Zekiya Louis (R) and Manuela Ramirez (L) handing out free water to protesters in Times Square, New York. Credit: James Reinl/IPS

By James Reinl
NEW YORK, Jun 4 2020 (IPS)

The United States has been a story of broken dreams and broken glass this past week.

Once again, an unarmed black man died at the hands of a white police officer, with George Floyd being pinned to the ground under a lawman’s knee in Minneapolis, Minnesota, as stunned passersby made cell-phone videos of the incident to post on social media.

Once again, local protests snowballed into nationwide rallies against police violence and racism that in some cases led to clashes, smashed windows, torched cars and looted stores — dashing hopes that America was making progress on race relations.

In New York City, Zekiya Louis, a 29-year-old beautician and entrepreneur, headed to Times Square to pass out free bottles of water at a Black Lives Matter protest aimed at prompting action from a Washington elite that has struggled with civil rights woes for decades.

“It’s becoming a problem now because nine out of ten times it’s black people who are the victims of police violence — and we’re tired of that,” Louis, who was born in the U.S. and has family in the Caribbean, told IPS. 

“I know that a lot of people are protesting and they’re angry and they’re breaking stuff. But you gotta understand we tried protesting peacefully, we tried holding hands and coming together, and what we got was more violence and tear gas.”

The U.S. has been convulsed by waves of protests and mayhem since Floyd, 46, died on May 25 in the state of Minnesota after police officer Derek Chauvin, 44, pinned his neck under a knee for nearly nine minutes while Floyd was handcuffed face down in the street.

In videos, Chauvin appeared unphased as Floyd repeatedly gasped and said he could not breath, while onlookers urged officers to release the detainee, who had been accused by a deli worker of buying cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 bill.

Chauvin and three other officers involved in Floyd’s arrest were sacked soon after videos of the incident became a viral sensation and the latest example of police violence against an unarmed black man to send shockwaves across the U.S.

Chauvin has since been charged with second-degree murder and the other three former  officers — Tou Thao, Thomas Lane and J. Alexander Kueng — face counts of aiding and abetting murder.

The Floyd saga follows the high-profile cases of police killing unarmed black men, including  Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Eric Garner in New York, and others that also prompted waves of grief, demonstrations and soul-searching.

Within days, protests had spread from Minneapolis to dozens of cities across the U.S., including Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and Washington, some of which were accompanied with violence and looting. Police have made some 9,300 arrests. 

Protestors have been met with tear gas, flash grenades and, at times, excessive force by the authorities. Police have targeted journalists, including the arrest of CNN reporter Omar Jimenez as he was broadcasting live. Officers have also been injured.

President Donald Trump expressed his “sorrow” at the “horrible thing” that ended Floyd’s life, but also courted controversy by threatening to use soldiers and warning via Twitter that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”.

On Monday, Trump made headlines again, threatening to deploy the military on U.S. soil and posing for cameras while holding a bible in front of a damaged church shortly after police had used tear gas to disperse peaceful protesters from the scene.

On Wednesday, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, urged U.S. politicians to “condemn racism unequivocally” and “truly tackle inequalities” in a society in which whites are richer and healthier than blacks.

“The voices calling for an end to the killings of unarmed African Americans need to be heard,” Bachelet said in a statement.

“The voices calling for an end to police violence need to be heard. And the voices calling for an end to the endemic and structural racism that blights U.S. society need to be heard.” 

While many protesters demanded accountability for the officers involved in Floyd’s death, they also raised broader concerns about heavy-handed policing, systemic inequality between black and white Americans and the painful legacy of slavery.

At a briefing with journalists, veteran rights campaigner Rev Al Sharpton said that the Floyd case must lead to new federal laws, the BBC reported.

“If we come out of all this and do not have federal legislation where we can protect citizens from local policing … then all of this is drama to no end. Drama in the street must be geared to fundamental legal change,” said Sharpton. 

Back in Times Square, Manuela Ramirez, a 23 year-old Colombian student and waitress, who lives in Brooklyn, New York, called for big changes to how police officers perceive the citizens they are paid to protect and serve.

“I believe that there’s a lot of good cops and there’s a lot of bad cops killing people — and that’s what we shine the light on,” Ramirez told IPS. 

“It’s that mentality of these people who are just going to do bad things to us, and nobody should think like that.”

Syria’s government has arrested, detained and tortured large numbers of medics in a systematic effort to cut off treatment to swaths of the turbulent country’s population and swing the civil war in its favour, according to a new report. This photo dated 2015 shows supporters demanding an end to the bombing of hospitals in Syria at a die-in to defend Syrian health professionals. Credit: Michael Hnatov/Physicians for Human Rights

By James Reinl
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 4 2019 (IPS)

Syria’s government has arrested, detained and tortured large numbers of medics in a systematic effort to cut off treatment to swaths of the turbulent country’s population and swing the civil war in its favour, according to a new report.

Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), a campaign group, provided jaw-dropping testimony from 21 physicians, pharmacists, volunteers and other medical workers who had been detained by forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad.

Researchers found that Assad’s forces have tracked down and arrested medical staff, subjected them to beatings and humiliation and interrogated them over whether they had treated wounded rebel fighters and civilians in opposition areas.

“The Syrian government has effectively criminalised the provision of nondiscriminatory care to all, regardless of political affiliation,” the report says.

It has also “systematically targeted health facilities and health workers as part of a wider strategy of war aimed at breaking civilian populations and forcing them into submission.”

Syria’s mission to the United Nations did not respond to requests for comment from IPS. Previously, Syrian ambassador Bashar Jaafari has denied claims that Damascus targets health workers, often accusing critics of seeking to delegitimise Assad’s government.

Between June and August this year, the New York-based research group interviewed 19 men and two women medical workers who had previously been detained by the Syrian government during the country’s chaotic, eight-year war.

Interviewees said they were detained for “real or perceived involvement” in treating injured “opposition members and sympathisers”. Interrogators tried to make the detained medics confess to treason, they said.

“Interviewees reported that Syrian security forces regularly beat, humiliated, and subjected them to stress positions,” the report said. 

“In some cases, they were burned, shocked with electricity, and sexually assaulted.”

Researchers describe questioners and torturers accusing detained doctors of “working in or establishing field hospitals, providing medical treatment and material support to terrorists, and other acts considered to be subversive”. 

The 48-page report, called “My Only Crime Was That I Was a Doctor”, highlights the case of a surgeon, known in the report as Dr. Youssef, who helped establish a network for treating injured protestors at the start of the Syrian uprising in early 2011. 

Seven plainclothes security officers arrested Youssef at a hospital in the Qalamoun area, north of Damascus, in August of that year, and took him to al-Nabek State Security Branch, where he was strip-searched and caged in a tiny cell.  

Youssef was tortured for some 1-3 hours daily, including electric shocks and beatings with concrete-filled pipes. Interrogators quizzed him about supporting “terrorists”, demanded that he name medical colleagues and forced him to sign confessions.

The physician was ultimately released in December 2011. For some months, he treated the injured in a field hospital in rebel-held Idlib province, in the country’s northwest, before crossing the border into Turkey in 2014.

Syria’s government, which is backed by Russian airpower and Iran-aligned militias, has repeatedly faced criticism for deliberately targeting doctors, clinics and ambulances as it claws back control over a fragmented country.

PHR has documented 583 attacks on Syrian health facilities since the conflict began. The group attributes 90 percent of these attacks on the government and its allies in what it calls a “purposeful assault on health”.

Last month, the New York Times daily reported on Russian air raids on Idlib over a 12-hour period, which found that the Russian air force repeatedly bombed hospitals in a bid to crush the last rebel-held stronghold.

Earlier this year, U.N. officials accused Russian forces of deliberately targeting hospitals and schools as a tactic to “terrorise” civilians — accusations denied by both Damascus and Moscow. 

In August, the U.N. established a board of inquiry to investigate the bombing of U.N.-supported medical facilities in the northwest of the country, which is due to release its findings in the coming weeks.

Saudi Arabia was elected to the United Nations cultural agency UNESCO’s top board. However, human rights activists say that the Saudi government, which has been implicated in the murder of journalist and government critic Jamal Khashoggi (pictured) in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul last year, has been pursuing an ongoing crackdown on political freedoms. Many questioned the Saudi government's appointment to the UNESCO board. Courtesy: POMED/CC by 2.0

By James Reinl
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 22 2019 (IPS)

Human rights campaigners have reacted angrily to the election of Saudi Arabia to the United Nations cultural agency UNESCO’s top board, highlighting the kingdom’s ongoing crackdowns on political freedoms and critics.

On Wednesday, Saudi culture minister Prince Badr bin Abdullah bin Farhan celebrated Riyadh winning a four-year term on UNESCO’s 58-nation executive board, telling state-backed media of the kingdom’s global “role in building peace” and of promoting culture and science.

Critics, however, decried “hypocrisy” at UNESCO, saying the Paris-based agency should instead distance itself from Riyadh, which has been implicated in the murder of Saudi journalist and government critic Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul last year.

Josh Ruebner, an author on two books on the Middle East and board member of the anti-autocrat campaign outfit Freedom Forward, also bashed UNESCO’s multimillion-dollar tie-up with Saudi youth charity the MiSK Foundation.

“UNESCO is supposed to be an advocate for press freedom,” Ruebner told IPS.

“But now the same Saudi dictatorship that assassinated Khashoggi is on UNESCO’s executive board. UNESCO was already taking money from the Saudi dictatorship via the fake Saudi charity MiSK. Now the hypocrisy has grown even worse.”

In recent months, the U.N. has faced mounting pressure over its cooperation deals with MiSK, the private charity of Saudi Arabia’s crown prince and de facto ruler Mohamed bin Salman, an ambitious moderniser who is better known as MbS.

UNESCO, which advocates for free speech and protecting journalists, inked a $5 million cooperation deal with MiSK in 2016, and the two groups have worked together on several events, including a Nov. 18-19 youth forum at the U.N. agency’s headquarters in Paris.

As delegates met in Paris, Ken Roth, executive director of the New York-based pressure group Human Rights Watch, accused UNESCO of “letting the Saudi crown prince whitewash his reputation by co-sponsoring” the two-day parley.

Why is UNESCO letting the Saudi crown prince whitewash his reputation by co-sponsoring a conference. UNESCO says it promotes media freedom. Has it forgotten about Jamal Khashoggi already? @MaurinPicard French: https://t.co/3jsy5UCbdM English: https://t.co/R9gYxd0AGG pic.twitter.com/hOGdrgku02

— Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) November 20, 2019

Meanwhile, some 6,500 people have signed an online petition against the UNESCO-MiSk tie-up, which describes the Saudi charity as a “propaganda” vehicle aimed at obscuring Riyadh’s rights abuses at home and during its military operations in neighbouring Yemen.

In a tweet this week, Agnes Callamard, the U.N. official who investigated Khashoggi’s murder, criticized UNESCO, saying the “agency responsible for #pressfreedom” was too cozy with the Saudi officials responsible for the journalist’s death.

#UNESCO, the UN agency responsible for #pressfreedom said that in the absence of a court conviction for #JamalKhashoggi murder they dont have evidence permitting them to break their agreement with #SaudiArabia for their youth event. It says it all.. https://t.co/lN0sV04i7r

— Agnes Callamard (@AgnesCallamard) November 20, 2019

UNESCO spokesman Matthieu Guevel told IPS that the agency is “currently re-evaluating its partnership strategy”. Saudi Arabia was elected to the board by member governments, and was not a decision by agency officials, he added.

Saudi Arabia’s mission to the U.N. did not respond to requests for comment from IPS.

It was not the first scandal over U.N.-MiSK tie-ups.

Street protests over a separate deal between MiSK and the U.N.’s youth envoy, Jayathma Wickramanayake, led to a fancy panel session that was planned to take place in New York in September being canceled and relocated at short notice.

Critics highlight the murder of Khashoggi, who was killed and dismembered by a Saudi hit squad in Turkey in October 2018, which the CIA has reportedly concluded was ordered by MbS, though the young prince denies his direct involvement.

This month, the FBI indicted three men with being part of a Saudi government spying operation, which saw Riyadh pay Twitter employees to access accounts of users who criticised the kingdom online and relay their private details back to headquarters.

Bader al-Asaker, who runs MbS’ private office and acts as secretary-general of his MiSK charity, reportedly received phone calls from Khashoggi’s hit squad in Istanbul and masterminded the Twitter spying ring for his royal boss.

Polio cases around have declined globally by more than 99 percent since 1988, but the type 1 poliovirus remains endemic in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where it has made a comeback this year and infected 102 people. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By James Reinl
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 20 2019 (IPS)

Efforts to wipe polio off the face of the planet took a step forward this week, with a multibillion-dollar fundraiser in the Middle East helping eradication schemes tackle a virus that disproportionately kills and cripples children in poor countries.

Donor governments and philanthropists pledged $2.6 billion on Tuesday in Abu Dhabi to immunise 450 million children against polio each year — further beating back a bug that is only endemic nowadays in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Some global health experts say mankind is walking its “final mile” towards a polio-free world, but others warn that so-called polioviruses could re-emerge and spread swiftly, as was witnessed to deadly effect in the Philippines earlier this year.

In Abu Dhabi, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organisation (WHO), said “one of the world’s largest health workforces” had been assembled so that medics reach “every last child with vaccines”.

#polio end game strategy 2019 – 2023 strongly supported by partners and global leaders pledging U$2.6 billion at Reaching the Last Mile Forum #RLMForum in Adu Dhabi today. read more https://t.co/mQJa8yjqGr

— WHO Afghanistan (@WHOAfghanistan) November 19, 2019

Reem Al Hashimy, Minister of State for International Cooperation for the United Arab Emirates, which hosted the event, said the Gulf nation was working hard injecting Pakistan children so that “together we can consign polio to the pages of history”.

The fundraiser came on the back of last month’s WHO announcement that the second of three types of poliovirus had been successfully eradicated around the world. The other strain was certified as wiped out in 2015.

Polio cases around have declined globally by more than 99 percent since 1988, but the type 1 poliovirus remains endemic in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where it has made a comeback this year and infected 102 people. 

Health workers in South Asia say that conflict prevents them from vaccinating children in Afghanistan’s polio hotspots, while in Pakistan, inaccurate video reports about vaccinations causing sickness have deterred parents from sending their children for jabs.

#DYK last month UNICEF and @WHO mounted a national immunization campaign against #polio aiming to protect all children under 15, across Iraq; including over 4,500 #Syrian children in Bardarash camp, outside Dohuk City in Iraq. pic.twitter.com/2xuiE4QR33

— UNICEF Canada (@UNICEFCanada) November 19, 2019

Polio invades the nervous system and can cause irreversible paralysis within hours. There is no known cure, but the bug can be prevented by vaccination. Immunisation campaigns have reduced worldwide cases in recent decades.

The disease mostly affects children aged under five years. In every 200 cases, one infection will lead to irreversible paralysis. Among those paralysed, between 5-10 percent of victims perish when their breathing muscles stop working.

Nigeria, the last African country to have cases of wild polio, has not seen any such outbreaks since 2016. WHO aims to certify Africa as polio-free next year, under the Global Polio Eradication Initiative’s “endgame strategy”, which culminates in 2023.

Still, polio-eradication efforts have repeatedly faced setbacks. In unvaccinated populations, or in areas where immunity is low and sanitation is poor, the resilient bug can quickly re-emerge and tear through vulnerable populations.

In September, the Philippines said it was planning an emergency vaccination campaign after polio re-surfaced and caused the first two recorded polio cases for 20 years, affecting different parts of the tropical archipelago.

