In the face of severe food shortages and with no relief aid, the elderly like Zeinab Wambui, from lower Mukurweini, Central Kenya, are facing very tough times. Credit: Miriam Gathigah/IPS

By Miriam Gathigah and George Gao
NAIROBI/NEW YORK, Oct 17 2013 (IPS)

Wambui Karunyu, 72, and her seven-year-old grandson are the only surviving members of their immediate family.  Karunyu’s husband and five children all succumbed to the hardships of living in the semi-arid area of lower Mukurweini district in central Kenya.

In 2009, a drought struck parts of central and southeast Kenya, leaving 3.8 million people in need of food aid. Four years later, conditions in the area remain dire. According to the regional Drought Management Authority, while the upper parts of Mukurweini receive an annual rainfall of 1,500 mm, lower Mukurweini only receives 200mm.

A new report by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), a U.K. based think tank, identifies Kenya as one of 11 countries most at risk for disaster-induced poverty. The report, entitled “The geography of poverty, disasters and climate extremes in 2030”, warns that the international community has yet to properly address the threats disasters pose to the poorest parts of the world.

The report includes locations where both poverty and natural disasters will likely be concentrated in 2030; and in many instances, these locations overlap.

Hazards and vulnerability to poverty in 2030
Source: Overseas Development Institute

However, the severity of disasters – such as drought, floods and hurricanes – depends on what “disaster risk management” policies the government has put in place, according to ODI.

In 2010, for example, the magnitude 7.0 earthquake in Haiti killed 11 percent of people who felt its tremors, while the Chilean earthquake – of an even higher magnitude, 8.8 – killed 0.1 percent; and in 2008, Cyclone Nargis killed 138,000 people in Myanmar, while Hurricane Gustav of similar strength killed 153 when it struck the Caribbean and the U.S.

“Slow-onset” disasters – such as the drought afflicting Karunyu and her grandson in Kenya – are often the harshest setbacks for development, especially in poor, rural areas that lack social safety nets, according to ODI.

“I plant maize and beans every season, but I harvest nothing. I never stop planting because I hope that this time will be better than the last time. But it’s always the same, loss and hunger,” Karunyu tells IPS.

Simon Mwangi, a resident of Mukurweini and a service provider with the Dairy Goats Association of Kenya, an association of small-scale goat farmers, tells IPS that Karunyu’s story is not unique.

“Life here is characterised by poverty and hunger. A great majority live in rural areas, and they are farmers. Due to prolonged dry spells, the situation is alarming, since they have no other livelihoods,” he says.

Mwangi notes that unreliable rainfall, frequent droughts and the inability of residents to adapt to harsh climatic changes has affected the growth of a variety of crops, such as maize and beans, which used to grow successfully.

“Lower Mukurweini is no longer a corn zone, but farmers continue to plant maize with no success. There are drought-resistant crops that can do well here, including fruits, such as pineapples and indigenous mangoes. But the lack of extension officers has made it difficult for people here to adapt to the dry climate,” he says.

There is also a lack of NGOs and aid workers in Mukurweini to address the residents’ plight. The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) operated in Mukurweini for nine years, but left in 2011. “Things were much better when [IFAD] ran irrigation and trainings for farmers. Some sub-locations were doing much better, and there was food. But many parts of lower Mukurweini are now at risk of starvation,” says Mwangi.

Ten Worst Natural Disasters Reported in Kenya from 1980 to 2010. Source: United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction

In Kenya, each child born in a drought year is 50 percent more likely to become malnourished, according to the report. And from 1997 to 2007, less than 10 percent of Kenya’s poor escaped poverty, while 30 percent of Kenya’s non-poor entered poverty, partly due to the multiple natural disasters affecting the country.

In July 2012, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon assembled a team of 27 advisers to help him achieve the lofty goal of ending world poverty. Ten months later, the team – known as the High Level Panel of eminent persons (HLP) – produced a report that advised Ban, among other things, to “build resilience and reduce deaths from natural disasters” by a percentage to be agreed.

The HLP recommended this target on disaster-mitigation to be included in the post-2015 development agenda, a list that would replace the eight current Millennium Development Goals –which do not include the word “disaster” once.

The intensity of natural disasters is expected to increase with climate change. ODI predicts that up to 325 million impoverished people in 49 countries will be exposed to extreme weather conditions by 2030.

The regional Drought Management Authority says that Nyeri County, where Mukurweini is located, should expect more prolonged dry spells moving forward.

“During the day, you barely see anyone outside, it’s too hot. Even the earth becomes too hot, you cannot walk barefoot,” says Mwangi.

“Without food or access to water, the elderly starve and fade away quietly,” he says.

President Barack Obama talks with Prime Minister Enrico Letta of Italy during the G20 Summit in Saint Petersburg, Russia, Sept. 6, 2013. Credit: White House Photo by Pete Souza

By George Gao
NEW YORK, Sep 19 2013 (IPS)

When U.S. President Barack Obama tried to drum up momentum for airstrikes in Syria to punish and deter the use of chemical weapons, he failed to gain much of a following.

At the G20 summit in St. Petersburg – which featured leaders from 20 of the world’s top economies – the U.S. proposed a statement to condemn Syria’s use of chemical weapons. But over half the other participants – from the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), the European Union, Argentina, Indonesia, Mexico and Germany – chose not to sign."The Obama administration recognised its limits and was ready to change course rather than head into a very risky option of war.” -- James Paul

Domestically, a range of public opinion polls reflected U.S. citizens’ growing distaste for military interventions. The New York Times and CBS, for example, asked 1,011 people from Sept. 6-8 whether the U.S. should take the leading role in trying to solve international conflicts, and 62 percent of respondents said no.

“You see characteristics of a more gradual change that’s taking place,” said Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

Since World War II, the U.S. has been a “provider of last resort” in acting alone or with a coalition to address international problems, Kupchan told IPS. But now, the U.S. public is more focused on domestic issues and increasingly wary of intervening abroad.

“The U.S. simply doesn’t have the same sway that it used to,” said Kupchan, who cited a process in which power is slowly diffusing on a global scale. “In some ways, Syria is emblematic of these more long-term trends.”

The recent case over Syria was also interesting at grassroots levels. While Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron pushed for intervention, public representatives in Congress and Parliament held them back.

“Not since the Vietnam War era had we seen such decisive influence from the grassroots over international policy,” said James Paul, former executive director of Global Policy Forum (GPF).

“Washington did not command the beliefs or the respect of world public opinion… Governments wanted to go along, but could not without losing their support. Even Gulf monarchs have to think about how the public will receive their policies,” Paul told IPS.

U.S. leadership?

The idea that the U.S. is “failing” to lead unilaterally is a stigmatised one in U.S. society, whereas the U.S.’s main competitors have recently trumpeted ideas of diplomacy and multilateralism.

Chinese President Xi Jinping, for example, has been touting the phrase “win-win cooperation”, in which countries engage each other as partners, and Russian President Vladimir Putin criticised the notion of “American exceptionalism” in his recent New York Times op-ed.

“There are big countries and small countries… (but) we must not forget that God created us equal,” wrote Putin.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov took the initiative in brokering a diplomatic deal between the U.S. and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad – which forces Assad to turn over his chemical weapons arsenal to the international community at the expense of a U.S. military attack. But Obama took criticism at home for backing into such an agreement.

“Today, the U.S. has less leverage, less respect and less flexibility than it once had,” said Paul. “But we must see the Syria outcome not as a U.S. failure, but rather as a kind of success, in that the Obama administration recognised its limits and was ready to change course rather than head into a very risky option of war.”

Nonetheless, many U.S. officials are wary of Russia’s Putin, who granted the U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden asylum in his country. Putin’s recently established anti-gay laws also cast him under a negative light in the West.

“There is a certain predisposition in the United States to look askance at partnerships with non-democracies,” said Kupchan of CFR. “That’s simply part of America’s ideological equipment.”

However, engaging diplomatically with Russia over Syria may improve bilateral relations and give new momentum for the U.S.-Russia “reset”. It may, for example, allow U.S. and Russia to renew negotiations for nuclear disarmament.

“But if this agreement stumbles, and it appears that Russia acted in bad faith, it will do more harm than good,” warned Kupchan.

Paul said that the U.S.-Russia deal finally puts the spotlight back on diplomacy at the U.N., paving a way for U.N. special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi to have another try in negotiating a political settlement to end Syria’s deadly civil war.

“When the great powers use the U.N., we can breathe a sigh of relief,” argued Paul. “Hopefully, the Syrian people can anticipate peace and political renewal. Western publics, by opposing war, have made this (opportunity) possible. “

The multipolar world

On the heels of the G20 summit in Russia was another meeting in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, which gathered heads of state from the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) – an assembly of former Soviet nations and China. SCO leaders have also pioneered new ideas for development and trade across Eastern Europe and Asia. When the U.S. applied for observer status to the SCO in 2006, its application was rejected.

The SCO reflects the increasing role of regional organisations and alliances to deal with international issues in a “multipolar” world. Such organisations include the European Union, the African Union, UNASUR, ASEAN and the Gulf Cooperation Council, among others

Asked if diplomacy or coercion will be the norm in a “multipolar” world, Kupchan said, “I think it could go either way. You could say that in a world in which there are multiple centres of power, those centres of power can address global challenges only through multilateral cooperation. As a consequence, you can expect more of it.

“An alternative view would be: in a world in which there is a diffusion of power, there will be more competition for primacy and status, and as a consequence, you will see less multilateralism and more geopolitical rivalry.

“But I’m enough of a realist to say that the default position will be growing rivalry, and only through really good policy and steady efforts will we tame that rivalry through multilateral cooperation,” argued Kupchan.

Secretary of Defence Chuck Hagel hosts an honour cordon to welcome China's Minister of National Defence Gen. Chang Wanquan to the Pentagon Aug. 19, 2013. Credit: DoD Photo by Glenn Fawcett

By George Gao
NEW YORK, Aug 21 2013 (IPS)

U.S. Secretary of Defence Chuck Hagel welcomed Chinese Defence Minister Chang Wanquan to the Pentagon Monday as part of Chang’s four-day tour of U.S. defence compounds.

“We just finished a very productive meeting, where I restated that the United States is committed to building a positive and constructive relationship with China,” Hagel told reporters.

Hagel and Chang spoke of their countries’ commitment to build a stronger military-to-military relationship. They highlighted new ways to cooperate, such as in humanitarian aid and disaster relief operations, counter-piracy and counterterrorism initiatives, joint military exercises, and military exchange programmes.

Asked about the U.S. “rebalance” or “pivot”, which involves increased U.S. military presence in the Asia-Pacific, Chang quoted his president, Xi Jinping: “The Pacific is wide enough to accommodate the two great countries, China and the United States. It’s always the Chinese position to welcome the U.S. to play a constructive role in the Asia-Pacific.”

Chang said that while the U.S. rebalancing strategy is a comprehensive one, he hopes it will not target China or stand against China’s affairs in the region.

Tensions flare in Asia-Pacific

Meanwhile, China is embroiled in territorial disputes with U.S. allies in the Asia-Pacific, namely the Philippines and Vietnam in the South China Sea, and Japan in the East China Sea.

Hagel said that while the U.S. takes no official position on sovereignty on these matters, the U.S. does have an interest for such disputes to be resolved “peacefully, without coercion”.

Hagel is slated to visit the Philippines at the end of August. As part of its rebalance, the U.S. is negotiating an agreement with Manila to allow U.S. troops greater access to Philippine military bases. Obtaining such access builds on former U.S. Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld’s “lily pad” strategy, which involves lightweight U.S. forces stationed in bases spangled across the globe.

“China sees the U.S. as exploiting the opportunity created by the anxieties in the region to enhance its military presence and access arrangements,” said Bonnie Glaser, a senior adviser for Asia in the Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

“The prospects of a U.S.-Philippines agreement on access arrangements has been discussed for some time, so the Chinese aren’t taken by surprise, though they are likely concerned about it,” Glaser told IPS.

China sees the U.S. rebalance as a strategy to counter China’s increasing global influence. In general, China’s rise in status has dotted media headlines in 2013: most recently, China passed the U.S. as the world’s largest trading nation. It is also set to overtake the U.S. as the world’s largest economy by 2016, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Analysts have already noted evidence of a new conventional arms race between the two nations. The U.S. and China have the world’s highest defence budgets, running up to 682 and 166 billion U.S. dollars in 2012, respectively, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

China has invested in a range of anti-ship, land attack, and ballistic missiles, as well as counter-space weapons and military cyberspace “capabilities”, according to a 2013 U.S. Department of Defence (DOD) report.

Such actions are part of China’s anti-access and area denial, or “A2/AD”, missions. The U.S. is worried that China’s A2/AD weapons will restrict U.S. “freedom of action”, by limiting U.S. access to future “theatres of conflict”, as well as U.S. movements within that theatre.

To get around A2/AD, the U.S. unveiled a new war tactic known as AirSea Battle, which evolved from the AirLand Battle concept developed in the Cold War to counter any “Soviet-backed combined arms attack in Europe”. AirSea Battle’s aim “is to develop networked, integrated forces capable of attack-in-depth to disrupt, destroy and defeat adversary forces”, according to the DOD.

“Conventional arms competition between the U.S. and China is primarily over U.S. military access to the region,” said Glaser.

“China is developing (A2/AD) capabilities that seek to deny the U.S. such access in a crisis, and the U.S. is determined to sustain access and operational manoeuvrability,” she said.

One military niche that China has not rapidly developed is its nuclear arsenal, which contains a modest 250 nuclear warheads, compared to Russia’s 8,500 and the U.S.’ 7,700, according to SIPRI estimates.

While China is expected to streamline and modernise its nuclear force, specifically for second-strike or retaliatory purposes if another country instigates the first strike, analysts don’t see the arms race extending into the nuclear realm.

“Right now, I don’t see a high probability of China dramatically increasing the size of its nuclear forces,” said Elbridge Colby, co-chair of a working group that penned the report “Nuclear Weapons and U.S.-China Relations” published by CSIS.

“(China) does not appear to want to engage in a nuclear arms race with the U.S., both because that would likely spur countervailing responses by the U.S. and other countries in the region, and because it views too much expenditure on nuclear arms as wasteful,” Colby told IPS.

Asked how China is responding to AirSea Battle, John Chan, a China analyst at the World Socialist Web Site, told IPS that China is expanding its A2/AD capacities, as well as other military capabilities, including anti-surveillance, “in the hope that Beijing can seriously undermine the U.S. military in the event of war”.  Chan has long argued that the U.S. rebalance has ratcheted tensions in the Asia-Pacific.

Chan also interpreted an Aug. 2 piece by Chinese security expert Shen Dingli published in Chinese by Huan Qiu as something that calls into question China’s longstanding “no first use” nuclear policy. China is currently the only one of five U.N. Security Council permanent members with a “no first use” policy – which restricts China’s use of nuclear weapons only for deterrence and retaliation after suffering a nuclear strike.

However, asked via email if the U.S. rebalance to the Asia-Pacific should or will lead China to re-examine its “no first-use” policy, Shen, the vice dean of the Institute of International Affairs at Fudan University, told IPS: “Not clear, probably not.”

Asked for ways to prevent the U.S. and China from entering into a classic security dilemma and arms race, Shen said: “If the U.S. would cease to do its pivoting; if the U.S. would cease to build up its missile defence; if the U.S. would cease its space military programme, and if China would follow suit.”

Cyclists in Chengdu, China, home to the world’s largest building, the New Century Global Centre. Credit: Bigstock

By George Gao
NEW YORK, Jul 24 2013 (IPS)

The China pavilion is a red, inverted pyramid in Shanghai that was built for the city’s bustling 2010 World Expo. While the pavilion pays some homage to China’s ancient past, it mostly shows off China’s 21^st century ambitions, with as much swagger as the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Once the visitor makes her way through the pavilion’s coiling lines, she is swept – by a series of escalators, and by the crowds pushing forward from behind – into visions of China’s future.

On display are children’s drawings of utopian places; a video that fictionalises one family’s intergenerational path from peasantry in the village to globalisation in the city; sustainable designs for various structures; and other grandeurs.  

Earlier this month, China unveiled the world’s largest building, the New Century Global Centre, in its southwest city Chengdu. The 1.7 million square metres of floor space include a 14-screen IMAX theatre, a replica Mediterranean village, a water park and an artificial sun.

China – now the world’s second largest economy – has also claimed other superlatives, by planning construction in Hunan on what is slated to be the world’s tallest skyscraper, and by completing in Zhejiang the world’s longest cable-stayed bridge.

In politics, China has stood its ground, even challenging the world’s most powerful nation, the United States, on different fronts. In April, after the U.S. State Department released its annual human rights report that in part targeted China, the Chinese State Council fired back with a report of its own, picking apart the U.S.’s human rights failures.

And when U.S. President Barack Obama hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping in California for an informal, bilateral summit, it was observed as a meeting of equals.

But China’s status today belies its volatile modern history – which includes bloody upheavals, peasant rebellions, mass protests, warfare, regime changes and revolutions.

For decades, China failed to adopt the appropriate military technologies to defend against imperialists, the economic frameworks to develop and the governmental systems to maintain order. So how did China come to this moment of economic and political success? And what underlying philosophies had driven China forward to this point?

Parts of China’s history were distorted by the state-owned media, or simply purged during the Cultural Revolution, or at least suppressed by the state from collective memory.

In their new book, Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-First Century, authors Orville Schell and John Delury weave together the history of modern China through the perspectives of China’s most influential leaders.

Schell and Delury’s historical investigation covers 180 years in scope and begins in Nanjing, in the Temple of the Tranquil Seas. “It was in a back room of this temple that, in the oppressive heat of August 1842, Chinese negotiators were forced to sit with their British counterparts and hammer out the crushing terms of the Treaty of Nanjing,” they wrote.

The treaty marked the end of the three-year Opium War, China’s first major conflict with the West. It also marked the first of many unequal treaties that China would suffer through under its imperial oppressors – the U.K., Germany, Russia, France, the U.S. and Japan.

