the camps of Bunia from the territories of Djugu and Irumu explain what feeds the rancor. “They go around with the heads of those who kill and mutilate their bellies, then leave the bodies there, among the trees. The houses are burning down. It is impossible to remain in these conditions, so I fled,” she says. “They kill a person and eat his heart. It’s impossible to stay in a place like that.”

Since May of this year, the Congolese government has decreed a state of siege in an attempt to control a conflict that returns in waves like a damnation—from 1998 to 2003, and then until 2007. In 2017, there were less than 500,000 displaced people; now they number 1.7 million in a region slightly smaller than Ireland. The peak came in June 2020, when the brutality of the armed groups emptied the villages. Civilians are targets; terror and rape are weapons of war. A war too often described–in a manner akin to throwing alcohol on a fire–as simply the result of an ancestral hatred.

Bile fears that what happened in Djugu might happen here. “For women, whether you run away or not, these bandits will catch you, they will rape you. Even if there are ten people, they will all pass over you,” she says. She experiences panic attacks because in this patch of land, which should host four thousand people but lodges more than twelve thousand, the gunshots at night offer a reminder that war is not far.

Jean de Dieu Amani Paye. Credit: Elena L. Pasquini

The ISP – where Jean de Dieu, secretary of the camp’s steering committee, lives – was set up through the efforts of displaced people on the properties of Bunia’s Institut Supérieur Pédagogique and the Catholic diocese. They have built small shelters with reeds and mud on the slope of a hill, so close to each other that it’s hard to walk between them. There are also large common areas, a hangar crowded with too many souls. The ISP is not the only IDPs camp in Bunia. Kigonze is home to a growing number of persons. It has been established in 2019 by humanitarian organizations to receive those who lived on other sites now closed and to decongest the overcrowded ISP. It can be reached along a junky dirt road that cuts through cultivated land. There are no mud houses at Kigonze; instead, there are tarapulins, silvery and dazzling under the African sun.

Jean de Dieu comes from a small town near Walendu Bindi. He fled with his family, whose older members carried the children on their backs, on a Saturday afternoon in February 2018. They had not even a sweet potato to eat. The family knew that the militiamen had set fire to the houses in a nearby village and that the violence would eventually reach them. They fled all night, until the morning. “We waited for a truce. We wanted to return, at least to get some water. We learned that bandits had returned, had taken the goats, burned houses, and taken away the many things left.” He talks with his legs curled up and his back leaning against the intensely yellow wall of the room where his household members sleep and eat. “We still live here, despite the living conditions.”

Those who flee want to get to Bunia, which is safer than the rural centers. IDPs sites, although potential targets, are patrolled by police and soldiers from the United Nations peacekeeping mission. However, a hiss is enough to generate panic. “If you hear the shots of the bullets 7 km from where you are, why can’t they get here? It is close to us,” Jean de Dieu says.

“The camp is open, there is no fence. It can be crossed; people pass from left to right. We don’t really know who they are. The assailants have already entered the city,” François Mwanza Lwanga adds with concern. He is among the leaders of the ISP camp, too. He is the president of the committee. He fled with his family and his very young baby—only two weeks old—from Sanduku, almost a hundred kilometers from Bunia. Reaching the city took them three days on foot. It was February 2018.

Bile Luchobe. Credit: Elena L. Pasquini

Elena Mbusi is sitting with Bile in front of her small house, a mirror nestled in the mud wall. She wears a blue dress with white motifs and puff sleeves. A beautifully knotted brown scarf adorns her head. A small crowd of youth throngs beside them. “I was not afraid, but this war is killing our children. This is the biggest loss,” she says. Elena arrived at the ISP on February 12, 2018, from Bahema Baguli and she is part of the team that organizes the life at the camp, too. Like Bile, hygienist. “We are here but we are really afraid. Several people send us messages saying that the fighting will reach us in the city, at the camp. But may they have mercy on us!”

The two women stand and slowly walk through the narrow alleys, up to a widening at the top of the hill where the wind blows and the smoke rises from the braziers on which food is cooked. Children play silently and the cassava dries in the sun on an immense cream-colored sheet. The hangar where Bile lives is not far away. It is a common house made of mud and wooden boards through which a very clear light filters through. A wall is covered with sacks and cloths that seem to gather all the colors of Africa. Children wash themselves in plastic basins while their mothers knead cassava flour to make foufou, a kind of soft grit or porridge. Bile, who lives at the ISP with her seven grandchildren and many other relatives, is frightened by the night crackle of firearms. “I’m afraid of almost everything. I am traumatized and to hear that what happened to Djugu is happening here… When I remember what happened in my village, I have panic attacks,” she says.

Only minor traumas can be relieved at the camps. When the conditions are too serious, patients are referred to the local hospital, while a Congolese non-governmental organization, Sofepadi, takes care of women victims of sexual exploitation, as Josèphine Atibaguwe, a nurse at the Kigonze camp, explains.

Fear paralyzes. Those who live in the camp know that. Outside, insecurity does not cease. There’s nothing to do but wait and hope that food aid, never enough, won’t be lacking. Leaving the camp is a risk that very few take. Children, on the other hand, beg in the city center, becoming easy prey for being recruited into armed groups. The sites where displaced people live mark the boundary between the city and the countryside, but the countryside is inaccessible. “Before, we would have gone to the fields near [Bunia] as day laborers, but those who have the courage to cross the Shali bridge never come back. If you go far, they can kill you for nothing,” explains Rachel Turache, a mother of five who lives in Kigonze and comes from Liseyi. She represents those who live in the bloc, 1 sector B.

“This life is too difficult,” Francois says. “We seem to be people without responsibility because we no longer depend on ourselves but on NGOs. We are unemployed and do not work. Our intelligence continues to decline. Children’s behavior is also changing.” The clothes hanging from the ceiling of his house, the pots in a corner next to a small stove where food is cooked by burning dark spheres of charcoal that dry in the sun, made of coal and water by women and children: Francois tells how hard it is. For his wife, it would be a problem if she could not find the pagne, a large piece of fabric women use to grid their hips. Those who are married wear it, a visible form of dignity and respect.

“It is not the life lived in the village. We ate well there,” recalls François. The children grew up well, while now, childhood malnutrition is rampant. In Kigonze, there is a feeding session every Wednesday for the most severe cases of acute malnutrition. Children are fed pre-prepared food made of peanuts, milk, and other ingredients. It’s cold at night, in Kigonze, and too hot during the day. Mosquitoes bring diseases. At the medical center, Josephine wears a pure white gown and distributes drugs: “The cases we record are mainly malaria, diarrhea, and, in children, malnutrition,” she explains. No Covid cases until now, but only fever and cough, and no plague, which has returned in Aru.

Charcoal balls. Credit: Elena L. Pasquini

The houses of Kigonze are in parallel rows and overlook avenues where a little activity flows: a few motorbikes, small shops that sell everything, women crushing cassava leaves In a mortar, cassava is ground by noisy millstones. The longed-for life is that of rural Africa: lush, blessed yet tortured, where food is at war with minerals, where gold, agriculture, and livestock struggle to share the same land. Bile, who was a primary school teacher, farmed the land after work, as Rachel used to do.

“We try to live despite everything; certainly, this is not the life we led in our villages,” explains Rachel, her hands resting on a yellow pagne, a splash of color in the monotony of Kigonze’s light-colored shelters. The rhinestones on her blouse sparkle as she recounts what the war has destroyed, the mornings when she woke up early to look after the cattle before going to the fields, and the evenings spent sustaining the family income with a small business. “My greatest passion was feeding my cattle,” adds Michel Kiza Barongo, who sits next to Rachel in a pink plastic chair under a canopy. He comes from Fataki and was a village chief. Now, he is the chief of the bloc 15, sector B.

Accepting dependence on others, to lose what has been painstakingly built, is hard. Some try to go back, those who do not want to leave their homes, even if a truce does not necessarily mean peace. A few have managed to move back to their former lives. When Jean de Dieu’s village was attacked, not everyone reached Bunia immediately; some returned for the space of a season. “They also cultivated the fields, but as harvest time approached, [the violence] erupted again,” says Jean de Dieu. “As leaders and representatives, we are reassuring people by telling them that what happens today will pass, that they can stay in this situation because if they leave, they will continue to face other dangerous situations.”

Kigonze has a steering committee, like the ISP: displaced people who help other displaced people, together with local and international organizations, UNHCR, WFP, Caritas, and IOM. There is who is in charge of health, of women, spare time and children, or surveillance. At the ISP, there are thirty-eight avenues, streets, or “blocs,” each with its own leader.

