Elephants in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS

By Ramy Srour
WASHINGTON, Feb 10 2014 (IPS)

A group of international organisations fighting illicit wildlife trafficking has unveiled a new website aimed at assisting whistleblowers who want to aid in the fight against wildlife crimes.

WildLeaks, the first platform of its kind, is an online portal where its creators say whistleblowers can safely and anonymously reveal information on wildlife crimes. Globally, this illegal trade is thought to be worth over 17 billion dollars a year, some of which is thought to be helping finance terrorism, particularly in Africa.“We encourage whistleblowers to use the completely anonymous process, especially if they live in oppressive regimes." -- Andrea Crosta

Officially launched on Feb. 6, WildLeaks is funded by the U.S.-based Elephant Action League (EAL) and run by a group of former law enforcement officers, journalists and environmental NGOs across five continents.

“The goal of WildLeaks is to facilitate the arrest and the prosecution of traffickers, corrupt government individuals, and anyone behind wildlife and forest crime,” Andrea Crosta, EAL’s co-founder and the central figure behind the WildLeaks initiative, told IPS.

Any individual who witnesses a wildlife crime or possesses any type of related information – documents, files, images or videos – can use the website to transmit that information to WildLeaks, using either of two routes of varying strength encryption.

The completely anonymous encryption route makes use of ‘Tor’ technology – more commonly known as the ‘Dark Net’ – and does not disclose the sender’s IP address or any other information.

“We encourage whistleblowers to use the completely anonymous process,” Crosta said, “especially if they live in oppressive regimes where communication is not free and where local governments themselves may actually be engaging in wildlife crime.”

The name of the new initiative is meant to resemble that of WikiLeaks, the group that has drawn much public attention over the last few years by disclosing secret U.S. government documents. But the WildLeaks initiative is designed to be substantially different from its namesake.

“First of all, we’re not after government or military documents,” Crosta said. “And second, while WikiLeaks tends to share everything with the media right away, for us that’s only the last option.”

Once WildLeaks receives any leaked information, the individuals and organisations behind the project will first assess its accuracy and reliability. Thereafter, WildLeaks will try to forward the findings to law enforcement agencies such as Interpol or to trusted government authorities.

However, if governments will not cooperate, the last option would be a leak to the media.

“It’s important to underscore that our goal is to work side by side with law enforcement agencies across the globe,” Crosta said. “We want to create a bridge between the public and law enforcement.”

Initial response to the new project has been positive.

“We strongly encourage anyone with information about wildlife crimes to report them to the appropriate law enforcement agency,” a spokesperson with the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), the country’s largest animal protection organisation, told IPS when asked about the WildLeaks initiative.

Global momentum

The launch of WildLeaks comes only days before a major international anti-wildlife crime conference kicks off in London, on Feb. 11. Hosted by the British government, the conference will bring together key actors in the global wildlife community to craft a global response to the illicit killing and trading of wildlife and forests.

The movement against wildlife crimes has gathered a lot of momentum in recent months. Last week, the French government publicly crushed three tonnes of illegal ivory, the first European country to publicly destroy illegal ivory.

Last month, the Chinese government also publicly destroyed a large quantity of illegal ivory, and the U.S. government took a similar action last November.

Activists have generally welcomed the new global momentum.

Peter Knights, the executive director of WildAid, an advocacy group here, welcomed the Chinese government’s public crush.

“Every great journey starts with one small step. This is a very important first step from China and it should be encouraged,” Knights told IPS in an interview.

Today, the profits from illegal wildlife trafficking are widely believed to be larger than the trafficking of small arms, gold, diamonds and oil. The illegal trade of tiger skins and ivory tusks has led to the estimated death of over 50,000 elephants a year and to an estimated population of fewer than 3,500 wild tigers across Asia, the Environmental Investigation Agency reports.

Last month, the Washington-based Stimson Centre released a report in which it showed evidence of the strong links between wildlife poaching and the financing of international terrorism.

“There is very strong evidence today that groups in the Central African Republic, in Somalia, and in the DRC are heavily involved in poaching,” Varun Vira, an analyst with C4ADS, a security firm here, told reporters at the launch of the report last month.

Activists and analysts alike believe that one of the largest terrorist organisations on the African continent, Al Shabaab, funds much of its activity through the illegal trade of ivory.

The Obama administration, too, has taken some steps toward fighting illegal trafficking in wildlife products. In July 2013, the U.S. president signed the Executive Order on Combating Wildlife Trafficking, committing to assist “those governments in anti-wildlife trafficking activities when requested by foreign nations experiencing trafficking of protected wildlife.”

Obama has tasked several U.S. government agencies and departments with the enforcement of the new directive, including the Departments of Defence, Treasury, Homeland Security and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

The United States’ main foreign aid funder, USAID, released a mission statement Wednesday that includes new focus on ending extreme poverty while also promising to be more inclusive in incorporating civil society and other input in its decision-making.

“We partner to end extreme poverty and promote resilient, democratic societies while advancing our security and prosperity,” the agency’s new mission statement now reads, putting a greater emphasis on the link between extreme poverty and strong and democratic states.“Any process in which USAID opens its door to different perspectives is an important step and is one that should be applauded." -- Akshaya Kumar

A USAID spokesperson told IPS that the new mission statement “is about how we do what we do and it’s the core of who we are and what we have always done over [the past] 50 years.”

Civil society actors reacted to the new vision with cautious optimism.

“[USAID’s] stated commitment to engage with civil society and others in order to shape their thinking is very important,” Nora O’Connell, associate director of public policy and advocacy at Save the Children, an advocacy group here, told IPS.

Yet she also noted that it will be important for Western donors, while including different stakeholders, to also include local actors in the development effort.

“No donor or outside actor can go in and develop people. The country has to do it itself, and that is why governments in those states should also play a leadership role,” O’Connell said. “These can be from civil society or the private sector,” she said, as long as they are fully included in the development and reconstruction process.

The release of the new statement comes a day after top USAID officials and civil society leaders made a public commitment to fight extreme poverty in conflict zones as part of the post-2015 global development agenda, the successor to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

Alex Thier, USAID’s assistant to the administrator, told a panel discussion here on Tuesday that the agency will undergo a major process of inclusion over the next year. This will see USAID increasingly welcoming input from civil society, think tanks and affected stakeholders in its efforts to implement the post-2015 global development agenda.

“We are truly on the precipice of a great moment: One year ago, President Obama called on us to stand together to achieve what I believe may be one of the most extraordinary goals that the United States or frankly any country has ever set out for itself, which is to eradicate extreme poverty from the planet,” Thier said.

“We at USAID are … rising to answer this call [and] as we focus on ending extreme poverty, we have to seek better ways to engage in fragile states where conflict, corruption and recurrent crises impede inclusive growth.”

USAID says it will need to “scale existing partnerships and develop new ones to draw in fresh perspectives and innovative thinking”. This expansion is part of a new effort that Thier said is “meant to provoke thought” by bringing in new perspectives and views.

The new perspectives are likely to come from universities, research institutes and non-governmental organisations, Thier said.

“We’re not just stating policy,” he noted.

Security focus

USAID’s efforts are part of broader global momentum to make the fight against extreme poverty in conflict zones a top priority. Last year, the Washington-based World Bank unveiled a new institutional vision that will likewise focus on ending extreme poverty.

In 2011, a grouping of conflict-affected countries known as the g7+ unveiled a new initiative, called the New Deal Compact, aimed at providing developing states with more of a say in the fight against poverty. With countries such as Afghanistan, the Central African Republic (CAR), the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Haiti, Liberia, Somalia and others as members, the New Deal Compact aims to ensure that development aid focuses on peace and security ahead of other goals.

Also, in 2012, a United Nations report emphasised that eradicating extreme poverty would be a “crucial” aspect of any new post-MDG strategy, especially in conflict-affected areas.

According to USAID statistics, there are currently 1.2 billion people living in extreme poverty, 70 percent of whom live in fragile states. USAID’s Thier says that by 2020 extreme poverty will be increasingly concentrated in fragile or failed states.

Some activists say that such an approach should constitute an important part of USAID’s new approach in countries experiencing conflict.

“Any process in which USAID opens its door to different perspectives is an important step and is one that should be applauded,” Akshaya Kumar, the Sudan and South Sudan analyst at Enough Project, an advocacy group here, told IPS. “But it’s also important to first diagnose the inter-linkages between different conflicts across different regions.”

Very often, Kumar said, conflicts are driven by economic factors – for instance, mining or trade. Once such linkages are detected, addressing root causes of conflict can become easier.

“If you look at the Horn of Africa, for instance, you can see that [warring factions] try to take advantage of goldmines in northern Darfur, or oil routes in South Sudan, undermining the ability of the local population to benefit from economic opportunities,” she said. “They then use that money to fuel war.”

Real efforts aimed at conflict resolution are perhaps the best strategy to begin thinking about how to fight poverty in conflict areas, she said, and the new political commitment by the U.S. government and USAID are positive signs.

“The next step is to show that these commitments will be put in practice. One important factor will be whether U.S. government bodies such as the State Department will actually facilitate these negotiations.”

Neither the police nor the paramilitary forces have been unable to control targeted killings of aid workers in Karachi. Credit: Adil Siddiqi/IPS

By Ramy Srour
WASHINGTON, Jan 23 2014 (IPS)

With the 2014 deadline for a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in sight, analysts here are urging Washington policymakers to drop the term ‘Af-Pak’ and recognise the importance of Pakistan beyond its implications for Afghanistan.

U.S.-Pakistan relations have for too long focused on the Afghan security question, according to a new report from the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a Washington think tank. Such a focus, CFR researchers warn, neglects the high strategic importance Islamabad has for the United States in the region.“Pakistan’s internal security is not something the U.S. can confront directly.” -- Daniel S. Markey

“U.S. policy in Pakistan has consistently been linked to Afghanistan and has fallen under the broader heading of Af-Pak – a label that has never been very popular in Pakistan and one that has also been seen as degrading,” Daniel S. Markey, a senior fellow at the CFR and author of the new report, told IPS.

“But as the U.S. is drawing down in Afghanistan and in many ways signalling a reduced commitment there, [it] ought to rethink its Pakistan strategy.”

A revised approach to Pakistan would also advance U.S. interests in Asia, Markey’s analysis suggests, particularly in light of President Barack Obama’s efforts to refocus U.S. policy on Asia.

Any new approach would need to have two main strategies, the report suggests. First, Washington will have to seriously engage with the security threats that it currently faces in Pakistan, including threats from terrorist organisations but also from Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and its delicate relationship with India.

The second and perhaps more groundbreaking strategy would see the United States pushing Pakistan into closer economic integration with regional economic powers, particularly India and China.

The first strategy, however, comes with its limits.

“Pakistan’s internal security is not something the U.S. can confront directly,” Markey said. “It’s Pakistan’s problem, and one that will require Pakistan’s political leadership directly.”

At the same time, the author notes that Washington can provide some assistance, such as equipment and training. This is a strategy Washington has used in the past, including in its assistance to Islamabad while fighting the Taliban.

Growing mistrust

Besides being difficult in practice, the limited role the United States can play inside Pakistan is also a consequence of the deep mistrust Pakistanis harbour towards Washington.

One of the recommendations highlighted by the report emphasises how U.S. assistance to Islamabad should be conditioned on a show of Pakistan’s true commitment to fighting terrorism.

“U.S. military aid to Pakistan should not be linked primarily to the Afghanistan war,” the report argues. “It should instead be conditioned on Pakistan’s effort to address internal security threats… and on Pakistan’s overall commitment to countering violent extremism on its soil.”

Indeed, the problem of mistrust may be one of the biggest hurdles the U.S. will have to overcome in order to achieve its long-term interests in the region.

“One of the reasons the U.S. doesn’t have much leverage inside Pakistan is that there’s a lot of mistrust and hostility between the two sides, particularly when it comes to the security establishment,” Michael Kugelman, senior programme associate for South Asia at the Wilson Centre, a think tank here, told IPS.

This mistrust, Kugelman notes, is the result of divergent views between Washington and Islamabad when it comes to defining a threat and how to respond to one.

According to analysts, the United States sees all militant groups as potential threats, urging for tough action regardless of the groups’ targets. But for the Pakistani leadership, the differences matter.

“Pakistanis tend to see some militant groups as more dangerous than others, especially those that target the government,” Kugelman said.

“The U.S. will need to lower its expectations and stop setting these very high goals of getting the Pakistani government to crackdown on all militants. That’s just not going to happen.”

Regional economics

Markey’s report also calls for the United States to look at Pakistan from an economic perspective, particularly in light of its relationship with India and China.

“U.S. diplomats and trade officials should negotiate a preferential U.S. trade access deal for India, Afghanistan and Pakistan, conditioned on reduced barriers to intraregional trade,” the report notes.

However, this does not mean that the U.S. should get involved in a mediation of the multiple disagreements that currently exist between India and Pakistan, Markey said.

“Rather, the U.S. should encourage both sides to realise the incentives of more bilateral integration,” he noted. “There is no other way in which Pakistan can find prosperity unless they link it to a more regional perspective.”

According to recent statistics, India-Pakistan trade today is slightly tilted towards India, with New Delhi providing more goods to Islamabad than vice-versa. Much of this is due to Pakistan’s limited home-grown resources when it comes to manufacturing and resource-extraction.

The Washington-based Centre for Global Development (CGD), a think tank, on Wednesday noted that the U.S. government could do more to improve Pakistan’s economy, including by supporting the efforts of the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and Asian Development Bank “to promote … Pakistani reform efforts”.

India and Pakistan have already begun working towards a normalisation of their trade relationship, with Pakistan currently a few steps away from eliminating a list that forbids it from trading certain goods with New Delhi.

Yet Kugelman again cautions against Washington playing too overt a role in its push for trade normalisation.

“Very quietly, subtly and away from the cameras, Washington can push them both to take a final step and ensure that the two can finally establish a MFN relationship,” he said, referring to the ‘most favoured nation’ status that countries assign to each other when they normalise trade in a mutually beneficial agreement.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government continues to evaluate its exit strategy from the 12-year-old Afghan conflict, as well as Washington’s evolving strategic vision in Central Asia following the withdrawal. This strategy, and its impact, is being examined intently in both Washington and Islamabad.

“Both sides are at the very least trying to make their way through the endgame in the war in Afghanistan,” the CFR’s Markey said, noting that Pakistani authorities have begun “to worry about what will happen once the U.S. leaves Afghanistan.”

In a highly anticipated speech on Friday, President Barack Obama introduced a series of reforms that will place new limits and safeguards on U.S. intelligence gathering, including additional protections for foreign nationals overseas. 

President Barack Obama talks on the phone with British Prime Minister David Cameron in the Oval Office, Jan. 16, 2014. Credit: White House Photo by Pete Souza

After weathering months of new disclosures and increasingly strident public criticism about the extent of U.S. spying, Obama on Friday recognised that the country’s National Security Agency (NSA) and other intelligence agencies may have overreached in the aftermath of the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks and the ongoing “war on terror”.

At the same time, Obama also stated that the particularly controversial bulk gathering of Internet and phone records would remain in place.

“We have to make some important decisions about how to protect ourselves and sustain our leadership in the world, while upholding the civil liberties and privacy protections that our ideals and our Constitution require,” Obama said Friday.

The new directive will “strengthen executive branch oversight of [U.S.] intelligence activities … reform programmes and procedures in place to provide greater transparency to our surveillance activities, and fortify the safeguards that protect the privacy of U.S. persons.”

In an unanticipated attempt to quell loud criticism from foreign governments and U.S. allies, Obama also introduced a series of changes aimed at protecting non-U.S. citizens abroad – the first time that a U.S. president has taken such steps.

“People around the world, regardless of their nationality, should know that the United States is not spying on ordinary people who don’t threaten our national security, and that we take their privacy concerns into account in our policies and procedures,” the president said.

“In this directive, I have taken the unprecedented step of extending certain protections that we have for the American people to people overseas [including] safeguards [that] will limit the duration that we can hold personal information, while also restricting the use of this information.”

In particular, the new directive seeks to ensure that “information about persons whose activities are not of foreign intelligence or counterintelligence value” will not be collected, “whatever their nationality and regardless of where they might reside.”

It is still unclear how exactly these protections will be implemented, but for now, the directive states that the United States will collect data only for the purposes of detecting espionage, cyber crime, threats to U.S. or allied armed forces, and threats from terrorism, weapons proliferation and sanctions evasion.

Yet there remains wide disagreement about the soundness of extending constitutional protections to foreign nationals.

“Although I agree that we should be sensitive to foreign nationals, the question is whether they have equal protection under the Constitution,” Brian Michael Jenkins, a senior adviser at the RAND Corporation, a think tank here, told IPS. “And the answer is that they really don’t.”

Others note that although foreign nationals may not be protected under the U.S. Constitution, their privacy still needs to be respected as a broader human rights issue.

“It may be the case that foreigners overseas do not enjoy constitutional protections, but they do enjoy basic human rights,” Elizabeth Goitein, the co-director of the Liberty & National Security Programme at the Brennan Centre for Justice at the New York University School of Law, told IPS. “And privacy is one of them.”

Distance to go

The president’s announcements comes in the midst of a historic public debate that first broke out in June when a former NSA contractor, Edward J. Snowden, publicised documents revealing the intrusiveness of U.S. intelligence gathering. And while many have welcomed Friday’s speech, the new reforms did little to quell all calls for action.

“The president took several steps toward reforming NSA surveillance, but there’s still a long way to go,” Cindy Cohn, the legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital-rights advocacy group, said following the president’s speech. “Other necessary reforms include requiring prior judicial review of national security letters and ensuring the security and encryption of our digital tools, but the president’s speech made no mention of these.”

Others expressed disappointment at the president’s decision to simply reform, but not eliminate, the government’s bulk collection of telephone records, also known as metadata.

“The president should stop bulk collection, approach Congress and support the USA Freedom ACT,” the Brennan Center’s Goitein says, referring to a legislative proposal that, if approved, would substantially rein in the NSA’s activities through an official act of Congress.

The president did note on Friday that he would include Congress in the new overhaul, either by asking legislators to codify the new changes or by ensuring that lawmakers were part of a rigorous oversight mechanism.

However, Goitein warns that Congress should be included only if this will lead to actual reforms, and not as a way to avoid progress.

“The president should go to Congress to tighten the law and to ensure that no other administration will do this in the future,” she says, noting that if the president had really wanted to end bulk collection, he could have done so during Friday’s speech.

Obama also noted that the bulk collection of telephone records would be substituted by an alternative mechanism, although the details of this remain unclear. The president proposed a two-stepped transition that would initially see a more limited surveillance of phone calls, one that would “pursue phone calls that are two steps removed from a number associated with a terrorist organisation, instead of the current three.”

