A Bolivian cocalero shows his leaf-picking technique. Credit: Diana Cariboni/IPS

By Samuel Oakford
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 26 2014 (IPS)

This week, the U.N. reported that coca cultivation in Bolivia fell nine percent last year, and a massive 26 percent in the past three years.

Two mid-altitude regions – Yungas de La Paz and the Cochabamba Tropics – account for nearly all cultivation in Bolivia and both areas saw significant reductions in 2013. Remarkably, illegal cultivation in Bolivia’s national parks was cut in half, to only one thousand hectares.“A very small country challenged the basic premises of U.S. domination and policy implications, and it succeeded." -- Kathryn Ledebur

The nationwide decrease, to an area of only 23,00 hectares, or 12 miles, is widely regarded as a laudable achievement, but overlooked is the fact that Bolivia’s success has come on its own terms – not Washington’s – and with vital cooperation from many of the country’s small coca farmers.

“Bolivia reduced the crop through eradication efforts, but also with the participation of coca growers and farmers,”Antonino de Leo, U.N. Office for Drugs and Crime’s representative in Bolivia, told IPS.

“They are doing this in a climate of participation and dialogue – they call it social control,” he added. “Not only does the government have a target for illicit cultivation, but it’s the very same as what farmers and the union of farmers have.”

After his election in 2005, President Evo Morales, himself the former head of the country’s Cocalero union, began negotiating with farmers and their unions, working to convince them that mutually agreed upon cultivation totals would mean higher prices and a sustainable income for tens of thousands of subsistence growers.

Indeed, last year, the price of coca in Bolivia, already higher than in neighbouring Colombia and Peru, rose a further seven percent, from 7.40 dollars to 7.80 dollars per kg.

While the total value of Bolivia’s coca crop fell from 318 million dollars to 283 million dollars, farmers for the most part no longer live in fear of having their livelihoods destroyed by the severe eradication efforts that were funded by the U.S. and characterised drug policy in the Andean nation for decades.

A militarised response favours criminal gangs and armed factions and leads to a concentration of illicit wealth among those groups. In Bolivia, the annual coca allowance of one cato – usually 1600 square metres – is seen as a sort of minimum wage, rather than a bonanza for a small elite.

Unlike in Peru and especially in Colombia, where forced eradication, fumigation and seizures are still the preferred method of handling illegal coca production, farmers in Bolivia allow officials to visit and measure their mountainside fields – measurements that are then verified by satellite data.

Because of this, data reported by the government closely match U.S. figures (they were identical in 2012), while the two sets of numbers can vary wildly in neighbouring countries.

“Nothing is done entirely without friction, but it has done away with cycles of protest and violence and the deaths of coca growers,” Kathryn Ledebur, director of the Andean Information Network, told IPS. “There continue to be human rights violations, but in the past they would rip out all their coca and there was no plan for how they should eat in the meantime.”

In Colombia, the government destroys roughly 100,000 hectares every year. Because small farmers often have no economic alternative, they replant coca, and the cycle begins again.

Bolivia’s programme does have strict limits and well-defined geographic allotments for growing. Any plants found to be in excess of the cato or in areas not approved for cultivation are destroyed.

“Good practices show that in order to reduce illicit crops in a sustainable way and avoid the balloon effect, there is a need to combine eradication efforts with long-term participatory development programmes that create real opportunities for the farmers, and they need to be comprehensive,” said de Leo.

In 2008, Morales expelled U.S. ambassador Philip Goldberg; the following year the Bolivian government kicked the DEA out the country, and drug funding from the U.S. ceased.

The moves were a precursor to a carefully planned re-working of Bolivia’s obligations under the U.N. convention system that governs global drug policy. In 2011, the country took the unprecedented step of withdrawing from the 1961 convention on Narcotics Drugs, but the following year re-acceded – with the stipulation that Bolivia be allowed to maintain a legal domestic market for coca leaves.

The decision was accepted by the overwhelming majority of member states, who accepted that coca was a traditional plant used, without abuse, by millions of Bolivians.

Like various other efforts, including marijuana legalisation in several U.S. states, the decision served to chip away at a uniform and prohibitionist legal interpretation of the conventions. But unlike Uruguay, Washington and Colorado, Bolivia has official approval from the international community.

“If 15 years ago someone asked what would happen to an Andean country that loses all U.S. funding, we’d be talking about Marines coming in and things falling apart, but none of those things have happened,” said Ledebur.

“A very small country challenged the basic premises of U.S. domination and policy implications, and it succeeded,” she added.

Last year, the U.S.government cited Bolivia’s withdrawal from the conventions when it decertified it for failing “demonstrably to make sufficient efforts to meet its obligations under international counternarcotics agreements.” But in the same memorandum, authorities acknowledged the “pure potential cocaine production” of the country had decreased 18 percent in 2012.

While Bolivia may have made peace with its coca growers, it’s still the third largest producer of cocaine in the world. In 2013, the government destroyed over 5,000 cocaine production facilities and maceration pits and seized 20,400 kilogrammes of cocaine paste.

Fueling production in the Andes is the growth in demand in Brazil, today the second largest cocaine market in the world behind the U.S.

“As long as there is a solid demand for cocaine, it’s going to be very difficult to compete with coca – it will always be a very attractive crop,” said de Leo.

Though users are generally not criminalised for use to the extent in other countries, law 1008, a draconian, U.S.-influenced legislation signed in 1988 still underpins drug policy in the Bolivia. A lack of clarity in the law means a worker labouring inside a cocaine factory can be treated the same as a powerful “narcotraficante”.

Law enforcement efforts still tend to target the poorest members of Bolivia’s society. One survey found 60 percent of prisoners were earning less than 300 dollars every month before they were arrested.

“They pursue interdiction in a very traditional way,” said Ledebur.

Buoyed by his successes, Morales has announced a goal of further reductions in the coca crop, down to 14,700 hectares. To this point, curtailment has been sufficiently absorbed by growers, but greater cuts could run up against opposition. If farmers feel squeezed, Morales, the former coca grower, could find he’s bit off more than he can chew.

Between 2000 and 2012, rents in the U.S. rose by 12 percent while the average renters’ income fell 13 percent. Credit: Bill Lapp/CC-BY-2.0

By Samuel Oakford
NEW YORK, Jun 9 2014 (IPS)

Six years after the financial crisis, Wall Street’s housing alchemy engine is revving up again – only this time it’s coming for your rental.

Right as housing prices bottomed out around January 2012, large institutional investors began buying distressed properties in regions hit hard by the foreclosure crisis; they’ve purchased at least 200,000 to date.

In only a year, private equity giant Blackstone Group went from owning no single-family rental properties (SFRs) to being the U.S.’ single largest landlord.

Now, several companies, including Blackstone, are packaging their SFRs into bonds similar to the mortgage backed securities that fueled the financial crisis.

Like those securities, SFR bonds are backed by homes; but this time rental payments, rather than mortgage payments, pay the interest. Securitisation frees up money, allowing big buyers to purchase more properties with less capital by increasing their leverage – and risk.

“Previously you had individual ‘mom and pop’ landlords, but now you have companies that have large portfolios that span multiple states – [will] the systems that they are putting in place [...] be able to keep up?” -- Sarah Edelman, policy analyst at the Center for American Progress

Issuances thus far are small – less than three billion dollars. But wary housing advocates are pushing regulators to increase supervision. Wall Street’s role as a proprietor is unprecedented, and no one knows what to expect, least of all the families renting the homes.

Last year, two senior Federal Reserve economists warned institutions could “have difficulties managing such large stocks of rental properties or fail to adequately maintain their homes.”

Indeed, this May, a couple in Sun Valley, California filed suit against Blackstone subsidiary Invitation Homes for allowing their home to descend into a slum, where they allege toxic mould caused “nose bleeds, headaches, fatigue, memory loss, inability to concentrate, chronic runny nose, respiratory issues and other chronic flu-like symptoms.”

In January, California Congressman Mark Takano called for hearings on the issue, but they have yet to take place.

“Securitisation allows for bad practices to flourish exponentially,” Kevin Stein, associate director of California Reinvestment Coalition, told IPS. “We don’t know what kind of property manager is available, and we don’t know if there will be pressure to raise rents.”

Last October, Deutsche Bank marketed the first ever bond backed by SFRs – 479.1 million dollars in expected rental payments on 3,207 units owned by Invitation Homes.

The deal was only a drop in the bucket of 44,000 homes Blackstone owns nationwide. This summer, they aim to package a billion dollars’ worth of units.

Collectively over the past three years, large investors have spent an estimated 20 billion dollars on homes. The thought of capturing more of the three-trillion-dollar single-family market has Wall Street frothing at the mouth.

Their entrance into the housing market comes amid historic inequality in the U.S., where extracting wealth from the poorest has become normalised.

The financialisation of everyday life means that something as commonplace as the landlord banging on your door for rent now involves thousands of investors, thousands of miles away, all urging that landlord to extract greater profits.

“Single family rental is not new,” Sarah Edelman, policy analyst at the Center for American Progress, told IPS. “Previously you had individual ‘mom and pop’ landlords, but now you have companies that have large portfolios that span multiple states – [will] the systems that they are putting in place work – will they be able to keep up?”

Because institutional investors can pay more than the asking price – in cash – for multiple properties, they’ve edged out local would-be homeowners and driven up prices in several hot markets. The percent of all-cash buyers has doubled in only a year, to over 40 percent of all home sales.

Tight credit for personal mortgages – from the same lenders that liberally dished out dangerous subprime loans before 2008 – has only worsened the picture for renters looking to move into a home of their own.

That has resulted in homeownership rates at two-decade lows and rising rents in practically every region.  Income, however, is moving in the opposite direction. Between 2000 and 2012, rents rose 12 percent in real dollars; over that same period, the median income of renters fell 13 percent.

SFR-backed securities do theoretically open up funding for an expansion of the rental market. Though there is an immediate need for affordable housing, seeing Wall Street renting out homes that its own malfeasance forced owners to abandon makes for a bitter image.

“Millions of families lost their homes during the foreclosure crisis and now as a result we have millions of families that are looking for homes to rent,” said Edelman. “We do need an increased supply of rental housing, but we also need to make sure those are stable.”

But as SFRs, like seemingly every financial instrument, become increasingly inevitable, housing advocates don’t want regulators to be playing catch up.

“The industry doesn’t have much of a track record – it’s important that the industry establishes best practices and that state and local policy makers revisit their landlord-tenant policies,” said Edelman.

Issuances are picking up. In April, Colony American homes sold bonds totaling 513 billion dollars. The next month, American Homes 4 Rent, the largest publicly traded single-family landlord, sold 481 million dollars’ worth.

More than half of the properties in the American Homes 4 Rent deal were located in Atlanta, Dallas, Las Vegas, Tampa and Phoenix – some of the cities hit hardest when the housing bubble collapsed.

“Securitisation just provides a mechanism to increase the volume of this activity,” Stein told IPS. “It’s not surprising people have found out a way to make money out of this.”

(END)

UNITED NATIONS, June 7, 2014 (IPS) – A new UN report finds astronomical resource prices are doing little to stem their depletion around the world.

The study is the second released by the UN’s Environmental Program (UNEP) that looks at the prospect of “decoupling” economic growth from resource consumption and environmental degradation.

"...Annual material extraction grew by a factor of eight during the twentieth century” - Achim Steiner, UN Under Secretary-General and UNEP executive director
The numbers are stark: during the 20th century, extraction of materials from the earth grew eight-fold. Since the start of the 20th century, metal mining has grown at such a rate that the report required a logarithmic graph to illustrate it’s exponential increase.

Since 2000, metal prices have risen 176 percent, rubber prices by 350 percent and energy overall by 260 percent.

It is estimated that by the middle of the century, extraction of “minerals, ores, fossil fuels and biomass” will rise to three times their 2000 levels. That, says Achim Steiner, UN Under Secretary-General and UNEP executive director, is something the earth – or at least one humans can inhabit – is not made to withstand.

“The worldwide use of natural resources has accelerated – annual material extraction grew by a factor of eight during the twentieth century – causing severe environmental damage and depletion of natural resources,” said Steiner. “Yet this dangerous explosion in demand is set to accelerate as a result of population growth and rising income.”

Without slowing extraction and consumption, it is estimated that within 50 years the world economy will experience shortages of several metals vital to industrial production.

Decoupling technologies that would allow growth to continue apace but cut back on resource use are myriad – in theory.

By better utilizing existing technology and streamlining what industries squeeze out of their inputs, the report estimated the world could save 3.7 trillion each year on resources.

The opportunities are big and small – from switching to high efficiency engines in China’s oil fields to simply installing LED traffic lights in South Africa.

If developing countries were to make a just a partial switch to higher-grade steel, the resulting efficiencies could result in a 20 percent drop in the cost of steel worldwide.

But standing in the way of efficiency are over one trillion dollars spent annually to subsidize consumption of resources. Subsidies, the report found, often “support continued inefficient use of resources, not resource productivity.” In other words, not only do they lead to great pollution, but they are a net-loss for economies.

The danger, however, is that any savings resulting from energy efficiency will simply be plowed into new projects.

Last year, renewable energy captured a larger percentage of the energy market than in 2012, but overall consumption grew so much that global carbon emission still rose by 2.1 percent.

A new UN report finds astronomical resource prices are doing little to stem their depletion around the world.

The study is the second released by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) that looks at the prospect of “decoupling” economic growth from resource consumption and environmental degradation.

The numbers are stark: during the 20th century, extraction of materials from the earth grew eight-fold. Since the start of the 20th century, metal mining has grown at such a rate that the report required a logarithmic graph to illustrate it’s exponential increase.

Since 2000, metal prices have risen 176 percent, rubber prices by 350 percent and energy overall by 260 percent.

It is estimated that by the middle of the century, extraction of “minerals, ores, fossil fuels and biomass” will rise to three times their 2000 levels. That, says Achim Steiner, UN Under Secretary-General and UNEP executive director, is something the earth – or at least one humans can inhabit – is not made to withstand.

“The worldwide use of natural resources has accelerated – annual material extraction grew by a factor of eight during the twentieth century – causing severe environmental damage and depletion of natural resources,” said Steiner. “Yet this dangerous explosion in demand is set to accelerate as a result of population growth and rising income.”

Without slowing extraction and consumption, it is estimated that within 50 years, the world economy will experience shortages of several metals vital to industrial production.

Decoupling technologies that would allow growth to continue apace but cut back on resource use are myriad – in theory.

By better utilizing existing technology and streamlining what industries squeeze out of their inputs, the report estimated the world could save 3.7 trillion each year on resources.

The opportunities are big and small – from switching to high efficiency engines in China’s oil fields to simply installing LED traffic lights in South Africa.

If developing countries were to make a just a partial switch to higher-grade steel, the resulting efficiencies could result in a 20 percent drop in the cost of steel worldwide.

But standing in the way of efficiency are over one trillion dollars spent annually to subsidize consumption of resources. Subsidies, the report found, often “support continued inefficient use of resources, not resource productivity.” In other words, not only do they lead to great pollution, but they are a net-loss for economies.

The danger, however, is that any savings resulting from energy efficiency will simply be plowed into new projects.

Last year, renewable energy captured a larger percentage of the energy market than in 2012, but overall consumption grew so much that global carbon emission still rose by 2.1 percent.

A report released Tuesday by the London School of Economics (LSE) depicts drug prohibition as a massive failure, a financial drain on economies and a violation of the basic human rights of citizens.

“The pursuit of a militarised and enforcement-led global ‘war on drugs’ strategy has produced enormous negative outcomes and collateral damage,” concluded the LSE’s Expert Panel on the Economics of Drug Policy, a group of 21 that includes five Nobel Prize-winning economists, former U.S. secretary of state George Shultz and Deputy Prime Minister of the UK Nick Clegg.“The LSE report in many ways articulates what has been said before - that we are wasting tremendous financial and human resources in the name of a failed paradigm." -- Kasia Malinowska-Sempruch

For years, opposition to drug prohibition has often been associated – accurately or not – with marginalised groups, either users themselves or the families of prisoners incarcerated under minimum sentencing guidelines.

Now, economists – perhaps the least likely victims of the war on drugs but vital to its deconstruction – are weighing in.

“The LSE report in many ways articulates what has been said before – that we are wasting tremendous financial and human resources in the name of a failed paradigm,” said Kasia Malinowska-Sempruch, director of the Open Society Global Drug Policy Programme.

“The question of the economics [of the drug war] have never really been gauged as strongly as it is being today,” Malinowska-Sempruch told IPS.

The report comes as more nations voice their displeasure with policies of interdiction that were hoisted upon them by powerful, conservative countries like the U.S.

In 2012, the heads of states of Colombia, Mexico and Guatemala delivered a statement to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon asking for an “urgent” review of drug policy.

Last year, the Organisation of American States released a report that called for the easing of such policies and consideration of possibility of decriminalisation.

In New York for the 2013 U.N. General Assembly, Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina called marijuana legalisation in Uruguay and the U.S. states of Colorado and Washington that year “visionary.”

And this past December, a leaked internal document containing draft recommendations from U.N. member states on drug policy showed many more willing to express their disquietude in private.

Failure by any measure

The LSE report found that policies of interdiction fail even their own narrow objectives.

“Evidence shows that drug prices have been declining while purity has been increasing,” wrote the authors.

The 100 billion dollars spent annually worldwide on law and order measures associated with drugs is not only largely wasted but ends up incurring bigger bills down the line.

One U.N study cited in the report found every dollar spent on opioid-substitution therapies (OST) like methadone “may yield a return of between four and seven dollars in reduced drug-related crime, criminal justice costs and theft alone.”

When accounting for health care costs, “total savings can exceed costs by a ratio of 12:1.”

But where prohibition is favoured over harm reduction programmes, drug use can lead to public health crises.

Russia, one of the few countries than bans methadone, has an HIV rate more than double most western European countries. Last year, the Russian government reported 55,000 newly diagnosed HIV patients, 58 percent of whom were intravenous drug users.

In recently annexed Crimea, Russian authorities announced they will shut down OST services.

Draconian drug laws can have a punitive effect not only on citizens but on the entire workforce of a country.

In 2000, the Polish government criminalised the possession of even the smallest quantities of illicit drugs. Within a decade, more than 100,000 Poles had gained criminal records and now find themselves barred from public sector employment.

All the while, in the U.S., the private prison industry and defence contractors have profited handsomely from enforcement expenditures and the housing of prisoners – staggering numbers of them.

Between 1979 and 2009, the number of prisoners in the U.S grew by 480 percent to 2.2 million; 1 in 5 – and half in federal prison – are locked up on drug offences.

Reports like the LSE’s set the stage for a showdown in 2016, when the U.N. General Assembly will have a special session dedicated to the future of drug policy.

Last year, for the first time, a majority of U.S. citizens said they favoured the legalisation of marijuana. But in the U.S. and around the world, laws lag behind the evolution of mores.

Despite headlined-grabbing votes in Uruguay, Portugal and small parts of the U.S., the vast majority of an estimated 230 million drug users worldwide still reside in countries that schedule drugs based on two strict U.N. Conventions: the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotics and the 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances.

Still, the International Narcotics Control Board, an oversight body with quasi-judicial powers, is increasingly ignored by countries that see benefits from bucking the conventions.

“The conventions are just just a reflection of what states see them as,” says John Collins, coordinator of the LSE’s IDEAS International Drug Policy Project.

“They are realising that the conventions are a lot more flexible than previously interpreted,” Collins told IPS. “I think we are really reaching a tipping point.”

But while decades ago signing the conventions had little political fallout for member states, least of all for those – like the U.S. – who ghost-wrote them, unwinding their countless manifestations in trade agreements and international law will take more than a stroke of a pen.

Many smaller countries that are ill-affected by the war on drugs still prefer to risk their political capital on more cut and dry issues.

“The General Assembly in 2016 is a tremendous deal,” said Collins. “But I think what we should argue for more broadly is that the U.N. stop being a bully on this issue.”

“The main thing to look at is what member states are doing at a national and regional level. Let’s see how they react to cannabis regulation,” he added.

A mother and children walk amongst flooded shelters at the Tomping IDP camp. Credit: UN Photo/Isaac Billy

By Samuel Oakford
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 24 2014 (IPS)

After a week that saw a massacre inside a U.N. base and wide-scale ethnic-based slaughter in an oil-producing region, the international community is grappling with what, if any, options remain to save lives in South Sudan.

In a closed door meeting Wednesday, the Security Council was shown video from Bentiu, where between last Tuesday and Wednesday, rebels executed hundreds of civilians in a mosque and the town’s hospital.“You have a situation where civilians are taken out of a mosque and killed and people are calling on the radio for the rape of women of certain ethnicity." -- Philippe Bolopion

In a terrible harkening to the Rwandan genocide, the U.N. reports that after capturing the town, rebels commandeered a local radio station and broadcast messages urging supporters to take revenge on Dinkas and Darfuris by raping women from those communities.

In a statement, the members of the Security Council “expressed horror and anger at the mass violence in Bentiu” and condemned the Friday attack on a U.N. camp in Bor, where at least 48 of the 5,000 mostly-Nuer residents it was sheltering were killed by a heavily armed mob that opened fire after breaking into the compound.

“The members of the Security Council strongly reiterated their demand for an immediate end to all human rights violations and abuses and violations of international humanitarian law, and expressed their readiness to consider appropriate measures against those responsible,” the statement added.

The “measures” will likely entail targeted sanctions against officials linked to atrocities like those in Bentiu and Bor.  On Wednesday, Human Rights Watch publicly called on the Council to “impose sanctions on individuals in both government and opposition who are responsible for grave abuses.”

Earlier this month, U.S. President Barack Obama opened the door to travel bans and the freezing of assets of military and political leaders in South Sudan, but administration officials have yet to name individuals.

In many cases, the threat of U.S. action is enough to scare commanders, but U.N. sanctions would go farther in South Sudan, says Philippe Bolopion, U.N. director at Human Rights Watch.

“U.S. sanctions are a welcome development but a lot of the leaders involved in the current violence have bank accounts in neighbouring countries – U.S. sanctions alone would not be enough,” said Bolopion. “U.N. sanctions send a powerful message to the people on the ground that they will have to pay a price for their crimes.”

Violence in the world’s youngest country broke out in December, when gunfire erupted in capital, Juba, between forces loyal to President Salva Kiir and breakaway factions of the SPLA that claim allegiance to former vice-president Riek Machar, himself sacked by Kiir during a putsch in July.

Kiir is an ethnic Dinka, Machar a Nuer, and the conflict, though it revolves in essence around unresolved questions of power, oil money and politics, has split the country along ethnic lines.

In December, the Security Council authorised 5,500 additional peacekeepers to assist the U.N. Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS), but bureaucratic wrangling, disputes among member states and an overstretched Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) have seen fewer than 700 arrive by April.