They try to convince those who live in the camp to stay and break the spiral that leads to never-ending displacement, but they also try to tackle the hardest task: helping people bear the weight of suffering and not getting swallowed by another spiral, the one leading from rancor to violence. “What we are doing here is raising awareness to relieve their tension. We give advice so that displaced persons do not participate in demonstrations here and there in the city and so that they know how to deal with stress because everyone here has their own story,” Francois explains. There are stories like that of Bernadette Ngaji, a sixty-three-year-old from Largukwa, who witnessed violence and looting. She sits on the ground, on the threshold of her house in the Kigonze camp. The brown pagne decorated in purple and beige lies like a blanket on her outstretched legs, which she struggles to bend. Three bullets created a long scar on her left leg, which she must use as a pivot to get up. The right leg is marked by burns that look like faded petals. “In my village, I was a hard worker. I had my own shop; I was selling fuel and I had three vehicles and everything has been burned… I’m here as a disabled victim of the war,” she says. Bernadette does not leave the camp because outside it would be worse. She will flee only if war reaches her there. Elena stays, too. “I can’t go back there, not in this insecurity. If there is a return of peace, of course, I will go back.”

In the darkness of the displaced lives, dazzling as when entering the cramped houses, one clings to Michel’s concise words: “It was the mutual help between the populations that struck me more.” Solidarity within a conflict whose reasons no one, from the ISP to Kigonze, can explain. Trying to understand them means unraveling a tangle of threads that from Bunia—the capital besieged by the desperation of those seeking refuge and sustained by the courage of those who struggle to weave the web of peace with those same threads—leads to rural villages and, then, much farther.

Nagaji Bernadette. Credit: Elena L. Pasquini

This feature was first published by Degrees of Latitude
Akilimali Saleh Chomachoma as producer and Sahwili interpreter

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Credit: Elena L. Pasquini

By Elena L. Pasquini
ROME, Apr 22 2021 (IPS)

Sylvain Kakule Kadjibwami lost the use of his legs during one of those ambushes that bloodlessly bleed North Kivu. “When I was shot, I thought it was the end of my life, but when I shared it with other disabled people, I discovered that life is still possible,” he said. Now it is Covid-19 that risks destroying the dreams of Sylvain, a small trader from Goma, a city whose roads are volcanic rock-ridden screes where pick-ups trudge. Those who walk face the risk of falling at every step. However, for those who cannot, the same roads can become traps where it is not only war that kills but also a stigma fostering misery and disease.

Confined to their homes by poverty, even before the pandemic, people living with disability in the capital of North Kivu, in the East of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, must overcome obstacles higher than those erected by the lava of the Nyiragongo. They are obstacles made even more challenging by the coronavirus containment measures that are severely affecting the fragile local economy, made up of informal activities and community solidarity.

“Since the outbreak of Covid, here, in North Kivu, more than a dozen disabled people have died not because they had Covid: They have died of hunger because they had nothing to eat,” Herman Cirimwami, coordinator of the Paph, a Congolese organization that assists and protects people with disabilities, including promoting their rights and social inclusion, told Degrees of Latitude.

They die because they survive thanks solely to the solidarity of their communities, friends, and families. However, confinement has reduced everyone’s incomes along with the economic capacity of those who took care of people unable to provide for themselves. The disabled live off charity because employment has always been almost inaccessible to them.

“Most of them also beg in the street, because they can’t access employment or get a good job,” said Therese Mabulay, athlete, president of the North Kivu Paralympic Committee, and founder of Asam – Stand up disabled, a small vocational training center for women and young people with disabilities. The reason lies in a rooted prejudice. The disabled are perceived as “useless” or even seen as the “devil,” as Cirimwami said still occurs to those suffering from albinism.

Between Goma and Rwanda, the crisis of small traders

A man who trades food in Goma. Credit: Elena L. Pasquini

The few people disabled who have managed to build a business are struggling to not slip into complete destitution, as is happening to the small traders who transport agricultural products across the border with Rwanda: flourishing commerce in the restless heart of the African Great Lakes region, which, for decades, has been tax-free for people with disabilities.

Corn, flour, bananas, plantains, cabbage, potatoes, beans: They use tricycles or rickshaws adapted for those who cannot walk. Propelled by the strength of arms or by men paid to push, they defy rough terrain, loaded almost to instability. These are small ventures that play a key role in the food market of North Kivu’s capital, providing goods at competitive prices compared to those who use trucks. They are exhausted by the eight-month closure of the border during last year’s lockdown, as well as by the costs of Covid tests and passes introduced after the pandemic began.

Jacques Bisimwa Mitima is president of the Association of People with Physical Disability Tuungane, which means “let’s unite” in Kiswahili. It is composed of two hundred and ten members who trade food across the “petite barrière” between the twin cities of Goma, in the DRC, and Gisenyi, in Rwanda. When we met him, he was coordinating a meeting that was a forest of hand-bikes, raised arms, and determination. Members—who tax themselves to help those in need pay for medical expenses or for funerals for those who cannot afford them—were electing new leadership and discussing financial solutions to the crisis. Their life has been harder after the Covid-19 outbreak.

“We have many difficulties. Some of our members have been evicted because they did not have the money to pay the rent. We spent the little money we had during the period of the border closure,” Mitima said. On his tricycle, the painted word “President” and the flag of the DRC are the graphic representations of the charisma of this man who started to trade almost twenty years ago. He has five children and other young members of the family to feed: thirteen people who live on his income. Before Covid, he told us, you could earn as much as fifteen dollars a day. Today, that amount is perhaps fifty cents: “We are looking for some money just to eat and we eat with difficulty,” he added.

Jacques Bisimwa Mitima, president of TUUNGANE. Credit: Elena L. Pasquini

To cross the border, traders need the CEPGL, an administrative document from the Great Lakes Community that must be renewed every two weeks, as well as a Covid test, to be repeated every two or three weeks as well. Maman Soki, a mother of five, is also in the business: “We pay five dollars for the test and thirteen for the CEPGL … and the rickshaw must have the same documents too. So, you have to invest thirty-six dollars every two weeks. The small gain we might get is spent on customs,” she explained. “We live a really difficult life, but at least they have reopened the border.”

It can happen, however, that the documents necessary to travel must be renewed even before goods are sold. This pushes traders into the grip of debt, as Sylvain Kakule Kadjibwami told us. He was a driver before being wounded. “On April 28, 2009, our vehicle was attacked on our way back from Bunia. Armed bandits shot the car I was driving on the Kiwanja road in Rutshuru territory. Two people died in the cabin and I was injured. Behind us, there were nine other injured but I only know of one person who survived and who is now disabled like me. The bullets hit my legs and I still have metal in [my bones]. These fragments should have been removed for a long time, but I cannot afford to pay for a new operation.”

North Kivu’s war has made Goma a city where disability is a frequent condition. Grief inflicted by a war that has not ceased for decades can be read in the amputated limbs and tortured bodies of its population. “Since 2008, people have started fleeing to the city and have settled in refugee camps. It was difficult then to return to the villages and they remained [here] … I don’t have the exact figures, but I can estimate that fifteen percent of the population of Goma has a disability,” Cirimwami said. Not only is war a cause of injuries and physical and mental traumas but it also makes disabled people more vulnerable. According to Cirimwami, many are left alone when conflicts break out. They manage to escape only with difficulty and when they reach safer places, they often do not have the means to survive.

Kadjibwami thanks God. He is alive. He has a tricycle that can cost almost $400—the investment of a lifetime. If one of those expensive vehicles were to break, for many it would mean no longer being able to work because there is no money for repairs. Now the challenge for Kadjibwami is to imagine the future despite the pandemic. Business was good before the outbreak; he could send his children to school, feed them, and save for future projects. Now, there’s only uncertainty. “I can only dream according to my income and with this one, I cannot plan anything.”

The talent of fighting against prejudice

People with disability at the “petite barrière” want to return to living off their work. They do not ask the government for help, but wish to reduce the costs that weigh too much on their fragile income. “We don’t want to beg for our dignity,” Mitima said. It is a dignity that Congolese society still struggles to recognize at all, beyond the fragility of bodies and mind.

“Towards people with problems of mobility, or people with visual impairments, there is a stigmatization … the social environment thinks those people are useless,” Mabulay explained.

Getting married is still hard for women with disabilities, and they can easily be abandoned by their husbands if they give birth to disabled children. Thus, children are not always accepted at schools and even education is not a guarantee of landing a good job. Isolation is greater for those suffering from deafness or blindness: Without knowledge of sign language or Braille, information technologies remain inaccessible.

Credit: Elena L. Pasquini

“When we try to practice sport, when we get them involved in sports, it is to show the community that people with disability have many talents, that they are persons like them, that they can do more if the society gives them a space which can allow them to be useful. For those who have [psychological] problems because they are neglected, our activity in sport is to show that they can have self-esteem, they can do more in society, they can’t be hidden in the houses but they have to show what they can do, their talents,” she added. “Our athletes feel integrated because they accept their disability, they can travel. The community is astonished when they play—wheelchair basketball, sitting volley—or when they sing. Some are singers too. They are proud.”

Making sport an integration tool, however, is a challenge that can be even harder than those faced by the athletes who brought the colors of the DRC to the Olympics in London and Rio, such as Rosette Luyina Kiese, who competes in shotput. Her right leg was amputated after she stepped on a landmine in the territory of Rushuru. In Goma, there is only an equipped space, built by the International Committee of the Red Cross, and athletes often have no money to buy equipment, or even wheelchairs to leave their houses and reach the Paralympic area. It is more difficult to reach the villages in rural North Kivu, where about one hundred and fifty armed groups are fighting. Yet the members of the Paralympic Committee continue to go to Sake, Rutshuru, Masisi, Lubero, and Beni and Butembo to advocate for practicing sport. “The greatest risk of working in conflict areas is the accessibility, kidnapping, and logistical resources to respond to the people in need,” said Mabulay, whose organization also implements vocation training.