During this initial period, the attorney-general and the rest of the intelligence community will look for an alternative mechanism to replace the NSA’s storage mechanism. It is still unclear whether this will be a single third party conducting the government’s surveillance or a group of private companies and contractors.

Ultimately, Friday’s speech was a notably public look at some of the United States’ most highly classified programmes, highlighting an already startling distance from the days prior to Snowden’s leaks.

“Intelligence collection is always a delicate business in a democracy, and it should be,” the RAND’s Jenkins told IPS. “Public debate and argument is the only way we have of achieving something that will be more or less acceptable to the public and that will provide the protection to our civil liberties.”

A white rhino at a sanctuary in South Africa’s Limpopo Province. In 2011, poachers killed 668 rhinos in South Africa. Credit: Jennifer McKellar/IPS

By Ramy Srour
WASHINGTON, Jan 11 2014 (IPS)

Top diplomats and retired U.S. military officials are urging Western and African governments to step up the global fight against illegal wildlife poaching.

Adding new pressure ahead of a major February summit slated to take place in the United Kingdom on the subject, a growing body of evidence suggests that wildlife poaching is funding criminal and terrorist organisations in several parts of Africa. These groups include Al-Shabaab in Somalia, and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Uganda and South Sudan, who have reportedly turned to the killing of wild rhinoceros, elephants and other protected species to sell their tusks."On one end, you have the poor local tribesman with no job who just needs the money. On the other, you have the organised criminal gangs." -- Andrea Crosta

Such trafficking is associated with a massively lucrative illicit trade.

“Although there’s been a lot of progress [against poaching], we still haven’t been able to stop this crime. We still haven’t achieved momentum,” Gen. Carter Ham, a recently retired U.S. Army general who headed the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) until April of last year, said Friday. “Now is the time.”

Ham suggested that an effective response to poaching in Africa could be to include a strong military component, possibly involving the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), more commonly known as drones.

“The use of drones is not only desirable, but is also likely to be very effective,” Gen. Ham said.

Peter Westmacott, the British ambassador to the United States, seconded the call for a greater security mentality in the fight against wildlife poaching and trafficking.

“The illegal wildlife trade is a tragedy for the natural world, but also for international security,” he said. An important next step, he said, would be the London Conference on Illegal Wildlife Trade, to be hosted by his government next month.

Also this week, the Washington-based Stimson Centre, a think tank, published a comprehensive report on the growing link between poaching and terrorism. That study, the result of research conducted last fall in Kenya, notes that “the spike in poaching and wildlife crime coincides with the increased involvement of sophisticate transnational organized criminals and terrorist organizations.”

“Although we don’t know the full extent of [this] relationship, we know that there is an important link between poaching and … security,” Jonah Bergenas, deputy director of the Managing Across Boundaries Initiative at the Stimson Centre and the report’s author, told IPS.

“We have to treat this issue not just as a conservation challenge but also as a security challenge that will require a holistic approach, one that entails the building of partnerships both within and outside government.”

Western and African governments, Bergenas says, should cooperate with local actors in order to provide a truly comprehensive solution.

Lucrative temptation

According to the report, wildlife poaching funds a 19-billion-dollar industry worldwide, extending from Africa to East Asia and Western countries. Much of this demand continues to be powered by China.

The impact on wildlife has been stark, and has grown significantly in recent years. In 2012 and 2013 alone, nearly 60,000 elephants and over 1,600 rhinos were illegally killed for their tusks.

The driving force behind this practice is clearly the significant money that can still be made from these products. According to expert estimates, a rhino horn is worth 50,000 dollars per pound on the black market, more than the value of gold or platinum.

This, activists say, makes poaching very hard to resist.

“Most people know that this is wrong, but you need to make a distinction between poacher and poacher,” Andrea Crosta, the executive director of Elephant Action League (EAL), a U.S.-based group that fights poaching and illegal trafficking, told IPS.

“On one end, you have the poor local tribesman with no job who just needs the money. On the other, you have the organised criminal gangs, with weapons and money, who are able to bribe rangers and get their information.”

Crosta says a pair of tusks can be worth a few years’ salary in many African countries.

“To someone with no job and a large family to feed, that’s a lot of money,” he says. “They know it’s wrong, but the temptation is just too strong.”

Together with a team of EAL members, Crosta spent much of 2010 to 2012 investigating poaching in East Africa. According to their findings, large quantities of ivory were getting into Somalia in a systematic, organised way.

Later, they discovered this process was being run by Al-Shabaab.

“We were undercover, pretending to be researchers and zoologists, and that way we were able to speak with small and big traders, poachers and middlemen,” Crosta, who is currently based in the Netherlands, told IPS.

His team was able to unveil an undercover trafficking system that saw between one and three tonnes of ivory getting into Somalia, facilitated by Al-Shabaab, every month.

Blood ivory

Diplomats and others are now calling on Western and African governments to pool resources in order to put an end to this illicit market.

“People need to understand that wildlife trade is no different than the well-known blood diamond issue,” Peter Knights, the executive director of WildAid, an advocacy group that seeks to end the illegal wildlife trade worldwide, told IPS.

Knights noted that a public awareness campaign, similar to the one aimed at delegitimising the “blood diamond” phenomenon, could be successful in stopping illegal poaching.

“One of the best ways to do this is to defund [poaching] from the demand side by educating consumers in Asia and other consuming countries, urging them not to buy these products,” he said.

“Consumers need to understand that these products are not from natural mortality and that their purchase is driving this activity, that poachers are being killed and that the proceeds are being used for the financing of illegal activities.”

Indeed, activists say the human aspect of poaching is often overlooked. Thousands of poachers are reportedly killed every year while hunting for elephants and rhinos, often leaving behind families with no income.

Meanwhile, this week the Chinese government for the first time publicly destroyed several tonnes of ivory (the United States took a similar action in November). The step was widely lauded, particularly given China’s outsized influence on the global wildlife trade.

“This was an important public gesture, but it’s definitely not enough,” EAL’s Crosta. “The Chinese government needs to be seriously pressured, including by the U.S., in order to cut down its internal demand.”

The U.S. government announced Monday it has repatriated two Saudi detainees held at the Guantanamo Bay prison, less than two weeks after two Algerian detainees were likewise sent back to their home country.

A female soldier observes the first 20 captives at Guantanamo being processed on Jan. 11, 2002. Credit: public domain

Saad Muhammad Husayn Qahtani and Hamood Abdulla Hamood have reportedly been transferred from the military prison to Saudi Arabia, even as U.S. lawmakers debate legislation that supporters say would ease the Barack Obama administration’s efforts to definitively close the detention centre.

“The U.S. has made real progress in responsibly transferring Guantanamo detainees despite the burdensome legislative restrictions that have impeded our efforts,” Paul Lewis, the Pentagon’s special envoy for Guantanamo’s closure, said Monday.

After the announcement a little over a week ago that two other inmates, the Algerians Belkacem Bensayah and Djamel Ameziane, had likewise been repatriated, there are now 160 detainees left at the base, of which 80 have been cleared for release. Rights groups and experts alike here have welcomed the moves.

“Amnesty International USA welcomes the Obama administration’s renewed commitment to closing the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and urges it to resolve all detentions in a manner fully compatible with human rights principles,” Naureen Shah, advocacy advisor at Amnesty International USA, told IPS.

The debate here has primarily focused on the implications for U.S. national security and the Obama administration’s longstanding promise to close the Guantanamo detention centre.

“I think it’s great news that the Obama administration is taking action for those who have been cleared for transfer,” Jennifer Daskal, an assistant professor of law at American University here and a former counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice, told IPS. “It’s consistent with what he said he was going to do.”

A legislative shift

During his 2008 presidential campaign, Obama famously vowed to close the military prison in order to improve the U.S. reputation abroad, a pledge he renewed earlier this year. That he still has not been able to do so has been attributed partially to his own timidity and partially to strong Congressional opposition.

However, recent weeks have seen an increasing momentum around the issue on Capitol Hill, where the National Defence Authorisation Act (NDAA), a major annual appropriations bill, was approved by a majority in the House of Representatives and is set for a vote this week in the Senate.

If passed, a provision within the NDAA would provide the executive branch with more discretion in granting transfers of detainees from the military prison, possibly facilitating the White House’s commitment to Guantanamo’s closure.

“The NDAA is a sign of a shift in the politics around Guantanamo, providing support for the administration to move the detainees that have been cleared out for transfer,” Daskal says.

But while the NDAA may provide the president with substantial support for the prison’s closure, primarily by barring detainees from being transferred to the United States, some experts warn that Obama will need to spend a lot of political capital to actually succeed.

“During the first two years of his administration, Obama’s party controlled both the House and the Senate, and that was the best time to get this done,” Charles Stimson, a former deputy assistant secretary of defence for detainee affairs under the administration of George W. Bush and currently manager of the National Security Law Programme at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank here, told IPS.

“Now, however, if you look at the vagaries of the election calendar, there are other issues, like [health care] and the economy. So, unless Obama spends real political capital on [the Guantanamo] issue, it may not be politically possible.”

At the same time, Stimson noted that the release of the Saudi and Algerian detainees may hint at a possible strategy the White House could consider if it truly wishes to close the prison by 2016.

“Another way the president could do this is by stepping up these transfers, which is also what [the Bush administration] did, and just keep sending these guys off the island,” he said. “Knowing, however, that some of them will come back to activity – there is no such a thing as a risk-free transfer when it comes to Guantanamo.”

Stimson also admits that Obama was handed a particularly complicated task in trying to close Guantanamo.

“I really think that the Obama administration has been doing a good job in evaluating the high risks posed by the detainees that are left at Guantanamo,” he says. “By the time the current administration came to power, there were only those detainees we had decided not to transfer. And those were the toughest cases.”

Yemen issue

One of the most significant problems faced by the Obama administration is the large percentage of Yemeni citizens currently held at Guantanamo. So far, the Yemeni government has been unable to provide the U.S. with guarantees that it will be able to control its ex-detainees.

Yet some warn that policymakers shouldn’t overstate the obstacle posed by the Yemeni government.

“There have actually been some assessments pointing to the possibility of guaranteeing appropriate safeguards” in transferring detainees to Yemen,” American University’s Daskal says, “and the U.S. and Yemeni governments have been discussing the issue.”

Still, she says, repatriating the Yemenis will be a critical part of closing the base, and notes that the Obama administration will ultimately do so only based on the “determination that it’s in the nation’s security interests and that the Yemeni government can in fact provide those assurances.”

The U.S. government is being urged to roll back a longstanding policy that has banned foreign aid funding from being used for health care services for victims of sexual violence in conflict situations.

A group of leading U.S. and African NGOs gathered here Wednesday to launch a global campaign that, if successful, would provide millions of women and girls in crisis and conflict areas around the world with post-rape access to comprehensive health care.

The Centre for Health and Gender Equity (CHANGE), an advocacy group, was joined by the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch in calling on the administration of President Barack Obama to clarify or repeal four-decade-old legislation, known as the Helms Amendment, that forbids U.S. foreign aid recipients from using this funding to perform abortions “as a method of family planning.”

“The 1973 Helms Amendment is a law that says no funds are allowed for abortions overseas as a matter of family planning – full stop,” Serra Sippel, the president of CHANGE, told IPS. “But when we talk about abortion in the case of rape, that’s not family planning, so the law [actually] doesn’t forbid foreign assistance to pay for these cases.”

At the new campaign’s launch, Sippel said nearly 50 women between the ages of 15 and 49 are raped every hour in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), “where rape is used as a war weapon.”

Unwanted pregnancies resulting from rapes in conflict situations have become a particularly visible feature of the ongoing violence in the DRC, where people living in the eastern part of the country remain subject to marauding militias in a war that has claimed nearly three million lives. This situation is exacerbated by the ongoing social stigma surrounding rape across many parts of Africa.

“I will tell you about a 20-year-old girl who was raped and who, since abortion in the DRC is illegal, kept the baby, hiding her pregnancy because rape causes so much shame there,” Justine Masika Bihamba, the founder of the Women’s Synergy for Victims of Sexual Violence (SFVS), a network of 35 women’s rights organisations in the DRC, told IPS.

“But when she gave birth, she went with her mom – who didn’t want her to keep the child – and wrapped the baby in flannel and abandoned it along the road.”

When a hunter passed by and found the baby, he called for help.

“But everyone was afraid,” Bihamba continued, “and no one had the courage to come and cover the child. When they brought it to the hospital, they found out that the child was dehydrated and was about to die.”

The story underscores how difficult it can be for rape survivors to move on with their lives. Often, Bihamba said, women try to hide a post-rape pregnancy because evidence of her assault would brand her as “inferior” to other women, perhaps making it difficult later on to find a husband.

Changing the law

The new campaign, “Break the Barriers”, is now set to step up pressure on the Obama administration to support and allow access to safe abortion services for the millions of women and girls who face sexual violence in areas plagued by conflict. Currently, the confusion surrounding the Helms Amendment makes this difficult.

The problem, advocates suggest, is that the law has been interpreted by U.S. government agencies, including the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), to include post-rape abortions, despite the fact that the text only refers to family-planning purposes.

(USAID was unable to respond to requests for comment by deadline.)

“President Obama doesn’t actually need congressional action to do this,” CHANGE’s Sippel said. “We are simply asking him to clarify, through an executive order, that the law doesn’t bar funding for abortions in cases of life endangerment.”

Yet others say more drastic change is required.

“We think that the Helms law is just bad law,” Liesl Gerntholtz, the executive director of the women’s rights division at Human Rights Watch, told IPS. “It deprives women of critical services and it really doesn’t advance human rights in any way.”

Gerntholtz says the Helms Amendment should be repealed.

Future roadmap

But the U.S. government has also recently taken a series of measures that recognise sexual violence as a frequent characteristic of conflict. In 2011, the Obama administration issued an executive order, the U.S. National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security, which sought to “protect women from sexual and gender-based violence and to ensure equal access to relief and recovery assistance.”

Yet advocates point out that women’s security worldwide remains unacceptably weak. Recent U.N. statistics find that the first half of 2013 saw 705 registered cases of sexual violence in the DRC alone, while the World Health Organisation notes that nearly 50,000 women and girls continue to die from unsafe abortions every year.

The Obama administration also recently embraced U.N. Security Council Resolution 2122, adopted in October, which is set to strengthen women’s participation in “all phases of conflict prevention, resolution and recovery,” in addition to ensuring better access to comprehensive reproductive services.

But, activists say, more needs to be done.

“We would like to see the U.S. develop a roadmap and strategies that will enable [reproductive services] to reach the most vulnerable,” Ruth Ojiambo Ochieng, the executive director of the Uganda-based Isis-WICCE, a women’s rights group, told IPS.

But while the newly launched campaign puts a strong emphasis on what the U.S. government could and should do, there are obstacles to what U.S. activism can achieve. Perhaps most importantly, abortion remains illegal in many countries.

In the DRC, for instance, abortion is criminalised by two articles of the country’s criminal code, which punish “women who get an abortion, but also anyone who assists them with the practice,” SFVS’s Bihamba told IPS.

Even if the Helms Amendment were to be repealed or clarified, U.S. and international humanitarian agencies would likely face legal hurdles in the provision of abortion on the ground.

Still, advocates hope that a strong U.S. stance on the issue will send an important signal globally.

“An executive order coming from the [Obama administration] would show the world that the U.S. government is stepping up to recognising that women who have been raped need access to abortion services,” CHANGE’s Sippel told IPS. “Global leadership by the U.S. government can really help push [countries] like the DRC to move forward and change their laws.”

A strike by fast-food workers for higher wages in New York City's Union Square in August 2013. Credit: The All-Nite Images/ CC by 2.0

By Ramy Srour
WASHINGTON, Dec 11 2013 (IPS)

In the midst of a nationwide movement for policymakers to raise minimum wages for millions of workers in the United States, experts here continue to debate the advantages and drawbacks of raising the federal rate.

The push for higher minimum wages has gained momentum in recent weeks, particularly with strikes by low-wage restaurant workers last Thursday in more than 100 cities. President Barack Obama also joined the debate, delivering a landmark speech condemning income inequality and the “race to the bottom” where businesses try to “pay the lowest wages” possible.

Obama’s renewed call coincided with a letter by 53 members of Congress calling on McDonald’s and other employers in the fast-food sector to raise pay for their employees. “Put[ting] more money in the hands of consumers…can help strengthen our economy,” the lawmakers noted.

But while higher minimum wages are widely believed to have a positive effect on social conditions, particularly by easing poverty among the most vulnerable sectors of society, economists maintain varying views on the issue.

“We’re all looking for ways to help low-income people get ahead, and that’s a very important goal,” Jonathan Meer, an assistant professor at Texas A&M University and an expert on economic public policy, told IPS. “But the real question is, what’s the right way to do it?”"Raising minimum wages is not going to reverse inequality, but it does help [in] mitigating it."
-- Sylvia Allegretto

So far, he said, most people have proposed minimum wage increases because “it’s the easy fall-back to say, ‘Let’s just pay people more.’ But research shows that increasing minimum wages actually reduces job growth. Simply put: people never get hired.”

This is a phenomenon economists call “disemployment” or “job loss” – that is, when employers don’t lay off workers but simply stop hiring new ones while decreasing the hours of those who are already employed. Opponents of raising the minimum wage say doing so leads to an overall lower level of employed individuals and slower job growth.

Gathering momentum

In his speech, Obama stressed that “inequality…hurts us all,” especially when “middle-class families can no longer afford to buy the goods and services that businesses are selling.” In the United States, he continued, “success has never been about survival of the fittest [but one] where we’re all better off.”

Despite strong opposition from many sectors of American society, including businesses and policymakers, some states have already started moving toward the president’s vision.

According to the most recent statistics from the U.S. Department of Labour, 19 states plus the District of Columbia have a minimum wage that is higher than the federally mandated threshold of 7.25 dollars per hour. Washington state leads the country at 9.19 dollars per hour, while several others have proposals to raise some of these rates even higher.

Others have recently raised their minimum wage, including California, Connecticut, New Jersey and New York. But experts say it is too early to establish whether these moves have had a sizable positive impact on low-income workers, and those who subscribe to the view that higher minimum wages could increase unemployment have used statistical evidence to prove their point.

But Meer said this view may be too simplistic and that it ignores the larger trends that often hide behind the numbers.

When trying to understand the relationship between minimum wage and employment, he said policymakers need to look at “the rate of job creation and job disruption.” When employers stop expanding their workforce, you get to job disruption, which is when employers stop hiring new workers because of the higher costs associated with their wages.

It is a larger trend that “goes beyond simple numbers, with more and more people living on government subsidies,” Meer said. And it is usually very “difficult to see in the conventional data.”

Meanwhile, other economists consider the link between minimum wages and employment levels to be weak, and claims of higher wages leading to job loss simply “scare tactics”. What is really at stake, they say, are the poorest sections of society.