Should all 12,500 mandated “blue-helmets” deploy in short order, it is unclear if they’d be capable of doing much outside of bases where they’ve sheltered tens of thousands since December. But even this capability is called into question by the attack in Bor.

“This is not what the mission was designed for, this is not what the compounds were designed for,” Stephane Dujarric, spokesperson for the U.N. Secretary General, told reporters.

Regional solution

The Security Council expressed support for the African Union’s Commission of Inquiry in South Sudan, though that effort has been slow to begin. This month, the commission announced it would meet with regional leaders to discuss the conflict, including Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir and Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya, both under indictment by the International Criminal Court.

The commission will also meet with Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, whose troops have been fighting alongside South Sudanese government forces – even as Ugandan representatives, as part of the regional bloc IGAD, attempt to broker peace at increasingly futile negotiations in Addis Ababa.

On Jan. 23, those talks saw the signing of a cessation of hostilities agreement, only for it to be broken within hours. Between periods of convalescence, both sides have fought continuously since.

“We see that neither party is ready to, in any way, cease the hostilities,” Herve Ladsous, U.N. peacekeeping chief, told reporters after the Council session.

“The agreement on that, which was signed exactly to this day three months ago, has never been implemented. They do not give indication that they want to sincerely participate in the peace talks,” said Ladsous.

At the U.N., there was a sense that the executions and wanton murders in Bentiu had jarred delegates accustomed to a slow-burning but nonetheless deadly civil war, one that could always be addressed tomorrow, or the next week.

The Council quickly asked that the U.N.’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights send human rights officers to Bentiu and launch an investigation there.

“You have a situation where civilians are taken out of a mosque and killed and people are calling on the radio for the rape of women of certain ethnicity… we have reached a turning point in the crisis where all bets are off,” Bolopion told IPS.

Despite signs of life at the Security Council, the solution in South Sudan likely will have to come from regional leaders, who until now have expressed neither neutrality nor a willingness to apply real pressure on Kiir and Machar.

IGAD has announced its intentions to replace Ugandan soldiers with a regional force, but that plan too has been slow in materialising and wouldn’t necessarily allay concerns over impartiality.

“These sanctions could help but they are not going to solve the problem,” said one high-ranking human rights official who spoke to IPS on the condition of anonymity. “I think the big players at the U.N. realise that it’s key for the regional powers to be more active and do the right thing.”

“IGAD is key and the neighbours are key, if they don’t solve it politically, it will get much worse,” the source added.

Rwandan Defence Forces deploy to the Central African Republic in late January. Credit: U.S. Army Africa photo by Master Sgt. Thomas Mills

By Samuel Oakford
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 10 2014 (IPS)

Amid alarming reports of ethnic cleansing in the Central African Republic, the U.N. Security Council voted unanimously Thursday to send an official peacekeeping mission to the conflict-torn country where the minority Muslim population has all but disappeared in much its Western half.

The French-authored resolution would rely on a force of some 10,000 troops and 2,000 police to restore order and prevent further sectarian violence that has left thousands dead and displaced roughly a quarter of the population.“The roads and bridges need to be fixed, all the transportation infrastructure. In Bangui there are only two hotels." -- spokesperson for U.N. peacekeeping

The Council in December mandated a joint AU-French force that thus far has proven unable to clamp down on violence against the Muslim communities, particularly outside of the capital Bangui, where peacekeepers have been light on the ground.

The Council’s morning session was preceded by reports of anti-balaka attacks in the central town of Dekoa, 300 kms north of Bangui, that left some 13 dead.

Despite Thursday’s vote, rights groups point out it will be a full six months before the mission, known as MINUSCA, is operational.

“There are tens of thousands of vulnerable Central Africans who need protection and assistance right now,” said Mark Yarnell, senior advocate at Refugees International.

“Clearly, a U.N. peacekeeping operation, once fully deployed, can contribute to peace and stability over the long term. But this mission will not address the atrocities, displacement, and dire humanitarian needs on the ground today.”

A “re-hatting” of many of the 5,000 AU troops would take place on Sep. 15, the official start date of MINUSCA’s peacekeeping operations. It is unclear, given a paucity of peacekeepers in several other countries, how long it will take the mission to reach full capacity.

“You will not even be getting to 10,000 troops by September given the global shortage,” Yarnell told IPS. “There is no guarantee they will arrive by that date.”

A spokesperson for U.N. peacekeeping told IPS the landlocked country is a particularly difficult location to build the infrastructure for a mission from scratch.

“We can send engineers to assist and we’ll ship some equipment and cargo to Cameroon, the nearest port,” he said. “The roads and bridges need to be fixed, all the transportation infrastructure.  In Bangui there are only two hotels – we will need to construct our bases, starting with sanitary facilities and offices.”

The transition will come nearly two years after the Séléka, a loose coalition of predominantly Muslim rebels from CAR’s neglected northwest and Chad, announced their alliance and took up arms against the government of former president François Bozizé.

In March of 2013, the rebels captured Bangui and for nearly a year presided over a state of anarchy, pilfering what was left of the state infrastructure and targeting Christians with impunity.

Christian anti-balaka self-defence militias with unclear ties to the former regime formed to combat the rebels. Following the arrival of French and African Union troops in December, the militias began gaining the upper hand.

In January, under international pressure, former Seleka leader Michel Djotodia resigned the presidency and ex-Seleka forces began pulling back from the capital, creating a power vacuum and leaving Muslim communities under threat from the vengeful Christian majority.

Peacekeepers were slow to recognise the anti-balaka as a new and larger threat, even as militias repeatedly carried out massacres in Muslim enclaves. The result, according to the U.N., has been the “ethnic-religious cleansing” of the West of CAR.

In a report, Amnesty International called the exodus of Muslims from CAR “a tragedy of historic proportions.”

“Not only does the current pattern of ethnic cleansing do tremendous damage to the Central African Republic itself, it sets a terrible precedent for other countries in the region, many of which are already struggling with their own sectarian and inter-ethnic conflicts,” the report said.

In response to a Central African government request, the resolution gives MINUSCA the emergency capacity to supplement the state’s meagre police force by authorising peacekeepers to make arrests and carry out basic law and order functions.

The first of an expected 1,000 EU peacekeepers arrived this week and are expected to spell French troops that have guarded a makeshift camp for displaced persons at Bangui’s aiport. Until MINUSCA is fully functional, EU advisors are meant to assist local authorities in rebuilding the criminal justice system. Several recent arrests of anti-balaka leaders have seen them flee or be released only hours later.

The Security Council had an opportunity to mandate a peacekeeping mission as far back as November, but due to logistical and financial concerns gave the AU time to demonstrate its capacity at peacekeeping on the continent.

Though observers have highlighted the efforts of troops from Rwanda and Burundi, Chadian peacekeepers were implicated in atrocities of their own, including the deaths of over 30 civilians in a market on Mar. 29. The Chadians were allegedly attempting to evacuate residents from one of Bangui’s few remaining Muslim enclaves when they opened fire.

Chad has since withdrawn its battalion from the AU mission, forcing African leaders to search for a further 850 troops.

The CAR vote comes as Rwanda commemorates its own 100 days genocide that began 20 years ago this week.

A wind farm outside Tianjin. China is the world's leading manufacturer of wind turbines and solar panels. Credit: Mitch Moxley/IPS

By Samuel Oakford
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 7 2014 (IPS)

Policy uncertainty and plummeting solar prices led to a 14-percent decrease in investment in renewable energy in 2013, according to a report released Monday.

Investment fell across the globe, even in high growth regions like China, India and Brazil. But it was severe cuts in Europe – until recently a pace-setter for the rest of the world – that marked the retrenchment.“In the longer run, the market frameworks will have to change in order to integrate a large fraction of renewables into the grid.” -- Ulf Moslener

In 2013, the continent spent 48 billion dollars less than the year before.

The report, jointly released by the U.N. Environmental Programme (UNEP), the Frankfurt School and Bloomberg New Energy Finance, painted a hopeful picture of an industry recuperating after a period of consolidation, but could only highlight a “trickle of significant” projects of the kind that possibly could supplant – not supplement – traditional power generation on a wide scale and curb carbon emissions.

“Lower costs, a return to profitability on the part of some leading manufacturers, the phenomenon of unsubsidized market uptake in a number of countries, and a warmer attitude to renewables among public market investors, were hopeful signs after several years of painful shake-out in the renewable energy sector,” said Michael Liebrich, chair of the Advisory Board for Bloomberg New Energy Finance, in a statement.

Renewables constituted 43 percent of new power capacity and increased their share of global power generation from 7.8 to 8.5 percent. Still, they have not been able to displace rising coal consumption in the developing world and continue to staunch carbon growth rather than reduce it overall.

Though last year renewables prevented an estimated 1.2 gigatonnes of carbon from being released into the atmosphere, global emissions still grew by 2.1 percent.

“On their own, renewables investment will certainly not grow fast enough to put the world on a two-degree compatibility path,” said Ulf Moslener, head of research at the Frankfurt-School-UNEP Collaborating Centre for Climate & Sustainable Energy Finance, referring to the temperature threshold widely used by scientists.

A rise of more than two degrees centigrade over the year 1900 temperatures would have catastrophic consequences in much of the world.

Moslener says the post-crisis investment climate and the Basel III global regulatory framework makes investing in alternative energy less attractive to large funds and institutional investors who seek higher leverage to cover the higher up-front costs associated with renewable projects.

A study commissioned last year by the Norwegian government predicted “the capital and liquidity requirements of Basel III are likely to limit the amount of capital available for renewable energy financing from banks in the future.”

The Frankfurt report found that venture capitalists and private equity companies cut back considerably in 2013, reducing investments in specialist renewable energy companies to only two billion – their lowest levels since 2005.

But convincing global regulators to make room for the type of leveraged investments and bundled-and-chopped assets that caused the financial crisis will be a tough sell.

“It’s always faster for a government to say ‘we will put in a set price for energy’ than it is to change their financial regulations – which are essentially their entire financial system,” said Eric Usher, chief of the finance unit in UNEP’s Division of Technology, Industry and Economics.

Despite uncertainty, Usher says larger investors are slowly – very slowly – starting to take notice as renewables increasingly become interchangeable with rent-paying assets like real estate.

“There’s been an uptick in green bonds and pension funds are starting to engage,” Usher told IPS. “In the U.S. and Canada you have tax-driven structures that group power plants together and sell them to investors. It provides very low cost financing.

“The investors with longer time horizons get interested in mature technologies,” he added.

Those companies that survived an extended period of consolidation and a recovery from over-capacity – primarily in the solar industry – saw their equity prices increase by 54 percent last year, roughly doubling gains in the market at large. But despite frothy returns for portfolio managers and a rash of IPOs, the main tracking index – The WilderHill New Energy Global Innovation Index (NEX) – is still 60 percent below its 2007 peak.

“In the longer run, the market frameworks will have to change in order to integrate a large fraction of renewables into the grid,” Moslener told IPS. “That will also need government attention – I would expect renewables to be only part of the solution.”

Unless significant cuts are achieved in existing emissions, the goal of renewables risks changing from serving as an avant-garde solution to just another corollary low-cost fuel for increased growth. Though most models predict global energy use tapering off by mid-century, without cuts or a rethinking of axiomatic growth, it will be too late by then to head off climate change’s most cataclysmic impacts.

“The financial system we have today is based on a construct that is not helpful to sustainable development,” says Usher. “The reality is a huge challenge – it will take some time to solve. Renewables are not the solution on their own.”

Prisoners on Pakistan's death row have been singled out for abuse in the past, rights groups say. Credit: Fahim Siddiqi/IPS

By Samuel Oakford
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 27 2014 (IPS)

The number of recorded executions carried out worldwide rose 14 percent last year, as anti-terrorism measures in Iraq and hardline drug polices in Iran accounted for more than half of all reported government-sanctioned killings in 2013.

In a report released Thursday, the human rights group Amnesty International said at least 778 people were executed in 22 countries last year, though the total did not include several nations, most notably China, where official execution statistics are a state secret. The Chinese government is estimated to put thousands of prisoners to death by firing squad every year, dwarfing the rest of the world."Armed attacks amongst insurgents are on the rise and the Iraqi government wants to use the death penalty as a quick fix, to pretend to be tough." -- Jan Wetzel

“China is a case of its own – nothing comes close to them in terms of real executions,” said Jan Wetzel, advisor on the death penalty to Amnesty International. “However we do see some glimmers of hope, especially in regard to internal discussions – within the Chinese elite more doubt is being created over the death penalty.”

Outside of China, four in five executions took place in three adjoining Middle Eastern states: Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

An escalation in sectarian conflict in Iraq and increased government crackdowns saw a 30-percent upswing in death sentences in the country. Most of the at least 169 killings there fell under Iraq’s strict 2005 anti-terrorism law, passed in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion. In its report, Amnesty expressed concern over the law’s language, vaguely encompassing “acts such as provoking, planning, financing, committing or supporting others to commit terrorism.”

“In Iraq, we have to see this against the worsening security situation – armed attacks amongst insurgents are on the rise and the Iraqi government wants to use the death penalty as a quick fix, to pretend to be tough,” Wetzel told IPS.

But sectarian attacks in Iraq have risen along with increased use of the death penalty, says Wetzel, belying the intended effect of the death penalty.

“We know the death penalty does not have a deterrent effect vs. long term imprisonment.”

Amnesty was unable to determine if judicial executions were carried out in Egypt or Syria, though Syria’s brutal civil war would raise questions over the legality of any such confirmed killings. Egypt announced this week the mass death sentences of 528 alleged supporters of ousted president Mohammed Morsi.

At least 369 were put to death in Iran during 2013, though Amnesty cited hundreds more not officially reported.

Iran, one of four countries that practices public executions – along with North Korea, Saudi Arabia and Somalia – wields the morbid spectacle as a political tool, says Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, co-founder of the advocacy group Iran Human Rights.

“The Iranian government uses the death penalty to spread fear in society,” Amiry-Moghaddam told IPS. “The timing of executions over the past 10 years have been carefully coordinated – for instance when authorities fear protests or right after protests, the number of executions has increased, but when the international community is focused on Iran, the numbers are quite low.”

Most Iranian executions stem from drug cases and often target the poorest in Iranian society, including Afghan migrants allegedly involved in opium and heroin smuggling. Public hangings, of which Iran Human Rights estimates 59 took place in 2013, are not only death sentences but torture, says Amiry-Moghaddam.

“They are pulled up by a crane and it often takes more than 10 minutes until they die – it’s a slow death,” he said.

Footage emerged this year of one such hanging, showing the prisoner crying out for his mother who responds “My child, my child,” as he dangles from a noose, legs flailing.

Earlier this month, U.N. anti-drug chief Yuri Fedotov drew criticism when he applauded Iranian authorities for their effort to curb the flow of illicit narcotics within Iran’s borders, even as several European countries withdrew funding from U.N. anti-drug programmes in Iran due to its use of the death penalty.

“Iran takes a very active role to fight against illicit drugs,” said Fedetov. “It’s very impressive.”

Although capital punishment is not forbidden by international law, torture is, as several recent cases in the U.S. brought to light.

In January, an Ohio man took more than 15 minutes to die after being injected with an experimental new sedative and painkiller cocktail intended to replace traditional drugs European pharmaceutical companies no longer agree to provide if they may be used for killings. In Oklahoma, one prisoner’s last words upon being injected with another mixture were, “I feel my whole body burning.”

In the Americas, the United States was the only country to put inmates to death. Just nine, mostly southern, states accounted for 39 of 43 executions in the U.S. Though executions fell 10 percent nationwide, Texas put to death 16 prisoners, over a third more than in 2012.

Amnesty did report “progress towards abolition was recorded in all regions of the world.” The number of countries practicing the death penalty has nearly halved in the past two decades.

Though Indonesia, Kuwait, Nigeria and Vietnam all resumed executions in 2013, only nine countries – Bangladesh, China, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan the United States and Yemen – have carried out killings in each of the past five years. In Europe and Central Asia, no executions took place.

But Saudi Arabia, in contravention of international law, put to death at least three prisoners for crimes allegedly committed when they were under 18.

Flee or die: refugees from CAR in Cameroon. Credit: European Commission/cc by 2.0

By Samuel Oakford
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 3 2014 (IPS)

Budget constraints in Washington and obstinacy at the highest levels of the African Union (AU) have combined to dangerously delay a possible U.N. peacekeeping mission in the Central African Republic (CAR), according to sources close to negotiations currently underway in New York.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon was set to deliver his report on CAR to the Security Council this past Friday.“We agree with the principle of African solutions to African problems, but it should not come at the expense of African lives.” -- Philippe Bolopion

But the document, believed to contain a damning portrayal of ethnic cleansing and atrocities as well as a recommendation for an official mission, was held up at the last moment and delayed to this week, raising fears that its language could be toned down to accommodate the reservations of the U.S., AU and others.

Whatever the immediate outcome, the struggle illustrates an evolving and at times tense relationship between the Security Council, a more assertive AU and the U.N. over interventions on the continent.

“The reality is that a U.N. mission is absolutely essential to stabilising CAR, and the secretary-general’s reporting is spot-on as to the desperate situation on the ground,” said a high-ranking human rights officer in Bangui who spoke with IPS on the condition of anonymity.

But there is hope that this time Ban will not wilt in the face of pressure.

In December, with violence ratcheting up, the Security Council, after initially considering a French proposal for a full mission, chose instead to mandate and enlarge the existing AU mission in the country – thereafter called MISCA – and authorise the deployment of French “Sangari” troops, currently numbering 2,000.

The move saved hundreds of millions of dollars in the short term, but has proved a stop-gap measure.

Underpinning the tension between the AU and the U.N. is a push by the Africans and international partners to encouraged “African solutions to African Problems,” in this case, letting MISCA handle its mandate without calling in the U.N.

“We agree with the principle of African solutions to African problems, but it should not come at the expense of African lives,” said Philippe Bolopion, U.N. director of Human Rights Watch.

CAR “is not the time or the place for the AU to make a point,” Bolopion told IPS. “It’s pretty clear that the AU-French combination on the ground is not enough to protect civilians. A huge chunk of the Muslim population has had to flee under their watch.”

Smail Chergui, African Union Commissioner for Peace and Security, speaks to journalists following a Security Council meeting on the situation in the Central African Republic on Feb. 20, 2014. Credit: UN Photo/Paulo Filgueiras

In April, 700 EU troops are set to spell French troops stationed the Bangui airport, allowing the Sangaris to travel out into more rural areas where the peacekeeping presence is thin and small bands of lightly armed Christian anti-balaka militias can wipe out entire villages.

In an interview with African Arguments, Amnesty International’s senior investigator Donatella Rovera said neither the French nor AU forces, by now numbering 6,000, have been effective.

“The military efforts belonged to the AU and French and they have had huge coordination problems,” said Rovera. “They weren’t present where things were happening, when they could have made a difference, when they could have stopped some of the massacres. They did not seem to be very willing to confront the new actor.”

The small U.N. political mission already in place, BINUCA, is grossly underfunded and ineffective at fulfilling its basic mandate. At the time of the December vote, observers expressed concern to IPS that without a bona fide, well-funded intervention, though violence might be temporarily snuffed out, the inequities and development shortfalls that led to the crisis would kicked down the road.

At the time, logistical concerns were also raised: where would an already overextended Department for Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) raise troops?

Money was an issue as well: in the U.S., which funds over one-quarter of peacekeeping operations, Congress would soon set a 2014 budget that left a 12-percent funding gap in their dues and allocates exactly zero to a recently announced mission in Mali. How could they afford another venture in CAR?

Yet later that month, the Security Council saw fit to increase the number of peacekeepers in an already in-place mission in South Sudan. Many wondered if CAR was being shortchanged.

U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power, who has publicly pleaded the case of CAR before the Council, was put in an awkward position by budget considerations. In a workaround, the U.S. provided 100 million dollars of direct assistance to a trust fund set up for MISCA, thereby making themselves investors in their success alone.

But MISCA is in many ways a poster child for AU stubbornness.

“It is important to remember that the MISCA mission has been around in various forms since 1996, so this is a country where many of the officers have been posted often. Many even learned [the local language] Sango,” said the human rights official in Bangui.

“The AU itself is very much opposed to a U.N. mission because they want to claim success in CAR and want to keep the MISCA mission, which suits the U.S. as well,” said the official. “The AU has long misrepresented the reality on the ground.”

In December, the AU’s envoy to the U.N., Smaïl Chergui, brushed aside accusations that Chadian MISCA troops had repeatedly attacked civilians in CAR. But last week, Chadian troops were again charged by locals with killing three civilians in a Christian neighborhood of Bangui.

At a Jan. 14 meeting of the AU’s Defence Committee, Chergui told gathered ministers in Addis Ababa “we are hopeful that we will soon significantly improve the security situation and prove the prophets of doom wrong.”

Yet in February, the U.N.’s refugee agency and the human rights group Amnesty International identified rampant ethnic cleansing against the country’s Muslim minority.

After an initial bout of violence committed by predominantly Muslim Seleka rebels left a thousand dead in December, the French Sangaris set about disarming and arrested the group, who had held power in Bangui since taking the city in March.

At the time, observers, including U.N. human rights chief Navi Pillay, expressed concern over the potential for revenge killings against Muslims in areas vacated by the Seleka. Those fears proved disastrously correct and peacekeepers proved no match for containing disparate but potent attacks by Christian anti-balaka militias.

In Bangui, where upwards of 150,000 Muslims lived prior to the conflict, by some accounts fewer than 10,000 remain.  Palm fronds hanging outside houses in formerly diverse neighbourhoods indicate where Christian families have seized a home deserted by their former neighbours, either murdered or attempted to flee, likely to Cameroon or Chad.

At least 100,000 Muslims have left the country entirely and countless displaced persons have fled to the bush.

In December, members of the Security Council explained their piecemeal solution to the violence in CAR by pointing to the six-month time frame for implementing a full U.N. mission. But three months later the same reasons are given for dampening hopes of a mission now.

Though the French have publicly spoken in favour of an official mission, they remain in delicate negotiations with regional power-broker Chad over existing missions in Mali and their basing rights in the country.

And they, like the AU, have reason to want the current mission to be seen as a success. President Francois Hollande, who visited Bangui Friday, wants to impress a sceptical populace after he made interventions in former colonies a cornerstone of his foreign policy.

Earlier this month, out of sight of peacekeepers, 70 Muslims were killed over the course of two days in the southwest town of Guen, made to lie down on the ground then shot one by one.

A contingent of Nepalese peacekeepers arrives in Juba, South Sudan from Haiti on Feb. 4 to support UNMISS, after an outbreak of violence in mid-December between pro- and anti-government forces. Credit: UN Photo/Isaac Billy

By Samuel Oakford
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 26 2014 (IPS)

An interim human rights report released by the beleaguered U.N. peacekeeping mission in South Sudan is being tentatively hailed by rights groups and observers who have pressured the mission to be more transparent with its findings.