Denied rights and Covid-19 prevention

Credit: Elena L. Pasquini

There are about two hundred and fifty athletes from the Paralympic Committee; about fifty are victims of war, but each awareness campaign reaches at least one thousand disabled people. This is a huge number for a single organization, but perhaps still small for a city that is estimated to have close to one million inhabitants and where the lives of most people with disabilities are consumed by poverty, between walls made of wooden boards and lava, in houses facing roads without asphalt and without light, where the water does not reach the kitchens but digs craters that only a 4 by 4 can wade through. The poor population struggles to eat and take care of themselves, vulnerable to disease and, today, more exposed than others to the risk of contracting Covid-19.

Despite the work of organizations such as those of Mabulay and Cirimwami, which provide sanitation and prevention, the situation is very serious: “In the families of these people there are no handwashers, there are no disinfectants … and thus, they are exposed to contamination from Covid. Similarly, people who go to Rwanda, pushed by others on the tricycle, cannot respect the distances of one meter; equally, the blinds, ”Cirimwami explained.

However, the health risks faced by people with disabilities are the result of longstanding limited access to basic social services and of an expensive health care system with few specialized facilities which leaves families with no other options than to “abandon the disabled at home,” Cirimwami said.

“Covid-19 came with more difficulties. Even to get information about Covid is not easy. [They] didn’t reach all kinds of disabled. People who can’t hear, who can’t move from their home, they have more difficulty being updated on the situation of Covid,” Mabualy explained. “Most of them can’t afford the kits, the safety kits to wash hands, to protect themselves.”

No access to health, education, employment, sport: That’s a question of denied rights.

Although the DRC has ratified the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the instrument has been neither properly implemented by the institutions nor disseminated to the population. “People do not know the rights of the disabled and so the marginalization continues both in the community and at the political and administrative level,” he explained. But people with disability want to have a voice in that decision-making process where “there is no one to take the disabled out of marginalization,” he added.

Mitima said it clearly when we met him in Goma: “The life of a disabled person is very difficult … We have no help from the government, sometimes we receive a few small sums from people of goodwill … But if we have to say that there is a person or institution that supports us, no, there isn’t. We can only count on ourselves.”

Mama Soki. Credit: Elena L. Pasquini

Elena Pasquini is an Italian journalist who visited DRC recently. She is founder and editor in chief of Degrees of Latitude

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Credit: KMP in the Philippines, supported by the Agroecology Fund

By Elena L. Pasquini
ROME, Oct 23 2020 (IPS)

Producing food and ensuring nutrition security, protecting the environment and restoring biodiversity, building sustainable and fair food systems: That’s the promise of agroecology.

It is a dream? Or an economically feasible model that can feed a growing world population, expected to increase by 2 billion persons in the next 30 years, reaching 9.7 billion in 2050?

“Some people have been saying: Maybe it is more sustainable or it’s more resilient, but it’s not as productive and not as economically viable. This has been [shown] to be untrue, even in Europe,” Emile Frison, member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, told Degrees of Latitude.

“There are many examples throughout the world now, either at individual farms or at [the] community level or even at [the] regional level, where agroecological practices have been implemented and are showing their potential from … different points of view, including the economic point of view,” he said.

Since 2016, the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh has been the largest-scale example of how agroecology can be applied to increase yields and improve the economic condition of farmers. Zero Budget Natural Farming involves 500,000 peasants in the practice of community-based natural farming: no synthetic pesticides or fertilizers, preservation of the health of the soil, landscape regeneration, biodiverse productions, intense training of farmers, and the involvement of communities.

The Government of Andhra Pradesh aims to cover 6 million farmers by 2024 and the entire cultivable area of 8 million hectares by 2026. The programme was implemented because of the high rate of farmers’ debt, which has been linked to high suicide rates. More than a quarter of a million farmers have committed suicide in India in the last two decades. The strict measures adopted to prevent the spread of the coronavirus are exacerbating the suffering of farmers crippled by debt.

“India as a whole is a place where there have been hundreds of thousands of farmer suicides, farmers’ deaths … In the circle of purchasing expensive inputs and having crop failure, many hundreds of thousands of farmers have committed suicide over the years: there [has] been a lot of migration from the rural areas into the urban areas,” Daniel Moss, Executive Director of the Agroecology Fund, told Degrees of Latitude.

In an attempt to find solutions for sustaining their land and growing food more safely, thereby promoting their own good and that of consumers, “constituency organizations, primarily of women that have been very concerned about health and nutrition and farming issues” have pressured the Andhra Pradesh government to find a solution, Moss explained.

The ambition of “Zero Budget” is to end farmers’ heavy indebtment by dramatically reducing production costs, as well as not relying on credit and purchased chemical inputs. According to Frison, a study of the initiative has shown that productivity was 20 percent higher in agroecological farms than in farms using conventional agriculture techniques, industrial synthetic fertilizers, and pesticides. The agroecological farms also economically performed 50 percent better because of the lower costs of production and the capacity to sell at higher prices on the market, due to consumers’ recognition of the better quality of the products. A survey of 97 Zero Budget farmers reported increased yield, seed diversity, product quality, household food autonomy, income, and health, along with reduced farm expenses and credit needs.

However, India is not the only example of agroecology scalability. The Association of Organic Movement Federation of Kyrgyzstan – BiokG – is developing a network of organic “aymaks,” or groups of farmers. The project, supported by the Agroecology Fund, is based on collaboration among farmers to “develop a system of self-assessment of organic farms production quality, productivity and income generation, as well as their development related to organic agriculture technologies introducing, with respect to national traditions and heritage,” AGF explained. It started locally, at the village level, but expanded into a nation-wide network and could potentially spread to neighbouring countries. “That’s the idea of what we call [the] agroecology movement: there’s a lot of evidence and learning that may happen in one place [that can ripple…],” Moss said.

The lock-down has shown that supplying the urban population is also a challenge, particularly in times of crisis. Providing food from local producers, however, proved to have worked during the harsh months of the pandemic, even in a country where the confinement measures have been very strict, like the Philippines. However, also in the ordinary life of a city, agroecology seems to be able to reach consumers, thereby offering an alternative. In Nairobi, for example, there has been a whole re-introduction of traditional green leafy vegetables that were lacking in the supermarkets.

Mexico and West Africa – namely, Senegal – are among those places that seem encouraging for the advancement of agroecological practices. What’s key is to support civil society organizations in working together and putting pressure on the government, as there are often good practices that are not implemented, according to the director of the Agroecology Fund, which undertook a workshop specifically in Andhra Pradesh to understand how the government implemented the model investing hundreds of millions in training programmes to support agroecology.

“We believe very strongly in the power of the co-generation and possibly of moving things forward together,” Moss said. “We fund coalitions of organizations because we know that agroecology is that kind of field that really requires interdisciplinary solutions.” From nutritional aspects to farmers’ income, from the involvement of consumer organizations and policymakers, to power decentralization and the engagement of local decision-makers, agroecology is a model that requires collaboration and knowledge sharing.

The capacity of agroecology to feed a growing population remains in question but, according to Frison, is a mere matter of profit: “The fact that we need more fertilizers and pesticides to meet the demand is misinformation being circulated by vested interests that want to continue to sell pesticides and synthetic fertilizers.”

“If we are really trying to advance agroecology as the new food system, or the way the food has to be produced, it’s our responsibility to show that it could actually feed the world population, which is growing quite quickly,” Moss added.

Credit: Giulio Piscitelli for Emergency

By Elena L. Pasquini
ROME, Oct 12 2020 (IPS-Partners)

Distant and blurred, as if it belongs to the past, the war in Afghanistan has never been so fierce and forgotten. On the 7th of October, the country entered the twentieth year since the United States announced the first airstrikes against the Taliban, adding a new chapter to the endless bleeding of this corner of Asia, where more than four decades without peace have left entire generations hopeless.

‘I believe that the [Afghan] people do not remember why we started this war.’

The voice of Giorgia Novello, medical coordinator of the NGO Emergency in Kabul, bursts onto the screen of the theatre where the documentary A hospital in war – Emergency in Afghanistan was premiered last week in Rome. Filmed and produced by Nico Piro, special correspondent of the Italian Rai 3, it is one of the few recently released first-hand reports on the Afghan war. It recounts both the spiral of violence in which the country is still trapped and the tireless efforts of those trying to ease the pain of a jaded population.

International media attention withdrew from Afghanistan with the US and NATO troops in 2014, dooming to oblivion an already underreported conflict, where, in 2019, civilian casualties have reached an unprecedented level.

Hidden victims of an invisible war, civilians are paying the highest price: injured while playing, driving, going to school, providing livelihoods to their families; wounded by bullets, and landmines; victims of explosions and airstrikes.