“The biggest problem is that low-wage workers are falling further and further behind, and there’s a need to pull [them] up above the poverty line,” Sylvia Allegretto, the co-chair of the Centre on Wage and Employment Dynamics at the University of California, Berkeley, and a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute here, told IPS.

Minimum wages, then, become more than simply a way to increase or decrease unemployment and instead are about inequality itself.

Inequality vs. employment

In the United States, recent figures suggest that the wealthiest 10 percent of the population earn an average yearly income of over a million dollars, while the remaining 90 percent brings in just over 30,000 dollars. One tenth of the population controls two-thirds of the country’s economic wealth.

“Raising minimum wages is not going to reverse inequality,” Allegretto warned. “But it does help [in] mitigating it.”

She noted that a raising wage is likely to have very few negative effects, and would most likely benefit those at the very bottom of the wage scale. At the same time, the Berkeley economist recognised that there may be some disemployment risks, though she says these are largely negligible.

“Even granting that there may be some small disemployment effects to higher wages, the benefits far outweigh the costs,” she said.

Workers that keep their jobs end up having a higher income and are better off even if their hours are cut, she continued, because “higher wages help mitigate the fewer hours.”

But even if workers manage to mitigate the effects of fewer hours, critics of minimum wage laws note that the real problem is with those who fail to get hired. The divergence in the debate seems to hinge on the purpose of a minimum wage. For some, it’s about mitigating inequality. For others, it’s a matter of avoiding unemployment.

Western tech companies are often confused as to what type of digital products they are actually allowed to unblock in sanctioned countries. Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS

By Ramy Srour
WASHINGTON, Dec 6 2013 (IPS)

Aliakbar Mousavi is a former member of the Iranian parliament and an internet freedom and human rights advocate now living in Washington, DC. In 2006, he was arrested and jailed by the Iranian government for urging human rights reforms.

But the authorities are not the only ones to shoulder blame for quelling dissent, he says. Mousavi told IPS that the U.S. sanctions imposed on Tehran over its nuclear programme are also stifling freedom of expression in his country. “There is really no reason why U.S. sanctions should be inadvertently doing the work of oppressive governments.” -- Danielle Kehl

“People in Iran are suffering because of technology-related sanctions. After the 2009 revolution, Iranians were being arrested and had their private e-mails and information exposed,” he said.

The problem, activists say, is that even though the U.S. government has recently created some exceptions to protect the flow of information in sanctioned countries, regulations are still unclear.

This has led to a situation in which U.S. and other Western tech companies are confused as to what type of digital products they are actually allowed to unblock in sanctioned countries.

“One of my friends, who is also an influential person in Iran, was jailed and accused of conspiring against the regime,” Mousavi said. “After they arrested him, they got hold of his e-mails and showed them to him. He simply couldn’t deny their accusations, even though his e-mails were private.”

Mousavi said that those e-mails came from a Yahoo account. After these incidents, together with a group of Iranian activists, he tried to convince Yahoo to protect their personal information from the Iranian government at the time.

After nearly three years of exhortations, he said, Yahoo’s new president took charge and the company agreed to put in place new protections. At the same time, he noted, Iranians are still finding it difficult to open e-mail accounts because of sanctions still in place.

Last month, Iran and a group of six world powers that includes the U.S. struck an interim nuclear deal to ease sanctions on the Iranian government in return for a partial freeze of nuclear activities.

However, looking at the broader picture, experts here are urging the U.S. government to better protect internet freedoms when it imposes sanctions on countries with questionable human rights records, such as Iran.

“There is really no reason why U.S. sanctions should be inadvertently doing the work of oppressive governments,” Danielle Kehl, a researcher at the New America Foundation (NAF), a non-partisan think tank here, said Thursday at the launch of a new report that criticises some aspects of the U.S. sanctions approach in Iran and beyond.

Kehl points to how unclear sanctions regulations have curtailed the ability of ordinary citizens to share and access information over the internet in countries where U.S. sanctions are in place.

“Expression that seems most threatening to the state is not political manifestos on democracy, but exposés on the foibles and corruption of leaders,” Suzanne Nossel, the executive director of the PEN American Centre, an advocacy group advancing free expression, told IPS.

“This reality is much more troubling under repressive regimes like those in Syria, Iran and North Korea, where people can be killed or jailed for speaking out.”

Chilling effect

“We’re still seeing a chilling effect caused by these sanctions,” Jamal Abdi, policy director at the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), an advocacy group here, told IPS. And the recent exemptions the U.S. government has put forward to protect internet freedom in sanctioned Iran haven’t been enough, he said.

“Companies that could be taking advantage [of the exemptions] aren’t doing so, because they see it as too perilous because of all the risks, and as generally not being in their economic interest,” he said.

According to the report, the problem is that “the lack of legal clarity and fear of political or economic repercussions often discourage American companies from attempting to export their products to sanctioned countries.”

“Some specific examples include Google apps, mobile apps, Skype credit, or antivirus programmes such as McAfee and AVG,” the NAF’s Kehl told IPS.

Although the U.S. government currently imposes comprehensive sanctions on a set of different countries, including Cuba, North Korea, Sudan and Syria, much of the discussion has focused on Iran, partially because of the recent nuclear deal and the country’s history of stifling freedom of expression.

“Sanctions regulations in some cases effectively aid repressive regimes that seek to control access to information within their borders,” the report argues.

Lack of clarity

In recent years, the U.S. government and Congress have enacted some legislation and regulations that would facilitate the provision of technology in sanctioned countries.

In May 2013, the U.S. Treasury Department published a new license that allows companies to export software and services to Iran that are “incident to the exchange of personal communications over the internet, such as instant messaging, chat and e-mail … sharing of photos and movies, web browsing, and blogging.”

Although the license (known as General License D) does grant greater internet freedoms for Iranians, experts note a continued lack of clarity, especially when it comes to the difference between an exemption and an authorisation.

“Congress needs to show more flexibility in the way it issues exemptions, because that will leave more room for executive agencies … to issue adequate safeguard regulations such as General License D,” Kehl told IPS.

And this flexibility, activists say, should leave more room for ordinary citizens to conduct basic financial transactions.

“Remember that simply authorising a product doesn’t mean that people can actually use it,” Mousavi told IPS.

“So far, Iranians have been able to use free software but can’t use most of the important ones – like antivirus and security programmes – that come with a payment, because these companies are still not allowed to process payments coming from Iranian accounts.”

“What we need,” he continued, “are more clarifications and executive orders coming from the U.S.” that would allow ordinary Iranians to express themselves freely.

Cocalero shows leaf-picking technique. Credit: Diana Cariboni/IPS

By Ramy Srour
WASHINGTON, Dec 4 2013 (IPS)

Despite looming differences over Colombia’s drug policy, President Barack Obama renewed his support for a peaceful settlement to the civil war that has plagued the country for over half a century in a meeting with Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos Tuesday.

The White House visit came as the Colombian government is engaged in the third stage of negotiations with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the country’s largest guerrilla organisation. Analysts say it will be a difficult one, particularly because of how the U.S. might react to some of its components.“The end of fumigation is one of the principal demands of the FARC, and the Santos government has shown greater openness to discussing alternatives to the practice." -- Cynthia J. Arnson

“Many officials in the Obama administration … including Obama himself, have had very positive and supporting things to say about the peace process, and I think that at a political level there has been unequivocal support,” Cynthia J. Arnson, the director of the Latin American Programme at the Wilson Center, a think tank here, told IPS.

“But this round is going to focus on counter-narcotics and drugs, and the Santos government has been one of the governments at the forefront in the region calling for a rethinking of the way counter-narcotics policy is conceived of and implemented,” she said.

Arnson was referring to Santos’ openness to discussing alternatives with the FARC that would not be particularly popular with Washington, which has long funded aerial fumigation of coca crops – the widespread spraying of tens of thousands of coca hectares.

“The end of fumigation is one of the principal demands of the FARC, and the Santos government has shown greater openness to discussing alternatives to the practice,” she said.

At the same time, other analysts, while recognising the delicacy of the issue and the disagreements of some members of the U.S. government over alternative options, believe that in the end, the Obama administration will support any settlement that will enhance the chances of a peaceful solution.

“There are certain sectors within the U.S. government that will not be happy with some of the options that Santos is considering, but I think that most of the weight of the government will back him,” Michael Shifter, the president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a leading think tank on Western Hemisphere affairs here, told IPS.

“If that [considering alternative options] is what needs to be done, Obama and the State Department will do whatever Santos needs to achieve an agreement.”

With regard to his recent openings to the FARC and how they might be perceived from the outside, the Colombian president told reporters Tuesday that, although “some people say we’re giving in to FARC, this is nonsense, absolute nonsense. I decided to open a peace process with them because every war must end with some kind of negotiation. I am very conscious that we will have enemies, but I am also conscious that this is the correct step.”

In a break with tradition, Santos’ predecessor, Alvaro Uribe has strongly and repeatedly criticised Santos for negotiating with the FARC and another guerrilla group, the ELN (National Liberation Army), from his current perch at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington-based think tank.

His denunciations have themselves drawn criticism here, particularly from Democrats who note that Santos was hand-picked by Uribe as his defence minister and that the former president himself often displayed great leniency toward right-wing paramilitary groups accused of human-rights atrocities.

Labour rights

The two heads of state also discussed progress on the U.S.-Colombia Trade Promotion Agreement, a bilateral agreement that came into effect in May 2012 with the goal of strengthening commercial ties and creating jobs in both countries.

At the core of the agreement is the Labor Action Plan. Announced on Apr. 7, 2011, the Plan contains a series of provisions aimed at protecting Colombian workers, an issue the U.S. government had particularly emphasised as a precondition to signing the trade deal.

On Tuesday, the White House noted progress on the Plan and acknowledged its continued commitment to its implementation. According to critics, however, the Plan hasn’t shown any results yet.

“Any claim that there’s been progress is not correct,” Gimena Sanchez, a senior associate at the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights watchdog here, told IPS.

“Colombia has made advances only on paper and they are not based on real results,” she noted, urging the U.S. government to seek a more active role in ensuring the Plan’s implementation on the ground.

“The U.S. needs to find ways to go there, and move beyond just looking at the veneer of what Colombia is representing,” she said.

Colombian officials, however, argue that the country is moving forward. “What we care about the most today is everything that is related to equality and reducing poverty,” Juan Carlos Pinzon Bueno, Colombia’s minister of national defence, said at a gathering at the Brookings Institution here Monday.

To that end, he noted that the government has managed to reduce the country’s double-digit unemployment to about nine percent, an achievement he labeled as a “substantial improvement.”

High unemployment is critical, he said, “because money helps solve social problems. [To that end], we’re creating more formal employment and social security.”

The 17th round of peace talks, representing the third step in the negotiation process, began Nov. 28 in Havana, Cuba behind closed doors. Only a few days before the round’s beginning, Santos announced his intention to run for re-election in next May’s presidential elections.

An eventual victory would provide him with four more years to continue peace negotiations with the FARC.

Gay and transsexual immigrants who enter the U.S. detention system face high levels of sexual abuse, new research warns, at times leading them to decide to return to their home countries rather than stay to fight a legal battle.

Activists say instances of LGBT immigrants who prefer being deported rather than endure abuse in U.S. detention facilities are quite common. Credit: Bigstock

Advocates say that, although sexual assault and violence are widespread in all types of prisons, LGBT immigrants are particularly vulnerable.

“One of my clients, a transgender Mexican woman detained in a facility in New Jersey, after months of mistreatment actually ended up accepting her deportation, rather than endure her situation,” Clement Lee, a detention staff attorney at Immigration Equality, an advocacy group representing LGBT immigrants in court, told IPS.

“I told her, ‘I can win your case, but it will take several months,’ but because she was poor she could not pay to get out of detention. In the facility, people were calling her ‘maricon’, Spanish for faggot, and she seriously feared for her physical safety.”

Clement notes that his clients often come from countries that are dangerous for them. He cites instances in which transgender individuals would be raped and assailed “for violating gender norms”, or instances in which some of his gay clients have been subjected to “conversion therapies” under which community and family members attempt to change their sexual orientation.

Jamaica is the country from which most of his clients have fled, “which is surprising,” he says, “given that country’s image as a beach paradise.”

According to other immigration activists closely involved in LGBT cases, instances of LGBT immigrants who prefer being deported rather than endure abuse in U.S. detention facilities are quite common.

Karen Zwick, a managing attorney at the National Immigrant Justice Centre (NIJC), says that the decision to accept deportation may not be a rational one, because these immigrants may be underestimating the risks they would face going back to their home countries.

“They can’t see beyond the terrible situation they’re in,” she told IPS.

According to a new report, released this week by the Centre for American Progress (CAP), a progressive think tank here, as many as 34,000 immigrants are detained each day by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in over 250 detention facilities across the country.

According to the study, which is based on evidence gathered through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, detained LGBT immigrants are far more vulnerable to abuse than other immigrants.

“What we tried to do with this report is to paint a clearer picture of what is going on inside these detention centres,” Sharita Gruberg, a policy analyst at CAP and the author of the report, told IPS. “And what we’ve found is that, in some centres, guards were still using homophobic language against LGBT detainees.”

But LGBT detainees say they face far worse problems than abusive language, reporting instead physical and sexual abuse by both fellow detainees and guards.

15 times more vulnerable

Because of internal regulations, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) does not keep data on sexual orientation or gender identity of detainees. But the information obtained through the FOIA request suggests that LGBT detainees are “15 times more likely to be sexually assaulted than the general population”.

ICE, the agency in charge of immigration detention facilities across the United States, has also been at the centre of an investigation by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), an official watchdog, into the agency’s sexual abuse allegations.

According to a GAO report released Nov. 20, nearly 40 percent of total allegations were never acted upon “because ICE field office officials did not report them to … headquarters.”

“ICE takes the health, safety and welfare of those in our care very seriously,” an ICE official, who commented on the condition of anonymity, told IPS by e-mail. “The agency is continually working to ensure these reforms are consistently implemented at all facilities that house ICE detainees.”

The official also noted that in 2009 the agency initiated “fundamental detention reforms, including the development of new detention standards to protect vulnerable detainees.”

Yet advocates suggest an underlying problem with the way the U.S. immigration system functions.

“We know that the immigration detention system has extended vastly over the last 20 years, as we spend billions of dollars on immigration detention every year,” Harper Jean Tobin, the director of policy at the National Center for Transgender Equality, an advocacy group here, told IPS.

Tobin refers to the congressionally mandated requirement that ICE detain 34,000 immigrants at all times, also known as the “bed mandate”. According to the NIJC, this mandate “prevents ICE officers from exercising discretion and expanding more efficient alternatives to detention … that would allow individuals who pose no risk to public safety to be released back to their families.”

In the past, U.S. legislators have touched upon the issues surrounding mistreatment of detainees in immigration facilities. In 2003, Congress passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), which sought to protect individuals against sexual abuse in confinement settings, including in immigrant detention centres.

But according to the new Centre for American Progress findings, PREA may have only partially addressed the issue of sexual abuse in detention facilities. It points out that ICE created its own standards on sexual assault in detention facilities, which are less comprehensive than those mandated by the Department of Justice in 2012.

Last June, Rep. Trey Growdy of South Carolina, the chair of the House Immigration Subcommittee, introduced the Strengthen and Fortify Enforcement Act (SAFE), which was later approved by the Judiciary Committee. Yet critics note that, if approved, this bill would not only do “nothing to resolve the legal status of 11 million undocumented immigrants” but would also “create an environment of rampant racial profiling and unconstitutional detentions.”

A local woman returns to her home with a new shelter kit. While the destruction is widespread, local rebuilding efforts are already underway. Credit: Simon Davis/DFID/cc by 2.0

By Ramy Srour
WASHINGTON, Nov 21 2013 (IPS)

Nearly two weeks after Typhoon Haiyan devastated parts of the central Philippines, experts and activists here are warning that post-disaster reconstruction needs to be more transparent than past such efforts, while also focusing on a long-term assistance strategy that goes beyond immediate emergency relief.

In recent days, academics and civil society experts have also urged the international community to learn from some of the mistakes made during the disaster responses following the 2010 earthquake in Haiti."When the funding dries up, the rebuilding effort still needs to be taken care of." -- Prof. Jesse Anttila-Hughes

“I think there is a big myth that emergency response is split in different stages, with emergency relief coming first, followed by reconstruction and then rebuilding,” Jake Johnston, a research associate at the Centre for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), a think tank here, told IPS. “But what you actually need is a more comprehensive view, from the very beginning.”

Johnston has closely followed reconstruction efforts in Haiti following the earthquake that left an estimated 316,000 people dead and 300,000 injured, and displaced almost 1.5 million people. He says there are several lessons learned from the Haitian disaster that can be applied to the current crisis in the Philippines.

Keeping locals in the loop

“One thing that, unfortunately, didn’t go very well in Haiti was that the local government and civil society were largely bypassed by foreign organisations,” he says. “For instance, you saw USAID” – the U.S. government’s primary foreign aid agency – “spending almost 1.3 billion dollars in awards to contractors and NGOs that were mostly based in the U.S., with less than one percent of that money actually going to Haitian organisations.”

In the Philippines, he notes, international organisations should keep the Manila government in the lead, making sure that it is a prominent part of the coordination of the entire reconstruction mechanism.

Transparency and accountability can also be vastly improved over past efforts. Experts say doing so would ensure that the organisations working on the ground meet local needs and are effective in doing so.

“Nongovernmental organizations and private contractors have been the intermediate recipients of most of these funds,” Vijaya Ramachandran and Owen Barder, two senior fellows at the Center for Global Development (CGD), a think tank here, wrote last week. “But despite the fact that these organizations are beneficiaries of public funds, there are few publicly available evaluations of services delivered, lives saved, or mistakes made.”

The analysts note that this lack of transparency and accountability has led to growing disillusionment among the local population in Haiti. Perhaps more important, lack of transparency can also end up affecting the relief’s efficiency itself.

“In Haiti, we saw that the groups on the ground weren’t actually communicating with each other, leading to a situation in which different groups simply duplicated the same things,” CEPR’s Johnston says. “That’s a clear indicator telling us that there wasn’t enough transparency and accountability around the aid that was being provided.”

Greater communication between groups would enable them to be more effective with their work, while also increasing their accountability to donors, he says.

Still, some NGOs currently working in the Philippines are stressing that transparency and communication are already at the core of what they do.

“We try to be very transparent about our finances, and we make sure that everyone sees where all of our money is going,” Rachel Sawyer, a member of the communications staff at All Hands Volunteers, a non-profit that works in disaster-stricken areas both in the U.S. and internationally, told IPS.

“We are also constantly communicating with other organisations. When we see one, we either partner with them or we try to meet the unmet needs somewhere else.”