The report, delivered to the Security Council Friday and tweeted by the mission, UNMISS, on Sunday, is an overview of evidence collected by its roughly 80 human rights officers dating from the outbreak of violence on Dec. 15 through the end of January.“Malakal is deserted, with houses burned throughout and countless dead bodies strewn in the streets.” -- Carlos Francisco

Jehanne Henry, senior Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch, who returned last week from Bentiu and Rubkona, said she welcomed the report but stressed that in a country beset by impunity, regular reporting from the mission would serve as a powerful deterrent against atrocities.

“This is definitely a good step, but it is also clear that this is an interim report,” Henry told IPS, adding that the mission didn’t provide “any recommendations, fact-finding or legal analysis.”

“We would have wanted to see more regular public reporting that might have prevented some of this,” said Henry.

Based on more than 500 interviews with civilians and officials, the report contains accounts of mass ethnic-based killings, gang-rapes and torture carried out by government troops and various militias in opposition.

The report focused on allegations of human rights violations in what it called the four “red” states – Jonglei, Upper Nile, Unity and Central Equatoria – where battles were fiercest. It is clear, the authors wrote, “that civilians bore the brunt of much of the fighting and that gross violations of human rights were committed.”

The mission said it was also investigating reported mass grave sites in Juba, Bentiu and Rubkona.

Shortly after fighting broke out in Juba, the report states, “Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) soldiers were reported to have engaged in targeting killings of civilians of Nuer origin following house-to-house searches.”

Meanwhile, in the strategic oil city of Malakal, Dinka civilians were the alleged targets of defected Nuer SPLA and national police elements and of the so-called Nuer White Army.

The report came as a surprise to some observers who had expected nothing public until the end of April, when the mission delivers its full report to the Security Council.

But the interim document does not contain charges or name individuals under investigation. UNMISS human rights chief Ibrahim Wani defended that decision Wednesday, saying “the most important response to such allegations is obviously the credibility of the report itself.”

Outside of what it sends the Security Council, UNMISS has released publicly only two human rights reports in its nearly three-year history.

Ceasefire ignored

Both sides in the conflict appear to be ignoring the cessation of hostilities reached by negotiators in Addis Ababa on Jan. 23. Shortly after it was signed, government forces reportedly retook Leer, the hometown of rebel-leader Riek Machar, burning down much of the town and forcing thousands to flee.

On the day of the interim report’s release, the U.N. said it had found 50 bodies in Malakal and more at a local teaching hospital where the medical charity MSF said many had been shot through the head, execution-style.

“Malakal is deserted, with houses burned throughout and countless dead bodies strewn in the streets,” said Carlos Francisco, MSF’s emergency coordinator in Malakal.

On Sunday, the British NGO Oxfam was forced to evacuate all of its workers from the city.

Malakal has already changed hands at least five times and the ethnic makeup of the overflowing U.N. camp there largely depends on what army is currently laying siege to the city.

Last week, the U.N. base there reported that during gun battles outside its walls, inter-ethnic fighting broke out within the camp, resulting in the deaths of six and injuring more than 43. Though UNMISS denied it via Twitter, former BBC journalist Martin Plaut reported fighting took place at the Malakal camp not only between displaced persons but between local U.N. employees.

Pressure on UNMISS

On Feb. 11, a mission spokeswoman informed IPS the interim report wouldn’t be public but rather was “an internal report similar to a roadmap that will indicate trends based on initial findings and lead to” the late April Security Council Report.

Sources at the U.N. who were aware of the report’s delivery to the Security Council Friday said they were unsure until the last moment whether it would be made public. Though the report stresses its findings are still provisional, it does appear the mission changed its mind at some point over the past several weeks and decided to post the 21-page document publicly on its website.

UNMISS’ special representative Hilde Johnson has come under criticism for her perceived closeness with the government of President Salva Kiir. Human rights groups specifically alleged that the mission under her command should have been more vocal, via regular reporting, about human rights violations that foreshadowed the current conflict.

Hilde Johnson, Special Representative of the Secretary-General for South Sudan and Head of the UN mission in the country (UNMISS), speaks at U.N. Day celebrations organized by UNMISS in South Sudanese capital Juba on Oct. 24, 2012. Credit: UN Photo/Isaac Billy

Observers close to the U.N. and UNMISS suggest that when the mission’s mandate is renewed – as it is expected to be – in July, a new special representative will likely be appointed. One diplomatic source who spoke with IPS anonymously said Johnson, feeling heat from U.N. headquarters over her bunker mentality and paralysis over reporting, is perhaps now less inclined to safeguard relations with a government more belligerent towards her by the day.

In a statement that accompanied the release, Johnson spoke of accountability and said “without bringing to justice the perpetrators of these horrendous crimes, revenge and impunity is likely to lead to a perpetual cycle of violence.”

“Some observers say she was too close to the government,” D’Souza told IPS.

“But in this position, it shows that they are working to be seen as more impartial – throughout the report, there were signs that SPLA soldiers were engaged in targeting of civilians, said D’Souza. “By being impartial, you come under pressure from one side or the other.”

Indeed, upon learning of it, a government spokesperson called the interim report “pure fabrication.”

Impunity

South Sudan’s 2011 independence failed to bring about a mechanism for south-on-south justice, allowing longstanding schisms in the ruling SPLM to metastasise into a body politic that only staved off collapse by rewarding rebel leaders with ministries and by applying the salve of oil money to succour displeased leaders.

Those schemes came to an abrupt halt on Dec 15, when Kiir, a Dinka, accused his former vice-president and longtime rebel comrade Machar of plotting a coup. Machar denied those charges but fled to take control of a mostly-Nuer rebel force, though his command over erratic groups with local grievances has been questioned throughout the conflict.

Soon after violence began, the African Union (AU) began piecing together a commission of inquiry into the conflict. Recent efforts by the AU to distance itself from the International Criminal Court (ICC) has led to suspicions that the inquiry is at least in part an effort to elude the spectacle of yet another African leader on trial in the Hague.

“You can probably argue that some countries want to sidestep the ICC, however the commission of inquiry is still a huge deal,” said D’Souza. “It is very important for the international community to open its own investigation to complement national initiative.”

“South Sudan has a history of impunity which perpetuates the cycle of intercommunal violence. It’s absolutely critical that UNMISS human rights officers are able to interview senior leadership of both the government and the opposition to analyse the command and control structure and see who should be held accountable within them.”

Tar sands in Alberta, Canada. Credit: Dru Oja Jay/ CC 2.0

By Samuel Oakford
NEW YORK, Feb 26 2014 (IPS)

The Pine Ridge Reservation of the Lakota Nation, in the midwest of the United States, is one of the most abandoned places in the country and in the world.

Unemployment on the reservation hovers around 80 percent and only one in ten graduate from high school. Women live an average of 52 years, men 48. Half the population over 40 has diabetes and one in four children is born with some kind of foetal alcohol disorder.

So when the big companies behind the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline traced its proposed route around Pine Ridge, they probably thought little of this community of fewer than 30,000. If anything, they assumed, the Lakota would be happy to have jobs.“We are concerned about the preservation of our life and the earth for future generations. That’s not fear, that’s common sense.” -- Debbie White Plume, Lakota activist and resident of Pine Ridge

But what Pine Ridge lacks in material riches it makes up for in a unique attachment to the environment.

In 2012, when trucks belonging to a pipeline company attempted to drive through the tribal land in South Dakota, they were blocked by native authorities and locals who had sent out a call over the local radio station’s Facebook page.

Despite their poverty, locals knew that contrary to industry talking points, potential jobs in the area would be short-lived and outside experts flown in to maintain the pipeline.

Debbie White Plume, a Lakota activist and resident of Pine Ridge, says the pipeline runs against their conception of life and relationship with Mother Nature. They will never allow the pipeline to be built without putting up a fight, she told IPS by telephone.

Plume helps organise “Moccasins on the Ground”, a training programme that teaches native people the skills and tactics of non-violent direct action. Travelling from settlement to settlement, often hundreds of miles apart, Plume teaches local communities about their rights as sovereign citizens and how they can protest encroachment by corporations.

“We see what the tar sand oil mining is causing in Canada, we see what the oil drilling in the Dakotas is doing – as they gouge her (Mother Nature) and rape her and hurt her, we know it’s all the same ecosystem that we all need to live in,” Plume told IPS. “For us it’s a spiritual stand – it’s our relative, it hurts us.”

The Keystone XL is the final of four phases of the Keystone Pipeline system that brings highly corrosive oil called diluted bitumen (dilbit) from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada south to the Gulf of Mexico to be refined.

Oil sands, by far the most polluting of any fuel, require huge quantities of energy to be extracted and leave behind byproducts like “petcoke”, a high-sulphur coal-like substance that burns dirtier than coal.

The U.S. portion of the fourth phase would be built between the frontier town of Morgan, Montana and Steele City, Nebraska, where it would join existing pipelines headed south.

This final northern segment would cross several major rivers including the Red Rivers, the Missouri and the Yellowstone Rivers and pass over the Ogallala Aquifer, a shallow underground water table that supplies over a quarter of the United States’ irrigated land.

If it is completed, the pipeline would transport fuel equivalent to 181 million metric tonnes of CO2 per year, the equivalent of 51 coal plants.

Though technically skirting the reservation’s borders, the proposed pipeline would pass between Pine Ridge and the Rosebud Reservoir, where communities draw their water.

“In our mind, that’s our water,” Plume told an August gathering in Bridger, South Dakota. “We love our water and we have to protect our water.”

Plume says the Lakota have been joined by non-native ranchers and farmers in places like Nebraska who fear contamination could ruin their cropland.

Spills

With the Alberta oil sand boom pumping out record levels of Canadian crude, accidents are on the rise. In March 2013, between 5,000 and 7,000 barrels of Canadian heavy crude spilled from a gash in ExxonMobil’s Pegasus pipeline in Mayflower, Arkansas, leading to catastrophic environmental damage.

In October, 20,600 barrels of fracked oil spilled out of a pipeline in North Dakota.

According to the U.S. Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), last year there were 364 pipelines spills in the U.S.. And in Alberta, accidents are just as common. One investigation found more than 25,000 spills there in the past 37 years.

It is virtually guaranteed that Keystone would have a spill at some point. Incredibly, when Texas activists locked themselves inside a newly installed segment of the pipeline, rays of sunshine poured through huge cracks in an exterior meant to be water tight. Later that day, the portion was buried.

Corruption

After years of opposition from activists, the U.S. State Department released its environmental impact statement on Jan. 31, finding that construction of the Keystone XL would not significantly worsen carbon emissions.

This was the test by which U.S. President Barack Obama said he would approve or veto the project. But the study assumed the oil sands would be extracted at the same rate and shipped via rail should the proposal be rejected, even though industry studies had shown the rail system was incapable of absorbing excess crude.

Democratic Party lawmakers had urged the State Department to postpone releasing the impact statement until its own Inspector General completed an investigation into whether Environmental Resource Management (ERM), the company contracted by the State Department to carry out the assessment, had hidden conflicts of interest.

Environmental groups publicised documents indicating the State Department made little effort to verify if what ERM told them was true.

In reality, the London-based company receives much of its profits from existing deals with companies like Conoco Phillips, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Canadian Natural Resources, all of which stand to benefit from the pipeline and further tapping of the Alberta oil sands.

Several ERM analysts who wrote the assessment appeared to have also been former employees of TransCanada, the company building the pipeline.

“We’ve submitted tons of evidence that the company lied on their disclosure forms,” Ross Hammond, senior campaigner at Friends of the Earth’s Climate and Energy Programme, told IPS.

“The investment community sees Keystone as critical and the State Department glossed over that issue,” Hammond told IPS.

“So basically they’re saying ‘since there’s no climate impact, you might as well build Keystone.’ There are definitely instances in the analysis where it’s really shoddy.”

Friends of the Earth alleges that TransCanada schemed to employ former Obama administration officials as State Department lobbyists.

Anita Dunn, former White House communications director and now chief lobbyist for a firm that represents TransCanada, visited the White House over 100 times after leaving office in 2009.

“The only way to approve Keystone XL is to ignore the multiple lies that TransCanada told the State Department in its application. I’m sorry to see the State Department is comfortable with that,” said Democratic congressman Raúl Grijalva, who serves on the House Committee on Natural Resources.

A 30 day public comment period following the report’s release ends Mar. 7, after which input from federal agencies, NGOs and citizens will be released for review by Secretary of State John Kerry. The last time they took public comments, the State Department was inundated with over 1.5 million letters, emails and faxes, the majority disapproving of the plan.

In Pine Ridge, Plume says the choice is clear.

“We are concerned about the preservation of our life and the earth for future generations. That’s not fear, that’s common sense.”

“Our creation story places us here at the beginning of time,” says Plume. “We are hoping president Obama will say no – if he says yes, then we’ll put our moccasins on the ground and engage in civil disobedience.”

This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Youth activists organised a mock lemonade sale to raise money for the Green Climate Fund in the absence of serious commitments at the Warsaw climate talks in November 2013. Credit: Claudia Ciobanu/IPS

By Samuel Oakford
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 21 2014 (IPS)

Facing a crucial meeting this week in Bali, the board of the U.N.’s Green Climate Fund (GCF) once again postponed drawing out the bulk of policy that will guide the fund as it prepares to open later in 2014.

Facing a yawning funding gap, the 24-member board said it would “aim for” splitting the financing it doles out 50:50 between mitigation and adaptation efforts and to devote at least half of adaptation monies to vulnerable regions. In a minor victory, members also clarified language over a mechanism for countries to seek redress with the fund."The corporate capture of the Green Climate Fund is deeply troubling." -- Sarah-Jayne Clifton

The GCF, formally established in 2010, is intended to serve as the primary vehicle for industrialised countries to pay for mitigation and adaptation in the developing world. Almost immediately after its creation, though, wealthy countries began backtracking on their original commitments and started pushing for a greater use of private funds to leverage their smaller contributions.

A paucity of pledges in Bali and a statement indicating the board would “maximize engagement with the private sector” bolstered concerns over the potential for a slow unraveling of donor promises and a watering down of what began as a clear-cut way of repaying developing countries for damages caused by carbon emissions.

“The GCF Board urgently needs to decide on the shape of the Fund, but progress is grindingly slow,” Oscar Reyes, an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, told IPS from Bali. “Most of what was scheduled for decision in Bali has been postponed. Given the inability to decide on matters of substance, the chances of significant breakthroughs at the next Board meeting in May look extremely slim.”

That next board meeting will take place May 18-21 in Songdo, South Korea.

Aletter signed by 80 civil society organisations called for ensuring the fund “truly prioritizes and meets the needs of climate-impacted people in developing countries, free of undue business and industry influence.”

Credit: http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/

“Climate finance is compensation, reparations paid by those countries most responsible for the climate crisis to those worst impacted,” said Sarah-Jayne Clifton, director of Jubilee Debt Campaign, a signee of the letter.

“It must be adequate and predictable and from public sources, and fully accountable to the developing countries who need it, not the profit-driven multinational companies of the rich world and their financial backers.”

After an original promise of 100 billion dollars was made at the 2009 U.N. Climate Summit in Copenhagen, climate financing dried up as governments facing austerity budgets at home chose to deprioritise it. The Overseas Development Institute estimates multilateral climate financing pledges fell by 71 percent in 2013.

When delegates met in Warsaw last November for the most recent U.N. Climate Summit, rich countries balked at a decreased 70-billion-dollar pledge.

It was hoped that the Feb. 19-21 meeting in Bali would clarify from where and exactly how the fund’s coffers will be filled. Prior to the meeting, the GCF had received 34 million dollars from Germany and South Korea, just enough to pay the staff at its Incheon headquarters.

Without clarification and donor guarantees, the U.N.’s 2015 comprehensive global climate conference in Paris could be thrown into disarray.

Attendees said they would have been happy with pledges of 10-20 billion dollars in Bali but donors offered up less than one million, just over a quarter of it in a highly symbolic donation from its host, Indonesia.

Though complete abandonment of the fund is a long way off, the slide towards private funding is causing concern among even the most cynical of observers.

“The vast body of that money should be from developed country’s budgets,” said Reyes. “It needs to be made political priority.”

The fund was initially intended to avoid replicating climate financing schemes already attempted by multilateral lenders and development banks – lenders who expect the return of at least their principal amount. Unlike those institutions, the GCF was meant not merely to achieve economic stabilisation in poorer countries or repair damage after storms. Instead, its genesis included the moral spirit of reparations for historic wrongs.

Yet like many international climate agreements, time has loosened memories and dampened initial euphoria.

“Our concern is that it doesn’t become ‘the World Bank for Climate Change’ and that it actually focuses on projects that can’t be done by private investors alone,” Reyes told IPS. “But what we see in particular is the [GCF] Secretariat is heavily staffed by people from the developed world where there is this tendency of seeing investment only as what can be leveraged from the private sector.”

Reyes says the 50:50 funding split should be binding and not aspirational. Money earmarked for mitigation in middle-income countries could potentially end up funding cleaner fossil fuel projects like natural gas installations. There had been hope that the board would emerge from Bali with stronger language limiting how much, if any, of funds could be spent on fossil fuels.

Severe flooding is one of many devastating effects of climate change, as the Caribbean island nation Dominica experienced in 2011. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

Representation

In Bali, civil society groups called into question representation at the meetings, which they say gave the business sector and in particular large corporations too much influence.

Under the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, non-governmental constituencies are split into nine groupings, only one of which is the business community. That the Bali meetings had only four active observers – two from the business community and two from civil society representing the other eight, including trade unions, farmers and indigenous groups – fueled those accusations.

“The corporate capture of the Green Climate Fund is deeply troubling and yet another example of the interests of private finance and multinational corporations being placed above the public interest,” Clifton told IPS.

A central unresolved point of contention concerns how much of the fund should be dedicated to grants and how much of it to loans, as well as how generous those loans should be.

“One of the issues that should be decided here are the terms and conditions of concessional lending,” said Reyes. “The terms that we were pushing for would be around not contributing to indebtedness –we think adaptation should be grant funding.”

In the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan – even as its delegates engaged in a hunger strike at the Warsaw summit – the Philippines government immediately took out one billion dollars in emergency loans from the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. Though both institutions provided smaller direct grants, the model troubles groups that have for years campaigned for debt forgiveness in the developing world only to see climate change potentially push those regions towards further loans.

“Climate finance should not be profit-driven, nor forced as loans or other debt-creating instruments on to countries already burdened by both the worst impacts of the unfolding climate crisis and the obligation to service existing unjust, illegitimate debt,” said Clifton.

Like moths to a flame, countries with large financial sectors like Switzerland and the UK have reportedly been talking up the benefits of sophisticated currency swaps as ways to safeguard private foreign investment. While such assurances will be required for certain outlays, groups are concerned that money being pledged does not become a pool for Wall Street to play in. In Bali they had hoped to set limits on the private sector’s involvement – that did not happen.

But Wall Street may end up footing much of the bill itself. Growing pressure in Europe has seen moves to use income generated by proposed Financial Transaction Taxes – levies on the buying and selling of assets – to fill gaps in climate financing.

An offshore oil rig drilling platform. Global subsidies of fossil fuels rose to 1.9 trillion dollars in 2013. Credit: Bigstock

By Samuel Oakford
NEW YORK, Feb 10 2014 (IPS)

Despite evolving public awareness and alarm over climate change, subsidies for the production and consumption of fossil fuels remain a stubborn impediment to shifting the world’s energy matrix towards renewable sources.

Collectively, fossil fuel subsidies amount to a nearly two-trillion-dollar oar left dragging in the water.“The economic story around renewables has shifted." -- Dr. Daniel M. Kammen

Today, lawmakers hold routine hearings on climate change’s costs and mitigation, citizens in developing nations demand reparations for extreme weather, and even multinational corporations have tepidly begun advertising that rising seas could spill over onto their bottom lines.

But talk is one thing, money quite another.

“If you can remove fossil fuel subsidies, then renewables are the clear choice, they are far cheaper in the long run,” said Philipp Tagwerker, research fellow at the Worldwatch Institute and author of a recent report tallying subsidies. “Renewables are competitive at the moment, but it takes political will to change.”

After the 2008 financial crisis, subsidies fell along with plummeting energy prices, but by 2011 they had rebounded to pre-crisis levels. That volatility, whether due to supply and demand or geopolitics and speculation, is partly why countries are looking to lessen their exposure to carbon-based fuels.

Though definitions vary, in 2013 the IMF found that when “post-tax” externalities like carbon emissions, effects on health and resource scarcity were considered, global subsidies of fossil fuels rose to “$1.9 trillion worldwide – the equivalent of 2.5 percent of global GDP, or 8 percent of government revenues.” Estimates for renewable subsidies top out at a comparably measly 88 billion dollars globally.

“That’s a pretty hard equation to overcome,” said Dr. Daniel M. Kammen, director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. “Fossil fuels not only have the advantage of subsidies, but they are the incumbent.

“That said we are seeing much faster growth in the renewable sector,” Kammen told IPS. “The economic story around renewables has shifted. It’s not just wind – solar is competitive now, and we are seeing big pushes for geothermal.”

Though critics of renewables often cite their higher cost per kilowatt-hour (kWh) compared to traditional sources, when externalities are considered, that dynamic is reversed. According to the Worldwatch report, customary analyses find it can take up to 15 cents of a renewable subsidy to generate one kWh, far higher than the 0.1 to 0.7 cents per kWh for fossil fuels. But including externalities immediately tacks on an additional 23.8 cents per kwh to fossil fuels but only half a cent to renewables.

Tagwerker writes that “accelerating the phaseout of fossil fuel subsidies would reduce CO2 emissions by 360 million tons in 2020, which is 12 percent of the emission savings that are needed in order to keep the increase in global temperature to 2 degrees Celsius.”

A mixed support system

Generally, consumption subsidies that lower prices at the point of sale have prevailed in the developing world, while producer subsidies have been more common in industrialised countries.

Over the past decade, while fossil fuel subsidies haven’t abated, their characterisation has shifted from one of necessity to troublesome vestige.

Last year, the G20 reiterated its pledge to “phase out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies that encourage wasteful consumption over the medium term.” And during his January State of the Union address, U.S. President Barack Obama told Congress “climate change is a fact” and called for the phasing out of an estimated four billion dollars in tax breaks and incentives – many dating back a century, when oil exploration was dangerous and far more expensive – that U.S. companies enjoy every year.

Yet politicians and investors alike still the find the long-term payouts from alternative energy projects don’t always jibe with their short-term electoral goals and the pressures of quarterly earnings – leaving policy to lag and projects wanting for infusions of cash.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that in the developing world, consumption subsidies alone cost countries over 500 billion dollars.