? Incredible news! Thank you to our visionary donors at the #RLMForum who have pledged $2.6 billion to #EndPolio.

Standing together we will protect 450M children each year against polio and make the ? polio-free.#AcceleratingThePacehttps://t.co/GuSLc7R0uh pic.twitter.com/jsRZ504VQO

— Michel Zaffran (@michelzaffran) November 19, 2019

As such, health officials warned that donations in Abu Dhabi alone were not enough. Michel Zaffran, WHO’s point man on polio, told the Wall Street Journal daily that without immunisation schemes polio would “rapidly spread in the Middle East and Asia and go back to Africa.”

The biggest donation of $1.08 billion came from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Other pledges included Abu Dhabi’s crown prince Mohamed bin Zayed ($160 million) and the United States government ($216 million). 

(L-R) Somappa, 52, Muniraju, 37, and Kaverappa, 54, finish manually emptying a pit, in Bangalore, India in August 2019. Courtesy: WaterAid/ CS Sharada Prasad/ Safai Karmachari Kavalu Samiti

By James Reinl
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 15 2019 (IPS)

People who empty out sewage tanks and scrub down latrines doubtless perform a vital, thankless and even undesirable task. A new report, however, shows that doing such jobs could also cost workers their lives.

A study from the World Health Organization (WHO) and others has revealed that millions of sanitation workers in low-income countries are routinely exposed to contagious bugs, powerful chemicals and filthy conditions that can turn out to be deadly.

The 61-page study titled ‘Health, safety and dignity of sanitation workers‘ holds up the world’s sanitation workers as unsung heroes who risk their lives cleaning other people’s muck, saying they should at the very least get protective clothing and basic employment rights.

Speaking with reporters in New York on Thursday, United Nations spokesman Stephane Dujarric described the “unsafe and undignified working conditions of sanitation workers” across nine developing countries.

Researchers focussed on muck-cleaners in Bangladesh, Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Haiti, India, Kenya, Senegal, South Africa and Uganda who typically toiled in an “informal economy” lacking basic “rights and protection,” added Dujarric.

The report by WHO, together with the International Labour Organization, the World Bank, and WaterAid, a charity, described people around the world emptying pits and septic tanks, cleaning sewers and manholes and handling fecal sludge at treatment and disposal works. 

Researchers shone a spotlight on the case of Wendgoundi Sawadogo, a sanitation worker in Ouagadougou, capital of the landlocked West African country, Burkina Faso, a city of some 2.4 million people.

The 45-year was photographed climbing into latrines and open pits, holding muck-smeared ropes without gloves. In a statement accompanying the report, he described finding discarded syringes and broken calls in fetid pits. 

Sawadogo spoke of colleagues struggling to lift the concrete slabs that cover pits, occasionally breaking fingers, toes, and feet. The work is “really dangerous” and some of his co-workers have perished in such trenches, he added.  

“You have no paper to show that this is your profession. When you die, you die,” said Sawadogo.

“You go with your bucket and your hoe without recognition, without leaving a trace anywhere or a document that shows your offspring that you have practiced such a job. When I think of that, I’m sad. I do not wish any of my children to do the work I do.” 

Another emptier in the same country, Inoussa Ouedraogo, described a slab crushing his finger in an injury that cost the 48-year-old about $100 in local currency during 11 months of “painful”  treatment, in which time he had to carry on working. 

Researchers described sanitation workers toiling in sewage pits around the world without safety gear — risking exposure to cholera, dysentery and other killer bugs. Some 432,000 people perish from diarrhoeal deaths each year, the report said.

They also have to work in tanks amid fumes of ammonia, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide and other toxic gases that can cause workers to lose consciousness and die, or face long-term breathing and eyesight problems.

Few low-income countries have health and safety guidelines to protect sanitation workers, researchers said. There are no reliable global statistics, but it is estimated that one manhole worker dies unblocking sewers by hand in India every five days.

Dr Maria Neira, a public health director at WHO, called for much sanitation work to be mechanised so that workers do not have to touch human waste with bare hands. She called for better health and safety laws, training, protective gear, insurance, and health checks.

“Sanitation workers make a key contribution to public health around the world – but in so doing, put their own health at risk. This is unacceptable,” said Neira. “We must improve working conditions for these people.”

A protest against the welcoming of Mohammad bin Salman at Downing Street, last year. Rights organisations have started an online petition against the involvement of bin Salman’s Misk Foundation with the United Nations Educational Scientific And Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) Youth Forum being held in Paris next week. Courtesy: Alisdare Hickson/CC by 2.0

By James Reinl
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 14 2019 (IPS)

The United Nations faces renewed criticism over its partnership with Saudi Arabia’s Misk Foundation amid revelations that the charity is headed by the mastermind of a recent Twitter spying operation.

An online petition against the tie-up has received some 6,000 signatures, with organisers saying the U.N.’s cultural agency, UNESCO, should “have nothing to do” with Misk, the private charity of Saudi crown prince and de facto ruler Mohamed bin Salman. 

The campaign comes days before Misk takes part in the Nov. 18-19 UNESCO Youth Forum in Paris, and days after revelations that Misk official Bader al-Asaker led a Saudi effort to gather private details about dissidents via their Twitter accounts.

“Thousands of people are urging UNESCO to cut ties with Misk, a fake Saudi charity that’s really a front for spying run by the Saudi dictator as he tries to track and kill critics,” Sunjeev Bery, director of campaign group Freedom Forward, which organised the petition, told IPS.

“It’s time for the world to wake up and realise that you cannot dance with a brutal despot without becoming implicated in their public relations efforts. The Saudi dictatorship uses its international affiliations to hide the violence it deploys to silence opponents.”

Bery says Misk is used by the powerful crown prince as “propaganda” to divert attention away from Riyadh’s spying operations, a crackdown on critics and the “mass slaughter” during its military operations in neighbouring Yemen.

UNESCO has worked with Misk since 2015 in a deal worth $5 million to the Paris-based U.N. agency. Misk promotes young entrepreneurship at glitzy gatherings in New York, Paris and elsewhere, featuring such speakers as soccer legend Thierry Henry.

UNESCO spokesman Alexander Schischlik said the agency and Misk have co-hosted several events in recent years, and that Misk had helped select a candidate to take part in this month’s forum at UNESCO headquarters.

“It is our role and obligation to work with all member states within our mandate,” Schischlik told IPS. 

“We will continue to do so. Saudi Arabia has been a valuable partner in many issues, including heritage protection, and culture.”

Critics of the tie-up point to revelations this month that Misk’s secretary-general, al-Asaker, ran a Saudi effort to track down dissidents using Twitter, and claims last year linking him to the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi

Last week, the United States Department of Justice charged three men of spying for Saudi by digging up private user data of suspected dissidents and passing it to Riyadh in exchange for cash and luxury wristwatches.

A 24-page FBI complaint accuses two former Twitter employees and an individual who previously worked for the Saudi royal family as being part of a spy ring that tapped private data from thousands of accounts.

The document does not name Asaker or the crown prince, but references to “Foreign Official-1” and “Royal Family Member-1” have been identified as Asaker and prince bin Salman, who is the kingdom’s de facto ruler and is better known as MbS. 

Asaker runs MbS’ private office and heads Misk, which promotes entrepreneurship in Saudi, where high unemployment rates and a demographic bulge of youngsters raise tough questions for an economy that seeks to wean itself off oil.

The complaint describes Asaker cultivating Twitter employees and paying them hundreds of thousands of dollars to discover the email addresses and other private details related to Twitter accounts that had criticised the kingdom.

It was not the first time that Asaker made headlines. Last year, Turkish pro-government daily Yeni Safak reported that the head of Saudi hit squad that killed dissident journalist Khashoggi phoned Asaker four times as the gruesome operation was carried out.

Transcripts of the calls were never published, and it remains unclear whether Asaker was involved. Saudi officials initially denied links to Khashoggi’s murder in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, 2018, but later described a “rogue operation” that did not involve MbS.

The CIA has concluded that the prince ordered the hit, according to reports. Saudi officials point to a trial in Saudi of alleged plotters, in which Asaker is not a defendant, but which has been widely criticised for lacking in transparency.

The U.N. has faced repeated blowback over its ties with Misk. In September, the U.N.’s youth envoy, Jayathma Wickramanayake, pulled out of an event she was co-hosting with Misk at the last minute amid controversy over Khashoggi’s murder.

A United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) school in Gaza. UNRWA director Pierre Krahenbuhl resigned amid a misconduct probe over whether he fast-tracked his girlfriend into a top aid job. Credit: Khaled Alashqar/IPS

By James Reinl
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 7 2019 (IPS)

The United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees was in “crisis mode” on Wednesday after director Pierre Krahenbuhl resigned amid a misconduct probe over whether he fast-tracked his girlfriend into a top aid job, analysts said.

The decision to quit by Krahenbuhl, commissioner-general for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), came as the agency battled an ongoing cash crisis after top donor the United States cut all funding earlier this year.

“This is the biggest crisis UNRWA has ever had,” David Bedein, director of the Jerusalem-based Center for Near East Policy Research, a research group that has lobbied against the agency for decades, told IPS.

“It’s not a schoolteacher or social worker who has been caught with their hand in the cookie jar. We’re talking about the top guy, who’s meant to be an unimpeachable example of purity for the organisation.”

Senior aides for U.N. secretary-general Antonio Guterres have spoken with Bedein and other prominent pro-Israel campaigners about overhauling UNRWA to make it more transparent and less political, he told IPS.

“They want a school and administration system that would be characterised by transparency and accountability. While this has been prompted by a sex scandal, it’s going to lead to good things,” said Bedein.

“This is more than a case of simply removing a few people at the top. You have to take a messed up system and redo it.”

Answering a question from IPS, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said UNRWA was undergoing a “process of strengthening its work in the face of financial difficulties” focussed on “areas of oversight and accountability”.

But Dujarric declined to comment on closed-door meets between Guterres’ aides and Bedein and Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights group, about overhauling UNRWA.

Krahenbuhl, a Swiss national, had resigned “effective immediately”, Dujarric told reporters on Wednesday. Guterres appointed Christian Saunders, a Briton, as the temporary officer in charge of UNRWA the same day.

Krahenbuhl had been battling allegations that he led an “inner circle” of UNRWA officials who had engaged “in sexual misconduct, nepotism, retaliation, discrimination and other” wrongdoing, according to a confidential report by a U.N. watchdog that was leaked earlier this year.

According to the document, Krahenbuhl struck up a relationship with senior adviser Maria Mohammedi in 2014 that was “beyond the professional” and arranged for her to fly alongside him on costly business class flights.

On Wednesday, the U.N. said in a statement that investigators had not found evidence of “fraud or misappropriation of operational funds” against Krahenbuhl, but that there were “managerial issues that need to be addressed”.

Danny Danon, Israel’s ambassador to the U.N., said the Krahenbul scandal was just the latest in a “growing list of charges” against the agency and that “there is no other solution to UNRWA except to close it”.

Officials from the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump have repeatedly bashed UNRWA, saying that its schools and health clinics should be run instead by neighboring countries.

The agency has struggled with a financial crisis since Washington, which was historically UNRWA’s biggest donor, slashed its contributions from $360 million to $60 million in 2018 and down again to zero for 2019.

UNRWA was established following the 1948 Arab-Israeli War surrounding Israel’s creation to help some 700,000 Palestinians who were forced from their homes by fighting. Absent of a political solution, the U.N. General Assembly has repeatedly renewed UNRWA’s mandate.

The agency provides education to 500,000 Palestinian students, health care at 144 centres that handle 8.5 million patient visits each year, and social services to 5 million Palestinians. UNRWA is also a big employer in Palestinian areas.

Freedom House president Mike Abramowitz warned of online propaganda and disinformation spreading ahead of elections in 24 countries this past year. Credit: Erick Kabendera/IPS

By James Reinl
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 5 2019 (IPS)

Using armies of online fans, trolls and, automated ‘bots’, the world’s authoritarians and populists are increasingly using the web to drown out opponents and swing public opinion and elections their way, a new study says.

The Freedom on the Net report, compiled annually by Freedom House, a United States government-funded research group, confirms the fears of many online activists and paints a bleak portrait of how the internet is straining democracies.

The 32-page document, released Tuesday and titled “The Crisis of Social Media” found that more than half of the world’s 3.8 billion web users live in countries that censor the internet and use pro-government trolls to manipulate the online realm.

Freedom House president Mike Abramowitz warned of online propaganda and disinformation spreading ahead of elections in 24 countries this past year. The group assesses web freedom in 65 countries that host 87 percent of the world’s web-users.

“Governments are finding that on social media, propaganda works better than censorship,” Abramowitz said in a statement. 

“Authoritarians and populists around the globe are exploiting both human nature and computer algorithms to conquer the ballot box, running roughshod over rules designed to ensure free and fair elections.”

Researchers found that officials had worked with celebrity yes-men, business titans and semi-autonomous “online mobs” to spread clickbait, conspiracy theories and misleading memes from “marginal echo chambers to the political mainstream”.

The report spotlights Brazil, where Jair Bolsonaro’s presidential election win in October 2018 was preceded by misleading news, anti-gay rumours and doctored images being spread by the right-winger’s fans via YouTube and WhatsApp, researchers said.

In Egypt, the government of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi blocked some 34,000 websites to stifle debates about whether el-Sisi should be allowed to hold power until the end of 2030 ahead of an April referendum, the report said.

Hundreds of thousands of online trolls spread fake news to swing voters behind two main parties in April-May elections in India this year, it added. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “NaMo” app was reportedly relaying users’ data to a private analytics firm.

The world’s two biggest economies — the United States and China — come in for special scrutiny.

In the U.S., much like in the 2016 presidential election that brought Donald Trump to power, online trolls spread “disinformation” during the November 2018 mid-term vote and during the confirmation process for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. 

Meanwhile, U.S. immigration officials are increasingly demanding access to the mobile phones and laptops of visitors and snooping on immigrants’ social media feeds, operating with “little oversight or transparency”, the report says.

China remains the “world’s worst abuser of internet freedom” — a title it has held for four consecutive years, and where a phalanx of online commentators known as the 50 Cent Army pushes government messages online.

Beijing clamped down harder on web users ahead of the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre on Apr. 15 and got tighter still in the face of ongoing anti-government protests in Hong Kong, the report says.

Adrian Shahbaz, the group’s research director for technology and democracy, warned that even governments of smaller economies can now afford large-scale “advanced social media surveillance programs”.

Last month, Facebook sued NSO Group, an Israeli surveillance firm, for using the WhatsApp messaging service to hack the phones of some 1,400 dissidents, journalists, diplomats, officials and others for their clients, understood to be governments and spy agencies.

“Once reserved for the world’s most powerful intelligence agencies, big-data spying tools are making their way around the world,” said Shahbaz. “Even in countries with considerable safeguards for fundamental freedoms, there are already reports of abuse.”

Researchers noted that officials in 47 countries, armed with such sophisticated web-snooping tools, had arrested web users between June 2018 and May 2019 for posting political, social or religious messages online.

“The future of internet freedom rests on our ability to fix social media,” said Shahbaz. 

“Since these are mainly American platforms, the U.S. must be a leader in promoting transparency and accountability in the digital age. This is the only way to stop the internet from becoming a Trojan horse for tyranny and oppression.”

By James Reinl
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 24 2019 (IPS)

A partnership between United Nations and African Union (AU) agencies will help African economies insure themselves against the droughts and other extreme weather events that plague the continent, organisers say.