Self-dubbed the “Middle Kingdom”, 19^th-century China and its then ruling Qing Dynasty emperors were reluctant to learn from the advancing West – which the highbrowed Chinese still referred to as “barbarians”.

But after a few additional rounds of military defeats and humiliations suffered at the hands of the West and Japan, as well as increasing rates of domestic unrest, Chinese leaders acknowledged their country’s own weaknesses and worked painfully to reform them.

The book details the careers of 11 of China’s subsequent leaders. It weaves through their personal and political lives, and analyses the ideas that propelled them forward. What strings the characters together is the leitmotif “wealth and power” – a concept that morphs and accretes as the historical narrative progresses.

Schell and Delury met in New Haven, Connecticut, over dinner at the home of historian Jonathan Spence, a professor at Yale University. Delury had just finished his PhD programme under Spence and was looking for a job, and Schell – the director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society – had a contract with the publishing group Random House.

Schell first hired Delury on as an associate director at the Center on U.S.-China Relations. Delury is now an assistant professor at the Graduate School of International Studies at Yonsei University in South Korea. Eventually, the two decided to undertake the enigmatic task of piecing together modern China.

“History always makes sense. We thought it was our job to try to understand how it did in this case,” Schell told IPS. “Each of us brought different parts of the historical puzzle into the project.”

In pursuit of achieving “wealth and power” and restoring the country, China – now a single-party communist state – dabbled in a variety of ideologies, including “republicanism, anarchism, Marxism, Christianity and even fascism – whatever ism of the time seemed to offer the best restorative promise,” wrote the authors.

One of the most fascinating portraits in the book is that of Chairman Mao Zedong, who led China through a series of violent and oppressive revolutions, most famously the Cultural Revolution (1966-76).

“Like an addict in search of the next high, (Mao) was always looking to the next campaign or movement, each more relentless, brutal and exhilarating than the last,” wrote Schell and Delury.

But through the cold lens of history, Mao’s acts may have finally cleared the burdens of China’s ancient traditions and allowed for the pragmatically minded Deng Xiaoping to reform and open up China’s economy, they wrote.

The emphasis on “wealth and power” in statecraft differs, however, from the more Western ideals of achieving democracy and individual liberties.

Even Sun Yat-Sen, the Western-educated founding father of the Republic of China, doubted democracy’s success in his newly minted country.

“Like so many other Chinese reformers and even revolutionaries, when push came to shove, Sun came down on the side of order, not the rights of the people. China’s basic challenge was not to be met by ‘merely copying the West,’ but by ensuring the overall liberty and independence of the country collectively,” wrote Schell and Delury.

The last profile in the book focuses on dissident Liu Xiaobo. Liu, a professor and writer, was an active participant of the 1989 Tiananmen protests. He gained international fame after he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, the first Chinese citizen to do so. But Liu was unable to receive the award since he was locked up in a Chinese prison cell.

Asked why the authors included Liu, who values individual rights and strays away from the “wealth and power” narrative, Schell said, “Now, having obtained a fair modicum of wealth and power, maybe (China’s) agenda of becoming a more just, rule of law [society], perhaps even a constitutional society becomes possible.”

“Every person profiled in the book feels that democracy or republican government is good, but not until we’ve unified, not until we’re strong, not until we’re wealthier.

“So now that’s happened. Suddenly, Liu Xiaobo and people like him become much more relevant,” said Schell.

The United Nations has come under criticism from medical experts and members of civil society for what these critics consider inaccurate statements about the effects of lingering radioactivity on local populations.

Ana Pancenko, one of the many Ukrainian children affected by the Chernobyl disaster. Credit: José Luis Baños/IPS

Scientists and doctors met with top U.N. officials last week to discuss the effects of radioactivity in Japan and Ukraine, and the U.N. has enlisted several of its agencies, including the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the U.N. Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), to address the matter.

In May, UNSCEAR stated that radiation exposure following the 2011 Fukushima-Daichii nuclear disaster in Japan poses “no immediate health risks” and that long-term health risks are “unlikely”.

“I think it’s ridiculous,” said Helen Caldicott, an Australian doctor and dissident, in response to the UNSCEAR report.

“There have been health effects. A lot of people have experienced acute radiation illness, including bleeding noses, hair loss, nausea and diarrhoea,” she told IPS.

The UNSCEAR report followed a February WHO report, which also predicted low health risks and normal cancer rates in Japan after the Fukushima disaster, even while noting that long-term studies are still needed. WHO warned instead of resulting psychosocial damage to the population.

Asked why UNSCEAR and WHO released such statements if they were medically inaccurate, Caldicott referred to a 1959 WHO-IAEA agreement that gives the IAEA – an organisation that promotes nuclear power – oversight when researching nuclear accidents.

“The WHO is a handmaiden to the IAEA,” said Caldicott, who engaged in a 2011 debate on the subject with The Guardian’s George Monbiot. Monbiot had argued that nuclear plants are a viable alternative to coal plants. "A lot of people have experienced acute radiation illness, including bleeding noses, hair loss, nausea and diarrhoea."
-- Helen Caldicott

“It’s a scandal which has not really been exposed in general literature and to the public,” said Caldicott of the WHO-IAEA agreement.

When the U.N. General Assembly proclaimed 2006-2016 the “Decade of Recovery and Sustainable Development of the Affected Regions”, it committed to a “development approach” to redress the areas affected by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear fallout in the former Soviet Union.

The U.N.’s action plan was based on scientific studies from the 2005 Chernobyl Forum, which brought member states Belarus, Russia and Ukraine together with experts from the IAEA and seven of the world’s most influential development agencies, including the World Bank Group, WHO and UNSCEAR.

The Chernobyl Forum noted that the Chernobyl nuclear accident was a “low-dose event”. It stated, “The vast majority of people living in contaminated areas are in fact highly unlikely to experience negative health effects from radiation exposure and can safely raise families where they are today.”

Caldicott said of WHO, “They didn’t do any studies of Chernobyl, they just did estimates.” She cited a 2009 report by the New York Academy of Sciences, which painted a different picture.

Radiation from uranium mining

The IAEA promotes “safe, responsible development of uranium resources”, the raw materials used to fuel nuclear reactors and build nuclear bombs.

For Ashish Birulee, a Ho tribal resident of Jadugoda, India, safe uranium mining in his community is far from reality, and the health effects of radiation are as clear as the photographs he has taken to document them.

Birulee, a student and photojournalist, lives next to a tailings dam, filled with radioactive waste from a uranium purification plant operated by the Uranium Corporation of India.

“Lung cancer, skin cancer, tumours, congenital deformities, down syndrome, mental retardation, megacephaly, sterility, infertility in married couples, thalassemia [and] rare birth defects like Gastroschisis [are] common in the area,” he told IPS.

“We are like guinea pigs here,” he said, citing government negligence on the matter. “I’m experiencing everyday radiation exposure and also witnessing how my people are suffering.”

Radiation from nuclear tests

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union conducted 456 nuclear tests at the Semipalatinsk test site in present day Kazakhstan.

“Based on information collected during the missions and subsequent research, there is sufficient evidence to indicate that most of the area has little or no residual radioactivity directly attributed to nuclear tests in Kazakhstan,” according to the IAEA.

But the IAEA narrative differs from those who live around Semipalatinsk. According to the preparatory committee for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO),”A number of genetic defects and illnesses in the region, ranging from cancers to impotency to birth defects and other deformities, have been attributed to nuclear testing.”

“There is even a museum of mutations at the regional medical institute in Semey, the largest city near the old nuclear testing site,” it noted.

“What radiation does – gamma, alpha or beta – is it either kills the cell or changes the biochemistry of the DNA molecule,” Caldicott, who has worked on nuclear issues for 43 years, explained. “One day [the cell] will start to divide by mitosis in an unregulated way, producing literally trillions and trillions of [mutated] cells, and that’s a cancer,” she said.

“You don’t know you’ve been exposed to radiation,” Caldicott pointed out. “You can’t taste or see radioactive elements in the food, and when the cancer develops, of course it doesn’t denote its origin.”

Fukushima on the Hudson

Meanwhile, two nuclear plants at Indian Point Energy Centre – just 60 kilometres upriver from U.N. headquarters in New York – are fighting for new licences, making the health and radiation question more relevant to diplomats from the 193 U.N. member states who live and work in the area.

Critics have dubbed Indian Point, which sits on two fault lines, as “Fukushima on the Hudson”, in reference to the nuclear disaster in Japan that was sparked by an earthquake and a tsunami.

However, there are a few differences between Fukushima and Indian Point. “Fukushima was directly over the ocean, and the winds were favourable. They were blowing most of the radiation out to sea,” said Manna Jo Greene, environmental director for Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, noting that the remaining radiation was still disastrous.

But the winds in New York would blow plumes of radiation from north to south and from east to west. “There are 20 million people living within [100 kilometres], and there are 9 million people between Indian Point and the nearest ocean,” Greene told IPS.

“If there was a problem at Indian Point,” she added, “there’s a very good chance that the radiation could move in a southeasterly direction and expose millions of people to radiation before it blew out to sea.”

The National Security Agency has access to data from numerous telephone and internet companies. Credit: Ed Yourdon/CC by 2.0

By George Gao
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 12 2013 (IPS)

Edward Snowden, 29, left behind a comfortable lifestyle in Hawaii as a private contractor for the Pentagon’s National Security Agency (NSA) because he did not want to help create an “architecture for oppression” for fellow citizens.

Snowden blew the whistle on a series of invasive activities that the NSA conducts domestically and internationally under the banner of “national security” – activities that intensified after Al Qaeda attacks against the United States on Sep. 11, 2001.

The NSA has access to a variety of online and telephone metadata banks, including from Verizon Communications, a leading telephone provider. Verizon metadata displays the duration of phone calls, the location of callers, the phone numbers being connected and the dates phone calls were made, according to the Guardian.

The NSA also collects data from AT&T and Sprint Nextel, as well as from credit card transactions, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Through its “Prism” programme, the NSA has direct access to central data from nine major internet companies – Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, AOL, Apple, PalTalk, Skype and YouTube – including access to U.S. citizens’ email content and chat logs, reported the Guardian and the Washington Post, the recipients of the documents leaked by Snowden.

The NSA revelations have prompted civil society demands for the U.N. Human Rights Council to address privacy rights in the face of increased state surveillance worldwide. They also underscore the warnings of a Jun. 4 report by U.N. Special Rapporteur Frank La Rue that addressed the increasing use of such surveillance.

“National laws regulating what constitutes the necessary, legitimate and proportional state involvement in communications surveillance are often inadequate or simply do not exist,” said La Rue."The surveillance being undertaken by the NSA...is a breach of international guarantees of freedom of expression."
-- Toby Mendel,

La Rue’s report noted that surveillance technologies are developing much faster than legal frameworks can adapt to regulate them. It cautioned specifically against the U.S.’s Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which paved the way for NSA activities.

The report argued that unfettered state access to surveillance technologies could compromise human rights to privacy and freedom of expression, as protected by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which the United States has adopted and ratified, respectively.

The report warned too against the use of “an amorphous concept of national security” as a reason to invade people’s rights to privacy and freedom of expression, arguing that such an invasion potentially “threatens the foundations of a democratic society”.

La Rue’s report followed a 2012 global survey on Internet privacy and freedom of expression produced by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

The UNESCO report noted that the right to communicate anonymously strengthens political accountability and encourages people to speak out in the public interest without fear of reprisal.

“The surveillance being undertaken by the NSA, if the [news] reports are correct, is a breach of international guarantees of freedom of expression,” said Toby Mendel, co-author of the UNESCO report and executive director of the Centre for Law and Democracy in Canada.

“The idea that the NSA is tracking vast volumes of communication data, potentially based on little or no evidence of a crime having been committed, will exert a significant chilling effect on all kinds of communications,” he told IPS.

Mendel also noted that the within the European Union, companies are being asked to store communication tracking data for up to two years for potential government use, with some protective barriers.

EU countries expressed initial outrage over the NSA’s activities, according to the Associated Press, with some officials promising to raise the issue of surveillance with the U.S. government. But analysts argue that under the surface, the EU benefits from NSA intelligence without having to do the dirty work itself.

Later this month, the U.N. Human Rights Committee will review the U.S. government’s compliance with the ICCPR and may highlight the U.S.’s surveillance program, according to Allison Frankel at the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) human rights programme.

Meanwhile, the ACLU and the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) filed a lawsuit against U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration.

“Those programmes…constitute unreasonable intrusions into American’s private lives that’s protected by the Fourth Amendment [on search and seizure],” said Brett Kaufman, the national security fellow at ACLU’s National Security Project.

What is most disturbing, Kaufman told IPS, is that NSA activities were approved by all three branches of the U.S. government – Congress and the judiciary, as well as the executive – without appropriate input from U.S. citizens.

“In a democracy, the authority for this kind of intrusion into privacy must come from the people themselves,” he said.

Jun. 10 polls from the Pew Research Centre in Washington – conducted after the NSA leaks – shows that U.S. public perception of government surveillance has not changed much since 2001 and 2006, with 56 percent accepting NSA phone monitoring and 45 accepting email intrusions.

Jun. 12 polls from Gallup, however, show a 53 percent public disapproval rating of NSA surveillance activities.

Snowden’s leaked NSA documents may only show the tip of the iceberg of U.S. government surveillance activities.

Ryan Calo, an assistant professor at the University of Washington School of Law in Seattle and an expert on privacy issues, said that limited, public knowledge of NSA surveillance may take a psychological toll on some U.S. citizens.

“I believe the resulting discomfort and fear – the state of oblique awareness without really knowing the details – constitutes a form of privacy harm,” he told IPS.

Calo described a privacy “Catch-22” that is often the case in attempts to hold secretive government agencies accountable. “The courts won’t let you challenge secret surveillance because you cannot confirm it exists,” he said.

Such was the case in Clapper v. Amnesty International when the plaintiffs, including the ACLU, could not prove that they had been monitored by the NSA. But the ACLU, in its status as a Verizon customer, may now have the standing necessary to renew its lawsuit.

Asked by the Guardian about his actions, risks and sacrifices, Snowden said, “You can get up every day. You can go to work. You can collect your large paycheck for relatively little work against the public interest and go to sleep at night after watching your shows.”

“But if you realise that that’s the world you helped create, and it’s going to get worse with the next generation…to extend the capabilities of this sort of architecture of repression, you realise that you might be willing to accept any risk…so long as the public gets to make their own decisions about how that’s applied,” he said.

The U.N. Security Council unanimously adopts resolution 2094 (2013), strongly condemning the Feb. 12 nuclear test by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and imposing new sanctions on that country, Mar. 7, 2013. Credit: UN Photo/Evan Schneider

By George Gao
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 3 2013 (IPS)

U.S. President Barack Obama is set to host his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping on Jun. 7-8 for their first bilateral meeting as heads of state. Figuring on their agenda is how to address a precarious North Korea, which is armed with a small nuclear arsenal and vying for a bigger one.

In the past seven years, North Korea has suffered a spate of U.N. Security Council sanctions, the most recent of which was co-drafted by the U.S. and China in March under resolution 2094. The resolution prohibits the transfer of any materials and financial assets into North Korea that may contribute to its nuclear programme. The resolution also prevents some luxury goods from entering the country.

But in general, U.N. sanctions have yet to halt North Korea’s nuclear developments, much less disarm its nuclear arsenal.

“Clearly, U.N. sanctions have not been effective, as evidenced by North Korea’s continued development and testing of nuclear weapons since sanctions were first introduced in 2006,” said Charles K. Armstrong, a professor of history at Columbia University and the director of the Center for Korean Research.

Sanctions are seen as provocative by Pyongyang and are often met with pugnacious threats against the U.S. and its allies, including promises to burn down Washington in a “sea of fire”. Armstrong told IPS that a diplomatic approach instead was possible, albeit very difficult given how far apart the U.S. and North Korea have drifted on the nuclear issue.

“North Korea has declared it will never give up its nuclear weapons, (and) the U.S. insists Pyongyang must give them up,” he said. “For now, the best we can hope for is an agreement to freeze North Korea’s programme where it is, while diplomatic negotiations work toward reducing and ultimately eliminating weapons on the Korean peninsula.”

According to the U.S. policy of “strategic patience”, Pyongyang must first reconfirm its commitment to denuclearise before Washington opens up for dialogue.

Part of the solution lies in China, which has maintained diplomatic and economic relations with North Korea as its neighbour to the north. Trade between the two countries has reportedly grown in the past decade, or at least up until a Chinese banking decision curtailed financial ties in early May.

China and the U.S. have different visions of the Asia-Pacific moving forward. China hopes for stability on the Korean peninsula and has taken a less coercive approach to North Korea.

Other issues plaguing the U.S-China relationship include security violations via cyberspace, of which both countries have accused the other of carrying out and instigating; as well as the U.S.’s “rebalancing” or “pivot” of military forces away from the Middle East and into the Asia-Pacific.

At The Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore on Saturday, U.S. Secretary of Defence Chuck Hagel announced a variety of military assets that his country is planning on diverting into the region, including submarines, long-range bombers, carrier strike groups, F-22 and F-35 fighter jets and ground troops. Hagel also boasted forthcoming laser and drone technologies, the latter of which can now take off from aircraft carriers.

Chinese General Yao Yunzhu rebuked Hagel’s speech and alleged that the U.S.’s military build-up in the Asia-Pacific was an attempt to counter China’s rising international influence and offset China’s increasing military capabilities, reported the Guardian.

But North Korea’s nuclear developments, missile launches and threats of late has irritated China as well, said Stephan Haggard, a professor of Korea-Pacific Studies at the University of California, San Diego.

On May 7, the state-run Bank of China cut off financial ties with North Korea’s Foreign Trade Bank, which is North Korea’s main international business liaison. And on May 21, during a bilateral meeting with North Korean envoy Choe Ryong Hae, President Xi “reaffirmed China’s stance of denuclearisation on the Korean Peninsula” and called for North Korea to return to six-party talks, reported China’s Xinhua News Agency.

“On the opportunity side, this issue might be a way for the U.S. and China to cooperate, given that they have common interests in the denuclearisation of the peninsula,” Haggard told IPS.