Media coverage tends to focus on these parts of the world when unrest follows moves to remove or reduce fuel subsidies. Indeed, last year several dozen people were killed in Khartoum during riots after the Sudanese government, facing a fiscal crisis brought on by the annexation of the oil-rich south, eliminated subsidies. Meanwhile in India, where the government has been more cautious, the oil ministry predicts fuel subsidies for the fiscal year will end up 750 billion rupees over budget.

For years, poorer governments found lower fuel prices the simplest way to keep basic goods just cheap enough that the poorest in society could survive – a sort of broad-stroke welfare. Today, they remain fearful that reform runs the risk of triggering inflation, raising prices for food and basic goods beyond the reach of millions.

But unlike traditional forms of state welfare that attempt to target the needy, consumption subsidies are nearly always flat and regressive, funneling wealth to those who consume the most. The IMF has found that in low and middle-income countries, the richest 20 percent of households receive six times the benefits from subsidies as the poorest fifth. Among gasoline consumers alone, the disparity widens to 20 to one.

Tagwerker says governments can look to places like Indonesia, where, despite snags, subsidy curtailments were coupled with targeted cash-transfer schemes to assist those most affected by higher prices.

“You can avoid the period of unrest if you carefully plan it,” said Tagwerker, adding that all countries should consider carbon trading, which has a track record of reducing emissions.

“You are already spending so much on importing fossil fuels and subsidising them to keep them at a low price, why don’t you set up a fund that puts this towards renewable energy? China, of all places, has a consumption tax on fossil fuel and they put it towards renewable energy.”

Investment quibbles

In May 2013, Goldman Sachs announced it would finance more than 500 million dollars’ worth of residential solar panels for U.S.-based SolarCity Corp, allowing the company to offer homeowners zero down payments. The Wall Street firm, which pledged to put 40 billion dollars towards renewable projects by 2021, has also pumped 1.5 billion into a Danish wind farm and invested 340 million into an Indian wind venture.

But despite headline-grabbing deals like Goldman’s, overall investing in alternative energy sagged 12 percent last year to 244 billion. Investors remain skittish of the higher initial outlays required by renewable projects, a problem made worse by austerity in Europe and the winding down of stimulus in the United States. The U.N. found that “developers, equity providers and lenders were unsure about whether commitments to subsidise renewable energy deployment would continue.”

However, Kammen believes the next few years will see larger sovereign wealth funds financing more alternative energy projects. As the sector consolidates and interest rates remain low, Kammen says money earmarked for real estate may be shifted to renewable electricity-generating ventures which financially mimic the purchase of office space or other rent-paying assets.

“Because renewables have very low fuel costs the real issue is up-front financing. If one doesn’t correct this fundamental over-subsidy of the incumbent fossil technology, it makes the issues of renewables that much more difficult.”

Re-allocating subsidies to renewables would help investment get over the initial hump, says Tagwerker.

“You’ve got to shift the paradigm from paying every month to ‘we pay everything in the first month then we don’t have to pay for the following year’. If you could use all the money that is spent on fossil fuel subsidies for that, you’d have [renewable] plants popping up everywhere.”

UNMISS peacekeepers hoist the United Nations flag during a ceremony marking UN Day. Credit: UN Photo/Martine Perret

By Samuel Oakford
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 1 2014 (IPS)

As South Sudan’s fragile ceasefire threatens to unravel, human rights groups are calling on the U.N.’s mission there to make public its human rights reporting, a step they say will help lay the groundwork for reconciliation that never took place following independence in 2011.

Though the mission, UNMISS, reports to the Security Council every four months and periodically publishes press releases, it is not mandated to make public the information its human rights division collects."In UNMISS a lot of the leadership believed they were there to capacity-build the government. That mindset has to change now – with this conflict it’s very clear that this government is party to a conflict.” -- Jehanne Henry

While missions often elect to put out human rights reports regardless of their mandate, as UNMISS has done twice since its creation in 2011, observers and U.N. officials tell IPS many reports are filtered through back channels to U.N. headquarters or via longstanding private connections to human rights organisations.

With no transparency mechanism, they say, oversight is difficult and self-reflection rare. Complicating matters are Security Council members that rely on their own sources in the country and within the mission.

“We’ve been concerned by the lack of public reporting coming out of the mission, especially when you compare it to the output of other missions such as the one in the Democratic Republic of Congo or Ivory Coast,” said Philippe Bolopion, U.N. director at Human Rights Watch.

“In a country where you have entrenched impunity, including for crimes committed by security forces, it’s all the more important that the U.N. reach out and report on abuses, whoever committed them, and the U.N. Mission has not always done that,” Bolopion told IPS.

In a statement, the mission told IPS that it “does not keep information from the public but we don’t go into specifics, especially not while in the process of collecting evidence – which again will only be possible when we have regained full access throughout the country or at least all areas affected by violence.”

“UNMISS will continue to publish reports and will continue to remain impartial in documenting, collecting and interviewing eyewitnesses from all sides and in all areas of the conflict,” said a spokesperson.

The mission did not respond to questions concerning the private dissemination of human rights reporting.

Observers agree that due to concerns over security and accuracy, releasing reports now is difficult. But complaints well preceded the current violence, says Michelle Kisenkoetter, representative to the U.N. at the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH).

“FIDH has been calling for a long time for public human rights reports coming out of U.N. peacekeeping missions and the situation in South Sudan is a perfect example of where that is extremely important,” she said.

“[It’s] an area where the U.N. is the only one with access to the community in many parts of the country. They have a mandate to be observing and monitoring the human rights situation and it’s imperative that those reports go public so we can shed some light on what’s happening.

“We’ve brought it up with the secretary general’s office, we’ve brought it up with the Security Council, we’ve brought it up with UNMISS itself, and we haven’t really received much of a response from them on this,” Kisenkoetter told IPS.

The last human rights report from UNMISS was released in April 2013, several months before communal violence in Jonglei state that would presage the current conflict.

One observer at a large international think tank told IPS the public reporting “ has been very limited and systematically downplaying the extent of the abuses, including on the violence in Jonglei, where I believe the ethnic dimension and the government’s (or government officials’) lack of appropriate reaction if not direct responsibility should have been publicly and clearly invoked.”

Bloodshed foretold?

Long-simmering mistrust within the ruling SPLM party erupted on Dec. 15 when rival factions clashed in Juba. President Salva Kiir, a Dinka, accused former vice-president Riek Machar, whom he had sacked in July, of plotting a coup. Machar, a Nuer, denied those charges but fled and took command of rebels and SPLA deserters. Soon after, fighting devolved into vicious ethnic clashes.

On Dec. 24, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said teams had encountered mass graves in both Juba and Bentiu and reported extensive “extrajudicial killings” and “the targeting of individuals on the basis of their ethnicity.”

The U.N. has indicated it will offer information – privately – to assist a recently announced African Union commission of inquiry, the details of which have yet to be fully established.

On Jan. 23, with rebels losing ground to government and Ugandan forces and running out of food and ammunition, negotiators in Addis Ababa agreed to a temporary cessation of hostilities. Both sides have since accused one another of breaking its terms.

Though overseen by U.N. headquarters, each mission’s special representative is given broad latitude to dictate internal policies and maintain lines of communication with sources that may also be the target of investigations. Hilde Johnson, appointed to lead UNMISS in 2011 with backing from then U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice, has maintained a relatively low profile and according to observers, a cautious, in-house management style.

A large NGO presence and heavy Western funding have fostered allegations the intervention relied too heavily on development to head off lasting grievances, seeing the potential for a north-south conflict but not an internal civil war.

Relations between the U.N. and the southern government soured in May 2011 when Sudanese forces seized the contested border region of Abyei. At the time, U.N. officials said southern incursions had provoked violence.

In November 2012, Kiir expelled a top UNMISS human rights official for “unethical” reporting. Shortly before the January ceasefire, he accused UNMISS of sheltering rebels and “running a parallel government.”

“There’s a constant tension between the importance of having access on the ground and the requirement of fulfilling the mandate as laid out by the Security Council,” said one U.N. official, who spoke to IPS on the condition of anonymity.

“Human rights reporting is always controversial in missions – the category of U.N. staff that gets thrown out of the country by the host governments are inevitably human rights officers. Nevertheless, their work is critical to the U.N.’s credibility.”

But other observers tell IPS the mission played only a small role in peace negotiations and have become preoccupied with maintaining their position in South Sudan.

“The effectiveness of a peacekeeping mission is always complicated by the relationship with the government and understandings of mandates,” said Jehanne Henry, senior Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch who has been compiling reports in South Sudan since the outbreak of violence.

“But it’s very clear that in UNMISS a lot of the leadership believed they were there to capacity-build the government. That mindset has to change now – with this conflict it’s very clear that this government is party to a conflict.”

“Their human rights reporting should have been more regular and public,” said Henry. “You can make the argument very clearly [that] the atrocities that were committed in Jonglei wouldn’t have been committed as they were if the government felt it was really being watched and called out.”

Kisenkoetter says the tenuous state of emergency surrounding the ceasefire furthers the sense that accountability will be pushed down the road. Public reporting and establishing a precedent for transparency is vital in a country where a 2005 peace agreement with the north included no justice mechanism for south-on-south violence, she says.

“This is precisely why the U.N. and international community needs to take seriously its role of ensuring justice and ensuring political reconciliation – if we leave it the military victor to rule, that’s the greatest mistake we can make.”

Over 900,000 people have so far been uprooted from their homes since the conflict in CAR escalated. Close to half a million are in the outskirts of the capital Bangui with 100,000 taking refuge at the airport. Credit: © EU/ECHO/Pierre-Yves Scotto/cc by 2.0

By Samuel Oakford
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 30 2014 (IPS)

Reports of horrific revenge killing continued to emerge from the Central African Republic Wednesday, less than 24 hours after the Security Council voted to increase the international troop presence there and levy sanctions against those it suspects of war crimes.

Over 2,000 people have been killed and one million – a quarter of the population – displaced since a coalition of northern, predominantly Muslim rebels calling themselves Seleka (“alliance” in the local Sango language) seized power in March 2013.“Today, two men were killed in the street - one had his head cut off. They were cut to bits." -- Joanne Mariner

Following the deployment of peacekeepers and the resignation of president and former Seleka leader Michel Djotodia earlier this month, the group began a hasty but violent retreat from the capital and several contested rural towns.

Violence against the Christian community was highest in early December, when marauding ex-Seleka elements killed hundreds of civilians. But since then, the 1,600 French and 5,000 African Union peacekeepers have proved unable to fill the security vacuum left in the Seleka’s wake and civilians in areas where fighters had based themselves have come under increasingly vicious attacks from Christian anti-balaka militias seeking revenge.

“The Seleka are the worst thing that could have happened to Muslims in the Central African Republic,” said Joanne Mariner, senior crisis response adviser at Amnesty International, who estimates over 100,000 Muslims have already fled.

“I’ve spoken to hundreds of Muslim civilians and almost every single one tells me that at this point they want to get out of the country,” she told IPS.

On Tuesday, interim president Catherine Samba-Panza told French radio she would request that an official U.N. peacekeeping mission take over from the joint French-African Union mission that the 15-member U.N. Security Council authorised in December, something human rights groups have called for since last year.

But the council again stopped short of sending such a “blue-helmet” mission, authorising only 500 additional European Union troops who will be expected to spell French “Sangari” soldiers guarding 100,000 displaced people camped at Bangui’s airport.

On Wednesday, Human Rights Watch emergency director Peter Bouckaert tweeted a photograph taken at the airport appearing to show a crowd mutilating the corpses of two Muslim men, just 15 yards, he said, from French troops.

Last week, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay warned “the disarmament of ex-Seleka carried out by French forces appears to have left Muslim communities vulnerable to anti-balaka retaliatory attacks.” Other officials have warned of the potential for genocide in the country and Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has urged for a peacekeeping mission with up to 9,000 soldiers. But the Security Council demurred.

Rwandan soldiers wait in line at the Kigali airport Jan. 19. U.S. forces will transport a total number of 850 Rwandan soldiers and more than 1,000 tons of equipment into the Central African Republic to aid French and African Union operations against militants during this three week-long operation. Credit: U.S. Army Africa photo by Air Force Staff Sgt. Ryan Crane.

In recent days, anti-balaka have made regular incursions into Bangui’s two remaining Muslim enclaves, known locally as PK5 and PK12, killing dozens of residents and driving out hundreds. PK12 is a main transit point and Muslims from villages surrounding Bangui have congregated there, awaiting passage to Chad and Cameroon.

Last Friday, 22 civilians were murdered in a convoy on the highway to Cameroon, many hacked to death with machetes.

“In PK5, when people leave that area there are lynchings,” Mariner told IPS from the northwest town of Bozoum. “Today, two men were killed in the street – one had his head cut off. They were cut to bits.”

She added, “Bangui used to be an enormously mixed city. That is completely over.”

In PK13, another traditionally Muslim neighbourhood now emptied of its residents, newcomers have already written their names on abandoned houses and made plans to turn the local mosque into a youth centre.

“You come back in a year and you’ll never know that there were Muslims there,” said Mariner. “Unless there’s real action taken, that’s where the country is going.”

Information is sparse outside of Bangui but the situation is believed to be dire north and northwest the capital, where the peacekeeping presence is light and where anti-balaka have actively pushed Muslims out of their towns.

In the western town of Baoro, the only Muslims left have taken refuge in a local church guarded by peacekeepers. But elsewhere, in towns like Bossembele, Yakole and Boyali, most have fled.

Until the Chadian-backed Seleka began fighting, sporadic violence in the country had never broken so deeply along religious lines.

Disorganised violence

Because the Christian militias are only loosely coordinated at best, negotiations have been impossible in many parts of the country.

“There’s no command and control structure, so even within a single region, they may have five anti-balaka groups vying for power,” said Mariner.

But unlike in the capital, where better organised gangs have access to automatic weapons and grenades, the lightly armed and often young anti-balaka in the countryside travel on foot and are seen fleeing from peacekeepers.

“Obviously you can’t have peacekeepers on every block, but you can have peacekeepers in every town. Even a few peacekeepers make a huge difference,” said Mariner.

“They mostly have hunting rifles, shotguns, you see a lot with bow and arrows, they are no match to real soldiers. And when there are real soldiers they get out of the way. There are attacks that almost certainly could have been avoided had there been peacekeepers in place.”

Mission confusion

The EU contingent will add a third element to an already piecemeal force that has at times appeared overwhelmed.

After the initial Security Council vote in December, observers expressed concern that a streamlined mission – of the kind that had seen moderate successes in Mali against an organised foe – would fail to prevent violence that had devolved into communal, tit-for-tat killings, nor would it address long-term development needs that fostered conflict.

French Ambassador Gerard Araud spoke this week of the need for a full U.N. mission replete with up to 10,000 peacekeepers. But Tuesday’s vote accomplished neither of those goals.

Ainsley Reidy, senior legal advisor at Human Rights Watch, says the international community has a responsibility to bolster the intervention.

“We see protection of the civilian population and accountability for crimes committed by all as the two priority responsibilities of the international community,” said Reidy. “For that reason we continue to remain convinced of the need for the quick deployment of a properly resourced U.N. peacekeeping mission to respond to the scale of the violence.”

Such a mission would augment BINUCA, the small, non-military “peace-building” office already in the country. Groups have for months criticised what they see as a lack of public human rights reporting coming from observers there, a problem they place in the generally disjointed nature of the intervention. Without a unified mandate for all observers and peacekeepers, human rights groups worry accountability and reconciliation will be waylaid.

“We think ultimately there needs to be a fully fledged U.N. mission that addresses both the security needs and can contribute to holding people accountable,” Reidy told IPS.

The December resolution left the door open for the possibility of a larger U.N. peacekeeping mission and would only require an additional vote to initiate a transition. At the time, there was speculation that Security Council members, in particular the United States, were hesitant to budget for another peacekeeping mission at a time when the U.N. has more troops deployed worldwide than ever before. That state of affairs appears unaltered.

In neighbouring South Sudan, where the Security Council voted earlier in December to increase the blue-helmet mission there by 5,000, the transfer of troops has been delayed and thousands have yet to arrive.

“We do know these deployments tend to be slow and can take up to six months,” said Reidy.

“If we take what has happened to civilians between mid-December and mid-January as an indication of how quickly things can happen on the ground in CAR, then six months is too long a time. The U.N. and others can’t afford to drag their feet on this.”

Intravenous drug users are the last in line to get support from Pakistan's government-run AIDS programme. Credit: Fahim Siddiqi/IPS

By Samuel Oakford
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 24 2014 (IPS)

In the exclusive, rarified air of Davos, Thursday’s attendees at the World Economic Forum shared in a whiff of decriminalisation at a panel on drug policy in the Swiss alpine city that included former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, Texas Governor Rick Perry and the head of Human Rights Watch, Ken Roth.

“I believe that drugs have destroyed many people, but wrong governmental policies have destroyed many more,” said Annan.  “When we realised [alcohol] prohibition wasn’t working, we had the courage to change it.”"How can I tell a farmer with half a hectare growing marijuana he will go to jail if in the [U.S.] states of Washington and Colorado it's legal?" -- Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos

Santos echoed a common theme, complaining of half-baked policies and lip service paid to drug reforms. Colombia, for many years Washington’s staunchest ally in the so-called war on drugs, has recently made an about-face, joining much of Latin America in questioning the increasingly violent consequences of prohibition.

Perry served as a foil for the other three panelists, though he agreed that U.S. states had the right to decide on policies independently from the federal government.

“I am not for legalisation of drugs,” Perry said. “We certainly would never jump out in front of a parade because that’s where the public seems to be going.”

“I’ve long wondered what it would take to persuade the Davos organisers to put drug policy on the main stage of the forum,” said Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, in a statement. “Drug policy reform as a global political movement has come of age.”

Davos comes a month after a leaked internal U.N. document showcased disagreement among member states over the future course of global drug policy. Shortly after, Uruguay became the first country to legalise possession of marijuana, flouting existing U.N. conventions.

The response from the U.N.’s quasi-judicial International Narcotics Control Board was tepid and left the door ajar for more countries to challenge a faltering consensus on interdiction.

“I don’t see any evidence of any political will at the U.N. to penalise states that are exploring these options,” said Sean Dunagan, a former U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent in Guatemala and current member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.

The U.S., which largely wrote the U.N. conventions that codified the war on drugs, has emerged Janus-faced on the world stage, with a president who admittedly inhaled, recent legalisation in two U.S. states – Colorado and Washington – and a populace increasingly unbothered by drug use among their friends and neighbours.

“How can I tell a farmer with half a hectare growing marijuana he will go to jail if in the states of Washington and Colorado it’s legal?” said Santos.

Despite increasingly viral coverage of the few that flout interdiction – next week’s Superbowl pits teams from Washington and Colorado and has been dubbed the “Marijuana Bowl” – nearly all countries still schedule and criminalise drugs based on guidelines codified in the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotics and the 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances.

“I see the conventions as lagging indicators. I don’t think they will be changed any time soon,” Dunagan told IPS.

In the developing world, Nadelmann says countries tend to pull their punches and can at times feel obliged to follow the path of retrograde policies, even as the countries which authored them distance themselves from those laws.

“Policy innovation in this area doesn’t come easily or naturally in Africa,” Nadelmann told IPS. “I think the old moralistic notions have yet to really be challenged.”

But Nadelmann says Annan’s evolution on the issue is vital for the region and carries significant symbolic weight. In 1998, Annan oversaw a special session of the General Assembly that focused exclusively on eradication, much to the chagrin of activists. But by 2011, Annan had joined other members of the Global Commission on Drug Policy in encouraging “experimentation with models of legal regulation of drugs.”

“What’s most significant in many ways is the fact that Kofi Annan was willing to identify so publicly and boldly with the cause of drug policy reform. He’s been on the global commission since its inception, but it’s only in the last year that he’s begun to step out of it more,” said Nadelmann. “In recent months he’s decided to make a deeper commitment on the issue.”

In May, the Organisation of American States released a report that raised the prospect – long advocated by harm reduction activists – of decriminalisation, elevating the easing of interdiction policies that since the 1970s were accepted as gospel by countries when confronting drug use.

Though Colombia had successfully reined in its once seemingly-untouchable cartels, Santos said increased production elsewhere, particularly in Central America, was an example of the “balloon” effect, where eradication only displaces, rather than eliminates production and does nothing to reduce demand.

While the U.S. relaxes federal enforcement domestically, militarisation continues in Central America, where DEA agents silently accompany local forces on often violent missions in rural areas.

Perry’s Socratic responses seemed to at times befuddle other panelists, particularly when he attempted to draw links to the fight against Al Qaeda. “How long have we been in the War on Terror?” asked the governor to the bemusement of the crowd.

Dunagan said it was important that reform not forget those already incarcerated. In the U.S., half a million prisoners are currently serving terms for drug offences.

“There are declines in prosecutions in Colorado and Washington but people aren’t being led out of jail in those states,” said Dunagan.

“There’s certainly a willingness for world leaders to challenge that orthodoxy that is U.S.-driven, and is enforced by the U.S. via the U.N. The trend is clear but I don’t know if we are at a critical mass.”

Christiana Figueres, the executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. Credit: Lusha Chen/IPS

By Samuel Oakford
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 16 2014 (IPS)

Despite Wall Street’s nascent rediscovery of green stocks, global investment in alternative energy declined by 12 percent last year.

According to a Bloomberg New Energy Finance report, investment was scaled back in both the U.S. and China – for China it was the first year without growth in the sector in a decade – and plunged by nearly half amidst austerity in Europe.“Why is Goldman Sachs investing? Why is Warren Buffet investing? The answer is these aren’t dumb players." -- Michael Liebrich

The solar sector led the decline, as plummeting prices for photovoltaic arrays led to an industry-wide contraction of nearly 20 percent.

But the front-end of the solar sector saw a surge in demand for rooftop solar installations and investors piled into installation companies, doubling the value of the MAC Global Solar Energy Index.

In May, Goldman Sachs agreed to finance more than 500 million dollars in solar panels for California-based SolarCity Corp.

“Why is Goldman Sachs investing? Why is Warren Buffet investing? The answer is these aren’t dumb players. There’s plenty of money to be made,” said Michael Liebrich, CEO of Bloomberg New Energy Finance. “For every solar panel someone is selling at a loss, someone is getting a cheap solar panel.

“We are seeing a new era of energy technologies breaking through into the big time and the finance is flowing. Those sort of eye-catching deals mean it will be that much easier for the next lot.”

Liebrich spoke to IPS at the 6th Investment Summit on Climate Risk, held at the U.N. Wednesday.

The summit brought together nearly 500 private investors, pension managers and bankers who listened to speakers who repeated two bottom lines: climate change must be diminished, and there’s money to be made in avoiding it.