‘The biggest lie ever told about contemporary wars is that they are fought by armies on battlefields. Indeed, they are fought among people in the middle of villages and in the hearts of cities. That lie pushes people to think that conflicts, being a matter of warriors and soldiers, leaves only them killed and injured, not civilians, which are instead the main victims’, Piro told us at the sidelines of the premiere in Italy.

Never so fierce

Three young male patients are seen in the ICU after surgery. All the boys were injured in a mine blast. October 1st 2017, Emergency Surgical Center for War Victims in Kabul, Afghanistan. Credit: Mathieu Willcocks for Emergency

The Italian NGO Emergency has operated in Afghanistan since 1999. It runs two hospitals for war victims in Kabul and Lashkar Gah, a network of first aid posts in eleven provinces and a medical-surgical centre in Panjshir. Over the past few years, notably from 2017, the number of patients receiving care at its health facilities has significantly and consistently increased.

‘The majority come from the provinces, but they also come from Kabul where explosions are extremely frequent’, Marco Puntin, Emergency’s program coordinator in Afghanistan, reached in the Afghan capital, told us. Fifteen percent of those treated are women and thirty percent are children. The large majority of the patients, many of which civilians, are treated for bullet injuries — 55 percent — or for wounds caused by foreign bodies — 30 percent.

‘The security situation has deteriorated, especially in [the capital]. Our local staff do not leave home at night, travelling after dark is dangerous. If they can, they avoid running that risk. The same for us, internationals’, Puntin said.

Fighting continues in all the provinces, too. Fifteen percent of the patientes admitted at Emergency hospital in Panjshir – the safest place in Afghanistan – are still victims of war coming from neighbouring areas.

After the agreement signed in February between the United States and the Taliban, something has changed. ‘We noticed a reduction in large-scale attacks, but a severe surge in small explosions’, he said. ‘In Kabul, even if small, there are explosions every single day, no day excluded’.

In September, a new spike of violence throughout the country marked the stalling negotiations between the Afghan government and the Taliban. Since Sunday, a Taliban military offensive against Afghan security forces has been underway in the Helmand province. Yesterday Emergency’s Surgical Centre for War Victims in Lashkar-Gah received forty-eight patients with war injuries, four of whom had already died upon arrival. “This morning, a rocket flew into the city, and we immediately received six patients due to the explosion. Today, we have received one person who was dead on arrival and another eleven seriously injured patients have been hospitalised. Six have already been treated and discharged,” Puntin said in a note to the press.

“Whilst in Doha there is talk of peace, the violence here in Afghanistan doesn’t stop. Civilians are already paying the price for this new wave of fighting in Helmand, ” Puntin added.

Finghtings are raging while COVID-19 outbreak continues to challenge the fragile national healthcare system. Between May and June, the spread of the virus forced some hospitals to shut down: ‘That stressed a health system already brought to its knees by forty years of conflict’, Puntin said. Cases are on the rise again, especially along the border with Iran.

Emergency is implementing preventive measures in all its facilities, which include the use of personal protection equipment, the reduction of bed capacity to ensure adequate space between beds and specific protocols to minimise the risk of virus transmission.

However, the pandemic was not perceived as a major threat by the Afghan people: ‘Most of them didn’t believe in COVID very much because they have a greater problem: the war. Their priority is to stay alive in the areas where they live, hit more by war than by coronavirus’, he explained.

Staying alive, surviving. And to survive, ‘the only thing to do is not to think . . . You have to try to live normally if you want to preserve your mental health’, Puntin said.

But Afghans know that every day can be their last.

‘Recently, a friend in Kabul, a well-educated young man, who has a good job and a healthy family, told me something which I hold dear. “When I leave home in the morning, I kiss my kids many and many times because it can be the last time I see them.” This describes very well what living in Afghanistan means today’, Piro told us.

Living hopelessly, dying in silence

Life has changed dramatically since the end of the Isaf mission, according to Piro, who has been covering the conflict since 2006. ‘Conflict-related violence has increased, and criminality is on the rise with robbery and kidnapping on a daily basis’, he said.

Nonetheless, it is not just a matter of violence and criminality.

‘After 2001, people really believed in a new and greater Afghanistan, a new phase of peace and prosperity. Now they are completely hopeless waiting for the worst yet to come’, he added.

Fragile signs of hope are seen in the response of the people: ‘From what we see, from our patients and from our local staff, there aren’t many positive elements. I saw a few. The positive thing is that since a couple of years, rallies for peace are proliferating. People can’t stand it anymore. Forty years of constant war: They can’t stand it anymore’, Puntin stressed.

Peace would not only mean ceasing the Afghan people’s suffering, it could also impact well beyond the country’s borders — according to Piro — stopping opium, heroin and methamphetamine production; weakening the Islamists movements in the bordering ex-soviet republics; halting migrations; downsizing Pakistan’s power in the area and so its impact on the Kashmir tensions, possibly bringing stability and prosperity to that entire sector of Asia.

‘Peace is closer than ever’, Piro said. However, the Italian journalist believes that the Afghan people are not giving peace a chance: allowing the Taliban to return to power could mean a peace ‘potentially worse than war’ for many Afghans, forcing ‘the best part of the country — people who fought for and built freedom of press, women’s right, civil and human rights, democracy’ — to flee the country to avoid retaliation.

In 2018, when the documentary, which will be realised in English, was filmed, Piro was almost the only foreign journalist in Afghanistan during the Parliamentary elections. ‘Since 2014, Afghanistan has been forgotten by the international media. Why? Security, the rising Syria topic, budget cuts and so on. All of those reasons are true, but we have to admit that the media made a big mistake because in leaving Afghanistan behind, we, as reporters, did what the politicians wanted us to do. Forgetting Afghanistan meant giving impunity to politicians and their decision to begin and expand an impossible war’, he said.

In silence, hope is fading as in silence Afghans continue to die.

“In this country, divided on everything … just death seems left to unify everyone ’. The voice from the screen chills the audience, dazed by realizing that the conflict in Afghanistan has never come to an end.

This article was first published by Degrees of Latitude

Credit: DegreesOfLatitude

By Elena L. Pasquini
ROME, Jun 8 2020 (IPS-Partners)

The COVID-19 outbreak has brought the world back to the essentials: health and food. Fighting the spread of the virus while ensuring access to food has proven to be a challenge in many countries. The loss of income is reducing families’ ability to feed themselves; movement restrictions and lack of labour for planting and harvesting are a strain on the chain that brings food from field to fork. Hundreds of millions of the most vulnerable people are on the brink of acute hunger, and food insecurity is likely to increase globally.

The fragility of the food chain and the role played by agriculture in the multiple, unfolding crises—including climate change, diminishing biodiversity, and nutritional crises in the forms of undernutrition and overnutrition—are not new issues. But the current emergency is adding a sense of urgency to the need of rethinking the way in which food is produced, distributed and consumed.

COVID-19 “is exacerbating a lot of weaknesses in our current food systems,” Emile Frison, member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, told Degrees of Latitude. “The vulnerability of … large industrial production systems has been clearly shown through this pandemic …,” he stressed.

What strategies exist to build food systems that are resilient to shocks? What alternatives are there to industrial agriculture?

Agroecology is one of those models. No longer niche, it is at the core of global and national legislations, and is increasingly being implemented on farms. Is it economically feasible? Can it feed a growing world population? What are the constraints for the transition to agroecological food systems?

That is what we are going to investigate in our series of articles devoted to the future of food.

Agroecolgy vs industrial agriculture

Peru. Credit: DegreesOfLatitude

Agroecology is not just a production technique, but a multidimensional model, with economic, environmental, social, and governance aspects.

“It’s a food system that takes into consideration and understands that it exists in a biological and ecological environment, in a cultural environment as well,” said Daniel Moss, the Executive Director of the Agroecology Fund, a pool fund of donors from Europe, Asia and United States. The fund invests resources in advocacy and support for organizations around the world that are making the change towards agroecology.

Agrecology is not “one-size-fit-all food systems but food systems that derive from local resources, from biodiversity, local markets, local cultures and habits, and [native] seed varieties,” he told Degrees of Latitude. It is a model – which can be defined by thirteen principles as outlined by the High Level Panel of Experts of the CFS, the Committee on World Food Security – where the production is not of one or two crops, but is diversified, and the chain that links farmers with consumers is short. Industrial agriculture, instead, is based on inputs—like seeds—purchased by external suppliers, on pesticides and fertilizers, on large-scale and export-oriented monoculture in a long food chain.

The idea behind the Agroecology Fund is, in fact, “to fortify local-based food systems,” food systems rooted in the culture and nutritional needs of people living in the area where food is produced. That’s why an important complement to agroecology is food sovereignty. “It means the ability of communities to decide on the shape of their food system, the kinds of food they eat and what they prefer to eat, in ways that support local farmers,” Moss said.