The AU’s African Risk Capacity (ARC) and the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) stuck a deal in Bonn, Germany, this week to raise money for the safeguard scheme and advance policies that help countries adapt to weather threats.

Organisers say that 45 million people across Africa cannot put enough food on their tables, especially in the south and east of the continent, where punishing dry spells have cut harvest yields and pushed up prices of staples.

“Reducing the impacts of drought and other natural disasters by helping member states improve climate resilience through innovative mitigation and risk financing instruments are key to our mandate,” Mohamed Beavogui, ARC’s director general, said in a statement on Wednesday. 

“The agreement signed today with UNCCD will create a functional synergy in our efforts to help countries better understand their risk profiles, improve knowledge and strengthen capacities for climate adaptation and food security.” 

Ibrahim Thiaw, executive secretary of the UNCCD, described a new financial vehicle called the eXtreme Climate Facility (XCF) that would raise money for AU members to access to alleviate their parched agricultural sectors.

The XCF will be “an important tool to help African countries to cope effectively with the impacts of drought”, said Thiaw, formerly a Mauritanian official and deputy chief of the U.N. Environment Programme.

Drought-ravaged countries can apply to the fund for help adapting to drought and other weather calamities, organisers said. Payouts will be corruption-proof and provided as “climate change catastrophe bonds”.

“The message is clear. We will see an increasing number of droughts with unprecedented severity, which are exacerbated by climate change. No country or region, rich or poor, is immune to the vagaries of drought,” said Thiaw.

“The UNCCD is helping 35 of Africa’s 57 countries to create the mechanisms they need to take early action to avert drought disasters. Today, Africa is ramping up pre-emptive actions as a unified front against future drought and climate-induced disasters in the region.”

The inking of an agreement between the two agencies came amid a week of growing concerns over harsh dry spells across Africa that are reducing harvests, killing wildlife and worsening security for millions of people.

On Wednesday, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, a study group, released a report saying that three decades of conflict in Somalia — together with crippling droughts and flooding — were strengthening the hands of militants and weakening the government’s power. 

In the Hwange National Park in western Zimbabwe, at least 55 elephants have died from starvation since September, officials said on Monday. The locations of their carcasses — near water holes — suggested they had traveled long distances to drink.

On October 15, aid agency Concern Worldwide, which co-compiles the Global Hunger Index, said hunger levels in the turbulent Central African Republic were “extremely alarming”, while levels in Chad, Madagascar, and Zambia were “alarming”.

“Today marks the beginning of a unified front against drought and climate-induced disasters in the African region,” Thiaw said in a statement on Wednesday.

“Our key aims are to support the establishment and implementation of national drought plans and mobilise innovative financial instruments to better mitigate the risks of extreme climate situations.”

According to the UNCCD, droughts already bad and they are getting worse. By 2025, some 1.8 billion people will experience serious water shortages, and two-thirds of the world will be “water-stressed”, the UNCCD says. 

Though droughts are complex and develop slowly, they cause more deaths than other types of disasters, the UNCCD warns. By 2045, droughts will have forced as many as 135 million people from their homes.

But there is hope. By managing water sources, forests, livestock and farming, soil erosion can be reduced and degraded land can be revived, a process that can also help tackle climate change. 

Workers with the United Nation’s body, the International Organisation for Migration register returned migrants at Yaounde Nsimalen Airport in Cameroon. United Nations researchers interviewed 1,970 migrants from 39 African countries who had traveled without official papers and lived in 13 European nations and found many migrated primarily for job prospects and were not seeking asylum. Credit: Mbom Sixtus/IPS

By James Reinl
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 22 2019 (IPS)

Sub-Saharan African migrants who risk perilous sea crossings to Europe are often assumed to be illiterate, jobless chancers in desperate bids to flee stagnation and rampant corruption in their home countries. But a survey of some 2,000 irregular African migrants in Europe found them to be more educated than expected, while many of them were leaving behind jobs back home that paid better-than-average wages.

While economic factors do indeed drive many Africans to irregularly migrate across the Mediterranean Sea, a new United Nations report provides some startling data that could change the way migrants are perceived in Europe.

“The report finds that getting a job was not the only motivation to move and that not all irregular migrants were poor in Africa or had lower education levels,” U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters on Monday.

“Over half of those interviewed were employed or in school at the time of their departure, with the majority of those working earning competitive wages.”

The report, called Scaling Fences: Voices of Irregular African Migrants to Europe, also found that more than 90 percent of those surveyed were undeterred by risky sea crossings and other dangers and would brave such a journey again.

Researchers interviewed 1,970 migrants from 39 African countries who had traveled without official papers and lived in 13 European nations. They had migrated primarily for job prospects and were not seeking asylum.

#ScalingFencesUNDP: why does risking death travelling to another country hold more promise than staying? @ahunnaeziakonwa on how the #migration crisis is disrupting Africa’s development progress and the need to understand the drivers. https://t.co/frd0eh0DWW pic.twitter.com/ay6ZjKaS1d

— UNDP Africa (@UNDPAfrica) 21 October 2019

They found that the undocumented migrants had often not been struggling by sub-Sahara African standards. Some 58 percent either had a job or were in school at the time they decided to take a risky journey north.

On average, the respondents had three more years of education under their belts than peers. For those who were leaving jobs in their African homelands, they tended to have commanded better-than-average wages.

Still, money was a big motivating factor to leave. About half of the respondents who left jobs said they had not been earning enough. Wages earned in Europe were typically much higher than those paid back home.

“The report is meant to paint a clearer picture of why irregular migrants move from Africa to Europe,” added Dujarric. 

“The report calls for more opportunities and choices in Africa while enhancing opportunities to move from ungoverned to governed migration.”

According to researchers, jobs and money were not the only factors. Of those surveyed, 77 percent said they lacked a political voice back home, and 62 percent said they had been treated unfairly by their governments.

Achim Steiner, Administrator of the U.N. Development Programme, said the 71-page report showed how African migrants often left home because of “barriers to opportunity” and “choice-lessness” in graft-ridden economies.

“Migration is a reverberation of development progress across Africa, albeit progress that is uneven and not fast enough to meet people’s aspirations,” said Steiner.

The European Union has witnessed mounting migrant flows in recent years, with folks drowning at sea during perilous crossings in rickety boats and often getting stuck in sprawling, unsanitary camps in Greece and elsewhere.

This has raised political tensions across the 28-nation bloc, with Italy and others adopting anti-immigrant policies and members struggling to agree on how to process and host new arrivals.

The #EU requires bold leadership in telling a story about #migration as a normal and necessary phenomenon. Currently, it is undermining its own credibility and failing to take responsibility for the situation.

? New from @Shoshana_Fine
@ECFRMenahttps://t.co/RhJZxViI00

— ECFR (@ecfr) 15 October 2019

“As it stands, the bloc has no system through which member states can share responsibility for hosting migrants in a fair manner,” Shoshana Fine, a fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations think tank, said in a report this month.

“As a consequence, they continue to wrangle with one another over which of them should host the asylum seekers and other migrants who reach Europe’s shores.”

Female subsistence farmers, who according to the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa form more than 70 percent of farmers in Africa. Last week USAID announced $70 million of investment into research for new seeds and methods to reduce the impact of droughts and disease on crops across the developing world. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By James Reinl
DES MOINES, United States , Oct 21 2019 (IPS)

Experts vaunted new strains of seeds, drone aircraft and other technological breakthroughs as solutions-in-the-making for farmers in Africa, where hunger, drought and food price hikes are continent-wide problems.

At the gathering of nutritionists in the 2019 Borlaug Dialogue International Symposium, held annually in Des Moines, Iowa, in the United States, hopes were pinned on a new generation of so-called ‘agro-entrepreneurs’ in Africa.

At the event, USAID administrator Mark Green announced $70 million of investment into research for new seeds and methods to reduce the impact of droughts and disease on crops across the developing world.

“Humanitarian assistance, including food assistance, is treatment, not cure,” said Green. “We must develop new technologies and partnerships that will not only assist displaced families in crisis settings, but offer them livelihood opportunities wherever they can find them.”

The three-day gathering, which ended on Friday, saw some 1,200 experts, policy chiefs, executives and farmers from more than 65 countries tackle food scarcity and price hikes — blights that disproportionately hurt sub-Saharan Africa.

Jennifer Blanke, vice president for agriculture human and social development at the African Development Bank (AfDB) said Africa “missed out” on the green revolution that bumped up harvests across Asia and Latin America in the 1950s and 1960s.

But with new technologies — from unmanned “drone” aircraft to new strains of more resilient crop seeds — coming online, African farmers and policymakers have an opportunity to get agriculture back on track and boost harvests.

“You can do so many things with technology,” said Blanke.

“With drones, you can survey your fields in a minute, which would have taken hours and hours previously. You can spray pesticides. Satellite technology allows you to see what’s happening to weather systems. Basic mobile technology helps farmers in rural areas know what prices they can get for their food.”

In the coming months, Blanke aims to bring together researchers, policymakers and investors to foster helpful policies and roll out schemes to buy and spread technology as well as training farmers and officials how to use it.

Dozens of young African entrepreneurs traveled to Des Moines to network, woo investors and brainstorm ideas for addressing Africa’s worrying problem of producing enough food for a growing population.

They included Ifeoluwa Olatayo, from Nigeria, who was awarded a fellowship from the World Hunger Fighters Foundation, for building small hydroponic farms on rooftops in Ibadan, in Oyo State, for growing lettuce, cucumbers and other vegetables

“Since we’re planting in close proximity to consumers, we’re able to create fast and easy access to nutritious foods while at the same time lessening the impact of transportation on the whole agricultural value chain,” said Olatayo.

“It’s important that people have access to nutritious foods, as affordable and as fresh as possible.” 

Other agro-entrepreneurs are tackling another problem for African farmers — the fact that, thanks to bad roads, poor transport and other woes, entire harvests rot beside the fields they were grown in and never reach market.

Other start-ups involve distributing new varieties of seeds that are more resilient to insects and disease, yield bigger harvests, provide more nutrients, and in some cases taste better than the crops they are replacing.

Lourena Arone Maxwell, from Mozambique, which has been ravaged by disease and droughts since cyclones Idai and Kenneth killed more than 600 people earlier this year, is focussed on fighting crop diseases.

“Plant diseases can reduce the amount of food that farmers have and the solution is a very affordable and environmentally-friendly method to control them,” Maxwell said on the sidelines of an event to honour the first batch of fellows.

The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan documented some 100 attacks in the Afghanistan’s presidential election period, from Jun. 8 to Sept. 30. Some 85 civilians died and 373 others were injured. Pictured here is a dated photo of the country’s 2009 elections. Courtesy: UN Photo/Tim Page

By James Reinl
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 16 2019 (IPS)

A wave of bloody Taliban attacks aimed at derailing Afghanistan’s recent elections killed and maimed hundreds of people, including children, the United Nations mission to the country said on Tuesday.

The U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, known as UNAMA, documented some 100 attacks in the country’s election period, from Jun. 8 to Sept. 30, which claimed the lives of 85 civilians and injured 373 others.

On polling day itself, Sept. 28, some 249 civilians were injured and another 28 were killed, with children making up more than one-third of the victims in a day of carnage across the turbulent South Asian country.

The bloodshed underscores the fragile state of Afghan democracy and the relative strength of Taliban insurgents some 18 years after the United States and others invaded the country in a bid to tackle terrorism that has dragged on far longer than expected.

Tadamichi Yamamoto, head of UNAMA and the world body’s envoy to Afghanistan, lauded Afghans who bravely “defied the threats” and “cast their votes” despite fears of Taliban gunfire, grenades and other perils.

“These attacks, along with public statements made by the Taliban, revealed a deliberate campaign intended to undermine the electoral process and deprive Afghan citizens of their right to participate in this important political process, freely and without fear,” said Yamamoto.

United Nations special report describes severe impact of election-related violence on civilians in #Afghanistan, mainly coming from the Taliban’s deliberate campaign to disrupt the 28 September presidential election. More: https://t.co/ET9Tk9bFvX. pic.twitter.com/o0zQuwZFBR

— UNAMA News (@UNAMAnews) October 15, 2019

Some 95 percent of the attacks were the work of the Afghan Taliban group, which has been waging an insurgency since it was toppled by a United States-led coalition following al-Qeada’s Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S.

Most of the Taliban strikes were carried out with grenades, rockets and mortars, but some home-made bombs were also planted near polling stations, which included schools, researchers said in the eight-page report.

Speaking with IPS and other reporters in New York on Tuesday, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric blamed “most of the violence” on the “Taliban’s deliberate campaign to disrupt Afghanistan’s presidential election”.

“The report not only documents the harm to civilians caused by the Taliban’s violent offensive to disrupt the election but also highlights a pattern of abductions, threats, intimidation and harassment carried out by the Taliban against civilians,” Dujarric said.

Only about one-quarter of eligible voters cast their ballots — a low turnout of an estimated 2.6 million votes that was attributed to Taliban threats and concerns over the fairness of elections in a country that is riddled with graft.

Though the vote was safer than a parliamentary ballot in 2018, Afghanistan has since been gripped with political uncertainty and the front-running candidates complaining about the process even before a result has been called.

The leading candidates — President Ashraf Ghani and his main rival Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah — both claimed victory on polling day, even though preliminary results will not be released until this Saturday at the earliest.

Unless one of the candidates secures a majority of more than 50 percent, the elections will proceed to a second round. The Independent Election Commission says that biometric voter verification and other safeguards have cleaned up Afghan elections.

The U.S. invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, weeks after the 9/11 attacks, to topple the Taliban. The hardliners regrouped and have waged a fierce insurgency for years against the government, US forces and other Western allies in Afghanistan.

The Taliban control more of Afghanistan than at any time since its regime was toppled in 2001, and government security forces are struggling to contain the militants as several rounds of U.S.-Taliban peace talks in Qatar have so far failed to clinch a deal.

In another report released on Tuesday, the International Crisis Group, a research and advocacy organisation, warned that 2018 was Afghanistan’s deadliest year yet, with a death toll comparable to the Syrian and Yemen wars combined.

The group warned of “extended political wrangling” between presidential candidates should they contest the outcome of the presidential vote, while noting the “glimmers of an opening for the resumption of U.S.-Taliban talks”.

“If talks restart and produce a deal, that could mark the beginning of a serious peace process. If, on the other hand, they remain frozen, Afghanistan may descend into worsening violence,” the group said in a statement.

This week UN Security Council considered the situation in Syria. Aid groups operating in northeastern Syria have been raising the alarm about civilian casualties and an impending humanitarian crisis this week, as Turkey began a military assault on the turbulent region’s Kurdish militants. Credit: UN Photo/Manuel Elias

By James Reinl
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 10 2019 (IPS)

Aid groups operating in northeastern Syria have been raising the alarm about civilian casualties and an impending humanitarian crisis this week, as Turkey began a military assault on the turbulent region’s Kurdish militants.

Doctors Without Borders (MSF), Human Rights Watch (HRW) and other groups warned about everything from massive new flows of refugees to conditions for detained Islamic State (IS) fighters from a previous phase in Syria’s chaotic civil war.

Turkish forces began an offensive in Syria’s northeast on Wednesday to clear out Kurdish militias and return Syrian refugees, within days of United States President Donald Trump’s controversial decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria’s turbulent north.

MSF teams “remain ready to provide medical care after the Turkish military launched operations” and “are preparing for a potential increase of patients linked to the conflict,” the group said in a statement Wednesday.

“We have seen people being displaced from locations along the border due to the conflict and are extremely worried that the military intervention will threaten the safety and wellbeing of the Syrian people,” the group said.