She warns that “‘disaster relief’ is obviously a very broad term.”

Long-term funding

One other major issue experts point to is the problem of ensuring that the outpouring of funds raised in the immediate aftermath of a disaster is maintained over time, which is what long-term reconstruction requires.

“While media, funders and emergency responders spend a short amount of time dealing with immediate needs,” Lori Bertman, the president and CEO of the Louisiana-based Pennington Family Foundation, a grant-making institution, wrote on Monday, “this does not create the infrastructure to mitigate future risk, and leaves long-term needs such as resettlement, mental and public health, as well as fiscal viability, unfunded and unattended.”

Bertman’s article was later endorsed by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank here.

Some have suggested that this short-term response may be partially due to the cyclical nature of media coverage, which tends to shift the public’s attention quickly.

“Obviously the news cycle is a cycle, and trying to get people to give more attention is not really going to work,” Jesse Anttila-Hughes, a development economics professor at the University of San Francisco, told IPS.

He notes, however, that the current strategy can be improved.

“Funding in these situations is very much focused on shelter and food. But then when the funding dries up, the rebuilding effort still needs to be taken care of,” he said. “What really needs to be done in these situations is to ensure that funding calls are specifically tied to clear, long-term reconstruction.”

According to the latest information released by the National Disaster Risk Reduction Management Council, the Philippine government’s agency monitoring the current crisis, Typhoon Haiyan has so far killed over 4,000 people, leaving almost 4.5 million people without a home.

Earlier this week, the Washington-based World Bank announced that it would release 500 million dollars in funding to support the Philippines’ effort in recovery and rebuilding. The funds, which are a loan, came in response to a request by the government in Manila, and Bank officials are already looking to see how this money can be stretched for the long term – and how it can be used to sidestep some of the problems that have beset previous reconstructions.

“Given the scale of this disaster, the country will need a long-term reconstruction plan,” Axel van Trotsenburg, the World Bank’s vice president for East Asia said on Monday. “We can bring lessons learned from our work in reconstruction after disasters hit Aceh, Haiti and other areas that might be helpful in the Philippines.”

Twelve-year-old Maruf lives in a shanty in Nayanagar, close to a Dhaka suburb. He works at a nearby car workshop, fixing luxury car engines for about six dollars a month. He shares this meagre income with his family of four. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

By Ramy Srour
WASHINGTON, Nov 20 2013 (IPS)

Growing income inequality will pose a major threat to social stability in countries around the globe, according to a new report by the World Economic Forum.

Based on a worldwide survey of experts from academia, government and the non-profit sector, the report finds that income inequality is the second most important trend in the top 10 that are likely to impact social stability over the next year.“People see that there is that one percent of the population that is at the very top of the system and keeps on accumulating wealth." -- Christian Meyer

It cites rising tensions in the Middle East and persistent structural unemployment as other major global threats.

But while the findings are primarily geared toward highlighting income inequality within countries, experts suggest that there is also a global picture that needs emphasis, one where national borders are less of a factor.

“Looking at income inequality within a given country makes perfect sense, because government policies will affect the way people live there,” Christian Meyer, a research associate at the Centre for Global Development (CGD), a think tank here, told IPS.

“But there’s also an international perspective, one that goes beyond the national level, where if we take people and compare their income levels, without thinking about national borders, we will find that income inequality is incredibly high, much higher.”

The report is based on responses offered by the nearly 1,600 experts that make up the Network of Global Agenda Councils (NGAC), a global community of over 80 councils representing “thought leaders” around the world. The World Economic Forum describes itself as an independent international organisation that gathers world leaders from business, academia and the non-profit sector to try to shape the global social and economic agenda. Its members come primarily from companies and industries from the developed world. 

“Widening wealth disparity affects every part of our lives,” the report notes. “It’s impacting social stability within countries and threatening security on a global scale, and looking ahead to 2014, it’s essential that we devise innovative solutions to the causes and consequences of a world becoming ever more unequal.”

According to this new body of research, growing income inequality has become a major threat in both the developing and developed world, including North America, where the survey reveals that income inequality is the number one challenge.

The “incredible wealth created over the last decade in the [United States] has gone to a smaller and smaller portion of the population,” the report warns, “and the disparity stems from many of the same roots as in developing countries.”

According to the WEF survey, nearly two-thirds of U.S. citizens think that the current economic system favours the wealthy. But in some European countries, where people are still recovering from the global economic crisis that has left thousands of people out of work, the percentage is much higher.

Elite capture

As the gap between rich and poor widens according to both national and international metrics, analysts worry that people will be more likely to take the streets to voice their frustrations with a system that paves the way for the privileged few. This scenario, the report notes, is likely to lead to greater social instability and may threaten global security.

“Unrest cloaked in a desire to change from one political leader to another is a manifestation of people’s concerns about their basic needs,” the report notes. It also stresses that it is usually the young who are most willing to do so, as they feel “they have nothing else to lose.”

“People see that there is that one percent of the population that is at the very top of the system and keeps on accumulating wealth,” the CGD’s Meyer says. “So they realise that there must be something wrong going on at the top, that this is a form of ‘elite capture’.”

Indeed, the perception of elite capture, or the lack of social mobility, is what seems to be at the root of much of this widespread disaffection.

“The problem with this concentration of income is that it self-perpetuates from one generation to the other through a series of mechanisms, such as good education, but also through the access to good networks,” Ricardo Fuentes, head of research at Oxfam Great Britain, a humanitarian group, told IPS.

“This self-perpetuation means that the whole idea of equality of opportunity and that ‘all men are created equal’ is seriously undermined.”

This phenomenon, Fuentes notes, has led to people increasingly believing that personal effort and merit will not bring them anywhere, and that their government will only listen to the voices of the rich.

“Even in countries where governments are elected democratically,” he says, “we are increasingly seeing that the rich use their money to influence the government and the media through lobbies and other mechanisms that make them particularly influential.”

Reversing the trend

The report’s release comes as the NGAC’s leaders are gathered in Abu Dhabi Nov. 18-20 for the 2013 Summit on the Global Agenda, where they plan to discuss the topics that will be part of the yearly summit the WEF will hold in Davos, Switzerland, in January.

At the summit’s opening, WEF founder and chairman Klaus Schwab noted that the “biggest challenge we have today is the incapability of the system of global governance to take the necessary time and devote the necessary attention to construct our future.”

As leaders seek to come up with solutions to income inequality, some suggest that the recent growth witnessed by some Latin American countries may be one way to tackle the issue elsewhere.

“We know from history that having a more equal society is not a utopian objective,” Fuentes says. “Up until the 1980s, there was more investment in public education, a conscious effort by the state to strengthen safety nets, and a growing standard of living for workers.”

More countries, particularly in Latin America, are taking fiscal measures that reflect these policies, he says, at least according to certain indicators. “And now, they have actually started to reverse inequality.”

Nigeria's security forces barricade institutions and police stations to prevent further attacks by Boko Haram. Credit: Ahmed Usman/IPS

By Ramy Srour
WASHINGTON, Nov 14 2013 (IPS)

The U.S. government has designated the Nigeria-based militant groups Boko Haram and Ansaru as terrorist organisations, prohibiting U.S. citizens from interacting or aiding the groups.

Boko Haram and Ansaru are widely believed to be behind extremist terrorist attacks that have claimed thousands of lives in Nigeria in recent years, amidst a fight with the central government and its army over the role of Islam in Nigerian society."What really matters here is the fact that the Treasury Department will be able to go after the assets of these groups in U.S. banks." -- Douglas A. Ollivant

Response to the designation has been mixed, with some welcoming the decision while others warn that the move could end up hurting U.S. interests.

“This decision is very welcome and is a great step forward for the U.S., and I’m sure it will be fully upheld in Nigeria,” Samuel Okey Mbonu, the executive director of the Nigerian-American Leadership Council (NALC), a Nigerian advocacy group here, told IPS.

“At the same time, it is clear that this decision should have come long before now … I think that the U.S. has actually underestimated Boko Haram over the years.”

Boko Haram formally formed in 2009 in an attempt to impose Islamic law in all 36 Nigerian states, and has since carried out repeated attacks against both the military and civilians. Last week, such an attack reportedly killed at least 30 people.

Ansaru, considered a branch of Boko Haram, formed in early 2012. Since then it has proven itself a major force, managing to infiltrate Nigerian military structures on numerous occasions. Ansaru has also extensively targeted Western targets, including kidnapping foreigners working and living in Nigeria.

Both are believed to have ties to Al-Qaeda affiliates in Africa.

Still, others have long warned the State Department against making such a designation. Brandon Kendhammer, an expert on African politics and a faculty member at Ohio University, says the new announcement will make it increasingly difficult for those who, like him, study these groups.

“[The designations] will make it difficult for people … in the academic environment who want to study these movements,” Kendhammer told IPS. “Now it’s going to be very hard to contact their members or even to just work with communities where members might be present.”

Kendhammer’s concerns are not isolated. In May 2012, he was joined by a group of 24 other academics from across the U.S. in writing a letter to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, urging the Obama administration to refrain from designating Boko Haram a terrorist organisation.

In the letter, the group of experts argued that a “designation would internationalize Boko Haram, legitimize abuses by Nigeria’s security services, limit the State Department’s latitude in shaping a long term strategy and undermine the U.S. Government’s ability to receive effective independent analysis from the region.”

“We surely have more information about Boko Haram than we did at the time of the letter, but it’s clear that the State Department still hasn’t articulated very well what type of connections the group has with other jihadist organisations,” Kendhammer says.

Big stick

Still, analysts now suggest that Wednesday’s decision will have a sizable impact on the group’s activities.

“In practice, the designation means that no American citizen can give any kind of material support to the group, and that no American can help them in any way, shape or form,” Douglas A. Ollivant, a retired U.S. Army officer and a senior national security fellow at the New America Foundation, a think tank here, told IPS.

That includes both financial support and the provision of expertise, Ollivant says.

“But what really matters here is the fact that the [U.S.] Treasury Department will be able to go after the assets of these groups in U.S. banks – and, if the United Nations will pass a resolution, also in foreign banks,” Ollivant says.

The designations come at a time in which the domestic situation in Nigeria is still far from stable.

“What we need to understand is that Nigeria is a very complex and diverse country, where any government in power needs to carry every region along in its policies,” the NALC’s Okey Mbonu says.

“That means that sometimes the government is not going to wield the big stick on certain issues because it does not want to alienate certain regions.”

Indeed, Boko Haram’s strongholds are in northern Nigeria, which Okey Mbonu says is also the most politically influential region in the country. That has made any settlement between the Nigerian government and the group particularly difficult to achieve.

“It is clear that these extremist groups get most of their recruits from disaffected youth who are not fully integrated within the Nigerian socioeconomic environment,” Okey Mbonu says. “The central government will have to develop policies that will enable it to catch these youth before they get recruited.”

“So far,” he says, “the Nigerian government hasn’t been very good at that.”

Asylum seekers who travel to the United States to escape persecution in their home countries receive no assistance from the U.S. government and are not allowed to work for months, which activists say lead many to live on the streets or work illegally.

And despite a recent high-level judicial decision on the issue, many say only action by Congress will be able to fix the problem permanently.

Current U.S. law bars asylum-seekers entering the United States from applying for work authorisation for at least six months, a timeframe that is often only a minimum. In fact, waiting times can typically extend for several additional months due to what is known as the “asylum clock”, a term used to describe the six-month period during which asylum-seekers wait for their claims to be adjudicated by U.S. immigration laws.

“The problem, however, is that this is actually not a real clock,” Bill Frelick, the director of the refugee programme at Human Rights Watch, a global watchdog group, told IPS. “It’s a clock that stops and starts when a delay in the proceedings is caused by the applicant. But when it stops, sometimes it takes years to restart it again.”

The issue is discussed at length in a new report from Human Rights Watch, which notes that the main feature of the clock is its ability to start and stop because of what are also called “applicant-caused delays” (ACD). These can range from an applicant’s inability to find an attorney, to his or her decision to postpone a hearing.

“The [ACD] provisions are actually a result of regulations implemented by the two main federal agencies that deal with asylum-seekers,” Mary Kenney, a senior attorney at the American Immigration Council (AIC), a non-profit here, told IPS.

The two federal agencies Kenney refers to are the U.S. Citizens and Immigration Services (USCIS), which is a part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), an agency of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) that adjudicates immigration cases.

“It is important to distinguish between the [ACD] provisions from the 180-day waiting period,” Kenney says. “The 180-day waiting period is the result of legislation passed by Congress, which didn’t mention anything about the clock’s start and stop rules.”

On the other hand, the asylum clock regulation is a result of the way the legislation was implemented by the USCIS and the EOIR, she notes.

Although it declined to comment on the report itself, a USCIS spokesman told IPS that the recommendations brought forward by HRW, which include legislative amendments to two U.S. statutes, would require legislative action, a process which USCIS, as a federal agency that implements congressional legislation, is not a part of.

Judicial relief

Nevertheless, things seem to be moving in the right direction for asylum seekers. In light of the difficulties of going through the legislative process, some have opted for a less direct approach  by attempting to change some of the regulations that implement current U.S. law.

Last week, a judge in the state of Washington ordered the approval of a nationwide class action settlement agreement, which originated from a case filed in 2011 by the AIC and the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project (NWIRP), an organisation based in Seattle that assists immigrants and refugees.

Due to this settlement, beginning Dec. 3 some of the “clock” hurdles currently faced by asylum seekers are going to give way to a fairer and more transparent process, advocates say.

“Up until the settlement, courts had a policy according to which the clock wouldn’t start until the applicant actually appeared for his or her first hearing in court, which obviously could take several months,” Chris Strawn, an attorney at NWIRP Seattle’s office, told IPS. “Now, thanks to the settlement, the clock starts from the moment in which the application is filed, regardless of the time it’s going to take for the applicant to appear in court.”

Another major improvement has to do with those instances in which a judge denies the application and the applicant appeals to the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA), the highest administrative body that interprets and applies immigration law. Prior to the recent settlement, handed down Nov. 4, an appeal immediately brought the asylum clock to a halt, even if the BIA later reversed the judge’s decision and sent the case back down for consideration.

“With the old rule, the judge’s denial meant that the clock would stop, and it would stop permanently,” the AIC’s Kenney says. “Now, however, if the [BIA] remands the case, the clock will restart and the applicant will be credited with the time lost during the appeal.”

This is a major change, she says.

The settlement contains other improvements, as well, including more flexible and transparent USCIS practices likely to contribute to fewer bureaucratic problems for people who apply for asylum status in the United States.

Safety nets

The Nov. 4 settlement will make it easier for asylum seekers to obtain work authorisation within a reasonable time. But according to Human Rights Watch, much remains to be done to permanently rectify this issue.

“As we were working on the report, we also noticed that other developed countries had individualised procedures for asylum seekers, and provided them with food and housing,” Frelick says. “But in the United States, there are no such safety nets.”

Often, he says, asylum-seekers find themselves with no work and are forced to live on the streets, subsisting off of food provided by charities.

The report calls on the U.S. Congress to repeal the provisions concerning work authorisation in the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA), and amend Section 208 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), by allowing asylum seekers to apply for work authorisation as early as 30 days after filing their application.

For now, the settlement amends some of the regulations, but the IIRIRA and INA have remained untouched.

The EOIR declined to comment on these recommendations, but told IPS that the agency stands by the Nov. 4 settlement agreement. On Nov. 21, the EOIR will hold a teleconference to assist stakeholders in understanding the terms of the settlement, with more information available here.

Men warm their hands by a fire in Homs, Syria, which endured two months of artillery bombardment in 2012. Credit: Freedom House/cc by 2.0

By Ramy Srour
WASHINGTON, Nov 8 2013 (IPS)

The almost three-year-old Syrian civil war has been a “silent war on human and economic development”, destroying the ability of ordinary Syrian citizens to maintain basic livelihoods, according to a report launched here Wednesday by two United Nations agencies.

“There is an informal rule that it usually takes a country around seven years to recover for each year of civil war,” Michael Bowers, the senior director of Strategic Response and Global Emergencies at Mercy Corps, a humanitarian organisation that works closely with Syrian refugees in neighbouring Lebanon and Jordan, told IPS.“The humanitarian situation in Syria continues to deteriorate rapidly and inexorably." -- U.N. humanitarian chief Valerie Amos

“And although it’s hard to justify this type of estimate, if we look at past civil conflicts such as Yugoslavia or Iraq, it usually does take at least a decade for a country to recover.”

The massive displacement of Syrian citizens and widespread job loss have contributed to a “dramatic drop in consumption … [that] tumbled by 18.8 percent in 2012 … and 47 percent in 2013,” according to the report, by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

Private consumption, the U.N. researchers note, is a direct measure of household welfare.

In addition, as many as 2.3 million jobs have disappeared since the beginning of the war, primarily due to the large-scale shutdown of economic activities in highly populated areas.

The report comes at a critical time. World leaders are currently struggling to come up with a date for the “Geneva 2” conference, which aims to pave the way for a political solution to a conflict that has left at least 100,000 people dead.

Even if that conference happens and even if a political solution is found, however, experts say the socioeconomic impact of the civil war will go on for decades. According to Alex Pollock, the director of the microfinance department at the UNRWA, the U.N. agency providing assistance to Palestinian refugees in the Middle East, it will take up to 30 years for the Syrian economy to recover to its 2010 growth rate of five percent of gross domestic product.  

Hidden impact

The economic impact in Syria is not the end of the story. The war has also had a devastating effect on key social welfare factors, including education, health assistance, and population displacement, that are going to negatively impact the country’s overall level of human development.

According to the report, as of July 2013 nearly 3,000 schools had been partially or totally damaged, many of which were eventually turned into shelters for the thousands of internally displaced persons (IDPs). School dropout rates have also heightened the deep educational crisis that is plaguing the country: by the second quarter of 2013, 49 percent, or one out of two children, had been forced to quit their school.

And while the conflict has taken a toll on school buildings across the country, medical facilities have not been spared either. The report estimates that over 40 percent of the country’s hospitals are currently out of service, making it increasingly difficult for ordinary Syrians to receive basic medical assistance, not to mention the more serious health threats posed by larger and more devastating epidemics.

Although the international community, with the U.S. and the European Union at the forefront, have been providing millions of dollars in humanitarian aid and funds to foster economic development, this assistance is unlikely to pull the Syrian socioeconomic situation out of the abyss.

International assistance

International agencies such as the UNRWA have been engaged in a number of economic development projects aimed at helping ordinary Syrians to at least maintain a basic level of livelihood, including building up microfinance projects, education facilities and health infrastructure.

“We have been receiving a lot of support, primarily from the Europeans, but also from some of the Arab countries in the region,” Pollock told IPS. “And although the assistance from the Arab world has been rather small, countries such as Saudi Arabia have provided food assistance to those who have been displaced within the country.”