North Korea’s last nuclear test shows that it is on the cusp of having an efficient nuclear device, warned Leon V. Sigal, director of the Northeast Asia Cooperative Security Project at the Social Science Research Council.

“The Chinese position’s been clear for a long time. They absolutely do not want the North Koreans to test longer-range missiles and nuclear weapons. They understand the reactions of the nuclear states and South Korea will adversely affect Chinese security,” he told IPS.

“The problem is that they’re not prepared to bring North Korea to its knees… Their influence is therefore limited because the North Koreans know they don’t want to topple the regime,” he said.

If North Korea falls, its refugees may pour across the Yalu River and over the Sino-Korean border. A collapsed regime may also lead South Korea, a U.S. ally, to take over the peninsula, bring U.S. presence right into China’s backyard and ratchet tensions between the two superpowers.

“The U.S. and China have to work out further accommodations… It’s not only the key to the North Korean problem, but even more, it’s the key to the larger Asian security problem,” said Sigal.

In the late 19^th century, Russian playwright Anton Chekhov famously touted one golden rule for dramatic productions: if you show your audience a loaded gun in the first act, that gun must go off by the last.

The first launch of a Trident missile on Jan. 18, 1977 at Cape Canaveral, Florida. Credit: U.S. Air Force

But Chekhov’s storytelling trope is troubling if applied to the world’s weapons technology today, which include an estimated 17,300 nukes – used primarily by nations as props to leverage international power.

According to the Ploughshares Fund’s World Nuclear Stockpile Report, an estimated 8,500 nukes belong to Russia and 7,700 to the U.S. The seven other nations with a nuclear arsenal trail far behind: they include France (300), China (240), the U.K. (225), Pakistan (90-110), India (60-110), Israel (60-80) and most recently North Korea (<10).

“It’s hard to imagine any military mission that will require the use of one nuclear weapon. The use of 10 weapons would be a catastrophe beyond human experience, and 50 is unthinkable,” said Joe Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, a global security foundation based in the U.S.

“The number you need to actually deter an enemy from attacking the U.S. with or without nuclear weapons is very, very low. To be on the safe side, you might want a couple of hundred,” he told IPS.

“The idea that we need thousands of nuclear weapons… is an outmoded, irrational, expensive legacy of the Cold War,” he said.

While the U.S.’s nuke budget is secret, Cirincione estimates that in the next decade, the U.S. will spend 640 billion dollars on nukes and its related programmes – such as missile defence systems, environmental clean-up of nuclear activity and the technological upgrade of the current nuclear arsenal.

Asked about the U.S.’s role in pushing for nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation on the international scale, Cirincione said, “The U.S. is probably the most influential voice in this debate, but it can’t do it alone. Most importantly, it needs Russia to reduce the arsenals with them.”

On Feb. 5, 2011, the U.S. and Russia entered into force a New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), in which both nations agreed by 2018 to limit the number of their warheads to 1,550; and the number of their combined intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) and heavy bombers equipped for nuclear armaments to 800.

“If the U.S. and Russia can agree to cut their arsenals in half, for example, as they did in the 1980s and the 1990s… it would be universally applauded, and it would be very difficult for bureaucracies and political opponents to resist that in either country,” said Cirincione.

But U.S. progress for disarmament and non-proliferation has stalled in the past few years. George Perkovich, director of the Nuclear Policy Programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, attributes the U.S.’s balk partly to internal politics in Washington.

In his April 2013 monograph, Do Unto Others: Toward a Defensible Nuclear Doctrine, Perkovich writes, “A relatively small, specialized community of experts and officials shapes U.S. nuclear policy.”

Members of this community often distort nuclear threats to the U.S., as well as the best ways to respond to such threats, argues Perkovich. They do this not in the U.S.’s national security interest, but in their own career interests to prevent “their domestic rivals from attacking them as too weak to hold office”.

Nukes deter U.S.-led regime change

Perkovich also notes in his monograph that Iran, North Korea and Pakistan believe having their own nuclear arsenals deter U.S.-led regime change. They fear the fates of nuclear-free Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011.

Asked how the U.S. should respond if future world governments – oppressive or not, who are acting against U.S. interests – continue pursuing nukes to prevent regime change, Perkovich told IPS that would be a difficult problem.

“The one and only thing nuclear weapons are good for is to keep people from invading your country. So, states and leaders that worry about getting invaded tend to find nukes attractive, or alliance with the U.S. attractive,” he said.

“Non-proliferation would be easier to achieve if states didn’t worry they were going to be invaded and/ or overthrown if they didn’t have nuclear weapons.

“The problem, clearly, is that some governments are so brutal and menacing to their own people and neighbours that it is hard to foreswear trying to remove them,” he added.

Perkovich recommended that the U.S. limit pressure against repressive governments to political and moral means, as well as to sanctions; and that the U.S. clarify it won’t act militarily, if the repressive regime does not attack its neighbours or seek nukes.

Cirincione, author of Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons, argued that vying for nukes, in Iran and North Korea’s cases, may actually be counterproductive.

“I don’t think it improves their security, I think it isolates them even further,” he said. “It prevents them from forging the kind of international ties that can really aid their country, build their economies (and) increase their influence.

“That means that in order to stop those countries from getting or keeping nuclear weapons, you have to address their legitimate security concerns. A part of the engagement with those countries has got to be security assurances that guarantees then that you won’t attack them, or that their neighbours won’t attack them.”

Obama’s nuclear legacy

During his December 2012 speech at the National War College in Washington, U.S. President Barack Obama said, “Missile by missile, warhead by warhead, shell by shell, we’re putting a bygone era behind us.”

Cirincione explained that pursuing nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation has been important to Obama since his youth. Obama’s first foreign policy speech as president – in Prague in April 2009 – and his first foreign policy speech after re-election both focused on nukes.

“The president faces a multitude of pressing issues, but only two of them threaten destruction on a planetary scale: global warming and nuclear weapons,” said Cirincione.

While opposition to nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation is prevalent inside Washington, it pales in comparison to opposition facing warming, immigration, or tax reform.

“This is an opportunity for the president to make a major improvement in U.S. and global security with a relatively small investment of his time,” said Cirincione, who explained that Obama’s efforts to curb nukes may conclude a historic arc, which started with President John F. Kennedy’s efforts in the 1960s and was accelerated by President Ronald Reagan’s efforts in the 1980s.

Cirincione said, “(Obama’s) got three and a half years to do it. If he starts now, he can get the job done. He can change U.S. nuclear policy to put it irreversibly on a path to fewer nuclear weapons, and eventually (eliminate) this threat from the face of the earth.”

Victims of drone attacks readied for burial in Miranshah, North Waziristan. Credit: Haji Mohammad Mujtaba/IPS

By George Gao
UNITED NATIONS, May 11 2013 (IPS)

Adding fuel to a long-simmering dispute between the U.S. and Pakistan, a Peshawar High Court declared CIA drone strikes illegal on Thursday, referring to such attacks in Pakistan’s tribal belt as “war crime(s)”.

The court called for its nation’s “use of force, if need be” to prevent further civilian deaths from U.S. drone strikes. It also ordered Pakistani delegates at the U.N. to bring forth the issue with the Security Council, where Pakistan is currently a non-permanent member.“Because the administration has been so opaque, a left-right coalition running from Code Pink to Rand Paul has now spoken out against the drone programme.” -- Harold Hongju Koh

Chief Justice Dost Muhammad Khan, who presided over the case, cited a litany of broken international laws and agreements, ranging from the U.N. Charter to the U.N. Millennium Declaration and the Geneva Conventions. He also called for the U.S. government to redress Pakistani civilian victims of U.S. drone strikes, and for U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to establish a war crimes tribunal to investigate further injustices.

However, Masood Khan, the permanent representative of Pakistan to the U.N., did not address the topic of U.S. drone strikes in his statement on counterterrorism to the Security Council today, despite the Peshawar ruling.

Philip G. Alston, a former U.N. Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, told IPS, “There is an important symbolism in the findings of the Peshawar Court.”

Alston applauded the court’s determination to highlight the fact that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) drone strikes are inconsistent with international law. However, he noted, the legal reasoning behind the ruling was not “impeccable”.

“I doubt that either the (U.S.) or Pakistani governments will be moved by the far-reaching orders issued by the court,” he said, “but the message being sent is nonetheless an important one.”

Muhammad Khan’s sweeping judgments on May 9 came two days before his country’s presidential elections. Mirza Shahzad Akbar – a legal fellow at Reprieve and a Pakistani lawyer who defended victims in the Peshawar case – referred to the High Court’s decision as a “landmark judgment”.

He stated in a press release, “This judgment will also prove to be a test for the new government: if drone strikes continue and the government fails to act, it will run the risk of contempt of court.”

In 2010, Akbar assisted the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) in a terrorism case involving a Pakistani diplomat. But their relationship turned sour when Akbar and his legal charity, the Foundation for Fundamental Rights, decided to sue the CIA for launching a drone strike on Mar. 17, 2011 that killed a group of Pakistani civilians.

When Akbar planned a trip form Pakistan to New York in June 2011 to speak at Columbia Law School, the U.S. State Department initially refused to grant him a visa.

In February 2013, U.S. President Barack Obama pledged in his State of the Union address to make his counter-terrorism strategy – including the “targeting, detention, and prosecution of terrorists” – more legally accountable and transparent.

Asked if Obama had held true to his words, Brett Kaufman, the National Security Fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) National Security Project, told IPS, “No. Despite repeated promises from President Obama and the new CIA director John Brennan and the Attorney General Eric Holder during a hearing before the Senate, the (Obama) administration has not taken any efforts to increase transparency.”

Asked if there was any pressure from the legislative or judicial branches to curb executive powers over U.S. targeted drone strikes, Kaufman said, “I think the best example of legislative pressure came before and during the confirmation hearing for John Brennan, the CIA director.”

He explained, “At the same time, there was the leak of the white paper to NBC News. In the wake of all of that, the government released an official version of the white paper and granted access to two committees in the Senate to view the actual underlying Office of Legal Counsel memoranda that authorised the killings of U.S. citizens by the executive branch.

“After the confirmation of Mr. Brennan… there hasn’t been nearly as much legislative pressure,” he said.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates 368 total CIA drone strikes in Pakistan from 2004-13, of which 312 occurred under Obama’s direction. It also estimates that between 2,541 and 3,533 people were killed, 411-844 of which are civilians, and 168-197 of which are children.

Last month, U.S. protestors launched “April Days of Action” to protest military bases, universities and companies where drones are used, supported and built. The protests – which sought to raise awareness about U.S. drone strikes – were partly inspired by Republican Rand Paul’s 13-hour filibuster of John Brennan’s nomination as CIA director. Paul’s filibuster highlighted Brennan’s opaque drone policies.

Obama’s former legal aids – Jeh Charles Johnson and Harold Hongju Koh – also cautioned against continued government secrecy over drone programmes.

Johnson, the former general counsel for the Department of Defence, entertained the idea of establishing a “national security court” or a “drone court” during his Mar. 18 keynote address at the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School.

“The problem is that the American public is suspicious of executive power shrouded in secrecy,” he said. Johnson noted, however, the many complications of creating of such a court to oversee executive power in counterterrorism operations.

Koh, a former legal adviser to the U.S. Department of State who defended Obama’s drone policy in 2010, addressed CIA drone strikes at the Oxford Union in the U.K. on May 7. He admitted that the Obama administration “has not done enough to be transparent about legal standards and the decision-making process that it has been applying.”

Koh added, “Because the administration has been so opaque, a left-right coalition running from Code Pink to Rand Paul has now spoken out against the drone programme.” Koh noted that the lack of transparency is the core issue, rather than the drone strikes per se.

Asked if the CIA has improved its transparency measures for drone strikes, Alston, the John Norton Pomeroy Professor of Law at New York University School of Law, said, “Unfortunately, the terms CIA and transparency cannot realistically be used in the same sentence.  Like other intelligence agencies, it is dedicated to the highest possible level of opacity, not transparency.  That is the very reason why it should not be carrying out lethal operations.”

LGBT activists, human rights observers and police officers wait outside a courtroom in Uganda's constitutional court. Four activists had brought a case against Minister of State for Ethics and Integrity Simon Lokodo. Credit: Will Boase/IPS

By George Gao
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 26 2013 (IPS)

Ishita Chaudhry spent the past 36 hours listening to U.N. delegates discuss population growth and development. She noticed that on “controversial” topics, such as sexual and reproductive rights, young people’s voices often get lost.

“For us as young people, it’s really not as controversial as it is for governments,” said Chaudhry, a member of the High-Level Task Force for the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), at a press briefing Thursday.

“We know that we need to be empowered to claim our human rights… And we understand that access to sexual, reproductive health and birth services, and comprehensive sexuality education is a key aspect of that empowerment,” she explained.

Joaquim Alberto Chissano, a former president of Mozambique and co-chair of the task force, added, “Fulfilling sexual and (reproductive) health and rights is not only a human right… it also offers solutions to many of today’s global problems.”

Chissano – often credited for ending civil war and strengthening democracy in Mozambique – cited the links between sexual and reproductive health and national progress.

He explained that by promoting sexual and reproductive health, the international community can “fully unleash human potential, energies and talents… to nurture the human capital that countries need to reduce poverty and inequality”.

If sexual and reproductive rights are not addressed, “those who will feel the pinch more are the coming generations”, he warned.

The task force’s work – entitled “Policy Recommendations for the ICPD Beyond 2014: Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights for All” – reaffirms values established almost twenty years ago in Cairo, where 179 governments gathered to adopt a Programme of Action that placed the human rights of women at the centre of international development goals.

The task force calls on the governments to address Cairo’s “unfinished agenda” by: ensuring sexual and reproductive rights through law; working towards universal access to sexual and reproductive health services; providing sexuality education for all young people; and eliminating violence against women and girls.

It argues that governments should expand access to safe abortion and to services for victims of gender-based violence, and that the international community should adopt a definition of “comprehensive sexuality education”.

The task force’s work will inform U.N. negotiations for a new development framework, to replace the expiring Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) post-2015.

According to the task force, the sexual and reproductive health of young women and girls are particularly compromised. It cites that one in three girls in developing countries are married without their consent; 2,400 young people are infected with HIV every day; and up to 50 percent of all sexual assaults are committed against girls under the age of 16.

Asked if sexual and reproductive rights are often barred by social or cultural norms, Chaudhry – founder of The YP Foundation, a non-profit organisation in India – said, “I come from a country that has a broad representation, both in terms of religion (and) culture. It has a lot of sensitivities.”

She emphasised the importance of providing information and sexuality education to approach such sensitivities. “You’re not telling the young person that they should or shouldn’t do something, you’re giving them access to evidence-based information, which means that they are in the best place to decide (for themselves).”

She said, “Because there’s such a broad lack of understanding… the fear and stigma and discrimination around issues of sex and sexuality therefore remains very high.”

Chaudhry argued that some of the most effective cases in achieving sexual and reproductive rights are when governments invest at community levels in reducing levels of related stigma.

She explained, “One of the biggest misconceptions of sexuality education is that if you provide sexuality education to an adolescent, you’re going to decrease the age of first sex.”

She added, “Once you start breaking the stigma and the silence around issues of sex and sexuality, you find that even parents and religious leaders themselves have questions… They (just) haven’t had anybody else to ask.”

Tarja Halonen, former president of Finland and co-chair of the task force, posed a question of her own: would you want to perpetuate socially rooted injustices, “or would you like to be the founding father or mother with a new way of (doing things)”?

She explained that while it is important to respect traditional values, it is also important to abide by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She emphasised the need to work with experts from schools, health centres and religious communities.

Halonen noted that social stigmas on sexuality are prevalent even in Finland – ranked the second happiest country by the U.N.’s World Happiness Report. These stigmas discourage victims of sexual abuse from seeking the help they need, while providing impunity for perpetrators.

Halonen told IPS, however, that there has been some progress. She shared her experience fighting for sexual and reproductive rights, which started over four decades ago when she was a young lawyer.

“In the late 1960s, when I spoke on behalf of young Finnish students… I said that (students) need more information for these issues,” said Halonen.

“I remembered how they answered me in Parliament. They said, ‘(Students) are in the university in order to study, not to have sex’.”

Despite social stigmas and Parliament’s neglect, Halonen was able organise sexual and reproductive health services and information for the university’s health care centres.

Her national progress for sexual and reproductive rights continued from there.

“We changed the legislation in 1970s concerning minorities (and) homosexuals. Then we changed the abortion law, little by little. Now when we look at statistics, we see afterwards that it has worked well. We have less abortions, we have better birth rates, we have fewer HIVs,” she said.

“So what are we afraid of?” she added.

Former U.S. Republican Congressman Asa Hutchinson hopes his country can redeem itself after torturing an unknown but certainly large number of detainees.

“There is no persuasive evidence in the public record that the widespread use of torture against suspected terrorists was necessary,” he said during a press briefing Tuesday in Washington.

“Torture often produces false information, and it is difficult and time-consuming for interrogators and analysts to distinguish what may be true and usable from that which is false and misleading,” Hutchinson continued.

“We see no evidence in the public record that the traditional means of interrogation would not have yielded the necessary intelligence following the attacks of 9/11,” he added.

Hutchinson is co-chair of the Constitution Project’s blue-ribbon Task Force on Detainee Treatment, a bipartisan group comprised of high-ranking U.S. officials from the judiciary, Congress, diplomatic service, military and intelligence agencies, as well as experts in law, medicine and ethics.

For over two years, the task force amassed public records and conducted over 100 interviews to shed light on the U.S.’s treatment of suspected terrorists since Sep. 11, 2001.

The task force concluded in a 560-page report that it is “indisputable that the U.S. engaged in the practice of torture” and that “the nation’s highest officials bear some responsibility for allowing and contributing to the spread of torture”.

Hutchinson said that the task force’s definition of torture stems from historical and legal court cases. He explained that interrogation techniques the U.S. State Department identifies as torture when implemented by other nations are similar, if not identical, to some U.S. interrogation techniques.