But as the alternative energy sector consolidates and matures, a safer investment environment offers little immediate respite for residents in at-risk countries, where the last year has seen record temperatures in Australia, massive floods in South Sudan and in the Philippines, the most powerful storm ever recorded.

“Absent climate change, we would be moving towards lower carbon energy matrixes anyway,” said Christiana Figueres, the executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. “But climate puts an urgency factor there that we otherwise would not have. We know that if we delay in being able to balance the global energy matrix, we may be facing very, very serious threats to the global economy.”

A November climate conference in the Polish capital saw the creation of the “Warsaw Mechanism” for loss and damage associated with climate change. Agreed to just days after Typhoon Haiyan ravaged the Philippines, the mechanism offers a vehicle to allocate funds to poorer countries that suffer the brunt of natural disasters associated with increased carbon emissions. But how the mechanism will be financed is still up in the air.

“We have a window to do that, which is basically the next 10 years,” Figueres told IPS. “In the next 10 years we have to be able to reach a global peaking of emissions.”

Yet despite a consensus on carbon-induced global warming, many countries continue to subsidise fossil fuels, often putting alternative energy at a disadvantage even where it can compete in a free market.

“Certain renewable energies are already now cheaper than fossil fuel energy, despite the fact the fossil fuels are benefiting from subsidies,” said Figueres. “So actually they are being really truly competitive. But the point we have to get to is not to have those as isolated cases in certain countries.”

In 2011, the International Energy Agency reported subsidies for renewable energy totaled 88 billion dollars. The same year, the IEA estimated direct fossil fuel subsidies exceeded 500 billion dollars. And in 2013, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) reported “that energy subsidies amount to a staggering $1.9 trillion worldwide”, mostly devoted to fossil fuels.

“The policy stick is hugely important because right now we’re lacking a level playing field between clean energy, an emerging industry with big societal benefits, and the fossil fuel industry, which is highly subsidised and has negative societal impacts it’s not paying for,” said Mindy Lubber, president of Ceres, co-host of the Summit .

“Comprehensive government policies that better incentivise clean energy and properly price fossil fuel impacts will be enormously helpful in spurring more clean energy investment.”

Several large banks in the U.S. and Europe, including Bank of America, JP Morgan and Credit Agricole Corporate, recently agreed to voluntary guidelines on the issuance of so called “green bonds” earmarked for climate change mitigation. Public pension funds in California and Sweden have already invested in similar bonds.

“Government policies have a critical role, but investors themselves need to work harder to prioritise clean energy investing across all asset classes, including the largely untapped bond market and direct project investments. Setting specific portfolio-wide clean energy investing goals would send a powerful signal to the markets,” Lubber told IPS.

But the cautious optimism of the summit was tempered by the continued plight of developing countries. After Haiyan, the Filipino government took out one billion dollars in emergency loans from the World Bank and Asian Development Bank in order to rebuild. Without a working mechanism to allocate funds to countries like the Philippines, their debt load could grow along with climate change and could erode the economic growth and poverty reduction of the last 25 years.

“There should be protections in place for the poorest countries and people in the world who are going to be harmed by this,” said Liebrich, who suggested funding solutions like the Warsaw Mechanism with financing from countries proportional to their historical emissions.

Asked if such a set-up could be achieved by 2015, when climate talks will be held in Paris, Liebrich said no.

Rwandan genocide survivors exhuming the bodies of their relatives killed and buried in a mass grave during the 1994 100-day massacre. Credit: Edwin Musoni/IPS

By Samuel Oakford
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 15 2014 (IPS)

On Jan. 11, 1994, Romeo Dallaire, force commander of the United Nations Mission in Rwanda, sent a fax to U.N. Headquarters in New York, telling officials there a source close to the government had confided to him that Tutsis were being forced to register themselves in Kigali.

“He suspects it is for their extermination,” wrote Dallaire.“Having 26,000 people running around [DRC] just with a rifle doesn’t mean you are going to actually have a solution." -- Romeo Dallaire

In five months, a million, mostly Tutsi, Rwandans would be dead, victims of a meticulously planned 100-day genocide unleashed by Hutu extremists after they shot down the plane of President Juvénal Habyarimana, fearful he would soon seal a lasting peace in the country.

On Wednesday in New York, the U.N. marks the sombre 20th anniversary of what most consider its greatest failure – and the lives that proved the price required to force peacekeeping into the 21st century.

“Twenty years ago, humanity turned itself inside out,” Dallaire told reporters Tuesday. “The international community did its best to ignore Rwanda. It wasn’t on their radar, it was of no self-interest, it had no strategic value.”

Simon Adams, executive director of the Global Centre for Responsibility to Protect, who joined Dallaire and Rwandan ambassador Eugene-Richard Gasana, said the genocide, along with ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, was a turning point for the U.N.

Eleven years after the genocide, in 2005, the U.N. launched the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) initiative, obliging states to protect their own population from mass killings and holding the international community accountable for taking collective action to prevent genocide.

“Without the tragedy of Rwanda, we wouldn’t have had the Responsibility to Protect,” Adams told IPS. “There’s no way that would have happened without the process of sad reflection afterwards and the utter failure of the U.N. in 1994.”

Yet in 2009, the U.N. came under heavy criticism for not doing more during the final months of the Sri Lankan civil war, when up to 40,000 civilians were killed in a conflict which had, for most purposes, already been decided.

A 2012 internal U.N. report echoed investigations from the 1990s, finding “the UN’s failure to adequately respond to events like those that occurred in Sri Lanka should not happen again. When confronted by similar situations, the UN must be able to meet a much higher standard in fulfilling its protection and humanitarian responsibilities.”

Still, U.N. peacekeeping missions now prioritise the protection of civilians and sovereignty no longer takes precedent when they are targeted. Today it is expected that peacekeeping operations, such as recent interventions in South Sudan and the Central African Republic, will receive Chapter Seven mandates, authorising peacekeepers to use force in order to prevent the deaths of non-combatants.

Dallaire’s mission had no such mandate.

Coming a year after the disastrous failed mission in Somalia, countries were hesitant to send troops to Rwanda. Even when Dallaire asked the U.S. to jam radio transmissions emitting instructions to kill, Washington declined, afraid doing so would violate Rwanda’s sovereignty.

“The onus is on every sovereign state that makes up this U.N.,” said Dallaire. “Every sovereign state washed its hands, didn’t want to get involved, saw another Mogadishu catastrophe coming on line and did its best to avoid being engaged. So there was no prevention. There were words, but there was no prevention.”

Not only did the U.N. not heed Dallaire’s pleadings, but during the worst of the genocide, when seven Rwandans were being murdered every minute, the Security Council voted to cut its peacekeeping mission in the country by 90 percent.

Ordered to leave the country, Dallaire, along with several hundred soldiers, refused. They tried desperately to protect civilians, but the killing subsumed the ill-equipped and overwhelmed troops.

Only three weeks before Tutsi rebels took the capital and ended the genocide, the Security Council finally approved a French intervention force, but the 3,000 French troops soon after gave safe passage to fleeing interahamwe and Hutu soldiers, even allowing them to keep their weapons. Pursuit of the genocidaires continues today, both abroad and in the jungles of eastern Congo.

“History has judged the U.N. very harshly for its inaction in Rwanda, and we must learn the lessons of the past,” Adams told IPS.

In March 2013, the Security Council authorised the “U.N Force Intervention Brigade,” a rapid response force that aggressively and successfully pushed into submission the M23 rebels in Eastern Congo.

“The new force there, having offensive capabilities, is a significant departure from the mandates that were so restricted,” said Dallaire.

“Peacekeeping always suffers from a lack of rapid reaction,” said David Curran, lecturer in peacekeeping, peace building and conflict resolution at University of Bradford. “There is a strong need to examine concepts of rapid deployment.”

Curran says countries still complain about erratic mandates and many member states – mostly developing – are remiss to send soldiers on orders from a security council whose members offer few or none at all.

“Certain states, mainly from the non-aligned movement, find they are being pushed to provide peacekeepers in situations where there is little peace to keep,” Curran told IPS. “They say they are being given vague mandates pertaining to protection of civilians from the Security Council, which certainly has a majority of states who do not provide troops to peacekeeping operations.”

Dallaire says peacekeeping often is a question of money and resources, no more evident than in Congo missions, which for many years were seen as failures.

“Having 26,000 people running around there just with a rifle doesn’t mean you are going to actually have a solution,” Dallaire told reporters. “So until developed countries get reengaged in peacekeeping and peacemaking operations we will continue to have forces that are not necessarily effective on the ground but also we seem to also continue to have mandates that are so restricted.”

But, he added, there is “a whole new generation of conflict resolution in which peacekeepers can be deployed but with the ability to influence the situation and not stand there and observe it, report, a sort of referee without a red card.”

Recent mandated French-led interventions in Mali and Central African Republic – cheaper than full blue-helmet missions – have seen mixed results, but observers raise questions concerning those actions’ long-term viability and development prospects.

Dallaire spoke encouragingly of the recent deployment of troops from other missions to augment the peacekeeping force in South Sudan, which the Security Council voted to increase by 5,500 shortly before Christmas.

But Adams says the mission in South Sudan is tentative and unwilling to enforce its mandate. On Tuesday, gunfire burst through the walls of an UNMISS camp in Malakal but the U.N. did not report any engagement. Groups say 10,000 have died, many of them civilians.

“In the case of South Sudan, they have a responsibility to protect mandate, it’s written in there,” says Adams. “There’s no problem with doctrine, which is very different from 1994. I think what we see in South Sudan is a question of resourcing, political leadership and will.

“What we often lack in mass atrocity crime situations is not early warning but timely response,” he added.

Closer to Rwanda, Gasana said the interahamwe that the French let slip so easily through their grasp continue to operate as FDLR rebels in the Eastern Congo, and for that, celebrations were not yet in order.

“I don’t think that they’ve learned anything. MINUSCO’s been there 13 years. And everybody, all of us here, knows what FDLR represents and they are still there,” said Gasana. “But we learned a lesson, we are part of the U.N., we don’t want this to happen anymore and that’s why we contribute peacekeepers to see how we can do our duty and serve the people all over the world.”

UNMISS officers provide water to civilians seeking refuge from fighting in Juba on Dec. 17, 2013. Credit: UN Photo/UNMISS

By Samuel Oakford
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 11 2014 (IPS)

As the death toll rises from South Sudan’s spiraling political and ethnic conflict, the ability of the U.N. to enforce its peacekeeping mandate in the country is coming under increased scrutiny.

On Thursday, U.N. under-secretary general for peacekeeping Hervé Ladsous told reporters the toll well exceeded 1,000 and reiterated that “the situation in terms of violations of human rights remains terribly critical.” The next day, the International Crisis Group released its own estimates that put the figure at up to 10,000."It's 11 million people across a country the size of France. How could we promise that we could protect everyone all of the time against everybody?” -- Kieran Dwyer of DPKO

Yet since the deaths of two Indian peacekeepers during a Dec. 19 attack by Nuer militia on an UNMISS base in Jonglei State, the U.N. has engaged militarily neither the loose coalition of rebel forces led by former vice-president Riek Machar nor government SPLA troops fighting for President Salva Kiir.

Vastly outnumbered by combatants, peacekeepers have been directed to protect UNMISS compounds where NGOs and the U.N.’s humanitarian agency, OCHA, have struggled to provide for upwards of 60,000 displaced South Sudanese who have sought shelter.

“We cannot protect those people from being overrun while at the same time doing patrolling in an area the size of France,” said Kieran Dwyer, chief of public affairs at the U.N.’s Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO).

As fighting raged and the government appeared to retake the northern city of Bentiu Friday, Mongolian peacekeepers there remained near the city’s compound, where 9,000 residents had taken refuge.

“It’s not our job to stand in the way of the anti-government forces fighting the pro-government forces,” Dwyer told IPS.

Dwyer says UNMISS utilises local channels to inform combatants of the location of civilians and threatens them with accountability should they attack, but he admits peacekeepers themselves are fearful of being overwhelmed and killed and even of reprisal attacks within UNMISS camps if they were to engage one side or the other in a firefight.

That state of affairs means little stands in the way of potential human rights violators, says Cameron Hudson, director of policy at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and former director for African Affairs at the National Security Council.

“You can’t do peacekeeping with the mentality that you accept zero casualties,” Hudson told IPS. “If that’s how you enter into these missions, they will never be fully successful and carry out their mission mandates.”

Fighting began on Dec. 15 when Nuer and Dinka factions of the SPLA skirmished in the capital. President Kiir, an ethnic Dinka, immediately ordered the arrest of 11 high-profile opposition leaders and accused Machar, a Nuer, of plotting a coup, a charge Macher has denied. Despite international scepticism of Kiir’s account, Machar fled Juba and took command of rebels.

The rebellion has displaced 400,000 people and pushed unknown numbers into the bush where they remain unreachable by humanitarian agencies and peacekeepers. The fate of those who fled their homes but didn’t make it to U.N. compounds lingers as a glaring question that neither the U.N. nor its critics appear capable of answering.

Human rights

The violence comes as the U.N. unveils “Rights Up Front,” its new genocide prevention initiative – an attempt to address failures to avoid civilian deaths in past conflicts in places like Bosnia, Rwanda and Sri Lanka.

Though it remains unclear how many civilians have perished in South Sudan, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay in December reported mass graves had been found in Juba and Bentiu and cited “extrajudicial killings” and “the targeting of individuals on the basis of their ethnicity.” Observers believe more will be uncovered.

“It is irrefutable, and needs repeating, that serious human rights violations are the best early warning of impending atrocities,” said Deputy Secrety-General Jan Eliasson, speaking before the General Assembly on “Rights Up Front.”

But in South Sudan, UNMISS has been tentative.

“They don’t have that many forces on the ground,” said EJ Hogendoorn, deputy programme director for Africa at the Crisis Group. “They also obviously have significant logistic challenges in terms of moving around safely.”

Still, in a Christmas Eve letter to the U.N. secretary general, Crisis Group President and CEO Louise Arbour wrote that the U.N. needed to do more to ensure the safety of civilians.

“We feel that UNMISS, using its existing forces until additional troops arrive, should take a number of immediate, specific steps to prioritise protection of civilians, above all other mandated tasks,” said Arbour.

“Clearly not enough is known about what’s going on,” Hogendoorn told IPS. “This is part and parcel of the fact that peacekeepers are not patrolling as much as they normally would.”

From its beginning in 2011, UNMISS was mandated to protect with force “civilians under imminent threat of physical violence.” But despite signs of political instability in the SPLM governing coalition and an uprising earlier in 2013 in Jonglei state, the mission remained unequipped to prevent or intervene in violence on the scale seen in the past month.

On Dec. 26, Hilde Johnson, the U.N. special representative to South Sudan, told reporters, “I don’t think any South Sudanese nor any of us observers in country or outside expected the unraveling of the stability so quickly.”

But others have said those investments meant the U.N., Johnson, and NGOs on the ground were more hesitant to criticise the government and highlight warning signs.

Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation, says UNMISS was unprepared from the start. After South Sudan declared independence in 2011, peacekeepers that had already been in the country to enforce the 2006 comprehensive peace agreement between the north and south were shifted into the new mission.

“It was the power of inertia,” de Waal told IPS. “There were contracts, jobs, infrastructure and the U.N. said, let’s maintain it.”

“There was no deep analysis – what will these troops actually be doing? So they are really there by default.”

But Dwyer says part of the problem is some observers’ inaccurate expectations of the mission.

UNMISS “was never set for a situation where you have almost a civil war,” said Dwyer. “The primary responsibility to protect civilians is the government’s and our job is to support the government.”

“The U.N. will intervene militarily against any armed group who threatens civilians if we are there and have the capacity to do so.”

The rationing of intervention isn’t a new strategy for U.N. missions. Though DPKO oversees the second-largest deployed army in the world, peacekeepers are spread thin among 15 missions and further divided among bases within countries.

“It’s [South Sudan] 11 million people across a country the size of France,” said Dwyer. “How could we promise that we could protect everyone all of the time against everybody?”

Last month, the Security Council voted to increase troop levels in South Sudan from 7,000 to 12,500, but a lengthy approval process has slowed their deployment. Ladsous, who previously told reporters the 5,500 new troops would arrive by the middle of January, now says they may not all be in the country until March.

Meanwhile, as the conflict threatens to morph into a wider civil or regional war, information on deaths and human rights violations has become increasingly obscured by the fog of war.

Adding to the dilemma facing peacekeepers is the presence of Ugandan troops fighting for the government. Ugandan President Yuweri Museveni is a strong ally of Kiir, but Uganda is also one of the countries mediating at U.N.-endorsed negotiations taking place in Addis Ababa.

Observers say the talks in Ethiopia are unlikely to achieve a ceasefire until one side has gained a significant military advantage.

All of this only makes a show of force more important, says Hudson.

“There’s no question they could be doing more,” he said. “The humanitarian part of the mission appears willing to accept a much higher risk than the actual armed peacekeepers. That’s not how it’s supposed to be, that’s a fundamental flaw in the system.”

But Dwyer says that at a certain point, little can be done “if two people are really intent on their destruction.”

“The leaders of South Sudan, on both sides, bear responsibility for this conflict and for ending the fighting,” he said.

The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported Tuesday that over 31,000 South Sudanese have fled the country since armed conflict broke out more than three weeks ago.

In Uganda, UN officials have been hard pressed to provide for more than 23,000 South Sudanese who’ve officially registered there.  “They are now crossing at a rate of up to 2,500 people a day,” said UNHCR spokesperson Melissa Fleming.

Fleming said officials in Uganda were already struggling to provide services and shelter to refugees flowing in from the Congo. “We still have 8,000 new Congolese arrivals at three reception centres in western Uganda. So, our staff and our supplies are stretched.”

Elsewhere, UNHCR reported more than 5,300 refugees in Ethiopia and at least 3,100 in one Kenyan camp alone. Within South Sudan, UNHCR has “also been taking on increased responsibilities for the 57,000 civilians taking refuge in 10 UN compounds throughout the country,” said Fleming.

The Secretary General’s spokesperson told reporters several explosions had been heard early Tuesday around Bor, where government troops were attempting to retake the city from forces loyal to former vice-president Riek Machar.

UNMISS camps in Bor are currently protecting more than 30,000 refugees from the conflict.

In July, Machar was sacked by President Salva Kiir in a move widely acknowledged as power grab by the Kiir. Tensions simmered until violence finally broke out on December 15 between Nuer and Dinka factions of the national army in the capital.

Kiir, an ethnic Dinka, accused Machar, a Nuer, of masterminding a coup plot. Machar denied those claims but fled the capital to lead rebel forces made up of defected SPLA troops and local militias.

The UN estimates the fighting has claimed the lives of over 1,000, though the true number will likely prove much higher.

A source inside an UNMISS camp in Bor told Radio Tamazuj that several youths, believed to be part of the Nuer “white army” which took the city, had entered the compounds on humanitarian grounds. The men have put other residents of the camp – made up mostly of women – on edge.

A spokesperson for Machar told Radio France International that Ugandan troops equipped with helicopters had joined government forces, around Bor and had bombed the city in recent days.

“(Ugandan Presidemt Yoweri) Museveni has already involved himself, he’s not neutral anymore,” said Moses Ruai Lat.

Museveni had earlier threatened to unleash the Ugandan army on rebel forces if Machar doesn’t agree to lay down arms. “He’s supposed to be impartial, instead of involving himself deeply,” said Lat.

Despite reports of gunfire in Juba, the capital remained firmly under government control. Regional mediators have been meeting in Addis Ababa, attempting to broker a cease-fire between representatives of Kiir and Machar.

Salva Kiir Mayardit (in black hat), and Riek Machar (right), bid farewell to Sudanese President Omer Hassan A. Al-Bashir, who visited Juba, South Sudan, less than a week before the South’s referendum on self-determination. Credit: UN Photo/Tim McKulka

By Samuel Oakford
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 1 2014 (IPS)

Hours after forces ostensibly under Riek Machar’s command claimed victory in the strategic South Sudanese city of Bor, the former vice-president and once again rebel commander announced he would – after a week of postponement – send an envoy to upcoming peace dialogues in Addis Ababa with regional leaders and representatives of his one-time superior and comrade, President Salva Kiir.

Tuesday had been the deadline put forth by the regional body IGAD for Machar’s troops to lay down their arms and abide by the ceasefire agreement they formulated during talks in Nairobi without any rebel input."Factions rubbed against each other then cut a deal with one another, but in the past there was a bigger enemy in the North. Now they just have each other." -- Simon Adams

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, an ally of Kiir, has stationed troops at Juba’s airport, and Monday appeared to threaten deployment of the Ugandan army to defeat Machar if he did not step down.

“We gave Riek Machar some four days to respond and if he doesn’t we shall have to go for him,” said Museveni.

Reports of the government’s defeat or retreat in Bor capped several days of dramatic but erratic reporting centring on a group of up to 25,000 Nuer ‘youth’ – known as the “White Army” for their practice of rubbing ash over their bodies – who had marched on the city on behalf of Machar – though even that allegiance wasn’t entirely clear.

Machar is an ethnic Neur, Kiir a Dinka. The two leaders were militarily united during the Second Sudanese Civil War that lasted until 2005 – a war that killed over two million – but their ties had frayed since Southern Sudan voted for independence in 2011.

In July, Kiir sacked Machar and several cabinet members in a move widely seen as a power grab. Yet worried about stability in the country, Kiir suffered little reprimand from an international community that – outside of oil revenue – in effect funds many parts of the government.

Machar has denied Kiir’s allegations that a Dec. 15 skirmish at the presidential palace between Dinka and Nuer army factions was a coup attempt, though immediately after the confrontation he fled the capital to administer rebel forces that materialised almost instantaneously from army deserters and smaller militias.

Kiir has publically ruled out any kind of power-sharing agreement with Machar. “If you want power, you don’t rebel,” he told the BBC. “You go through the process.”

Information deficit

But at the U.N. on Tuesday, the secretary-general’s spokesperson could not confirm reports that Machar was willing to lay down arms. And with the conflict still festering, over 70,000 have fled the ongoing battles in Bor.

In a statement on the violence, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay cited “mass extrajudicial killings, the targeting of individuals on the basis of their ethnicity and arbitrary detentions.”

In the majority Dinka capital during the days after the palace clash, members of the national army were seen testing Nuers with Dinka phrases before rounding up and later murdering some of those who failed. Dinka elsewhere in the country told similar stories after surviving attempts on their lives at the hands of Neurs.

“We have discovered a mass grave in Bentiu, in Unity State, and there are reportedly at least two other mass graves in Juba,” wrote Pillay.

The number of U.N. peacekeepers in the country is set to increase after an emergency Security Council vote last week approved an additional 5,500 peacekeepers – brought from U.N. missions in other parts of the world –  bringing the total “blue helmets” to 12,500. That process, U.N. under secretary-general for peacekeeping operations Hervé  Ladsous told reporters, could take up to three weeks.