The Syrian government itself has been quite supportive of UNRWA’s work, Pollock says.

“We’re primarily engaged with the governing Ba’ath Party, which is also our main contact at the Syrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs,” he says, noting that the central government has also facilitated assistance to the large Palestinian refugee population in the country.

But despite the political support these organisations have been receiving, the future of the Syrian economy remains grim.

The escalation of the civil conflict has resulted in armed factions “destroying the economic and productive assets of the country,” the report argues. This has pushed the Syrian population to rely on agriculture, a highly unstable and unpredictable sector in the country.

As of Nov. 6, the war has produced nearly three million Syrian refugees, of which only 2.2 million have been granted refugee status, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. Nearly 40 percent of these are children below the age of 12.

The catastrophic humanitarian crisis, however, does not seem to be moving toward any solution. On Monday, the U.N. humanitarian chief Valerie Amos told the Security Council behind closed doors that the “humanitarian situation in Syria continues to deteriorate rapidly and inexorably,” according to her spokeswoman Amanda Pitt. The number of Syrian people in need of humanitarian assistance may have risen to over nine million, Pitt said.

World powers, however, are still struggling to coordinate strategies to achieve a political solution to the conflict. On Tuesday, U.S, Russian, and U.N. diplomats met in Geneva to try to fix a date for the “Geneva 2” conference, but to no avail.

During a U.S. Department of State background briefing on the negotiations, a senior U.S. official noted that despite the lack of an agreement now, “the conference will take place before the end of the year.”

Yvonne Shields is the community chef at Broadway Community, Inc., a soup kitchen in Morningside Heights, New York. Credit: Vadim Lavrusik/cc by 2.0

By Ramy Srour
WASHINGTON, Nov 5 2013 (IPS)

Deep cuts in food aid for poor people in the United States are poised to bring higher demands on charities and food pantries across the country that provide food to families in need – and which are already overstretched.

“How are people going to feed their families?” Earle Eldridge, a volunteer at St. Anthony Catholic Church’s food pantry in Washington, told IPS on Monday. “We’re becoming a country where the government cuts such essential things as food, and we don’t know how people are going to survive.”"They’re just worried to death that they’re not going to be able to feed their families." -- food pantry volunteer Earle Eldridge

The nearly 50 million U.S. citizens who currently rely on government food aid are set to see a substantial decrease in their assistance as part of a federal cut that came into effect on Nov. 1.

According to recent statistics, some 14 percent of U.S. households are currently dependent on food assistance, widely known as food stamps or formally as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programme (SNAP).

The federal cuts come at an already difficult time for millions of people in the United States, many of whom are still struggling to recover from the recent economic crisis.

“Ever since the beginning of the recession, people have been coming to us because they’re not making the money they were supposed to be making,” Elaine Schaller, another volunteer at the church, told IPS. “But lower incomes also mean fewer donations, and that is quite problematic as we rely on donations for most of our distributions.”

Indeed, the depressed economic situation currently affecting the country exposes the larger and indirect implications of the cuts. As people have less money, they’re also less likely to make donations to distribution centres, which means food pantries are likely to be even tighter in the months to come, Schaller says.

The Nov. 1 cuts are happening as part of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) – commonly known as the “stimulus package” – that aimed at boosting the national economy, including through a temporary expansion of the food stamp programme.

Since then, the ARRA has provided over 45 billion dollars in food assistance funding, or did until Friday, when several related provisions expired.

Further, while the ARRA cuts will take away as much as five billion dollars from the food stamp programme, duelling legislation is currently being debated in Congress that could further subtract an additional 40 billion dollars from the programme over the next 10 years.

“We’ve talked about this issue with the families coming to us, and they’re just worried to death that they’re not going to be able to feed their families,” Eldridge says.

Advocates say that the situation was already critical before the Friday cuts. Slow economic growth in the aftermath of the recession, and a recent government 16-day shutdown that left thousands of families with no income, has only contributed to an increased demand on food donors.

According to U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics, in as many as 37 U.S. states, food stamp demand went up between 2012 and 2013, with states such as Illinois and Wyoming seeing the highest percentage increase. But even in those states where demand did not go up in the past year, the aggregate amount of households that rely on food stamps is still high.

At 21 percent, Mississippi has the largest proportion of its population currently depending on food stamps – nearly 630,000 people. Oregon, Tennessee and West Virginia are next, where people relying on food stamps are at around 20 percent of the total state populations.

In West Virginia, one of the states that will be most affected by the cuts, SNAP benefits went down from nearly 42 million dollars in September to a little less than 39 million, a West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources (DHHR) spokesperson told IPS. The nearly three-million-dollar cut for November will affect almost 300,000 people in the eastern state.

States that see their SNAP funds decreased often have no alternative funding to replace the loss.

“Clients were notified of this change via mail for [the] decrease effective November. Workers were provided tools to educate recipients of this decrease in advance,” the DHHR spokesperson told IPS. However, West Virginia is not going to supplement this loss with other funds and is not currently aware of any plans to support other donor organisations such as food pantries.

Other states are likely to face similar situations.

All are involved

Days before the Nov. 1 ARRA expiration, Al Franken, a Senator from Minnesota, joined 38 other lawmakers in organising a letter calling for Congress to stop the new SNAP cuts that is currently under legislative scrutiny.

“I met with farmers and farm leaders from across Minnesota who want us to ensure that we don’t hurt children, seniors, and families in Minnesota and across the country by slashing SNAP funding,” Sen. Franken said in a statement on Oct. 28.

The 39 senators write that the SNAP programme “is our nation’s first line of defense against hunger [and it] plays a critical role at a stressful time in the life of families [as it] allows struggling families to put groceries on their tables when they face financial troubles.”

The senators urge Congress to approve a bill that will not include those changes that are designed to raise new barriers to participation in the programme.

In the meantime, advocates can do little but wait.

“I really hope that bipartisanship will eventually make people in this town realise what they should do,” Earle Eldridge, the church volunteer says. “All I can do is pray.”

Mekhredze Telman (left) pushes Amanda Arthur's (right) cart of dry and canned goods at Tukwila Pantry, Tukwila, Washington on Oct. 20, 2011. The pantry provides monthly food bank services to individuals and families in need. Credit: USDA/cc by 2.0

By Ramy Srour
WASHINGTON, Nov 1 2013 (IPS)

U.S. state legislators and corporate lobbies have engaged in an unprecedented attack on minimum wages that has lowered U.S. labour standards, according to new research released Thursday.

The report by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a think tank here, is the first of its kind, providing a comprehensive overview of all legislation enacted over the past two years across all 50 U.S. states.“This is a remarkable indictment of how the economy is not working for everybody.” -- Ross Eisenbrey of EPI

According to EPI researchers, some of the country’s largest corporate lobbies have engaged in an intense attack on U.S. labour standards and workplace protections, including minimum wage laws, the amount of paid sick leave offered, and even child labour protections.

“What is particularly important about this new report is that it emphasises the recent legislative developments at the state and local levels, which unfortunately have been largely ignored,” Jon Schmitt, a senior economist at the Centre for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), an economic research institute here, told IPS.

“That means that the discussion of economic and political inequality also needs to move to the local level,” he said.

EPI says such legislative attacks have seriously undermined the ability of average U.S. citizens to achieve economic prosperity.

“What is clear from the report is that attacks on labour unions are part of a larger attempt by trade associations and corporate lobbies … to fundamentally change the labour situation in America,” Gordon Lafer, an EPI research associate and an associate professor at the University of Oregon, said at the report’s launch here on Thursday.

Despite the country’s general economic growth, EPI notes that more and more people in the United States are struggling to earn a living wage.

“According to our statistics, from 1983 to 2010 the bottom 60 percent of Americans actually lost wealth, despite the fact that the overall U.S. economy has grown over this same time period,” Ross Eisenbrey, the EPI’s vice-president, said Thursday. “This is a remarkable indictment of how the economy is not working for everybody.”

Although most attacks on labour standards come through state legislatures, the report notes that the momentum behind this large legislative movement has been driven primarily by powerful national corporate lobbies “that aim to lower wages and labour standards across the country.”

Wage theft

Indeed, one of the striking features of the report is the way it sets the local data into the larger national context.

Today, one out of five U.S. citizens is getting paid less than the federally mandated minimum wage. According to recent polls, workers in the U.S. are also increasingly dissatisfied with their current standards of living.

As many as seven in every 10 are saying that the economy is getting worse, and average confidence in the economy has reached its lowest point since November 2011, according to recent polls by Gallup.

On top of that, several U.S. states have already acted in one way or another by taking measures aimed at cutting minimum wage laws, considered some of the last bastions of low-wage worker protections in the country.

In 2011, for instance, New Hampshire legislators repealed the state’s minimum wage, mandating that only the federal minimum wage should be heeded. South Dakota recently abrogated the minimum wage for much of its summer tourism industry.

And while federal minimum wage standards are still in place, these recent trends suggest that the corporate influence at the state level is growing steadily.

While minimum wage restrictions are starting to take their toll on the average worker, the report also notes that many workers are not even able to recover those wages they have actually earned. Their failure to get paid – or what the report calls “wage theft” – refers to those widespread instances in which workers see parts of their paycheques being illegally withheld by their employers.

According to a 2009 survey by the National Employment Law Project, a labour advocacy group, as many as 64 percent of low-wage workers in the United States have seen portions of their paycheques stolen by their employers.

“The problem with alarming issues such as wage theft is that it’s actually very difficult to provide accurate evidence,” the CEPR’s Schmitt says. “Employers say that they’re eventually going to give that money back, but there’s no way of actually monitoring that.”

Advantage: employers

And as workers struggle to obtain those wages legitimately owed to them, national labour regulations seem to be increasingly tilting to the advantage of employers.

Some states have tackled the growing problem of wage theft by requiring employers to keep detailed pay records, or by passing legislation that enables state authorities to inspect these records. But according to the EPI, business lobbies have worked hard to block the enforcement of these efforts, in some cases by challenging the constitutionality itself of wage-theft laws.

In 2010, Florida’s Miami-Dade County enacted the first wage-theft law in the country. Lacking a department of labour since 2002, the state charged its Department of Small Business Administration with the law’s enforcement.

During its first year, the new law enabled the collection of nearly two million dollars’ worth of illegally withheld pay.

But as other counties sought to follow suit with their own wage-theft laws, business lobbies engaged in extensive legal battles aimed at curbing such laws. In 2011, Palm Beach County, another Florida county, tried to enact a wage-theft law similar to Miami-Dade’s, but business lobbies successfully blocked it by arguing that it would only add a costly new bureaucracy.

“The very little enforcement of wage-theft allegations has only contributed to emboldening employers across the country,” Schmitt says. “Right now, they feel they can take more risks and take advantage of their employees, without fear of retaliation.”

Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio used chain gangs and a "tent city" in his crusade against undocumented immigrants in the state. He has been sued more than 2,000 times and is now is overseen by a federal monitor. Credit:Valeria Fernandez/IPS

By Ramy Srour
WASHINGTON, Oct 29 2013 (IPS)

Saul Merlos is an undocumented migrant from El Salvador. About two years ago, he was living and working in the southern U.S. city of New Orleans.

“One day, our employers told us we were going to get paid, but instead they sent immigration,” he told IPS. “I was a witness to the raid, where they got 55 of us.”"People are disappearing on their way to drop their children off to school." -- Jennifer Rosenbaum of the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice

Merlos said the raid was violent. “I was a witness that there was a pregnant woman with her daughter, but they didn’t care,” he said. “They yelled at her, and at all of us, that this was their country and asked us what we were doing in their country. They hit some of us, and didn’t even allow me to use the restroom.”

Speaking to IPS on the sidelines of a hearing at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) Monday, Merlos added that the immigration officers did not read the workers their rights or inform them of what to expect from the detention process.

As momentum builds for U.S. immigration reform after months of political deadlock, a group of NGOs and immigration lawyers are warning that the U.S. system is currently leading to widespread violations of immigrants’ human rights.

The accusations come as the IACHR, the region’s pre-eminent rights forum, began an investigation into the issue on Monday. At that hearing, held at the 35-member Organisation of American States (OAS) headquarters in Washington, advocates questioned the rights standards used by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers (ICE).

According to the witnesses, ICE officers may have violated immigrants’ basic human rights by indefinitely separating them from their U.S. citizen children, in addition to having detained them without appropriate constitutional protections.  

Family focus

At Monday’s hearing, multiple advocacy groups alleged that ICE detention practices have failed to account for the human rights of parties involved when officers use what is known as their prosecutorial discretion. This refers to a federal agency’s authority, in immigration cases, to decide whether to begin removal proceedings against undocumented migrants.

Saul Merlos has been in the United States for 18 years, and has a 13-year old daughter who is a U.S. citizen. A favourable exercise of prosecutorial discretion would avoid him being deported Dec. 17, 2013.

“All we want is for the U.S. government to stop this because they are separating our families,” Merlos said.

The place of human rights in immigration proceedings has emerged as a key point of discussion in recent months in situations in which the children are U.S. citizens but at least one of the parents is deported because of their illegal status. Most of the time, this means that families are separated for indefinite amounts of time.

“We need to realise the serious concerns raised by the way people are being arrested and the way the U.S. government is pursuing these prosecutions.” Jennifer Rosenbaum, the legal director at the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice (NOWCRJ), an advocacy group, told IPS.

“The government’s failure to use its prosecutorial discretion has led to families being separated and to children being separated from their parents,” she said.

NOWCRJ and several other groups are calling on U.S. ICE officers to consider rights norms when detaining illegal immigrants or considering initiating removal proceedings against them. According to data presented before the IACHR this week, U.S. immigration agencies have largely failed to use their prosecutorial discretion, choosing instead to deport thousands of illegal immigrants with no regard to their family ties.

Yet others raise separate concerns about the possible implications of more lenient behaviour on the part of ICE.

“We should remember that the government isn’t actually separating families, as the parent is choosing to leave his or her child behind,” Jon Feere, a legal policy analyst at the Centre for Immigration Studies (CIS), a non-profit organisation here, told IPS.

“Moreover, it probably shouldn’t be standard U.S. policy that people can’t be deported if they have children, because there’s the question of where exactly you’re going to draw the line. If the parent has engaged in criminal activity such as identity theft, or has broken serious laws, are we saying that the American victim is not going to receive any restitution just because that immigrant has a child?”

Rights advocates, on the other hand, suggest that in the majority of related cases, immigrants are stopped and detained unconstitutionally in the first place.

“In New Orleans and other communities across the country, people are disappearing on their way to drop their children off to school,” NOWCRJ’s Rosenbaum said. “Their apprehensions involve the inappropriate use of force and no due process protections. What is even more worrying is that most of them are the victims of outright racial profiling.”

In 2012, as many as 150,000 U.S. citizen children saw at least one of their parents get deported, according to information presented Monday at the IACHR.

The U.S. delegation to the OAS was not able to respond to the panel’s allegations.

“Unfortunately, the federal government shutdown prevented us from properly preparing for today’s hearings, as officers were not able to collect any evidence and witnesses,” Lawrence J. Gumbiner, the deputy U.S. permanent representative at the U.S. mission to the OAS said. Gumbiner later declined to comment further on the human rights implications of the allegations.

Washington gridlock

The hearing comes at a critical time, as Congress recently resumed its work on a proposal that would massively overhaul the United States’ sprawling immigration system. As the House of Representatives looks more closely at the comprehensive Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernisation Act approved by the Senate last June, President Obama urged all in Washington to come together and fix the country’s “broken immigration system”.

House Republicans oppose comprehensive immigration reform, which they worry would force them to accept some provisions that they dislike, particularly a contentious “path to citizenship” for the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants currently living in the United States. Instead, House conservatives have broken apart the many issues in play in the reform push and started passing piecemeal legislation.

“One of the major concerns is that yet another comprehensive immigration bill will only bring more illegal immigration in the country,” CIS’s Feere told IPS. “Right now, many Americans simply do not trust the president to actually go through with the bill’s enforcement provisions.”

President Barack Obama greets Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan in the Oval Office prior to their bilateral meeting, Oct. 23, 2013. Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

By Ramy Srour
WASHINGTON, Oct 24 2013 (IPS)

Even as Pakistan’s prime minister again publicly demanded an end to controversial U.S. drone strikes in his country before a meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama Wednesday, secret documents reveal long-time collusion with the CIA-led targeted assassination programme.

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s visit coincided with fresh allegations this week by human rights groups that U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal regions may amount to war crimes.

On Thursday, the Washington Post said it had obtained top-secret CIA documents and Pakistani diplomatic memos explicitly confirming what was already apparent to many – that “top officials in Pakistan’s government have for years secretly endorsed the programme and routinely received classified briefings on strikes and casualty counts.”

“This whole business of ‘they [Islamabad] secretly or tacitly agreed to the strikes’ is very, very dangerous,” Jeremy Rabkin, a member of the board of directors at the U.S. Institute of Peace, an independent national security institution here, and a professor of law at the George Mason University School of Law, told IPS.

“It doesn’t mean very much to us if the Pakistani government can’t even endorse the drone programme in front of their own people,” he said.

According to Professor Rabkin, the secret deal between the U.S. and Pakistani governments could pose a serious threat to U.S. interests in the long run. “If you look at the anger of the Pakistani people, it is clear that we’ve acted against their consent, and that doesn’t do us any good. I think we’re on very thin ice,” he said.

Two days before the Post’s revelations were published, Sharif continued to to press Obama to put a definitive end to drone strikes at an appearance at the U.S. Institute of Peace.

“The issue has become a major irritant in our bilateral relations,” Sharif said Tuesday. “I would therefore stress the need for an end to drone strikes.”

However, the evidence suggests that this stance is merely a political maneuver aimed at appeasing Sharif’s audience back home.

“What we do know from sources such as Wikileaks is that in the last government at least the prime minister and the president knew about the strikes and supported them,” Christine Fair, an assistant professor at Georgetown University here and a fellow at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center, said Wednesday.

Fair cited a statement by a high-ranking U.S. military official saying that “the U.S.-Pakistan relation is improving because they are letting us kill their terrorists.”

While the Washington Post documents cover the period from 2007 to late 2011, some say that the two countries have shared a covert deal on drone operations ever since the first strike in 2004, which presumably targeted Nek Muhammad Wazir, a greater enemy to Pakistan than he was to the United States as he had twice attempted to assassinate then-President Pervez Musharraf.

“The first drone strike in June 2004 was basically the first time the CIA was allowed to use drones. Musharraf had allowed the CIA to carry out these operations. That was the deal from the beginning,” Mark Mazzetti, the national security correspondent for the New York Times said Wednesday.