Hutchinson said, “We as a nation have to get this right. I look back at history to the time during World War II when we interned some Japanese Americans. At the time, it seemed like a right and proper thing to do. But in the light of history, it was an error.”

He added, “This report will hopefully put into focus some of the actions taken in the post-9/11 environment.”

U.S. Ambassador James Jones, a democrat from Oklahoma and co-chair of the task force, noted the importance for his country to uphold and value the rule of law. “What we tried to do in this report is to point out where we separated ourselves and our official actions from those values, and how we must get back on track,” he said.

“We believe that this report is the most comprehensive record of detainee treatment across multiple administrations and multiple geographic theatres,” he added.

Laura Pitter, a counterterrorism adviser at Human Rights Watch’s U.S. Programme, told IPS, “It’s an incredibly important report.”

She added, “It’s not some kind of a political witch-hunt, it’s a bipartisan effort to look at things objectively.”

The report’s 11 chapters cover a span of topics, including detention at Guantanamo Bay, the role of psychologists in interrogation techniques, the U.S. rendition programme and the efficacy of torturing for information.

The report also includes character sketches of both victims and perpetrators of torture, such as Captain Albert Shimkus of the U.S. Naval Medical Corps, who was in charge of a medical facility in Guantánamo’s Camp Delta detention centre.

According to the report, Shimkus initially lauded Camp Delta’s treatment of detainees, comparing their medical treatment in Guantánamo to that received by U.S. troops.

But Shimkus now believes the commanders he reported to walled him off from the abuse U.S. detainees suffered. He told the task force that he had been used “as a tool” by those who wanted to draw a misleading picture of Guantánamo.

Asked why President Barack Obama’s administration has kept U.S. treatment of detainees in the shadows, Pitter told IPS, “There doesn’t appear to be the political will to unseal what the U.S. did in its name.”

She added, “It’s very unfortunate because it makes it very difficult for the U.S. to then argue that other countries should abide by these principles when (the U.S.) clearly did not… and then fails to account for it publically.”

Asked how U.S. torture of non-U.S. nationals affects diplomatic relations abroad, Pitter said, “When the U.S. engages in torture and abuse and fails to account for that abuse and hold those responsible for abuse, it undermines U.S. credibility to argue for the same type of adherence to those principles in other countries.”

She continued, “The impact is on U.S. foreign policy because (the U.S.) is working with these nations and these countries on a number of issues and (is undermining) their relationships.”

Pitter said that the U.N. Convention Against Torture and the U.S.’s own domestic laws obligate the U.S. to investigate torture and prosecute those who are responsible. But the report stated that “no CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) personnel have ever been convicted or even charged for numerous instances of torture in CIA custody.”

Pitter noted the existence of a 6,000-page classified report detailing the CIA’s detention and interrogation programme, and called for it to go public.

Pitter also noted that the U.S. is legally obligated to “provide redress to these victims… who were never charged for the crime and are released”.

She argued, “The wrongdoing that was done to them should be acknowledged, and there should be some ability to provide some kind of compensation to them for the years that they lost and the abuse that they suffered… So perhaps that’s the next step.”

Indian Point is classified as a potential target for terrorist attacks, due to its proximity to New York City and to over 20 million residents. Credit: Daniel Case/cc by 3.0

By George Gao
NEW YORK, Apr 16 2013 (IPS)

Over one million kgs of nuclear waste sit in limbo on the banks of the Hudson River, in dry cask storage units and spent fuel pools just 60 kms north of New York City, according to environmental organisations.  

The original plan was to bury the nuclear waste in a national repository deep beneath Yucca Mountain, in the southwestern deserts of the U.S. But that plan fell through when President Barack Obama’s administration defunded the project.

Nuclear waste is known for its long-lasting qualities and is often associated with unpredictable health effects that metastasise over many years.

The waste along the Hudson River belongs to Indian Point Energy Center, a nuclear power plant run by Entergy Corporation. Indian Point has endured a series of incidents in its 52-year span, including radioactive leaks, transformer explosions and ensuing fires.

Indian Point is classified as a potential target for terrorist attacks, due to its proximity to New York City and to over 20 million residents. It is also located precariously on two fault lines, which led critics to dub it “Fukushima on the Hudson”, in reference to the March 2011 nuclear catastrophe in Japan following an earthquake and a tsunami.

Indian Point made local headlines last week when the U.S. Government Accountability Office produced a report warning residents within a 16 km radius of nuclear operations that in case of a nuclear emergency, those fleeing the area would likely jam evacuation routes.

Indian Point’s two functioning units are up for relicensing in 2014 and 2016, to operate for an additional 20 years.

“If that does go through, they’ll generate approximately an additional (one million kilogrammes) of waste,” said Deborah Brancato, a staff attorney at Riverkeeper, who has been engaged in an ongoing legal campaign to close Indian Point.

Brancato noted that dry cask storage units and spent fuel pools were meant to be temporary solutions to hold nuclear waste, and that they were untested for longtime use.

“The radioactivity in the pool is actually five times the radioactivity at the (plant’s) cores… The pools have a history of leaking radioactive water, so they’re already in a degraded condition,” she told IPS.

Asked how the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) – an independent agency established by Congress in 1974 to ensure the safe use of radioactive materials – has approached Indian Point, Brancato said, “They’ve been in lockstep with Entergy and have taken on the same positions.”

She noted that the NRC and the Entergy Corporation have largely ignored environmental concerns associated with Indian Point, even though such concerns were raised by the state and the environmental organisations in the area.

Manna Jo Greene, the environmental action director at the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, told IPS that Indian Point’s routine release of radioactive steam into the air and nuclear waste into the groundwater also pose serious health risks.

“That’s something that needs to be analysed by the NRC and a solution found, but they were punting. They either punt or they give out waivers (citing) existent laws, which are not protective enough,” she argued, explaining that the NRC has taken a “hear no evil, speak no evil” approach to Indian Point’s potential health effects.

“We know that when nuclear power plants shut down, certain cancer rates and thyroid problems decline fairly quickly over time,” she added.

Greene, who has been organising in the Hudson Valley since the civil rights movement, told IPS that the regulatory agencies she works with – such as the Environmental Protection Agency, New York State Department of Health and New York State Department of Environmental Conservation – are usually neutral and nonpartisan.

“But that’s not the case with the NRC,” she argued. “Their comments are sometimes more harsh on the interveners than the companies. They see their mission as to keep the (nuclear) industry going.”

The NRC – lauded internationally for its safety standards – has also been criticised for pandering to the interests of the commercial entities it is tasked to regulate.

Last month, Gregory Jaczko – a former chairman of the NRC – told Nuclear Intelligence Weekly (NIW) that the 103 nuclear plants currently operating across the U.S. should be phased out for health and safety reasons.

According to NIW, Jaczko – who regularly sparred with his four fellow commissioners while at the NRC – resigned from his post in 2012, claiming that he was a victim of a nuclear industry-backed effort to oust him from office.

Greene said, “These (nuclear) industries and NRC staff work on (legal) cases all over the country, and they get to know each other and develop a very cordial relationship.”

She added, “There’s a lot of familiarity… and somewhat of a revolving door between the industry and the oversight agency.”

Nuclear waste and river ecology

Paul Gallay, president of Riverkeeper, told IPS that Indian Point’s nuclear waste –which seeps into the groundwater and drips into the Hudson River – also affects marine ecology.

“Indian Point is not only the most dangerous place in the New York metro area for people, it’s also the most dangerous place for our river creatures,” he noted.

“They suck (10 million kls) of water through that plant every day and destroy one billion fish and other river creatures each year. So that’s gone under the radar to a great extent.”

The iconic statue of a knotted gun barrel outside U.N. headquarters was created by Swedish artist Fredrik Reuterswärd and is titled "Non-Violence". Credit:Tressia Boukhors/IPS

By George Gao
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 2 2013 (IPS)

For many in the international community, the iconic sculpture outside the U.N. Visitors’ Centre appears more prominent today, as the majority of member states tightened its knot by adopting the first ever Arms Trade Treaty (ATT).

The General Assembly tallied 154 member states that voted “yes” for the ATT and three that voted “no”, with 23 that abstained. The treaty’s adoption by majority vote followed gruelling negotiations from Mar. 18-28 at U.N. headquarters, which included a botched effort to adopt the text through consensus.It’s not perfect, but maybe it’s not completely broken.

The adopted ATT seeks to curb the use of weapons for human rights abuses. The currently unregulated trade has armed child soldiers, perpetuated gender-based violence and fuelled civilian massacres across the world.

The ATT legally binds its “States Parties” – or those who ratify the treaty’s text – to report their arms transfers and to assess whether such transfers will reach the hands of human rights and humanitarian law violators.

The treaty itself opens for signature on Jun. 3. According to the General Assembly resolution, the ATT’s “entry into force” applies only to those 50+ member states that will have ratified its text – with no legal obligations for others, explained Nikola Jovanovic, spokesperson and adviser to the current president of the General Assembly.

“The General Assembly resolutions are not legally binding, but there is political obligation (to) follow up and comply,” he told IPS.

Critics of the ATT

On Mar. 28, member states had an opportunity to adopt the ATT through consensual agreement. But Iran, North Korea and Syria made it “crystal clear” that no such consensus was reached, when they blocked the treaty. They cited a litany of reasons, ranging from national security concerns to the threat of non-state actors.

The National Rifle Association – a powerful U.S. gun lobby – also expressed dismay over the treaty, citing fears (which were later debunked) that the ATT would restrict U.S. citizens’ second amendment constitutional rights.

Critics from civil society point out that the ATT will barely put a dent in the military industrial complex and the global arms trade, a goliath business estimated to be worth 60-70 billion dollars a year.

“The treaty won’t curb exports and is not intended to,” Ann Feltham, parliamentary coordinator for the Campaign Against Arms Trade, told IPS. “It would be better not to have a treaty, as it legitimises arms exports and could provide governments with extra justification for them.”

In general, the vast “grey area” that shadows the arms trade – where legal and illegal dealings between governments, defence contractors and arms dealers collude – was seldom brought up during negotiations.

The Bolivian delegation abstained from the ATT vote in the General Assembly, for example, and cited the ATT’s ineptness to curb the conflict-driven profits of large defence corporations.

The evolving text

While most member states that participated in ATT negotiations from Mar. 18-28 favoured a more robust treaty, “the major suppliers favoured a treaty that would not constrain their ability to sell weapons to their chosen recipients,” said Dr. Natalie J. Goldring, senior fellow in the Center for Peace and Security Studies at GeorgetownUniversity.

In the end, Ambassador Peter Woolcott, president of the U.N. conference on the ATT, tilted in favour of the suppliers, Goldring told IPS.

While speaking at the GA, the Pakistani delegation – which voted “yes” for the treaty – reflected Goldring’s point. Pakistan noted that such biases should be addressed during the States Parties next review of the ATT.

Goldring argued, however, that the treaty – if fully implemented – would indeed affect both arms suppliers and recipients. “Suppliers will be required to give greater attention to human rights and humanitarian concerns before making decisions to transfer weapons,” she said.

“For example, ammunition and munitions were included in the treaty, despite U.S. objections,” she said, noting that this is “critically important”, as an estimated 875 million small arms and light weapons are already in circulation.

The treaty itself took on three forms during March negotiations. The first was a “legal scrub” of last July’s draft, which member states failed to adopt after the U.S. prevented consensus ahead of its presidential elections.

The second draft released by conference president  Woolcott was widely criticised by civil society organisations for its “watered down” language.

After the final ATT draft was released, Anna MacDonald, head of arms control at Oxfam, told IPS, “There were quite a few improvements that were made to the text (during final negotiations).” She cited changes in the amendments and final provisions section, as well as the improved language on ammunitions and conventional arms.

“It’s still not the ideal text,” she said, citing gaps addressing social and economic development, as well as the narrow scope of weapons covered.

“But the pressure is very much now on all those governments who want to see strong arms control put into play, to make sure they implement this treaty to the highest possible standards,” she added.

Paul Holtom, director of the Arms Transfers Programme at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), told IPS, that the ATT included “practical” tools, relevant for “preventing diversion, illicit arms trade and the misuse of weapons”.

He noted the practicality of “control lists”, for example, which the treaty requires ratifying nations to have. “That will set out in terms of what items are subject to control for transfers,” he said, noting its usefulness in tackling customs violations.

He explained that some nations already have control lists that cover a wider range of weapons than the eight categories included in the treaty. Holtom hopes that through international dialogue, the scope of such weapons included in both national control lists and the ATT will expand.

He emphasised the importance of the amendments section of the treaty. “It leaves (the ATT) more open for it to live and develop,” he said. The Conferences of States Parties will allow amendments and protocols to be included, he explained.

This way, the treaty’s scope can evolve to cover the technologically evolving weapons being traded today. Holtom cited armed drones as an example of a weapon that was left out in the ATT, but could one day be covered.

Holtom also noted the significance of including parts and components in the treaty. In today’s market, he explained, weapons are transferred not only as finished systems, but also the parts and components that make up those systems.

“These separate articles in the ATT on ammunition and parts and components are designed to try and block (any) circumvention (and gaps),” he said.

Asked to compare the ATT to treaties of the past, Holtom said, “It’s a very different animal to the non-proliferation and disarmament treaties. It’s not calling to ban anything.”

He added, “It’s calling on states to have prohibitions of certain types of transfers… so it’s a bit more complicated.”

“What’s significant is that it (was) negotiated in the U.N.,” said Holtom. Other treaties – on landmines and cluster bombs, for example – were negotiated outside of U.N. headquarters.

“(The ATT) can make a difference if implemented in good faith within the U.N. system,” he added. “It’s not perfect, but maybe it’s not completely broken.”

Viktor Bout is extradited to the United States aboard a Drug Enforcement Administration plane on Nov. 16, 2010. Credit: DEA

By George Gao
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 28 2013 (IPS)

Viktor Bout earned a few monikers in his heyday: “Merchant of Death”, “Sanctions Buster” and “Lord of War”. He’s the poster boy for illicit arms brokers – a guild of shadowy intermediaries who link arms suppliers to their end users.

While Bout sits in a jail in the southern U.S. state of Illinois, U.N. member states are concluding an Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) – an international agreement that hopes to control a trillion-dollar industry and curtail the use of arms for human rights violations. They justify in the most compelling ways that what they do is actually good for the world, using phrases like ‘in defence of humanity’ and ‘arming people to keep the peace’.

But “arms brokering” in general was hardly brought up during ATT negotiations at U.N. headquarters, from Mar. 18-28, even though Bout’s like-minded successors and contemporaries – many of who fuel the abuse of arms – remain at large.

“There’s something sinister here,” said Kathi Lynn Austin, executive director of the Conflict Awareness Project, referring to the relationships between governments and arms brokers.

“Governments around the world depend on brokers to carry out their national security operations,” she told IPS, pointing out that brokers are the main facilitators of any arms trade.

“If you talk about including these actors (in the ATT), and if you talk about bringing stronger control, then you open a can of worms and put a lot of governments on the spot,” said Austin, who’s own efforts led to Bout’s capture.

The reason brokering was not discussed, suspected Austin, was that governments made up their minds about brokering before ATT negotiations even began.

“Had there more time for (member states) to better understand the role of brokers and transporters, than you might have seen a stronger lobby for brokering,” she said.

“I just think we ran out of time (to convince them),” she added.

Brian Wood, head of arms control at Amnesty International, told IPS that there is an absence of national and international regulations surrounding brokering. Over two-thirds of U.N. member states lack national laws regulating the activity.

The final ATT itself contains only one small paragraph on brokering, which starts, “Each State Party shall take measures, pursuant to its national laws, to regulate brokering under its jurisdiction.”

Wood noted the significance of the phrase “pursuant to its national laws”. He said, “If two-thirds of countries don’t have (national) laws regulating brokering, then (by definition) the activity is not going to be illicit.”

Andrew Feinstein, author of “The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade”, told IPS that individual arms brokers are closely linked with defence contractors, governments and intelligence agencies.

Many governments and corporations are largely intertwined with arms brokers, using them as intermediaries to pay bribes and conduct other shadowy activities, he explained.

“Virtually every individual broker who is engaged in massive illegal arms trading activity are at one time or another being accessed by one or more intelligence agencies in the world,” he said.

Feinstein noted that such collusions might have played out during ATT negotiations.

“Defence companies, defence contractors and the defence sector are enormously powerful,” he said. “The ways their voices are heard are through the power they wield over governments.”

“These industries have incredibly close relationships with governments… They have an access to government which is quite unique,” said Feinstein, who served as a member of parliament for the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa.

He also noted the U.K.’s position in the ATT talks. “The U.K. has been positive about some of the (strong ATT) measures imposed, but the way in which the U.K. engages in the trade is that they use a huge number of intermediaries from the world for the illicit trade,” he said.

“I think the U.K. is supporting transparency measures with the knowledge that the really big players (U.S., Russia and China) are going to put it back, and I don’t think they’re actually going to be that disappointed with it,” he added.

Feinstein warned that if the final ATT is too watered down, it might be worse than not having a treaty at all.

“It (would) effectively provide a stamp of approval for the status quo as it currently functions, a status quo that only intensifies conflict… and most ironically make the world a more dangerous place,” he said.

Who are the arms brokers?

Wood of Amnesty International told IPS, “The top arms brokers are what I call professors of the arms trade.

“They work systematically. They have a breadth of technical and legal knowledge. They have commercial acumen. They know the right people, and they’ll offer a ‘one-stop-shop’ type of service,” he said.

However, few people have a clear view of the arms brokering network. “No one has a list of arms brokers, because the governments don’t control them… We (only) get a snapshot of what’s happening,” said Wood.

The most “nefarious” brokers are the ones who are corrupt and who work to circumvent U.N. arms embargos, he added.

Feinstein, who spoke with an arms dealer as recently as last week, told IPS, “They have certain common characteristics. The first that strikes me about all of them is that they’re all these absolutely charming, larger than life, charismatic characters.”

Another characteristic, said Feinstein, is that “to a sociopathic extent”, these brokers are unable to comprehend the effects of their actions.