Military operations against Kurdish fighters began Wednesday with air strikes rocking the Syrian border town of Ras al Ain with large explosions, as Turkey moved tanks, artillery, and howitzers in preparation for a broader assault.

United Nations spokesman Farhan Haq said aid groups would have “scale-up at a time of crisis” and urged the region’s armed forces to keep the Turkey-Syria border open so that aid trucks could bring food, medicine and other gear to those affected by fighting.

Ankara seeks to create a “safe zone” to return millions of refugees to Syrian soil and end a “terror corridor” on Turkey’s southern border. Turkey says Kurdish YPG fighters in northeast Syria are terrorists due to their links to militants waging an insurgency inside Turkey.

Turkey had been preparing to advance into Syria’s northeast since U.S. troops started pulling out of the area in a policy shift by Trump that was widely condemned in Washington as a betrayal of America’s armed Kurdish allies.

Eric Schwartz, president of Refugees International, an aid group, blasted Trump’s policy shift and rounded on Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s “shockingly irresponsible” assault, which “will put lives at grave risk.”

“Trump’s decision to give Turkey the green light to launch an incursion into northeast Syria could have major humanitarian consequences,” Schwartz, a former U.S. State Department official, said in a statement.

“It could open new fronts in the conflict and newly displace hundreds of thousands of civilians across an area already in the grip of a humanitarian crisis [and] likely force international relief groups to evacuate just when they are most needed.”

Doz, a youth aid organisation, said Ankara’s stated objective of resettling some 2 million Syrian refugees from Turkey back to their homeland was tantamount to “demographic engineering and ethnic cleansing”.

In a statement, Doz urged the European Union, the U.N. and the U.S. to try to “prevent this war”, which will have “dramatic consequences such as new mass forced migration and directly affect the life of 6 million civilians.”

Fighting in the struggling northeast could “revive” prospects for IS and “cause the release” of some 12,000 hardline militants who are detained by Kurdish forces at al-Hol and other camps in Syria’s northeast, said Doz.

HRW, a New York-based campaign group, said the detained militants across some seven lockups in the northeast included 4,000 foreign fighters who should be repatriated to their countries of origin.

“Thousands of people, including children, are stuck in what amounts to shockingly overcrowded prisons on suspicion of being IS, but no one is accepting responsibility for them,” said Letta Tayler, a crisis researcher for HRW. 

“Any authority that effectively controls these informal prisons is legally bound to urgently improve conditions and ensure that each and every detainee is held lawfully.”

Over a million Rohingya refugees are without a state as Myanmar refuses to recognise them as citizens. Pictured here is the refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar along Bangladesh border with Myanmar. Credit: ASM Suza Uddin/IPS

By James Reinl
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 8 2019 (IPS)

Movie star Cate Blanchett and businessman Richard Branson spoke up this week for the millions of people around the world who cannot get passports and other papers because they lack an official nationality.

The United Nations says the problem — known as “statelessness” — is getting worse, as a worldwide trend towards nationalism means governments are increasingly loath to help people viewed as unwelcome outsiders.

From the mostly-Muslim Rohingya people across Myanmar and Bangladesh to the masses of stateless folks in Côte d’Ivoire, Thailand, Latvia, Syria and Kuwait, Blanchett, Branson and others urged governments to tackle the problem.

“Statelessness has a devastating impact on millions of people around the world,” Blanchett, an Australian double Oscar-winner, told journalists on Monday during a week of intergovernmental talks in Geneva.

“They experience marginalisation and exclusion from cradle to grave … It’s total invisibility.”

By one count from 2017, some 70 countries reported on 3.9 million stateless individuals, but the U.N. agency for refugees, UNHCR, says the real figure globally is likely three times higher with some 12 million people impacted.

The world’s biggest stateless population are the Rohingya, hundreds of thousands of whom have sought safety in Bangladesh after fleeing violence in Myanmar, which does not recognise them as citizens.

“No one should have to suffer the indignity and exclusion that comes with being stateless,” Branson, a British billionaire wrote on Monday.

“Fortunately, over a hundred states have come together in Geneva this week to commit to do more to put an end to statelessness once and for all.”

It’s difficult to imagine how any country can maximise its potential by ignoring significant populations of stateless people. My take on statelessness and how to solve it https://t.co/R5gRApf5pa #IBelong @Refugees pic.twitter.com/SoGgG1rJtb

— Richard Branson (@richardbranson) 7 October 2019

The U.N. calls statelessness a “man-made problem” stemming from a “bewildering array of causes” — often legal directives and the re-drawing of national borders. Some 600,000 people remain stateless after the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

Stateless people are often denied certificates at birth and remain excluded for the rest of their lives, the U.N., says. They lack the papers for travel, marriage, work, schooling, healthcare, and opening bank accounts.

“Statelessness can deny people and communities their identity and sense of self, contributing to the breakdown of family and social relationships and creating legal problems for generations,” said U.N. deputy secretary-general Amina Mohammed. 

“And stateless people are voiceless people. Prevented from voting or participating in public life, they are without representation anywhere.”

U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi said the decade-long “#IBelong” campaign was making gains towards ending statelessness by 2024, with more than 220,000 stateless people acquiring a nationality since 2014.

“This is an area in which – for relatively little investment – wide-reaching impact is within our reach,” said Grandi.

In July, Kyrgyzstan became the first country to officially end statelessness. The U.N. says Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan could also meet the 2024 deadline; while Thailand is boosting efforts on its 479,000 ethnic hill tribespeople and other stateless individuals.

Madagascar and Sierra Leone have rewritten their laws so that mothers can confer citizenship to their children, as fathers have long been able to do. Still, 25 nations do not readily grant mothers this right – one of the leading causes of statelessness globally. 

But Grandi also highlighted the Rohingya, and the Indian state of Assam, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has vowed to disenfranchise millions of Muslim immigrants amid a polarising election campaign.

“The progress is far from assured: damaging forms of nationalism, and the manipulation of anti-refugee and migrant sentiment – these are powerful currents internationally that risk putting progress into reverse,” said Grandi.

A new United Nations report on children and armed conflict in Afghanistan found that 12,599 youngsters had been confirmed killed or injured by fighting between 2015-2018 — 82 percent more than between 2011-2014. A mother and her children who live amid bomb rubble on Kabul's outskirts in this picture dated 2008. Credit: Anand Gopal/IPS

By James Reinl
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 4 2019 (IPS)

The United Nations has warned that the past four years were among the deadliest for children in Afghanistan since the United States-led invasion of 2001, with nearly 13,000 youngsters killed and injured in that period.

U.N. secretary-general António Guterres’ new report on children and armed conflict in Afghanistan found that 12,599 youngsters had been confirmed killed or injured by fighting between 2015-2018 — 82 percent more than between 2011-2014.

The report serves as a potent reminder that while peace talks between the U.S and the Taliban, a hardline Afghan militant group, have made fitful progress, life for ordinary Afghans remains blighted by violence and hardship.

Speaking with reporters on Thursday, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said Guterres was “deeply disturbed by the scale, severity and recurrence of grave violations endured by boys and girls” in Afghanistan over recent years.  

“The recruitment of children, mostly by armed groups, including the Taliban and Daesh, continued to be documented, as were over 800 attacks on schools and hospitals,” added Dujarric, using an alternate name for the Islamic State (IS) group. 

The 17-page study, which bore Guterres’ name but was compiled by his special envoy on children in wartime, Virginia Gamba, said that youngsters made up almost a third of all civilian casualties in Afghanistan. 

They were mostly killed or maimed by fighting on the ground, improvised explosive devices, airstrikes, suicide bomb blasts, and from unexploded weapons that detonated unexpectedly after they were deployed. 

“Children in Afghanistan have known nothing but heartbreaking realities as a result of violence and war,” Gamba said in a statement accompanying her report.

“The number of child casualties is appalling, and I urge all parties to immediately put an end to the suffering of children.” 

The U.N. blamed the Taliban, Afghanistan’s branch of IS, and other armed groups for most (43 percent) of the 3,450 children who were killed and 9,149 others who were maimed in the 18-year-old war.

Still, 30 percent of child casualties were blamed on Afghan security forces, pro-government forces, the U.S. and other international partners — a large increase on the previous four-year period.

Gamba noted the growing civilian death toll since the Afghan Air Force became capable of launching aerial attacks in 2015. Since the beginning of that year, some 1,049 children were killed or injured in attacks from the skies.

In one extreme case, Afghan Air Force helicopters in April 2018 fired rockets and heavy machine guns at an open-air graduation ceremony at a madrasa in Dasht-e Archi district of Kunduz Province, killing at least 30 children and injuring 51 others, the report said.

The Taliban, IS and Afghan security forces continue enlisting children as soldiers, the report said. Once they are released from service in militant groups, youngsters frequently end up in jail on national security charges.

“While the protection and well-being of children can only be reached through long-term peace, we must seize all available opportunities to improve right now the protection of boys and girls in Afghanistan,” added Gamba.

The report comes after U.S. and Taliban negotiators struck a draft peace deal last month aimed at leading to drawdowns of the 14,000 U.S. troops and thousands of NATO troops in the landlocked, South Asian country.

U.S. President Donald Trump broke off talks after Taliban militants carried out a Sept. 5 bomb attack in the capital Kabul that killed 12 people, including a U.S. soldier. Pakistan and the Taliban have since called for a fresh round of negotiations.

The Taliban currently controls more territory than it has since 2001, when the U.S invaded following the 9/11 attacks. The war has become deadlocked, with casualties rising among civilians and combatants despite fitful progress at peace talks in Qatar.

A 2009 study found that almost 250,000 children worked in auto repair stores, brick klins, as domestic labourers, and as carpet weavers and sozni embroiderers in Jammu and Kashmir. A new study says financiers in Wall Street, the City of London and other banking centres should play a bigger role in freeing the millions of people who endure slave-like working conditions globally. Credit: Umer Asif/IPS

By James Reinl
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 2 2019 (IPS)

Financiers in Wall Street, the City of London and other banking centres should play a bigger role in freeing the millions of people who endure slave-like working conditions globally, according to a new study.

A group of experts known as the Financial Sector Commission on Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking say that banks and other finance bodies can adopt policies to reduce the 40.3 million men, women and children who are victims of forced labour.

Their 172-page report, Unlocking Potential: A Blueprint for Mobilising Finance Against Slavery and Trafficking, calls for more financial probes into people-smuggling rings and greater support to those freed from slave-like conditions. 

“Slavery and human trafficking are big business, reckoned to generate 150 billion dollars every year over the broken backs, hearts and dreams of people young and old,” said Dutch foreign minister Stef Blok, who was involved in the report.

The report paints a bleak portrait of modern slavery, which sees one in every 185 people globally forced to work in an illicit sector that compares in scale to the trade in illegal drugs and counterfeit goods.

Modern forms of slavery include debt bondage, where workers are forced to toil for free in service of a debt, forced marriage, domestic servitude, and forced labour, in which workers face violence or intimidation.     

Modern-day slaves can be found doing everything from begging to gold-mining, but the biggest sectors in the 150-billion-dollar-a-year global business are housework, manufacturing and construction. A quarter of those involved are children. 

James Cockayne, a co-author of the report and policy analyst at United Nations University, said human trafficking and slavery represented a “tragic market failure” . 

“Modern slavery leaves us all worse off because it treats people as disposable objects rather than full economic and social agents,” said Cockayne. 

“We collectively lose out on a huge amount of potential that is currently locked up.”

Tackling the scourge will be a struggle, says the report. Getting the number of exploited workers down to zero by 2030 will involve releasing 10,000 victims of modern slavery every day for the next 11 years.  

Financial institutions can help to achieve that target by boosting resources for financial probes into people-trafficking rings and lifting the lid on firms that turn a profit through slavery, according to the report’s authors. 

Banks can get better at spotting the illicit cash flows linked to people-smuggling rings, and can cooperate more with other institutions to identify and combat the abuse of some of the world’s most vulnerable people. 

As well as turning people into slaves, trafficking ringleaders have also been known to hijack the financial identities of their victims for money laundering purposes. Once they regain their freedom, some victims also find that they have low credit ratings. 

Muhammad Yunus, who won the Nobel Peace Price for his microfinance scheme and assisted on the commission, says banks should invest more in digital and social finance schemes to make poor people less vulnerable to traffickers.

“Large numbers of people around the world remain unbanked,” said Yunus.

“We must … create social businesses, that is, businesses dedicated to solving problems without seeking monetary returns personally, focusing on reducing, and ultimately eliminating the human trafficking and modern slavery.”

The report was driven by the Liechtenstein Initiative, a public-private partnership with the participation of Barclays, Bank of America, HSBC, Wells Fargo, BMO Financial Group and other well known finance brands.

“The financial sector possesses huge potential to help end modern slavery and human trafficking and to maintain the integrity of the international financial system,” added Blok.

“It can create moral capital markets, and can therefore be a powerful force for good, first and foremost by supporting the victims of these criminal business practices.”

The origins of the GSN come from the endeavours of the Joint Declaration of Religious Leaders signed on 2 December 2014. Religious leaders of various faiths, gathered to work together “to defend the dignity and freedom of the human being against the extreme forms of the globalisation of indifference, such us exploitation, forced labour, prostitution, human trafficking” and so forth.

Excerpt:

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) seeks disclosure of files under the U.S. intelligence community’s “duty to warn” obligations, which demand officials alert folks in imminent danger. The CPJ wants to know if they knew about an assassination plot against Jamal Khashoggi. Photo by Sam McGhee on Unsplash

By James Reinl
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 30 2019 (IPS)

A media watchdog has asked United States intelligence agencies to reveal whether they knew about an assassination plot against Jamal Khashoggi and failed to warn the Saudi journalist he was in mortal danger.

A legal brief, filed in a Washington DC district court by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), comes almost exactly one year after a Saudi hit squad butchered the renegade writer inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2.

CPJ’s advocacy manager Michael DeDora told IPS that his lawsuit against the U.S. government “asks a simple question: did the intelligence community know of yet fail to warn Jamal Khashoggi of threats to his life?”

Khashoggi, a U.S.-based Washington Post columnist, who was once a royal Saudi insider and had grown critical of the regime, was reportedly lured to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in an elaborate and brutal plot to silence him.

Khashoggi was allegedly killed, dismembered and removed from the building; his remains were never found. The CIA reportedly assessed that crown prince Mohammad bin Salman, known as MBS, had ordered the operation.

The CPJ seeks disclosure of files under the U.S. intelligence community’s “duty to warn” obligations, which demand officials alert folks in imminent danger. The brief, filed Thursday, follows the Trump administration’s rejection of a previous CPJ disclosure request.

“Nearly one year after Khashoggi’s murder, disclosure of these documents would provide transparency and help efforts to secure accountability,” DeDora told IPS in an email.

“But this lawsuit has broader implications: journalists around the world should have the security of knowing that the U.S. will not ignore threats to their lives.” 

Khashoggi’s assassination sparked global outrage, blighted MBS’ global standing and undercut his ambitions to improve the kingdom’s poor human rights record and diversify its economy away from hydrocarbons. 

Saudi officials, who initially said Khashoggi had left the consulate unharmed, now say he was killed in a rogue operation that did not involve the prince. A domestic Saudi trial of 11 suspects is widely viewed as a sham.

Speaking with IPS among a small group of journalists in New York this month, Hatice Cengiz, Khashoggi’s former fiancée, explained how she was saddened by the lack of global pressure on Riyadh to come clean about the affair.