According to Moss, the consequences of industrial agriculture are “dire,” leading to environmental degradation, contamination of water and ecological crises, as well as the shut-down of smallholder farms. It is also seen as a major driver for the development of diseases, including pandemics like COVID-19: “The extension of industrial agriculture into nature by deforestation and bringing agriculture closer to wild animals [is] exposing us to their pathogens. There have been several examples in the last couple of decades, COVID-19 is just one of them,” Frison said. It happened in China, with swine ‘flu that correlated with the very intensive animal production system.

Agroecology means re-diversifying agriculture in terms of production and consumption. “Moving away from an industrial model of agriculture makes it more difficult for an epidemic to become a real pandemic…because the diversity and lower density that we have in agroecological systems do not provide conditions for the rapid expansion of diseases,” Frison added. The better quality of nutrition resulting from a more diverse diet is also crucial in strengthening the immune system and preventing the spread of non-communicable diseases, which are major risk factors, for instance in patients with COVID-19.

Short chains vs long chains

From field to fork, industrial agriculture is organized around commodities that are exchanged across continents: “The increased dependency on long food chains, and long value chains in general, is exposing us to difficulties when you come across such a crisis situation as the one we are living now. The need for re-localisation of production systems, including our food systems, is important“, Frison said.

During the COVID-19 crisis, according to Moss, farmers’ organizations, supported by the Agroecology Fund, have been able to provide a lot of innovations to overcome the bottlenecks generated by the lockdowns, thus proving the resilience capacity of short chains.

“Agroecology is something that requires a lot of local solutions and local creativity in terms of moving the food from the production source to the consumers’,’ Moss said. In the Philippines, as well as in Brazil, farmers’ networks addressed some acute food needs distributing food to the most vulnerable, moving relevant quantities of food quite quickly and showing that the food is “available locally and that’s the food which people can count on”.

Where commercial food chains have been disrupted, “more people have been going directly to the farms that are locally producing a diversity of food through agro-ecological means,” Frison stressed. It is crucial, according to Moss, to rely on “the expertise of producers that may be working in cooperatives or some kind of associations to aggregate the supply of food.”

Supporting short chains and the transition toward an agroecological are political choices requiring public investments, funding for research, infrastructure, roads, more space for farmers markets and a legal environment to regulate the exchange of seeds, access to land, subsidies. What is promising is the global recognition of the need for a transformation of food systems, as remarked in recent reports, analysis and conversations, including at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and at the CFS.

“What we are seeing in COVID-19 is the kind of challenges to the very globlized food system that we have in place right now. … It is a real wake up call to a lot of people that are very concerned about their food supply in times of crisis”, Moss said. “We see a real opportunity for agroecology to strengthen”.

However, the “business-as-usual” temptation is around the corner: “Vested interests” are calling on governments to invest in rescuing companies “… using the same kind of messages: We need to feed tens of thousands of people and therefore we need more pesticides, fertilizers and large scale monoculture, etc. That will not go away,” Frison said.

This article was first published by Degrees of Latitude

Credit: KMP

By Elena L. Pasquini
ROME, Jun 4 2020 (IPS)

Landless farmers who produce rice for the landlords of big “haciendas” can’t get more than a little pocket money from their harsh work—not enough to provide diverse and healthy food for their families. Seasonal workers on sugar-cane plantations know that they can count on only six months of earnings. When summer arrives, those whose irrigation facilities have been destroyed by typhoons, or those who never had any, struggle while waiting for the rain.

That was the snapshot of agriculture in the Philippines when the COVID-19 outbreak hit the country. And it still is. The colonial past shaped a farming sector dominated by large export-oriented monocrop plantations; large plots devoted to agribusinesses, industrial plants, or housing subdivisions; and, still, 7 out of 10 farmers with no land, regardless of decades of attempts to enforce land reform.

“The agriculture in the Philippines is not actually ready for any pandemic,” said Kathryn Manga, community development worker and project officer at Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas, KMP, the Peasant Movement of the Philippines, founded in 1985 and supported by the Agroecology Fund. It has more than two million members, representing landless peasants, farmworkers, peasant women, and young farmers.

“Even before COVID, the agriculture in the Philippines was not sufficient to support its people… There was already a crisis, with prices of commodities, even vegetables and rice, that have gone up,” she told Degrees of Latitude.

Farmers have never stopped advocating and putting their lives at risk for “genuine land reform” as a prerequisite for the development of an agricultural model able to ensure food security: “The monocrop practice has really destroyed the ecosystems, the natural resources of our country. We would want Filipino farmers to enjoy a system where they would be able to decide what type of crops to plant. Something they can think of eating with their family,” Manga said.

What farmers grow is now mostly intended for sale, and diversity of production is rare. Manga told the story of those who cultivate rice, one of the most important staple commodities of the country: “When they sell their palay – the palay is the rice – for a low price, they go home with the little money they get … After selling their palay to the landlord … they have to go [back] to the market to buy rice.” Nothing remains for self-consumption because all the rice goes to pay land rents or inputs needed for production.

Farmers in the lockdown

Credit: KMP

COVID-19 containment measures added “chaos” to an already fragile situation, according to Manga. The military and authorities controlled the movement of farmers, preventing them from tending farms and selling their produce. Volunteers who took part in relief operations to bring food to the most vulnerable were detained and charged with the accusation of violating the quarantine, six of them from KMP. However, small-scale agriculture is still proving its resilience in this emergency.

Lockdown “has really been very militaristic,” Manga said. “Check-points were placed in many different regions, [and] also in Metro Manila. … People were just told to stay at home. Without a job, they were not able to eat. For farmers it is very difficult … There’s really no work from home for them.”

Access to food has been an issue not only for rural poor but also for urban communities: “If the Philippines’ government will not really support agriculture, it will be difficult to have food security especially in urban areas, to access good and low-price vegetables in Metro Manila,” she said.

However, networks of farmers have been able to mobilize food even during the lockdown. From Bulacan—50 km north of Manila, where a past programme of KMP helped farmers to occupy unused land—come the vegetables that are feeding the most vulnerable in the city. “These are mostly for urban poor communities, for homeless people, for workers who are not able to go home to their provinces. It started with a Church organization that has a mobile kitchen and looked for a community of farmers who were producing vegetables.”

KNP, whose member organizations have been able to deliver ten thousand kilos of vegetables in the first month of operations, has also launched an online food shop whose profits support their relief activity.

Land, agroecology for resilience

Credit: KMP

At the root of insecurity, however, is a century-long agricultural system based on extensive farming. It has been designed based on the export of high-value commodities like sugar, pineapple, and banana, as well as on production of rice.

Government, according to farmers organizations, has failed to address the crucial question of land distribution and is not providing the support that farmers need for production, including self-production of seeds or irrigation. “There is no production support for the Filipino farmers. There’s an irrigation bill that was passed two years ago, but until now it has not been given a budget by the government,” Manga said.

Farmers plant on land they rent and what they get is barely enough to pay for it. “They do not have the certificate of ownership.” That’s the point, she stressed. “[If] most of their produce has to be as payment, they won’t have extra for their own [consumption].”

“If you have a small plot that you can till, if you can grow a garden with vegetables, it would be easy. Many people [now live on what they] call ‘survival crops,’ crops that they do not really plant regularly, but they find around—root crops or vegetables which grow wild”.

Ownership of land means farmers can choose what to grow for themselves and for their communities in a model of agriculture based on diversification and sustainability. The agroecological model “will bring healthy food to Philippinos and the farmers,” Manga said.

Filipino farmers have practised agroecology for a long time, but monocrop and GMOs planting, according to Manga, has led to a decreased biodiversity and increased dependency on external inputs, including chemicals. Farmers are now trying to replant local seed varieties and are looking for diversification in the farm: “Those who are practising diversified farming still have rice, [but also] vegetables, root crops, fruit trees, and medicinal plants … which is also food for them. They have some animals ….”, she said.

Access to the market remains a major bottleneck: “Many of our farmers still need to go through the middlemen who buy the products at the very low price and then they transport to the nearby markets, in Metro Manila or in the region,” Manga explained. Middlemen, for instance, can pay 16 pesos for squash that will be sold on the market for 50 to 60 pesos each. When KMP offered to buy some farmers’ produce at a higher price, they expressed great concern: “It will make the middlemen angry and many of them will not go back to us,” they said. KMP is trying to overcome the problem by working with local organizations instead of individual farmers.

However, in the long-term, food security is a matter of rights: “The State should recognize the right to food, the right to produce food, the right to till the land, and to have control of the land that farmers have been tilling for generations. Farmers have the right to choose their own production system,” Manga said.

This article was first published by Degrees of Latitude

By Elena L. Pasquini
ROME, Apr 15 2020 (IPS-Partners)

For millions of children around the world, the COVID-19 outbreak means not getting the most important, if not the only, meal of the day.

‘We estimated that around 360 million children [out of 380 million] do not have access to those meals … Of those children, about half of them are in low and lower-middle-income countries’, Carmen Burbano, director of the World Food Programme’s School Feeding division, told Degrees of Latitude.