“They justify in the most compelling ways that what they do is actually good for the world, using phrases like ‘in defence of humanity’ and ‘arming people to keep the peace’,” he said.

“They’re unable to see the other side of what they do, the real human consequences of the ways they make huge amounts of money,” he added.

Brokering in the future

“Arms brokering thrives on globalisation,” said Wood, co-author of “The Arms Fixers: Controlling the Brokers and Shipping Agents” with Johan Peleman.

“There’s loads of submarkets for different things, thousands of products… this is tens of thousands of items being traded every day,” said Wood.

“The arms market themselves have become more differentiated,” he explained. “A lot of the stuff that’s traded are parts or components, so they’re not the finished systems.

“You have a lot of people who specialise in particular kinds of equipment. It’s a niche market,” he added.

“If they are not regulated… people may wake up and realise that brokers have taken them for a ride,” he warned.

The iconic statue of a knotted gun barrel outside U.N. headquarters was created by Swedish artist Fredrik Reuterswärd and is titled "Non-Violence". Credit: Tressia Boukhors/IPS

By George Gao
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 22 2013 (IPS)

The U.N. organ tasked with maintaining international peace and security harbours a serious conflict at its core.

The Security Council’s five permanent members (P5) – United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom and France – along with Germany, are the world’s six leading arms exporters, often shipping weapons used to perpetuate violence across the globe.

Meanwhile, over 150 member states have gathered at U.N. headquarters, from Mar. 18-28, to negotiate an Arms Trade Treaty (ATT). If signed into law, this unprecedented rulebook may help regulate the international flow of arms, and curtail the arms’ potential for abuse.

According to Amnesty International – a human rights group that has journeyed two decades for a legally binding ATT – P5 weapons exports have fuelled a throng of human rights violations.

But some members of the Security Council are tough negotiators, hoping to water down the treaty and continue profiting from its loopholes. The U.S., China and Russia, for example, prevented the treaty from moving forward when the ATT was last negotiated in July 2012.

“They’ve got two interests at hand,” said Widney Brown, senior director of international law and policy at Amnesty International.

“One is all the profits they’re making from their engagement in traded arms… the other is their responsibility as permanent members of the Security Council for maintaining international peace and security,” she told IPS.

“In this negotiation, (the P5) are being called out,” said Brown. “In the end, are they going to be willing to put profits aside and create a strong treaty?”

Gathering momentum and moving roadblocks

Anna MacDonald, head of arms control at Oxfam, told IPS that nations leading the charge for a strong ATT include Mexico, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Nigeria, Ghana, Gambia, New Zealand, and “to a certain extent” the U.K. and Germany.

Asked about the U.K. – a P5 member and one of seven co-authors of the 2006 resolution that brought ATT talks to the U.N. – MacDonald said, “We do think the U.K. is (being) pressured from other members of the P5 to compromise their position.”

However, proponents of a strong ATT have gathered momentum. MacDonald noted that in the first few days of negotiations, at least 116 member states signed onto a joint statement pushing for a strong ATT.

Additionally, at least 69 member states signed for the ATT to include ammunition, and over 40 signed for sustainable development.

And as of Thursday afternoon, 59 countries signed onto a joint statement for the ATT to address gender-based violence. “That one is snowballing,” said MacDonald.

She noted that the same countries that pushed for an outcome document in the just-concluded 57th session on the Commission on the Status of Women – which focused on ending violence against women and girls – continued pushing for gender-based violence to be addressed in the ATT.

“It really demonstrates cross-regional majority support to get the text right,” she said.

Natalie J. Goldring, senior fellow in the Center for Peace and Security Studies (CSS) at Georgetown University, told IPS, “We’re seeing countries work in coalitions much more effectively than they did in July.”

Goldring explained that the “so-called sceptics” who were making rhetorical statements during negotiations in July are now approaching ATT talks more productively.

These member states include Pakistan, Iran, and “to a certain extent” India and Algeria.

“They’re still sceptical,” added Goldring, “and some of the changes would undermine the treaty in various ways and shouldn’t be accepted, but they’re engaging in a different way.”

Asked about China, MacDonald of Oxfam told IPS, “China began with a very negative attitude towards the arms trade treaty; they’ve abstained in resolutions in the past few years.”

This time around, China is more cooperative in the negotiating process, said MacDonald, but Beijing is still pushing for certain loopholes.

“For example, there is a loophole in the current text which would allow weapons if they are ‘gifted’ to not be subject to the same assessment and risk assessment process,” explained MacDonald.

“If you say it’s a gift, it’s not assessed. This is currently the way in which China transfers quite a lot of weapons to Africa, so it’s quite important that gifts are subject to the same procedures,” she added.

On Russia, MacDonald said, “We’d be quite surprised if Russia signed onto this treaty. However, we certainly hope they won’t block it.”

Sacrificing consensus for strength

Many delegates and civil society leaders argue that they would rather have a strong treaty signed onto by a majority of member states rather than a watered down treaty agreed upon by consensus.

Even if a strong treaty is not agreed upon during this round of negotiations, “there’s a provision in the latest resolution… that will allow it to go to the General Assembly and be voted through,” explained MacDonald.

“Weak treaties are rarely improved over time. Even if they achieve universal signature, they don’t transform situations,” she explained.

“Strong high standards will affect behaviour even if there are states that don’t sign on,” she added, noting that governments do not like being held accountable by other governments for “flouting high customary standards”.

Goldring added, “The history of negotiations and treaties at the U.N. is one in which countries have had grave difficulty improving those treaties and making them robust, once they’ve been agreed,” noting that the decision between consensus and strength is still not an easy choice.

Governments, however, can still sign onto a treaty at a later time.

New instruments to regulate arms

Goldring explained that a strong ATT would call on member states to monitor and assess what weapons are entering, passing through and leaving their borders, including transactions made by private companies.

Brown of Amnesty International told IPS, that a strong ATT should set up international norms, as well as a peer mechanism for monitoring those norms.

“Because (arms exporters) are competing for the same market, there will be a lot of pressure among them to abide by these norms when they’re there,” she explained.

“What we have now without any norms is a race to the bottom,” she added, citing that exporters sell arms to whomever they want.

If norms are established through the ATT, than “if you think of (exporters) as salespeople in a market, they’re going to pressure each other to all follow the agreed rules,” she noted.

The final stretch of a long run

After a week of gruelling negotiations, from 8 AM to midnight, a new ATT draft treaty is slated to emerge on the eve of Friday, Mar. 22, said MacDonald.

This draft is expected to contain significant changes, and it precedes a third draft on Wednesday, Mar. 27. Civil society members and U.N. delegates will pour over its text, paragraph by paragraph, for one final week of negotiations.

Critics say says the plight of the workers is part of a larger systemic problem, including one overseen by Washington. Credit: Indi Samarajiva/cc by 2.0

By George Gao and Joe Hitchon
NEW YORK/WASHINGTON, Mar 19 2013 (IPS)

A spate of legal battles in the southern state of Louisiana has shed new light on the unfair recruitment and employment practices of Filipino guest workers at several companies in the United States.

On Monday, a federal judge awarded nearly 4.5 million dollars to 347 Filipinos after finding that a Los Angeles company had lured them into slave labour, working as teachers in Louisiana public schools.The exploitative immigration system of the U.S. works hand-in-hand with the corrupt labour export policy of the Philippines.

The decision comes as more than 100 Filipino workers at a shipyard in the New Orleans area are alleging that they suffered discriminatory treatment, threats and abuse at the hands of their recruiters and employer, and have joined a class action lawsuit.

The shipyard, Grand Isle Shipyard (GIS), put the Filipinos to work on an oil production platform owned by Black Elk Energy, a U.S. company that, according to federal regulators, had racked up 315 documented “incidents of safety non-compliance” offshore since 2010.

The problems at Black Elk Energy were amplified following an explosion in November on a platform in the Gulf of Mexico that claimed the lives of three Filipino workers, while three others were seriously injured.

The incident brought increased attention to the practice of U.S. companies hiring foreign guest workers for potentially hazardous jobs – and the exploitation that can come with such arrangements.

According to BAYAN USA, a coalition of progressive U.S.-based Filipino organisations, U.S. guest worker programmes have historically bound workers to one employer at a time, making them susceptible to exploitation. The list of grievances filed against the Grand Isle Shipyard range from wage theft, unlawful deductions and theft of tax refunds to labour abuse, discrimination and unsafe working conditions.

“The main [hazardous condition] is the sleep deprivation that they experience – just long hours of work that the [U.S.] workers don’t face,” Josef Calugay, a member of Katarungan, an advocacy organisation based in Washington, told IPS. “They’re forced to work sometimes for two weeks straight, 70 hours a week.”

According to BAYAN, Filipino welders, pipefitters and scaffolders were trafficked under “fraudulent” contracts that promised high pay and safe working conditions. But many were placed for work on dangerous oil rig platforms.

By that time, former GIS workers “were already gearing up for the campaign [and lawsuit], but the explosion sort of fast-tracked everything,” Calugay says. After the November explosion, he notes, more GIS ex-employees gained confidence to speak out against the company.

The media dug into working conditions on the oil rig. A local television reporter, for instance, launched an investigative report that captured testimonials of abuse and detailed a complicated web of private contractors associated with GIS.

Systemic problem

The Philippine government has long lauded the fact that, every day, some 4,500 Filipinos are sent abroad to work. The remittances they send back keeps the Philippine economy afloat.

But the Filipino community and diaspora are increasingly questioning why the Manila government continues to support such a strategy for development.

“The government doesn’t seem to provide any protection when these overseas Filipino workers run into distress,” Calugay says. “Yet this labour export policy is still one of their pillars of development – pushing people to other countries instead of addressing poverty or lack of jobs at home.”

Yet Jackelyn Mariano, deputy secretary-general of BAYAN USA, says the plight of the workers is part of a larger systemic problem, including one overseen by Washington.

“The exploitative immigration system of the U.S. works hand-in-hand with the corrupt labour export policy of the Philippines to maintain a steadily increasing flow of cheap, temporary migrant labour,” she said in a recent press release.

Indeed, there are relatively few regulations regarding foreign worker recruitment practices here. Many of these workers have already incurred substantial debt just to get these jobs, and this inevitably puts them in compromising situations – particularly if they encounter poor working conditions of any kind.

U.S. immigration policy allows these workers to work only for whatever employer who sponsored their visa.

“Their options are to pretty much to stick it out with the employer – who may not be paying them properly or exposing them to dangerous working conditions – or to go home,” Jim Knoepp, the deputy legal director for the Immigrant Justice Project at the Southern Poverty Law Centre, in Montgomery, Louisiana, told IPS.

“But they are often in such massive debt from the recruiters that they cannot go without first earning the money to pay off those debts first, so it puts them in a really difficult position.”

Such a situation provides employers with a near exemption from the normal supply and demand of the labour market, Knoepp says.

Pursuit of justice

In early February, several of the former GIS guest workers were recognised as human trafficking victims and granted a “T visa” – a human trafficking visa, which allows them to legally remain in the United States for up to four years.

Filipino activists are now calling for the resignation of the Filipino ambassador to the United States, and demanding a policy overhaul that would put an end to the exploitation of guest workers.

In late February, a fact-finding mission sponsored by the National Alliance of Filipino Concerns (NAFCON), Bayan USA and the Southern Poverty Law Centre took place in Louisiana as part of the Justice for the Grand Isle Shipyard Filipino Workers campaign. At that time, those on the mission learned that GIS had filed a motion of contempt against the Filipino ex-workers, which prevents the labourers from discussing details related to the case.

“The motion for contempt shows … how threatening it is to the company that more people are becoming aware of this issue,” Katrina Abarcar, a paralegal who participated in the mission, told IPS.

“The defendants are doing whatever they can to keep a lid on the exploitation … even going so far as to allege that the Justice for GIS Filipino Workers campaign is just a façade set up by lawyers.”

She adds that all of the groups supporting the campaign have extensive involvement defending migrant and workers’ rights, and they now “pledge their continuing support of the former GIS workers until the truth is revealed and justice is served.”

Michele Bachelet (left), Executive Director of UN Women, addresses a press conference on the fifty-seventh session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), taking place at UN Headquarters in New York, Mar 4-15 2013. Credit: UN Photo/Mark Garten

By George Gao
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 17 2013 (IPS)

In her opening speech for the world’s largest conference on ending violence against women and girls, Michelle Bachelet summoned the spirit of 15-year old Malala Yousafzai, who’s skull was shattered on Oct. 9, 2012 by a Taliban bullet.

“It is for Malala – and for every girl and woman, and every human being – that we must come to a strong action-oriented agreement to prevent and end violence against girls and women,” said Bachelet, executive director of U.N. Women.

The Taliban singled out Yousafzai for advocating girls’ education. She miraculously survived the attack, as surgeons fitted her skull with a titanium plate.

The atrocity highlights a fact many diplomats and civil society members have taken to heart: that violence against women and girls undermines international development goals and U.N. values.

The 57th session of the Committee on the Status of Women (CSW57) took place at U.N. headquarters from Mar. 4-15 and addressed this issue. It resulted in an outcome document, adopted with consensus by member states.

On the heels of CSW57 is another series of diplomatic negotiations, for an international Arms Trade Treaty (ATT). The U.N. has allotted 11 days from Mar. 18-28 for delegates to reach an agreement. Here, too, the issue of gender-based violence is on the table.

A sigh of relief, but the fight continues

Civil society organisations and U.N. member states were largely relieved that a document of “Agreed Conclusions” came through this year, after last year’s CSW session failed to produce one.

“It was a very difficult process because of the broad range of political interests and agendas that member states represent,” said Mavic Cabrera-Balleza, international coordinator for the Global Network of Women Peacebuilders (GNWP).

This year, “we (successfully) lobbied for language on the link between violence against women and peace and security, women human rights defenders, sexual and reproductive health, small arms and light weapons,” she told IPS.

“(But) the final document was not as strong as we want it to be,“ she said.

Cabrera-Balleza noted that member states failed to “reaffirm” – and only “recalls” – Security Council resolutions 1325, 1820, 1888, 1889, and 1960 on women, peace and security.

“However, in negotiations with member states, you cannot play an ‘all or nothing’ game,” she explained.

Radhika Balakrishnan, executive director of the Center for Women’s Global Leadership (CWGL) at Rutgers University, told IPS, “There were quite a few things we gained in this new document… which we might have lost if negotiations continued.”

“One of the successes was that (member states) weren’t able to invoke (traditional values and morals),” she said, noting that some governments had been trying to use “traditional values” – as well as “state sovereignty” – as a trump card against women’s human rights.

“But many issues that women’s groups have been fighting for, (such as) sexual orientation (and) gender identity, were lost in the document,” she noted.

Daniela Rosche, a policy and advocacy adviser in gender justice for Oxfam, told IPS that CSW57 established new norms, but did not address how to implement them.

“If you really want to do something to fight the surge of violence and take concrete steps to solve it, you need to also develop an ‘international action plan’, basically to operationalise the standards that are there,” she said.

“We couldn’t convince governments to commit to this,” she added.

“What would ensure accountability is (if they) set concrete targets,” she said, citing the annual Millennium Development Goals reports as an example.

Linking arms with gender justice

“The relationship between small arms trade and violence against women is in the (CSW57) document, and I think that’s very important,” said Balakrishnan of CWGL, who’s 16 Days Campaign highlighted the issue.

Widney Brown, senior director of international law and policy at Amnesty International, explained to IPS that while the CSW57 outcome document is not legally binding, it can be a powerful instrument for activists to pressure their governments.

On the other hand, “the Arms Trade Treaty will be law” if it goes through, said Brown. “But in terms of enforcement– it’s mostly a peer pressure mechanism.”

She noted, “In the Jul. 27, 2012 draft of the Arms Trade Treaty, there’s a reference to gender-based violence and violence against children.”

However, some governments will likely use the issue of gender-based violence as a bargaining chip.

“Anytime you have references to things like gender-based violence in international negotiations, there’s a group of states who are always going to be willing to say, ‘We’ll give you this, on the condition that you take (that) off’,” she explained.

“I think it will be in play again, and we’re going to have to be very vigilant against that,” she added.

Brown explained that Russia, Syria, Iran and Egypt have often impeded member states negotiations for women’s rights and gender equality – and may also act as barriers during ATT negotiations.

At CSW57, for example, the Vatican worked with Syria and some other member states to strip out any reference to gender identity. “This battle has been going on for years now,” she said.

“Fortunately, the NGO community is holding very strongly on why it’s important to talk about gender-based violence,” she stated.

Statement on CSW57 from the SGs office

On Mar.15, the spokesperson for Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon issued a statement welcoming the conclusions of CSW57:

“No matter where she lives, no matter what her culture, no matter what her society, every woman and girl is entitled to live free of fear. She has the universal human right to be free from all forms of violence so as to fulfil her full potential and dreams for the future.”

Peter “Pete” Seeger is a 93-year old U.S. folk legend who resides near Wappingers Falls in southern New York. He can be spotted occasionally on the traffic-heavy Route 9, flanked by world peace signs and armed with a banjo.

Activists behind a New York Police Department vehicle at an anti-fracking demonstration in Manhattan, New York City organized by CREDO Action and New Yorkers Against Fracking. The demonstration was aimed at New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who was holding a policy summit in the New York Sheraton across the street. Credit: Adam Welz for CREDO Action/cc by 2.0

Seeger is famous for his protest songs – which tackle topics ranging from U.S. wars abroad to environmental degradation at home.

Last month, Seeger signed a letter – along with hundreds of health professionals and local organisations – addressed to Governor Andrew Cuomo, encouraging him to take into account “any and all public health impacts before deciding whether or not to allow fracking in New York”.

The letter – released to the public on Feb. 27 by Concerned Health Professionals of NY – warned of “public health consequences” that have emerged in neighbouring Pennsylvania, where fracking is allowed.

Formally termed “high pressure hydraulic fracturing”, fracking is a method used to capture natural gas from shale rocks. It requires horizontal drilling deep beneath the earth’s surface, then pressurising fluid to fracture shale rocks, which allows natural gas to escape.

According to the letter, health risks associated with fracking include hazardous air pollutants; improper disposal of radioactive wastewater; and climate-altering methane emissions.