MBS has not visited Europe or the U.S. since the murder. While the prince was briefly shunned by foreign leaders, Riyadh’s long-standing diplomatic support from the U.S., Britain and others has largely resumed.

“This silence and inertia created huge disappointment on my side,” said Cengiz. 

“Countries could have demonstrated a more honourable attitude instead of remaining silent, particularly the United Nations, the European Union and the five members of the U.N. Security Council.”

Cengiz was joined at an event on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly by Agnes Callamard, the U.N. rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions who investigated the killing and concluded it was a “deliberate, premeditated execution,” and called for MBS and other officials to be probed.

Callamard, a French academic, said she knew that achieving justice for Khashoggi’s murder would be an uphill struggle, given Riyadh’s deep pockets, clout in the world energy markets and powerful friends in Washington, London and elsewhere.

“This single year [since Khashoggi’s death] is just the first phase in our journey for accountability and justice. And that means that it will demand and deserve patience, resilience, and time,” said Callamard.

“Early on, I could see that justice for Jamal Khashoggi would have to be found beyond the usual path and beyond our usual understanding of accountability.”

Callamard urged the CIA to publish its files, while also calling for an FBI investigation and a public inquest in Turkey. Meanwhile, a draft U.S. law on human rights and accountability, if enacted, would unmask and sanction the culprits and send “ripple effects” towards accountability around the world.

The African Development Bank (AfDB) has been investing in projects to assist African countries adapt to climate change. Seven out of the 10 most vulnerable countries to climate change are located on the continent even though Africa contributes less than 4 percent of world greenhouse gas emissions (GHG). However, Africa needs between 7-15 billion dollars every year to adapt to the impacts of climate change, according to the AfDB. Pictured here is a wind energy generation plant located in Loiyangalani in northwestern Kenya. The plant is set to be the biggest in Africa, generating 300 MW. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

By James Reinl
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 27 2019 (IPS)

African Development Bank (AfDB) President Akinwumi Adesina unveiled millions of dollars of new pledges at the United Nations this week amid growing fears of climate change ravaging the continent and derailing anti-poverty targets.

At a gathering of world leaders in New York, Adesina disclosed commitments on tackling global warming, a massive solar energy project in the Sahel, and an insurance scheme that poor countries can access when the next cyclone strikes. 

“Africa has been shortchanged by climate change, but it should not be shortchanged by climate finance,” Adesina told reporters at a press conference at the start of the U.N. General Assembly. 

The AfDB would double its climate financing to emerging economies to 25 billion dollars from 2020-2025, half of which would help governments adapt to droughts, rising tides and other impacts of climate change, said Adesina.

The bank would also help raise 250 million dollars to fund co-payments for insurance premiums so that disaster-prone countries get cashback when extreme weather events wreak chaos on their economies, said Adesina.

“Poor countries didn’t cause climate change, they shouldn’t be holding the short end of the stick,” said Adesina.

Another 20 million dollars would fund the Sahel’s new ‘Desert to Power’ solar scheme, for generating 10,000 MW of clean electricity for some 250 million people, including 90 million rural folks who live far from a power grid, said Adesina.

“This will make the Sahel the Baobab of energy,” said Adesina, referencing the hardy African tree. 

Such funding is welcome, but may not be enough. Africa needs between 7-15 billion dollars every year to adapt to the impacts of climate change, said Adesina. 

More broadly, the continent needs between 130–170 billion dollars of investment in power plants, internet cables and other infrastructure each year, leaving a funding gap of some 68-108 billion dollars, according to AfDB data.

Benedict Okey Oramah, President of Afreximbank, a trade finance body, said African economies had to work harder to train workers and expand their markets to lure investors to the continent.

“Countries which are fragmented are small markets, they cannot be of interest to people who want to put money to grow in a massive way,” Oramah told a meeting of African leaders at the U.N. on Wednesday. 

“We have to build again the technical schools that we used to have, we have to build universities of science and technology so that we can have the right skills to take up the kinds of jobs that are beginning to emerge.”

Talks came amid concerns from teen Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, U.N. chief Antonio Guterres and many others that the world was not on track for slashing emissions of heat-trapping gases.

Guterres, secretary-general of the world body, warned that while countries were making progress towards the U.N.’s so-called Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), more efforts were needed.

“Let us be clear — we are far from where we need to be. We are off track,” said Guterres. “Deadly conflicts, the climate crisis, gender-based violence, and persistent inequalities are undermining efforts to achieve the goals.”

The 17 SDGs were agreed by the U.N.’s 193 member states in 2015 in an effort to curb war, climate change, famine, land degradation, gender-based inequality, and other global ills by 2030.

Progress is being made in access to energy, to decent work, and in battling poverty and child mortality, but youth unemployment has plateaued and global hunger and gender inequality continue to rise, the U.N. says.

In an impassioned address to a U.N. climate summit on Monday, youth activist Thunberg raged at world leaders in a crowd that briefly included United States President Donald Trump and his entourage.

“You have stolen my dreams, my childhood, with your empty words,” said Thunberg, 16. “We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about are your fairy tales of money and eternal economic growth.”

Protestors rallied outside a library building in Manhattan on Wednesday, carrying placards about Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen and referencing the “bone saw” that was reportedly used to dismember Jamal Khashoggi, a prominent critic of Saudi prince Mohammad bin Salman. Credit: James Reinl/IPS

By James Reinl
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 19 2019 (IPS)

A New York library appeared to bow to pressure this week when it canceled an event that was being co-hosted by Saudi Arabia’s crown prince Mohammad bin Salman, who is accused of a range of human rights abuses.

On Wednesday, the New York Public Library (NYPL) said it was scrapping the so-called Misk-OSGEY Youth Forum, a workshop on Sept. 23 that was being co-hosted by bin Salman’s Misk Foundation and U.N. youth envoy Jayathma Wickramanayake. 

The event had been blasted by Human Rights Watch (HRW) and other campaign groups, who said it served to whitewash bin Salman’s reputation after the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in October last year — reportedly on the crown prince’s orders. 

Evan Chesler, chairman of the NYPL board, said that dropping the workshop was the “appropriate thing to do” after weeks of protests and an online petition that had garnered more than 7,000 signatures.

In a statement, the library said it had cancelled the “space rental” amid “concerns about possible disruption to library operations as well as the safety of our patrons” amid “public concern around the event and one of its sponsors”. 

It remains unclear whether the Misk Foundation will seek an alternative venue for the workshop at short notice. A U.N. spokesman told IPS it was “up to Misk to provide information on whether the event will take place elsewhere or not”.

Saudi Arabia’s mission to the U.N. and the Misk Foundation declined to comment on the controversy.

Protestors rallied outside a library building in Manhattan on Wednesday, carrying placards about Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen and referencing the “bone saw” that was reportedly used to dismember Khashoggi, a prominent critic of bin Salman. 

“This week’s protests show that the public will not keep quiet while the leadership of the NYPL, a treasured repository of civilisation, hires our library out to the butcherer of Khashoggi,” Matthew Zadrozny, president of the Committee to Save the New York Public Library, told IPS.

“The NYPL leadership must explain to the public it serves who signed the deal with bin Salman’s foundation and why.”

Kenneth Roth, director of HRW, blasted the “repression-whitewashing event” on Twitter and asked U.N. secretary-general Antonio Guterres to scrap the partnership between his youth envoy, Wickramanayake, and the crown prince’s charity. 

Now that the New York Public Library has withdrawn as a venue for the Saudi crown prince’s repression-whitewashing event https://t.co/JvGG6cyLd2 will UN chief @AntonioGuterres withdraw his youth envoy’s sponsorship before a replacement venue is found? https://t.co/ZA1Ctd8iIO

— Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) 19 September 2019

Suzanne Nossel, CEO of rights group PEN America, said the library had made the “right choice”, addiing bin Salman’s government had “orchestrated the murder and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi”.

“Hosting this event just days before the anniversary of Jamal’s killing would have been particularly appalling not just for his family, friends, and colleagues, but also for those currently being persecuted in the kingdom.”

Nossel also noted that the library “is the crown jewel of the literary community in New York” and it stands for “free exchange of ideas and free expression, qualities that the crown prince has repeatedly disdained in both words and actions”.

The NYPL event was set to see some 300 budding young entrepreneurs learn about green themes, corporate responsibility and other parts of the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) agenda.

Khashoggi, a U.S.-based journalist who frequently criticised the Saudi government, was killed and dismembered on Oct. 2 last year after visiting the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, where he collecting documents for his wedding.

The CIA assessed that bin Salman had ordered Khashoggi’s killing. U.N. expert Agnes Callamard has described the death as a “premeditated execution,” and called for bin Salman and other high-ranking Saudis to be investigated.

Officials in Riyadh, who initially said Khashoggi had left the premises unharmed, now say the journalist was killed by a rogue hit squad that did not involve bin Salman. Activists have since pushed for accountability over the killing.

Jamal Kahshoggi, a US-based journalist who frequently criticised the Saudi government, was killed while visiting the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, where he was collecting papers for his wedding. Courtesy: POMED/CC by 2.0

By James Reinl
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 18 2019 (IPS)

The United Nations faces growing public opposition to an event it is co-hosting with a Saudi Arabian charity only days before the anniversary of the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

On Tuesday, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), a watchdog, joined the campaign to scrap the Sept. 23 Misk-OSGEY Youth Forum — a tie-up between the U.N. and Saudi crown prince Mohammad bin Salman’s Misk Foundation.

Meanwhile, some 5,000 people have signed a petition against the event, which campaigners say whitewashes the image of bin Salman, who reportedly ordered the murder of Khashoggi inside the country’s consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, on Oct. 2 last year.

“On the anniversary, I expected a message from the U.N. to elevate the case and to seek more punitive measures against Saudi Arabia and those who participated in the killing of Khashoggi,” the CPJ’s Middle East coordinator Sherif Mansour told IPS. 

“Perhaps people at the U.N. had not heard or seen the outrage that has circulated around the world since Khashoggi’s death. It’s offensive and insulting to have such a conference around the time when people are remembering his brutal murder.”

The forum is part of a scheme between the U.N.’s youth envoy Jayathma Wickramanayake and bin Salman’s foundation and is aimed at inspiring ethical business practices.

The event will take place at the New York Public Library and see some 300 budding entrepreneurs learn about green themes, corporate responsibility and other parts of the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) agenda.

Sunjeev Bery, director of Freedom Forward, which launched the petition, said bin Salman should be blackballed over Khashoggi’s killing, Saudi-led military operations in Yemen’s civil war and other human rights abuses. 

“The trustees of the New York Public Library should not allow a brutal Saudi dictator to use their space for a propaganda event. Thousands of people are now demanding that this bogus Saudi event be canceled,” Bery told IPS.

“Many Saudi citizens are imprisoned or executed for saying the very things that are written in thousands of New York Public Library books. How can the NYPL trustees possibly justify allowing a  Saudi dictator to use their space?”

The U.N. youth envoy’s office, Saudi Arabia’s mission to the U.N. and the Misk Foundation declined to comment on the controversy. U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said the forum was part of a “work plan” between the youth envoy and bin Salman’s foundation.

“We’ve seen the petition and I think its good that people express themselves and I think the [youth envoy’s] office is always ready to engage with civil society groups in order to answer what questions or concerns they have,” said Dujarric.

“The forum is designed to bring together young leaders, creators, and thinkers to think about ways of engaging and encouraging youth to transform the world.”

Two speakers — Ann Rosenberg, a technology executive, and Bart Houlahan, a business consultant — have already pulled out of the event, which has also been criticised by Human Rights Watch, Civicus, and other groups.

I’m not going to help the Saudi crown prince whitewash his abysmal human rights record by attending his big event on Sept 23 at the New York Public Library during the opening of the UN General Assembly. RT if you agree. https://t.co/TLUruJMI7P pic.twitter.com/9yhrl6Dibc

— Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) 11 September 2019

The remaining speakers include Alexandra Cousteau, a conservationist and granddaughter of French adventurer Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Paul Polman, the former CEO of consumer goods firm Unilever, and Andrew Corbett, an academic at Babson College.

Khashoggi, a United States-based journalist who frequently bashed the Saudi government, was killed and dismembered after visiting the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, where he was collecting papers for his planned wedding.

The CIA concluded that bin Salman ordered Khashoggi’s murder. U.N. expert Agnes Callamard has described the killing as a “deliberate, premeditated execution,” and called for bin Salman and other Saudi officials to be probed.

Saudi officials, who initially said Khashoggi had left the consulate unharmed, now say the writer was killed in a rogue scheme that did not involve bin Salman. Rights groups have pushed for accountability in the journalist’s killing.

United Nations experts warned this week that world leaders attending this month’s United Nations General Assembly should listen harder to scientists if they want to tackle climate change and meet global anti-poverty targets. Pictured here is the 2017 damaged caused by Hurricane Irma on the British Virgin Islands. Credit: Kenton X. Chance/IPS

By James Reinl
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 13 2019 (IPS)

World leaders attending this month’s United Nations General Assembly should listen harder to scientists if they want to tackle climate change and meet global anti-poverty targets, U.N. experts warned this week. 

Shantanu Mukherjee, from the U.N.’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs, said the presidents, prime ministers and princes coming to discuss development and global warming in New York must boost their efforts to avert global calamity.

Politicians must start “recognising the impact of science and policy and strengthening it among the people who are here so that it becomes a reliable basis for decision-making,” Mukherjee said in answer to a question from IPS.

“If there is a commitment among the leaders who come here, even some of them that they will take this seriously and use it to inform their policy, which we will support with scientific evidence, that would be great.”

Environmentalists have expressed fears of wavering commitments among leaders to limiting climate change, pointing to such skeptics as United States President Donald Trump and his Brazilian counterpart Jair Bolsonaro.

Mukherjee spoke with reporters in New York on Wednesday while releasing a report, called The Future is Now: Science for Achieving Sustainable Development, which warns of deepening inequalities and irreversible damage to ecosystems.  

The document says that mankind can still achieve the U.N.’s so-called Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) towards ending poverty and other targets, but not without boosting efforts to reduce waste, pollution and inequality.

Between 2017 and 2060, the annual global consumption of material goods is expected to climb from 89 Gigatons to 167 Gigatons, leading to more greenhouse gas emissions, mining and other resource extraction, researchers said.

Meanwhile, the global population is expected to reach 8.5 billion people by 2030, meaning more mouths to feed and greater demand on power stations, most of which still pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. 

Endah Murniningtyas, a former Indonesian minister who helped write the report, said producing enough food while keeping the global rise in temperatures below a benchmark figure of 2 degrees Celsius could prove impossible.

“This is not inevitable. We have the knowledge and the means already to change and ensure that all our wellness [is maintained] even as we scale back the adverse impacts,” of climate change,” Murniningtyas told reporters.

“Focus on the policy must be enabling equitable global access for food and maximising the nutritional value of produce while at the same time minimising the climate and environmental impact of production.”

The 250-page report was drafted by an independent group of 15 scientists. The document will be at the centre of high-level talks on the SDGs on Sept 24-25, when Trump, Bolsonaro and others are expected in New York.

Peter Messerli, director of the Centre for Development and Environment at the Bern University in Switzerland, said leaders must start changing how we design cities, harness energy and feed growing populations.

“All these systems are currently we can say to a certain degree dysfunctional, but they hold the promise that if we address those trade-offs, that way, they will really leverage transformation,” Messerli told reporters.

But the politicians attending a U.N. climate summit on Sept 23. and other high-level talks in New York will be swamped with other hot issues, said Messerli, with wars in Syria and Yemen high up the global agenda.