The most affected are the poorest, those kids already struggling because of war, hunger, food insecurity and poverty, being refugees or internally displaced. Of great concern, there are countries, especially in the Horn of Africa, that have been impacted already by the desert locusts, those who are dependent on food and fuel import, on tourism or remittances.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, 85 million participate in school feeding programmes – mainly carried out by governments -, about 10–12 million coming from the most vulnerable families: ‘In our region there are different situations. Argentina or Brazil, [for instance], have strong safety nets … Our concerns are more for countries with very weak institutions … Haiti, which is very fragile, countries in the North part of Central America where the numbers of food insecurity and poverty are still very high … Venezuela …’, Ricardo Rapallo, food security officer at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, told Degrees of Latitude.

It is not just feeding kids’ bellies

On a typical day at school, children eat a combination of non-perishable and fresh food, often locally procured. World Food Program – which is operating in 51 countries and supporting more than 12 million kids, the poorest in the poorest and most critical areas of the world – is looking for alternatives: take-home rations, vouchers, or cash that families can spend in stores.

‘These kids were receiving crucial nutritional support through those meals. It wasn’t just about feeding their bellies; it was about giving them essential nutrition … Through the meals they were receiving nutritious food, fortified rice or supplements, or things that were preventing anaemia, that were preventing hunger’, Burbano said.

The challenge for the UN Food agency is making sure children continue receiving what they need even if COVID-19 prevention measures affect the food chain. Take-home rations ‘have to be about non-perishable food only. We can’t include things that will go bad in transport, etc.’, Burbano added. Options could include fortified foods or supplementation.

However, packaging, delivery of rations, and even scaling up cash and voucher programmes where these food programmes are already in place is not as easy as it might seem when in critical environments: ‘It’s about being creative about the solutions’, Burbano said. ‘We are trying to use digital technologies as much as possible. We can transfer funds or cash into cell phones or into bank accounts without having contact with the beneficiaries. We are trying to expand our capabilities in that sense’, she said.

“Governments with more capacity are already implementing some of those measures. In Latin America, Rapallo explained, some of them are providing meals to families through army, police, and civil society organizations. Compared to the financial crisis of 2008, many have developed stronger safety nets. In Argentina, for instance, there’s already a programme in place to support mothers with children under five with cash, which is now being increased with the equivalent to the cost of the missed school meals.

When families have to buy food, however, their grocery shopping is changing: less fresh, more non-perishable items such as pasta or rice, easier to find, easier to keep and to store for longer periods. ‘The other face of the coin is that their diet or the food patterns are going to change’, Rapallo said. That’s the concern of FAO, which is providing advice, guidance and recipes ‘to prepare the food to maintain at least some equilibrium and diversify the diet … It is also an opportunity to eat at home, to prepare the food with the children, to make what you are eating more important …’, Rapallo explained.

In the long-term, school closures can also have another impact: ‘Our concern is that not all children are likely to come back to school. [Those] from poor families normally have other responsibilities, they take care of their siblings, they work, etc., and with pulling them out of school, not all families will bring them back, will enrol them back’, Burbano said. But school meals can be an incentive in a ‘Back-to-school’ campaign, for which the World Food Programme and UNICEF are trying to join forces.

Impact on families and communities

Lost access to school meals is not only threatening children’s health, but it is also impacting the most vulnerable families by reducing their income and the rural communities where small-scale farmers represent an important ring in the schools’ supply chain.

“Meals in schools act as a safety net, representing the 10% of the monthly income of those households. ‘If you take away that indirect income, compounded with possible unemployment … loss of livelihoods … this is really catastrophic for families’, Burbano said.

Moreover, a lot of farmers, which are making a living selling food to the schools and many of which are women, are also being affected.

The role of family farming varies from country to country, according to Rapallo. However, in the case of the COVID-19 lockdown’s impact on food distribution, procurement from local markets can be an opportunity: ‘Chains are shorter and … it is more difficult to be closed or to be affected. It seems it can be part of the solution ….’, Rapallo said. In Latin America, supplies from family farmers are a key aspect of the school feeding programmes, particularly in Brazil.

Whatever solutions will be put in place must ensure children are fed and that families and farmers supported. Reflecting on the importance of these programmes, Burbano said, ‘What this crisis has evidenced is the crucial role that social programs, safety netsz programmes, like school feeding, play in the community’.

Photo Credits: WFP/Photolibrary

This story was originally published by Degrees of Latitude

Credit: Martina Martelloni / INTERSOS

By Elena L. Pasquini
ROME, Apr 9 2020 (IPS-Partners)

Behind the Tiburtina Station, in the East of Rome, with just a small covered area protecting from the inclemency of the weather, sleeping close to each other is the only way to stay warm. A boy of Ivorian origin is alone, far from everyone, in the centre of the sidewalk, exposed to a freezing wind.

‘He told me he preferred to die of cold than to get infected, because he was very scared and he knew that it was not safe for him to be close to the others’, Dr. Antonella Torchiaro told Degrees of Latitude. She is a physician of the NGO Intersos, one of the few organisations carrying out prevention activity, medical examinations and screening of COVID-19 symptoms among those who do not have a secure roof over their head in the Italian capital.

An estimated eight thousand people are homeless in Rome; between fourteen and sixteen thousand, if the figure includes those who call ‘home’ an inadequate housing or who live in such extreme exclusion that their living conditions are comparable to those who are homeless.

About two hundred and fifty persons crowd the area of Tiburtina, where social distancing is hard, if not impossible, because the sheltered space is narrow. Among the most vulnerable population, there are also those who live in the squatted houses, mostly in the East of the city, and at the Termini station, in the centre.

They are migrants and Italians fearing not only the disease but the future, living without hand sanitiser, access to water, having lost their jobs, with few chances of getting what they need to survive.

Since April 1st, Intersos has deployed two social health teams in the field because the demands are so high: In just three weeks, the first mobile medical unit reached 610 people and performed 255 medical examinations. What is being protected, however, is not only the individual health but also the collective one: ‘It is as if this epidemic reveals [….] that the public health is made up of many rings and the people who live in a condition of fragility or social marginality are fundamental links in the chain. Excluding them means undermining everyone else’s health, the community. It is as if this moment reminded us how important it is to start from the most fragile ring to ensure the tightness of the entire system’, shared Torchiaro, who is also the medical coordinator of the clinic of Intersos24, a project which includes a primary care centre the Italian NGO has set up in Torre Spaccata, on the outskirts of Rome. It provides protection and support to unaccompanied minors, women who are victims of violence and exploitation, as well as young adults who are out of the national reception systems and are living in conditions of vulnerability.

Fear of the virus, fear of the future

Credit: Martina Martelloni / INTERSOS

Those met by Intersos’s physicians and cultural mediators behind Tiburtina Station are mostly migrants. They are waiting for the regularisation of their residence permit, sometimes they are passing through just to get their documents between one seasonal job and another in the agricultural areas of Foggia, Calabria or Northern Italy; or they are new adults expelled from the Italian reception system, employed under the table at car washes, restaurants or as unloaders. ‘It remains a place of transit for people who are temporarily homeless, for migrants in conditions of extreme social unease, exposed to labor exploitation’, Torchiaro said.

The work, even the illegal work, is no longer there, and those men and women, the unseen ghosts of the emergency, cannot imagine a future. Torchiaro observes, ‘At the moment everything is halted, so they are living suspended lives, lives that were already suspended as they waited for a residence permit or for an improvement to their conditions’.

The same is happening at Termini, where chronically homeless Italians and migrants, who get their living from handouts or from charities, find a shelter and where the inhabitants of the large buildings around Piazza Vittorio Emanuele gravitate. Those are the most fragile from the Chinese and Bengali communities, and being poorly integrated, they do not have easy access to the information necessary to protect themselves from the virus.

In the squatted houses, more information is being circulated among the better organised groups. Coming from the experience of the political struggle, these groups are more aware of what is happening and how to prevent the spread of the disease. ‘But they live with a double fear: [becoming ill] and losing their homes. Getting sick would mean leaving the house, jeopardising their squatting rights. It is the fear of losing the little they have’, Torchiaro stressed. As for the women assisted by Intersos: many are caregivers without a contract, some of which probably continue working without being able to protect themselves and without being entitled to paid leave should they contract the disease.

Credit: Martina Martelloni / INTERSOS

However, those who are on the streets experience the greatest despair, like the Afghan boy met by Torchiaro, homeless after finding and then losing a job. He carries the trauma of someone who comes from a wartorn country: ‘He suffers from panic attacks; he told me of the worsening of symptoms and insomnia. He told me he already had problems due to his past, his experience. And then the street, the difficulty of sleeping on the street. He told me: “Every evening, when I think I won’t be able to shelter myself from the cold, panic attacks come and now this fear of dying and not being able to do anything to protect myself is tormenting me”’.

People lacking the most important personal protective equipment — a home — feel more and more isolated: ‘In Termini, those who usually have oppositional behaviour are increasing. They are even more agitated and nervous; they feel their impotence quadrupled compared to normal conditions’. They often only manage to eat a single meal every day, most of the time just lunch, in the few soup kitchens left open or thanks to food distributions. ‘Moving around in Rome is now much more complex, especially for people who are afraid of being stopped by the police … This means the struggle to survive is increasing’, Torchiaro explained.