Afghanistan

Despite the public outrage over the U.S. drone programme, Afghanistan has been and still is the primary source of tension in U.S.-Pakistan relations, with a looming U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan set for 2014.

In a statement delivered on Tuesday at the U.S. Institute of Peace, Sharif said he believes that “a peaceful, stable and united Afghanistan is in Pakistan’s vital interest.”

However, the relationship between the two countries plunged into crisis in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. raid that captured and killed Osama Bin Laden in northeastern Pakistan in May 2011, which was allegedly conducted without the prior consent of the Pakistani government.

The government in Islamabad soon responded by blocking U.S. and NATO access points in and out of Afghanistan, creating a substantial logistical obstacle to U.S. military movements there. The supply routes opened again in July of 2012.

The Obama administration has also faced critiques over a U.S. airstrike that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers near the country’s border with Afghanistan.

Pakistan has allegedly taken steps of its own aimed at achieving a peaceful solution to the 12-year old conflict in neighboring Afghanistan.

Last month, the government in Islamabad agreed to Afghan requests to release long-time leader and founding member of the Afghan Taliban Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. Pakistani authorities hoped to finally get the peace process started by having the Taliban negotiate with the Afghan government.

According to recent reports, however, Baradar may not be free at all. No negotiations have been set so far, and there have been no talks of setting up a location either. Some suggest that he is still being held captive by Pakistani authorities.

A protest in Peshawar against drone strikes. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ramy Srour
WASHINGTON, Oct 22 2013 (IPS)

The U.S. government has been engaged in unlawful drone strikes in Pakistan that are in violation of international law, and may amount to war crimes, according to a new report released here by Amnesty International on Tuesday.

The report’s release comes at a critical time, as newly-elect Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif returns to Washington for his first official visit as the country’s leader since 1999."The narrative of precision and of no civilian casualties is a false one." -- Naureen Shah of Amnesty International

In the report, “Will I Be Next? U.S. Drone Strikes in Pakistan,” the human rights organisation provides evidence that U.S. drones have killed innocent civilians that posed no apparent threat to the United States.

Amnesty’s report notes that in nine strikes carried out between May 2012 and July 2013, at least 29 unarmed civilians lost their lives, including a 68-year-old woman who was killed instantly by two U.S. Hellfire missiles as she was picking vegetables.

The study was released jointly with a report by Human Rights Watch, another human rights organisation, highlighting the illegality of U.S. drone strikes in Yemen. The report “Between a Drone and Al-Qaeda,” estimates that in Yemen, where the U.S. is currently engaged fighting Yemen’s Al-Qaeda wing (AQAP), dozens of civilians have been killed between 2009 and 2013 by U.S. drone strikes.

“President [Barack] Obama needs to come clean about these killings,” Naureen Shah, an advocacy advisor at Amnesty International USA, told IPS. “What really matters is that the U.S. government and Congress recognise that these killings are occurring, that civilians have been killed and that the narrative of precision and of no civilian casualties is a false one.”

Indeed, while the two human rights groups call for greater transparency by the U.S. government and for accountable investigations of unlawful killings, they are not advocating for an end of the practice itself.

“Drone technology is not illegal per se, it’s just a weapon or a weapons platform. What really matters is that the U.S. government conducts any drone strike in compliance with the rules of international law,” Amnesty International’s Shah told IPS.

According to Human Rights Watch, the U.S. conducted as many as six drone strikes in Yemen, five between 2012 and 2013. Two of the attacks killed civilians indiscriminately “in clear violation of the laws of war,” and the other four strikes targeted individuals who were not legitimate military objectives.

False promises

In a speech delivered last May, Obama vowed to increase his administration’s transparency on the issue of drone strikes, shortly after three U.S. citizens were reportedly killed during a drone operation.

However, critics and human rights activists claim that President Obama has fallen far short of this pledge.

“The U.S. government continues to operate in complete and utter secrecy over its drone policy, so we still don’t know whether the government’s actions amount to war crimes,” Mustafa Qadri, Amnesty International’s Pakistan researcher, said at the report’s launch here on Tuesday.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had no comment when contacted by IPS, referring press inquiries on the matter to the White House.

At a briefing Tuesday, White House spokesman Jay Carney defended the U.S. government’s drone policy.

“We take the matter of civilian casualties enormously seriously and the actions we take are mindful of the absolute need to limit civilian casualties,” Carney said.

So far, the two human rights organisations have been cautious and have not labeled U.S. practice a war crime. Part of the reason is the lack of detailed information.

“We’re still not 100 percent sure that the strikes amount to war crimes. So what we’re doing is we’re calling on the Obama administration to come forward and demonstrate that we’re wrong,” Human Rights Watch’s Letta Tayler said on Tuesday. A more transparent approach, she said, would be a first step.

Both groups urged the U.S. government to at least offer compensation to the relatives of the victims. But the problem, they say, is that the U.S. refuses to acknowledge the strikes. So far, the U.S. government has only acknowledged two attacks in Yemen, which involved the death of U.S. citizens.

Mending relations

U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan have long been a contentious issue between Washington and Islamabad, and the public backlash over civilian victims may hinder U.S. efforts against Al-Qaeda insurgents in the country. Prime Minister Sharif’s visit could not have been more timely.

“The drone issue is definitely going to come up during Sharif’s visit with President Obama, but it probably won’t be a major point of contention, since the two countries are trying to rebuild their ties,” Shuja Nawaz, the director of the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council, a think tank here, told IPS.

According to Nawaz, Pakistan’s prime minister is going to raise protests against U.S. drone policy, but mainly to appease his audience back home.

The two governments are attempting to mend their relations after reaching an historic low-point in 2011, following the capture of Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden and the killing of 24 Pakistani soldiers by a U.S. air strike near the country’s border with Afghanistan.

The White House has also recently confirmed that that it will release a 1.6-billion-dollar aid package to Pakistan, beginning in 2014. It is estimated that most of the aid will be allocated to assisting the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

“In some ways, it is unfortunate that the White House announced its aid release before the Prime Minister’s visit,” the Atlantic Council’s Nawaz told IPS. “It reduces the partnership to a simple transactional relationship, while the two governments should be working more closely together on other important issues, such as better trade relations.”

Sharif is scheduled to meet with President Obama on Wednesday.

Agriculture Under Secretary for Farm and Foreign Agricultural Service (FFAS) Michael Scuse (left) tours a drought stricken corn field with Doug Goyings, on the Goyings farm in Paulding County, Ohio on July 17, 2012. Credit: USDA

By Ramy Srour
WASHINGTON, Oct 21 2013 (IPS)

As the planet heats up and larger populations demand larger water supplies, the United States will be left high and dry if it fails to address a worsening water shortage.

By 2060, the gap between water supply and demand could grow to nearly four billion cubic metres per year – 10 times the amount of water used by the desert-bound city of Las Vegas.“If you go to the western U.S., people are still in that mindset of trying to withdraw as much water as they can, as long as they can pump faster than their neighbour." -- Betsy Otto of WRI

“Water shortage has huge ramifications not just for the entire national economy – as farmers, ranchers, cotton producers have to cope with less and less water – but also for the natural system itself,” Adam Freed, the director of the Securing Water Programme at the Nature Conservancy, an environmental organisation here, told IPS. “And climate change is only going to make it worse.”

According to a new trend analysis by scientists in the public and private sectors, U.S. population growth of nearly one percent and rising global temperatures will result in a clear and significant supply-and-demand imbalance.

Dr. Robert Mace, deputy executive administrator of water science and conservation at the Texas Water Development Board, which monitors aquifer levels throughout the state, told IPS that “2011 was both the hottest and driest year on record in Texas. Statewide agricultural losses [across all crops and livestock] that year totaled 7.62 billion dollars, making it the most costly drought in history – more than 3.5 billion dollars higher than the 2006 drought losses, which was the previous costliest drought on record.”

In the future, 16.7 percent of water supplies in the state are projected to come from agricultural irrigation conservation strategies, according to the 2012 State Water Plan.

In Texas and across the United States – as across the world – initiatives addressing water shortages are already emerging. Clean water funds and water efficiency infrastructure in a host of Western cities make clear that the reality of the looming problem has already begun to dawn on some policymakers.

Organisations such as the Nature Conservancy are creating so-called water funds, conservation projects that aim to guarantee a continuous supply of clean water all along the watershed. One way to do that is by encouraging upstream farmers and downstream municipalities to enter into financial agreements with one another, with cities and utilities paying the farmers to “send” them clean and abundant water.

The money helps upstream users finance water restoration and conservation projects. There are currently 15 water funds projects worldwide, including two major projects in the United States, in the often-parched states of New Mexico and Texas. More are on the way.

Thus far, some of the success of these projects comes from the financial incentives for the upstream stakeholders. Farmers realise that securing their water supply is in their long-term interest, as they are less likely to have to import water from somewhere else.

“Finding the balance between conserving our resources while protecting our economy and the people who rely upon it will always be a difficult task,” Tracy Streeter, director of the Kansas Water Office, told IPS.

The Ogallala Aquifer, which runs under eight Great Plains states and provides nearly a third of all irrigated water in the U.S., is falling, but “reducing the amount of pumping to sustainable levels would cause economic devastation”, she said.

“While some will argue we’re not doing enough, fast enough, a culture of conservation aimed at reducing the decline of the Ogallala is emerging in western Kansas,” Streeter added.

Downscaling to the local

A report by the U.S. Department of the Interior recently noted that one of the country’s most at-risk areas is the Colorado River Basin. This watershed, running through seven western states and two Mexican states, is the largest water source in the United States.

The Basin’s two reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lade Meade, are also the country’s largest reservoirs. And according to Ken Nowak of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the U.S. federal agency that oversees water resource management, the two lakes are quickly drying out.

Cities across the western half of the country are scrambling to stop that from happening.

Founded in 2007, the Water Utility Climate Alliance, or WUCA, is a network that brings together 10 of the nation’s largest municipal water providers.

“WUCA has been doing some really great work. What they’re getting at is trying to understand what the science behind climate change is really telling us,” Betsy Otto, the director of the Aqueduct project at the World Resources Institute (WRI), a think tank here, told IPS.

“But the biggest problem with climate change estimates is that they only give us the global picture. The real challenge is then to downscale them to the local level and understand them.”

In Seattle, a co-chair of the WUCA network, city officials realised that their water demand estimates were far too aggressive, and did not reflect the city’s real needs.

“By carefully looking at the data, they suddenly realised they needed much less water than the estimates suggested,” Otto says. “So they started to bring their demand down, by simply saving water.”

In part, this achievement comes from simple strategies such as the city’s decision to distribute free energy-saving showerheads to all single-family homes, or the creation of water audits helping home- and business-owners understand how they can bring down their water waste.

The city of Seattle now claims to have enough water for the next 30 years.

“Of course, these measures need money in order for them to go through,” Otto notes. “But they’re still much cheaper than having to build water reservoirs.”

Accepting limits

The broader challenge, advocates say, is to get other areas with critical current or future water-shortage problems to come up with their own plans. One of the most significant obstacles in this regard across the country may simply be the general approach to water supply.

“Water scarcity increases commodity prices,” John Mesko, a Minnesota farmer who raises grass-fed beef, told IPS. “Farmers make more and this gives them the push to invest in irrigation facilities. So it’s easy to think ‘I can afford to install irrigation, I make profits.’ That’s fine. But it’s just a quick fix. We need to prepare for the long haul.”

Indeed, unlike with surface water, there are almost no regulations on groundwater pumping. One way would be for federal regulations to put caps on allocations, or distribute permits as for surface water use.

“If you go to the western U.S., people are still in that mindset of trying to withdraw as much water as they can, as long as they can pump faster than their neighbour,” Otto warns. “They continue to think that there are simply no limits on how much you can withdraw.”

*With additional reporting by Aarthi Gunnupuri in New York.

On Tuesday, the largest deregulation in the history of U.S. arms exports took place as part of the Barack Obama administration’s export reform initiative.

But a day after the new reforms came into effect, former government officials and critics from the human rights community are warning of the serious human rights consequences and of the negative long-term impact for U.S. foreign policy.“This could further facilitate the commission of human rights abuses around the world.” -- Amnesty's Adotei Akwei

The reforms are part of the Export Control Reform Initiative (ECRI) brought forward by the Obama administration in 2010, with the goal of simplifying U.S. export practices by eliminating redundant restrictions and regulations.

The most problematic aspect of the reforms is the extensive deregulation of military exports by categorising them as ‘dual-use’ goods, which currently face no trade restrictions under international commercial law.

But according to critics, this large deregulation of armaments trade will have serious long-term consequences for U.S. military strategy and for human rights abuses across the globe.

The arms export reforms will transfer the oversight of military export items from the U.S. Department of State to the U.S. Department of Commerce. This change will only increase the risks connected with arms exports, critics say.

“Unlike standard armaments, dual-use goods currently face little or no restriction because they’ve always been considered normal commercial goods,” said William J. Lowell, a former U.S. State Department official and now the managing director of Lowell Defense Trade, a national security consulting firm here.

The military items that will move to Commerce Department oversight are primarily small parts such as aircraft components, electronic equipment, night vision equipment, and automatic firearms. Credit: West Midlands Police/cc by 2.0

“What this deregulation does is move as much as 75 percent of our arms exports to the Commerce Department, with no regulation,” Lowell told IPS.

No regulation

The military items that will move to Commerce Department oversight are primarily small parts such as aircraft components, electronic equipment, night vision equipment, and automatic firearms.

But these are the items that will inevitably threaten U.S. military strategy, critics suggest.

“When you allow these items to be traded with no restrictions and no licensing, you’re basically allowing places like China and Iran to obtain our military technology and our spare parts with no restrictions whatsoever,” Steven W. Pelak, a former U.S. Justice Department official and now a partner at Holland & Hart, an international law firm, said here on Wednesday. “In the long-term, this can put American lives at risk.”

And while some emphasise the potential backfiring effect of the new deregulation on U.S. interests, others highlight the damaging effect the reforms will have on the international arms export regime.

Since World War II, the U.S. has been in the forefront in urging other countries to control conventional arms more closely, Lowell says.

“We’re the world’s largest arms provider. And now we’re basically retreating from our leadership,” he told IPS. “This means that other countries, like Russia, will be only too happy to agree with decontrolling some of their international arms transfers.”

Human rights abuses

And as critics consider the implications for U.S. foreign policy and military stability in troublesome areas around the world, human rights advocates warn of the human rights abuses that are going to take place after the deregulation.

“We’re seriously concerned that the reforms will open a floodgate of weapons technology and equipment to governments that have bad human rights records,” Adotei Akwei, the managing director for government relations at Amnesty International USA, a global human rights movement, told IPS. “This could further facilitate the commission of human rights abuses around the world.”

Indeed, according to a recent report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Russia, the second-largest arms exporter after the U.S., has provided Algeria, where human rights records are troublesome, with over 90 percent the country’s armaments between 2008 and 2012.

The trend may spread to other problematic spots, including Sub-Saharan Africa. In early 2012, Sierra Leone’s People’s Party raised concerns over large imports of small weapons and ammunition from China, as it feared the weapons could be used to persecute political opponents in the upcoming elections, the SIPRI reports.

Human rights activists fear that these types of scenarios will only increase after the extensive export deregulation measures took effect on Tuesday.

“We in the human rights community have been fighting for the past 30 years to try to bring more oversight and regulation to the global trade in arms because of the link with human rights violations such as killings, displacement of population, and torture,” Amnesty International USA’s Akwei told IPS. “And now we see the U.S. stepping back from these commitments. It is extremely alarming.”

Unclear motives

It is still unclear why the U.S. administration has opted for this arms export deregulation, the largest and most comprehensive in the country’s history.

The shift from the State to the Commerce Department also comes with a change in the definition of what constitutes a “military item.” Before the reforms, the U.S. State Department maintained jurisdiction and control over all items on the U.S. Munitions List, the list containing all military-related items requiring an export license prior to being shipped to foreign countries.

Now, however, the Commerce Department defines a military item as an item that is “inherently military or [one that] possess[es] parameters or characteristics that provide a critical military or intelligence advantage to the United States.”

According to critics, the new definition is alarming.

“This definition is so unclear that the U.S. military industry simply won’t know what will fall under that category. Because of this confusion, we’ll see a real damage for U.S. industry,” Holland & Hart’s Pelak said Wednesday.

And as opponents wonder why the U.S. government will implement reforms that will damage its national industry, U.S. servicemen warn of the deadly consequences of such a massive deregulation.

Kevin McDonnell, a retired U.S. Army Colonel, recently noted that exporting night vision equipment to foreign states, now allowed under Commerce Department rules, would put U.S. lives at risk.

“In enemy hands, these devices can enable hostile forces to track and fire on our aircraft at night,” he says. “The direct result is the loss of American lives.”

Homeless people in front of the Martin Luther King Jr. Library in Washington DC, waiting for shuttles that will take them to food shelters. Credit: Ramy Srour/IPS

By Ramy Srour
WASHINGTON, Oct 17 2013 (IPS)

Near the Martin Luther King Jr. Library in downtown Washington, just a few blocks away from the federal district, dozens of homeless men and women wait for the evening shuttles that will take them to their dinners at one of many food shelters around the city.

They can get by during the day with the few dimes and quarters spared by passersby, but the only daily meal they can really count on is the one they will get at the local food shelter, and so for them, hunger is a very real problem.

Two weeks before federal legislation that will cut funding from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), also known as food stamps, goes into effect on Nov. 1,  thousands of families around the country wonder how they will put food on the  table, while the homeless wonder about meals from shelters, because the one meal they used to count on is no longer a guarantee. "The bill comes at a terrible time, when the needs in this country are tremendous."
-- Josh Protas

Last month, the Chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, Frank Lukas (R-OK), introduced new legislation that will cut almost 40 billion dollars from the SNAP programme, the main source of food funding for thousands of struggling families across the country.

According to a statement released by Lukas after the bill was narrowly approved in the House, the new bill “encourages and enables work participation, closes programme loopholes, and eliminates waste, fraud and abuse while saving the American taxpayer nearly 40 billion dollars.”

‘This is not right’

But while the SNAP cuts may save the U.S. government budget billions, the effects on millions of struggling Americans will be catastrophic, critics say.

“The bill comes at a terrible time, when the needs in this country are tremendous,” Josh Protas, the director of government affairs at Mazon, a Jewish advocacy group that fights hunger in the United States, told IPS. He said the cuts will have a devastating effect on people struggling economically and on food banks and shelters across the country.

“The new cuts will not be able to compensate for the high demand at food banks and shelters, which are already incredibly stretched,” he said.

Bread for the World, a Christian advocacy group, has been pushing Congress to protect the SNAP programme since the new cuts were introduced last September.

“Any kind of cut is really going to hurt families,” Christine Ashley, an analyst at Bread for the World, told IPS. “We estimate that the new cuts will take as much as 36 dollars a month from each family…Think how [many] groceries you can buy with that amount.”