“We will not change the world. But we need to change their minds in this direction. Because if we change the minds, I think we can change the world,” Messerli, a co-author of the report, said in answer to a question from IPS. 

Bolsonaro and Trump are the first two leaders listed to speak at the start of the U.N.’s general debate on Sept. 24, followed shortly afterward by Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and others.

Swedish teen climate change activist Greta Thunberg last month sailed across the Atlantic Ocean aboard a carbon-neutral racing yacht bearing the slogan “unite behind the science” to attend the summit and put pressure on leaders.

This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 250 news outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate story. 

In Eritrea, many of the journalists who were jailed in the 2001 media crackdown remain behind bars, the Committee to Protect Journalists says. Courtesy: UN Photo

By James Reinl
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 10 2019 (IPS)

Eritrea has the world’s highest levels of censorship and the most active government in jailing reporters and stifling newspapers, radio and television, a study by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) watchdog says.

The authoritarian Horn of Africa nation, which shuttered all independent media in 2001 and currently has some 16 journalists behind bars, is followed by North Korea and Turkmenistan as the world’s worst places to work as a reporter, the CPJ says.

“The internet was supposed to make censorship obsolete, but that hasn’t happened,” the group’s executive director Joel Simon said in a statement upon releasing the annual report Tuesday.

“Many of the world’s most censored countries are highly wired, with active online communities. These governments combine old-style brutality with new technology, often purchased from Western companies, to stifle dissent and control the media.”

The top 10 watchlist of countries that “flout international freedom of expression norms and guarantees” also includes Saudi Arabia, China, Vietnam, Iran, Equatorial Guinea, Belarus, and the Caribbean island of Cuba. 

In Eritrea, many of the journalists who were jailed in the 2001 media crackdown remain behind bars, the CPJ says. The government controls most broadcast outlets; internet connections are hard to find, and foreign radio signals are jammed.

Eritrean law says reporters must promote “national objectives”. Journalists at the country’s state-run media outlets “toe the government’s editorial line for fear of retaliation”, the CPJ said in a nine-page report.

Eritrea’s mission to the United Nations did not answer an interview request from IPS.

In North Korea, the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) runs nearly all the country’s newspapers and broadcasters and sticks to reporting on the latest comments and activities of the reclusive nation’s leader Kim Jong Un.

KCNA has typically been “highly restrictive in its coverage of foreign news”, but that changed in recent months, allowing for reporting on talks between Kim and United States President Donald Trump over Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program.

Free media also remains largely absent in Turkmenistan, where President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov “enjoys absolute control” over newspapers and broadcasters and wields this power to “promote his cult of personality”, the CPS says.

“A handful of independent Turkmenistan-focused media outlets, such as Khronika Turkmenistana, operate in exile, and anyone who attempts to access the website can be questioned by the authorities,” the report says.

The group also names Saudi Arabia as an offender, spotlighting the murder and dismemberment of Saudi journalist and government critic Jamal Khashoggi in the country’s consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, in October 2018.

The oil-rich kingdom has witnessed a “sharp deterioration” in media freedoms during the ascendancy of the country’s crown prince and de facto ruler Mohammed bin Salman, with new anti-terror and cybercrime laws helping to silence journalists, the CPJ says. 

The CPJ report was released only days after the hardline religious militant Taliban group kidnapped six local journalists in Afghanistan last week, as they were travelling to a media workshop in Paktika province. 

CPJ researchers noted that journalists struggled with war and instability in such countries as Afghanistan, Syria and Somalia, but said that these issues were “not necessarily attributable solely to government censorship”.

The CPJ media freedom ranking is similar to the list compiled by Reporters Without Borders, another watchdog, which also shames Eritrea, North Korea and Turkmenistan as the world’s worst three countries for independent journalism.

Forest fires, droughts and other forms of land degradation cost the global economy as much as 15 trillion dollars every year and are deepening the climate change crisis. Pictured is a drone visual of an area in Upper East Region, Ghana prior to restoration taken in 2015. Credit: Albert Oppong-Ansah /IPS

By James Reinl
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 7 2019 (IPS)

Forest fires, droughts and other forms of land degradation cost the global economy as much as 15 trillion dollars every year and are deepening the climate change crisis, a top United Nations environment official said Friday.

Ibrahim Thiaw, executive secretary of the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), said the degradation of land was shaving 10-17 percent off the world economy, which the World Bank calculates at 85.8 trillion dollars.

“In very simple terms, the message is to say: invest in land restoration as a way of improving livelihoods, in reducing vulnerabilities contributing to climate change, and reducing risks for the economy,” Thiaw said in response to a question from IPS.

Thiaw spoke to reporters in New York through a video-link from New Delhi, India, where delegates from UNCCD signatories are gathering for talks on tackling the desertification threat, which runs until Sept. 13.

Droughts and desertification currently hit 70 countries each year, while sand and dust storms are becoming a growing menace around the world, leading to asthma, bronchitis and other health problems, Thiaw warned.

“The good news is that the technology, the science and the knowledge is there to actually reduce land degradation and fix this phenomenon once and for all,” said Thiaw, formerly a Mauritanian official and deputy chief of the U.N. Environment Programme.

“Land restoration is being done in many parts of the world and by restoring land we are able to mitigate climate change.”

Some 100 government ministers and 8,000 delegates from 196 countries are at the UNCCD talks, which will cover drought, land tenure, restoring ecosystems, climate change, health, sand and dust storms and funding to revamp cities.

Thiaw praised a record-breaking turnout of decision-makers in the Indian capital that “could mark a major turning point for how we manage the scarce land and water resources we have left.”

Attendees include Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, his counterpart from Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Ralph Gonsalves, and the world body’s deputy secretary-general Amina Mohammed.

An outcome document, known as the “Delhi Declaration”, will inform this month’s climate summit in New York and spur a “coalition of like-minded countries” to make firmer pledges on tackling droughts, said Thiaw.

“We are fast running out of time to build our resilience to climate change, avoid the loss of biological diversity and valuable ecosystems and achieve all other Sustainable Development Goals,” said Thiaw, referencing the U.N.’s SDG agenda. 

“But we can turn around the lives of the over 3.2 billion people all over the world that are negatively impacted by desertification and drought, if there is political will. And we can revitalise ecosystems that are collapsing from a long history of land transformation and, in too many cases, unsustainable land management.”

Droughts are getting worse, says the UNCCD. By 2025, some 1.8 billion people will experience serious water shortages, and two-thirds of the world’s population will be living in “water-stressed” conditions.

Though droughts are complex and develop slowly, they cause more deaths than other types of disasters, the UNCCD warns. By 2045, droughts will have forced as many as 135 million people from their homes.

Last month, a report from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) showed that better management of land can help limit the release of greenhouse gases and thus combat global warming.

Tackling desertification and other forms of land degradation could help keep the global rise in temperatures below the benchmark figure of 2 degrees Celsius, IPCC scientists said in the 43-page study. 

Jamal Kahshoggi, a US-based journalist who frequently criticised the Saudi government, was killed while visiting the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, where he was collecting papers for his wedding. Courtesy: POMED/CC by 2.0

By James Reinl
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 4 2019 (IPS)

The United Nations is under growing pressure to scrap an event it is co-hosting with the private foundation of Saudi Arabia’s crown prince Mohammad bin Salman, who has been linked to the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

On Tuesday, Sunjeev Bery, director of Freedom Forward, became the latest leader of a campaign group to press the U.N. to cancel the Sept. 23 event, saying it would help repair bin Salman’s reputation over the Khashoggi murder. 

The event, known as the Misk-OSGEY Youth Forum, is a partnership between the U.N.’s youth envoy, Jayathma Wickramanayake, and the Misk Foundation, a culture and education foundation chaired by bin Salman, who is better known as MBS.

“No one — especially not the U.N. — should be partnering with MBS or his personal Misk Foundation,” Bery told IPS.

“Saudi Arabia’s brutal crown prince is responsible for the deaths of thousands of Yemeni children. His thugs imprisoned leading women’s rights activists and murdered Jamal Khashoggi.”

Kenneth Roth, the director of Human Rights Watch, a campaign group, last week accused the world body of helping to “whitewash” MBS’s record; Mandeep Tiwana, from Civicus, a rights group, called the event “disturbing”.

Why is the UN helping the Saudi crown prince whitewash his record by co-hosting a conference with a foundation he leads just a year after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi? https://t.co/r65LWZWN0J pic.twitter.com/7C8LoV4MTb

— Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) 31 August 2019

The U.N. youth envoy’s office declined to comment on the row. U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said the world body had repeatedly issued “very strong statements … calling for accountability” in Khashoggi’s killing.

The Misk-OSGEY Youth Forum will take place in New York only 10 days before the first anniversary of Khashoggi’s murder on Oct. 2 last year, when Saudi government agents killed and dismembered the journalist inside the country’s consulate in Istanbul.

The CIA later determined that MBS had personally ordered the hit. Saudi officials, who initially said Khashoggi had left the consulate alive, now say the journalist was killed in a rogue operation that did not involve MBS.

Saudi Arabia’s mission to the U.N. did not answer requests for comment from IPS.

The four-hour workshop for 300 young people at the New York Public Library will occur on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly and promote green themes, corporate responsibility and other aspects of the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) agenda.

It will feature Alexandra Cousteau, an environmentalist and granddaughter of French explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau; and Bart Houlahan, an entrepreneur who promotes sustainable business practices.

Other speakers include Andrew Corbett, an expert on entrepreneurship at Babson College, Paul Polman, former CEO of consumer goods firm Unilever, and Ann Rosenberg, an author and U.N. technology expert.

Dr. Reem Bint Mansour Al-Saud, a Saudi princess and an envoy to U.N. headquarters in New York, who advocates for empowering women and development in the Gulf kingdom, will also speak at the workshop.

Khashoggi, a United States-based journalist who frequently criticised the Saudi government, was killed while visiting the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, where he was collecting papers for his wedding.

U.N. expert Agnes Callamard issued a report in June that described the assassination as a “deliberate, premeditated execution,” and called for MBS and other Saudi officials to be probed.

The Misk-OSGEY Youth Forum comes after years of tensions between the U.N. and Riyadh over the war in Yemen, where Saudi Arabia is leading a military coalition against the country’s Houthi rebels. 

The conflict has killed tens of thousands of people and caused led to a major humanitarian crisis. 

“The crown prince and his violent government must be held accountable for their human rights crimes,” said Bery, who advocates for the U.S. to cut ties with Saudi Arabia and other authoritarian regimes.

“Instead, misguided U.N. staff are absurdly giving the crown prince a public relations platform as he attempts to wipe away the blood of so many dead Yemeni children.”

UNAMID peacekeepers in Dafur could be scaled back from November if the situation on the ground improves. This picture of peacekeepers is dated 2012. Courtesy: Albert González Farran/UNAMID

By James Reinl
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 27 2019 (IPS)

Sudan’s transition to civilian rule offers a chance to end the ethnic violence that plagues the western province of Darfur and end a peacekeeping mission there, a top United Nations official said Monday.

Jean-Pierre Lacroix, the U.N. under-secretary-general for peace operations, told the U.N. Security Council that the peacekeeping force in Darfur, known as UNAMID, could be scaled back from November if the situation on the ground improves. 

A complex civilian-military transitional government is set to rule Sudan for a little over three years until elections can be held, following a mass protest movement that forced the ouster of longtime authoritarian President Omar al-Bashir in April.

“This is an opportunity to put a definitive end to the conflict in Darfur,” said Lacroix.

“Donor support will be critical more than ever to assist the simultaneous transitions in Darfur and wider Sudan, particularly considering the economic crisis that triggered the political change.”

In June, council members agreed to “pause” the drawdown of UNAMID’s 5,600-strong blue helmet force, which was deployed to Darfur in 2007 amid fighting between rebels and Sudanese government forces.

The new government in Khartoum has pledged to revive peace efforts in Darfur and other hinterlands, though it remains unclear whether the new sovereign council’s civilian or military members will wield more influence.

The political shift in Khartoum has not changed the situation in Darfur, where anti-government rebels clash with the Sudanese armed forces and a paramilitary group called the Rapid Support Forces, Lacroix said via video link. 

Sudan’s ambassador to the U.N., Omer Mohamed Ahmed Siddig, urged council members to lift an arms embargo on Darfur and to start withdrawing peacekeepers by an agreed deadline of June 2020.

“Realisation of peace is my government’s priority during the coming six months,” Siddig said in New York.

“We call on the international community to join my government in inducing the revolutionaries who fought for toppling the previous regime to join hands with us to uplift the plight of our people who suffered the consequences of war.” 

Darfur is not Sudan’s only flashpoint. On Sunday, the sovereign council formally declared a state of emergency in the Red Sea city of Port Sudan, following clashes between tribesmen there that police say have killed at least 16 people.

Addressing the council, British diplomat Jonathan Allen spoke of “hope and optimism” at the “beginning of a new chapter in Sudan’s history” that could tackle the bitter ethnic splits in a nation of some 40 million people.

“The new government has committed to achieve a fair, comprehensive and sustainable peace in Sudan and prioritise the peace process,” Allen said.

“We call on all sides but in particular the armed movements to engage constructively, immediately and without preconditions in negotiations to finally deliver a peaceful solution to the conflict in Darfur.”

The military overthrew Bashir on Apr. 11 after months of mass demonstrations, but protesters continued taking to the streets — fearing the military could cling to power — and demanded a swift transition to a civilian government.

A power-sharing deal between protest leaders and Sudan’s Transitional Military Council (TMC) was signed earlier this month, ending months of political chaos.

But tensions between the military and civilians are expected to feature prominently in new Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok’s unruly transitional government.

Beyond politics, Sudan has been wracked by flooding across 17 of its 18 states that has claimed the lives of at least 62 people, the government says. Thousands of people have been displaced by the floods, which are worse in areas along the river Nile.

By James Reinl
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 23 2019 (IPS)

Two years after the start of an exodus of Rohingya civilians from genocide-like attacks in Myanmar, members of the mainly Muslim minority have little hope of securing justice, rights or returning to their homes, according to the United Nations and aid groups.

Reports this week from the U.N. and Oxfam, a charity, show that, on the second anniversary of the ethnic violence in Rakhine state, hundreds of thousands of Rohingya remain refugees in neighbouring Bangladesh or are effectively interred in domestic, government-run camps.

“Rohingya people feel as though they are in limbo with no end in sight. They are alive, but merely surviving,” said Elizabeth Hallinan, an Oxfam advocate on Rohingya issues, in a statement marking the beginning of the exodus on Aug. 25, 2017.

More than 730,000 Rohingya civilians fled Myanmar’s Rakhine state into Bangladesh amid a military-led crackdown in August 2017 that the U.N. and Western governments say included mass killings and gang-rapes.

Oxfam says some 500,000 Rohingya remain in Myanmar, including almost 130,000 confined in government-run camps and where red tape often leaves them unable to send children to school or to visit a doctor.

This week, Bangladesh and the U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR) announced plans to assess whether some 3,450 Rohingya refugees will accept Myanmar’s offer to return home, nearly a year after another major repatriation scheme failed.

Many refugees refuse to go back, fearing more violence, Radhika Coomaraswamy, an expert from the U.N. Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, told reporters Thursday, as persecution continues to threaten them in the South Asian nation.   

Coomaraswamy described satellite images of what had been Rohingya villages in Rakhine state, where the government’s slash-and-burn approach had seen settlements “bulldozed” until there was “not a tree standing”.

Sending Rohingya refugees back to Myanmar would expose them to “near-apartheid laws”, and a government that must give approval for marriages between Buddhist women and men of other faiths, including Muslims.