Fighting the virus among the most vulnerable

Prevention in the context of such fragility is particularly hard. In the stations, homeless people live in crowded spaces and have no way to bathe or wash hands: ‘We are distributing toilet kits, but they are not enough; alcoholic gel, wet wipes and surgical masks’. It is also difficult to make a differential diagnosis, that is to distinguish between COVID-19 and the normal flu because those who live on the streets not only run a greater risk of contracting the coronavirus and of not reaching the health services in time — ‘with risks for individual health and collective’ — but they are also much more exposed to other types of diseases. ‘That is one of the main expressions of inequalities in health. The possibility of protecting [the homeless] from common environmental factors would certainly simplify a possible early diagnosis’, Torchiaro added.

Credit: Martina Martelloni / INTERSOS

Many of them have previous diseases or chronic conditions, from hypertension to diabetes, from broncho pneumopathies to oncological pathologies. Often they know about the pandemic and the main prevention measures, but ‘we often find very fragile people — those with discomfort or mental difficulties, very old, who do not speak the language well, who are more isolated or do not have a community of reference — bewildered, frightened because they have the perception that we are certainly in an exceptional moment, but then, in the individual conversation, the lack of information comes out’.

Most of them want to be examined by Intersos’s doctors because they are scared. Only at the beginning of oIntersos’s activity, Torchiaro said, was there some distrust because after the Decree of 9 March imposing the lockdown, many nonprofit organisations have slowed down their activities in order to adapt to the new conditions and the areas of fragility in the city have been left to their own devices. Intersos itself had to change its way of working, closing the centre of Torre Spaccata and finding accommodation for its guests, asking for permits to operate and implementing new procedures ranging from individual protections to the daily sanitisation of uniforms and means of transport.

An extremely complex and time-consuming job, although the most demanding aspect, according to Torchiaro, is not so much the assistance to the people as the making sure that ‘the needs of those we meet’ get a concrete institutional response because the public institutions are currently struggling.

The opening of reception and active surveillance centres for the homeless is crucial: the Plan of the Municipality of Rome foresees the opening of 24H facilities for approximately 450 persons, but just 240 for the whole day. Pending this, Intersos is calling for the government to provide what is essential, water: ‘Awaiting the opening of the centres, which are the most urgent thing, strengthening or reopening the facilities dedicated to the personal hygiene of the homeless or [installing] chemical toilets [is fundamental]’.

Without adequate places to shelter those who do not have a home, prevention is impossible—it is impossible, without a home, to call health services, to enforce active surveillance and isolation, or to monitor symptoms. ‘At this moment, there are no places for active surveillance unless the person is positive for the swab, but the person [does] the swab only if he has done active surveillance’, Torchiaro explained.

‘The reality is that there is still no access to those centres, and in any case, they will not be enough.’

On March 19, however, Intersos signed an agreement with the Municipality of Rome to transfer people in particularly vulnerable conditions into a dedicated structure.

This story was originally published by Degrees of Latitude

By Elena L. Pasquini
ROME, May 23 2017 (IPS)

For thousands of years, farmers have used genetic diversity to cope with weather variability and changing climate conditions. They have stored, planted, selected and improved seeds to continue producing food in a dynamic environment.

Community seed banks are mostly informal collections of seeds maintained by local communities and managed with their traditional knowledge, whose primary function is to conserve seeds for local use. They can play a major role in climate change adaptation, according to a recent article published by Bioversity International’s researchers Ronnie Vernooy, Bhuwon Sthapit, Gloria Otieno, Pitambar Shrestha and Arnab Gupta.

Based on various countries’ experiences, the article argues that, ‘community seed banks can enhance the resilience of farmers’ by securing ‘access to, and availability of, diverse, locally adapted crops and varieties’.

According to Ronnie Vernooy, genetic resources policy specialist at Bioversity International, ‘mostly because of climate change, there’s a stronger interest in establishing and supporting community seed banks’. However, many of them ‘are still quite fragile, organizationally and in terms of technical management’, he added.

Bioversity International, which is working in several countries on informal seed systems, has designed a project for community seedbanks Platform and is currently looking for donors interested in its implementation. The Platform aims at reinforcing farmers’ seed systems by supporting existing community seed banks as well as national or regional community seedbank networks around the world, scaling out their activities and contributing to their sustainability. It should have four key functions, covering documentation and analysis to practical experiences, capacity building, research agenda coordination and digitalization andmanagement of data.

But why do community seed banks matter?

Tools for adaptation
Seeds are stored in diverse types of collections, ranging from international and national genebanks, or ex situ collections where seeds remain often for years or decades, to small seed banks managed locally by farmers. ‘In the ex-situ collections … seeds are like frozen in time … That means there’s no chance [for them] to adapt in the field to changing conditions’, Ronnie Vernooy, explained to Degrees of Latitude.

In community banks, seeds usually remain for shorter terms, ‘ sometimes for one year’, Vernooy specified, to be then distributed to farmers: ‘Those plants are in the field and in the real conditions, so they are adapting themselves to changing circumstances. Then farmers usually select the best seeds of any given crop in the field. Part of those seeds goes back to the community seed banks and the next year the cycle continues’. Moreover, genebanks focus more on the major food crops, while community banks tend to conserve all the diversity farmers have on field, including minor crops, neglected varieties, medicinal plants, wild relatives and even trees.

Community banks not only conserve genetic diversity, they ‘have the potential … to become seed producers and it’s happening … but it requires support’, Vernooy said. Compared to the formal seed sector – which includes research institutions, genebanks, governmental bodies and private companies – the informal seed bank offers several advantages to small farmers, according to Vernooy. It provides not only ‘broader [genetic] diversity’, but seeds that are better adapted to farming systems that ‘tend to be diverse, [located] in marginal, very dry or mountainous areas, etc.’, he explained. ‘[Seeds from the formal sector] tend to require high level of inputs – fertilizers, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides … – and the price is often high’.

However, ‘it’s not a black and white system’, he stressed. The formal sector can help building farmers’ capacities. In fact, ‘in many countries we are trying to breach the gap between the formal and the informal systems with activities like participatory plant breeding, but also with the community seed banks … We try to bring the national genebanks work together with the community seed banks’, he said. In an ‘ideal world community seed banks could be part of what’s called a national conservation system. Right now, governments channel money into national genebanks … Our argument is why not also put a small amount of money into each of the community seed banks that exists or into the new ones that can be established?’, Vernooy said.

An enabling legal environment
Strengthening community seed banks requires not only technical and financial support but also an enabling policy and legal environment. In many countries, apart from a few like Bhutan, Nepal, Uganda, South Africa, Brazil, “there is no or little recognition of and support for community seed banks …, [and] farmers are not allowed to sell farm-saved seed. In others, legislation to protect farmers’ genetic resources is lacking’, Vernooy’s article reports.

Laws and regulations that can conflict ‘on what community seed banks are trying to do, [for instance] the intellectual property rights policies …’ are also often in place, Vernooy explained. Community seed banks are ‘like collective enterprises’ managed cooperatively: ‘Laws that prohibit or restrain these collective uses are in contradiction to what community seeds banks do’, Vernooy explained.

From an international perspective, the Convention of Biological Diversity and the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture have been ‘quite supporting’, according to Vernooy. A study out of the Norwegian Development Fund, suggests that community seed banks can also contribute to the implementation of farmers’ rights to save, use, exchange and sell farm-saved seeds. Those rights are recognized by ITPGRFA, which is legally-binding for 143 countries. The Treaty demands contracting parties not only to promote or support ‘farmers and local communities’ efforts to manage and conserve on-farm their plant genetic resources for food and agriculture’ but also ‘in situ conservation of wild crop relatives and wild plants for food production’.

‘ITPGRFA has the farmers’ rights and in principle the text is very much in support of community seed banks, but then it goes back to the national governments to implement those international agreements. So, we are back to the same situation’, Vernooy said.

However, the direction seems clear: ‘There’s quite a strong international movement of people working on these issues and the international treaty itself is quite interested in advancing on this’, he said.

Photo credits: Bioversity International – Bioversity International/C.Fadda – Seeds for Needs, Ethiopia

This story was originally published by Degrees of Latitude

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By Elena L. Pasquini
ROME, May 12 2017 (degrees of latitude)

‘Diaspora is the biggest development community that exists in the world’, according to Pedro De Vasconcelos, manager of IFAD‘s Financial Facility for Remittances. However, its potential is still largely untapped.

In 2015, over 200 million migrants sent home about 450 billion dollars in remittances. An amount which is three times the official development assistance and exceeds foreign direct investments in most countries. Recent estimates by the World Bank suggest a decline of 2.4 percent in 2016, whilst a growth of 3.3 percent is expected in 2017.

De Vasconcelos strongly believes that the money migrants send back to their home countries can be leveraged to stimulate investments, boost development and pull people out of poverty.

How to exploit migration-related inflow of capital to spur growth and build prosperity? Reducing transaction costs is not enough to, according to De Vasconcelos. Migrants and their families need financial inclusion, which is access to basic financial services, such as payments, savings, including current accounts, credit and insurance. Senders and recipients of remittances need options to the cash-to-cash system.