“What they’re finding in Pennsylvania are people with rashes, nosebleeds, people with serious abdominal pain and so on,” said Sandra Steingraber, a distinguished scholar in residence at Ithaca College and founder of Concerned Health Professionals of NY.

“In general, we need better data on all this, and the problem is that fracking got rolled out across the landscape without any advanced health studies being done,” she told IPS.

On Mar. 6, the New York State Assembly voted to extend the moratorium on fracking until 2015, which would delay drilling for two more years and make way for new health assessments to be conducted.

The legislation must now pass through the state Senate and be approved by Cuomo if it is to take hold.

“This is the first time in my knowledge that the oil and gas industry (may be) stopped in its tracks because of unanswered questions about health,” said Steingraber.

U.S. energy trends

The decision in New York came at a time when natural gas is abundant in the U.S., at unprecedented levels, largely due to fracking.

But with increasing awareness of fracking’s potential side effects and the lack of regulations over the industry, a national opposition is growing as well.

“There are a couple of other states that have moratoriums: New Jersey has one, Maryland has one – and North Carolina is developing new rules on fracking,” said Amy Mall, a senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

“Companies that aren’t highly regulated don’t have to prove anything, and therefore, data is not collected. So we don’t have the type of data (on fracking) that we might for another industry, because it has been so severely under-regulated,” she told IPS.

Part of the reason fracking rolled out with little oversight was due to the influence of powerful oil and gas industries in politics.

Michael T. Klare, director of the Five College Programme in Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College, told IPS, “The experience in Pennsylvania and elsewhere is that local people just get steamrollered by the oil companies and their lawyers and lobbyists.”

He said, “The biggest (player) is ExxonMobil, because they bought XTO (Energy), which was the biggest natural gas company using fracking… and they’ve been pushing (fracking) very hard. And other giant companies are in on the act.”

The U.S. energy mix

Proponents of fracking argue that natural gas is cleaner than coal, and could act as a bridge between fossil fuels and renewable energy.

However, “When you say bridge, people use it to mean different things. For example, how long a bridge, how wide a bridge, how high a bridge… it’s just a term that doesn’t have a lot of details,” said Mall of NRDC.

Klare, a defence correspondent at The Nation, warned, “Companies and utilities that might invest in renewable sources of energy are all rushing to convert their electricity generation to natural gas.

“These facilities will be in operation for decades to come, so there’s no sign that the country’s moving in the direction of renewable energy… It’s unclear where this bridge is leading to, except more gas,” he told IPS.

David G. Victor, a professor at the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, noted that renewable technologies are currently unreliable, in terms of “keeping the lights on”.

“There’s a world of difference between some engineer thinking about a clever solution that works in the laboratory under ideal conditions, and then (using it in) actual power grids,” he said, arguing that they exist in small markets and depend too heavily on subsidies.

When asked about renewable energy, Klare agreed that they were in infant stages.

“Renewable energy is a much younger, newer kind of energy. Naturally, at this stage of its development, it’s less efficient and more expensive than oil and natural gas,” he said.

However, Klare argued that renewable energy deserves more government support, saying that this would be good for the U.S. in the long term.

“After all, oil has been around for 150 years, and natural gas has been around for 50 years or so. They’ve had more time; they’ve had a lot of government subsidies along the way and they still get government subsidies,” said Klare.

Mall of NRDC added that there is also a middle ground: “As long as we do need natural gas… There are much better ways to produce it, with much stronger protections and much cleaner methods than the industry is using now,” she said.

Mall cited ways to capture air pollutants, encase wastewater in steel tanks, use less toxic chemicals in fluids and keep fracking away from watersheds.

Health and community

Mall said, “Because of (U.S.) property laws, a lot of (homeowners) don’t own the oil and gas rights beneath their property. Therefore, they can’t stop (fracking) on their own land, and they’re not (fully) compensated for the damage to their own land.”

Steingraber, author of “Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment” (2010), added, “There are potential avenues of (chemical) exposure to people who didn’t consent to any of this.”

She noted that health problems associated with chemical exposure from fracking are expensive ones.

“We’re talking about preterm birth, which is the leading cause of infant mortality and the leading cause of disability (in the U.S.),” she said.

“Before we decide that fracking is this bonanza economically, providing royalty money and so on, we really need a full picture of the costs and benefits,” she argued.

“The job of government (is) to protect people from harm… whether that’s protecting us from some invading foreign army, or against chemicals others are putting into environments that get into our bodies,” she said.

Violence against women and girls is both a cause and a consequence of gender inequality. Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS

By George Gao
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 4 2013 (IPS)

The U.N. has opened up public platforms to engage the world on how best to replace the expiring Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and frame a new development agenda, post-2015.

What has come through is a cacophony of voices.

But according to some civil society members and U.N. officials – who are hoping to unhinge the structural drivers of inequalities and gender-based violence, and push for a cross-cutting framework for gender-equality – a little chaos may not necessarily be a bad thing.

The public consultation on inequality in Copenhagen – part of a series of U.N. and civil society led Global Thematic Consultations – drew over 1,200 participants, from Feb. 18-19.

It also received 175 papers, which were synthesised into a report, entitled “Addressing Inequalities”, the centrepiece of discussions in Copenhagen.

At a New York briefing of the consultation, Saraswathi Menon, director of the policy division at UN Women, said, “I rather like chaos, because out of chaos you get creativity.”

“The fact of having multiple voices and multiple perspectives on an issue is very important,” said Menon, on Feb. 25 at the Baha’i International Community.

Gender-based violence post-2015

The consultations took place two weeks ahead of the fifty-seventh session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW57), which will be held at U.N. headquarters from Mar. 4-15.

In Copenhagen, the topic of violence against women and girls – the focus of CSW57 – was much on people’s minds.

During a panel discussion, Kate McInturff, research associate at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, explained that gender-based violence inhibited development in various forms.

She gave the example of a woman running for parliament in Nepal who was threatened with sexual assault by people outside of her own house. “We can’t talk about political participation… without talking about the barrier of gender-based violence,” she said.

McInturff cited that girls in Canada are sexually harassed in schoolrooms, by teachers and classmates. “We all know the data on the transformative power of education and education for girls, but education continues to be a barrier for girls,” she said.

Women entrepreneurs also face domestic abuse and violence in the workplace, explained McInturff. “Fear of violence can be exploited to make them a more docile workforce,” she warned.

“(This) violence is a barrier to the achievement of any other (development) goal for women and girls,” McInturff told IPS, noting that the MDGs do not even attempt to address gender-based violence.

Zohra Moosa, a women’s rights adviser at ActionAid UK, told IPS that violence against women and girls is both a cause and a consequence of gender inequality.

“It causes gender inequality by acting as a means of social control that reinforces women’s subordinate status,” she explained.

“It does this by entrenching the idea that women’s lives are worth less than men’s, taking power away from (them) and restricting (the) decisions women can (make) for themselves.”

Moosa said that sexual harassment on the street, for example, inhibits women’s ability to travel freely through their own cities. It may even change the way they dress.

Moosa noted that when powerful men perpetrate violence against women and girls, police officers often ignore the women and girls’ claims, and some even go on to commit violence against women and girls themselves.

“(Gender-based violence) is a consequence of gender inequality because it is an abuse of the power imbalance between women and men,” she explained.

Moosa’s report “Violence Against Women and Girls in the Post-2015 Framework: Why and How” was one of the 175 received in Copenhagen.

Gender-based violence in militarised societies

When asked why gender-based violence is more prevalent in conflict and post-conflict settings, Dean Peacock, co-founder and executive director of the Sonke Gender Justice Network, told IPS that pressures on men increase during these times, while legal systems collapse.

“So you’ve got that mix of factors – the sense of impunity and inability of the state or civil society to engage in violence prevention… and men using rape and sexual violence as a way to humiliate (the opposition) and demonstrate their power to other armed groups,” he said.

Savitri Bisnath, associate director of the Center for Women’s Global Leadership (CWGL) at Rutgers University, points out that the lack of an arms trade treaty also contributes to the increasing militarisation of “peaceful societies”.

“Intimate partner violence becomes even more dangerous when guns are present in the home, as they can be used to threaten, injure and/ or kill women,” she told IPS.

Moosa at ActionAid UK noted that women and girls who stand up against gender-based violence are often targeted for violence themselves.

“They are attacked… because they are challenging the status quo, and (also) to send a (message) to other women and girls about the penalties of resisting violence and gender inequality,” she said.

“Attacks on high profile women activists, including those in political office, are unfortunately not uncommon,” she added, citing what happened to Malala Yousafzai in Pakistan and Najia Sediqi in Afghanistan.

Gender-based violence and social norms

Moosa explained that some social norms – defined as “rules” and conventions that provide part of the context within which people make decisions – may perpetuate violence against women and girls.

“For example, rape within marriage might be widely accepted, or hitting a wife might be understood as the prerogative or even duty of a husband,” she said.

“If most people do not believe violence against women is a bad thing, or think it is the women’s fault, it becomes harder for women to speak out and seek help,” she noted.

When asked how to address gender inequalities rooted cultural traditions, Lakshmi Puri, deputy executive director of UN Women, told IPS, “Culture is often misunderstood as static, uniform and unshakable.”

“(But) nothing is further from the truth,” she added. “Culture is dynamic, diverse and creative.”

“There is agreement at the international level that no customs, traditions or practices can be invoked to justify any form of violence against women,” she said.

Bisnath at CWGL said, “One of the most important things is to work with (women in) communities, to understand what the processes are which perpetuate their discrimination and to insure that there are policies and laws in place (to address) this discrimination.”

Men for an End to Violence against Women, a slogan on a T-shirt in Santa Marta, Brazil. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By George Gao
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 25 2013 (IPS)

Some of the most harrowing cases of gender-based violence Kathryn Bolkovac came across while working as a U.N. human rights investigator in Bosnia involved a perpetrator dubbed “the Doctor” by the women and girls he abused.

“It was (‘the Doctor’s’) practice to insert Deutsche Mark coins into the vaginas of young girls as they danced (in strip clubs),” she told IPS.

Gender inequalities were so deeply rooted into social structures that even men who worked for the U.N. participated in sexual harassment of various forms.Gender-based violence, including psychological and sexual abuse, often represents a perverse expression of dissatisfaction with regard to power and self-worth on the part of the perpetrator.

“My fellow International Police Task Force monitor… admitted to me (and U.N. management) that he had (purchased) a young girl from a local bar in Ilidža to keep at home with him as his ‘girlfriend’,” said Bolkovac.

Men who worked at the U.N. Mission in Bosnia Herzegovina (UNMIBH) hung pictures with “inappropriate depictions of women” on the walls of their offices, she added.

And DynCorp employees – who are private military contractors embedded with the U.N. – circulated rape tapes around military bases, she noted.

Bolkovac herself also faced harassment: “The U.N. personnel manager approached me to introduce himself and to tell me I was ‘kind of cute’,” she told IPS.

“(In another case,) the contingent commander invited me to a Fourth of July celebration at the U.S. embassy and asked what type of undergarments I might be wearing,” she said.

Bolkovac presented her book, co-written with Cari Lynn and entitled The Whistleblower: Sexual Trafficking, Military Contractors and One Woman’s Fight for Justice, at the U.N. Bookshop at the start of this month.

Her story also inspired a film directed by Larysa Kondracki, entitled “The Whistleblower”, which was screened at U.N. headquarters in October 2011, following a special request from Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. A panel discussion with senior U.N. officials on violence against women and girls ensued.

On Feb. 14, 2013, Ban delivered a message in support of One Billion Rising, a daylong exclamation that showcased the solidarity and collective strength of women across the globe. The number “one billion” referred to the estimate that one in every three women is raped or beaten in her lifetime.

“The global pandemic of violence against women and girls thrives in a culture of discrimination and impunity,” said Ban. “By standing together, we can end violence against women and girls, and build a world where all live free from harassment and fear.”

But on the same day as One Billion Rising, another occurrence rattled the gender frameworks. It involved a world renowned Olympian, known as the “Blade Runner”, who shot and killed his girlfriend while she sat on the bathroom stall.

Recipe for gender-based violence

Oscar Pistorius is a South African athlete with carbon-fibre racing legs. Once seen as a role model for young amputees, Pistorius fell from grace when he allegedly murdered Reeva Steenkamp on Valentine’s Day.

This happened shortly after 17-year-old Anene Booysen was gang raped and mutilated to death. The perpetrators abandoned her body at a construction site not far from her home.

Both events brought attention to widespread gender-based violence, the topic of the upcoming Commission on the Status of Women’s (CSW) 57th session, to be held at U.N. headquarters Mar. 4-15.

According to a synthesis report entitled “Addressing Inequalities”, gender-based violence reflects “unequal power relations between men and women, girls and boys – in the economic, social (including legal) and political spheres.

“Gender-based violence, including psychological and sexual abuse, often represents a perverse expression of dissatisfaction with regard to power and self-worth on the part of the perpetrator.”

Dean Peacock, co-founder and executive director of the Sonke Gender Justice Network, told IPS, “In South Africa, like in the U.S., there’s a very strong association between gun ownership and manhood.”

Bushmaster Firearms International, the same company that produced the .223 calibre semiautomatic rifle used in the mass shooting of a school in Newtown, Connecticut, ran an advertising campaign labelling Bushmaster guns as a “Man Card”.

Peacock explained the dangers surrounding notions of masculinity in South Africa, where much of the population suffers from long-term structural unemployment.

“Men face a social expectation and a social pressure to be able to provide for their families – make sure their children can go to school, put food on the table – but they’re (often) not able to do that, so they carry around a tremendous sense of failure,” he said.

“They internalise and blame themselves for what are structural problems created by our economic policies and (South Africa’s) position in the global economy. Men then compensate for their failure to live up to that pressure by engaging in a range of risky practices that grants them some fleeting sense of either escape or power,” he continued.

Many consume alcohol to deal with their sense of failure. “There’s also a social expectation generated in a significant part by the world of advertising that men should drink, and that drinking is a mark of being a man,” said Peacock.

“So if you (consider) the nexus of alcohol, guns, and – perhaps most importantly – the social pressure and expectation that men be dominant in their relationships with women (and) have the ultimate authority in their relationships and their homes… you’ve got a recipe for men’s violence against women,” he explained.

He advocated for psychosocial support for children exposed to violence, as well as policies in the education sector that integrate topics related to gender equality into the curricula.

Peacock also warned of the dangers facing women and girls in conflict and post-conflict situations, when there is a lack of legal systems to hold people accountable for their actions.

Gender-based violence and development

The U.N. is currently constructing a new development framework, known as the post-2015 development agenda, to replace the Millennium Development Goals when they expire in 2015.

A public consultation took place online and through social media platforms under the auspices of the U.N. Development Group between September 2012 and January 2013, focused on addressing inequalities.

It culminated with a public dialogue, which featured civil society experts and U.N. officials, who met from Feb 18-19 in Copenhagen.

One reoccurring topic brought up by both the public participants and the experts in discussion was how to incorporate gender-based violence – something that the MDGs failed to address – into the new development framework.

Midtown New York skyline with the Empire State Building in the background (with electricity), in the foreground is Alphabet City and the East Village without power, Tuesday night, Oct. 30, 2012, after Hurricane Sandy. Credit: David Shankbone/cc y 2.0

By George Gao
NEW YORK, Feb 18 2013 (IPS)

The “Spirit of America” is one of 10 ferries that carry passengers from Manhattan to Staten Island. Its keel – which lies on the bottom of the boat and carves through the waters of New York Harbour– was built with steel from the collapsed Twin Towers.  

While embarking, one can take in a panoramic view of some of New York’s diverse waterfronts: from the shores of Battery Park – the front lawn of Lower Manhattan’s skyscrapers – to the iconic Liberty and Ellis Islands, and to the industrial piers of Red Hook.

“New York City has more miles of waterfront than Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago and Portland combined,” said New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg at Brooklyn Bridge Park in March 2011, while unveiling a plan to make the city’s 837 kilometres of shoreline more resilient to climate change.Communities with lots of political power and influence are going to get resources...The question is, are we insuring that our most vulnerable communities are getting the same type of support, so they can recover from major storms like Sandy?

But atop the “Spirit of America”, a glance from one waterfront to the next presents a clear disparity in landscape and lifestyle.

According to a September 2012 New York Times article, the poorest one-fifth of New York City residents made 8,844 dollars in the previous year, while the richest one-fifth made 223,285 dollars. These figures rival income inequalities in the global south.

On Sep. 17, 2011, those who were critical of the economic system that gave way to such disparities touched off the Occupy Wall Street movement in Zucotti Park, in the Wall Street financial district in Lower Manhattan.

And when Hurricane Sandy swept through the waterfront on Oct. 29, 2012, its destruction was disproportionate as well.

A storm doesn’t discriminate, but people do

“A storm doesn’t discriminate where it hits based on race or class,” said Albert Huang, senior attorney in the Natural Resources Defence Council’s (NRDC) urban programme.

Even Wall Street was without power after Hurricane Sandy struck. Stores and restaurants were closed for days, traffic lights hung uselessly from their poles and subway entrances leading underground were as dark as caverns; similar plights were seen across New York’s five boroughs.

“Where we see the disparity, usually, is in the response to a disaster,” Huang told IPS.

According to Huang, neighbourhoods that suffered most during the aftermath of Sandy were low-income neighbourhoods, people of colour and elderly populations – many of whom live in public housing developments in places like Red Hook, the Far Rockaways and Coney Island.

These public housing developments, run by the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), shelter five percent of the city’s population.

“Communities with lots of political power and influence are going to get resources. They’re going to get all these different kinds of amenities,” explained Huang, who coordinates the NRDC’s work on environmental justice.

“The question is, are we insuring that our most vulnerable communities are getting the same type of support, so they can recover from major storms like Sandy?”

Mold and moisture

Climate change and storm surges also exacerbate pre-existing mold and moisture problems in public housing, said Huang. According to a June 2011 report by the National Academy of Sciences, the build-up of mold and moisture in indoor environments contributes to health-related issues.