“What are we sending them into, unless there’s some kind of promises being made for a pathway to citizenship that will give them rights?” Coomaraswamy asked in a press briefing in New York 

“It’s not only the issue of safety, physically, but also the fact that they should not have to live like people are living in” the displacement camps in Sittwe and elsewhere in Rakhine state, she added.

In Coomaraswamy’s report, the panel of independent investigators, set up by the U.N. Human Rights Council in 2017, said the sexual violence committed by Myanmar troops against Rohingya women and girls in 2017 showed a genocidal intent to destroy the group.

“Hundreds of Rohingya women and girls were raped, with 80 percent of the rapes corroborated by the mission being gang rapes. The Tatmadaw (military) was responsible for 82 percent of these gang rapes,” the 61-page document said.

Myanmar’s government has denied entry to the U.N. investigators, who instead visited refugee camps in Bangladesh, Malaysia and Thailand, and spoke with humanitarians, academics and researchers.

Myanmar’s mission to the U.N. did not answer requests for comment from IPS. Myanmar denies widespread wrongdoing and says the military campaign across hundreds of villages in northern Rakhine was in response to attacks by Rohingya militants.

Coomaraswamy called on world leaders and CEO’s to cut business ties with the Tatmadaw’s businesses, and said there was a small window of hope for prosecutions under a U.N. investigation mechanism in Geneva.  

The panel has gathered new evidence about alleged perpetrators and added their names to a confidential list to be given to U.N. human rights boss Michelle Bachelet and another U.N. inquiry that is readying cases for possible future trials.

A United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) school in Gaza. Top management at UNRWA are being probed for alleged abuses of power. Credit: Khaled Alashqar/IPS

By James Reinl
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 20 2019 (IPS)

A senior United Nations official has promised a thorough investigation into allegations of misconduct in field operations in Yemen and the occupied Palestinian territories, saying that those responsible would be punished.

Ursula Mueller, the U.N.’s assistant secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, decried the “devastating” impact of U.N. staffers lining their own pockets with cash that was donated for the world’s neediest people.

The world body’s reputation in the Middle East has been dented by a series of allegations that some of its officials in Palestine and Yemen are guilty of graft, sexual misconduct and other wrongdoing.

“We need to really look at the people who are committing these very devastating activities for the humanitarian response,” Mueller said in response to a question from IPS on Monday.

“When we are made aware of these irregularities or corruption or fraud, we follow up and I think there [are] mechanisms and rules in place to do so. And also these people need to face consequences. That it’s not brushed aside and can go unpunished.”

According to documents, top management at the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), including its commissioner general Pierre Krahenbuhl, are being probed for alleged abuses of power.

The confidential report by the U.N.’s internal watchdog describes an “inner circle” of Krahenbuhl and top aides engaging “in sexual misconduct, nepotism, retaliation, discrimination and other” wrongdoing.

Krahenbuhl struck up a relationship with senior adviser Maria Mohammedi in 2014 that was “beyond the professional” and arranged for her to fly alongside him on costly business class flights, it is claimed.

Krahenbuhl has rejected the report’s claims and said UNRWA is well managed.

Meanwhile, the U.N. is battling separate graft claims in Yemen, where it is tasked with tackling the world’s worst humanitarian crisis after five years of war has pushed millions of civilians to the brink of famine.

More than a dozen staffers have reportedly worked with fighters on all sides to pocket cash from the aid cash swishing around Yemen; some gave high-salary jobs to unqualified people, according to an Associated Press report.
A World Health Organization probe began in November, amid allegations of dodgy accounting by Nevio Zagaria, 20, an Italian doctor, who reportedly handed out well-paying jobs to friends, including a student who was tasked with looking after his dog.

The graft claims — and their damaging fallout — showcase how the U.N. can struggle to keep track of funding dollars and its own workers, who often operate autonomously in rapidly-changing crisis zones.

The scandal in UNRWA, which provides services to some 5 million Palestinian refugees, is particularly damaging, as it comes as the United States Trump administration has called for the agency to be shuttered.

Already, Belgium, Switzerland and the Netherlands have cut funding to UNRWA.

“The United Nations has a zero tolerance for corruption,” Mueller, also the U.N.’s deputy emergency relief coordinator and a former German civil servant and diplomat, told reporters in New York.

“We depend on voluntary contributions from member states from individuals to contribute to humanitarian response … any taint of corruption or fraud is disastrous. So we have fraud prevention mechanisms in place and when we hear about irregularities, we make every effort to follow up and correct it.”

UNRWA was set up in the years after some 700,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled their lands during the 1948 war over Israel’s creation. It provides medical and schooling services to millions of poor refugees in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and the Palestinian territories.

In Yemen, a Western-backed coalition of Saudi Arabia, the UAE and others intervened in March 2015 against the Iran-backed Houthi rebel movement that ousted President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi from power in late 2014.

The Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS) said two medical workers were killed in an attack Wednesday at an ambulance centre in Ma’aret Hurmeh, a town in Idlib province. Courtesy: Syrian American Medical Society

By James Reinl
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 16 2019 (IPS)

Medical aid groups have again blasted Russian and Syrian government forces this week for an ever-growing death toll among doctors, paramedics and other health workers in military strikes in northwestern Syria.

The Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS) said two medical workers were killed in an attack Wednesday at an ambulance centre in Ma’aret Hurmeh, a town in Idlib province, which has been gripped by fighting in recent weeks.

Paramedic Mohamad Hussni Mishnen, 29, and ambulance driver Fadi Alomar, 34, died in a series of six airstrikes that levelled the facility, SAMS said. A rescuer also perished in a “double tap” hit on the centre as he tried to pull Mishnen and Alomar from the rubble.

Several aid groups and the United Nations have warned of repeated strikes on Idlib’s hospitals as Syrian government forces, backed by Russian airpower, retake the last rebel bastion in the country’s eight-year civil war. 

Mufaddal Hamadeh, president of SAMS, said in a statement he was “saddened and disturbed by this terrible incident”. He paid tribute to the medics and said those responsible for such “blatant crimes” should be held accountable.

Another group, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), has received reports of 46 attacks on  health centres since Syrian government and Russian forces launched an offensive on Idlib on April 29. The group has verified 16 of them.

“PHR’s rigorous research since the conflict began reveals that Syrian government and/or Russian government forces have committed approximately 91 percent of the attacks on health facilities in Syria,” said the group’s policy director Susannah Sirkin.

“The fact that these courageous professionals in Idlib were killed while merely doing their jobs should compel the U.N. and all parties to act now to stop the relentless bombing of civilians.”

Last month, after two-thirds of U.N. Security Council diplomats issued a protest note, U.N. secretary-general António Guterres launched an inquiry into attacks on civilian infrastructure including hospitals, clinics and schools.

The so-called Board of Inquiry will probe whether GPS coordinates of hospitals and clinics that the U.N. provides to Russia, the U.S. and Turkey to ensure the hospitals’ protection were used instead to target them.

Guterres “must conduct a rapid, public, and transparent investigation into attacks on health in the face of the deconfliction agreements”, while Security Council members “must ensure that those responsible for these unthinkable crimes are held accountable,” added Sirkin.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government and Moscow, whose airpower has been critical to Damascus’ military gains in recent years, say they are fighting terrorists and deny targeting civilians, schools or hospitals, which can constitute war crimes.

Replying to a question from IPS, Dmitry Polyanskiy, Russia’s envoy to the U.N., said he was “disappointed” by the U.N.’s decision to launch the probe but did not commit to cooperating with investigators.

“If we were sure that this board will really try to establish the truth, then I can’t exclude this,” Polyanskiy told reporters.

“But there are a lot of doubts about this. These countries that were pushing for the establishment of this board … are not seeking to find the truth about what’s happened, they seek another tool to pressure Russia, to pressure Syria, and to just distort the actions that we take there.”

Syria’s U.N. ambassador Bashar Ja’afari has said that northwest Syria’s healthcare centres were used by “terrorist groups” rather than doctors.

According to the U.N., more than 450 people have been killed in the Idlib offensive and hundreds of thousands more displaced by fighting. Idlib’s population is about three million, most of whom have fled from other parts of war-torn Syria.

Idlib and nearby parts of the northwest were covered by a “de-escalation” deal to staunch the conflict that was struck in September by Russia and Turkey, which backs some rebel groups in the area. 

But the deal was never fully implemented after fighters refused to withdraw from a planned buffer zone. Fighting has ratcheted up again in recent weeks, sending waves of refugees spilling from conflict hotspots.

President Assad is seeking to claw back control of Syria after peaceful protests in 2011 spiralled into a brutal civil war that saw him lose much of the country to armed religious extremists and other rebels.

More than 400,000 people have died across Syria since 2011, according to World Bank figures, and almost 12 million others have been forced to flee from their homes because of the fighting, both within Syria and abroad.

The first Geneva Convention protects wounded and sick soldiers on land during war. Courtesy: International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)

By James Reinl
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 14 2019 (IPS)

World governments are not doing enough to stop armed groups from committing mass rape, torture and other war crimes, the head of the Red Cross aid group head Peter Maurer said on Tuesday.

Maurer, President of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), said that 70 years after their adoption, the Geneva Conventions were being breached and urged world powers to clamp down on those who commit atrocities.

As he spoke, fighting raged in Syria, Libya, Yemen, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and other hotspots in which United Nations investigators have warned of widespread civilian casualties and other likely war crimes.

“It is clear by the obvious terrible suffering in today’s conflicts that [the Geneva Conventions] are not universally respected,” Maurer told the U.N. Security Council via video link at an event to mark their 70th anniversary.

“Too often, ICRC sees the impact on people when international humanitarian law is violated — indiscriminate killing, torture, rape, cities destroyed, psychological trauma inflicted.”

The four Geneva Conventions are international treaties that deal with the treatment of injured soldiers in the field and at sea, the treatment of medics and prisoners of war and how to protect civilians.

They were adopted on Aug. 12, 1949, after lengthy deliberations.

For Maurer, they are increasingly tested by modern-day conflict, in which big powers frequently partner with local groups, fighting is concentrated in towns and cities and drones and other hi-tech military gear are deployed.

“There is no doubt that the modern battlefield is a complex arena; urbanised warfare, an increasing number of armed groups, partnered warfare are posing new and difficult dilemmas,” Maurer said.

“Rapidly developing technologies are creating new front lines in cyberspace, as well as new ways to fight, for example, autonomous weapon systems and remote technologies.”

U.N. diplomats pointed to Syria, where President Bashar al-Assad’s forces, backed by Russian airpower, are accused of torture, bombing civilians and using poison gas as they claw back rebel-held territory in the country’s eight-year civil war.

In Yemen, both the Iran-backed Houthi rebels and the Saudi Arabia-led coalition seeking to restore a U.N.-supported government have reportedly attacked civilians, schools and hospitals and recruited child soldiers in the protracted conflict.

Elsewhere, investigators have probed violations of international humanitarian law in Libya, the occupied Palestinian territories and in several African hotspots, including DRC, South Sudan and the Central African Republic.

Governments should sign up to humanitarian law treaties, pass domestic legislation, train more war crimes sleuths and raise the ethical standards of soldiers, said Maurer, a former Swiss ambassador.

Polish Foreign Minister Jacek Czaputowicz said military field commanders needed to know that pulling the trigger on an ethnic cleansing campaign could well see them end up in the dock of The Hague. 

Czaputowicz, a pro-democracy activist during Soviet times, said the rules of war were “not sufficiently observed” in such conflict zones as Libya, South Sudan, and the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.

The “Syria regime definitely used chemical weapons and should be held accountable,” Czaputowicz said in answer to a question from IPS.

The original Geneva Convention, which covered the “amelioration of the condition of the wounded in armies in the field”, was adopted in 1864 in after a proposal by Henry Dunant, who founded the ICRC.

In the years leading up to the second world war, the ICRC drafted extra treaties to expand protections for civilians who got caught up in combat, but governments did not commit to the new rules. 

The horrors of the second world war galvanised momentum and governments agreed to revise and update the conventions in 1949, adding a fourth to protect civilians and property in wartime. Two extra protocols were added in 1977.

The conventions are largely universal, having been ratified by 196 countries, including all members of the world body and observers like Palestine, the most recent authority to sign up to the treaties in 2014.

Drone visual of the area in Upper East Region, Ghana prior to restoration of the land that was taken in 2015. Years later the community restored the land by planting trees. A new United Nations report has described farming, land degradation and desertification as critical frontlines in the battle to keep the global rise in temperatures below the benchmark figure of 2 degrees Celsius. Credit: Albert Oppong-Ansah /IPS

By James Reinl
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 9 2019 (IPS)

A new United Nations report has described farming, land degradation and desertification as critical frontlines in the battle to keep the global rise in temperatures below the benchmark figure of 2 degrees Celsius.

The 43-page study from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released this week says better management of land can help combat global warming and limit the release of greenhouse gases.

“Climate change poses a major risk to the world’s food supply, and while better land management can help to combat global warming, reducing greenhouse gas emissions from all sectors is essential,” U.N. spokesman Stefan Dujarric told reporters Thursday.

The report offered “compelling evidence” for redoubling global efforts and shows that while “food security is already at risk from climate change, there are many nature-based solutions that can be taken,” added Dujarric.

Among the IPCC’s recommendations were calls for vigorous action to halt soil damage and desertification and for people globally to throw less food into trash cans, whether in private homes or out the back of supermarkets and factories.

Instead, scrap food can be used to feed farm animals, in some cases. Alternatively, food waste can be donated to charities so that homeless people and others in need get much-needed meals.

Controversially, the IPCC also noted that more people could be fed using less land if individuals cut down on eating meat and switched up their diets by consuming more “plant-based foods”.

“Some dietary choices require more land and water, and cause more emissions of heat-trapping gases than others,” said Debra Roberts, co-chair of an IPCC working group.

“Balanced diets featuring plant-based foods, such as coarse grains, legumes, fruits and vegetables, and animal-sourced food produced sustainably in low greenhouse gas emission systems, present major opportunities for adaptation to and limiting climate change.”

The report was co-authored by 107 scientists and was finalised this week at talks in Geneva, Switzerland.

It is called “Climate Change and Land, an IPCC special report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems”.

The report’s findings would be key at the Conference of Parties of the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) in New Delhi, India, in September and at other confabs over the coming months, said Dujarric.

Some 500 million people live in areas facing desertification, IPCC scientists said. These regions are more vulnerable to climate change and such extreme weather events as droughts, heatwaves, and dust storms. 

Once land is degraded, it becomes less productive and unsuitable for some crops. It also becomes less effective at absorbing carbon, which drives a vicious cycle of rising temperatures degrading soils even more.

“Land plays an important role in the climate system,” Jim Skea, co-chair of an IPCC working group, said in a statement accompanying the document.

“Agriculture, forestry and other types of land use account for 23 percent of human greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time natural land processes absorb carbon dioxide equivalent to almost a third of carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels and industry.”

Under the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement, governments pledged to limit the rise in average global temperatures to “well below” 2°C above pre-industrial times, and ideally to 1.5°C. The world has already heated up by about 1°C.

Droughts and heatwaves are getting worse, according to the UNCCD. By 2025, some 1.8 billion people will experience serious water shortages, and two thirds of the world will be “water-stressed”.

Though droughts are complex and develop slowly, they cause more deaths than other types of disasters, the UNCCD warns. By 2045, droughts will have forced as many as 135 million people from their homes.

But there is hope. By managing water sources, forests, livestock and farming, soil erosion can be reduced and degraded land can be revived, a process that can also help tackle climate change.