Feeding America, one of the largest hunger-relief organisations in the country, noted in a recent report that up to 75 percent of SNAP households include a child or an elderly or disabled person, all of whom will be affected by the cuts.

Mr. Valentine, 52, is a U.S. Marine Corps veteran who served for eight years. He is now homeless and unemployed, and he told IPS that he relies on food stamps for all his meals. When asked about the upcoming cuts, he expressed desperation and much frustration.

“These cuts, this is not right,” he told IPS. “I don’t know what I’m going to do if they take this money away from me. I have a wife and an 11-year old daughter. We live off food stamps.” He cannot hide his exasperation as he awaits the daily 6:15 pm van that will bring him and others like him to Adam’s Place Emergency Shelter in northeast Washington for a hot meal.

Valentine also believes that a consequence of the cuts will be an increase in crime. “If people get their stamps cut off, you’re going to see more desperate people committing robberies and things like that. Crime is just going to go up.”

Increased demand on charities

The SNAP cuts come at a critical juncture, as federal employees are still trying to recover from a government shutdown that left them without income for over two weeks. In fact, those federal workers with lower incomes have turned to community shelters to get food on their tables.

“With the government shutdown, we have seen a huge increase in people coming to us for food,” David O. Treadwell, executive director of Central Union Mission, Washington’s oldest social service agency, told IPS. “The SNAP cuts are only going to exacerbate this situation.”

The Central Union Mission is one of several non-profit organisations that provide food for people who do not receive food stamps. Located in the Chinatown district, the Mission runs a Food Place Centre in northeast Washington, where volunteers give away up to 125 food bags per day.

According to Jeff, the food service manager at the Mission, people who come to the Mission simply cannot make it from one paycheck to the next. “It’s already a bad situation,” he said. “It’s only going to get worse.”

As the cuts go into effect, organisations like the Central Union Mission will face considerable increase in demand as people turn to organisations that will feed them without stamps.

Room for hope

The SNAP cuts are part of the larger Farm Bill that was approved by a small majority in the House last month. The new bill is likely to penalise millions of unemployed Americans who cannot find work and who will be immediately removed from the SNAP programme.

“Rather than help unemployed workers who have been hit hardest by the recent economic downturn, this bill would penalise many of those who can’t find jobs by throwing them off SNAP,” Bread for the World and Mazon said in a joint statement with other hunger-relief organisations.

“We will continue to push Congress to protect the SNAP programme in any budget bill,” Bread for the World’s Ashley told IPS. “The bill passed only by a seven-vote margin. This means that there is still enough bipartisan support to keep SNAP alive.”

Press freedom advocates here charge that the administration of President Barack Obama is engaged in a war on “leaks” of secret information that is without parallel in this country.

This aggressive stance is having a chilling effect on U.S. press freedoms, they say. On one hand, government officials are becoming increasingly wary of speaking with journalists. On the other, reporters fear future criminal prosecutions over leaked information.“One of the reasons behind this tense atmosphere is that the scope of national security as currently defined by the government is extremely broad." -- Steven Aftergood of FAS

On Thursday, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), a non-profit organisation promoting press freedoms worldwide, released its first comprehensive report on the Obama administration’s surveillance practices and their effects on the domestic press. During the time that Obama has been in office, the number of individuals prosecuted by the Department of Justice (DOJ) for leaked information under the 1917 Espionage Act has seen a staggering increase.

“The Obama administration’s war on leaks … is in stark conflict with the president’s goal of increasing the federal government’s transparency,” Leonard Downie, Jr., the vice president at large of The Washington Post, said Thursday at the report’s Washington release.

Since 2009, a total of six government officials, plus two private contractors, have been subject to criminal prosecutions under the Espionage Act. Prior to that, only three officials had been charged in over nine decades. (Because of the government shutdown, the U.S. Department of Justice was unable to comment for this story.)

“The extremely aggressive approach by the current administration has led to an unusually high number of leak prosecutions,” Steven Aftergood, the director of the Government Secrecy Programme at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), a security-focused non-profit organisation here, told IPS.

“This has created a polarised atmosphere where journalists are simply frightened by the prospect of future prosecution,” he said.

Broad definitions

Public outrage here exploded over another recent incident that saw the Department of Justice secretly seizing Associated Press (AP) telephone records. The secret seizures were part of a DOJ investigation over an AP story that had disclosed a covert U.S. intelligence operation in Yemen.

The DOJ informed the AP of the seizures in May, three months after it had seized the material. Following the AP incident, last month the Senate Judiciary Committee approved a new Media Shield Law, legislation that would protect journalists from being forced to reveal confidential material.

Yet critics, including many journalists, have warned that the law offers only a very narrow definition of journalists, as those individuals who are formally associated with a news media organisation.

“What is worrisome about the new shield law is that, for instance, it would restrict online bloggers and journalists who aren’t connected to a news media organisation from carrying out any journalistic act,” Jillian York, the director of the International Freedom of Expression programme at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an advocacy group, told IPS.

“Of course, that depends on your definition of a journalistic act. Although it’s not a clear definition, it should be as broad as possible so as to safeguard the free flow of information.”

Indeed, much of the current debate seems to be centred on the breadth or narrowness of definitions.

“One of the reasons behind this tense atmosphere is that the scope of national security as currently defined by the government is extremely broad,” FAS’s Aftergood says. “It includes areas that many people think ought to be subject to public debate.”

So, while the public and the media would like to see a freer environment for the flow of information, the government has so far adopted a broad view of national security that has enabled it to withhold large amounts of information from the public.

This change has come at a high price, critics say.

“What the recent leaks tell us is not just that the government is trying to restrict freedom of expression,” Larry Siems, the director of the Freedom to Write Programme at the PEN American Center, an advocacy group advancing free expression, told IPS. “They’re telling us that our government has been engaging in activities that run counter to our laws and to international humanitarian law.”

War on leaks

The most recent example of leaked information involves Edward J. Snowden, the former security contractor who was charged under the Espionage Act for leaking classified government information on phone and Internet surveillance by the U.S. and British governments. Snowden was recently granted asylum in Russia, as he faces prosecution here in the United States.

The Obama administration has also implemented a series of surveillance practices that have made it increasingly troublesome for government officials to approach the press.

The Insider Threat Programme, for instance, aims to eliminate leaks by government officials, ordering federal employees to report any suspicious behaviour by their colleagues. Forced to spy on each other, government officials are now reportedly becoming increasingly less willing to respond to calls from the media, for fear of future repercussions, according to The Washington Post’s Downey, Jr.

The administration’s mass surveillance is impacting on foreign journalists working in the United States, too.

“One of our more troublesome findings is that foreign journalists currently in the U.S. lack any legal protection U.S. reporters may now have,” CPJ’s Joel Simon told IPS. “Unfortunately, they need to operate under the assumption that their communication is not secure.”

The lethal injection room at San Quentin State Prison, completed in 2010. Credit: California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation

By Ramy Srour
WASHINGTON, Oct 9 2013 (IPS)

Authorities in the southern state of Texas are refusing to return lethal injection drugs purchased from two compounding pharmacies, despite calls from the firms not to use their substances for executions.

The move comes after foreign drug companies have largely stopped exporting drugs for lethal injections to the United States, forcing those U.S. states that still impose death penalties to look to domestic compounding pharmacies to supply them with the required drugs.

According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), pharmacy compounding is a practice in which a licensed pharmacist combines, mixes, or alters a drug’s ingredients to create a medication specifically tailored to the needs of an individual patient.

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s (DCJ) refusal has to do with the drug pentobarbital, a substance usually administered as an animal anaesthetic and as a remedy for epilepsy and seizures in humans. The move comes only a few days after one of the two companies involved, Woodlands Compounding Pharmacy (WCP), had expressly requested that the drugs be returned.

“The drugs were purchased legally and we were upfront with the vendors that their names would be subject to public disclosures after the purchase,” Texas DCJ’s spokesman Jason Clark told IPS. “We are not going to return the drugs.”

Clark declined to offer any additional comments, as the issue is currently at the centre of litigation in Texas.

Calls by IPS to WCP for comment were not returned by deadline. However, in an Oct. 4 letter, the owner and pharmacist-in-charge of WCP demanded that the DCJ “immediately return the vials of compounded pentobarbital in exchange for a refund”. According to the company, the sale, which saw WCP providing the State of Texas with eight doses of pentobarbital, took place because Texas had misrepresented the facts.

“Based on the phone calls I had with [the Texas] DCJ, it was my belief that this information would be kept on the ‘down low’ and that it was unlikely that it would be discovered that my pharmacy provided these drugs,” WCP’s Jasper Lovoi wrote. “Now that the information has been made public, I find myself in the middle of a firestorm that I was not advised of and did not bargain for.”

The letter is now being used as evidence in a lawsuit that was filed last week in Texas, challenging the execution of three prisoners on death row.

The other company involved in the controversy, Pharmacy Innovation, has also denied any knowledge of the drugs’ purpose. The company said that it was “completely unaware that the drugs … were purchased with the intent to use them for lethal injections,” according to a new report by the U.K.-based Reprieve, an advocacy group.

As soon as it was informed, the company reportedly cancelled the order before it could be filled.

Asked for comment, Pharmacy Innovation referred IPS to David Ball, of the Ball Consulting Group, LLC, a health communications firm affiliated with the International Academy of Compounding Pharmacists (IACP), a trade association.

“Although it’s true that compounding pharmacies have been approached by some states to provide them with substances that would assist them in certain government practices, we should remember that drugs such as pentobarbital cover only a very small part of what compounding pharmacies do,” Ball told IPS.

“In fact, they represent a miniscule and infinitesimal part of the drugs produced by compounding pharmacies,” he said.

Ball declined to comment on the controversy between the Texas DCJ and Woodlands Compounding Pharmacy.

A new lethal mix

U.S. states turned to compounding pharmacies for drugs for lethal injections only as recently as 2011. That was necessary after drug companies stopped selling sodium thiopental (ST), the substance previously used for executions in the United States.

These drug companies, most based outside the United States, reported facing legal obstacles because of the unconstitutionality of death penalty in their home countries.

The Italy-based Hospira, for instance, announced in 2011 that it would stop producing the drug altogether. The British government, too, banned the export of ST.

That same year, the Denmark-based Lundbeck announced that it would “deny distribution of [pentobarbital] to prisons in U.S. states currently active in carrying out the death penalty by lethal injection.”

So far, the domestic compounding industry has offered a viable alternative to U.S. states still carrying out the death penalty. Texas, Pennsylvania, Colorado and South Dakota, for instance, currently rely on compounding pharmacies for their supply of pentobarbital.

But the recent developments in Texas suggest that this trend may be short-lived.

Death penalty opponents are pushing the U.S. FDA to outlaw the practice of compounding pentobarbital. Thus far, however, the agency has refused to do so, noting only that the broader practice of compounding is currently under scrutiny.

“Pharmacy compounding can serve an important public health need if a patient cannot be treated with an FDA-approved medication,” the agency says. For instance, if a patient needs a medication made without a certain dye because of an allergy, pharmacy compounding can be an important solution.

Nonetheless, the industry’s involvement with the production of pentobarbital has clearly become a point of significant concern for the compounding sector.

Meanwhile, the State of Texas is proceeding with the Wednesday night execution of Michael Yowell, a plaintiff in the Texas litigation, for the murder of his parents in 1998.

Flooding in areas near the malecón, or seaside drive, in Havana is increasing in intensity and frequency, according to a study by the Institute of Meteorology. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Ramy Srour
WASHINGTON, Oct 7 2013 (IPS)

Successful risk management can be a powerful tool for development, the World Bank said Monday in its annual World Development Report (WDR).

The WDR is the Bank’s most comprehensive publication, released yearly since 1978. This year’s report looks at how managing risks, ranging from economic crises to natural catastrophes and health disasters, can end poverty and increase equity.“If governments look at development as an investment, they’ll necessarily have to address the crucial question of what are its expected returns.” -- Georgetown's Bardia Kamrad

“Risk management can save lives, avert economic damages, and can provide resilience and prosperity by allowing people to undertake new endeavours,” Norman Loayza, director of the 2014 WDR, said at the report’s launch here in Washington.

A term usually associated with finance, risk management in development looks at those sets of policies that can help alleviate the negative effects of natural disasters, economic shocks, or health crises.

“A practical example of successful risk management would be for a flood-prone country to allocate funds for simple projects such as building dams, or making sure houses are built on stilts,” Anne Ralte, the director for the Monitoring and Evaluation programme at the International Relief  and Development (IRD), a non-profit organisation here, told IPS.

Loayza and his team are warning that there are currently several obstacles to successful risk management in pursuit of development aims. These include the behavioural failures of decision-makers, lack of resources, and low levels of information with which to make decisions.

The report suggests that poor risk management has resulted in a staggering child mortality rate from illness and injury in low-income countries – a rate 20 times higher than in high-income countries. Poor risk management has also led to more people dying from droughts in Africa than from any other natural disaster.

For instance, a farmer’s ability to withstand a drought can be considerably affected by how previous yields were managed. It will be up to local governments to ensure that the proper agricultural strategies to counter droughts are in place.

Yet if governments and decision-makers can create successful environments for managing risks, these trends can be reversed, Loayza suggests. In the vision laid out in the report, governments should be at the forefront of this effort, by providing tools for risk management in the financial sector and by creating a risk-free environment for vulnerable people.

“We’re advocating a sea change in the way risk is managed,” World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim said Monday. “Our new approach calls for individuals and institutions to shift from being ‘crisis fighters’ to proactive and systematic risk managers.”

Seeing through such changes, Kim suggests, will “help build resilience, protect hard-won development gains, and move us closer to … ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity.”

Investment perspective

Governments and international institutions are at the centre of this new strategy. Decision-makers are called upon to take a number of preventive measures aimed at limiting the uncertainty that is associated with risks.

Bardia Kamrad, a professor and an expert on risk management at Georgetown University’s School of Business, here in Washington, says that one way governments can approach this new idea would be by looking at development as an investment.

“If governments look at development as an investment, they’ll necessarily have to address the crucial question of what are its expected returns,” Kamrad told IPS. “Asking that sort of question would be a great starting point for governments to create the right kind of risk management environment.”

Once development is seen as an investment, he suggests, the international community could more easily tackle the inherent risks associated with it, such as financial shocks and natural disasters.

“If governments around the world start taking an active role in managing these risks, this can be very meaningful,” he says. “The best way would be for governments to actively absorb the risks the WDR identifies.”

He cites macro-level risk analysis and better management of information as potential government strategies.

Indeed, beyond top-down processes, the WDR also finds that preparing people for potential risks induces them to be less risk averse in the first place. For instance, having access to rainfall insurance can encourage farmers to invest in fertiliser, seeds and other such products, instead of refraining from spending money for fear of future droughts.

These are the types of strategies the World Bank is now calling on governments around the world to focus upon in coming years.

At the same time, there are areas where the report may be lacking, says Tom Mitchell of the London-based Overseas Development Institute. He notes that the report is missing a careful analysis of future developments.

“Despite highlighting dynamic risk contexts, there is precious little analysis of the future,” Mitchell said Monday in a statement. “[For] an organisation so publicly focused on ending extreme poverty by 2030, this missing context and perspective is strange.”

However, “risk management in today’s world has taken on a very new perspective and structure,” Kamrad says. “The new WDR shows that we’re heading in the right direction.”

Uncertainty

The publication of the WDR also marks a new way of functioning for the World Bank itself. The new strategy will now see the World Bank including uncertainty- and risk-related components to its country partnership frameworks, the overarching processes that define the bank’s relationships with individual countries.

“So far, [the World Bank] has been very risk-averse, trying to avoid risks when we are faced with uncertainty,” the WDR’s Loayza says. “Instead, we should actively tackle uncertainty with rigorous risk management.”

Indeed, although there are several downsides to uncertainty, there is also a positive side to it, Georgetown University’s Kamrad says.

“If we look at the upsides of uncertainty, we’ll realise that there are also many opportunities involved with risks,” he told IPS. “If risks are properly managed, and governments implement strategies that successfully mitigate risks, we’ll block the downsides of uncertainty and benefit from its upsides.”

This means that, instead of avoiding risks, governments will need to adopt a more preventive approach. Countering financial shocks and taking steps to prepare for or mitigate natural disasters means that governments will increasingly need to strengthen their banking sectors, and build stronger infrastructure that can better counter natural catastrophes such as earthquakes and tsunamis.

Lake Mead National Recreation Area is closed due to the government shutdown. Credit: National Park Service

By Ramy Srour
WASHINGTON, Oct 4 2013 (IPS)

Frustration is mounting with elected representatives here on the fourth day of a U.S. government shutdown that has left nearly 800,000 federal workers temporarily out of work, and advocates across the political spectrum are working to get their voices heard.

Others are working to strengthen the voices of the country’s citizens."The perception is that government is driven by special interests and that it doesn’t act according to common sense.” -- Steven Kull

Already the shutdown is likely to further decrease the U.S. public’s already historically low trust in their government. Recent polls show that 85 percent of Americans believe that members of Congress are more interested in serving special interest groups than the common good.

Just nine percent of respondents believed that Congress is serving the “American people”. Perhaps more worryingly, 75 percent of people in the United States are convinced that the country is currently headed in the wrong direction.

Out of such a situation, some here are starting to look at ways to foster change from beneath.

“What we’re trying to do is bring back to life the founding vision of our republic, that amidst all of our different factions, the American public can finally have a clear voice,” Steven Kull, the founder of a new organisation, Voice of the People, told IPS.

“The biggest problem is that the American people have lost confidence in the way that our government is operating. The perception is that government is driven by special interests and that it doesn’t act according to common sense.”

The new nonpartisan organisation launched Thursday, unveiling a plan to break the constant polarisation and gridlock that have come to characterise – and plague – Washington.

In launching its Campaign for what it’s calling a Citizen Cabinet Wednesday in Washington, Voice of the People brings together former members of Congress from both sides of the aisle to create a platform that will, hopefully, help citizens better connect with their elected officials.

“Recent research shows that Americans believe that a stronger voice of the people will help government break through this gridlock,” Kull says, noting that the shutdown offered a great opportunity for the launch. “Voice of the People is there to do just that.”

Great collective intelligence

The idea behind the new organisation is to create a policymaking simulation with the U.S. citizenry sitting in the driver’s seat. Citizens from all over the country – drawn from nationwide sampling – will be invited to sit on a panel that will see them think as policymakers for 12 months.

The Cabinet, which will operate primarily as an online platform, will include as many as 120,000 people at one time. They will then be informed about the major issues under discussion by Congress.