Mold and moisture is especially worrying in areas with already poor air quality, such as in East Harlem and the South Bronx, said Huang. Those neighbourhoods are surrounded by three highways and contain heavy air pollution. Their residents suffer from the highest levels of asthma in the country.

“(One) thing (a child) should have… is to come home and be able to breath inside your apartment. I mean, you already have a tough enough time breathing outside your apartment,” said Huang.

In NYCHA buildings, mold and moisture are worsened by broken pipes and leaking roofs. In January 2013, Bloomberg and NYCHA Chairman John Rhea announced a plan to address all 420,000 backlogged open repair work orders by the end of 2013.

But Huang worries that even if NYCHA does address all 420,000 work orders, it would not be enough.

“They show up with bleach and sponges and they wash off all the mold (from) the walls, (but) until you eliminate the moisture problems inside the walls, you’ll continue to have mold problems,” he explained.

“You can’t just do the cosmetic stuff,” he added.

SMIAs on the waterfront

Significant Maritime and Industrial Areas (SMIAs) are characterised by New York City as places along the waterfront that contain dense clusters of industrial firms and water-dependent businesses; they were also designated in 1992 as areas to be protected and encouraged for continued use in this fashion.

When the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance (NYC-EJA) started mapping SMIAs onto designated storm surge protection zones, they noticed something quite worrisome.

“What we immediately realised was that every single one of these SMIAs were in storm surge zones”, said Eddie Bautista, executive director of NYC-EJA.

On top of that, NYC-EJA layered maps from all the public environmental databases they had access to – ranging from New York State superfund sites to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s toxic waste inventories – and they discovered troubling overlaps.

“There are only six of these SMIA communities in the city,” Bautista told IPS, listing them as the South Bronx, Sunset Park, Red Hook, Newton Creek, the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the North Shore of Staten island.

“They are classic environmental justice communities,” he added.

Bautista cited a number of chemicals present in these areas, chemicals that the community would be exposed to during storm surges. They include trichloroethylene, which is a carcinogen; Naphthalene, which causes liver and kidney damage and harms eyesight; and N-hexane, which affects the brain.

“Half the businesses that were impacted by Sandy were industrial businesses,” he said. “For our communities, this presents a clear and pertinent danger.”

“We know that these (storms) are going to become more frequent and more intense,” he said. “If you know there are communities who, based on their profile, are vulnerable… to do nothing, to not act is an abdication of basic government responsibility.”

A few months ago, NYC-EJA proposed a series of recommendations to the city in order to make sure SMIA residents were aware that they lived in storm surge areas.

A plan was put forth, and a date had been set for voting in the city planning commission – Oct. 29, 2012.

But something else happened that day.

“Ironies abound, they had to cancel the hearing (for) the city’s coastal zone management plan because of a severe weather event and storm surges,” said Bautista.  “You can’t make this stuff up.”

Michael Brune. Courtesy of Sierra Club.

By George Gao
NEW YORK, Feb 15 2013 (IPS)

The term “civil disobedience” takes its roots from an 1849 essay by U.S. poet, philosopher and environmentalist, Henry David Thoreau, originally entitled “Resistance to Civil Government”.

Civil disobedience is often used as a non-violent tool of protest against widespread injustices, such as in the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

On the morning of Feb. 13, prominent activists gathered in front of the White House in Washington, DC, and participated in an act of civil disobedience, to protest the idea behind the Keystone XL Pipeline.

This pipeline would run from Alberta, Canada all the way across the United States, to its coastline in the Gulf of Mexico. It would carry about a million barrels of crude oil each day, and according to protestors and scientists, contribute dangerously to climate change.There are at least three times more jobs that come from solar and wind than for an equivalent amount of gas or coal or oil.

The protestors – who include NASA climate scientist James Hansen, poet Bob Haas and lawyer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., among others – were arrested after blocking a main thoroughfare in front of the White House and refusing to move.

Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, was among the participants in this event. It was his organisation’s first act of civil disobedience in its 120-year old history, and the first time its executive director was arrested.

Brune spoke with IPS correspondent George Gao about his experience at the protest, as well as the environmental significance of the Keystone XL Pipeline. Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: Can you describe what unfolded on the morning of Feb. 13 outside of the White House?

A: We organised about 50 community leaders from across the country who have been resisting various aspects of both the tar sands and other destructive projects in civil disobedience outside of the White House.

The point of this was to call on President (Barack) Obama to make sure that he’s doing everything within his power to turn away from extreme energy sources, and to embrace clean energy as much as he can.

Q: What specifically makes the tar sands’ oil deposits in Alberta, Canada – and the Keystone XL Pipeline that would transport these deposits – unique and deserved of such attention, as compared to other pipelines?

A: The tar sands is the most carbon intensive fuel source on the planet. It’s hard to access and takes a lot of energy to extract this thick gooey oil out of the ground. So we are deeply concerned that by expanding production of the tar sands, it will make it almost impossible to stop runaway climate change.

We have been advocating that instead of building a massive pipeline that would take almost a million barrels of oil per day, from Canada down into the U.S., that we should investing that same money, seven billion dollars worth, in clean energy instead – solar, and wind and energy efficiency and advanced energy technologies.

So we were fighting this both because the pipeline itself was highly destructive, but also because it’s a symbol of the kind of investments that we need to turn away from as a society.

Q: Proponents of the pipeline argue that this will create easy jobs for a slumping economy – ready jobs that the U.S. know how to allocate. Is this a misperception?

A: We have to be honest in this debate: there are jobs in installing a pipeline, and for many people those are important jobs. Any energy investments create jobs. If you create a coal plant, that will put people to work, if you create a pipeline, that will put other people to work.

But if we’re going to be honest about that, we should also be honest about the big picture, which is that we can produce more jobs – we have produced more jobs in clean energy than with dirty fuels.

There are at least three times more jobs that come from solar and wind than for an equivalent amount of gas or coal or oil. So if we care about climate change, of course you want to move to clean energy. If you care about the economy and producing jobs, you should probably move to clean energy as well.

The folks who are the most defensive and resistant towards a clean energy transition are the ones who are profiting from our dependence on fossil fuels.

Q: Does the pipeline run through any environmentally sensitive areas or protected lands in the United States?

A: It runs through Ogallala Aquifer in Nebraska, which is one of the most important drinking water supplies in the country. It also runs through people’s farms and ranches, many of whom have been farming and ranching in those areas for generations.

I was next to a couple of ranchers yesterday from Nebraska. They don’t want any part of a dirty oil pipeline running through their farm. They don’t feel as though companies like TransCanada and others have any right to take their property, risk their water supply – all for a substance that will pollute our air and pollute our atmosphere.

Q: What executive powers does U.S. President Barack Obama wield over this situation?

A: An enormous amount. The president can reject this pipeline outright. The State Department is currently reviewing the proposal, will issue a recommendation – or what’s known as a Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement – and then it is the president’s decision about whether the pipeline should be built or not.

One person gets to decide. That’s why we were out in front of the White House.

Q: Do you see this decision as a significant moment that sets the tone for future climate change policies in the U.S.?

A: Absolutely. We’re having the largest rally in U.S. history on climate change in the National Mall this Sunday, and it’s coming at a time where there are several important decisions that the president will make: about mountain top removal, about fracking across the country, about drilling in the arctic, whether or not to build a deadly and destructive pipeline.

What we’re seeing is a resurgence of committed, passionate Americans who are willing to advocate and fight for clean energy, and it’s really inspiring to be a part of.

Excerpt:

In Bangladesh, Amal Chandra Sarker shares farming experiences over community radio. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

By George Gao
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 12 2013 (IPS)

In 1983, producers of popular radio, alternative radio and educational radio convened in Montreal to define a new genre of radio: community radio. Those dialogues led to the formation of the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters (AMARC).

The ethos behind community radio, says Marcelo Solervicens, secretary-general of AMARC, is that it extends the public sphere to ordinary citizens, reducing the distance between those who speak and those who listen.

Through this service-oriented platform, community radio has empowered a variety of practitioners, ranging from farmers in rural villages, to university students and trade union workers.

“Community radio came from the need for people to express themselves at local (and national) levels… but from their own perspectives,” said Solervicens.

He cited the use of community radio by U.N. and civil society organisations in various aspects of development: by providing information for farmers facing climate change; by informing populations threatened by HIV AIDS; and by organising cholera-ridden communities in Haiti.

In the spirit of World Radio Day on Wednesday, Solervicens spoke with IPS correspondent George Gao. Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: With all the communication platforms in the world today – television, newspaper, computers, etc. – what makes radio unique, and why has it stood the test of time?

A: The key element of radio is that it is the most accessible type of media. Calculations (show) that about 97 percent of people are using radio. Although nowadays there’s a discussion about what has become known as a convergence of different media, I think radio stands out in terms of carrying voice.

Radio (creates) a unique type of relationship between the speaker and the one who listens. That’s something very important.

Q: What is the philosophy behind community radio? How is it different than say commercial or public radio?

A: Community radio came from the need for people to express themselves at local levels, or even at the national level, but from their own perspectives. It creates a specific sector that is different from commercial and public radio, and completes the healthy media landscape – healthy in the sense that it completes it with ideas that come from the people themselves, their perspectives… and it may be diverse – in the sense that it will respond to the diversity of the communities inside.

Behind community radio sits this idea of extending the public sphere to people who are ordinary citizens, so that they can voice their opinions. In that regard, it becomes a specific media, totally different from the others.

I think this ethos of community radio is what makes (people) so passionate for it all over the world, and this has expanded… because it is ingrained in human nature, the factor of being able to speak in the public sphere. From this perspective, community radio reflects levels of democracy in a community.

Q: What is the role of community radio in development? How have international organisations, like the U.N., used community radio stations across the continents to promote development?

A: There have been studies that (highlight) the role of community radio in informing and also in organising the struggle against HIV AIDS… and this has been recognised by the U.N.

AMARC has worked with FAO for a long time so that local farmers can use radio to get information (about) crises of crops, temperature and weather conditions, and how to better confront (other) challenges (related) to climate change.

I would (note), with the U.N., the impact of community radio in safety management. We had a (productive) experience in this regard in Haiti, after the earthquake, in fighting cholera – giving information to how these types of problems that came after the earthquake could be confronted… So community radios worldwide are available readily when there is a catastrophe, as places of information for local people.

If we consider development as a complex and integrated type of work, community radio is recognised as a key component to achieving development objectives in every area, mainly as a mode to send facts.

There are people who find it very much difficult to confront development challenges when they don’t have information. I think community radio helps in showing that.

Q: Can you tell me about AMARC’s Women International Network and the Gender Policy for Community Radio?

A: AMARC created in 1992 the Women International Network, with a key objective of not only insuring that women has a place in community radio at all levels, but also to develop a gender programming strategy for community radio that contributes to eliminating stereotypes.

So it has three levels – one is the level of defending and promoting a gender policy for community radio… It’s the discourse of ‘what is the role of community radio in regards to gender (not only) within the radio stations, but also in society.’

Secondly, in terms of ensuring training and coalition building and activities being cleared and piloted between women and men… to ensure that there’s not only discourse, but also the practice of equality in gender when it comes to the organisation of activities or different works.

Finally, I would say, in terms of strategic planning… in terms of legislations, in terms of developing sustainability of community radio (and) in terms of the impact of community radio.

Q: What are some challenges around the world that prevent community radio stations from reaching their full potential?

A: There are practical difficulties and challenges because of the nature of the media (such as training community radio participants), but the key challenges that were analysed in our global evaluation that we did in 2006-2007 are the (challenges that come with) legislation.

Community radio exists today in more than 120 countries, but it’s level of recognition (varies) from one place to another. In some places, community radio has to work with “private” legislations, and has to pay fees that are similar to commercial radios. In other places, it is limited in its sustainability, because it cannot (develop) publicity, or it cannot develop social economy models, because it is not recognised in a specific sector in the legislation.

Excerpt:

New York Harbour is Lower Manhattan’s first line of defence against rising seas. Credit: George Gao/IPS

By George Gao
NEW YORK, Feb 11 2013 (IPS)

During World War II, a German U-boat made its way into New York Harbour. It fired two torpedoes at a British tanker, splitting the hull in three places and igniting it in flames. The captain and 35 members of his crew burned to death.

Seventy years later, New York Harbour is Lower Manhattan’s first line of defence against another threat: the rising tides of the sea.

New York is situated on three large islands, one peninsula and a collection of smaller islands. In this sense, rising sea levels and increasingly erratic storm surges has rendered it water-bound.

Flooded subway systems, large-scale power outages and flurrying toxic waste along the coast during the onslaught of Hurricane Sandy brought attention to the city’s floundering climate resiliency strategies.

New and re-emerging ideas to improve resiliency have varied in shapes and sizes. They include inflatable subway-tunnel plugs, large storm barriers off the coast, a series of artificial islands, and porous membranes that cling to and protect Manhattan buildings.

Five to six years ago, New York representatives approached Jeroen Aerts, a professor at the VU University Amsterdam’s Institute for Environmental Studies, for advice on storm surge protection.

“At that time, nobody was really interested in flood risk in New York. Mayor (Michael) Bloomberg was mainly focusing on sustainability issues,” he told IPS. “After Hurricane Irene (in 2011), they said, ‘well, maybe we have to look at other options, like storm surge barriers.’”

Aerts is currently conducting a cost-benefit analysis, weighing the price of constructing storm barriers against the price of upgrading current legislation – such as building regulations, zoning codes and flood insurance. “What we do is we compare both strategies as to how much they reduce flood risks,” he explained.

Asked if storm surge barriers are used in other cities, Aerts cited several in the Netherlands, and the Thames barrier in London. “There’s (also) a large one just being finalised in St. Petersburg in Russia,” he said.

“One condition is that they (remain) navigable, because New York is a port city,” said Aerts, explaining that vertical or rotating floodgates would allow tides and boats to pass unimpeded.

One variation consists of a northern barrier in the East River, coupled with a larger southern barrier that spans from Sandy Hook in New Jersey to Breezy Point in New York. “That one (would) cost 15-16 billion dollars,” he said.

Peter Stillman, a professor of political science and environmental studies at Vassar College, told IPS that storm surge barriers often raise environmental justice issues.

“Unless the surge hits the barrier straight on, some of the surge and its energy will travel along the barrier and hit the places where the barrier stops much harder,” he explained.

In this case, the Rockaways and parts of New Jersey would receive the brunt of future storm surges, he added.

Stillman said that there exist other strategies, which work to mimic how nature protects landscapes. He cited oyster beds, wetlands, and artificial islands and reefs.

Aerts argued that while there’s a need for green projects in the area, he worries it may not be enough to protect the city from future storm surges on par with Hurricane Sandy.

Aerts noted that, nonetheless, the debate surrounding storm surge barriers, along with the time needed for its design and construction, delays the city’s protection against storm surges for a few decades. “Meanwhile, you have to do something else, right?”

He advocated for updating policies and building codes to encourage the construction of more resilient buildings.

Working with nature

Kate Orff, a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, told IPS, “The new frontier in infrastructure is not solely in hard, grey mono-functional infrastructure.

“What I’ve been calling for is a hybrid approach, which integrates some protective hard infrastructures,” she continued. “It’s a big picture look of regenerating the sort of ecological protective infrastructure that we used to have.”

Orff explained, “In many cases, we’ve decimated our inland islands with dredging, or we’ve collapsed our reefs through pollution or through over-harvesting… these are ecological infrastructures that were once in place that have been destroyed.”

One of Orff’s ideas is to nurture an oyster culture in the Bay Ridge Flats. The project, entitled “Oyster-tecture”, includes reefs – of oysters, mussels and eelgrass – that would attenuate waves and filter millions of gallons of New York Harbour water.

Oyster-tecture was inspired by Orff’s roots in Maryland and the Chesapeake Bay, which “has a commitment to marine life and a functioning harbour – a harbour that is very active with boats and people and so on.

“But the key thing,” she said, “is that I’m sort of bringing this into a degraded urban condition, and trying to integrate it into, essentially, a new blue public-space system.”

According to a report by the NYS 2100 Commission – which was convened by Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York, in response to Hurricane Sandy – NYC has lost 80 percent of its tidal wetlands and almost 200,000 acres of its oyster reefs.

Guy Nordenson, a professor of architecture and structural engineering at Princeton University and a member of the NYS 2100 Commission, told IPS, “I think some combination of engineered flood protection, offshore natural barriers, and onshore dunes and natural levees are necessary.”

The report also recommends further research into storm surge barriers, including its ecological effects – on aquatic life, on erosion, and on physical oceanographic conditions.

Adaptation mode

According to Aerts, people will continue moving into low-lying cities around the world. He estimated an additional one million people in New York City by 2040, even with foreboding storms.

“I don’t know any example of a city that retreated after a major event,” he said, with Hurricane Sandy and Hurricane Katrina (2005) in mind.

Stillman warned, “In a sense, we are in trouble in the greater New York-New Jersey area, because human beings have built homes – frequently expensive second homes… in areas that we are now learning (to be) very precarious in the case of storms.”

Orff, who is also the founding principal of SCAPE – a landscape architecture and urban design office, was slated to present at a Feb. 9 conference entitled “Waterproofing New York City”.

Ironically, the event was postponed when a winter storm covered the Northeast megalopolis in snow and flooded New York’s neighbouring coastlines.

On climate change, Orff told IPS, “We’re already in the mode of adaptation, which is simply assuming that our carbon dioxide emissions will be continuing to move exponentially upwards.

“What’s missing from the conversation is a discussion about carbon – carbon in cities and America’s carbon footprint,” she added.

Orff recalled her own experience during Hurricane Sandy: “I don’t think there’s anything like seeing water lapping at your feet on West End Avenue that provides a wakeup call. I can’t imagine what else could be more dramatic and focusing than water overtaking one of America’s celebrated international cities.”

“We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world,” said then Vice President Dick Cheney (left) in 2001. “A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quickly, without any discussion."