“The choices we make about sustainable land management can help reduce and in some cases reverse these adverse impacts,” said Kiyoto Tanabe, co-chair of an IPCC task force on greenhouse gasses.

“In a future with more intensive rainfall the risk of soil erosion on croplands increases, and sustainable land management is a way to protect communities from the detrimental impacts of this soil erosion and landslides.”

This week, the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) and the Iranian Red Crescent Society (IRCS) complained that U.S. President Donald Trump’s so-called “maximum pressure” campaign on Iran is also stopping key assistance to flood victims and refugees there. Courtesy: Iranian Red Crescent Society

By James Reinl
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 6 2019 (IPS)

Two major humanitarian groups have warned that United States sanctions on Iran are stopping cash flows for vital humanitarian work in the country, adding another complication to the growing rift between Washington and Tehran.

This week, the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) and the Iranian Red Crescent Society (IRCS) complained that U.S. President Donald Trump’s so-called “maximum pressure” campaign on Iran is also stopping key assistance to flood victims and refugees there.

Jan Egeland, secretary-general of the NRC and a former United Nations official, warned that support to some 82,000 people in Iran could be cut off by mid-August because his group cannot get funds in to the Islamic Republic.

“We have now, for a full year, tried to find banks that are able and willing to transfer money from Western donors to support our work for Afghan refugees and disaster victims in Iran, but we are hitting brick walls on every side,” said Egeland.

“The sanctions imposed by the U.S. on Iran are so comprehensive that banks are unwilling to facilitate transfers for humanitarian work. If all bank channels are blocked, then so is the delivery of critical aid to vulnerable people.”

Meanwhile, the Geneva-based International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) has collected funds from a global flood appeal that it cannot transfer to its local outfit, the IRCS.

“Due to the U.S. sanctions, IRCS has not been able to receive three million euro cash contributions that the Red Cross Red Crescent Societies, governments and organisations have donated to Iran’s flood-hit people through the IFRC emergency appeal,” it said in a statement Sunday.

Last year, Trump pulled the U.S. out of a nuclear deal with Iran and key world powers that had been agreed in 2015, and then ramped up sanctions to pressure Tehran and to lock it out of the global economy.

Trump said the landmark accord negotiated by his predecessor did not go far enough in preventing Iran from building nuclear weapons or do anything to halt its support for foreign militias and ballistic missile development.

White House officials say the sanctions are aimed at Iran’s energy sector and regime hardliners, and do not apply to essential items like food, medicine and humanitarian relief, even while these may have been indirectly affected.

The United Kingdom, Germany and France have taken steps to resist Washington, including setting up a barter-based trade scheme called the Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges (Instex) to allow business between Iran and Europe that is beyond the U.S. financial system.

However, reports indicate that fears over U.S. sanctions have caused western financiers to shy away from Instex and just a trickle of money has flowed in from European firms, leaving Iran scrabbling for revenue. 

According to Egeland, Europe’s bankers are just too scared to move money to Iran despite carve-outs to the sanctions regime.  

“Norwegian, European and other banks are too afraid of U.S. sanctions to transfer the money that European governments have given for our vital aid work,” Egeland said in a statement that was released Monday.

“We will run out of cash in two weeks and will no longer be able to provide relief to poor Afghan families,” he added, referencing the more than three million Afghans who fled conflict, poverty and natural disasters at home to neighbouring Iran. 

The potential shutdown of aid operations in Iran is just the latest spill-over from an escalation of tensions between Washington and Tehran, amid widespread fears that it could spiral into a military showdown.

At the peak of the crisis, Trump called off air strikes against Iran at the last minute in June after the Islamic republic’s forces shot down a U.S. military surveillance drone in the Gulf with a surface-to-air missile.

Trump has said publicly several times that he is willing to hold talks with the Iranians even as he bashes the cleric-run government as incompetent, graft-ridden, dangerous and a threat to Israel, regional security and U.S. interests.

One month after the attack on Tajoura, Libya which killed 53 detainees and injured more than 87 others, little has been done to help the incarcerated migrants in the turbulent country. Many sub-Saharan Africans migrants go to Libya hoping to make it to Europe and a better life. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

By James Reinl
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 1 2019 (IPS)

It is almost one month since an airstrike on a detention centre in Libya killed and injured scores of migrants and refugees locked up inside, many of whom were detained for doing nothing worse than fleeing instability or seeking better lives in Europe.

This week, it looked like world powers were finally making an effort to persuade Libya’s United Nations-backed Government of National Accord (GNA) to come good on its promise to free the thousands of refugees in lockups under its control.

At a U.N. Security Council meeting on Monday, diplomats were “concerned by the situation of refugees and migrants” in Libya, and were poised to take action, last month’s council president and Peruvian envoy Gustavo Meza-Cuadra told reporters afterwards.

Earlier, diplomats heard from the U.N.’s envoy to Libya, Ghassan Salame, who said the Jul. 2 bloodbath at the facility in Tajoura, a suburb of Libya’s capital, Tripoli, should prompt officials to close such centres once and for all.

“What is required is that they be shuttered,” Salame said via a video link from Tripoli.

“I urge the council now to call upon the authorities in Tripoli to take the long-delayed but much-needed strategic decision to free those who are detained in these centres.”

One month after the attack on Tajoura, which killed 53 detainees and injured more than 87 others — mostly sub-Saharan Africans who were seeking better lives in Europe — little has been done to help the incarcerated migrants in the turbulent country.

Despite GNA pledges to close Tajoura, officials instead filled the bombed-out hangar on a military base with some 200 new migrants and refugees since the late-night air strike that caused chaos and carnage in eastern Tripoli.

To make matters worse, new detainees include migrants who were picked up by Libya’s coast guard after their vessel capsized in the Mediterranean on Jul. 26 — a catastrophe that saw as many as 150 passengers drown.

Some 5,000 refugees and migrants are detained in facilities under the control of or linked to the GNA, Salame said. Some 3,800 of these were on the front lines of fighting in the North African country’s civil war.

The Lebanese diplomat also criticised the European Union (EU) for funding a scheme that sees Libya’s coast guard intercept migrant boats at sea before returning them to Libya and detaining them in places like Tajoura. 

Likewise, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch (HRW) and other campaign groups have criticised the 28-nation bloc for bemoaning Libya’s ill-treatment of migrants while at the same time backing schemes that lead to abuse.

Amnesty has decried the “utterly inhumane” conditions inside Libya’s migrant lockups, where detainees have “little access to food, water or medical care” and endure “brutal treatment, torture, rape – and even being sold”.

John Dalhuisen, a regional expert with the European Stability Initiative, a think-tank, said the EU was complicit in abuses by making it harder for refugees and migrants to exit Libya and cross the Mediterranean.

“The EU has backed a policy that essentially amounts to containment. It has invested and trained the Libyan coast guard and reduced its own rescue services in a very successful effort to stop migrants reaching Europe,” Dalhuisen told IPS.

“It made some effort to improve conditions in Libyan detention facilities and secure access to them for international agencies, but with very modest results.”

An EU spokesperson told IPS that it backs Libya’s coast guard in an effort to stop refugees and migrants from perishing at sea, but that the 28-nation bloc was strongly against locking them up back on Libyan soil.

U.N. bodies, including the refugee agency UNHCR and the International Organisation for Migration, have assisted detained migrants and even arranged for some to be released and sent back to their countries of origin.

Some have been assessed and gained refuge in Europe; others have been settled elsewhere, such as Niger. But these schemes have only affected a tiny proportion of the estimated half-million refugees and migrants in Libya.    

Judith Sunderland, an associate director for HRW, said “space is limited” in UNHCR resettlement schemes and there are logjams, with few “longer-term solutions” for settling refugees after temporary stops in Niger.

“The UNHCR’s programme to evacuate asylum seekers and refugees from Libya is severely handicapped by the low number of resettlement pledges by European countries and the slow pace of actual resettlement of the few that are processed,” Sunderland told IPS.

The situation is complicated by turbulence across Libya, which has seen little but violence since the 2011 uprising that killed president Muammar Gaddafi and saw the nation collapse into a civil war that continues today.

The airstrike that devastated Tajoura occurred after renegade military commander Khalifa Haftar and his self-styled Libyan National Army (LNA) launched an offensive in early April to seize control of Tripoli. The GNA blames the LNA for the deaths, which the LNA denies.

Elinor Raikes, a regional director for the International Rescue Committee, an aid group that operates in Libya, said that locking up migrants was not a problem only in North Africa, but part of a global anti-immigrant phenomenon.

“Arbitrary detention is not a just response to seeking safety, but countries across the world, including in Europe and the United States, are taking part in what is a deeply concerning trend,” Raikes told IPS.

“Detention has become a form of border management, and this has meant that thousands of people are intercepted at sea and on land and then detained in inadequate living conditions, often in overcrowded cells at risk of disease and infection.”

United Nations are warning of another drought in the Horn of Africa. Eight years ago famine left more than 260,000 dead. Pictured here is a child from drought-stricken southern Somalia who survived the long journey to an aid camp in the Somali capital Mogadishu during the 2011 famine. Credit: Abdurrahman Warsameh/IPS

By James Reinl
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 25 2019 (IPS)

Humanitarian groups and the United Nations are warning of another drought in the Horn of Africa, threatening a repeat of the deadly dry spell and famine that claimed lives in Somalia and its neighbours eight years ago.

The British charity Oxfam said Thursday that more than 15 million people across drought-stricken parts of Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia now needed handouts and warned of a hefty death toll unless donors stumped up cash fast.

“We cannot wait until images of malnourished people and dead animals fill our television screens. We need to act now to avert disaster,” said Lydia Zigomo, Oxfam’s regional director for the Horn of Africa.

According to an Oxfam report, donors were quick to dig into the pockets for a drought in 2017, helping to stave off a famine that could have been as deadly as the 2011 dry spell that left more than 260,000 dead, and many more hungry and sick.

But while the humanitarian response was well-funded back in 2017, donor governments have not raised enough cash yet this time around, added Zigomo, a human rights lawyer from Zimbabwe.

“We learned from the collective failures of the 2011 famine that we must respond swiftly and decisively to save lives. But the international commitment to ensure that it never happens again is turning to complacency,” said Zigomo.

“Once again, it is the poorest and most vulnerable who are bearing the brunt.”

The U.N. refugee agency UNHCR has also sounded the alarm. Somalia’s recent April-June and October-December rainy seasons were drier than expected, worsening an arid spell that was already hitting farmers and herders across the turbulent country. 

Some 5.4 million Somalis were expected to be facing food shortages by September, and 2.2 million of them would need “immediate emergency assistance” UNHCR spokesperson Babar Baloch warned last month.

Donors had only handed over one fifth of the 711 million dollars that was requested in an appeal in May, added Baloch.

“The latest drought comes just as the country was starting to recover from a drought in 2016 to 2017 that led to the displacement inside Somalia of over a million people,” Baloch told reporters in Geneva.

“Many remain in a protracted state of displacement.” 

Last month, the European Union launched a 3.2 million euro scheme to manage water sources and agriculture and lessen the impact of drought, in cooperation with officials in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, and the northern breakaway region of Somaliland.

“Water and land are critical resources for the Somali economy and people’s livelihoods but are also extremely vulnerable to natural disasters and climate change,” said EU diplomat Hjordis D’Agostino Ogendo.

“While access to water needs to increase, needed infrastructures are to be designed and managed in a sustainable way.”

Somalia has seen little but drought, famine and conflict since dictator Siad Barre was toppled in 1991. The country’s weak, U.N.-backed government struggles to assert control over poor, rural areas under the Islamist militant group al Shabaab.

Droughts are getting worse globally, according to the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). By 2025, some 1.8 billion people will experience serious water shortages, and two thirds of the world will be “water-stressed”.

Though droughts are complex and develop slowly, they cause more deaths than cyclones, earthquakes and other types of natural disaster, the UNCCD warns. By 2045, droughts will have forced as many as 135 million people from their homes.

“With climate change amplifying the frequency and intensity of sudden disasters … and contributing to more gradual environmental phenomena, such as drought and rising sea levels, it is expected to drive even more displacement in the future,” added Baloch.

But U.N. experts say there is hope. By managing water sources, forests, livestock and farming, soil erosion can be reduced and degraded land can be revived, a process that could also help tackle climate change.

BANGLADESH: Dose of Vigilance Helps Manage HIV, AIDS DHAKA, Nov 3, 2010 (IPS) - It is one of the poorest countries in the world, has a low literacy rate, and is next door to at least two countries that have a considerable portion of their respective populations with HIV and AIDS. Yet even having a large migrant population has not made Bangladesh a hot spot for HIV and AIDS. http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=53443

By James Reinl
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 24 2019 (IPS)

The global fight against Aids is floundering amid cash shortfalls and spikes in new HIV infections among marginalised groups in developing regions, Gunilla Carlsson, executive director of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), said Tuesday.

Speaking with reporters in New York, Carlsson, head of U.N.-led efforts against the pandemic, warned that gains over recent years were under threat, particularly in parts of eastern Europe, central Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

“We are at a precarious point in the response to HIV. Some countries are making impressive gains, while others are experiencing rises in new HIV infections and even Aids-related deaths,” Carlsson said at U.N. headquarters.

“Annual gains are getting smaller and the pace of progress is slowing down.”

More than half of all new HIV infections in 2018 were among drug users, sex workers, men who have sex with men, transgender people, prisoners and the sexual partners of these groups, said Carlsson.

Many of those at-risk groups do not get the treatment they need, she added.

A UNAIDS report released Jul. 16 noted “worrying increases” in these new infections in eastern Europe and central Asia, where HIV cases rose by 29 percent, as well as in the Middle East, North Africa and Latin America.

Global funding for the fight against Aids dropped off markedly in 2018 — by nearly one billion dollars— as international pledges dried up and domestic investments did not grow fast enough to fill the gap.

Only around 19 billion dollars was available for the Aids response in 2018 — some 7.2 billion dollars short of the total 26.2 billion needed by 2020, said Carlsson, describing a “deeply concerning” development.

“Ending Aids will not be possible unless we are investing adequately and smartly, focussing on people first, not diseases, and creating roadmaps for people who are left behind,” said Carlsson.

Some 770,000 people died of Aids globally in 2018 and almost 38 million people were living with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes it. The disease is transmitted via infected blood and other bodily fluids.

HIV cannot be cured but the infection can be kept in check by Aids drugs known as antiretrovirals. Around 23.3 million of the 37.9 million people with HIV globally currently get the Aids drugs they need.

Around 1.7 million people were newly infected in 2018, a 16 percent decline since 2010, driven mostly by steady gains in parts of eastern and southern Africa, according to the latest UNAIDS report.

South Africa, for example, has cut new HIV infections by more than 40 percent and Aids-related deaths by around the same proportion since 2010. But the report warns that the disease is still rife in other parts of eastern and southern Africa.

Earlier this month, the aid group Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) warned that efforts to fight Aids were “stagnating” and that many of the disease-related deaths could be prevented if better care was available.

Dr. Gilles Van Cutsem, head of MSF’s team on HIV and Aids, said that many HIV sufferers turned up at clinics in Congo, Guinea, Malawi and elsewhere with advanced symptoms of a condition that their immune system was unable to fight.

“People arrive very ill, often with severe opportunistic infections such as tuberculosis, cryptococcal meningitis, or Kaposi’s sarcoma,” Van Cutsem said in a statement.

“When they arrive, sometimes it’s too late to save them. They might not have been diagnosed on time or they failed to get access to lifesaving treatment.”