“The problem today is what we call the ‘noise of democracy’,” Byron Dorgan, a former U.S. senator, said at the programme’s launch. “There is a deep reservoir of common sense around the country, but it is rarely ever heard in the middle of all the noise coming from big money.”

Indeed, recent polls by Voice of the People President Kull, a political psychologist who studies public opinion at the University of Maryland, show that there exists a “great collective intelligence” in the country, as Kull terms it.

The new initiative will enable tens of thousands of U.S. citizens a new way to speak directly with federal lawmakers.

“The Cabinet is not going to replace traditional tools of communication between the people and their representatives. It’s going to make it stronger and better informed,” Bill Frenzel, a former U.S. representative, says.

After they have been briefed on a range of opinions behind issues before Congress, the Cabinet will be asked to formulate its policy.

“What we’re trying to do here is ensure that people get the most reliable kind of information on key issues,” Martin Frost, another former U.S. representative, explains. “Right now, most of the information out there on the Internet is just factually wrong. We want to address that.”

After the Cabinet comes up with an opinion, Voice of the People will break down the results according to congressional districts and send the information on to members of Congress.

“Of course, this doesn’t mean that members of Congress will automatically vote following this data,” Frost says. “But the [Voice of the People] results will make them better informed.”

One of the challenges for the newly unveiled Voice of the People will be its criteria for drawing samples, deciding on the composition of its panels. Although the initiative seeks to involve the entire U.S. citizenry, there are obvious doubts as to whether the initiative’s samples will be able to include, for instance, non-registered voters.

Meanwhile, the Voice of the People organisers are also heading to Congress to look for legislative backing – and legitimacy – for a part of their new plan. “We’re currently working on getting Congress to pass legislation that would create a national academy for a Citizen Cabinet at the national level,” Kull told IPS.

At the same time, funding remains an important concern, as it does today throughout Washington. Thus far, the initiative has benefited from generous funds from private donors, including the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Circle Foundation, but major ongoing economic concerns here will undoubtedly prove challenging to additional fundraising.

Textiles are one of the key sectors to benefit from the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA). Credit: Kristin Palitza/IPS

By Ramy Srour
WASHINGTON, Oct 1 2013 (IPS)

With a key U.S.-Africa trade agreement up for renewal in 2015, advocates on all sides of the issue say current policies are rife with shortcomings that leave many African businesses out in the cold.

Since its enactment in 2000, the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) has sought to create trade opportunities for small- and medium-sized African businesses by helping them export their products to the U.S. market.“The greater challenge is to get those key commodities such as sugar and cocoa products to access the U.S. market.” -- Kimberly Elliott of the Centre for Global Development

But policymakers and activists alike are currently increasing focus on AGOA’s failures at empowering Africa’s poorer communities, and whether the act can be tweaked by 2015.

“AGOA has been successful, but only within its limited parametres,” Kimberly Elliott, a senior fellow and expert on trade policy and globalisation at the Centre for Global Development (CGD), a think tank here, told IPS. “The bill has been relatively effective in removing U.S. barriers to African trade, but it hasn’t addressed the fundamental competitiveness issue in Africa.”

And while U.S. exports to Africa have tripled over the last decade, “only as little as 1.3 million jobs have been created on the African continent since the enactment of AGOA,” Ambassador Michael Froman, the U.S. trade representative, recently warned.

According to the U.S. Department of State, “African exports under AGOA have more than quadrupled since the programme’s inception. In 2012, AGOA-eligible countries exported nearly 35 billion dollars in products to the United States duty free under AGOA.”

Limited reach

One of the obstacles to a truly successful outcome for AGOA has been its focus on only some sectors of the economy – including oil exports – to the detriment of those sectors with a more immediate impact on poorer segments of society. That includes the agricultural sector, the single most important for African communities.

“Outside of clothing and other few sectors, U.S. tariffs were already quite low prior to AGOA,” Elliott says. “The greater challenge is to get those key commodities such as sugar and cocoa products to access the U.S. market.”

So far, agricultural products have been excluded from the AGOA framework because of U.S. domestic regulations. This seems to be the biggest bump on AGOA’s road to decreasing poverty in Africa.

“There aren’t that many sectors benefiting from AGOA, apart from textiles,” Zenia Lewis, an analyst on economic development in Africa at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, told IPS. “And unfortunately, the sector that has reaped most of the benefits has been the oil industry.”

According to recent estimates, oil exports cover nearly 90 percent of goods leaving African shores.

At the same time, AGOA has managed to open the U.S. market to the growing African textile industry. Many are today touting as a key AGOA success story the recent boom in Kenyan textile exports to the United States, to companies such as Victoria’s Secret and Macy’s.

According to the most recent estimates, Kenya was the United States’ 103^rd-largest supplier in 2011, with a total of 382 million dollars’ worth of imported goods, a nearly 23 percent percent increase from 2010.

“So far,” CGD’s Elliott says, “this has been AGOA’s best result when it comes to the poorer segments of African producers.”

Sheri Berenbach, president of the U.S. African Development Foundation (USADF), a federal agency, told IPS, “It is important to recognise that one of the most important constituencies of AGOA are the small local and marginalised communities. USADF has been very supportive of AGOA and trade, because a quarter of the producers that we support are small local groups that are now deeply involved with exports to the United States.”

USADF offers development grants to small African businesses seeking to access the U.S. market. Berenbach says such opportunities can have a direct impact on poverty. “Most of the work in Africa is about dealing with the weakest part of the African economy, the impoverished communities,” she says.

Deprivation

As the bill is set to expire, a broad cross-section of interests are looking to 2015 and providing recommendations on how to improve AGOA. They suggest that the bill’s ineffectiveness to date may not be entirely a result of hidden trade barriers.

“AGOA can’t reach those many African communities that aren’t involved in the production process, simply because of domestic restrictions and a lack of adequate infrastructure,” Mwangi S. Kimenyi, the director of the Africa Growth Initiative at the Brookings Institution here, told IPS.

A recent poll by Afrobarometer, an independent research organisation, finds that almost half of Africans still perceive themselves as being poor. Based on polls conducted in 34 countries, the survey shows that at least 20 percent of Africans still feel deprivation with respect to their most basic needs such as food, water and medicines.

One way to do address this, some suggest, would be to include a provision in the next version of AGOA that would provide assistance to small-scale African traders to build their skills at dealing with international trade concerns. USADF’s Berenbach calls this a “trade capacity-building”, or TCB, component.

“Including a strong TCB component would enable even the smaller producers to be more productive and trade effectively, so that we can really use trade to achieve development,” she says.

At the same time, Brookings’s Kimenyi notes that many see AGOA as doing very little for U.S. companies seeking to invest in Africa. Many corporate interests will thus be looking to the debate leading up to the 2015 renewal as an opportunity to change this aspect of the trade agreement.

With a key U.S.-Africa trade agreement up for renewal in 2015, advocates on all sides of the issue say current policies are rife with shortcomings that leave many African businesses out in the cold. Since its enactment in 2000, the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) has sought to create trade opportunities for small- and medium-sized African businesses by helping them export their products to the U.S. market.

Textiles are one of the key sectors to benefit from the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA). Credit: Kristin Palitza/IPS

But policymakers and activists alike are currently increasing focus on AGOA’s failures at empowering Africa’s poorer communities, and whether the act can be tweaked by 2015.

“AGOA has been successful, but only within its limited parametres,” Kimberly Elliott, a senior fellow and expert on trade policy and globalisation at the Centre for Global Development (CGD), a think tank here, told IPS. “The bill has been relatively effective in removing U.S. barriers to African trade, but it hasn’t addressed the fundamental competitiveness issue in Africa.”

And while U.S. exports to Africa tripled over the last decade, “only as little as 1.3 million jobs have been created on the African continent since the enactment of AGOA,” Ambassador Michael Froman, the U.S. trade representative, recently warned.

According to the U.S. Department of State, “African exports under AGOA have more than quadrupled since the programme’s inception. In 2012, AGOA-eligible countries exported nearly 35 billion dollars in products to the United States duty free under AGOA.”

One of the obstacles to a truly successful outcome for AGOA has been its focus on only some sectors of the economy – including oil exports – to the detriment of those sectors with a more immediate impact on poorer segments of society. That includes the agricultural sector, the single most important for African communities.

“Outside of clothing and other few sectors, U.S. tariffs were already quite low prior to AGOA,” Elliott says. “The greater challenge is to get those key commodities such as sugar and cocoa products to access the U.S. market.”

So far, agricultural products have been excluded from the AGOA framework because of U.S. domestic regulations. This seems to be the biggest bump on AGOA’s road to decreasing poverty in Africa.

“There aren’t that many sectors benefiting from AGOA, apart from textiles,” Zenia Lewis, an analyst on economic development in Africa at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, told IPS. “And unfortunately, the sector that has reaped most of the benefits has been the oil industry.”

According to recent estimates, oil exports cover nearly 90 percent of goods leaving African shores. At the same time, AGOA has managed to open the U.S. market to the growing African textile industry. Many are today touting as a key AGOA success story the recent boom in Kenyan textile exports to the United States, to companies such as Victoria’s Secret and Macy’s.

According to the most recent estimates, Kenya was the United States’ 103^rd-largest supplier in 2011, with a total of 382 million dollars’ worth of imported goods, a nearly 23 percent percent increase from 2010. “So far,” CGD’s Elliott says, “this has been AGOA’s best result when it comes to the poorer segments of African producers.”

Sheri Berenbach, president of the U.S. African Development Foundation (USADF), a federal agency, told IPS, “It is important to recognise that one of the most important constituencies of AGOA are the small local and marginalised communities. USADF has been very supportive of AGOA and trade, because a quarter of the producers that we support are small local groups that are now deeply involved with exports to the United States.”

USADF offers development grants to small African businesses seeking to access the U.S. market. Berenbach says such opportunities can have a direct impact on poverty. “Most of the work in Africa is about dealing with the weakest part of the African economy, the impoverished communities,” she says.

As the bill is set to expire, a broad cross-section of interests are looking to 2015 and providing recommendations on how to improve AGOA. They suggest that the bill’s ineffectiveness to date may not be entirely a result of hidden trade barriers.

“AGOA can’t reach those many African communities that aren’t involved in the production process, simply because of domestic restrictions and a lack of adequate infrastructure,” Mwangi S. Kimenyi, the director of the Africa Growth Initiative at the Brookings Institution here, told IPS.

Forced marriages are at the root of many of the murders committed by women in Afghanistan. Credit: Najibullah Musafer/Killid

By Ramy Srour
WASHINGTON, Sep 25 2013 (IPS)

Gender equality around the world has increased dramatically over the past half-century even though the vast majority of countries continue to restrict women’s economic development in at least one way, the World Bank reports this week.

The Washington-based institution, the world’s largest development funder, released a major report Tuesday tracking gender equality developments in 143 countries, focusing particularly on the last two years but contextualising those changes since the 1960s.

It finds that although many countries have moved toward greater gender parity, there are still major areas – particularly in the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa – where substantial legal barriers to equality remain in place.

Civil society groups generally agree with the bank’s long-term analysis, but emphasise that the picture on the ground remains problematic. Even when policies have changed, they say, poor implementation remains an outstanding issue.

“While it is true that over the last 50 years we have seen a huge uplift in women’s rights laws on violence, divorce and property rights, the greatest challenge is that the majority of these laws aren’t actually being enforced,” Ritu Sharma, president of Women Thrive Worldwide, a non-profit organisation here, told IPS.

“The real goal is to create infrastructure that will enable local governments to actually prosecute sex offenders, get women to keep their ownership rights, and enable them to initiate divorce proceedings. Right now, very little is being done to ensure that these new laws are respected.”

Nearly 90 percent of the 143 countries were found to have at least one legal restriction on women’s economic opportunities, according to the report. Bank researchers focused on regulations affecting women’s property rights, legal decision-making procedures, legal protections addressing violence against women, and legal barriers on women’s economic empowerment.

Most restrictions impact women’s ability to conduct basic activities, ranging from applying for a passport to registering a business, from opening a bank account to applying for a job to their ability to hold property. In 15 countries, husbands are still legally allowed to prevent their spouses from working or accepting a job.

The most significant obstacles in this regard affect some of the most basic aspects of women’s everyday lives. The length of paid maternity leave, for instance, as well as laws penalising employers from firing pregnant women are some of the most common.

Nonetheless, “Progress on gender equality under the law is accelerating,” Augusto Lopez-Claros, the director of global indicators and analysis at the World Bank Group, said Tuesday.

He added that some of the restrictions that have been removed were also some of the oldest still alive. For instance, in Latin America and the Caribbean women now have the ability to represent the family and manage marital assets, something only their husbands were previously allowed to do.

Spotty implementation

Funding and technical expertise from multilateral institutions has had an increasingly important role in nurturing gender equality around the world. But many advocates, such as Sharma, suggest that most multilaterals came late to this work, with the most important successes of the past half-century being carried out by local grassroots organisations.

“Although multilateral organisations such as the World Bank have done a lot of work pushing for better gender equality laws,” Sharma says, “they have only really stepped in as recently as five or 10 years ago.”

The World Bank’s financial contribution, for instance, has had an important impact on the global debate. But Sharma says much of the institution’s work seems to have had the effect of providing a normative basis for the movement, while local activists are struggling to implement their own strategies.

“What seems to be happening today is that local groups realise that they have to do most of the implementation on their own, so they are coming up with new ways to do that,” she notes, suggesting that many are now focusing on ways to change the social norms that lead to gender inequality.

“One way to do that is by reaching out to local religious institutions and trying to achieve gender equality by educating women through their faith and their cultural norms.”

Inequality rhetoric

Others worry that foreign-funded development projects themselves fail to fully account for their own unequal impact on women.

“What most multilateral organisations have achieved over the last few years is to improve their rhetoric on gender inequality in the global debate – but that’s about it,” Elaine Zuckerman, president of Gender Action, an advocacy group here that promotes women’s rights in international development investments, told IPS.

“The World Bank, for instance, has invested large amounts of money in excellent research, but they are still missing a rigorous gender-based approach to women’s issues.”

She says she would like to see the bank increase the number of gender specialists it employs.

Indeed, Gender Action has long been a critical observer of the negative impact that internationally funded development projects can have on women. A 2006 report by the group, for instance, looked at the gender dimension of a multilateral-funded oil-and-gas pipeline project in Central Asia.

“These industrial developments had a tragic impact on women,” Zuckerman says. “All construction and office jobs went to men, and the farmlands where women had been working had to be removed. The result was that women were practically forced into sex labour in order to sustain themselves.”

In the aftermath of the worst terror attack in East Africa in three years, foreign policy scholars here are urging the U.S. government to rethink its counter-terror policy in the region.

As the number of victims rises to 62 in an armed siege that has held dozens of people hostage in a major mall in uptown Nairobi, many are suggesting that the Somali Al Shabaab militant organisation, reportedly linked to Al-Qaeda, may be stronger and better organised than previously thought.

Just over a year ago, joint U.S.-Kenyan forces managed to expel Al Shabaab from their last stronghold in southern Somalia, leading the U.S. government to call it a success story for U.S. counter-terror policy. But what has taken place over the weekend in Nairobi’s Westgate Mall could suggest otherwise.

“This attack should be seen as a call to action,” Katherine Zimmermann, of the American Enterprise Institute, a neoconservative think tank here, told IPS. “What the attack shows is that the fight against terrorism in Africa has stagnated and that groups like Al Shabaab are much stronger than the U.S. administration thought.”

In coming days, U.S. policymakers may look anew at their counter-terror approach, particularly in Kenya, where the government has been a key U.S. ally.

“What this attack does is strengthen the notion that the region ought not to be seen solely through the lenses of counter-terrorism, sacrificing other equally important issues the international community should address,” Vanda Felbab-Brown, an expert on non-traditional security threats at the Brookings Institution, a think tank here, told IPS.

“Current U.S. counter-terror strategy in the region has focused primarily on targeted attacks against Al Shabaab, while it should have addressed the structural causes of their radicalisation.”

Felbab-Brown cites high unemployment, a weak Somali economy and widespread corruption as the main reasons behind the radicalisation of youths that have joined Al Shabaab. U.S. counter-terror efforts, she says, have devoted little or no attention to these issues.

The U.S. government delivered a total of 445 million dollars in security aid to Somalia between 2008 and 2011, almost 50 percent of total U.S. aid to the country during that period. What seems to be missing from the U.S. strategy, Felbab-Brown says, is “a real effort to improve the Somali economy and urge the government to foster a broader political inclusion of these youth”.

Few analysts would suggest that the issue of counter-terrorism should be left off the agenda in East Africa entirely. But experts in Washington are increasingly urging that U.S. strategy include concrete efforts aimed at strengthening civil society and rebuilding the Somali judiciary system, which remains dysfunctional following decades of civil war.

Following the attack, the U.S. government immediately promised to aid the Kenyan government in the aftermath of the attack.

“We have offered our assistance to the government of Kenya and stand ready to help in any way we can,” Secretary of State John Kerry said Saturday.

No surprise

U.S. counter-terrorism involvement in Somalia began in the early 2000s, during the administration of President George W. Bush. At the time, the U.S. government sought to help both Somalia and neighbouring Ethiopia to topple the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), which at the time was seeking to replace the power vacuum in Somalia with an Islamic regime run in accordance with Sharia law.

Al Shabaab formed during those years as the military wing of the ICU, and it has since sought to expel “hostile forces” in the region. Yet international forces, facilitated particularly by the United States, eventually made significant inroads in the fight against Shabaab militants.

Between 2011 and 2012, the U.S.-backed Kenyan military led a series of counter-terror strikes inside Somalia that resulted in the ouster of the group from Kismayo, a key coastal town known for its access to the oil routes of the Red Sea and Al Shabaab’s last stronghold in Somalia.

The U.S. Department of State welcomed Kismayo’s liberation as the end of the battle and greeted the “African Union Mission’s (AMISOM) success in driving the al-Shabaab terrorist organization out of strategically important population centers” as important achievements for U.S. counter-terror strategy in the region.

But the group, with a membership estimated at around 5,000 militants, was never really defeated, its continued strength now underlined by this weekend’s siege of the Nairobi mall. The Westgate attack is just the latest in a series of retaliatory measures taken by Al Shabaab against its enemies in East Africa, including a raid against a U.N. compound in June.

“The terrorist attack at Nairobi’s Westgate shopping centre was evidently a retaliation by Al Shabaab for the Kenyan military presence in Somalia since October 2011, and a deliberate signal that they are still a force to be reckoned with,” James Jennings, president of Conscience International, a humanitarian aid organisation that worked in Somalia during the 2010-11 famine, said Monday

“It represents a continuation of the violence that has swirled throughout East Africa in the wake of the disintegration of Somalia, a war now increasingly being exported across the region’s borders.”

Other analysts are suggesting that the mall was an attractive target because Westerners, including those from the U.S., frequented it.