Where cash is king

A World Bank and IFAD report indicates that ‘two billion or 38 per cent of working-age adults globally have no access to financial services delivered by regulated financial institutions, with 73 per cent of poor people unbanked’. However, millions of them receive remittances.

‘The reason they are not banked is because those who provide financial services think that these people are poor and have no money. That’s it’, De Vasconcelos told Degrees of Latitude in an exclusive interview.

That’s a ‘cliché’, he said. They get regularly what is equivalent to a monthly salary. ‘The majority of them want financial democracy, [but] they are living in a world where cash is king… They are equipped to some extent, with a little more of help, to be part of a financial democratic revolution’, he added. ‘Give them the options and see if cash remains king’.

When remittances received through regulated financial institutions, families plan for long-term investment goals, savings can be reinvested in the local community and they can “function as a buffer against instability at the macroeconomic level”, according to IFAD and World Bank. ‘Think of you’, without a banking account where to credit wages, without a credit card, no access to online banking services or without a credit history: ‘What do you do? You are going back to cash and hopefully you have it, but that’s it. How can you leverage anything? What you are having in your hands is what you have and what you will get’, De Vasconcelos said.

In the agricultural sector, for instance, financial institutions do not provide services or loans to farmers on the assumption that agriculture is a risky business without taking into consideration the remittances they receive. ‘Financial institutions just don’t see the opportunities that exist [with remittances]’, he said. ‘It is a sector of complete missed opportunity over missed opportunity … and it’s not just doing good, doing the right thing, it’s a win-win situation.’

De Vasconcelos has no doubt: ‘Financial inclusion is the biggest opportunity that exists.’

Learning, saving and investing

Financial inclusion requires the implementation of strategies to let offer and demand meet each other. Families need financial literacy to manage financial services, but financial institutions need to understand that banking senders and recipients of remittances is possible.

With the Financial Facility for Remittances established ten years ago, IFAD aims at testing mechanisms for accessing remittances in rural areas, but also promoting investment and entrepreneurship, as well as diaspora engagement in their countries of origin. ‘We are a laboratory’, De Vasconcelos said. ‘We saw dramatic changes’ testing new financial products with financial literacy programmes.

In Sri-Lanka, for instance, a project in collaboration with the Hatton National Bank helped senders and recipients gain access to financial services. The bank designed an account targeted for the migrants’ needs, linking savings to remittances and then providing housing or business loans. After the pilot, demand increased and Hatton Bank opened several branches offering remittance services.

In Italy, IFAD engaged Philippine diaspora with a training to learn how to budget, manage daily expenses, and increase savings. ‘That was a paradigm change … Now that [they] have saved, that know how to save, we showed that there are other options … Don’t give the money away, maybe you can invest.’ Many decided to actually invest in agricultural businesses in their communities.

Scaling up

IFAD’s projects are pilots designed to show what works and what doesn’t. Scaling up requires the involvement of multiple actors, from private sector to governments, and the mainstreaming of remittances into the programmes of many international organizations, according to De Vasconcelos. ‘Ministries of agricultures, [for instance]. It is imperative they understand that their target groups receive remittances. And the majority of them not even know or care. They think that it’s not their problem’, he said.

On 16 June, the International Day of Family Remittances will be celebrated at the United Nations headquarters, in the context of the fifth Global Forum on Remittances just one month before the High-Level Political Forum that will assess the advancement in the implementation of the first 10 Sustainable Development Goals. ‘…. If you want to achieve the SDGs, you have to look at this phenomenon that is affecting one out of ten people in planet.… One remittance affects five people on average’, De Vasconcelos stressed.

Maybe remittances are not the silver bullet, but while policymakers try to find solutions on ‘how to transform billion into trillions, and that’s what you need to achieve the goals’, migrants have sent trillions of dollars back home, according to De Vasconcelos. ‘Can you maximise that dollar when they send it? Can you try to make that dollar convert into two … by offering more options? You could do that. That’s the beautiful part of this story, it’s not a question of money for once. It’s a question of will, it’s [the] question of facilitating. The money is there, what you need is just the actors to make it happened’, he said.

‘Remittances are tricky’, De Vasconcelos noted. The risk of doing nothing, of remaining in a cash-to-cash system is to keep families dependent on what they receive from abroad.

This story was originally published by Degrees of Latitude

Photo credits: Sara Furlanetto

By Elena L. Pasquini
ROME, May 4 2017 (IPS)

Abdulwahab Tahhan is a journalist and a refugee. From his exile in London, he documents the war that is devastating his homeland of Syria, monitoring airstrikes and assessing civilian casualties for the non-profit Airwars.

As for many journalists and netizens forced to leave their countries due to war, oppression, and persecution, continuing journalistic work has been a challenge for Tahhan. But now that’s his job: ‘Helping people understand the war better’, he told Degrees of Latitude.

Youngest of seven children, he grew up in Aleppo, studied English and literature, but not journalism, even if he would have liked. It was the concern of becoming used as a ‘propaganda tool’ that kept Tahhan away from professional reporting until the spring of 2011.

When the Syrian uprising erupted, he began translating content and videos about the demonstrations from Arabic to English for a secret Facebook group that spread updates beyond the Syrian borders, documenting arrests and detentions, and advising protesters how to keep themselves safe. ‘It wasn’t a professional platform; too dangerous to be identified as the journalist or the voice who was reporting about what was going on. Once you were identified, that’s it. You will be targeted; your family will be targeted …’, he said.

It was in Turkey, where Tahhan fled from Syria and obtained a visa to the United Kingdom, that his professional career in journalism begun, working as a fixer, interpreter, translator, writer and in the production of the award-winning documentary ‘The Suffering Grassers’. But getting a job in England was tough: ‘I had all the skills, I had the knowledge, the only thing that I lacked were the contacts’, he said. It was the Refugee Journalism Project, a collaboration between the London College of Communication and the Migrants Resource Centre, that provided Abdulwahab with what he needed to make his voice heard again.

It isn’t what you know, it’s who you know

‘In many countries, getting ahead in journalism still relies on having the right social capital, that is, being able to access jobs and opportunities by virtue of having an influential professional and personal network. The old adage still applies – it isn’t what you know, it’s who you know. So, if you are new to a country, don’t speak the same language, aren’t the same colour or religion, don’t have knowledge of the system, you simply don’t have the same social capital as the journalists who came through the European system. The project’s activities (mentoring, workshops and industry placements) attempt to address this’, Vivienne Francis, Project media consultant, explained.

The Project – which so far has worked with 36 journalists from a number of countries, including Syria, Sudan, Eritrea, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Cuba, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Yemen – was originally a London-focused initiative, but it has received applications from all across the UK, and ‘in greater numbers than we anticipated’, according to Francis. ‘We did not want to turn anyone away, as a number of these individuals – due to the UK government’s refugee dispersal scheme – were living in communities where they felt quite isolated. We had to find practical ways to support not just more participants, but also those who lived many miles away. One solution was to offer online mentoring and connecting them with networks of journalists closer to where they lived’, she said.

The value of a different perspective

Refugee journalists need support, but they bring to the newsrooms the invaluable knowledge of the countries they come from. ‘That’s one of the ways we could improve journalism’, Tahhan said. ‘If you want to write a story about Syria, you want a Syrian researcher, someone who understands Arabic, who understands the culture, who knows places and locations, that can tell you something about the country that maybe people here don’t know or are not aware of, that can double-check the authentication of specific reports’, he said.

It is not about teaching the local journalists how to do their job better; it is about providing them with sources, insights and different perspectives. He was intrigued, and alarmed, noticing how much attention European journalists put on bombings and terrorists killed, compared to ‘the victims of those bombings’, Tahhan said. ‘I would always focus on the humanitarian aspect; I would always focus on the civilian casualties from the war … I haven’t seen this very much on the news, to be honest. I haven’t seen a lot of reports from a civilian perspective’, he added.

But to unlock the potential of refugee journalists, many barriers have to be overcome and a holistic approach is needed: ‘The asylum process itself also takes a huge toll on individuals. Before they can think about re-establishing their professional careers, many have to deal with the emotional anguish of leaving home and loved ones, battling to get refugee status, permanent housing, and access to benefits’, Francis said. Giving refugees the basic tools for survival is not enough to enhance integration. The question is how to ‘maximize the value of the professions, work experience and qualifications they might already have. Their prior lives and experiences need to be seen as adding value to society’.

What is crucial, according to Tahhan, is to provide journalists with contacts and a ‘safe’ platform: ‘A safe environment is where you can start discussion ideas without being accused of being biased, discussing the ideas for the ideas themselves without attacking you personally …. [discussing] the ideas, [without] discussing the person, throwing accusation, stereotyping people, generalizing. Being safe [means] that you have been able to express whatever you want to express without being prosecuted’, he explained.

Refugees journalists must feel safe. ‘I know this is highly unlikely to happen in the Europe because of the freedom of speech, freedom of the press, but bear in mind we come from countries where we are oppressed and we can’t really report a lot of things against the governments, against the regimes’.

This story was originally published by Degrees of Latitude

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