By George Gao
NEW YORK, Feb 6 2013 (IPS)

Shedding new light on a chapter of the U.S. “war on terror” that has largely remained shrouded in secrecy, the Open Society Justice Initiative released a report Tuesday detailing the cases of 136 individuals who were extraordinarily rendered or secretly detained by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Entitled “Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition”, the report confirms that the CIA held suspected terrorists in undisclosed prisons, known as “black sites”. The agency also carried out “extraordinary renditions” – defined by the report as the illegal transfer of a detainee to the custody of a foreign government for detention or interrogation.

According to the Justice Initiative’s report, CIA detainees were tortured and abused in detention sites around the world. Some were wrongfully detained, and others were never charged for a crime.

“That’s the thing with these cases, each one is quite disturbing,” Amrit Singh, author of the report and senior legal officer at the Open Society Justice Initiative’s National Security and Counterterrorism programme, told IPS.

Take the case of Fatima Bouchar, one of 136 individuals whose experience the report documented. In 2004, the CIA and Thai authorities abused Bouchar at an airport in Bangkok. She was chained to a wall and starved for five days, before being rendered to Libya. Bouchar was four and a half months pregnant at the time.

“Part of the reason why this report was written is because it’s really important to tell the stories of what happened to these victims,” said Singh.

The report argues that along with its illegality, torture produces faulty information. It cites the case of Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, who was extraordinarily rendered by the U.S. to Egypt in 2002. Under the threat of torture, al-Libi fabricated information about Iraq, Al-Qaeda and the use of biological and chemical weapons.

In 2003, then Secretary of State Colin Powell cited this fabricated information in his speech to the U.N., while advocating for war in Iraq.

The report was written in the context of post 9/11 U.S. counterterrorism policies. Its opening epigraph draws from a 2001 television interview with Vice President Dick Cheney, conducted by Tim Russert for “Meet the Press” on NBC News.

“We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world,” said Cheney. “A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quickly, without any discussion.”

The report also lists 54 complicit “foreign governments” that participated with the CIA in various ways: by hosting CIA. prisons on their territories; by capturing, transporting and torturing detainees; by providing intelligence, etc.

“It really speaks to the power that the U.S. wields over the world,” said Singh. “In this case, the U.S. has power essentially to recruit partners in committing human rights violations in the name of countering terrorism.”

Checks and balances and extrajudicial killings

In 2002, Maher Arar was detained by U.S. authorities at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport. The CIA flew him out to Amman, Jordan, where he was abused by Jordanian guards. Then he was extraordinarily rendered to Syria, locked in a grave-like cell for 10 months, beaten with cables and threatened with electric shocks.

Arar’s lawyer Maria LaHood, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, told IPS that they sued the U.S. government officials who sent him to be tortured. But their case came up short.

“Basically, the defendants (the U.S. government) came back with the same arguments as they always do, saying even if what (Arar) says is true – that the U.S. sent him to Syria to be tortured – the officials can’t be held liable,” said LaHood.

She said that when U.S. government officials associate their actions with “national security”, it is nearly impossible to prosecute them. “The judiciary cannot touch it.”

“Even though there’s constitutional violations here, there’s no remedy,” she added. “(Arar) couldn’t go anywhere with his case in the U.S. He hasn’t gotten an apology. He’s still on the watch-list.”

LaHood told IPS about similar challenges in prosecuting extrajudicial killings. She noted an ongoing case Al-Aulaqi v. Panetta in which the families of three U.S. citizens – who were killed in U.S. drone strikes – are suing the U.S. executive branch.

“The defendents – Panetta, Petraeus and a couple of others – have moved to dismiss the case, arguing that the judiciary can’t adjudicate the case,” she said.

When asked about the balance of power between the executive and judicial branches of the U.S. government, LaHood said, “(The) executive power has grown and grown, and that’s in part because the executive is increasing its own power, and in part because the judiciary is deferring to it.”

Philip G. Alston, a professor of law at New York University School of Law and a former U.N. Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, told IPS, “The executive branch is effectively given carte blanche by the judicial branch.

“The latter has particularly abdicated its responsibility to uphold the rule of law in any matter that involves the CIA,” he added. “The result is that it is left to make its own decisions, subject only to pro forma Congressional oversight – which, as far as can be judged from the public record, is little short of cheerleading.”

Singh told IPS, “There’s no doubt that there are serious terrorist threats today in the world, and they must be dealt with in an appropriate an lawful manner, but the fact that these threats exist does not constitute grounds to deviate from established domestic and international law.

“U.S. courts have largely denied victims of torture their (compensations). U.S. courts have not acted as a constraint on the abuse of executive power, which is how they should conduct their business,” she said.

Meanwhile, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) released a statement in response to a controversial U.S. Department of Justice white paper, entitled “Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen who is a Senior Operational Leader of Al Qa’ida or An Associate Force.”

“The parallels to the (George W.) Bush administration torture memos are chilling,” said Vincent Warren, executive director at CCR, of the white paper. “Those were unchecked legal justifications drawn up to justify torture; these are unchecked justifications drawn up to justify extrajudicial killing.”

The MDGs remain a distant dream for Nepali children, with 38 percent of the population defecating out in the open because of poor sanitation. Credit: Naresh Newar/IPS

By George Gao
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 31 2013 (IPS)

What values does a Yemeni journalist who fuelled the Arab Spring hold in common with a former principal of the U.S. National Security Council? And how in turn will they see eye to eye with a Jordanian queen, or the president of Indonesia?

The subjects of this riddle are meeting in Monrovia as part of Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s 27-member High Level Panel of Eminent Person’s on the Post-2015 Development Agenda (HLP).

The purpose of the HLP is to lead the discussion around a new framework, the post-2015 development agenda, to replace the expiring Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The HLP’s work will culminate with an advisory report to Ban in May 2013.

The meeting, which takes place between Jan. 30 and Feb. 1, is the third in a series of four. Previous meetings took place in London and New York, and the forthcoming one will take place in Bali.

“This (meeting in Monrovia) is the HLP’s chance to hear the perspectives of a wide range of organisations and individuals in Africa about their priorities for a post-2015 agenda,” said Claire Melamed, head of the Growth and Equity Programme at the Overseas Development Institute (ODI).

“It’s important those perspectives are reflected in the final report,” Melamed told IPS.

ODI, in partnership with the World Wide Web Foundation and the U.N., developed an online survey to gauge the priorities of the world’s citizens. The survey, conducted through myworld2015.org, inspired a running Twitter conversation on the topic (#post2015). The online platforms sparked international chatter that was absent during MDG discussions.

“As we witnessed in the historic events of 2011 – from the Arab spring to the rise of Occupy – the possibility of mobilising public opinion on a global scale is becoming ever-more urgent and realistic,” Rajesh Makwana, director of Share the World’s Resources (STWR), told IPS.

The airing of new voices does pose a challenge: how will 27 panellists harbour the hopes and concerns of so many people?

“My apprehension is that this process is moving in so many levels (that) there’s no priority on how these different conversations (will) come together in one place,” said Radhika Balakrishnan, executive director of the Center for Women’s Global Leadership and professor of women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University.

“There’s consultations happening all around the world… There’s not a clear way to see how these are going to come to fruition at the end,” Balakrishnan told IPS, noting that she is still hopeful, despite the challenges.

Approaching sustainable development

One agreement that did emerge from the HLP’s first meeting in New York was to anchor the post-2015 agenda through “poverty eradication” and “sustainable development”. This idea builds off both the MDGs and the 2012 U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) in Rio de Janeiro.

The Rio+20 outcome document entitled “The Future We Want” specifies that the process leading to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) should converge with the post-2015 framework.

“The post-2015 agenda builds off Rio+20 in the sense that one follows the other, and some of the same people and institutions are involved in both,” said Melamed, author of the report “After 2015: contexts, politics and processes for a post-2015 global agreement on development“.

“But the extent to which they become the same agenda is a hotly contested issue, and it’s not clear how or if that will happen,” she added.

Balakrishnan stated that the category “sustainable development” should also encompass economic issues, as in “sustainability of the economy to reproduce itself in terms of taking care of the people in it”.

“So many people are left out of the economy,” she said. “How sustainable (is a) world in which people cannot have an adequate standard of living?”

When asked about changes in the world between 2000 and 2015, Balakrishnan highlighted the geopolitical shift in north-south dynamics. “The north-south divide is not so clear – Europe is in the middle of huge crises in austerity,” she explained. “In a way the global economy is vulnerable all over.”

Makwana said, “We have to accept that we currently consume 50 percent more resources than the planet can produce and that it is imperative to follow an entirely different economic model – one that puts human and environmental welfare before economic growth and wealth generation.”

On climate change, Melamed said, “We know at least two more things about climate change than (we did) in 1999. Firstly, that it is not only happening, and fast, but that its impact will potentially be catastrophic. So there is more urgency.

“But we also know more about how to tackle it. We have better scientific and technical resources to solve the problem, if – and this is where the problems come – governments and companies choose to use them.”

Makwana echoed Melamed’s point, noting that around 40,000 people die every day due to lack of food, water and healthcare. He said, “We already know how to prevent these deaths, and the systems and institutions that can do so have long been in place.”

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, president of Liberia and co-chair of the HLP, addressed civil society organisations in Monrovia during a pre-consultative forum on Tuesday. “The meeting in Liberia is on ‘economic transformation’, and we want to make sure that we depart from the normal paradigm,” she said.

“We’re saying ‘economic transformation’ will go beyond growth, go beyond GDP (Growth Domestic Product),” she concluded.

When asked to comment on the weaknesses of current MDGs, Balakrishnan, co-author (with Diane Elson) of the report Post-2015 Development Framework and the Realization of Women’s Rights and Social Justice, said MDGs approached women’s rights through too narrow a scope and failed to address women’s role in the larger economic framework.

Makwana argued that while MDGs ignored much of the root causes of poverty, “we must of course support the (post-2015) process… because it is currently the only internationally agreed framework for trying to address some of the most pressing issues facing humanity”.

He added, “The post-2015 debate provides an important opportunity for policymakers to be far more ambitious about securing basic human needs for all.”

A ScanEagle UAV sits on a catapult in Iraq prior to launch. Credit: public domain

By George Gao
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 26 2013 (IPS)

On the long meadows of Prospect Park in Brooklyn, New York, a man pilots an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) – more commonly referred to as drones – in figure eights to the amusement of his Labrador.

A few miles north on the other side of the East River, U.N. delegates mull over a more serious idea for drones – their deployment, for surveillance purposes, into the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

Drones are a generative technology – a carte blanche platform that inspires a variety of functions, shaped by the actors who wield them. Among other applications, drones are used to gather data from hurricanes, deliver humanitarian aid packages in areas of conflict, fight fires, map territories for conservation, launch hellfire missiles and gather intelligence.

Ryan Calo, an assistant professor at the University of Washington School of Law, told IPS that privacy issues surrounding the use of drones are also limiting the technology’s constructive potential.

Surveillance drones in the U.S.

“In the U.S., it is a core principle that the government does not invade people’s privacy and collect information about their innocent activities just in case they do something wrong,” explained Allie Bohm, an advocacy and policy strategist at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

“Surveillance drones certainly have the technological capacity to surreptitiously collect information about all of us, even when we are not suspected of a crime,” Bohm told IPS.

According to Bohm, U.S. courts are currently debating the constitutionality of drone technologies, since there are no binding laws governing their use. “Our privacy laws currently are not strong enough to ensure that this new technology will be used consistently with our democratic values,” she said.

However, “congress has required the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) to open domestic airspace to drones in 2014”, she added, noting that the Department of Homeland Security has already started domestic drone programmes, such as in Oklahoma.

Calo, an expert on issues surrounding robotics and privacy, predicted that the visceral reactions people have in response to surveillance drones will lead the government to re-examine the adequacy of U.S. privacy laws.

“The issue with drone surveillance is that it is cheaper than previous forms of aerial surveillance, which rely on planes and helicopters that are expensive to purchase, maintain and operate.

“Whenever surveillance becomes cheaper or easier, you tend to see more of it,” he explained.

Psychological toll of constant surveillance

Unwelcome mental states such as fear and anxiety often stem from the belief that one is being watched or monitored, argues Calo in his essay entitled “The Boundaries of Privacy Harm”.

“There are studies suggesting, among other things, that people experience discomfort buying certain items with a camera present,” he told IPS.

“People are sometimes less creative when observed and have trouble accomplishing complex tasks,” he added.

When asked what the psychological effects that U.N. surveillance drones in the DRC may have on the civilians they fly over, Calo said, “I think the effects could be quite disconcerting.”

Drones in the DRC

The U.N. was not the first to think of flying drones in the DRC. Biologists Lian Pin Koh and Serge Wich, co-founders of conservationdrones.org, fly low-cost drones over a variety of countries to gather data for research and conservation purposes.

“In December 2012, our team brought a conservation drone to Odzala National Park in the Congo as part of an initiative by World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Netherlands to explore the potential of drones for detecting poachers,” Koh, an assistant professor of applied ecology and conservation at ETH Zürich, told IPS.

“We are currently working with others to develop a long-distance telemetry system for video and control over the plane. This will make it much more usable to detect poachers from a distance and react faster,” added Wich, a professor of primate biology at Liverpool John Moores University.

“We have had no experience with people firing at it from the ground, but when flying at 150 (metres) high, they are quite small and hard to see and probably hard to shoot out of the sky with an AK-47,” said Wich.

“But none of those (projects) are in a phase that we can determine success yet. That will take some time,” he noted.

While presenting at the 2012 Fuller Symposium on Conservation Crime in Washington, D.C., Koh said, “One of the concerns Serge and I have been talking about is what would happen if these low-cost drones get into the wrong hands.

“It might be the case that poachers start using these drones to start looking for valuable wildlife that they can then go after,” he warned.

“Governments will have to start coming up with legislations of who is allowed and not allowed to fly these drones and under what conditions,” he added.

André-Michel Essoungou, U.N. public affairs officer at the Department of Peacekeeping Operations and the Department of Field Support, told IPS, “If and when we were to use UAVs, on a trial basis in the DRC, the usual procedures and consultations with legislative bodies will be respected.

“Ultimately, the use of UAVs will be done only in full cooperation with the government of the DRC. And to introduce them, we would need the support of member states to equip the mission,” he said.

A national poll revealed that 83 percent of voters in the United States believe it is important for the country to be a member of  and provide funding to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, commonly referred to as UNESCO.

Polling results released on Jan. 16 by Better World Campaign (BWC), an organisation that works to support U.S.-U.N. relations, came after recent rows between the U.S. government and U.N. bodies surrounding Palestine’s push for statehood.

In November 2012, the United States was one of nine member states out of 193 in the General Assembly that tried to unsuccessfully bar Palestine from gaining non-member observer state status, and in October 2011, the U.S. cut off funding to UNESCO for admitting Palestine as a member.

The move to cut funds stemmed from a 20-year-old U.S. law that prohibits funding to any U.N. organisation that recognises Palestine as a state.

“The U.S. remains a member of UNESCO even though the U.S. has stopped funding UNESCO,” George Papagiannis, external relations and information officer at UNESCO, told IPS.

“It is even a member of the organisation’s executive board, and fully participates in UNESCO’s Programs,” added Sue Williams, media chief at UNESCO’s Department of Public Information.

UNESCO, a specialised U.N. agency, is described in the poll as an organisation that “helps prevent conflict and build peace around the world by promoting democracy, working to eradicate poverty, and supporting education for all”.

“The public support, indeed, affirms that UNESCO matters to Americans at home and abroad,” said Papagiannis.

Controversial issues

Jeffrey Laurenti, senior fellow at The Century Foundation, told IPS, “There is very little the U.N. does that runs counter to U.S. foreign policy,” but the U.N. does prioritise some issues that are “inconvenient and premature” in Washington politics.

These issues include the death penalty under the Bush administration and the Israel-Palestine conflict under any administration, explained Laurenti.  U.S. President Barack Obama is, however, “pressing to rescue UNESCO from the tangle of 1994 de-funding legislation with regard to Palestinian membership”, Laurenti added.

Public Opinion Strategies and Hart Research Associates conducted the bipartisan poll by surveying 900 registered voters via telephone between Jan. 6 and Jan. 9, on behalf of BWC.

“[Part] of our objective is to be the people who look at American attitudes just about what’s happening around the world,” said Bill McInturff, partner and co-founder of Public Opinion Strategies.

In response to one of the survey’s open-ended questions, “What do you think should be the main international priorities for the Obama Administration to accomplish in the next four years?” three out of every 10 responders said they hoped to end the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

According to McInturff, a veteran pollster who gathers data biannually for the U.N. Foundation, three out of 10 is a very high ratio for a response to an open-ended question.

Funding to multilateral organisations

Also on the survey were questions related to U.N. funding.

“We know from previous research [that] Americans greatly overestimate the share of the budget that goes to foreign assistance,” said Geoff Garin, president of Hart Research Associates, citing that the actual amount was less than 1 percent.

During a press teleconference on the morning of the poll’s release, Garin, McInturff, and Peter Yeo, executive director of the Better World Campaign, discussed the topic of U.S. funding to the U.N.

“Two-thirds of our voters support paying our dues to the United Nations on time,” said Yeo, even though “in past years, the U.S. has not paid its dues [on time]”.

“Americans have a sense of ‘Hey, if you’re a member of an organisation, and you’ve agreed to pay the bill, guess what? It’s like a mortgage, it’s just like any other bill. You have an obligation to pay,'” added McInturff.

Laurenti told IPS, “Presumably, the U.S. will continue to pay its assessed dues on time, in full, and without conditions.”

Other multilateral organisations ranked high in polling as well: 87 percent of those surveyed thought the U.S. should be a member of the World Food Programme (WFP).  “You just need to look at the headlines from Syria to know the important role that WFP is playing in feeding and taking care of refugees there,” said Yeo.

Additionally, 92 percent believed the U.S. should be a member of the World Health Organisation (WHO). “This is particularly relevant given that we’re experiencing the worst flu season in many years,” Yeo said.

Laurenti also added, “The U.N.’s performance ratings among Americans are vastly higher than those of the U.S. Congress.”

“Among the international agencies tested, a higher percentage [of people] feel they know enough about what the U.N. is doing that they can offer a judgment, compared to any others,” he noted.