But the speed at which events have played out – within days of the Dec. 15 clash at the presidential palace, oil fields were suddenly the site of raging tank battles – raises questions about just how aware the international community was of the spectre of civil war and how far behind they are on Machar and Kiir’s bloody chess match.

By the time the new peacekeepers arrive, the latest spasm of violence that has claimed over 1,000 lives may be over, but questions over Machar’s calculus and the viability of South Sudan’s democracy and civil society will linger.

“Did he [Machar] really launch a coup or is this just a deadly and ugly eruption of the power struggle that has been simmering since July?” asked Simon Adams, executive director of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect. “Did he launch it because there was no way he could engage politically any longer?”

Adams says Machar couldn’t possibly have expected support from regional powers and knew his military resources would quickly dwindle.

“If he can hold one or two states – Unity State or parts, then maybe he hopes he can re-negotiate his way back into government,” Adams told IPS. “But I suspect too much blood has been spilled for that.”

Machar’s simultaneous attack on Bor and his tacit agreement to send a peace mediator to Addis-Ababa suggests his calculus never included control of the country but was part of a strategic political power play, its mode familiar to local observers.

“History is important – power blocs and dangerous rivalries were part of how the SPLA and SPLM worked in the past. Factions rubbed against each other then cut a deal with one another, but in the past there was a bigger enemy in the North. Now they just have each other,” Adams said.

Independence gave way to a single party state whose power relations tend to mimic those of the insurgent armies that the country’s political leaders spent most of their lives fighting in.

Whether Machar launched a coup, then, while vital to a familiar narrative of events, is perhaps secondary to its context, says Florent Geel, co-head of the International Federation for Human Rights.

“Kiir is very authoritarian and direct, so Machar wanted to get power,” Geel told IPS.

Geel says because the government is made up of an uneasy continuation of a military coalition, disagreements are common among the group of fair-weather allies still accustomed to resolving border disputes via proxy wars with the North.

“It’s not just ethnic, it’s political,” Geel said.

In the meantime, the U.N., the media and countless Western NGOs are holed up in UNMISS bases, providing vital aid to and coverage of those inside, but unable to assist or learn about the at least 100,000 displaced Sudanese who have not been able to seek refuge.

A spokesperson for U.N. peacekeeping told IPS “protection work is the focus of UNMISS military peacekeepers. Our peacekeepers in South Sudan are not engaged in the conflict.”

Compared to the recent U.N.-sanctioned  and French-led missions in neighbouring Central African Republic – discussion of which has been subsumed by South Sudan at U.N. press conferences –  as well as Mali earlier in 2013, the U.N. and NGOs on the ground appear hesitant to engage belligerents or call out those who have committed crimes against humanity.

“NGOS invested so much in the success of South Sudan that some might have ended up with rose-tinted glasses on when it came to the harsh reality there,” said Adams.

This, he says, has fostered a feeling of rampant impunity that was never addressed in the south as it was attempted via the International Criminal Court and elsewhere, in the north.

“If those responsible for atrocities are known then the U.N. needs to be naming names. There needs to be a change in the posture of the mission,” Adams said.

“This is now primarily a protection of civilians mission,” he added. “The U.N. should not sit idly. If necessary, fire on perpetrators regardless of their ties. The U.N. needs to be an active protector, not a silent witness.”

Children affected by Typhoon Haiyan (local name Yolanda) wait for their turn to receive aid in Tacloban, Leyte, Philippines. Credit: UNICEF

By Samuel Oakford
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 23 2013 (IPS)

Since Typhoon Yolanda made landfall in the Philippines on Nov. 8, the country has sent holders of its debt close to one billion dollars, surpassing, in less than two months, the 800 million dollars the U.N. has asked of international donors to help rebuild the ravaged central region of the archipelago.

Even as the Philippines goes hat in hand to wealthier countries seeking disaster relief, it continues to diligently pay creditors in those same countries millions of dollars every day – much of it interest on debt that can be traced back to the corrupt regime of Ferdinand Marcos (1965-1986) , Cold War ally to the West.“We think it is always a bad idea and unjust to respond to a disaster by lending money." -- Tim Jones of Jubilee

When Philippine President Benigno Aquino III announced last week the staggering cost of rebuilding from the storm, the price tag – 8.17 billion dollars – and a pair of emergency loans to help meet that goal distressed debt reduction campaigners in the country who have for many years called for a cancellation of illegal debts.

“Every dollar of funding assistance will be used in as efficient and as lasting a manner as possible,” Aquino assured reporters. “The task immediately before us lies in ensuring that the communities that rise again do so stronger, better and more resilient than before.”

Yet every 12 months, the Philippines transfers to lenders nearly the same amount Aquino hopes to raise for reconstruction. And because Filipino law privileges the payment of debt over all other expenses, those installments could end up eating into rebuilding funds.

Even before the storm, education and healthcare spending in the country fell well short of global benchmarks; one in five Filipinos live in poverty and over 15 million are malnourished.

As the storm’s damage became clear, Aquino rushed to the World Bank and Asian Development Bank (ADB), both of which quickly inked 500-million-dollar emergency reconstruction loans and several small cash grants of less than 25 million dollars.

“From now until December 2014 we will be preoccupied with critical immediate investments such as the rebuilding and repair of infrastructure and the construction of temporary houses,” said President Aquino.

But the Philippines suffers on average seven to eight typhoons annually and climate change models predict storms like Yolanda will become more commonplace in the future.

Emergency loans set a troubling precedent, especially in a country where 20 percent of government revenue already goes to debt servicing, says Tim Jones, senior policy and campaigns officer at the Jubilee Debt Campaign.

“We think it is always a bad idea and unjust to respond to a disaster by lending money,” Jones told IPS.

The U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change prohibits climate-related investments from increasing the debt of a country. But the statute is ignored in emergency situations.

If the tomorrow predicted by climatologists is already here, ask activists, what can be considered “critical immediate investments?”

As financial and climatic “crisis” insinuates itself into the everyday, temporary measures that further indebt nations can easily morph into long-term palliative care for the world’s most vulnerable countries.

“The logic of the loan, if there is any, is that the money is lent so the money can be repaid, and by definition that cannot happen in the context of a reconstruction loan,” said Jones. “What sticks in the throat even more is when the World Bank and ADB present these amounts as aid.”

Though the Philippines has made progress in reducing its debt burden over the past decade – in large part due to one-time payments from wide-scale privatisations – the country may find itself in a similar state of climate-induced paralysis as soon as the next typhoon season.

Marcos’ legacy

President Marcos, who is said to have stolen as much as 10 billion dollars during his 21-year rule, borrowed 5.5 billion from the IMF and World Bank and a further 3.5 billion through bilateral deals with foreign governments.

Among the many fraudulent agreements Marcos was able to skim from were a set of U.S. loans earmarked for a Westinghouse-built Nuclear Power Plant on the Baatan peninsula. The structure, which was eventually built along a seismic fault line and next to a volcano and would cost the Philippines 2.3 billion dollars, never produced a single watt of electricity – though it did help finance Marcos’ wife Imelda’s infamous collection of over 3,000 pairs of shoes.

In 2008, the Philippine Congress suspended payments on 11 “illegitimate loans,” only to be reversed by then president Arroyo, under pressure from the IMF and fearful of interest rate repercussions.

Again, in 2011, Congress attempted a debt audit, but the committee chairman was quickly dismissed by President Aquino.

“They don’t want a precedent to be set,” said Jones.

Multilateral lenders, larger and more easily tracked than private bondholders, fear a forensic analysis of the debt could unearth billions in illegitimate loans, opening the floodgates for cancellation. Governments, for their part, fear that unilateral targeted defaults would be punished severely by investors.

Both the World Bank and ADB have been financially supportive – through both grants and loans – of innovative cash transfer schemes and climate change mitigation programmes in the Philippines. But neither would comment on questions of climate reparations or of a debt audit in any form.

Rogier Van Den Brink, the World Bank’s lead economist in the Philippines, told IPS the country’s immediate needs were paramount.

“It is critical that reconstruction begins quickly to minimise the economic impact and more importantly to reduce the hardship for people, especially the poor and vulnerable,” said Van Den Brink.

Though the loans offer grace periods of between eight and 10 years and yields barely above interbank rates, they are nonetheless debt, says Ricardo Reyes, president of the Freedom from Debt Coalition.

“Filipinos are being asked to pay without any consultation,” Reyes told IPS.

Reyes is one of many activists who, following Marcos’ overthrow in 1986, turned their attention to what they saw as his lasting legacy – a severe debt overhang made possible by complicit Western governments.

“The conversation of those in government after Marcos has been the same: ‘rely on foreign loans’ was always a mantra for them,” said Reyes. “I think taking these loans is a fatal mistake.”

Asked to what extent the Philippines’ debt could be tied to corruption, a spokesperson for Finance Secretary Cesar Purisima told IPS, “It is difficult to make a guess, your guess is as good as mine.”

But efforts to do more than guess have been successful elsewhere.

In 2008, Ecuador carried out an extensive audit of its foreign debt and decided to default on 3.2 billion dollars of loans. That decision, at the height of the financial crisis, was timed propitiously and the country recently announced plans to return to the international bond market in 2014.

“Economically and morally it is outrageous for the Philippines to be paying so much out of country in debt payments when it’s been hit by this disaster that’s been influenced by carbon dioxide emissions from the richest countries in the world,” said Jones.

A group of drug users in a Dhaka suburb. Credit: Shafiqul Alam Kiron, Map/IPS

By Samuel Oakford
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 7 2013 (IPS)

An internal United Nations draft document leaked last weekend has offered outsiders a rare look at longstanding disagreements between member states over the course of U.N. drug policy.

The document, first publicised by the Guardian and obtained by IPS, contains over 100 specific policy recommendations and proposals from member states, many at odds with the status quo on illicit drug eradication and prohibition.“Countries feel real pain. But they are being told they should strengthen interdiction.” -- Guatemala's U.N. Ambassador Gert Rosenthal

It confirms a widespread belief that discontent is growing among national governments and in the corridors of New York and Vienna, where the leak originated from the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

In a candid proposal, Norway calls for “questions relating to decriminalization and a critical assessment of the approach represented by the so-called War on Drugs.”

“It’s not particularly news to me,” said Kasia Malinowska-Sempruch, director of the Open Society Global Drug Policy Programme. “What’s news is that we are talking about it.

“I think there is this sort of façade put up by the U.N. as a whole, which is ‘we are one big happy family’, but that hasn’t been true for years,” she told IPS.

As early as 1993, Mexico told the U.N. General Assembly in a letter that because “consumption is the driving force that generates drug production and trafficking, the reduction in demand becomes the radical – albeit long-term– solution of the problem.”

But despite recent moves in Latin America and Europe towards policies of harm reduction, U.N. reforms remain mired in mid-20^th-century dogmas and perennial horse-trading between member states.

As prices drop for drugs that are purer by the year, governments continue to spend 100 billion dollars annually on enforcement measures. The U.N. estimates the illicit drug trade has grown to over 350 billion dollars per year. And by 2050, the number of illicit drug users is set to rise by 25 percent.

In the document, Switzerland notes “with concern that repressive drug law enforcement practices can force drug users away from public health services and into hidden environments where the risk of overdose, infection with hepatitis C, HIV and other blood-borne diseases become markedly elevated.”

Switzerland elsewhere voices support for the Organisation of American States (OAS), which this year proposed alternative forums for discussions of international drug policy. The OAS has been outspoken on the damage that drug traffickers – attracted by voracious North American consumption and potentially huge profits – have wrought on large swaths of Latin America.

In September, Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina told the U.N. General Assembly “we have clearly affirmed that the war against drugs has not borne the desired results, and that we cannot continue doing the same waiting for different results.”

Among the recommendations, Ecuador asks that “special efforts are made in order to achieve significant reduction of demand” and that enforcement measures are completed “with full respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity of States, the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of states and human rights.”

“Countries feel real pain,” Gert Rosenthal, Guatemala’s U.N. representative, told IPS. “But they are being told they should strengthen interdiction.”

Such documents are whittled down, behind closed doors, into unified policy recommendations. In this case, a consensus statement will be presented at the High-Level Review by the Commission on Narcotic Drugs next March in Vienna. That meeting will set the stage for a Special Session of the U.N. General Assembly in 2016, when member states are expected to outline an updated drug policy for the next decade.

The consensus process, which can give outsized control to already powerful pro-interdiction countries like Russia and the U.S., has come under criticism, says Tom Blickman, a research at the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam.

“If one country is blocking reform, they can be successful,” Blickman told IPS. “Countries are tired – it shouldn’t be this way.”

In negotiations, the EU speaks on behalf of all its members, further homogenising opinion, says Malinowska-Sempruch. “The voice of Portugal and other more progressive countries get drowned out because they are part of a bigger block.”

A spokesperson for UNODC told IPS it had a policy of not commenting on draft documents and would not speak about the consensus process.

Since the heavily U.S.-influenced 1961 Single Convention on Narcotics laid the groundwork for the modern “war on drugs,” countries have struggled to navigate its legal obligations. Much as later conventions led to the normalising of individual drug testing, the agreements in effect required countries to practice virtual total prohibition in order to gain acceptance internationally.

Today, most countries still schedule drugs based on guidelines set in 1961 and in the 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances.

Under the 1961 convention, certain plants and their derivatives are considered prima-facie illegal. But under the 1971 convention, which applied to psychoactive and pharmaceutical drugs mostly produced in Western countries, prohibition only follows proof of a drug’s danger. The disparity means that in the eyes of international law, chewers of cocoa leaves in the Andes are considered as aberrant as Oxycontin or methamphetamine abusers in the United States.

“Certain drugs have been demonised and it’s hard to turn the clock back,” said Blickman.

In the U.S., the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 had introduced mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes, assuring a nascent private prison industry with a steady flow of inmates. And a final 1988 U.N. convention required signatories to criminalise the possession of drugs included in the previous conventions, overnight creating a global criminal class of drug users.

In its draft recommendations from the leak, the U.S. reasserts the three conventions “remain the cornerstone of the international drug system.”

How far, how quick?

For countries like Uruguay, where marijuana decriminalisation awaits only a procedural Senate vote, skirting the agreements can be a delicate game of geopolitical chicken.

The International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), a quasi-judicial organisation charged with keeping tags on countries’ compliance with the three agreements, threatening the proposed law “would be in contravention of the 1961 Convention on Narcotic Drugs.”

“Looking at Switzerland, or Germany that has heroin injection sites, or Netherlands with coffee shops, or Portugal or Uruguay, it is clear there are countries that think there should be different policies,” said Malinowska-Sempruch.

But while these countries may make headlines – Portugal removed all penalties for drug users in 2000 – smaller states fear offending the likes of the U.S. and Russia, perennial aid sources and holders of Security Council veto power.

Under U.S. law, the Department of State must every year publish a report that includes evaluating whether foreign aid recipients meet the “goals and objectives” of the 1988 agreement.

“Not that many care about drugs enough to fight so hard and make enemies, because they know they will need those votes for what they really care about,” said Malinowska-Sempruch.

Most UNODC funding comes from member states, which can attach strings to “special-purpose funds.”

This means countries can maintain both private and public stances on drug policy. Switzerland, which began offering heroin-assisted treatment for addicts in 2008, backtracked this week in a press statement that stressed the leaked document was part of a “brainstorming” session and that it “does in no way support any efforts or attempts of changing the three U.N. Drug Conventions as they are today.”

As for 2016, Blickman says it’s important the special session be organised not just by UNODC but also by the U.N.’s human rights and development arms.

But while the session could prove a pivotal turning point, activists also say reform will likely first come out of piecemeal efforts to disentangle the conventions’ cascading legal web. Because the agreements exist in so far as countries enforce them, simply ignoring their mandate could as effective as anything else.

“There is leeway in the convention,” says Blikman. If countries start flouting them, the “INCB couldn’t do anything except maybe not allow certain (pharmaceutical) drugs into the country.”

If that trend continues, an ignored INCB could eventually be relegated to the scholarly study of an historical document.

Patients wait at the Kaga Bandoro Hospital in Central CAR. An estimated 35 percent of the population is particularly vulnerable and in need of life-saving assistance. Credit: Gregoire Pourtier/cc by 2.0

By Samuel Oakford
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 6 2013 (IPS)

The United Nations Security Council voted unanimously Thursday to authorise the deployment of thousands of French and African Union troops in the Central African Republic but stopped short of approving a full U.N. peacekeeping force in the country.

The French-backed resolution came amidst increased violence in the capital, Bangui, where Christian militias unexpectedly launched repeated attacks, reaching as far as the Presidential Palace.“The French were expecting to be asked to fight against Seleka, but now perhaps they will have to fight the anti-balaka as well.” -- Thierry Vircoulon

Medicins Sans Frontieres doctors in Bangui confirmed the presence of 50 bodies, bringing the number of casualties in the capital to at least 98. The BBC reported that a mosque in one of Bangui’s Muslim neighbourhoods was filled with victims of clashes.

And in Bossangoa, 300 kms north of Bangui, a standoff continued outside a Catholic church where an estimated 35,000 Christians have taken refuge. Local peacekeepers have attempted to head off attacks from Seleka units – the largely Muslim rebel group that ousted President François Bozizé in March – who claim armed elements are among the refugees.

France’s contingent of 600 troops already in the country is set to be doubled before the week is out and French President François Hollande announced from Paris that military operations would begin “immediately” to secure Bangui and major international roads that an estimated 400,000 refugees have used to flee the violence.

Yet with much of the violence taking place in rural areas, the peacekeeping force may not be able to reach all conflict zones.

At nightfall, Bangui was still nominally under the control of Seleka, but attacks throughout the day by “anti-balaka” Christian militias reportedly loyal to Bozizé caught residents and peacekeepers off guard.

Aware that French forces were expected to arrive shortly, the militias perhaps “wanted to take the opportunity to attack,” said Thierry Vircoulon, project director for Central Africa at the International Crisis Group.  “Now everyone is worried about night attacks by the anti-balaka.”

“The French were expecting to be asked to fight against Seleka, but now perhaps they will have to fight the anti-balaka as well,” Vircoulon told IPS.

Following their March victory, Seleka’s leader Michel Djotodia was installed as interim president.

But Djotodia’s September announcement that the rebel group would be disbanded set off a period of lawlessness and killings that culminated in Thursday’s Security Council vote.

The existing contingent of 2,500 regional peacekeepers in the country has been hamstrung by a lack of financing and disorganisation.

Since the capture of Bangui, the Seleka has been accused by international aid groups and the U.N. of deliberately targeting civilians.

Despite a post-independence history of conflict, the country has remained relatively free from the religious unrest that has plagued other Sahel nations.

But as Seleka reels from a concerted counterattack by militias, there are concerns that reprisals will mount against the country’s ever more defenceless Muslim minority.

After the vote, French Representative Gérard Araud told reporters the “conflict is increasingly taking a sectarian turn, with violence erupting between Christians and Muslims – in this context, history has taught us that the worst may happen, history has taught us that the Security Council needs to act.”

One source close to the Security Council told IPS that the decision to hold off on a full-fledged “blue-helmet” U.N. mission came in part as a result of U.S. mission-fatigue and  a reluctance to finance another prolonged presence on the continent. Instead, the U.N. will set up a trust fund for donor countries.

In July 2014, when the Security Council will review progress in the country, it will have the option to convert the African troops into a U.N. peacekeeping force if the security situation has not been resolved.

But unlike France’s intervention in Mali earlier this year, the military mission in the Central African Republic is expected to be brief. Stabilising the country could require a long-term development presence that France and neighbouring countries may not be prepared to offer.

But the decision was also seen as lending confidence to the African Union, which will take over control of the regional force, now called MISCA, and increase its numbers from 2,500 to 3,500.

“It fits into this recent trend of trying to find African solutions to African problems,” said Evan Cinq-Mars, a research analyst at the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect. “That’s certainly something the African Union wants and the Security Council is interested in.”

The intervention is reminiscent of a similar French-supported mission that stabilised the Central African Republic in 1997.  Like Thursday’s resolution, the Security Council sanctioned deployment under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter, but when the French grew tired of a prolonged mission, they reduced their operations in the country and the U.N. had to scramble to come up with a peacekeeping mission to augment weaker local forces.

“CAR suffers from neglect until intervention is needed,” Cinq-Mars told IPS. “And that’s a strategy that just can’t continue. Because I’m certain that these last-minute interventions cost more than making a significant investment in the Central African Republic now to ensure this is the last time the council has to deal with such a serious situation.”

The Security Council is expected to vote this week on a draft resolution introduced by France to create a UN peacekeeping mission in the Central African Republic.

Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has expressed support for a force of 6,000 troops in the country. Last week, he reportedly met with French representative Gérard Araud for consultations.

Last Tuesday, French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian told Europe 1 radio that France would send 1,000 more troops to the Central African Republic. An AFP report citing sources at the Bangui airport said French troops were already being airlifted into the country.

Lacking funding and materials, the 2,500 region peacekeepers already in the country have been largely unable to stem increasing violence

But at a press conference at the UN, Araud told reporters it could take up to three months for the Secretary General’s office to coordinate a plan of action.

Until that UN force can be readied, it appears the international body will rely on the Central African Republic’s former colonizer to achieve temporary stability.

Asked by IPS about the timing of a proposed mission, the Secretary General’s spokesperson Martin Nesirky said last week, “A resolution is in the hands of the council, so it’s not really possible for me to give a timeframe on that,” adding “there is a keen sense of urgency in all of this. Everything needs to be done as soon as possible.”

In an open letter to the Security Council, the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) called on the UN, “in cooperation with African Union, to promptly adopt a resolution offering immediate support to the African-led International Support Mission in the Central African Republic (MISCA), and authorizing its transformation into a UN-led Peacekeeping Operation (UNPKO)”

The letter also stressed “specific protection of human rights defenders, journalists, and humanitarian workers” and a vetting process “for all former rebels being integrated into the national military, police or gendarmerie.”

The country has been largely lawless since Seleka, a mostly Muslim rebel group including elements from Chad and Sudan, took over the capital of Bangui in March, overthrowing former president François Bozizé.

The rebel leader, Michel Djotodia, became interim president and under international pressure attempted to disband Seleka, reportedly leading to widespread violence and looting carried out by its members.

Last week, Human Rights Watch released satellite imagery of a small village, Camp Bangui, that showed the burnt remnants of over 200 buildings – roughly half the town – which the group says were destroyed by ex-Seleka rebels “nominally integrated into new  ‘national army,” under the command of Gen. Abdallah Hamat.

Clashes between Seleka and Christian militias known as “anti-balakas” have raised concerns of a Muslim-Christan conflict or reprisal killings in a country that has largely avoided religious strife in the past. Though the French Foreign Minister Lauren Fabius said the situation “verged on genocide”, recent reports indicate a more complicated state of affairs.

On Saturday, speaking with Reuters, Djotodia denied allegations that the country was approaching genocide. Less than a year ago France led military intervention in Mali to dislodge Muslim fighters who had created a de-fact state in the north of the country.

Analysts say the current conflagration in the Central African Republic is less well delineated, with groups scattered around the country.

Programmes targeting mother-to-child HIV transmission helped reduce new infections among children under 15 by 35 percent globally between 2009 and 2012, according to a new UNICEF report.

But despite gains in childhood prevention, the number of adolescent (10-19) AIDS-related deaths worldwide rose from 71,000 in 2005 to 110,000 in 2012, an increase of 50 percent.

In 2012, 62 percent of pregnant mothers in 22 high priority countries – 21 sub-Saharan Africa states and India – had access to antiretroviral drugs (ARV). New ARV treatments mean pregnant woman only have to take one pill every day, the same pill they can take for the rest of their lives.

“These days, even if a pregnant woman is living with HIV, it doesn’t mean her baby must have the same fate, and it doesn’t mean she can’t lead a healthy life,” said UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake.

Without ARV interventions, between 15-30 percent of babies will acquire HIV during pregnancy, labor or delivery and a further 5-20 percent will while breastfeeding.

Between 2005 and 2012, UNICEF estimates that effective mother-to-child initiatives helped prevent over 850,000 new infections among children in low and middle-income countries.

The report predicts that “without treatment, one-third of infants living with HIV will die before their first birthday and half will die before their second birthday.

As children mature and fall out of the scope of mother-child initiatives they can enter an ARV no-man’s land. In low- and middle-income countries the number of children on proper ARV regiments stood at only 34 percent in 2012, compared to 64 percent of adults in those same countries.

“It’s a matter of reaching the most vulnerable adolescents with effective programmes – urgently,” said Lake. “If high-impact interventions are scaled up using an integrated approach, we can halve the number of new infections among adolescents by 2020,”

Last year, full one third of children under 15 in countries with highest HIV burden had access to treatment at all.

According to the report, raising funding for adolescent HIV prevention – programmes that include making condoms available and “voluntary medical male circumcision” –   to $5.5, could reduce the number as few as 1.2 million by 2020.

In 2012, UNICEF estimated 2.1 million adolescents were infected with the HIV virus and in that year alone, “300,000 new HIV infections occurred among adolescents.”

A Nov. 15 town hall event on HIV/AIDS in New York. Credit: Courtesy of Matt Curtis/VOCAL-NY

By Samuel Oakford
NEW YORK, Dec 1 2013 (IPS)

Four hundred Eighth Avenue, home to the largest welfare centre for people with AIDS in New York, is the kind of grey, drab city building that seems like it was dragged, scowling, into the 21^st  Century.

Sandwiched between the banal hustle of Penn Station and the outer reaches of Manhattan’s once gritty waterfront, the corner of 30th street buttresses the north end of Chelsea, New York’s historically gay neighbourhood, where AIDS activism began over 30 years ago but today new glass condos price out long-time residents."If states like New York can take it that last lap, it can really provide this bellwether to say that it can be done.” -- Simon Bland

On a rainy afternoon in November, several HIV and AIDS Service Administration (HASA) clients stood out front, waiting for a drizzle to let up and chatting with workers, occasionally bumming cigarettes from them.

Inside, next to an older black gentleman blowing his nose and chatting on a cellphone about his boyfriend, a slight Latino man sat quietly watching a scratched-up television box and the neon ticker next to it that would show his number. The man was immediately recognisable to straphangers who ride the A, C, E and 2, 3 subway lines, where he has panhandled for years.

For more than a decade, activists have fought to include HIV-positive New Yorkers in protected groups that by law cannot be made to pay more than 30 percent of their assistance for housing. Currently, many are forced to choose between food and rent or have to enter the shelter system, which has swollen in recent years.

“City administrations have been relatively hostile to people with AIDS the last 20 years, since [Mayor Rudolph] Giuliani took office,” said Mark Harrington, a longtime activist and founder of Treatment Action Group (TAG).

But with new progressive mayor Bill de Blasio taking office in the New Year and a more attuned state government, activists are pushing to introduce a plan of action bolder than any before: to end AIDS in New York by 2020.

A long road home

In 1983, only two years into the pandemic in New York, playwright and AIDS activist Larry Kramer wrote “it is the sad and sorry fact that most gay men in our city now have close friends and lovers who have either been stricken with or died from this disease. Doctors are saying out loud and up front, ‘I don’t know.’”

Much has changed since then and the height of the epidemic a decade later, when nearly 10,000 New Yorkers were dying from AIDS every year.

Today, if the disease is caught early, HIV-positive young people following a strict anti-retroviral regimen can expect to have “near-normal” live expectancies. Needle exchange programmes have reduced infections among intravenous drug users in New York from over 13,000 a year to only 150.

Yet today the state is also home to more HIV-positive people than ever, an estimated 160,000 New Yorkers. Of those, 30,000 likely don’t know their status.

Gay men still make up the overwhelming majority of new cases, and among young gay men, infection rates are rising at an alarming 22 percent nationally.

Nationwide, African Americans silently make up 44 percent of new infections. In New York, people of colour make up 79 percent of the HIV-positive population.

Although a 2010 New York AIDS Institute study found that deaths among persons with AIDS had declined 82 percent since 1992, 2,000 New Yorkers still died of AIDS that year.

The same data showed that 46 percent of HIV-positive New Yorkers were not receiving regular care and 63 percent didn’t have their viral loads under control.

Disturbingly, a quarter of new HIV diagnoses are made when patients already have full blown AIDS.

So last year, frustrated by what they saw as a failed national AIDS strategy, Harrington and Charles King, CEO of Housing Works, sat down to come up with a plan for New York.

The national plan “was not a strategy to end the epidemic, it was a strategy to maintain an epidemic,” said King, who interrupted President Barack Obama at the White House unveiling to say as much.

“The technology is there, the tools are there,” King told IPS. “Do we have the political will to make it happen?”

Of course, without a cure, ending HIV is not on the horizon, but ending AIDS, the dangerous late stage of the virus, is something UNAIDS has already proposed globally with its “zero new infections, zero people dying of AIDS and zero stigma” campaign.

“Surveillance is the big picture,” Harrington told IPS. “On the community level we need to greatly increase testing among populations at risk, like young gay men and transsexuals.”

New York can learn from other cities, added Harrington. In San Francisco, the number of people who know their status increased “from about 80 percent to about 93 percent in the last six years – one of the ways they’ve done it is to increase testing among at risk communities from once a year to three or four times a year.”

If more people know their status, more are going to get proper treatment and get their viral loads under control.

Studies have shown that HIV-positive people on proper anti-retroviral treatment and with low viral loads can lower the chances of transmitting HIV to their partner by 96 percent.

“The first level of the end is control and very minimal transmission… reducing viral load as much as you can,” King told IPS. “If you got 80 percent of infected population virally suppressed, it would have a huge effect on transmission rates.”

“We should be encouraging everyone who is HIV-positive to start treatment,” he added.

The New York plan would institutionalise testing that can distinguish between chronic HIV patients those that have early, acute infections, when it is most contagious.

Exposed populations – intravenous drug users, gay men having unprotected sex or anyone who feels they don’t have control over how and with whom they have sex – would be further encouraged to use microbicides, vaginal rings and pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) – the most common of which, Truvada, has been shown to reduce infection rates by up to 78 percent.

Post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP), a sort of morning-after pill for HIV which is effective up to 72 hours after infection, is already recommended to victims of sexual assault. But organisers want to increase awareness among doctors and hospital staff, who can be unfamiliar with when and how to use PEP.

Harrington says this year’s Affordable Care Act and will mean most New Yorkers will have healthcare and its prevention mandate will encourage more regular testing, prevention and treatment.

But organisers know they have their work cut out for them. For one, the image of AIDS as a survivable disease can be an obstacle.

“Younger gay men are not having as much sex with condoms as they did 20 years ago, when people were dying all around them,” said Harrington. “The reality is it’s far from over and there’s going to need to be a lot of resources and political action to end it.”

With the CDC predicting that half of young gay men will have HIV by the age of 50, ending AIDS is not a choice, he says.

“More than 30 million people have died and because of activism and research we have these amazing tools. We have a humanitarian imperative to do it but it also makes economic sense and as human beings if we have a chance to end the suffering, we have an obligation to do that.”

Other groups, including Vocal-NY, ACT-UP and GMHC have joined the coalition.

And after several activist think tanks and meetings with state officials, King is optimistic that Governor Andrew Cuomo will include a variation of their proposals in his 2014 State of the State in January. Doing so would send a message to other states.

If the crisis were to come full circle and end as a pandemic in the city where it first gained infamy, the implications globally would be huge, says Simon Bland, director of the New York Office of UNAIDS.

“How do we ensure that the complacency doesn’t set in? I think that if states like New York can take it that last lap, it can really provide this bellwether to say that it can be done.”

Elections in Guinea-Bissau, already pushed back to March of next year, are threatened by “continued human rights violations and impunity” and “the climate of fear caused by the unlawful behavior of the defense and security forces,” UN envoy José Manuel Ramos-Horta told the Security Council Tuesday.

“Further delay would cause more social tension and misery,” the Nobel Prize winner and former President of Timor Leste told reporters.

In April 2012 a military coup threw the former Portuguese colony into disarray only two weeks before presidential runoff elections were to take place.

It was the most recent in long line of military interventions. In Guinea-Bissau’s history, no elected leader has finished a full term in office.

“I am deeply concerned by the recent increase in the number of human rights violations and acts of violence in Guinea-Bissau,” wrote Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in a report to the Security Council.

The report also listed a cholera outbreak and general strikes as impediments to the electoral process.

Regional body ECOWAS has committed 300 troops in addition to 400 already in the country.

But election preparations, including implementing digital voter registration, have taken longer than expected.

Voting was originally set for November 24 but earlier this month, interim president Manuel Serifo Nhamadjo announced it would be postponed until March 16, 2014.

The elections are being financed by international donors, including fellow Lusophone country Timor Leste, which is advising and providing technical assistance alongside 6 million dollars in assistance.

Ramos-Horta said a proposed amnesty for coup plotters could “encourage impunity” but that it was still a possibility.

Since the coup, the Guinea-Bissau has become a haven for drug traffickers flying cocaine from South America to European markets. In April, federal authorities in New York indicted the country’s army chief of staff, Antonio Indjai on drug and weapons charges.

Indjai’s proclamations that he will never relinquish power have worried election observers who fear the military may be hesitant to support a civilian government.

In October, a human rights officer from the United Nations Integrated Peacebuilding Office in Guinea-Bissau (UNIOGBIS) was “beaten by armed men” in the capital, Bissau.

The country of 1.6 million is one of the poorest countries in the world and relies heavily on donor funding. According to the World Bank, more than three quarters of the population lives on less than 2 dollars a day.

The Secretary General’s report said that without a stable elected government, it would be hard for donors to “formalize long-term assistance plans for the country.”

Rebel in northern Central African Republic. Credit: hdptcar/cc by 2.0

By Samuel Oakford
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 26 2013 (IPS)

France has said it will circulate a Security Council draft resolution Monday night that would create a U.N. peacekeeping force in the Central African Republic, as violence in its former colony threatens to morph into an ethnic conflict.

Earlier in the day, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, who last week said conditions in the country “verged on genocide,” announced France would triple its troop presence there to 1200, bolstering 2,500 regional African troops who have been largely helpless to stem increasingly anarchic conditions.“Attacks like these on populated areas are causing massive devastation and fear among the population of the Central African Republic." -- Daniel Bekele

“There are no more state security services in Bangui or the rest of the country,” said Thierry Vircoulon, Central Africa project director at the International Crisis Group. “People are left to themselves – only churches can offer anything.”

Since fighting began nearly two years ago, 400,000 people have been internally displaced.

In March, Seleka, a loose-knit coalition of rebel groups from the country’s Muslim north, captured the capital, Bangui, and forced the president, François Bozizé, who rebels accused of failing to abide by previous peace agreements, to flee the country.

The rebel’s leader Michel Djotodia was appointed interim president, becoming the first Muslim to hold the office.

But Djotodia’s announcement in September that Seleka would be disbanded set off prolonged bouts of looting and violence committed by disgruntled rebels.

Amnesty International reports that since Bozizé’s overthrow, the number of militants identifying as Seleka has actually increased from 5,000 to 20,000.

And Human Rights Watch Monday accused a Seleka commander of explicitly killing civilians in a Nov. 10 attack in Camp Bangui.

“Attacks like these on populated areas are causing massive devastation and fear among the population of the Central African Republic,” said Daniel Bekele, Africa director at Human Rights Watch.

Last week, the United States pledged 40 million dollars to prop up the regional force that has been holed up in Bangui for months.

Though the International Support Mission to the Central African Republic (MISCA) has plans to increase its numbers from 2,500 to 3,600, leaders in the region are convinced little can be done without the authorisation of a U.N. peacekeeping operation.

Recent reports of attacks on mosques and churches are stirring echoes of times when the U.N. has been slow to prevent genocide.

Following an internal report highlighting the U.N.’s inaction during the final months of civil war in Sri Lanka, the U.N.’s response in the Central African Republic will be seen as a test of promises to act earlier and more decisively to prevent genocide.

Muslims, who dominate Seleka, make up only 15 percent of the Central African Republic.

The conflict comes after “years of marginalisation and discrimination of Muslims in the northwest” of the country, said U.N. Deputy Secretary General Jan Eliasson.

Reports claim that elements of Seleka do not speak Sango, indicating they may have come from neighbouring countries such as Sudan or Chad.

In many parts of the country, members of the Christian majority have responded to the violence by creating their own militias, known as “anti-balaka”, or anti-machetes.

“There were several clashes between Seleka and the population this week,” Vircoulon told IPS. “The African peacekeepers retreated, they cannot prevent them.”

Though the country has a long history of coups and rebellions, religion has not reared its head to such a degree – as it has in the rest of the Sahel – until now.

“This did not start as a religious conflict,” said Philippe Bolopion, United Nations director at Human Rights Watch. “Neither party had a religious agenda.”

As fighting picks up, younger and younger Central Africans are being pulled into the ranks on both sides. UNICEF estimates there are currently 6,000 child soldiers fighting in the country.

Speaking to the Security Council, Eliasson called the suffering “beyond imaginable” and said the U.N. had to act in order to “prevent atrocities.”

But very little information makes its way out of the country, where NGOs are thin on the ground.

Thousands of refugees have fled from major cities into the bush where they are susceptible to malaria and are dying from treatable diarrhea.

Until semblance of order is restored, those who have fled are expected to die in increasing numbers.

“Part of the problem is we don’t know anything,” Bolopion told IPS.

Last week, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said he supported a U.N. peacekeeping force of 6,000 troops. But French representative Gérard Araud told reporters the secretary-general’s office would require up to three months to compile a plan of action, pushing into March.

That timeframe leaves many wondering what role France will play in the interim, less than a year after it launched a military operation in Mali to dislodge extremists who had created a de-facto state in the north of the country.

Many children in Nepal, part of the LDCs since 1971, continue to die from curable diseases. Credit: Naresh Newar/IPS

By Samuel Oakford
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 25 2013 (IPS)

The world’s poorest countries are rethinking economic policies that – even during periods of breakneck growth – have failed to provide quality employment capable of matching a demographic boom.

The disparity between growth and jobs is no starker than in the 49 Least Developed Countries (LDCs), which, according to a recent U.N. Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) report, will need to create 16 million positions every year if they are to keep up with new entrants into their rapidly expanding workforces.Commodity prices, which the IMF expects to steadily drop in coming years, have dictated hiring – and firing.

For decades, despite criticism from the U.N. and elsewhere, LDC governments were urged by multilateral lenders to cut public spending, curb inflation and end trade tariffs that protected domestic industries.

But today’s ubiquitous “jobless growth” has countries looking in the opposite direction.

“These countries have gone through radical policy reforms,” said Mussie Delelegn, officer-in-charge at UNCTAD’s New York Office. “In the 1980s many of them implemented structural adjustment programmes. The assumption that growth would automatically translate into employment and poverty reduction has not been seen.”

Though the percentage of people living in extreme poverty (less than 1.25 dollars per day) has declined in LDCs, their numbers have increased due to population growth.

While the economies of LDCs expanded yearly by over 7.5 percent in the decade before the 2008 financial crisis, employment growth per annum stood at just 2.9 percent between 2000-2012, barely ahead of the population growth rate of 2.3 percent.

Unemployment numbers, which have remained steady at roughly 5.5 percent, can’t be used in the ways they are in developed countries. The vast majority of employment is tenuous and offers little in the way of security – in 2010 over 80 percent of jobs in LDCs were considered “vulnerable.”

In 2011, the Istanbul Programme of Action concluded that to eradicate poverty and achieve inclusive growth, LDCs would have to grow by at least seven percent annually between 2011-2020. But the U.N. estimates most LDCs will miss that target by one to two percent in the next several years.

If high growth couldn’t buoy the job market during boom years, a period of slower increases will require specifically catered policies to spur employment.

Monetary policy “should be less fixated on attaining an inflation rate in the low single digits than on targeting full employment of productive resources,” wrote Dr. Muhkisa Kituyi, secretary-general of UNCTAD, in an introduction to the report.

“Given the relatively weak private sector in many LDCs, it is more likely and realistic that in the short to medium term, the investment push required to kick-start the growth process will originate in the public sector.”

To pay for increased outlays, governments should raise taxes on high-income companies and individuals, introduce value added taxes (VAT) on luxury consumption and “refrain from tariff cuts until alternative sources of revenue are put in place.”

Under these guidelines, the game of attracting investment would no longer be a race to the bottom.

The Big and Small

Employment in LDCs tends to be concentrated at two extremes: either in informal small and micro enterprises or in huge capital-intensive export industries.

At one end are businesses consisting of no more than a family or even one young person. At the other, commodity prices, which the International Monetary Fund expects to steadily drop in coming years, have dictated hiring – and firing.

Missing are the medium-sized enterprises that provide stable jobs in much of the developed world.

Experts agree that building that sector will rely in large part on domesticating value-added industries for primary exports – processing iron instead of simply shipping off ore, for example.

A 2011 law in India – a developing country but not an LDC – aimed to accomplish this by setting a 30-percent export tax on iron ore. By incentivising domestic refining, the price of steel in the country fell, benefiting other local industries.

In Chile, despite its reputation as a free-market paradise, the government has maintained a strong hand in copper production, ensuring jobs in processing and preserving sovereign ownership.

But in LDCs, value added in the manufacturing sector remained flat at 10 percent between 2001 and 2011.

“Countries were unaware of the value of their exports and value added,” Delelegn told IPS. “Information asymmetries indicate the playing field is not equal – the companies have the information.”

But as LDCs gain knowledge and confidence at the bargaining table they are pushing for better terms.

Botswana is one of only three countries to have graduated – in 1994 – from LDC status. Early on, it decided to pass laws that created floors for local employment and domestic enterprise in the diamond industry.

“Botswana increased the employment intensity of the diamond sector, which assisted them to capture more of the value gained locally – they were cutting, polishing, processing,” said Yao Graham, coordinator of the Third World Network, which helps facilitate Africa Mining Vision, a Pan-African mining framework that several countries have already adopted.

“For the past 20-30 years, African governments have… prioritised getting a share of the revenue of mining, through the exclusion of everything else,” Graham told IPS. “The World Bank famously summarised it in its Strategy for African Mining for 1992 when it said that African governments should not be interested in employment or control of the minerals.”

“I think the mining boom of the past decade underlined very clearly, actually, that this was a very flawed strategy.”

Disappointing local employment has given other African countries the green light to renegotiate revenue-sharing with companies and implement tax schemes that retain jobs and capital.

Ghana is looking to incorporate policies similar to Botswana’s into its domestic gold industry, which last year topped five billion dollars.

And in Namibia, the government has set up a national mining company, hoping to replicate Chile’s CODELCO and not the bloated state-run enterprises of post-independence Africa.

Varying models

The problem is more complicated in textile-exporting countries like Bangladesh, where policy recommendations centre on more nebulous “technical advancement.”

If Chile is a model for mineral exporters, garment producers look to Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore, all of which began by manufacturing textiles before graduating to more complicated consumer goods and electronics.

But countries worry they may have already missed the boat and it remains to be seen if low wages in LDCs can make up for a lack of expertise.

Ensuring sustainable, value-additive employment would help LDCs become less reliant on foreign aid, which can fluctuate with the global economy.

Studies have shown Official Direct Assistant (ODA) is “five times more volatile than GDP and three times as volatile as exports” and tends to potentiate upturns and recessions.

“Any instability will disrupt aid flows and flows of remittances from migrant workers,” said Delegn.

Countries are beginning to understand that the one-size-fits-all recommendations of the past simply don’t hold water anymore.

“During the Asian financial crisis, the only country that mitigated the negative impact of the crisis was Malaysia, which had put in place policies and strategies that effectively controlled free flow of capital,” said Delegn.

The mea culpas are slow in coming.

In 2011, the IMF quietly admitted in a paper that capital controls had their place.

But for LDCs, a more powerful realisation may be that they don’t need an IMF admission at all.

After Hurricane Sandy struck Jamaica a year ago, critics say the country's recovery was hampered by the IMF budget. Credit: European Commission/cc by 2.0

By Samuel Oakford
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 18 2013 (IPS)

On May 23, shortly after wrapping up negotiations on the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) 958- million-dollar loan – its second in three years – to keep Jamaica out of default, the fund’s mission chief in the country, Jan Kees Martijn, set out to visit Croydon, a former plantation settlement in the mountainous northwest of the island.

Also in Croydon that day was Verene Shepherd, professor of social history at the University of the West Indies and chair of the national reparations commission."There’s been a lot of talk about the new IMF... but what they are still pushing is from 15 years ago.” -- Jake Johnston

Shepherd was recording her weekly radio show, “Talking History” – she was marking the anniversary of the hanging of Samuel Sharpe, leader of the slave rebellion of 1831-32 – when she ran into Martijn being led through town by the local chamber of commerce.

The phlegmatic Dutch technocrat listened as Shepherd discussed the brutal history and economic legacy of slavery, one difficult to compute in dollars and cents (though Shepherd has, at 7.5 trillion dollars), but something that many in the region feel should at least footnote every budget shortfall and each emergency loan taken.

“I tried to tell him that you are looking at the end result of colonisation,” Shepherd told IPS. “It’s easy to say ‘you’re independent now, stop complaining’ but it’s very hard to distance what is happening now from the past.”

Though Shepherd was aware that in October Jamaica would be one of 14 Caribbean countries to sue Britain, France and the Netherlands for slavery reparations, she wished Martijn well, and the IMF team continued on to their heritage tour.

A towering crisis

Since 1990, there have been 37 debt restructurings in the Caribbean, a problem critics say international bodies like the IMF are woefully unprepared to tackle.

Barbados, Belize, Jamaica, Antigua and Barbuda, Grenada, St. Kitts and Nevis, and St. Lucia all have public debt higher than 80 percent of GDP; in Jamaica the figure is 143.3 percent.

Already this year, bondholders in Belize took 10-20 percent cuts, and in St. Kitts and Nevis, investors have seen 50-percent “haircuts” on their principal.

In a February report, the IMF found that the “main challenges for Caribbean small states looking ahead include low growth, high debt and reducing vulnerabilities from natural disaster.”

Yet even after issuing a mea culpa of sorts for pushing austerity in Europe following the 2008 financial crisis, the IMF turned around and insisted those very policies – ones that led to contractions and unemployment – were the only way out of the Caribbean’s fiscal mess.

“There’s been a split in their policies for rich countries and for developing countries,” said Jake Johnston, research associate at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR). “There’s been a lot of talk about the new IMF and in some cases they have been more lenient, but when you are talking about developing countries what they are still pushing is from 15 years ago.”

Despite successive loans from the IMF, Jamaica still spends around half its budget on interest payments, crippling the country’s ability to provide social services and prepare for natural disasters.

After Hurricane Sandy struck Jamaica one year ago, “they couldn’t repair or prepare for the next one because they were constrained by the IMF budget,” Johnston told IPS.

The IMF said it was unable to comment for this story because a team was currently in the country.

However, holding back spending can lead to a dangerous feedback loop: experts predict that for every dollar a country forgoes today on climate change mitigation, it will spend six or seven on disaster response in a few years’ time.

Media portrayals of the crisis tend to rely on sources in the IMF and investment community and adopt the same terse, tough-love language they favour that serves to distance themselves from people on the ground. Depictions often treat extreme weather and zero-growth economies as if in a vacuum, without interrogating their climactic or historical causes.

A history too quickly forgotten

Caribbean economies were ushered into independence underdeveloped and limited by colonial regimes that favoured primary exports over industrialization.

Countries came to rely heavily on preferential trade agreements that the EU offered former colonies.

The 1973 oil price shock forced many to take out dollar-denominated loans to pay for energy.

When interest rates in the U.S. shot up, payments on those loans ballooned and countries in the region had no choice but to accept the structural adjustment that accompanied IMF and World Bank bailouts, a position they’ve been in ever since.

To make matters worse, the U.S. successfully sued to end the EU concessions, effectively shuttering banana growers unable to compete with huge U.S.-owned plantations in Central America.

Before, “all the produce was sold and that was money in the pockets of people throughout the island, even in the smallest villages,” Father Sean Doggett, a catholic priest in Grenada, told IPS. “That came to a very sudden stop around 1998.”

Countries turned to tourism, but the recovery from the global financial crisis has been slow and uneven – in Grenada, unemployment doubled between 2008 and 2012.

Doggett and other members of the Grenadian Conference of Churches (COC) sat down with the IMF and the Grenadian government in October, proposing the creation of a “conference of creditors” to negotiate the terms of a two-thirds debt reduction and called on the IMF to attach greater importance to poverty reduction and unemployment.

In 2013, Grenada’s debt payments will amount to over 250 percent of what it spends on education and health.

“There is no way that Grenada can pay off its debt as it stands,” Doggett told IPS.  “We need to get out of this cycle of indebtedness and get on a development path that is more sustainable.”

“Having debt hanging around the neck of people forever and ever is contrary to the biblical concept of Jubilee, of debt forgiveness… this is as much an issue of justice and the building of a better society,” he said.

Though Grenada may one day serve as a model for more inclusive debt forgiveness in poorer countries, Johnston insists an international mechanism to settle sovereign debt disputes is needed.

“Companies go bankrupt, cities go bankrupt but when countries cannot pay their debt they end up being punished for it. It’s clear there is a need internationally and especially for the Caribbean that they have a mechanism to work these things out.”

At the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Colombo last weekend, countries discussed exploring a debt swap plan that would pay off the principal of heavily indebted countries with money already pledged by wealthier countries to combat climate change.

“In return for having their debt paid, countries would agree to set aside the principal amount into a trust fund to finance climate change mitigation” over 10 to 15 years, Travis Mitchell, economic advisor at the Secretariat, told IPS.

But for Shepherd, all of this misses the point.

“When we are talking to the international community, it’s always what you can do for us,” said Shepherd. “You need to own up to the exploitation and underdevelopment.”

For countries that are responsible for a miniscule portion of greenhouse gas emissions yet suffer the most from climate change, taking the money wouldn’t address the economic and moral offences that saddled them with debt in the first place.

Any payment, Shepherd says, should come as redress, not as a form of charity that lets the developed world clear its conscience.

“When you frame it in the post-2015 agenda and look at the (U.N.) Millennium Development Goals, you realise those aren’t realised without a change of attitude, otherwise you’ll be here talking about the same thing 50 years hence.”

One in four families in the shelter system include an employed adult, meaning that in today's New York, a job may not be enough to get you off the street. Credit: FaceMePLS/cc by 2.0

By Samuel Oakford
NEW YORK, Nov 6 2013 (IPS)

When Michael Bloomberg was elected mayor of this city only weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, few imagined that by the time he left office a new building would have risen in the shadow of the Twin Towers.

Fewer still could have foreseen that a few miles uptown, the foundation would be laid for a super-luxury condominium that, when completed, will be the tallest residential building in the Western Hemisphere, with a penthouse apartment on presale for 95 million dollars.“Sandy, like Katrina, ripped the band-aid off the wound, a wound that is still festering." -- Joel Berg

That building, 432 Park Avenue, is part of a slew of new luxury constructions in New York which, only five years after the global financial crisis threw millions out of work, contrast starkly with a deteriorating housing picture and a widening income gap in the rest of the city.

“New York is the poster child for the national trend,” Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition against Hunger, told IPS. “The wealthy get wealthier at the expense of everyone else.”

The dissonance apparently proved too much for New York voters, who last night overwhelmingly elected progressive candidate Bill de Blasio to be the city’s next mayor with 73 percent of the vote.

The New York metro area suffers from the widest gap between rich and poor in the U.S., an issue that de Blasio campaigned on heavily, referring often to New York as “a Tale of Two Cities.”

“That inequality, that feeling of a few doing very well, while so many slip further behind, that is the defining challenge of our times,” de Blasio told supporters during his victory speech.

The outgoing mayor’s brand of politics were no clearer than during a September weekly radio address, when Bloomberg – himself the 10^th wealthiest person in the world – told listeners “if we could get every billionaire around the world to move here, it would be a godsend.”

The remark, like Bloomberg’s support of a New York Police Department stop-and-frisk programme that overwhelmingly affects minorities, struck many, even those dulled to 12 years of the aristocratic foibles of a man who spent a quarter billion dollars of his own money to get elected, as out of touch.

During three terms (made possible when the city council overturned term limits in 2008) Bloomberg became known around the country as the “nanny mayor” for his progressive stances on access to healthy foods in poor neighbourhoods, nutritional labeling, banning sugary drinks and gun control, but locally was seen as at times deaf to the underlying question of why so many residents were poor in the first place.

Activists say that whether de Blasio is able to stem the rising income gap depends in large part on undoing much of the logic of the Bloomberg years, a period that saw a reintroduction of the language of trickle-down economics into one of the most liberal cities in the United States.

An affordable housing crisis

According to a study by New York University’s Furman Center, median rents in New York rose 19 percent between 2002 and 2011, while the real median income of residents saw a small decline.

During the same period, the percent of rental units considered affordable for low income households earning less than 50 percent of the area median income declined from 40 to 26.

And this year, the average rental price in New York City, excluding Staten Island, rose above 3,000 dollars per month, triple the national average.

Housing advocates are quick to point out what they see as feeble efforts by the Bloomberg administration to safeguard lower income households.

In 2006, New York City updated its inclusionary zoning provisions, increasing building allowances for developers willing to provide 20 percent of their units as affordable housing.

But the programme was voluntary and reports found the zoning effort had led to a net gain of only 2,700 affordable housing units in a city where 1.7 million residents live below the federal poverty threshold.

De Blasio has promised he will make the 20 percent cut-off mandatory, but for thousands of families who can no longer afford any type of housing at all, the debate came too late.

In 2005, the Bloomberg administration ended a longstanding practice of assisting homeless families to obtain federal rent vouchers and subsidised housing, replacing those programmes with short-term assistance.

In 2011, that assistance was cut off, leaving many homeless families with little choice but to remain in the shelter system, which has swollen to record levels.

“The next mayor is going to confront a historical homelessness crisis,” Patrick Markee, senior policy analyst at Coalition for the Homeless, told IPS. “There are over 50,000 people in the shelter system, including 20,000 children. It’s a real black mark on Bloomberg’s legacy.”

The rise in homelessness frustrates advocates who point out the ultra-wealthy and disproportionately foreign buyers of new luxury developments often spend little time in their new pied-à-terres.

But perhaps most disturbing are city estimates that one in four families in the shelter system include an employed adult, meaning that in today’s New York, a job may not be enough to get you off the street.

“This isn’t something that happens naturally,” Berg told IPS. “It’s a failure of public policy.”

Hurricane Sandy, which one year ago displaced thousands of low income families, laid bare city-wide inequities and made de Blasio’s messaging resonate with New Yorkers, he said.

“Sandy, like Katrina, ripped the band-aid off the wound, a wound that is still festering,” said Berg. “It exacerbated existing problems.”

During 12 years in office, Bloomberg repeatedly applied a ‘financial consultant approach – one he honed for decades at his eponymous firm – to issues like poverty, notably pooh-poohing calls for an increase in the minimum wage on the grounds it would force businesses to leave New York, ignoring the inevitable fact that many minimum wage workers had already made the financially-sound decision to do so themselves.

“Bill de Blasio obviously touched a chord that resonated with a lot of people,” said Tom Angotti, a professor of Urban Affairs and Planning at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center.

At the same time as he was cutting programmes for the homeless, Bloomberg welcomed developers with open arms and generous tax breaks, Angotti told IPS.

“Neighbourhoods have gone from being diverse to being sharply divided between rich and poor. You have a gentrification process that displaces tens of thousands, forcing many to leave the city because there is no affordable housing left.”

Bloomberg’s administration oversaw the rezoning of a full third of the city, spurring breakneck development in Manhattan and nearby parts of Brooklyn and Queens but also driving out those who could no longer pay rent.

Areas that were “upzoned” for greater development were more often in poorer, minority neighbourhoods while “downzoning”, which is seen as way of preserving communities, was more prevalent in wealthier, whiter areas.

Higher rents in historically Black and Latino areas made this year’s election in part a referendum on gentrification.

The question of displacement is especially painful for minority residents, many of whom lived through the city’s darkest years in the 1970s – when middle class families abandoned entire neighbourhoods and fled for the suburbs – only to find its new cachet among the professional and jet set has priced them out.

“People tell me this all the time – they struggled for decades and generations to improve their neighbourhoods,” said Angotti. “Why should we do all this work?”

The eye of Hurricane Sandy made landfall on Oct. 25, 2012, near the Mar Verde beach west of the city of Santiago de Cuba. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Samuel Oakford
NEW YORK/HAVANA, Oct 30 2013 (IPS)

One year ago, Hurricane Sandy ravaged the Northeast United States, causing an estimated 68 billion dollars in damage and paralysing the world’s financial nerve centre.

But days before, in the Caribbean, the same storm ran roughshod over Jamaica, Haiti, Cuba and other countries, causing widespread loss of life and destruction that the region is only beginning to recover from."If you don’t start investing, for every dollar not spent on adapting, you will spend six or seven within a few years." -- UNDP's Guido Corno

The hurricane was one of several in the past decades that meteorologists had previously considered “once in a century” events.

Those predictions now appear outdated.

“The power of these storms is off the chart,” Guido Corno, chief technical advisor at the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), told IPS. “Sandy was a massive storm, larger than any in the past 100 years.”

Scientists believe that by the end of the century, climate change will increase the severity of extreme weather events, making storms like Sandy more common.

For Caribbean nations with fewer resources, that spectre is daunting.

A path of destruction

On Oct. 24, Sandy strengthened into a Category One hurricane and made landfall in Jamaica, causing widespread damage in the east of the island.

Seventy percent of residents were left without power and in Portland Parish, on the northeast coast, the Red Cross reported 80 percent of houses had lost their roofs.

In Haiti, though the storm only skirted the coastline, it dropped nearly 20 inches of rain in the south of the country and came as a severe blow to hundreds of thousands still left homeless after the 2011 earthquake.

Already in 2012, Tropical Storm Isaac, which damaged parts of the north, had been followed by a drought that led up to Sandy. The combined effect of the three devastated Haiti’s farmers and left some 1.5 million Haitians at risk of malnutrition.

Residents in Santiago de Cuba, accustomed to storms that usually pass over west of Cuba, were caught unaware when the storm made landfall in the city as a Category 3 storms with winds up to 110 mph. Eleven died and half the houses in the city were either destroyed or severely damaged.

“Now I know what a hurricane is; when another comes, we won’t delay,” Rey Antonio Acosta, 12, who escaped the storm with his older brother, told IPS.

Though the hurricane was the deadliest to strike Cuba in seven years, the toll was relatively low considering its severity.

Cuba’s longstanding system of civil defence, which calls on all citizens in the event of disasters, has been able to plan well in advance of approaching hurricanes – recently with the help of climate change models – and spring into action quickly after storms pass.

The U.N. has highlighted the country’s disaster prevention initiatives that include “two-day training session in risk reduction for hurricanes, complete with simulation exercises and concrete preparation actions” as a model for the Caribbean.

Still, a year after Sandy, the government’s recovery efforts, hampered by the local economy and a U.S. embargo, have struggled to keep pace with a nationwide housing deficit that already existed well before the storm.

Vulnerability

In Haiti, like much of the region, “water is the main issue,” said Johan Peleman, head of the U.N.’s Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Haiti.

Port-au-Prince, a city of nearly 2.5 million, has no sewage system.

The hurricane worsened a cholera outbreak – alleged to have been brought by U.N. peacekeepers – that began in 2010 and has since infected more than 650,000 and led to the deaths of over 8,000 Haitians.

“Waterborne diseases were already one of the mass killers in Haiti,” Peleman told IPS.

The solution, an institutionally funded effort to build a water and sewage system from scratch, may take decades to fully complete.

What Haiti lacks in human-made infrastructure is only matched by what has been destroyed by human activity.

After years of often illegal logging, only two percent of the country is forested, leaving many areas vulnerable to mudslides that can wipe away neighbourhoods in heavy rains that pale in comparison to those seen during Sandy.

But mangroves, which serve as a natural barrier from the force of hurricanes and were lately on the verge of an ecological catastrophe in Haiti, have in recent years been included in preparedness plans and are making a slow but marked comeback.

After the earthquake and continuing in the wake of Sandy, the Haitian government, with significant outside funding began a process of disaster risk mitigation, mapping neighbourhoods by their risk assessments and marking houses with red, orange and green to indicate their habitability.

Still, as of July of this year, 279,000 internally displaced people were living in tent camps originally built after the earthquake, though it is difficult to delineate which catastrophe made them homeless.

An unpredictable future

For a region jarred by last year’s hurricane season, the third most active on record, 2013 has been eerily quiet.

Climate change could affect the already imprecise science of predicting weather, said Kathy Ann Caesar, acting chief meteorologist at the Caribbean Institute for Meteorology and Hydrology in Barbados.

“This hurricane season, the forecasts were for normal to above normal activity,” Caesar told IPS. “But that hasn’t manifested itself – there have been no named hurricanes.”

In September, the U.N.-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted temperatures could rise by as much as 4.8C by the end of the century, increasing food insecurity and harming many developing countries.

Years like 2013 are to be expected and shouldn’t be taken as indicative of trends, the panel said.

Even in a country as small as Haiti, where the northwest is predicted to experience temperature gains that outpace the rest of the country, the effects of climate change are expected to vary greatly.

Similarly, in Jamaica, climate studies “project we will have more rainfall in the next 20 years, then less after that,” said Albert Daily, principal at the climate change division of Jamaica’s Ministry of Water, Land, Environment and Climate Change.

“There will be fewer hurricanes, but they will be stronger,” he said.

Daily said sea level rises pose a severe threat to coastal infrastructures and countries in the region are trying to head off the threat as early as they can by changing the dialogue on environmental issues.

“We are mainstreaming climate change policy in the planning of programmes and legislation,” Daily told IPS.

Part of that effort is convincing foreign donors and the treasuries of heavily indebted countries like Jamaica that the upfront costs associated with planning for climate change are about the best investment any country can make.

“It’s been shown, if you don’t start investing, for every dollar not spent on adapting, you will spend six or seven within a few years,” said Corno. “These costs will continue to skyrocket unless you have a long-term plan.”

With additional reporting by Patricia Grogg in Havana.

Tamils protest Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa's speech at the U.N. General Assembly, Sept. 24, 2013. Credit: Samuel Oakford/IPS

By Samuel Oakford
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 26 2013 (IPS)

Sri Lankan Tamil hopes for a separate state – Tamil Eelam – in the north and east of the island were dashed when the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) were summarily defeated in May 2009 by government forces.

Allegations of war crimes during the final months of the Sri Lankan Civil War have offered an agenda to a diaspora groups struggling to find their place in a post-separatist political scene.

But for a diaspora that was largely responsible for financing one side of a three-decade war, questions remain about what role these groups should play.

Excoriating their own lack of action during those months, a 2011 U.N. Panel of Experts Report found that the Sri Lankan government repeatedly attacked “No Fire Zones” where it had told civilians to congregate and “systematically shelled hospitals on the frontlines.”

The report concluded that most of the estimated at least 40,000 civilian deaths “in the final phase of the war were caused by government shelling.”

President Mahinda Rajapaksa appointed a commission of inquiry in 2010 to investigate the war but it was heavily criticised by international human rights groups for lacking independence.

This September, the office of U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, stated she had “detected no new or comprehensive effort to independently or credibly investigate the allegations which have been of concern to the Human Rights Council.”

Pillay will submit a full report with recommendations at the 25^th session of the Human Rights Council in March 2014. She has given that month as a deadline for the Sri Lankan government to carry out a credible national enquiry. If they do not, she will recommend the international community establish its own.

Visvanathan Rudrakumaran, the prime minister of the Transnational Government of Tamil Elaam (TGTE), one of the groups most closely linked to the remnants of the LTTE, said what took place was genocide and alleged war crimes should be recognised as such.

“Our struggle is to demonstrate to the world that what happened in Sri Lanka is an act of genocide, so that will convince the international community that reconciliation is not possible,” Rudrakumaran said in an interview with IPS.

He believes the ill-treatment of Tamils under the current Sinhalese Buddhist government isn’t likely to stop and the only solution is a separate state.

“Rajapaksa is the latest manifestation of Sinhalese chauvinism” he told IPS. “Sinhalese oppression did not start with Rajapaksa… it’s been going on since independence.”

For Rudrakumaran, proving genocide is a natural evolution from a separatist ideology, and a means to an end. How that could come about is unclear.

Other groups, like the Canadian Tamil Congress (CTC), have toned down their words.

“If you ask a Tamil person, they would love to see a separate state,” said David Poopalapillai, national spokesperson of the CTC. “But having said that, normalisation is our policy.”

The CTC and the umbrella Global Tamil Forum (GTF) have supported Northern Council Elections in September, which despite heavy voter intimidation, were won handily by the moderate Tamil National Alliance (TNA).

The TNA is seen as moderate, but many diaspora groups point to their late adoption of LTTE rhetoric and imagery as evidence a hardline is still necessary.

CTC press releases published before and after the election make no mention of war crimes or genocide.

“Any solution that the TNA comes up with, the diaspora should be happy with,” said Poopalapillai.

Without the leverage afforded by Tamil Eelam, the diaspora worries its voices will be relegated to the chorus of marginalised groups around the world. Refusing to let up pressure has had the effect of discouraging self-reflection.

“It’s sort of a human truism, Tigers don’t change their stripes,” said Gordon Weiss, the U.N. spokesperson in Sri Lanka at the war’s end.

“It really requires a big leap for people to completely drop the things people have believed and repeated and lived among groups of people who have repeated as well and suddenly turn around and say a separate state won’t work.”

But claims of genocide are difficult to prove to an international community hesitant to become embroiled in the moral prerogatives that accompany the term.

And because such a massive element of the diaspora was in some way linked to the LTTE – a group that pioneered suicide bombings and conscripted children to fight the state – it is potentially weakened by the very organisational unity it once boasted.

“I think that the issue of accountability for what happened during the war has not been helped by the past associations with the Tamil Tigers or the ongoing goals of some Tamil groups for a separate state and raising allegations of genocide,” said Weiss. “Combined, they have not necessarily advanced Tamil aspirations.”

Focusing so greatly on genocide puts a full reckoning of the war at risk and muddies chances for reconciliation, said Alan Keenan, a Sri Lanka analyst at the International Crisis Group.

“It is certainly possible that one might someday be able to prove in a court of law what happened in Sri Lanka was genocide,” Keenan told IPS.

“But the current use of the genocide framework makes it harder for Tamils to have a discussion about the various ways that the LTTE contributed to their community’s catastrophe. And by painting things in such a black and white fashion, it also makes it harder for Sinhalese to accept their own community’s responsibility for atrocities.”

Weiss, whose book, “The Cage,” lays out a detailed case for charging the Sri Lankan government with war crimes, believes no lasting solution can be reached without an investigation and eventually a truth and reconciliation process that puts the crimes of both sides out in the open.

Yet the current political set-up, fueled in no small part by the diaspora, gives the Rajapaksa government little incentive to cooperate.

“Part of the problem is their culpability is intimately entwined with allegations of war crimes,” said Weiss. “It makes it very unlikely that the current government will be going down the path [of a true investigation] unless they can sell an amnesty package.”

This leaves diaspora groups in a painful bind. Do they prioritise engagement via the TNA and national politics or focus their attention on a distant and slow-moving international system, beholden to the whim of unfriendly U.N. Security Council members?

The diaspora and Tamils in Sri Lanka can postpone self-reflection in part because the government has continued with land grabs and human rights abuses and exhibited a general intransigence when it comes to reconciliation, said Keenan.

“If the Sri Lankan government gave reforms that would treat Tamils as equal citizens, that would give Tamils more space to criticise their own past leadership,” said Keenan. “As long as the government is being so harsh, it’s hard for Tamils to look at their own leaders’ mistakes.”

Part One of this series can be found here.

Excerpt: