A young black street vendor selling "acarajé", a traditional type of fritter, in Salvador, Bahia in Brazil’s Northeast. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Walter García and Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 21 2013 (IPS)

Carla Vilas Boas is of mixed-race descent – African, European and indigenous – like a majority of the population of Brazil. But she spends hours straightening her hair, trying to look more like the blond, blue-eyed women she sees in the mirror of television.

The 32-year-old domestic worker acknowledges that Brazil’s popular telenovelas have started to include characters like her – people from the country’s favelas or shantytowns, who work long workdays for low wages.

But among the actors and the models shown in ads, “there are only a few darker-skinned people among all the blue-eyed blonds. And you wonder: if I buy that shampoo and go to the hairdresser, can I look like that?” she remarked to IPS.

But her hair “never looks that way,” even with the new shampoo or the visit to the hairstylist, and Vilas Boas said that makes her feel “really bad.”

More than half of the women in this country of 200 million people – where over 50 percent of the population identified themselves as black or “mulatto” in the last census – do not identify with the images they see on TV.

Experts say that because of the prejudices reflected in the choice of actors and models, advertisers potentially lose a large segment of consumers.

A survey by the Data Popular polling firm and the Patrícia Galvão Institute (IPG), a women’s rights organisation, interviewed 1,501 women and men over the age of 18 in 100 towns and cities spread across every region of the country.

In the study “Representations of women in TV advertising”, 56 percent of those surveyed said ads did not show “real” Brazilian women.

For 65 percent of the respondents, the model of beauty in TV ads has little to do with the way Brazilian women really look, and 60 percent said they think women get frustrated when they do not feel reflected on TV.

Most ads show “young, white, thin, blond, straight-haired upper-class women,” the study says.

At the age of 17, Karina Lopes feels insecure as a woman. Her body has changed, but not into the shape she sees in the ads offering her clothes, make-up and low-cal yogurt.

“Even if I eat that yogurt every day, I’ll never be thin like that woman selling it,” she told IPS. “You feel bad because that image is so different from the way you look. Normal women aren’t shown on TV.”

Mara Vidal, assistant director of IPG, said “women come in all colours and shapes. We aren’t stereotypes. That’s what the public is saying – it’s not something that women’s organisations or academic studies came up with.

“It’s the public who are saying ‘we want to be better represented in society, not just by one single, universal type’,” Vidal told IPS.

She said she also suffered in the past. As a girl, she didn’t want to go to school because other kids called her “black girl with broom-bristle hair” because of her brown skin and red hair.

“I didn’t start liking my hair till I got to university, when I stopped straightening it,” she said. “My generation wasn’t as aware as people are today. The concept of someone who was ‘good-looking’ didn’t include people with our hair and colouring.”

In the study, 51 percent of those surveyed said they would like to see more black women in ads, and 64 percent said they would like to see more women from lower-income sectors.

Brazilian TV and the country’s world-famous telenovelas have gradually started to overcome prejudice and today black or brown-skinned characters are less limited to the traditional discriminatory roles of domestics, family drivers, or criminals. Some have even cast darker-skinned women as central characters.

But advertising, unless it specifically targets that segment of the population, still does not represent blacks.

“In an ad for margarine we don’t see black women or happy black families. But in the area of cosmetics we’re starting to see a change,” Vidal said.

For example, there are now lines of products specifically designed for darker-skinned women and shampoos for “curly” or “dark-coloured” hair.

Meanwhile, advertising by the government and public enterprises has become increasingly “politically correct,” reflecting the country’s ethnic diversity.

But that is not happening yet “as much as we would like,” said Vidal. “Brazil, because of its tradition of excluding blacks, has not yet dared to fully show that reality.”

Renato Meirelles, director of Data Popular, said that exclusion is now hurting advertisers. According to the polling firm, women in Brazil represent 500 billion dollars a year in income and are the ones who decide on 85 percent of what families consume.

Women are not just a “niche market but the main consumer market, and advertisers don’t know how to reach out to them,” Meirelles told IPS.

The idea that “Brazilian women want to be like Europeans is old,” he said. “Now women are proud of their new identity.”

Factors that have helped boost this newfound self-esteem include laws aimed at fighting racial discrimination that have been adopted in recent years and the fact that some 30 million people have left poverty behind and have moved up into the middle class.

According to Meirelles, “the big problem of advertisers and advertising agencies is that they belong to the elite and their decisions emerge from an elite mind-set. That’s why they fail to understand that a new consumer market has emerged.

“Their fear is that white women won’t buy a product if the girl in the ad is black. Few of them worry that black women won’t buy products because the model in the ad is white,” he said.

“Aspiration has given way to inspiration, where the model represents successful black women. Companies should understand this process of achievement that we have experienced,” he said.

Military parade in Caracas. Credit: Venezuelan Ministry of Defense

By Walter García and Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Oct 18 2013 (IPS)

A Venezuelan government decree to control information and “internal and external enemy activity” appeals to concepts of the national security doctrine, which various right-wing military dictatorships in Latin America invoked in the 1970s and 1980s.

Through the decree, left-wing President Nicolás Maduro established the Strategic Centre for Security and Protection of the Fatherland (CESPPA), which “will request, organise, integrate and evaluate information of interest to the nation at a strategic level, related to internal and external enemy activity, coming from all of the state’s security and intelligence bodies and other public and private entities.”

These actions will be carried out “as required by the political-military leadership of the Bolivarian Revolution” – which does not exist either in the constitution or in the country’s laws – and public and private institutions “will be under the obligation to provide all of the information required by CESPPA in the exercise of its functions,” the decree says.

The new office will also have the authority “to declare as reserved, classified or of limited dissemination any information, development or circumstance that CESPPA learns about in compliance with its functions or that is processed by CESPPA.”

Maduro designated, as the first head of CESPPA, Major General Gustavo González López, a former commander of the Bolivarian Militia, a force created by the late Hugo Chávez (1999-2013) to support the army, navy, air force and national guard in interior defence tasks.

CESPPA “brings echoes – both because of its character as a potential censorship body and, even more serious, of an intelligence body oriented towards controlling supposed internal enemies – of the national security doctrine that prevailed in the region in the 1970s and 1980s,” Argentine political scientist Andrés Serbin told IPS.

“It is also highly worrisome that no kind of oversight by the public or by civil institutions, including parliament, is contemplated, and that its first director will be a member of the military,” said Serbin, president of the Regional Coordinator of Economic and Social Research, founded in Managua in 1982 and based today in Buenos Aires.

Fransisco Leal, a political science professor at the University of Los Andes in Colombia, has written that the national security doctrine “maintained the idea that, by guaranteeing the security of the state, the security of society is ensured. One of its main innovations was to consider that in order to achieve that objective, the military control of the state was necessary. Another was substituting the external enemy with the internal enemy.”

The doctrine was part of the U.S. strategy to prevent the spread of communism in the Americas after World War II, according to historian Edgar Velásquez, of the University of Cauca in Colombia.

Through this doctrine, Washington “consolidated its domination over the countries of Latin America, engaged in the Cold War, set specific tasks for the armed forces and stimulated a right-wing current of political thought in countries in the region,” Velásquez wrote in the article “History of the National Security Doctrine” published in 2004 in the magazine Estudios Latinoamericanos of the University of Nariño, Colombia.

One of its characteristics was the training in repression received by members of the military and police from different Latin American countries in the U.S. School of the Americas in Panama.

The wave of democratisation that began to sweep the region in the second half of the 1980s threw the doctrine into question. But there have been no profound reforms of the armed forces.

And once again under the influence of Washington, the armed forces have begun taking on internal security and policing tasks in several countries – this time against the ever-present enemies of drug trafficking and crime.

Going down that path poses “the risk that, in a below-the-surface and not visible manner, the national security doctrine could reemerge on the Latin American scene,” states an essay on the impact on penal law in the region, written by legal expert Mario Zamora, currently minister of public security in Costa Rica.

Under the umbrella of that doctrine, the armed forces heading right-wing dictatorships repressed their political opponents as “internal enemies,” leaving tens of thousands dead, forcibly disappeared and tortured in a number of countries.

Venezuela did not follow that same path. And since 1999, it has had left-wing governments purusing “21st century socialism”, first under Chávez and now under his successor, Maduro.

CESPPA has been created against a backdrop of reiterated denunciations by the authorities of supposed acts of sabotage in the electric system and the economy. On Sept. 30, Maduro ordered the expulsion of three U.S. diplomats who he linked to these developments and the far-right in Venezuela.

Spokespersons for the government and the governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) have kept silent about CESPPA since the decree was published on Oct. 7.

IPS sought, without success, comments from several PSUV legislators, including two members of the People’s Power and Media commissions, who declined to comment on the decree until they had “studied it in greater depth.”

CESPPA is described as a body that will coordinate “the working policies of the institutions responsible for security, defence, intelligence and internal order, foreign relations and others that have an impact on the security of the fatherland, in order to provide timely, quality information to the president of the republic.”

Rocío San Miguel, director of the non-governmental organisation Control Ciudadano para la Seguridad, la Defensa y la Fuerza Armada, has said that “the objectives of this body include turning some citizens into vigilantes and informers [who report on] the rest.”

“All bodies and people will be obliged to supply information that CESPPA requires on practically anything,” she told IPS. “And the decree has not taken into account constitutional provisions, such as the one that establishes that only a law can create regulations for the classification and secrecy of official documents,” San Miguel added.

The Alianza por la Libertad de Expresión (Alliance for Freedom of Expression), which brings together organisations of journalists and civil rights activists, called for “the immediate repeal of the decree….because it runs counter to constitutional guarantees of the right to information and the prohibition of censorship.”

Carlos Correa, coordinator of the Espacio Público organisation, said “the most serious thing is the notion of ‘internal enemy’, because any Venezuelan critical of the government, or any opponent of the government, would fall under that label.”

That definition “used to be used as a rhetorical expression under a logic of war,” he commented. “But now it appears to be a presidential decree, based on regulations.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No regulation

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

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

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

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

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

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

Human rights abuses

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unclear motives

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

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

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

According to critics, the new definition is alarming.

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

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

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

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

While much of the foreign policy elite here sees the tide of public opposition to U.S. air strikes against Syria that swept over Washington during the past two weeks as evidence of a growing isolationism, veteran pollsters and other analysts say other factors were more relevant.

A variety of surveys have shown that the public has become generally more inward-looking in recent years, especially since the 2008 financial crisis and the widespread disillusionment over U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq."The key division between the public and the elites is not internationalist versus isolationist; it’s the different kinds of internationalists.” -- Political scientist Jonathan Monten

However, the Barack Obama administration’s failure to muster multilateral support for his plan to punish the Syrian government for its alleged use of chemical weapons played a key role, according to some experts.

In addition, demands by more-hawkish forces in Congress and much of the foreign policy elite that any U.S. military attack aim at weakening the regime on the battlefield – and the administration’s somewhat incoherent efforts to appease them – raised public concerns that Washington would soon find itself in the middle of yet another Middle Eastern civil war.

“The administration’s best chance to get public support was to stick to the normative argument [that it was necessary to uphold the international norm against chemical weapons] and not to get involved in affecting the course of the civil war,” said Stephen Kull, director of worldpublicopinion.org.

“But the normative argument got muddied by more talk about trying to affect the outcome of the war and that – combined with the fact that there was no U.N. Security Council approval – clearly bothered people.”

Moreover, by asking the Congress to authorise military action when most of its members were in their home constituencies for the August recess, rather than in the “Beltway bubble” where the foreign policy elite — Washington officialdom, highly paid lobbyists, the Congressional leadership, and think tank analysts — dominate the debate, Obama effectively exposed them to more grassroots pressure than usual.

The foreign policy elite “is generally more sceptical of multilateralism, more supportive of America playing a dominant role in world affairs, and more wary of constraints on U.S. freedom of action than the public is,” Kull, who also heads the University of Maryland’s Programme on International Policy Attitudes, told IPS.

Surveys of both elite and public attitudes on foreign policy and the U.S. role in the world that have been conducted over decades tend to support that assessment.

“The public is often eager for other countries to take their share – if not take the lead – in dealing with international problems… while the elite or people, who are much more knowledgeable about American power and the role it plays in the world, are more willing to play the role of first among equals in pushing for international action,” said Michael Dimock, director of the Pew Research Centre for the People and the Press which conducted the most recent major survey of elite-public opinion in late 2009.

“A lot of people in the international affairs world say, ‘If America doesn’t take the lead, no one will feel they should or have’,” he told IPS.

Indeed, in the 2009 survey, only a third of respondents from the general public said Washington should either act as the “single world leader” or the “most active” among major powers. By contrast, nearly seven of 10 elite respondents – taken from the membership of the influential Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) – took that position.

“When it comes to military engagements, the public perception is high risk, low reward, while there are many in the elite who see the balance or risk to reward in a different light,” Dimock told IPS.

Few experts deny that the public has turned more inward in recent years, although they generally avoid the qualifier “isolationist”, a pejorative term which is associated – by neo-conservative hawks, in particular — with (mainly Republican) opposition to Washington’s intervention in World War II before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, and Germany declared war on the U.S. in December 1941.

“One of the things that has really jumped out in this debate is that the key division between the public and the elites is not internationalist versus isolationist; it’s the different kinds of internationalists,” said Jonathan Monten, a political scientist at the University of Oklahoma and co-author of a number of academic articles on elite foreign policy views with Joshua Busby of the University of Texas.

“Are you the kind of internationalist who favours a very muscular, hawkish forward-leaning foreign policy or one who favours working through multilateral means, using more soft-power elements of foreign policy? What the Syria debate reveals is that there are both types of internationalists on both sides of the aisle,” he told IPS.

Until recently, the major media looked almost exclusively to Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham to act as spokesmen for their party’s foreign policy views. However, the Syria debate witnessed the emergence of non-interventionist figures in the party, with virtually all of the lawmakers considered likely 2016 presidential candidates coming out in opposition to military action.

“Before the debate shifted to Congress, it wasn’t really clear how powerful the anti-interventionist bloc was within the Republican caucus,” according to Monton, who said the breakdown in the elite Republican consensus encouraged opposition.

“Ten years ago, they wouldn’t be caught dead opposing the use of military power in the world once it had been proposed. It was interesting how quickly the cascade happened.”

“The growing split in the Republican Party between neoconservative interventionists like McCain and the anti-intervention ‘isolationist’ [Senator] Rand Paul groups forces rank and file Republicans to have to grapple more with issues and possibly choose,” added Busby in an email exchange.

While Obama’s failure to muster multilateral support for military action played a not insignificant part in the public’s opposition to strikes, Dina Smeltz, the senior fellow on Public Opinion and Foreign Policy at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs (CCGA), told IPS, “war weariness [was] the major point”.

“Two in three Americans say the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were not worth the cost, and I think those conflicts were probably perceived to be more of a direct [U.S. national] interest than Syria,” she said.

Indeed, a New York Times/CBS News poll taken last weekend found that two-thirds of respondents were particularly concerned that military action in Syria would result in a “long and costly involvement”.

Asked in the same poll whether the U.S. should take “the leading role among all other countries in the world in trying to solve international conflicts,” 62 percent said it should not.

Remarkably, in the immediate aftermath of the Iraq invasion 10 years ago when the U.S. was being compared to the Roman and British Empires in its mastery of world affairs, 43 percent said it should not, compared with a plurality of 48 percent who said it should.

But Kull said the war-weariness factor, like “isolationism”, is overplayed and that both the major media and the foreign policy elite itself tend to underestimate how much the public favours multilateral and cooperative approaches to international affairs.

Indeed, a 2004 CCGA poll of elite and public opinion in which elite respondents were asked to estimate how the public would react to specific issues, found that the opinion leaders significantly underestimated public support for, among other things, U.S. participation in U.N. peace-keeping operations, the International Criminal Court, and the Kyoto agreement to curb greenhouse gas emission, giving the U.N. the power to tax, and accepting collective decisions by the U.N.’s governing bodies.

“The more multilateral cooperation and support we get, the more comfortable people are,” noted Kull. “In this case, that support was not forthcoming – even the British weren’t there – and that definitely undermines support here.”

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

A tribal widow in India bends over a wood fire making puffed rice. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

By Walter García and Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Jun 24 2013 (IPS)

As managing director of the National Agricultural Cooperative Marketing Federation (NAFED), India’s apex agriculture marketing organisation, Sanjeev Chopra is in the thick of planned legislation to cover 800 million Indians under the world’s biggest food subsidy programme.

The new bill, whose implementation will cost 23 billion dollars annually, has been criticised as a ploy by the ruling Congress party to win votes in an election year.

Chopra, a top official in the ministry of agriculture, spoke with IPS correspondent Ranjit Devraj on the advantages and pitfalls of the Food Security Bill that, when passed in July, will make access to food a fundamental right in this country of 1.2 billion people.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: There are fears that the proposed Food Security Bill will undermine the existing public distribution system (PDS). Do you agree?

A: The Bill will not undermine the PDS. The basic change is that what has so far been a responsibility of the state governments will become that of the Central government. Further, provision of food will become a fundamental and enforceable right. This will, no doubt, increase the demands on the PDS system, and India will now have to invest far more in logistics, and infrastructure.

Q:  Almost daily we are inundated with images in the media of grain rotting in the open, exposed to the elements. What is your opinion on this, given widespread malnutrition and hunger in India, and the fact that the Supreme Court recently stepped in to order the distribution of free grain to starving people?

2. There can be no two views about the fact that rotting grain reflects poorly on India’s procurement and distribution system, as well as our inability to attract investments in this sector. The Planning Commission has attached high priority to creating warehousing infrastructure. The solution is not free distribution because this distorts the market, and makes farming for the marginal and small farmers less remunerative. A better response would be exports, or food assistance to countries where crops have failed on account of drought or excessive rainfall.

Q: Are there remedies to this glaring shortfall in governance?

A: Procurement systems require massive investments in infrastructure. We need  grading machines at principal market yards which can clearly give information about moisture, admixtures, average grain size, colour etc. These may come up in the private sector – which will ensure that manpower and maintenance issues will not be a hassle for the government. NAFED encourages its member organisations to get the grain graded in these machines, which will usher in transparency in procurement.

As for distribution we need to leverage technology. This ranges from ensuring weekly delivery schedules to informing all stakeholders over mobile phones about stock availability. While governments have to address the supply side, civil society, media and panchayats (village councils) have to ensure ‘effective demand’.

There are also structural issues like provision of liberal credit to the PDS dealer, improving his profit margins, and giving him an incentive to report off-take. The PDS dealer has to be treated as an integral part of the PDS system, not as an adversary.

Q: How do you propose to balance the interests of traders, including exporters, and small and marginalised farmers who seem to be at the short end of the stick (as witnessed in the exodus from rural areas to the cities)?

A: Intermediaries exist at all levels because they add ‘value’ – it may be argued that it is not value for money. Information technology can reduce the cost of information and intermediation. In states like Punjab and Haryana, which lead agricultural production, the influence of the intermediaries on the political economy of grain procurement is very strong. Thus there is a real conflict of interest and the government is trying to address it through cooperatives and farmer-producer organisations.

Q:  Once access to food becomes a right, the political economy of production will empower the large and medium farmers, who will depend on fertilisers and farm equipment to meet the state’s requirement of food grain to be procured under PDS. How can this be addressed?

The Small Farmers Agri-Business Consortium – an agency of the ministry of agriculture – is helping farmers (form) farmer-producer organisations to leverage inputs at competitive rates, and market their produce collectively.

Two funds have been specially created for these producer companies – the Equity Fund to provide matching equity and a credit guarantee fund to cover collateral-free loans. These interventions should reduce the dependence of marginal and small farmers on the intermediaries – but this is a process, and will take a few years to pan out.

Q: India has seen a steady migration from the rural to urban areas. Is this healthy?

A: Migration from rural to urban is the natural order of things when economies make the transition from a predominantly agrarian society to an industrial one or, in India’s case, a post-industrial society. The growth in services and manufacturing, ipso facto, has to be higher than growth in core agriculture.

However, efforts need to be made to improve the profitability of agricultural production – by reducing the cost of credit, by improved marketing and public investments in infrastructure.

Q: The new Bill will increase the demand for fertilisers, thereby increasing the fertiliser subsidy and making India more dependent on imports. With the rupee sinking in value, what are the long term implications for India?

A: The dependence on fertiliser, especially imported fertiliser, will grow, at least in the short run. The ministry is trying to move towards a nutrient-based subsidy regime – but if the rupee continues to slide, the situation will indeed be very challenging.

Excerpt:

With South-South trade on the rise and growth in emerging economies set to outstrip production in industrialised countries, the international mining sector has been quick to follow global trends.

In recent years, significant mining activity has moved from the developed to the developing world, with the latter’s share of global trade in minerals increasing from less than one-third in 2000 to nearly half in 2010.

Doris Eaton, Co-Chairperson of Yamatji Marlpa Aboriginal Corporation, the Native Title representative body for the Traditional Owners of the resource rich Pilbara, Murchison and Gascoyne regions in Western Australia. Credit: Neena Bhandari/IPS

A landmark 2012 publication by the International Council on Mining and Metals states that there have been huge investments in recent years in Latin America, Africa and parts of Asia, which are likely to escalate in the next 10 years.

Forty countries, including Australia, China, Brazil, Russian Federation, India, the United States and Canada, are heavily dependent on mineral exports; and 30 of them, including Chile, Peru, South Africa, Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, are low- or middle-income countries.

Mining ventures have brought mega profits, but also sharp scrutiny, with activists raising thorny questions about transparency, gender equality and community development in this sprawling and largely unregulated sector.

The World Bank estimates that today there are 15 to 20 million artisanal and small-scale miners, with about 80 to 100 million people depending on such mining for their livelihood.

Around 3.5 billion people live in developing countries that contain vast deposits of coal, iron ore, copper, gold, nickel, bauxite and zinc, but most are deprived of the benefits from their nation’s mining bonanzas, especially women, who also bear the brunt of the sector’s many negative externalities.

Oxfam Australia’s work with communities around the world has shown that the impact of mining is not gender neutral. “Women often experience the negative impacts of mining more than men, and rarely receive the benefits that men do,” the NGO’s mining advocacy advisor, Serena Lillywhite, told IPS.

“There is also a concern that they are not actively involved in project decision-making, benefit-sharing agreements or revenue payments as women are seldom at the table when mining projects are being negotiated,” she added.

Over the last few decades, several gender impact assessment frameworks have emerged, but there is no “one size fits all”. Oxfam’s gender impact assessment tool helps industry to assess the gender-specific impact of mining. It can assist companies to ensure that mining projects are responsive to women’s needs and interests, and also promote women’s participation in planning and implementation of projects.

Doris Puiahi, project manager in Solomon Islands of the inclusive natural resource management project of the Melbourne-based NGO Live & Learn Environmental Education, and her team have been working with heavily logged rural communities in the Solomon Islands. This archipelago in the south-west Pacific Ocean has observed similar trends.

“There is currently only one gold mine in Guadalcanal Province, central Solomon Islands,” Puiahi told IPS, “but as mining interests increase, most women fear they will be disempowered further.

“The 40-year-old logging industry hasn’t brought any development and people are unhappy with how royalties are distributed: only about 10 percent of profit goes to the community. But as profits are not usually disclosed, people don’t really know if they are actually getting even 10 percent of the profits made.”

With resource wealth comes the inevitable risk of conflict. As of Jun. 8, the World Bank Group’s Compliance Advisor Ombudsman (CAO) had a total of 114 cases (from the 2000-2013 period) across multiple sectors – predominantly extractive industries, infrastructure and agribusiness – in 40 countries; 38 of these conflicts are active in 19 countries. A total of 59 cases revolve around extractive sectors (oil, gas, mining and chemicals), of which only 21 are mining-related.

Whether it is minerals under the ground, land acquired for infrastructure or agriculture, or water used for irrigation or industrial purposes, competition between local communities who depend on those resources for their livelihoods, and developers who require those resources for their commercial activities, often leads to conflict.

“Population increase is creating more competition for these resources worldwide,” CAO’s vice-president Dame Meg Taylor told IPS. Two recent cases that have come to CAO relate to the International Finance Corporation and Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency’s support for early mining exploration activities in the Philippines and Indonesia, where communities have expressed concern about the potential impacts of these projects on their ancestral land, water, fields and forests.

Women’s participation in decision-making, and ensuring that they receive their due share of mining wealth, will be crucial to sustainable socio-economic development in resource-rich countries. Thanks to rising demand for coal and iron ore from China, India and other developing countries, Australia has witnessed unprecedented growth in the mining sector.

The Yamatji Marlpa Aboriginal Corporation (YMAC) is the native title representative body for the traditional owners of the Pilbara, Murchison and Gascoyne regions in Western Australia, which are home to massive crude oil, salt, natural gas and iron-ore mining operations.

The Corporation’s co-chairperson, Doris Eaton, told IPS, “Over the last decade, we have seen one of the largest mining booms in our history. We are losing the beautiful valleys where our old people walked, important ceremony and story places and land that is home to rare species of animals and plants.”

The mining sector contributes around 11 percent to Australia’s GDP, with export revenues from the sale of mineral and energy commodities forecast to be 171 billion U.S. dollars in 2012-2013. There are currently 98 projects, worth 239 billion dollars , at an advanced stage of development.

Emphasising that it is vital for indigenous people to receive compensation for the loss of their land and heritage, Eaton said, “Native Title (which recognises the traditional rights and interests of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to land and water) groups do not have equal negotiating power with mining companies and when companies mine, they change a country forever.

“Our people want to be genuine partners and have a say in how compensation from mining is used for creating jobs, security and a positive future for our young people.”

A study released last month by University of Melbourne Researcher Sara Bice has found that big miners’ corporate social responsibility or sustainable development programmes run the gamut from philanthropic donations to public-private partnerships, but can create a disturbing dependency over the long term, with communities often given money for projects they don’t need.

“For example, one school principal spoke of how his school received a sunshade, and one community received donations for the local football team guernsey. In another instance, principals didn’t openly resist a mining company attempting to influence the local school curriculum as they feared rebuffing the company could lead to withdrawal of funds,” Bice told IPS.

Respondents in remote communities studied expressed concern over the short-term and ‘superficial’ nature of such responses to community needs. Bice said, “The case studies found that these programmes are misaligned both with company policies which have been progressively working to promote long-term ‘sustainable’ development and with community needs, concerned with the lasting viability of their communities.”

According to civil society campaigners, governments need to step up and be more open about the income they receive from their resources industries. More countries need to commit to implementing the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), the global standard for transparency of government revenues from natural resources, which requires full disclosure of taxes, royalties and other fees from the country’s oil, gas and mining sectors.

By Walter García and Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jun 20 2013 (IPS)

The bold strategy implemented by the Brazilian government has achieved an 84 percent reduction in deforestation in the Amazon rainforest in the last eight years. But when the natural resources and pesticides used in agricultural production are taken into account, the environmental progress made is not so impressive.

The achievement was announced this month by leftwing Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and her environment minister, Izabella Teixeira, in the tone of “mission almost accomplished,” Francisco Oliveira, the director of policies against deforestation in the environment ministry, told IPS.

Between August 2011 and July 2012, 4,571 square kilometres in the Amazon were deforested – the lowest annual rate since the Institute of Space Research (INPE) began satellite monitoring in 1988, and 27 percent lower than in the previous 12-month period.

In 2004, when an inter-ministerial plan for prevention and control of deforestation, burning and illegal logging was established in the Amazon rainforest, the annual loss was 27,772 square kilometres. Deforestation in 2012 represented an 84 percent drop since the plan’s inception, Teixeira said.

Brazil’s Amazon region covers 5,033,072 square kilometres or 60 percent of the national territory, and the decline in deforestation is an essential contribution to progress towards the country’s target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, responsible for global warming.

Brazil made a voluntary commitment to reduce deforestation by 80 percent, from 1990 levels, by 2020. “We have already achieved 76 percent of this goal,” minister Teixeira said on Jun. 5.

“Several sectors contributed to this result,” said Carlos Painel, of Alternativa Terrazul, an environmental NGO. “The federal government improved oversight and control, which reduced illegal logging in the Amazon and limited the expansion of slash-and-burn of the rainforest for agricultural and livestock raising activities.”

The plan was launched early in the administration of leftwing former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011), based on three inter-related core concepts: tighter control and higher penalties for illegal logging, stimulation of sustainable activities and regulation of land use.

Land-use planning policies created forest conservation units totalling 250,000 square kilometres, equivalent to 75 percent of the environmentally protected areas in the world, according to official figures.

Environmentalists welcomed these results, but they warned about collateral effects and future threats.

“There have been setbacks in the past year, particularly after the approval of the new forest code,” Painel told IPS.

The controversial code, promoted by the powerful landowning lobby, halted the decline in deforestation, “putting the Amazon region in danger again,” the activist said.

The law provided an amnesty for illegal logging carried out before July 2008. This gave large agricultural and livestock producers and illegal loggers a sense of impunity, Fernando Gabeira, a former congressman for the Green Party, told IPS.

“In the Amazon, they got the idea that they should carry on deforesting as fast as possible,” he said.

The government and environmentalists consider that “accounts” for the Amazon should include an additional factor: the economic expansion of the country which is growing as an emerging power based on two pillars, agricultural production and mining.

Brazil is one of the top exporters of soy, beef and sugar, and its goal is to become the world’s biggest food producer. China is at present the main importer of Brazilian agricultural and livestock commodities.

“Deforestation is closely correlated with economic growth, and it now depends a great deal on China, which buys soy, beef and minerals. Our relationship with the Asian giant will determine much of what happens in future,” Gabeira said.

Painel said that as well as illegal logging, the expansion in the Amazon of crops like soy and of cattle ranching has a strong effect on deforestation.

He added that “it is important for all the costs of agricultural production to be taken into account. The natural resources used are not counted, and more organic, sustainable production does not exist,” he complained.

He also pointed out that Brazil is currently the top global consumer of pesticides, and that the country does not include costs like the water consumed by agribusiness in the accounts it keeps of its economic growth or exports.

“Every kilo of exported beef requires thousands of litres of water for its production, a precious resource in today’s world,” Painel said.

He also mentioned other natural resources that are not subtracted from the bottom line, such as land, “a resource that few countries have as much of as Brazil.”

The “over-use” of fuels for production and overland transport to the country’s ports is not taken into account either, he said.

“The accounting has to include other factors such as sustainability, social issues, benefits to the country and particularly investment in new technology to increase production with fewer natural resources and without pollutants,” he said.

“We don’t have to take on the role of feeding the world. We can contribute. But it is not Brazil’s role to feed billions of Chinese hogs with soybeans,” said Painel.

According to the environment ministry, areas of pasture and secondary vegetation (re-growth after land clearance) expanded by 22 percent between 2008 and 2010. Pastureland is increasingly occupying recently deforested areas.

“This shows that it is possible to produce in a sustainable manner while preserving the environment, by means of sustainable agricultural practices,” Minister Teixeira said.

But the government admits that in order to maintain the positive results in the Amazon, it is necessary to step up efforts to promote sustainable economic activities, which it says will now be the focus of its plan.

Oliveira mentioned, for example, that vast tracts of land in the Amazon that have not been allocated could become areas for sustainable forest management, settlement of landless farmers, or production.

“We have to separate the wheat from the chaff, because there are people of good faith who are working properly in the Amazon, respecting environmental laws and building a future in the right way,” he said.

But unfortunately, the majority persist in illegal behaviours, he added.

One positive step, the official said, is a moratorium by companies on buying soy grown on newly deforested land in the Amazon rainforest, in force since 2006 and respected by 90 percent of traders.

An agreement is also in effect for meat packing plants not to buy beef from illegally deforested areas.

Brazil cannot lower its guard in demonstrating that it can grow and maintain its forests, said Oliveira.

In Painel’s view, to do this requires “changing the vision of agribusiness in Brazil. It has an important role in the national economy, but the direction it is taking is utterly behind the times,” he said.

“The big producers want as much land as possible, so they encroach on protected conservation areas, indigenous territories, land close to river banks… they have no shame in accelerating the deforestation process as much as possible, to maximise production,” he maintained.

Once more, Swiss voters have lashed out against asylum seekers, further tightening the country’s already strict asylum law. The government has meanwhile announced a radical restructuring of the asylum procedure.

Switzerland’s asylum law exists since 1981. Since then, one reform chased the other, all of them to the disadvantage of those seeking asylum in the country. The aim of the ten law revisions so far is evident: make Switzerland as unattractive as possible for poor immigrants.

On Jun. 9, 78 percent of Swiss voters approved new measures to keep asylum seekers out. Switzerland had been so far the only country in Europe to allow asylum seekers to apply at Swiss embassies. Now, Swiss voters have closed that unique door.

The facility had offered a safe path to exile, especially for endangered women and children who could avoid dangerous trips and people smugglers.

The government says the provision attracted too many requests, leading to a huge administrative effort. In 2012 Switzerland registered 7,667 such applications. Since 2006, Justice Minister Simonetta Sommaruga has said, only 11 percent of these asylum seekers were allowed to travel to Switzerland, and 40 percent of these were finally granted asylum.

Since 2005, thousands of Eritrean refugees have found a way to Switzerland. In 2012, they filed 15.4 percent of all asylum requests. Many young, male Eritreans fled the dictatorship of Isaias Afewerki and compulsory, sometimes infinite military or state service. About two-thirds of them were granted asylum for being conscientious objectors. Now that will no longer be a sufficient reason for asylum.“Sommaruga plans to accelerate only unpromising, baseless asylum requests for one sole purpose: deterrence.”

Swiss voters have also paved the way for a major restructuring of the asylum process. As Swiss cantons struggle to accommodate asylum seekers, the state has demanded extra powers to provide accommodation in its own infrastructure such as unused military bunkers. The government can now use its infrastructure as asylum centres for three years without the approval of the concerned cantons and communities.

On Jun. 14 Sommaruga laid out the details of her restructuring project. Its main aim is the acceleration of the asylum procedure. Under the new procedure, 60 percent of all asylum requests should be conclusively dealt with within 140 days, the remaining 40 percent within a year.

The Swiss Justice Minister intends now to centralise the system that’s now scattered all over the country. Transporting asylum seekers from cantonal accommodations to the federal interrogation bureaus and back has been costing money and time.

Taking the Netherlands as an example, Sommaruga’s vision is to build a small number of big asylum centres, where all concerned administrative actors are present. Also, 60 percent of asylum seekers would be hosted by the government and only 40 percent by the 26 cantons. For that, the government needs to create at least 3,000 more accommodation places.

The Justice Ministry will carry out a two-year test phase at a centre in Zurich, starting 2014. “It makes sense to probe the new procedures in practice and collect experiences, before it is introduced comprehensively,” Sommaruga said at a press conference earlier on Mar. 25.

The details of the test system aren’t entirely clear yet, but it is being ensured that no more than 300 asylum seekers stay in a centre. The centres are likely to consist of detention cells to facilitate direct deportation of those denied asylum.

Human rights groups are watching the ministry’s efforts closely, and with concern. They agree on a need to accelerate procedures. “However, the Justice Minister’s project will mainly speed up Dublin cases and asylum requests with potentially low chances,” Moreno Casasola, secretary general of the refugee rights organisation ‘Solidarité sans frontières’ tells IPS. The ‘Dublin cases’ are asylum-seekers who can be sent back to the first European country where they were registered, under an EU agreement reached earlier in Dublin.

Casasola thinks that speeding up is needed for those asylum seekers who have a good chance of being granted asylum. Such asylum requests are often suspended for months or even years. “If the government wants more efficiency, it should simply decide upon these requests instead of leaving them in the drawer.”

In Casasola’s view, the government doesn’t want positive asylum decisions because it fears a pull effect that may attract even more immigrants. “Sommaruga plans to accelerate only unpromising, baseless asylum requests for one sole purpose: deterrence.”

Along with the accelerated procedure, the Swiss Justice Minister plans to offer asylum seekers free legal advice and representation.

“In principle, that’s a good idea,” Melanie Aebli, secretary general of the ‘Democratic Lawyers Switzerland’ (DJS) tells IPS. But Aebli fears that the government will place the legal advice office in the new centres “probably right besides the bureau for return advice.”

DJS and other refugee rights groups want the legal support promised to asylum seekers to be situated far from the asylum centres, and be identifiable as clearly independent. Aebli says the accelerated procedure will put a lot of pressure on the asylum seekers, because they will hardly be given enough time to collect evidence to present their case and to organise themselves.

Further, the government plans to cut the appeal period for original asylum decisions. “Already 30 days meant a lot of stress for legal representation, cutting it to ten days is highly problematic as there’s hardly time to work out a substantial appeal,” says Aebli.

Refugees dig for water in a dried up watering hole in Jamam camp, in South Sudan's Upper Nile state. Credit: Jared Ferrie/IPS

By Walter García and Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jun 20 2013 (IPS)

Yves Norodom, a 21-year-old refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo living in Brazil, is one of 45.2 million displaced people around the world – the largest number in 20 years.

In its annual report Global Trends 2012: Displacement, the New 21st Century Challenge, released Wednesday, the UNHCR said 28.8 million of that total were internally displaced persons (IDPs), 15.4 million were refugees outside their own countries, and nearly one million were asylum-seekers.

Some 35.8 million people were under the UNHCR mandate by late 2012 – the second highest number on record.

On average, 23,000 people were forced to flee their homes every day in 2012.

Norodom told IPS that he fled his country, the DRC, for Kenya, and from there to the United Kingdom, before finally making his way to Brazil in 2010 without documents or belongings.

“In Congo, everyone feared for their lives,” he said. “I was struggling to survive, I did the impossible to make it. My job was to save my own skin, and I was 17 years old at the time.”

His father, a member of the opposition, had to flee the DRC nearly a decade ago, and Norodom’s 15 siblings gradually found refuge in other countries, until the family ended up spread out across the globe.

“They threatened us, and six of us landed in Brazil. Others had already found refuge, some in Africa, others in France. We had to split up,” he lamented.

One of Norodom’s biggest challenges has been learning Portuguese. “I had never heard the language before. It took me six months to learn the basics, and a year to speak it a little better.”

He is currently unemployed, but he dreams of one day returning to school and attending the public university in Rio de Janeiro to study chemical engineering.

“I wouldn’t say I’m very happy, but at least I’m alive and I’m ok,” he said.

Norodom is one of 4,715 refugees of 76 nationalities in Brazil, according to figures from CONARE, the government’s national refugee agency. Of that total, 2,012 receive assistance from the UNHCR.

“They are people who belong to ethnic groups fleeing for reasons of thought or conflicts. Our challenge is to offer the refugees better conditions to adapt and integrate,” said CONARE vice-president João Guilherme Granja.

Brazil has adequate laws on refugees and offers them the same public services that are enjoyed by the country’s citizens. But this country of 198 million people receives a far smaller number of refugees than much poorer countries like Pakistan, which currently hosts over 1.6 million refugees.

At the launch of the Global Trends report ahead of World Refugee Day (Jun. 20), UNHCR representative in Brazil Andrés Ramírez said armed conflict was still the main cause of forced displacement.

He said more than half of the world’s refugees came from five countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan and Syria.

On average, war and other crises drove one person from their home every 4.1 seconds, last year, Ramírez said. “The political will to prevent conflicts has been lacking at a global level,” he added. “The refugee issue is a human tragedy of enormous magnitude.”

As it has for the past three decades, Afghanistan headed the list, accounting for one of every four of the 10.5 million refugees under the UNHCR mandate, or 2.5 million. It was followed by Somalia (1.1 million), Iraq (746,700), and Syria (471,400).

The report says about four-fifths of the world’s refugees flee to neighbouring countries.

The list of countries hosting the largest refugee populations includes Pakistan, the DRC, Kenya, Iran, Syria and Kenya.

In 2012, Brazil received over 1,200 requests for asylum, and the number will be bigger this year, Ramírez said.

“We have more requests now because of the crises around the world,” the UNCHR representative said. “Brazil is a country of continental dimensions and could receive more refugees, but it is far away from the places where the humanitarian crises are occurring.”

The rise in the cost of living in Brazil’s cities and the day-to-day difficulties in making a living faced by a large part of the population also affect the quality of life of refugees, said Aline Thuller, with the Catholic NGO Caritas.

“A majority of the refugees live in favelas (shantytowns) and other poor neighbourhoods. They have the same rights to public services and face the same difficulties as Brazilians. Most of them work in the informal sector,” she told IPS.

“There is still a lot of prejudice” against refugees, Thuller said.

In the past, the refugees assisted by Caritas were mainly Angolan men, who were fleeing forced recruitment during the 27-year civil war in that former Portuguese colony in southern Africa.

But today, many pregnant women and entire families reach Rio de Janeiro as refugees.

The state of Rio de Janeiro, which receives the second-largest number of refugees after São Paulo, is in the final stages of designing a state-wide refugee policy.

Under the new policy, “working groups will be created by thematic area and will organise practical activities, to facilitate refugees’ access to basic rights,” Thuller said.

Ensuring that women, youth and other marginalised groups are employed is a challenge in combating poverty. Credit: Naresh Newar/IPS

By Walter García and Lucy Westcott
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 19 2013 (IPS)

In the aftermath of the global economic crisis and with three years to go until the 2015 deadline of the Millennium Development Goals, global leaders are struggling to formulate a post-2015 agenda that can address the widespread dilemmas of employment and inclusive growth.

At a meeting attended by global leaders, ambassadors and civil society to discuss the post-2015 agenda last Friday, panellists agreed that better and more job opportunities are high priorities that must be included in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

Created in 2000 at the Millennium Summit, the MDGs include eradicating extreme poverty, achieving universal primary education and improving maternal health.

At the meeting, speakers critiqued a report on jobs and growth issued by the high-level panel for post-2015, co-chaired by U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, Liberian President Ellen Sirleaf and Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.

Civil society leaders found the report too conservative, as it failed to properly address structural issues and income inequality.

For people under the age of 35, the desire for employment opportunities is particularly high. According to data from the International Labour Organisation (ILO), unemployment increased from 170 million people in 2007 to 200 million people in 2012, 75 million of them young people.

To give experts a better understanding of global workers’ views on employment and growth, people were consulted through World We Want, an online platform.

The information they shared was “well-rounded and insightful”, Selim Jahan, director of poverty practice at UNDP, told IPS, and revealed civil society’s seemingly inherent, if surprising, understanding of the risks and issues at hand regarding jobs and growth.

“These are no economists we are talking about. These are not policymakers. But people talked about macroeconomic policies and…different measures to deal with inequality, about measures to deal with education and skill training,” he said.

Their ideas and comments reveal the myriad and complex issues people face in securing and keeping a job. One World We Want user, an executive assistant from Brazil, believed a more open dialogue about HIV/AIDS to be vital in job development.

“[There should be] government incentive for companies [and] tax deduction to hire HIV employees. We still suffer [from] prejudice. We still need to keep this disease as a secret to maintain the job,” the user, who remained anonymous to protect his or her identity, said.

For another user from India, renewable energy was an integral part of future development.

Challenges to job creation

Strong population growth presents a huge challenge for future job creation. With the world labour force growing by 40 million people a year, according to the report, 470 million new jobs will have to be created from 2016-2030 to keep up with the demand for work.

Engaging women, youth and other marginalised groups in employment is another difficulty, with a huge gender disparity in some regions. In the Middle East and North Africa, the gaps are the biggest, with male employment at around 60 percent and female employment hovering around or below the 20 percent mark.

While bringing more women into employment could require a shift in cultural norms, the low numbers of employed women in the MENA region also has to do with the way data is collected, Martha Chen, international coordinator at Women in Informal Employment: Globalising and Organising (WIEGO), told IPS.

“In the MENA region, it may also be the case that there are a lot of women doing home-based work and other forms of [paid] employment that do not get captured in the official statistics,” Chen added. “So the gap may not be as big as we think, but the problem may be that women’s work is not being fully captured.”

“It’s a mindset of those who do the interviewing and those who design the questionnaires,” she pointed out. “It’s a mindset about what…work [is], and the fact that women can be doing work in the home.”

“I think there [are] probably a lot of women in their homes doing something for the market, not just for subsistence,” Chen noted.

Youth are not the only ones who will be vying for future jobs. An aging population means that older people will also be looking for work.

“Job training, education, jobs, these are all issues important to older people. We don’t just stop living when we reach age 60,” said James Collins, U.N. representative of the International Council on Social Welfare and chair of the Committee on Aging in New York.

“As governments raise the retirement age, it’s very important that at the same time, they improve access to employment for older people who want to work,” Collins added.

Monday’s resignation of Czech Prime Minister Petr Necas over a massive corruption scandal may well mark a new era of judicial independence in the Czech Republic and possibly the whole post-communist region.

The Prime Minister’s chief of office Jana Nagyova, a regular in the tabloids and allegedly his lover, has been arrested and stands accused of illegal spying and bribing of MPs.

Two military intelligence officers and two former members of parliament face similar charges. Necas himself denies any wrongdoing.

The government, composed of a coalition of right-wing liberal and conservative parties, is resisting opposition calls for a fresh election, hoping to weather the storm with a mere government reshuffle.

Necas, who is intent on leaving politics following last week’s events, tendered his resignation to the President on Monday. He will remain in his post until a new prime minister is appointed.

“This is a good sign of some judicial independence in governance structures,” Petr Lebeda, director of the independent think-tank Glopolis told IPS.

“It could be encouraging for judicial systems in other countries. A message has been sent that there is no such thing as impunity for politicians and high public officials, that anybody who does something illegal can be sued for his crimes.”

Indeed, news of the corruption scandal and the subsequent resignation have sent shockwaves across Central and Eastern Europe, with the media following developments closely.

In the face of weak institutions, the region’s media and particularly investigative journalists have played a crucial role in uncovering corruption scandals and in pushing authorities to act, as is frequently recognised by international anti-corruption organisations such as Transparency International (TI).

Slovakia is witnessing the re-emergence of a public debate on the lack of independence of prosecuting and judicial bodies as well as on politicians’ lack of will to tackle corruption systematically.

In a statement published last year, Transparency International singled out the Czech Republic and Slovakia as home to particularly weak prosecuting bodies, describing them as “vulnerable to direct political influence because of their strictly hierarchical and non-transparent organisational structures.”

In one comment published by leading Slovak daily Sme, commentator Roman Pataj accused the government of “occupying key posts in the Slovak judiciary” and termed its policies in this field as “non-transparent” and “disastrous”.

There were similar reactions in Hungary, where also politicians could be heard: Gergely Karacsony, leader of the opposition party Dialogue for Hungary, reacted by making fresh calls for an investigation into a recent tobacco retail tender which controversially benefited government supporters and their relatives.

Karacsony lashed out at the country’s state prosecutor, calling on him to follow the Czech example while criticising his inactivity: “He lacks the expertise and the courage to step up,” he said, accusing him of protecting government “mafias”.

The Czech scandal has reverberated because it is inserted in a region that faces very similar challenges. The most frequently corruption-related malaise in the region involves unlawful party financing, manipulation of state institutions by political and economic interest groups, murky ties between the business and political classes, and weak prosecuting bodies.

There is also a clear East/West divide: TI’s corruption perception index shows Central and Eastern Europe lagging behind all of Western Europe with the exception of Italy. Among post-communist countries, only Estonia fares well in the index.

Hence the fall of the Czech leader caught many by surprise, not because of the high-level corruption, but due to the fact that authorities acted: “Justice only worked at the lowest levels, once it reached the top levels it would never lead to the courts,” Lebeda said.

While prosecutions of high level officials are not unseen in the region, they are usually reserved for opposition politicians, and convictions are rare.

What makes the Czech Republic different from the rest of the region is the fresh “emancipation of the office of public prosecutor and consequently anti-corruption police,” Ondrej Cisar, a political scientist at the Czech Academy of Sciences told IPS.

“Making a sort of sweeping analogy, one can say that we are going through a prosecutors’ revolution, similar to the judges’ revolution in Italy in the beginning of the 1990s,” Cisar added.

Ironically, Necas himself may be responsible for his own fate, as he ended an old habit – not just in the Czech Republic but in all of post-communist Europe and beyond – of placing political appointees to judicial posts.

Following years of media criticism of various governments over the prevalence of an alleged ‘justice mafia’ that protected high-profile politicians from prosecution, Necas named Pavel Zeman as chief prosecutor in 2010.

Zeman, perceived as an independent, played a key role in strengthening the independence of various prosecution and judicial bodies as well as in starting a wave of prosecutions that reached its climax last week.

This process was one that the “government probably did not actively support, but also did not block,” Lebeda told IPS. The weakness of the coalition government may thus have been a blessing in disguise, preventing any particular political force from asserting its authority over the judiciary.

Workshops for budding entrepreneurs are mushrooming in Spain, like this one in Benalmádena, Málaga. Credit: Inés Benítez/IPS

By Walter García and Inés Benítez
MALAGA, Spain, Jun 18 2013 (IPS)

The people in the textile factory where Lourdes Soler presented the design of her skirts had never seen such detailed “blueprints” of a garment. Spain’s depressed labour market forced the technical architect to reinvent herself and create her own job – a growing trend in this crisis-stricken country.

“We were educated with the idea of having the same career for our entire lives, and when a crisis hits and jobs are scarce, we find ourselves paralysed and we don’t know what to do,” the 41-year-old mother of three children between the ages of seven and 11, with 15 years of professional work experience, told IPS.

María Jesús González, 38, says she doesn’t “know how to do anything else,” after 13 years in positions of responsibility in the Newco airport services and Spanair airline companies.

Laid off in 2012, shortly before she gave birth to her son, she is still waiting for her severance pay, which she hopes to use to open a café-indoor playground, with two other partners, in the southern Spanish city of Málaga.

May 2013 saw the largest month-on-month rise in the number of self-employed workers since the start of the crisis in 2009, with 12,532 newly registered that month. The number of people registered as self-employed with the social security system totalled 3,029,843 in May, according to the Ministry of Employment and Social Security.

But the number of self-employed workers has actually dropped from year to year since 2009, and in May there were 34,651 fewer than in May 2012.

“Since 2009 we have lost 200,000 self-employed workers,” María José Landaburu, secretary general of the Union of Associations of Self-Employed Workers and Entrepreneurs (UATAE), told IPS. She said “the hikes in the high season (May-September) do not compensate for the drops in the low season.”

Landaburu attributed the increase in May “mainly to the lack of alternatives for the millions of unemployed people, who see self-employment as a solution.” But it was also due to “measures adopted by the government to foment self-employment,” she added.

“This is the first time I am setting out on my own,” Giselle Rocha, a 36-year-old administrative employee from Brazil told IPS. She was left without work along with 5,000 other people when Orizonia, one of Spain’s largest tour operators, went under.

Rocha, who has lived in Spain for five years, is now getting ready to open a small business selling natural juice and vegetarian food, along with a fellow Brazilian, in this city in the southern province of Andalusía.

She complained that because of her age she is not eligible for most of the options of government support for entrepreneurs. “The aid is for the young, but it should be made available to everyone, or to no one,” said Rocha, the mother of a seven-year-old boy.

On May 24, the government approved a bill on support for entrepreneurs, aimed at facilitating the creation and financing of businesses and encouraging an entrepreneurial spirit, in educational plans in schools.

“The lack of financing is the entrepreneur’s main problem,” rightwing Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy said on Jun. 11 during a ceremony in the seat of government where he presented the bill to some 50 entrepreneurs and small businesspersons.

Rajoy urged banks to support the initiative, saying “those who grant loans must rise to this challenge.”

Spain’s unemployment rate of 27 percent is the highest in the European Union after Greece’s. And half of the 4.9 million jobless people in this country of 47 million are 25 or younger.

Landaburu said the bill “does not strongly address major needs, especially the need for credit.”

But she said it does contain “interesting measures, like ones that foment business ventures or that stipulate that a person’s home cannot be foreclosed on for private debts up to 300,000 euros (just under 400,000 dollars).”

Among the novel aspects of the new law, expected to pass this month, is a special Value Added Tax (VAT) measure that would prevent self-employed workers and small businesses from having to pay the tax until they are paid.

It also creates a special VAT for young people, which would cut costs for entrepreneurs under 30.

Sources at the Centre of Support for Business Development (CADE), a government agency, in Málaga told IPS that the main concern of entrepreneurs who visit their offices is the lack of financing.

“They run into negative answers when they ask for loans in banks, which require more and more guarantees,” said Susana Benítez, with CADE.

According to the Financial Stability Report, published May 7 by the Banco de España –Spain’s central bank – “the rates of acceptance of loan requests from non-financial companies have gone down, from levels of around 45 percent in 2006 to around 30 percent during the crisis.”

Rocha and her partner were able to set up their small business with minimal seed capital, and without having to apply for a bank loan.

But González plans to seek credit, and complains that “the banks aren’t lending.”

Entrepreneurial activity is growing above all among groups that have been hit hardest by soaring unemployment: people over 55, young people, women and immigrants, said
Landaburu.

Sales and the hotel industry are the areas most frequently chosen by entrepreneurs, although the number of self-employed people and small businesses has gone up in scientific, technical and health-related fields.

But while the number of new entrepreneurs shot up in May, “the percent that survive is much smaller than what would be desirable due to the credit shutdown, the consumption slowdown, and the lack of advice,” said the UATAE spokeswoman. She added that helping these initiatives stay above water “is our real collective challenge.”

“I am self-taught,” said Soler, who believes the biggest obstacle for entrepreneurs is often themselves. “I find my own raw materials, I make my designs, and I learn about making clothes along the way. I’m building my own future. You have to know yourself, and discover where your talents lie.”

In April 2013, 8,938 new businesses were created in Spain, 23 percent more than in April 2012, according to the National Statistics Institute. But 2,090 businesses went under in April, compared to 1,414 in the same month of 2012.

According to the World Bank’s Doing Business 2013 report, Spain ranks 136th out of 185 countries on the “ease of doing business” index. In this country, it takes 10 steps and 28 days to set up a company, the report says.

In Angola, the Giant Sable’s natural habitat is Luando Reserve where some 70 are thought to live wild. But this population is now under threat following the allocation of prospecting rights to private diamond companies. Courtesy: Pedro Vaz Pinto

By Walter García and Louise Redvers
DUBAI, Jun 18 2013 (IPS)

Environmental campaigners are urging the Angolan government to halt plans to mine diamonds inside a national reserve that is home to the world’s last wild population of a rare antelope, the Giant Sable.

There are believed to be fewer than 100 purebred animals left and the species is listed as “critically endangered” on the Red List of the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

In Angola, the Giant Sable’s natural habitat is Luando Reserve, which is situated in the northern province of Malange, where some 70 are thought to live wild. But this population is now under threat following the allocation of prospecting rights to a group of private Angolan diamond companies.

“Legally, this should not have been allowed to happen. The law is very clear, mineral activity is not permitted within protected areas,” a spokesperson for the Kissama Foundation, an Angolan environmental NGO, which has led major conservation projects, including the restocking of large game into parks, told IPS.

The spokesperson, who did not want to be named, said he was concerned for the physical impact that mining would have on the reserve.The Giant Sable is on an absolutely critical threshold. They are on their last breath before extinction so it’s not going to take much to push them over the edge." -- South African conservationist Brian Huntley

“This is going to put the Giant Sable population in great danger and we are very concerned that this has been permitted by the government.

“This is a desperate situation. We need support from the international community, we need people to make a noise and stop this from going ahead.”

Decades of civil war, along with widespread poaching, have decimated the Giant Sable Antelope population.

The Palanca Negra Gigante, as it is known in Portuguese, is Angola’s national symbol. Palancas Negras is the nickname of the southern African nation’s national soccer team, and the antelope’s long curved horn is pictured on the logo and fleet of the national airline, Transportes Aéreos Angolanos or TAAG.

While significant efforts, through both private and government-sponsored schemes, have been made to preserve and promote breeding of the animals inside a section of Cangandala Park, a national park also in Malange Province, Luando Reserve remains their natural habitat.

But 3,000 square km of the Capunda diamond mining concession falls nearly exclusively inside the Luando Reserve, straddling the provincial borders of Malange and Bie.

According to Angola’s environmental law and mining code, mineral activity is not permitted inside protected areas such as national parks and reserves and all projects must undergo an environmental assessment impact to judge risks and suitability.

Pedro Vaz Pinto, an Angolan who has led the programme to protect the Giant Sable in Cangandala Park, told IPS: “Mining inside the reserve would be a disaster for the animals. There are surely legal constraints that should not allow it.”

He added that there was already uncontrolled poaching linked to mining activities along the Kwanza River. He said that the meat was being used to feed miners and workers.

“I am extremely worried with the establishment of further organised industrial mining operations in the area and that poaching, which is a real threat to the Giant Sable, will only increase.”

But despite this, in June 2012, former minister of geology, mining and industry Joaquim David signed off on “Project Capunda”, the details of which were published in the government’s legal gazette, the Diario da Republica.

The companies listed behind the project – KCC Limitada, Yango Limitada and AM & BC Limitada – are all Angola-owned but hitherto unknown with no apparent record of prior involvement in the diamond sector.

The country’s state-owned diamond firm, Endiama, which automatically gets paid equity in every diamond project, holds a 32 percent share in the deal.

Although the Ministry of Environment failed to respond to requests for comment, both Endiama and the Ministry of Geology and Mines, tried to play down the situation.

Endiama spokesman Antonio Freitas told IPS: “Endiama is discussing possible alternatives with the project investors. The concession is in a large part inside the national park and the law must be respected.”

And in an email, Minister of Geology, Mining and Industry Francisco Manuel Monteiro de Queiroz, who replaced David in August 2012, told IPS that the ministry has been following this process with concern.

“We are working with the Ministry of Environment, Endiama and the concessionary companies to correct the situation in terms of the environmental law and the mineral code.

“The mineral code clearly prioritises protection of areas of environmental, cultural and other sensitivities when confronted with mining projects.”

Brian Huntley, an internationally-respected South African conservationist, who has collaborated closely with the Angolan government and several United Nations agencies to develop national park strategies, welcomed the high-level response.

He said that the ministries were engaging was extremely positive, but it was important that their words were followed by definitive actions.

“The Giant Sable is on an absolutely critical threshold,” he told IPS. “They are on their last breath before extinction so it’s not going to take much to push them over the edge.

“It’s actually a miracle they are still hanging in there. Any further pressure on them will be the end. The Giant Sable is a national icon and it is hugely important for the people and for the government, it must be protected.”

It has been claimed locally that the owners of the companies granted the mining concession have close links to powerful figures from the ruling Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA), which has been in power since independence from Portugal in 1975, and that the ministries are too scared to challenge the deal.

The rush to exploit mineral resources could spell environmental disaster for countries like Angola where weak institutions are regularly held hostage to personal interests that appear to be able to ride roughshod over legislation.

As well as the world’s fifth-biggest diamond exporter, Angola is Africa’s second-largest crude oil producer behind Nigeria, and there are growing concerns about the impact the rigs – and their spills – are having on the country’s coastline and fish stocks.

Drilling for oil off Angola’s coast. Angola is Africa’s second-largest crude oil producer behind Nigeria, and there are concerns about the impact the rigs and their spills are having on the country’s coastline and fish stocks. Credit: Louise Redvers/IPS

A culture of secrecy, however, dominates Angola’s research institutions and ministerial departments and little information is ever published.

Private or overseas companies that are hired to carry out studies are not allowed to share their findings without governmental permission, which is seldom granted.

Local communities who claim to have been affected by oil spills are typically given ad hoc cash payouts by the multi-national firms operating in the area and strongly discouraged from speaking to the media.

Later this year, state oil company Sonangol is due to auction a number of new licences for onshore oil and gas exploration blocks, raising separate concerns about land contamination and habitat destruction.

Seismic studies are already underway inside one national park near the capital Luanda, and foreign operators have been seen inside a desert park in the south of the country.

Huntley stressed that it was a critical time for Angola in terms of its environmental management.

“After a decade of peace and the rehabilitation of infrastructure there has been a surge in activity, particularly in the extractive industries sector,” he said. Angola’s 27-year civil war ended in 2002 and over the past decade the country has had one of the fastest-growing economies on the continent.

“This places huge urgency on the consolidation and rehabilitation of national parks. On a positive side, there is a lot of interest in Angola and significant donor funding available so we do have an opportunity to match the interests of the industrialists and the conservationists by sensible planning and management.”

Local food for local people. That’s the idea behind Sharaka (‘partnership’, in Arabic), an entirely volunteer-run, Palestinian organisation that aims to bring locally grown products directly to Palestinian dinner tables.

“Our vision is a food sovereign Palestine where we’re economically independent, we use our local resources and we support each other. That leads to human development. It’s local economy. Through a local economy and a local food system, that’s how you build community,” said volunteer and Sharaka co-founder Aisha Mansour.

Mansour said that while it has often been a struggle to convince both Palestinian farmers and consumers to participate, Sharaka has organised several successful farmers’ markets in Ramallah, and continues to raise awareness about the benefits of eating locally.

The group has also refused to take any international aid to support its work.

“It’s a broken system. Everybody knows that,” Mansour told IPS, about the international aid and development model currently in place. “Local people who know their community, who want to develop and support, they do things. That’s how they develop. That’s how development happens; it’s not an externally imposed thing.”

Palestinians are among the largest per capita recipients of international aid in the world. From 1994 – when the first international aid packages streamed into the occupied Palestinian territories – until the present day, billions of dollars have been spent.

The first donor conference to provide financial support to Palestinians was convened in October 1993 in Washington, shortly after the signing of the Oslo Accords peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO).

“The Oslo agreement between the PLO and Israel would not succeed, not work even, not last, without donor support,” said Dr. Samir Abdullah, director general of the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute (MAS) in Ramallah.

Dr. Abdullah told IPS that restrictions placed on Palestinians under the Oslo agreement, including receiving only 80 percent of Palestinian tax revenues, and having access to only 40 percent of West Bank land, limited growth and development.

As a result, the Palestinian Authority (PA) – the Palestinian government created as a result of the Oslo Accords – was quickly forced to rely on international donors to fill gaps in its budget.

“Now, the PA has 3 billion dollars of debt,” Dr. Abdullah said. “If this continues, the Authority will collapse. If (donors) are not paying the burden, the debt will be unaffordable for the Authority.”

In its National Development Plan for 2011-2013, the PA stated: “Tax and clearance revenues, driven upwards by private sector-led economic growth and improved revenue administration, will progressively reduce our reliance on external aid.”

But efforts to wean the PA off its dependence on foreign aid have proven unsuccessful.

International donors pledged 1 billion dollars to the PA in both 2011 and 2012 to keep the organisation afloat. After this sum was never fully transferred, the PA faced the largest funding crisis in its history.

It is now regularly unable to pay the salaries of its public sector employees, and President Mahmoud Abbas often launches emergency appeals to Arab states to support his Ramallah-based government.

International aid to Palestinians is also very much dependent on the local political situation, and mainly, on so-called peace process negotiations with Israel.

After the PA secured the upgraded status of Palestine at the United Nations last November, Israel said it would withhold 100 million dollars in Palestinian tax revenues each month, and the United States froze 500 million dollars in aid as punishment.

Nora Lester Murad is a volunteer and co-founder of Dalia, a Palestinian organisation that advocates better use of local resources, and development that meets Palestinian goals. She said that while international aid has brought some positives to Palestinian society – including jobs and basic institution-building – it has largely been destructive.

“It has not helped in the claiming of rights. It has not helped in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and I’d go further and say that it has undermined rights and has delayed or prevented and made more difficult, the resolution of the conflict,” Lester Murad told IPS.

“But things are changing. There is a lot of discontent, and that’s the first step. There is also discussion, and that’s the second step.”

In 2012, the overall unemployment rate in the occupied Palestinian territories hovered just below 23 percent. In the West Bank, youth unemployment reached 30 percent in mid-2012, and 52 percent in the Gaza Strip.

Itiraf Remawi, acting director general of the Ramallah-based Bisan Centre for Research and Development, told IPS that Palestinians must return to the more sustainable system of development, similar to the one that characterised the First Intifada in the late 1980s.

“The development has to take an approach that facilitates and reinforces the Palestinian existence (and) the Palestinian resistance against the occupation,” Remawi said.

“The model (in the First Intifada) was much, much better. There was voluntary work, collective work. There was a very close relationship between the people. They struggled against the occupation without differentiating between this one or that one, between political factions or others. There was a common agenda.”

According to Aisha Mansour, that is exactly the type of community that Sharaka aims to build.

“How can you move into an independent country when people are at the level where they’re just struggling to put bread on the table?” she said. “That tipping point has to come for people to really say, ‘Ok. There’s no more money. We have to really think about a way to keep our community going, whether we’re under occupation or not, and develop.’” (END)

People at Labor Square in Gulshan-e-Maymar, Karachi, Pakistan wait for food aid after the 2010 floods. Forced migration and the displacement of vulnerable communities are issues of concern to U.S. national security experts. Credit: M Fahim Siddiqi/IPS

By Walter García and Joe Hitchon
WASHINGTON, Feb 27 2013 (IPS)

More than three dozen national security officials, members of Congress and military leaders are warning of the threat climate change poses to U.S. national security, the latest in an indicator that U.S. intelligence and national security circles are increasingly worried about a warming planet.

In a new bipartisan open letter, they stress the need for urgent action and call on both public and private support to address issues that included forced migration and the displacement of vulnerable communities, as well as the dangers related to food production during extreme weather events.

“We tried to accomplish two things: First, to make a call to action on the whole issue of climate change,” Lee Hamilton, a former member of Congress and a founder of the Partnership for a Secure America (PSA), a bipartisan Washington group that organised the letter, told IPS.It’s very weird we’re getting ‘100-year floods' every five years.

“Many people are frustrated that the political system doesn’t seem to be able to deal with question of climate change. It’s not on the agenda – the president has mentioned it, politicians have mentioned it, but we really have no action taking place.”

Hamilton continued, “The second thing we did was put it in a national security context, which I think was a unique way to frame it, and hopefully it will provide an additional stimulus for action.”

Signatories to the letter include former secretaries of state (George Schultz and Madeleine Albright), secretaries of defence and homeland security (William Cohen and Tom Ridge), a former director of central intelligence (R. James Woolsey), several generals (Gen. Anthony Zinni, Gen. Wesley Clark) and others.

They join the State Department, Defence Department, National Intelligence Council and a growing number of other security voices here in emphasising the national security implications of climate change.

“Even if you’re sceptical about any single part of climate change, it’s hard to get away from the … combination of feedback loops together with population growth and increasing consumption, which lead to a number of national security concerns,” Woolsey said here Tuesday, referring to “millions upon millions of hungry, thirsty neighbours to the south [of the United States], looking for somewhere to go.”

Unless precautionary steps are taken, the letter warns that “climate change impacts abroad could spur mass migrations, influence civil conflict and ultimately lead to a more unpredictable world.” And “protecting U.S. interests under these conditions would progressively exhaust American military, diplomatic and development resources as we struggle to meet growing demands for emergency international engagement.”

The new letter also comes against the backdrop of unfulfilled promises of action from the White House and a highly polarised Congress on the issue.

The national security aspect of climate change for the United States was given high prominence in December, when a major report from the National Intelligence Council (NIC), a high-level body coordinating all of the country’s intelligence agencies, listed climate change as one of four “megatrends” that will shape the world over the next two decades.

Other megatrends included factors relating to greater empowerment and prosperity of the individual, the growing political and economic power of developing countries, and dramatic changes in demographic patterns like rapid urbanisation.

The “Global Trends” report emphasised that climate change will severely impair the ability of food producers to meet a growing global demand for food, water and energy, each of which is forecast to increase by between 35 and 50 percent. Adding to this strain are the expanding consumer demands of a swelling worldwide middle class.

Most exposed

All of these issues will be exacerbated by the disrupted weather patterns associated with global climate change.

Scientists predict that the severity of existing weather patterns will intensify, with wet areas getting wetter, and arid areas becoming drier. Much of the decline in precipitation is expected to occur in the Middle East and North Africa as well as western Central Asia, southern Europe, southern Africa and the U.S. southwest.

“We are going to be see evidence of climate change beyond rising temperatures,” Jack Goldstone, a professor of public policy at George Mason University, said during an analysis of the Global Trends 2030 report Tuesday here in Washington.

“But as more thermal energy is put into the climate as a system, we will see more extreme events like the snowfalls across the country over the past couple of weeks, the floods in Thailand, floods in Pakistan, fires around Moscow … It’s very weird we’re getting ‘100-year floods’ every five years.”

Even as members of the U.S. Congress fail to arrive at any consensus on how or whether to overhaul the country’s energy sector, the Global Trends report notes that the United States is indeed moving towards “energy independence” – albeit not on the backs of renewable sources as pushed by environmentalists and others.

In fact, the U.S. recently regained its position as the world’s largest gas producer, largely due to its introduction of new “hydraulic fracturing” (or “fracking”) technologies. Experts now say U.S. reserves will be able to continue producing for the next century.

“It seems we are going to be stuck in an oil and gas world for quite some time, and we will see the impacts accumulate along with the temperature,” Goldstone said. “The poorer countries are precisely the ones left most exposed and vulnerable to climate change, and we need saleable, efficient, cost-effective solutions – and we need to keep vulnerable cities viable.”

Despite the expanding middle class and swelling urban populations and the resulting pressures on critical resources like food and water, the scientists point out that shortages are not inevitable, particularly through the effective management of natural resources.

Here in Washington, the close timing of the new letter and the report indicate a clear and growing recognition of the climate change threat as a national security issue. Yet whether this growing consensus can influence members of Congress has yet to be seen.

“It is quite clear that our national security establishment, especially over the past couple of years, has been keenly aware of the threat of climate change – but now its time to act,” Hamilton said.

Gang members in a Salvadoran prison. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Walter García and Danilo Valladares
GUATEMALA CITY, Oct 22 2012 (IPS)

El Salvador has managed to bring down one of the world’s highest murder rates thanks to a truce between gangs that was lauded by the United Nations as an example to be followed in other countries of Central America.

But experts question the sustainability of the truce and call instead for government policies focusing on prevention and social reinsertion.

“Efforts should focus on keeping young people from joining gangs,” said Armando Samayoa, with the Institute of Social Cooperation, a non-governmental organisation in Guatemala that offers non-formal education and provides recreational spaces for youngsters, to help prevent them from falling into gangs.

The activist told IPS that once young people had joined the gangs – known as “maras” in Central America – and were involved in criminal activities, it was a much more complex task to rehabilitate them, one which required a major investment in funds.

“If we look at public spending on the security forces compared to what goes towards prevention programmes, there is a vast difference,” he said.

The truce

The truce between the Salvatrucha and Barrio 18 gangs in El Salvador brought immediate results: the number of homicides in that country of 6.3 million people dropped from 13.6 a day in February to 8.2 in March, when it went into effect, according to a United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime (UNODC) report released in September.

The study, “Transnational Organized Crime in Central America and the Caribbean: A Threat Assessment”, reports that the murder rate in El Salvador stood at 69 per 100,000 citizens in 2011, six percent up from 2010.

The homicide rate is also high in the other two countries of the so-called “northern triangle” of Central America: 91 per 100,000 in Honduras and 39 per 100,000 in Guatemala in 2011.

The situation is different in the rest of the sub-region, where the maras are not active, with the exception of isolated incidents, according to the local authorities. In Panama, the homicide rate is 22 per 100,000; in Nicaragua, 13 per 100,000, and in Costa Rica 10 per 100,000.

According to the UNODC, Honduras and El Salvador have the highest murder rates in the world.

The UNODC believes the truce in El Salvador could serve as a model for other Central American countries to follow, as a mechanism to fight crime.

Prevention first and foremost

But Samayoa emphasises that programmes of non-formal education such as the ones offered by his NGO, which include courses in English, carpentry, baking and cooking skills, computer training, sports, and running a small business, help prevent youngsters from falling into the hands of gangs in the first place, while a truce can break down at any moment.

“I remember a case in Villa Nueva, on the south side of the capital, where the gangs reached an agreement,” he said. “But the next day, they came to our organisation to say that they had to feed their families,” which meant that they had to continue committing crimes, he added.

Alma Aguilar, with the Guatemalan organisation Paz Joven (Young Peace), also said public policies in the region should be aimed at preventing youngsters from joining gangs, as well as at fighting crime.

“It is a multifactorial problem, and thus should be approached from many angles,” she told IPS. “As young people, we believe that the important issue is to prevent youths from becoming involved in illegal activities.”

She said governments should guarantee, “at the very least,” education up to the first years of secondary school, and should make an effort to ensure that young people have employment opportunities, “which unfortunately is not happening.”

Aguilar said the Salvadoran truce “is a successful experience to be taken as a case study,” although “the government should guarantee peace and order in conflict-stricken areas with the full weight of the law coming down on those involved in crime.”

The maras originated in the 1970s and 1980s in Los Angeles and other U.S. cities where Central American migrants and refugees became gang members and were later deported to their countries of origin. Thousands of young people in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala are now involved in maras, which have morphed from violent youth gangs to organised crime groups.

On Oct. 11, the U.S. Treasury Department announced it was adding the Mara Salvatrucha to its list of the most dangerous Transnational Criminal Organisations “for its involvement in serious transnational criminal activities, including drug trafficking, kidnapping, human smuggling, sex trafficking, murder, assassinations, racketeering, blackmail, extortion, and immigration offences.”

Under U.S. law, this gives the Treasury the authority to target the gang with economic sanctions

The governments of El Salvador and Honduras have unsuccessfully tried to curb the growing power of the maras with tough anti-gang laws, which make it possible, for example, to arrest youngsters merely on suspicion of belonging to gangs.

The controversial truce reached in March by the main gangs in El Salvador was agreed without the participation of the government of moderate left-wing President Mauricio Funes, although the administration was widely assumed to have played an unspecified role as a facilitator.

The government is now taking early steps towards possible negotiations with the two gangs, to get them to put a definitive end to their criminal activities.

“The truce has produced good results in terms of reducing homicidal violence, but that’s all,” lawyer Ismelda Villacorta, with the Foundation for the Study and Application of Law (FESPAD) in El Salvador, told IPS.

The expert hesitated to say she was “absolutely optimistic about its results,” since other kinds of crime “are still as serious and worrisome as they were before the truce, or even worse in some areas.

“This entire situation shows that the reduction in homicides brought about by the truce is balanced on a weak platform that could collapse at any moment, and things could return to the way they were – or the number of homicides could soar even higher,” she said.

She suggested that the starting point to make the truce and the reduction in violent crime a lasting phenomenon should be to promote a programme of prevention at all levels, including the reinsertion and rehabilitation of gang members.

Isabel Aguilar, a human rights defender with the Guatemalan organisation Interpeace, told IPS that “the truce will be sustainable if it helps usher in a broader dialogue in which all segments of society would be involved and would contribute, with determination and commitment.

“The important aspect is that the truce makes possible, or generates the openness necessary for, prevention and reinsertion activities to be carried out in more fluid, sustainable ways, on more fertile ground,” added Aguilar, the coordinator of the multisectorial Central American programme of public policies to prevent youth violence.

In that sense, she was more optimistic, saying the truce “is an example to be followed, especially because it is demonstrating its effectiveness in reducing the high rates of violence.” She said, however, that it would have to be adapted to the situation of the different countries in the region.

But for now, the right-wing presidents of Guatemala, Otto Pérez Molina, and Honduras, Porfirio Lobo, have ruled out the possibility of promoting agreements of this kind between gangs in their countries, or seeking any kind of negotiations between their governments and the maras.

The election of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi to the presidency this summer was followed by a flurry of conjecture that the restoration of Egyptian-Iranian diplomatic relations – frozen since 1979 – was in the offing. Yet despite some initial indications to this effect, local analysts now say such speculation appears to have been premature.

“Egypt-Iran relations have certainly warmed since Morsi’s assumption of the presidency,” Mohamed Saeed Idris, expert in Iranian affairs at the Cairo-based Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, told IPS. “But in light of certain factors, not least of which is Egypt’s recent declaration of support for the opposition in Syria, the resumption of ties now appears unlikely in the short term.”

Over the last decade, Iran has repeatedly expressed its desire to restore ties with Egypt, the Arab world’s most populous country. “If the Egyptian government was willing, we would open an embassy in Cairo the same day,” Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad famously declared in 2007.

Under the regime of ousted president Hosni Mubarak, Egypt – taking its cue from Washington – consistently rebuffed the Iranian overtures, choosing instead to see the Islamic republic as a “threat” to regional security. But following Morsi’s assumption of the presidency in June, many analysts had predicted that the country’s new Islamist head of state would move quickly to restore ties with Iran.

In hope of sweetening the deal, meanwhile, Iranian officials had stressed their readiness to pump significant Iranian investment into Egypt’s economy and work on boosting bilateral trade if diplomatic relations were restored.

Although formal ties remain suspended until now, Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi recently expressed his “optimism” regarding the future of Egypt-Iran relations, stressing that they were “heading for the better.”

At a Sep. 19 press conference with his Egyptian, Turkish and Saudi counterparts, he said that economic relations with Egypt were “progressing well,” pointing out that the volume of bilateral trade had doubled in recent months. “This is a sign that the future of bilateral relations will be better,” the Iranian minister declared.

Morsi broke fresh ground in late August when he visited Tehran – the first Egyptian head of state to do so in more than three decades – for a summit of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), where he formally handed over the movement’s rotating presidency to Iranian counterpart Ahmedinejad.

In an unprecedented show of warmth, Morsi referred to Ahmedinejad as “my dear brother,” and to Iran as “the sister Islamic republic of Iran.”

But while Morsi’s Tehran trip may have served to break the ice, Idris says the visit “was mostly for reasons of protocol; to formally pass the NAM presidency from Egypt to Iran.”

Idris, who served as head of the Arab affairs committee in Egypt’s last (now-disbanded) parliament, went on to explain that, despite Tehran’s strong desire to restore diplomatic ties, there were both “internal and external obstacles” currently preventing Egypt from doing so.

“Externally, such a move would adversely impact Egypt’s relations with the Gulf countries, particularly Saudi Arabia, whose animosity towards Iran is well known,” said Idris. “What’s more, the Egyptian government is currently negotiating a hefty loan package from the IMF, which the U.S. would likely block in the event that Cairo restored relations with Tehran.”

On the domestic front, he added, the resumption of ties with Iran “would alienate Egypt’s nascent Salafist parties, which oppose normalising relations with a Shiite power that they believe wants to promote Shiite ideology in Sunni-Muslim Egypt.”

Egypt’s Salafist parties, established in the wake of the revolution early last year and which espouse an ultraconservative brand of Islam, won almost a quarter of the seats in the People’s Assembly (the lower house of parliament) in Egypt’s first post-Mubarak legislative elections.

Yet perhaps the most serious obstacle to the speedy restoration of Egypt-Iran ties, say analysts, is Cairo’s position – articulated by Morsi on more than one occasion – on the ongoing crisis in Syria.

While speaking at the NAM summit in Tehran, Morsi no doubt irked his Iranian hosts by coming out firmly on the side of Syria’s armed insurgency. Declaring that the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had “lost its legitimacy,” he went so far as to compare the Damascus regime with Israel’s perennial occupation of Palestine.

While Morsi has repeatedly ruled out foreign military involvement in Syria, he nevertheless went on to assert that the crisis could only be resolved through “effective intervention” from outside.

Tehran, which counts Syria as its only regional ally in its ongoing confrontation with the U.S.-led Western powers, has continued to support the Damascus regime against Syria’s armed – and increasingly violent – opposition.

“Tehran’s continued support for al-Assad has become the latest stumbling-block before Egypt-Iran rapprochement,” said Idris. “The resumption of ties with Iran now appears to be conditioned on the latter forsaking its support for Damascus.”

Only days before Morsi spoke in Tehran, a spokesman for Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood – from which the Egyptian president hails – stated: “The normalisation of relations with Iran is impossible as long as Iran continues to support the Assad regime. Egypt cannot restore ties with Iran at the expense of the Syrian people and the security of the Gulf.”

Diplomatic ties between the two countries were first severed in 1979, in the immediate wake of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, after former Egyptian president Anwar Sadat signed the Camp David peace agreement with Israel. Cairo further alienated the nascent Islamic Republic later the same year by granting political asylum to deposed shah of Iran Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

Relations became downright hostile during the 1980s, when Egypt openly supported Saddam Hussein’s Iraq against revolutionary Iran in the eight-year war of attrition between the two countries. Today, Cairo remains the only Arab capital not to have official diplomatic relations with Tehran.

“The formal restoration of ties cannot be ruled out in the medium term,” asserted Idris. “But in light of ongoing regional developments, such a step by Egypt is highly unlikely in the immediate future.”

Children on the rooftop of the Shuruf family home. Credit: P. Klochendler/IPS.

By Walter García and Pierre Klochendler
AR-RAM, Occupied East Jerusalem, Oct 15 2012 (IPS)

Ali Shuruf turns on the lights, that shine into a gaudy living room. Beyond the window, the dominant colour is uniformly grey: the house stands literally against a wall. Not just any wall – the infamous eight-metre cement wall separates Palestinians from Israelis.

“From the salon, see – the wall; from the kitchen, from the terrace – always the wall. The wall encircles us east, west, and south,” says Ali Shuruf, a successful Palestinian building contractor, appropriately pointing at a budgie hopping in a cage. “We’re like birds in a cage.” His is a golden cage.

“Freedom stops here,” he notes. From the rooftop of the three-story mansion which he built with his brothers (each family has its own floor), Shuruf points at the shimmering lights beyond the eastern side of the wall: “Here, separation between Arabs and Jews.”

Neve Ya’akov, the adjacent Jewish neighbourhood, is, like Ar-Ram, located within Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries. Whereas Neve Ya’akov lies within the intramural perimeter, Ar-Ram’s on the outer side of the wall.

After Israel’s conquest of East Jerusalem during the 1967 war, urban planning involved the building of community, commercial, medical and sports centres, as well as schools, playgrounds and synagogues – for large-scale housing projects that were intended for the Jewish population.

As suburbs like Neve Ya’akov are rooted in the occupied part of town, what’s also required is a protective wall.

“We played soccer together. Now, we’re disconnected from each other,” says Fadhi Hijazi, a friend of one of Shuruf’s sons.

The separation wall was erected in the wake of the Palestinian Intifadah uprising (2000-2005), as protection against potential suicide bombers.

Ten years on, a 142-kilometre long barrier surrounds much of East Jerusalem, with only four kilometres of its completed length running along the pre-1967 ceasefire line. Israeli soldiers operate checkpoints to the city on both sides of the wall – none on that ceasefire line.

The new concrete ‘border’ not only separates Jewish neighbourhoods from West Bank towns and villages; it also cut through Palestinian neighbourhoods located within the city’s limits, leaving many residents who, like Shuruf, hold Israeli blue residency cards, on the other side of the wall, without access to Jerusalem.

“To visit my next-door neighbour, it takes an hour,” says Shuruf.

From this side, the wall isn’t just about security; it doesn’t only impede freedom of movement – it’s a policy, aimed at maintaining a Jewish majority in Jerusalem.

“The wall’s a racist thing that encourages hatred,” chimes in Muhammad Turman, Shuruf’s brother-in-law. “The problem isn’t the Israelis per se – we could live together in peace. No, the problem is who controls the city.”

The battle over Jerusalem is one for demographic control. While East Jerusalem is nowadays home to roughly 200,000 Israelis, it’s home for 300,000 Palestinians. But whole Arab neighbourhoods have de facto been excluded from the city by the wall.

Located on the route to Ramallah in the West Bank, Ar-Ram, with its 10,000 inhabitants, is such a neighbourhood. To reach the Shurufs by car from the intramural part of town is an exhausting haul.

One must either bypass the Jewish suburb Pisgat Ze’ev through the Hizme checkpoint, or drive along the wall for some ten kilometres towards the Kalandia gateway to Ramallah, and then make a U-turn and drive back along the wall’s other side.

“We don’t enjoy municipal services due to us – in healthcare, in education.” Shuruf explains that he had to enrol his children “in a local, poorer, school because of the wall.” “What do you tell your children?” asks Hijazi. “Al-Yahud, the Jews…” Shuruf awkwardly giggles.

Palestinian neighbourhoods suffer from chronic neglect, but the wall has exacerbated the grim socio-economic reality. According to the Association for Civil rights in Israel, 78 percent of the Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem – including 84 percent of children – are poor. About 40 percent of the men, as well as 85 percent of the women, are listed as unemployed.

When two years ago Shuruf suffered a major stroke, “the Israeli ambulance didn’t accept to come because of security reasons; neither did the Red Crescent ambulance, because it’s Israeli-controlled area,” recalls Hijazi. Eventually, as last resort, Shuruf relied on his family to be taken to the nearest Israeli hospital.

During the 1990s, the Oslo peace agreement divided the West Bank into three zones: Area A (under the Palestinian Authority); Area B (under Israeli security control and the Palestinian municipal authority); and Area C (under full Israeli rule).

De facto annexed by Israel, East Jerusalem was excluded from the Oslo division.

Palestinians who are walled in suburbs such as Ar-Ram have been left in limbo – in “Area B13”, as graffiti scribbled around the neighbourhood by local youth scornfully notes the undefined situation.

The wall further severs vital connections between East Jerusalem and West Bank Palestinian economic centres such as Bethlehem to the south and Ramallah to the north.

Traditionally a hub servicing the West Bank, East Jerusalem is now inaccessible for Palestinians without an Israeli permit. “Our life was in Jerusalem – not in the Palestinian part,” says Hijazi.

If disconnecting Palestinians from Jerusalem was a goal in putting up the wall, it’s actually bringing the opposite effect – pushing them back towards Israel. They don’t want to wait in queues at checkpoints. They want to work, to benefit from municipal services, to shop in the Israeli part of town.

Shuruf may pay municipal and other Israeli taxes, but he protectively rents another house inside Jerusalem proper just for keeping his Jerusalem ID, and thus enjoying medical healthcare – now a privilege – to which he was entitled as Jerusalem resident before the wall’s intrusion into his life.

“For us, it isn’t about wanting to be absorbed inside Israel which is at stake, but survival – holding on under Israeli occupation,” says Shuruf.

Women walk past destroyed shops in Al-Qusayr in Syria. Credit: Sam Tarling/IPS.

By Walter García and Zak Brophy
MASHEREE AL-QA'A, Lebanon-Syria Border, Oct 14 2012 (IPS)

A group of six men listen as voices crackle through a walkie-talkie. They are sitting in a farmhouse in the north of Lebanon less than a kilometre from the Syrian border. The sound of gunfire and shelling in the distance sporadically punctuates the atmosphere. One of the group returns to the room after taking a telephone call. “Good news from the battle,” he exclaims with a smile.

The men are all in, or related to members of, the opposition’s Free Syrian Army (FSA), which is fighting fierce battles for control of a number of villages and the surrounding countryside on the other side of the border. “A military leader for Hezbollah has been killed in Zara’aat along with the head of Syrian intelligence from al-Qusayr,” he continues to tell the group. Earlier in the day the men also received news that at least 13 Hezbollah fighters had been captured and detained inside Syria.

Hezbollah is a Lebanese Shia militia-cum-political party that is the predominant force in Lebanon and it has remained a staunch ally of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad throughout the uprising. The Syrian opposition and its supporters in Lebanon have long suggested that Hezbollah is actively helping Assad quash the rebel forces, but the party has always denied any direct involvement.

However, the ambiguity surrounding the deaths of a number of Hezbollah fighters, including some highly ranked commanders in recent weeks has aroused accusations to the contrary. With the death of two senior military commanders in August and September the party stated that they had been killed performing their “Jihadi duty”, but did not say where.

Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah finally made a televised appearance on Thursday evening in which he categorically denied that the commanders had fallen in Syria, while also denying the capture of the 13 Hezbollah fighters.

“The Syrian Army is weak along the border now and Hezbollah is scared that the FSA will take control of all of it,” says Abu Ahmad, a combatant for the FSA on the Lebanese side of the border. He was fighting less than five kilometres from the Lebanese border in Zara’at the day before in a battle that is primarily about securing supply lines.

The FSA needs to maintain routes for the flow of refugees and injured fighters out of Syria while medicine, fuel and weapons move in the opposite direction. The routes from northern Lebanon to the Syrian town of Qusayr, via villages such as Zara’at and Jousi, are particularly important as the rebels in the war-ravaged city of Homs largely rely on them for ammunition and weapons.

Similarly, the army’s ability to hold territory is dependent on its supply lines from the heart of the country. “We have managed to cut their most important routes,” says Abu Ahmad. “They desperately need food and munitions and that is why there is such a tough battle for the villages across the border.”

Refugees and FSA fighters within Lebanon claim that Hezbollah has been using Housh as-Sayed Ali, a district on the border under their control just north of the town Hermel, to provide supplies to the Syrian army and send in fighters to buttress its debilitated forces. They say that the party’s fighters are firing across the border from Lebanon into Syria so as to pincer the FSA between the Syrian Army’s artillery fire from the mountains in the east and to cut their escape routes back into Lebanon.

In his televised speech Sayyed Nasrallah denied Hezbollah had sent fighters into Syria but conceded that members of the party have been fighting there on their own volition in order to protect their homes and families. The border area is essentially undefined, with many Lebanese citizens’ homes and farms falling within Syrian territory. Nasrallah claims Hezbollah supporters living there were attacked, harassed and some even killed by the FSA. While many have fled, others stayed to fight.

The justification is technically plausible but does not bode well for stability at the border. That Hezbollah members are fighting inside Syria with the support, if not the command, of the party hints at how Syria’s trauma is increasingly threatening to Lebanon’s vulnerable security.

Masheree’a al Qa’a, a strip of farmsteads along the border to the east of Housh as-Sayed Ali, is all but devoid of its native inhabitants. “Over the past six to seven months as the conflict has moved onto and over the border the families have all fled,” says Abu Mohammad, a philosophy teacher from Zera’aa living in one of the farm houses with his family.

He made the journey to Lebanon once the army started its aerial bombardment of his hometown and he now lives with his extended family in one of the farmhouses approximately one kilometre from the border. Of his two sons fighting in the FSA, one has been detained by the Syrian Army, and the other smuggles supplies to the FSA.

While standing on Abu Mohammad’s rooftop in Masheree’a al-Qa’a a house on the border can be seen burning. There had been a fierce battle between the FSA and the Syrian Army in the area earlier in the day, so the army set fire to the building once night had fallen.

“We moved to the relative safety here, but it is all relative. The first house on the border we moved to was shelled and I was injured and now we have moved here, but there is often cross border fire and you can see where we were recently hit,” he says pointing to where fist sized chunks of concrete have been ripped from the building. A local resident joins the conversation saying at least ten Lebanese civilians have been killed in cross-border attacks in the area over the past year.

The houses closest to the border have almost all been shelled or burnt to the ground and smugglers and fighters only make the journey to the frontier under the cover of night for fear of sniper fire. “The Syrian regime’s forces destroy the houses along the border so the FSA fighters can’t take refuge there or use them for their snipers,” says Ahmad Fliti, municipality official from the Lebanese border town Arsal.

The FSA’s use of the Lebanese border areas to offer refuge to its fighters and run smuggling operations destabilises the region and traps the Lebanese Army in an implacable bind. However, if Hezbollah is being drawn into the affray across the frontier, the repercussions threaten to be far more disruptive.

Several people in New York have been arrested for putting "RACIST" stickers on the SIOA ads.

By Walter García and Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Oct 12 2012 (IPS)

Faced with a rise in anti-Muslim sentiment and a well-funded campaign to promote Islamophobia, a coalition of faith and religious freedom groups Thursday said it will circulate a new pamphlet on frequently asked questions (FAQs) about Islam and U.S. Muslims to elected officials across the United States.

The initiative, which coincides with the appearance in subway stations in New York City and Washington of pro-Israel ads equating the Jewish state with “civilised man” and “Jihad” with “savages”, is designed to rebut the notion that Muslims pose a threat to U.S. values and way of life.

“Nothing gives weight to bigotry more than ignorance,” said Rev. Welton Gaddy, a Baptist minister who is president of the Interfaith Alliance, a grassroots organisation of leaders representing 75 faith traditions. “The FAQ enables people to be spared of an agenda-driven fear and to be done with a negative movement born of misinformation…”

Gaddy was joined by Charles Haynes, director of the Religious Freedom Project of the Freedom Forum’s First Amendment Center which co-sponsored the new 13-page pamphlet, entitled “What is the Truth About American Muslims?”

“In my view,” Haynes said in reference to the so-called “Stop Islamisation of America” (SIOA) movement that, among other things, has sponsored the subway ads, “this campaign to spread hate and fear is the most significant threat to religious freedom in America today.”

“Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the anti-Muslim narrative has migrated from the right-wing fringe into the mainstream political arena – and is now parroted by a growing number of political and religious leaders,” he said.

Indeed, public opinion polls have shown a gradual rise in Islamophobia here over the past 11 years, most recently in the wake of last month’s anti-U.S. demonstrations across the Islamic world that were triggered by a vulgar internet video mocking the Muslim Prophet Muhammad. The video, supposedly a trailer for a longer movie, was reportedly produced by a California-based, Egyptian-born Copt, although the source of its funding remains unclear.

While a majority (53 percent) of U.S. respondents say they believe that it is possible to find “common ground” between Muslims and the West, that majority has shrunk since 9/11, according to a poll released earlier this week by the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA). Only one year ago, it stood at 59 percent, and in November 2001 – just two months after 9/11 – it was 68 percent.

Conversely, the minority that agreed with the notion that “Islamic religious and social traditions are intolerant and fundamentally incompatible with Western culture” rose from 26 percent in 2001, to 37 percent last year, and 42 percent when the latest PIPA poll was conducted two weeks ago.

In another poll conducted by the Pew Research Center last year which asked respondents “how much support for extremism is there among Muslim Americans”, 40 percent said there was either a “great deal” or a “fair amount”, while only a narrow plurality (45 percent) disagreed.

In addition to the violent images of conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere in the Islamic world that have been beamed onto U.S. television screens and home computers since 9/11, popular beliefs that Muslims are inherently more hostile and dangerous have been propagated by a small network of funders, bloggers, pundits and groups documented in a 2011 report, entitled “Fear, Inc.,” by the Center for American Progress (CAP).

It identified seven foundations – most of them associated with the far-right in the U.S., as well as several Jewish family foundations that have supported right-wing and settler groups in Israel – that provided more than 42 million dollars between 2001 and 2009 to key individuals and organisations who have spread an Islamophobic message through, among other means, videos, newspaper op-eds, radio and television talk shows, paid ads, and local demonstrations against mosques.

Among the most prominent recipients have been the Center for Security Policy, the Middle East Forum, the Investigative Project on Terrorism, the Society of Americans for National Existence, as well as SIOA, the group, which, along with the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), is sponsoring the current subway ad campaign.

“Together, this core group of deeply intertwined individuals and organizations manufacture and exaggerate threats of ‘creeping Sharia’, Islamic domination of the West, and purported obligatory calls to violence against all non-Muslims by the Quran,” according to the CAP report.

It noted that their message was also echoed by leaders of the Christian Right and some Republican politicians, including several who ran for president this year, such as former speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich.

Leaders of many mainstream Jewish and Christian denominations have denounced specific aspects of the network’s initiatives, such as its efforts to derail the construction of a Muslim community center near the so-called “Ground Zero” site where Manhattan’s Twin Towers were destroyed on 9/11; distribute Islamophobic videos, such as ‘Obsession’; and to lobby state legislatures to ban the application of “Sharia”, or Islamic law, in their jurisdictions.

The new pamphlet, however, marks the first effort by faith groups and religious freedom advocates to directly rebut common misconceptions and claims made against Muslims and their theology by, among other things, explaining the meaning of “jihad”, and the sources, practice, and aims of Sharia.

“In a time when misinformation about and misunderstandings of Islam and of the American Muslim community are widespread, our goal is to provide the public with accurate answers to understandable questions,” said Gaddy, who noted that the authors consulted closely with well-recognised Muslim scholars in drafting the document.

Twenty-one religious and secular organisations, including the Disciples of Christ, the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good, the Presbyterian Church, the United Church of Christ, the United Methodist Church, and Rabbis for Human Rights-North America endorsed the pamphlet, as did several major Muslim and Sikh organisations.

Six people were killed at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin last summer by an individual who had mistakenly believed he was attacking Muslims.

Haynes stressed that the response to the Islamophobia campaign was late. “We have left the field to the people who demonised Muslims, and they have won the day,” he said. “We’re playing catch-up on this nonsense.”

In bold black-and-white lettering, the subway ad that first appeared in New York last month and then in Washington this week states: “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.”

A coalition of 157 local religious groups have formally objected to the transit authority over the ad, and demanded that it issue disclaimers alongside the ads as the San Francisco transit authority did when the same groups took out ads on buses this summer.

A number of religious groups, including Sojourners, an evangelical group, Rabbis for Human Rights, and the United Methodist Church are running counter-ads in New York and Washington.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

By Walter García and Becky Bergdahl
NEW YORK, Oct 11 2012 (IPS)

Donald P. Green is a U.S. professor of political science who turns theories about hate crime upside down with his research.

Courtesy of Donald Green.

According to Green, hate crimes don’t stem from economic competition. Instead, they are rooted in a fear of the unknown – and from ideals of masculinity.

After 22 years teaching at Yale, he has been based at Columbia University in New York since 2011. IPS correspondent Becky Bergdahl sat down with Green at his office to talk about his work.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: Which groups are being targeted by extremists in the United States, and what sorts of hate crimes do they suffer?

A: Arabs and Muslims were being targeted in much greater numbers in the aftermath of 9/11 than before 9/11, but that has subsided. Some of the biggest groups being targeted today are gay men and lesbians, racial minorities, and then a broad array of different groups, including Jews and Muslims.

And people are often the subject of property attacks that are not necessarily associated with a physical confrontation. For example, swastikas painted on a Jewish cemetery, or Muslims having a stone thrown through the mosque window.

Q: Should hate crime laws be more uniform in the United States, to combat those acts of extremism?

A: Women and people with disabilities are only covered under hate crime statutes in some states. That is also true for gay men and lesbians. Some states have very broad statutes, whereas other states have what is known as “race, religion and ethnicity statutes”.

The problem that I see, especially in the case of gay men and lesbians, is that their probability of being protected is lowest where the risk of being attacked is probably the greatest. In that case, I think that having more uniformity would be useful. In the case of women, it is dicier. But the case could be made.

Q: Which are the sources of hate crimes?

A: There is going to be no single answer. My work tends to argue against those who believe that hate crime stems from economic competition. I do not find evidence that hate crimes surge in a period of economic downturn. Instead, I would argue that you get hate crimes when places, or ways of life, seem to be threatened by people perceived as outsiders.

For example, in the United States, when all-white neighbourhoods were first experiencing immigration in the 1970s and ’80s, you saw a massive surge of hate crime. Or in Germany after the unification, you saw a huge number of non-Germans come into Germany, especially into former East Germany, which had been quite homogenous. And then you saw a big surge of hate crime.

Q: I thought that living side by side would be a medicine against hatred – not the opposite.

A: In the long run it perhaps is. In the 70s and 80s, you saw this big surge of hate crime in the U.S., but as immigration became more common, those sorts of hate crimes subsided.

Q: Even if you have found no evidence for the theory that a financial crisis fuels hate crime, there is evidence that right-wing extremists are generally poorer and have lower education than the average. But the most striking statistic is that they are almost only men. There are of course also poor women with low education, but they do not tend to join extremist groups like men do. Why is it so?

A: I think that your point of gender differences helps to puncture the idea that there is pure economic motivation behind those crimes. It shows how important social reinforcement is. Men reward each other for their machismo or violence. They are more likely to engage in these kinds of behaviour, especially in small groups, whereas women are not.

And when people – well, men – are arrested for violent hate crimes, they are often surprised that they are being treated as criminals. They think of themselves as defenders of the culture.

Q: So how can we combat the growth of hate groups?

A: One thing that stands out is to clearly point out norms. Surprising to those of us who study hate crime is the infrequency of when publicly elected officials will say openly that this kind of behaviour runs counter to the laws of the United States. But I think more and more people understand that hate crime is subject to special penalties. Burning trash on someone’s lawn, that is arson. But if you are burning a cross on someone’s lawn, that is subject to stronger penalties.

In addition, the media has, through its portrayals of gay men and lesbians and interracial couples, changed the norms of what could be seen as ordinary behaviour.

Q: In Europe, many right-wing extremist groups used to be both racist and anti-gay. But all of a sudden, many of those groups now state that they respect gay rights – in contrast to Muslims. Are you familiar with this rhetoric?

A: It reminds me of how the United States during World War Two was in a tricky position vis-à-vis Nazi Germany. We were sending soldiers in segregated military units. The Germans surely noticed the irony of this, the hypocrisy of fighting Nazism with a racist set of institutions.

Q: Could an alliance against right-wing extremism, between Muslims and the gay rights movement, be possible?

A: That will obviously depend on what people who set the norms of Islam will say in the years to come. Their current norms are conservative. But I wonder whether in the future they will soften their line. It might seem inconceivable now, but my guess is that 50 years from now, we will gradually see it.

Excerpt:

The Tabu border guard in the Sahara in southern Libya. Credit: Rebecca Murray/IPS.

By Walter García and Rebecca Murray
ZWEILA, Southern Libya, Oct 11 2012 (IPS)

A group of Tabu fighters with mud-splattered trucks rest on the outskirts of Zweila, a small historic slave-trade stop in Libya’s southwest Sahara.

Far from their home base of Kufra, hundreds of miles to the east, these men belong to a desert border patrol loyal to charismatic Tabu commander Issa Abdel Majid Mansour.

They police the country’s vast and seemingly impenetrable southern frontier with Sudan, Chad and Niger – an arduous off-road trek over towering sand dunes, volcanic rock and scattered minefields – using smugglers’ markers and the stars as a guide.

The indigenous, semi-nomadic Tabu, marginalised by Muammar Gaddafi under his ‘Arabisation’ campaign, staked out a leading role during the 2011 revolution with a goal to secure their civil rights.

Combining their intimate knowledge of the Sahara with a tribal network spanning both sides of the borders, they forged a successful blockade against pro-regime reinforcements.

When the revolution was won, a grateful transitional government controversially awarded Mansour oversight over vital desert crossings to the detriment of Kufra’s majority Arab Zwai tribe.

The Zwai, whose ties stretch over oil-rich territory to Ajdabiya, 150km south of Benghazi, previously benefited from Gaddafi’s divide-and-rule tactics.

Besides securing national oilfields, Mansour says their priority is to prevent extremist militias, including Al Qaeda, from the lucrative business of smuggling subsidised fuel and food out of Libya, and ferrying weapons and drugs in.

“I worry about terrorists,” he says intently. “They are dangerous – we need to stop them getting more power in the desert.”

Security is a critical concern for the Libyan government, especially in the aftermath of the deadly attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi by a suspected Islamist militia last month.

Jolted into action by a subsequent outpouring of public outrage, the government now faces an uphill battle to integrate or disarm poorly trained armed groups loosely affiliated with the state security apparatus along Libya’s coastal belt.

But often overlooked is the volatile, less populous south, home to significant oil reserves, rare minerals, Gaddafi’s man-made river project which feeds water to the north, and the profitable cross-border smuggling of illicit goods.

The Tripoli-based government has failed to address tribal and economic grievances at the heart of this year’s deadly clashes between Tabu and Arab tribes in the southern trade hubs of Kufra and Sebha, now governed by fragile ceasefires.

On an international level, competing regional interests have reduced information-sharing between foreign embassies and a cohesive approach to government ministries.

The U.S. believes Islamic extremist groups, including Al Qaeda, are trying to forge supply lines through southern Libya to its neighbours. It appears poised to introduce a more robust role for the U.S. Africa military command, AFRICOM, in its expanding ‘war on terror’.

Meanwhile, the French strive to retain a monopoly on the mineral-rich region, which they traditionally regard as their post-colonial backyard.

Navigating east across the steep, Saharan sand dunes, a surreal concrete enclave looms in the distance. This is the remote Kufra oasis, once a welcome sight for tired desert travelers.

When Kufra’s violence ended in an uneasy ceasefire last June, the Zwai erected the barrier, encircling the bitterly divided town and its population of 44,000.

The Zwai are convinced that the town’s Tabu community is mostly foreign, and is seeking to carve out an autonomous homeland. Their other concern is control over the south’s most profitable livelihood, smuggling.

Victors in the revolution, Tabu smugglers eek out a subsistence living quite freely, crisscrossing the borders in small Toyota pickup trucks loaded with cheap fuel and migrants.

But the large commercial trucks owned by Zwai businessmen – who until recently made small fortunes from illicit border trade – currently stand idle.

“The Zwai, economically speaking, want to control the area from Kufra towards the Egyptian and Sudanese border because of smuggling. They call it trade, but it’s actually smuggling,” says Fathi Baja, professor of political science at Benghazi University.

“There are also Islamist groups that want to control borders,” he adds.

Tabu and Zwai residents now stick to their heavily guarded neighbourhoods in Kufra.

Small numbers of official army troops guard the town’s invisible borders, having replaced the Shield of Libya auxiliary forces initially dispatched as a neutral buffer after clashes in February.

“The Minister of Defence gave orders to Islamists to go down, control the borders and sort out the issue,” says Rami Al-Shahiebi, one of the few journalists who travelled to Kufra in February.

The undisciplined Shield soon turned their weapons on the Tabu, Al-Shahiebi says. Convinced by the more media-savvy Zwai and Libyan broadcasts from Tripoli that ‘foreigners’ were invading, fighters trekked from as far as the coastal town Misrata for battle.

After hundreds were killed and the Tripoli government was sufficiently embarrassed by the role of their appointed ‘peacekeepers’, a ceasefire was brokered between the Shield and Tabu in June.

Fawzia Idris, an outgoing 37-year-old Tabu nurse in Kufra’s Shura district, is part of a volunteer effort to plant one-foot-tall saplings amongst the piles of rubbish. “To make the neighbourhood beautiful,” she explains.

“Racism and control of the border are the big things,” Idris says. “We are Muslim, but maybe because we are black and not white they think we are not Libyan. The same people who are working with Gaddafi are still in charge. There is no change.”

The Tabu maintain close familial ties in Chad, Niger and Sudan. Although many don’t own Libyan citizenship papers, first issued under King Idriss in 1954, they can trace family ancestors back to the same Libyan tracts of land.

The Tabu bore the brunt of Gaddafi’s rage over the defeat of Libya’s war with Chad over the mineral-rich Ouzou Strip in 1996. Many were stripped of citizenship, deprived of education, health and work, and had their homes demolished.

An estimated 4,000 of Kufra’s Tabu residents are now hemmed into the impoverished ghettos of Gadarfa and Shura. Rotting piles of garbage surround shacks built with sticks, cardboard and jagged pieces of corrugated iron. Homes, schools and the makeshift clinics are pockmarked or blackened by mortar rounds from the recent fighting.

The Tabu talk with deep bitterness about what they see is the transitional government’s betrayal of promises to grant them equal rights after their revolutionary role, and the prognosis for a Libyan constitution inclusive of minority rights appears dim.

Hassan Mousa, a Tabu military spokesman from Kufra, is direct. “The stability of the south depends on Tabu rights. And Libya’s stability depends on the south’s stability,” he warns.

With their rights now on the backburner, Palestinians in Gaza look to tunnels as their only effective outlet to the world. Credit: Eva Bartlett/IPS.

By Walter García and Pierre Klochendler
JERUSALEM, Oct 7 2012 (IPS)

The annual debate has just wrapped up and, already, the certainty is that if last year Palestinian statehood auspiciously dominated the international agenda, this time, the issue vanished from the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), and will vanish even further from world affairs.

When Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas looked down on the General Assembly plenum a fortnight ago, though the hall was packed, he probably felt lonely. He knew his would be the sole address devoted to the cause of an independent Palestinian state in peace alongside Israel.

For the umpteenth time, Abbas depicted how Israel’s settlement enterprise in the occupied Palestinian territories renders year by year a two-state solution to the conflict more unattainable – to no avail.

His speech was similar in essence to the one he’d delivered exactly one year ago at the same place – except that this time, his bid was limited to gaining non-member state status, not full statehood recognition at the U.N. Security Council.

Abbas’s statehood bid was shelved as soon as it was introduced. The U.S. and its Western allies had pressed the Security Council and the General Assembly not to proceed with the largely symbolic vote.

Then, prodded by the U.S., the reason advanced by the Security Council powers was that peace moves with Israel, not a unilateral move, had to be given another chance. As consolation price, a month later, Palestine gained UNESCO membership.

A year on, what Abbas drew from the General Assembly was the kind of almost casually apologetic words of recognition and appraisal that the Palestinian issue garners at every global forum.

The General Assembly was the first and leading power supporting a two-state solution. In November 1947, it voted the Partition Plan between a Jewish state and an Arab state in Mandatory Palestine.

But ever since the historic General Assembly vote, quasi-universal, though insipid, pledges and rubberstamp commitments to Palestinian statehood have been dutifully distilled by UN member states.

In his address, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu simply ignored his predecessor.

Surely, he submitted to the ritual. “We have to (…) negotiate together, and reach a mutual compromise,” he urged emphatically.

But he allocated two minutes of his speech to the Palestinian question at best, demonstrating thereby (if anyone needed such demonstration) that literally, wording an ironclad resolution on the future of Palestine will remain punctuated by a big question mark.

Netanyahu had heard U.S. President Barack Obama’s address. Albeit the usual hymn – or was it a eulogy? – to the bygone dream of a negotiated two-state solution which was wrapped in a single paragraph, Obama didn’t conceal the fact that, right now, diplomacy is urgently needed – but not between Israel and Abbas’ Palestinian Authority.

So, Netanyahu dedicated his address to calling for a “red line” on Iran’s nuclear enrichment programme – this, in order to “prevent war”.

With noises of war against Iran permeating the General Assembly debates (though Obama had earlier pledged “to block out any noise that’s out there”), no wonder that the only recipe to the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate consisted of rueful expressions of solidarity with the Palestinians’ predicament.

There were times, not that long ago, when the Israel-Palestine conflict was the centre of gravity in international affairs.

Last winter, three rounds of exploratory talks in Amman in Jordan, between Israeli and Palestinian delegates failed to bring any result.

Palestine has sunk into oblivion, orbiting around an Israeli-imposed sphere of “conflict management” rather than gravitating toward U.S.-led “conflict resolution”. A “low-intensity conflict”, it’s therefore been relegated to the backburner of world concerns.

The dubious ‘Headline News’ mantra, “when it bleeds, it leads”, has diverted public attention from the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Far more blood is spilled in other fracture lines of the area – between Shias and Sunnis, between liberals and Islamists, between Arab dictatorships and their pro-democracy citizenry, between Jihadist and all the mentioned-above parties.

The truth is, if one compares it with the upheavals convoluting the Arab Muslim world – in Syria notably, but also elsewhere in the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region – the Israel-Palestine conflict doesn’t appear that malignant.

And, far more blood would be spilled were Iran’s nuclear programme be tackled belligerently.

And yet, without renewed focus on the Israel-Palestine conflict, the U.S. and its Western allies (including Israel) will have a hard time convincing Arab leaders, Russia and China – themselves extremely perturbed by Iran’s nuclear programme – that a unified and more muscular approach must be adopted.

Were it to prod Israelis and Palestinians to re-engage in negotiations, the U.S. could perhaps sway public opinion, absorbed by a deep pro-Palestinian sentiment from the anti-U.S. feelings of humiliation pervading many Arab countries, as last month’s violent assaults on U.S. legations in Libya and Egypt again exposed.

That, in turn, could persuade Arab allies, as well as Russia and China, to adhere to increased pressure on Iran. But such U.S. endeavour will have to wait for a new president.

Moreover, Netanyahu’s “red line” argument would probably be more convincing were he to draw a line on his own policies in the occupied Palestinian territories, policies which traditionally elicit worldwide censure.

But why would he, for instance, be prodded to introduce a moratorium on settlement construction similar to the 10-month freeze he reluctantly agreed to impose in 2010?

After all, didn’t he implicitly agree at the U.N. that until next year’s spring or summer, Israel would allow diplomacy and sanctions to run their course. Netanyahu predicted that only by then Tehran would complete the threshold stage of its uranium enrichment.

Besides, he might be inclined to call for Israeli elections in February.

Red lines, deadlines, are like all lines: politicians like Netanyahu are seasoned enough in the art of ‘tight-roping’ a thin line. His is between war with Iran and peace with Palestine. He could still walk both. But as long as Iran’s and Syria’s leaders walk their own fine line, why should he? And so, the Israel-Palestine conflict will remain on the sidelines, in limbo.

Plenty of monikers have been attached to Omar Khadr, one of the most famous Guantanamo Bay detainees – child soldier, terrorist, war criminal, Al-Qaeda family member, security threat.

This image is taken from a video secretly recorded when 16-year-old captive Omar Khadr was interrogated by Canadian officials in Guantanamo. Credit: Public domain

One thing is certain: Khadr’s release last weekend to Canadian custody after 10 years has proven highly provocative. His return to Canadian soil has triggered passionate debate about how he should be regarded and whether a man born into a radical family championing terrorism can reintegrate into a society he barely knows.

The tendency to characterise Khadr as a convicted war criminal, given that his confession was made under duress, indicates there are “so many factors related to this particular case that are not being challenged enough” and that the context of children’s use in armed conflict must be reexamined, said Dr. Shelly Whitman, the director of Dalhousie University’s Child Soldiers Initiative in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Now 26, Khadr, a Canadian citizen, was a 15-year-old when captured during a 2002 firefight with U.S. military forces in Afghanistan. He threw a grenade, killing Sergeant First Class Christopher Speer, for which he pleaded guilty to murder, although his supporters argue evidence points to a death resulting from friendly fire.

Khadr, whose sentence began in 2010 and will end in 2018, also admitted to providing material support for terrorism, attempted murder, conspiracy and spying, according to a statement issued by Public Safety Minister Vic Toews over the weekend. The minister added that Khadr, raised in Canada, Pakistan and Afghanistan, was an Al-Qaeda supporter whose accomplices included Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri.

While Khadr’s life thus far has been a whirlwind of activity, the challenges will not end once he is a free man. Whitman told IPS that he will face hurdles to find employment, struggles to catch up with education and “deep problems” from a psychosocial perspective because he experienced torture. However, she cast doubt on the negative influences of his family.

“As far as I’m concerned, this notion that because they have an association and they’ve said some things which are viewed as radical to others in this country, it doesn’t mean necessarily that he’s going to want to commit anything (that forces him) to go back to prison… Why would he do anything to jeopardise going back to that context?”

A poll conducted last month suggested the aversion of many Canadians to Khadr’s return, a problem some say is rooted in the tendency of his portrayal as a child soldier or as a terrorist.

Under the Paris Principles of 2007, guidelines to protect children from recruitment and to assist those already involved with armed groups, “the things that define a child soldier are the very things that would define a child terrorist,” Whitman said. As it stands, there are perception problems in Canada about the definition of a child soldier, a worldwide phenomenon involving boys and girls assigned a variety of roles depending on the particular conflict, she said.

Gail Davidson, executive director of Lawyers’ Rights Watch Canada in Vancouver, disagrees with both the terrorist and child soldier claims.

The United States has not presented any evidence to any court that Khadr threw the grenade killing the U.S. soldier, she told IPS, adding that it would have been classified as “murder according to the laws of war” had he, as an armed combatant, killed an opponent.

“As far as Mr. Khadr being a child soldier, we don’t know whether he was a child soldier or not,” Davidson argued. “We don’t know of any instance of him ever bearing arms or otherwise engaging in warfare.”

The October 2010 plea agreement by which the U.S. government agreed to limit his additional imprisonment to eight years if he pleaded guilty to all the U.S. offences “should be properly viewed as a confession obtained through the use of torture and not as a reliable and legitimate determinant of guilt or innocence”, she said.

During his detention, Khadr complained of being forced into painful stress positions, threatened with rape and rendition to third-party countries, hooded, and confronted with barking dogs, some of which was confirmed by U.S. government witnesses, according to a Sep. 29 press release issued by Human Rights Watch. The organisation added he was denied legal counsel until 2004.

For the most part, Khadr has received positive assessments by psychiatric experts.

Last year, psychiatrist Stephen Xenakis reported no “indication of aggressive or dangerous behavior” after 300 hours of interaction with Khadr, who has “consistently emphasized his goal to establish a constructive and peaceful life as a Canadian citizen”, according to a letter written to Minister Toews.

In several conversations, Khadr “repudiated” the beliefs of terrorist groups and demonstrated a “capacity to engage with others in a healthy way”, added Katherine Porterfield, a clinical psychologist for the defence team, in a letter to the minister in 2011.

Still, there are detractors, among them psychiatrist Michael Welner. Welner worked with Khadr for 500 to 600 hours and described him as dangerous. Citing the Canadian’s demonstrated capacity to kill, Al-Qaeda affiliations and “hardened” family members conveying “belligerence towards the United States”, Werner testified that he feared the young man’s history and associates will all “contribute mightily” to bolstering Al-Qaeda’s North American presence.

Khadr advocates are concerned that Welner’s testimony heavily influenced the Canadian government. Upon Khadr’s release to Canadian authorities, the public safety minister expressed anxiety about the 26-year-old’s romanticisation of his father’s activities (which he viewed as NGO-related) and many of the issues raised by the psychiatrist. Ottawa pledged to offer appropriate programming during Khadr’s imprisonment and strict conditions if he is granted parole as early as next year.

Other reintegration proposals are based on keeping Khadr away from the negative influences of his family, but it was never clear which feasible assurances could be offered since media reports indicate his family wishes to see him, David Harris, the director of the international and terrorist intelligence programme at INSIGNIS Strategic Research Inc. in Ottawa and a former chief of strategic planning for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, told IPS.

Overall, the saga of Omar Khadr has been impacted by “possible simple-mindedness” surrounding the question of his child-soldier status, as some have insisted on the label without fully examining the specific merits and implications of the evidence, Harris said. Certain individuals have regarded as “wholly irrelevant” the issue of criminal responsibility, he added.

These “sentimental” views neglect to a large extent the public safety implications of cases like Khadr’s and understate the “burgeoning terror issue that I fear will become an extremely prominent feature of Canadian life”, Harris said.

Farrah Hamary looks the picture of despair as sweat trickles down his face in Tripoli’s heat and humidity. Hamary is too afraid to give his full name or to allow his picture to be taken.

He shows IPS the scars criss-crossing his back, the cigarette burns on his arms, and the bones in his left hand which failed to heal properly when it was broken by Libyan militiamen.

Hamary, 39, is from Sudan’s war-torn and economically deprived region Kordofan. He came to Libya several years ago to eke out a living selling vegetables and fruit from his street stall in the Suq Al Ahad market in Tripoli’s Kasr Ben Gashir neighbourhood. His meagre earnings were sent back to his wife and child in Sudan.

Hamary now lives in fear. He has become victim of a militia brigade, (Katiba in Arabic), who control his local neighbourhood through fear, intimidation and extortion.

By day the Fatih Katiba, whose chief calls himself Izzedine, wear Libyan army fatigues. By night he and his group exchange military uniforms for civilian clothing, steal and demand protection money, predominantly from sub-Saharan Africans in the area.

Hamary came to the attention of the Fatih militia when a friend was involved in a car accident in July near Kasr Ben Gashir, and he went to help. Shortly afterwards Izzedine’s men arrived on the scene. They took Hamary back to their headquarters where he was beaten and tortured over two days though he had committed no crime.

“I was hung upside down and beaten on the soles of my feet. They beat me repeatedly with an iron bar on my back and arms until I was bleeding. I was also beaten with a chair and cigarette butts were extinguished on my arms. My hand was broken during the beating and it still hasn’t healed properly,” Hamary told IPS.

The Katiba confiscated Hamary’s passport, took his car and demanded he pay them 5,000 Libyan Dinars before they would return his passport. On his release Hamary reported the incident to the Sudanese embassy in Tripoli, which gave him a letter to take to the police. Sudanese embassy staff have themselves lost several cars to armed hijackings.

“The police were not interested and told me to leave. They are afraid of the militia who have

previously attacked the police station and stolen guns. There is no law and order in this country,” said Hamary.

The Sudanese migrant’s next step was to hire a lawyer, who went with him to see Izzedine and tell him what his men had done. “He just laughed and said ‘God be with you. You can leave now.’”

Issa Ibrahim from Darfur is among the lucky few to have got away. He escaped to Libya fleeing Khartoum’s Janjaweed militia, who have carried out a scorched earth policy at the behest of the Sudanese government. In Tripoli he opened a small clothing shop in the Al Rasheed neighbourhood to help support his wife and children back in Darfur.

“I’ve made friends with my Libyan neighbours and they look out for me if anybody starts to make trouble with me,” Ibrahim told IPS. “So far nobody has hurt me physically. They have only called me insulting names because I’m black. There are a lot of Libyans who look down on black Africans.

“But I have to take a lot of precautions. I don’t go out after 7pm because the streets are dangerous, especially if you are black and foreign. I also avoid certain neighbourhoods and some cities such as Misrata I would never go anywhere near.”

During the revolution former dictator Muammar Gaddafi hired African mercenaries to fight the rebels. A significant number of black Libyans, particularly those from the town of Tawergha near Misrata, sided with Gaddafi and are alleged to have committed atrocities against the civilian population of Misrata.

Libya has long attracted migrants from neighbouring countries and other parts of the world seeking economic opportunities unavailable to them in their home countries, or using it as a transit point to Europe.

Under Gaddafi, Libya, with a small population and rich oil reserves, relied heavily on hundreds of thousands of migrant labourers to prop up the economy. Many of the migrants managed to escape during the civil war, but others chose to take their chance in Libya because conditions in some of their homelands were even more dire.

“The situation in the country has not yet stabilised and there is no central power capable of governing of the whole territory,” the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) in conjunction with the NGO Migreurop reported in June after visiting a number of migrant camps in Libya.

“So armed militia groups and individuals have taken it upon themselves to decide on the treatment of migrants, outside of any legal framework. The militias control, arrest and detain migrants in improvised retention/detention camps. Invoking security concerns to justify the ‘clean-up of illegals’, they hunt migrants down, with sub-Saharan Africans as their prime targets.”

U.S. Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Benjamin Cool (left) ties a detonation cord as Lance Cpl. Josh Czerepka places several blocks of explosives into an insurgent firing position at a location in Afghanistan on Mar. 5, 2012. Credit: DoD photo by Sgt. James Mercure, U.S. Marine Corps.

By Walter García and Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Sep 26 2012 (IPS)

With all foreign troops due to leave Afghanistan just two years from now, the news out of the Central Asian nation is becoming increasingly gloomy.

Adding to the pessimism is a just-released report by one of the most astute observers of the U.S. war, Gilles Dorronsoro, an Afghanistan expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP), who, among other things, predicts that the regime in Kabul “will most probably collapse in a few years” given current trends.

“Political fragmentation, whether in the form of militias or the establishment of sanctuaries in the north, is laying the ground work for a long civil war” that is likely to be fuelled by competition among regional powers, according to his report, which also joined the call by a growing number of experts for Washington to open negotiations with the Taliban as soon as possible.

Indeed, a series of setbacks just this month have renewed questions about even the short-term viability of the U.S.-led strategy to keep the Taliban at bay while bolstering the central government enough to persuade key elements of the insurgency to negotiate rather than fight on.

In recent days, some of the most die-hard Republican supporters of U.S. intervention have suggested throwing in the towel early, particularly in view of the growing number of fatal “insider” attacks – 51 so far this year – by uniformed Afghan personnel against U.S. and coalition trainers and soldiers.

The latest attacks prompted U.S. commanders to sharply curb joint operations by coalition and Afghan forces pending a massive re-vetting of the latter for possible Taliban sympathies. The move, according to more than a few observers, strikes at the heart of the U.S. strategy of building up Afghan forces while gradually transferring more security responsibilities to them.

“I think we should remove ourselves from Afghanistan as quickly as we can,” said Rep. Bill Young, the Republican chairman of the House Appropriations Defence Committee. “I just think we’re killing kids that don’t need to die.”

Similarly, Sen. John McCain, a steadfast backer of the Afghanistan war, also suggested that Washington should consider an early withdrawal, although he later backed away from the statement while blaming the administration of President Barack Obama for failing to follow the advice of his field commanders.

But the rise in so-called “green-on-blue” attacks and the subsequent reduction in joint operations between the two forces are just two of the signs that things are not going well for Washington and its allies, who, in principle, are committed to withdrawing all their combat troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014.

Just last week, U.S. forces were stunned by an unprecedented Taliban assault on a heavily fortified coalition air base in Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan that, in addition to killing two Marines, destroyed six fighter jets worth a combined total of more than 200 million dollars.

The attack, in which the assailants wore U.S. uniforms, demonstrated both the insurgents’ sophistication and their continued presence in Helmand, the main focus of the U.S. “surge” of some 33,000 troops two years ago. Indeed, the coincidence of the attack and the withdrawal of the last “surge” troops last week underlined the potential holes left in their wake.

At the same time, a coalition airstrike that killed eight women collecting wood for morning cooking fires in eastern Afghanistan, combined with continuing wrangling between Washington and the government of President Hamd Karzai over the fate of foreign and Afghan prisoners held by the U.S. in Bagram Air Base, deepened existing tensions between the two governments.

The latest incidents all took place even before Dorronsoro finished drafting his deeply pessimistic report which noted that, in some respects, the current regime in Kabul is less prepared to survive a challenge by the Taliban than the communist government that hung on for three years against the mujahideen after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989.

There are “two major differences,” he wrote. “First the current regime does not possess the ideological and social cohesion of the communist regime, and its ability to survive militarily has not been demonstrated. …Second, the Taliban form a united movement with few rifts, compared to the infighting of the mujahideen in the 1990s.”

Already next year, when tens of thousands of coalition forces will remain in Afghanistan, Dorronsoro predicted that the eastern part of the country and the region around the capital itself will be “gravely threatened by a Taliban advance” with the onset of spring.

“The situation will only worsen after 2014, when most U.S. troops are out of the country and aid going to the Afghan government steeply declines,” according to the 23-page report, ‘Waiting for the Taliban in Afghanistan’.

As coalition forces withdraw, including the 68,000 U.S. combat troops that remain in-country, the Taliban will “automatically” advance, especially in the east and the south where the insurgency has been contained as a result of constant pressure by the coalition forces.

Dorronsoro is particularly critical of Washington’s counter-insurgency strategy which gave precedence to tactical military operations aimed at systematically eliminating local insurgent leaders over a political approach of engaging the rebel leadership based in Pakistan.

One indication of the Taliban’s resilience has been the fate of the coalition-backed “re-integration” programme which not only failed to bring over significant numbers of insurgents in the targeted areas – the east and the south – but also fueled corruption, according to Dorronsoro.

Meanwhile, the Karzai regime will face three major crises while the coalition withdraws: an economic crisis precipitated by a sharp drop in Western aid and spending; an institutional crisis with the end of Karzai’s term in 2014 and indications that much of the political elite are already preparing to go into exile; and a security crisis in which large parts of the country fall outside the government’s control despite the overwhelming official size of the security forces.

“Maintaining control of Afghanistan’s major cities and main transport corridors is …the only realistic goal,” according to the report.

Certain eventualities could stabilise the situation for a few years, including a reduction in Pakistani support for the Taliban, the development of divisions within the insurgency, and the possibility that a new president in Kabul who could inspire greater confidence and support than Karzai.

“In reality, these developments are unlikely and would come about only as a result of unpredictable events – a major political crisis in Pakistan or the death of the Taliban’s spiritual leader Mullah Omar, for instance,” according to the report.

In terms of recommendations, Dorronsoro calls for the coalition to strengthen security in the east and around Kabul, even at the expense of losing control of the south more quickly.

And while negotiations with the Taliban are unlikely before the troops withdrawal, Washington should understand that it will “not be able to pursue its longer-term interests in and around Afghanistan if it is not willing to deal with the Taliban” which, alone among the various contenders for power if the Kabul regime collapses, “can potentially control the Afghan border and expel transnational jihadists from Afghanistan”.

Thus, Washington “must not further limit its ability to open negotiations with the Taliban”, and coalition military and drone operations “should focus first and foremost on foreign jihadist groups”, not on the Taliban insurgency.

In his blog at the nationalinterest.com, Paul Pillar, a former top CIA analyst who served as the National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, called Dorronsoro’s recommendation “good advice”.

Sound policy, he noted, requires “getting away from the mistaken tendency to view the Afghan Taliban as if they were themselves a transnational terrorist group – which they are not, notwithstanding their previous alliance with Usama bin Laden.”

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

Hassan Hader’s application for a permit to work in Israel has been rejected four times. Now waiting to hear back from the Israeli authorities on his latest attempt, the 52-year-old father of five said he has no choice but to keep applying.

Many Palestinian labourers from the Shuafat refugee camp across the barrier work on construction in the Israeli settlement Pisgat Zeev in East Jerusalem to the right. Credit: Jillian Kestler-D’Amours/IPS.

“I wasn’t even given a reason why my application was rejected,” said Hader, who worked at a quarry in the industrial zone of Ma’ale Adumim, one of Israel’s largest illegal West Bank settlements, for nearly 20 years before losing his job last year.

Hader lives in Ramallah and holds a West Bank-only ID card. He told IPS that he has no viable job opportunities in the Palestinian labour market. With his family’s savings slowly running out after over a year without work, he said that getting a permit to work in Israel is his only option.

“I’m tired,” he said. “It’s not a good situation.”

Recently, local media reported that the Israeli government plans to increase the number of work permits allocated to Palestinian labourers from the West Bank. In an e-mail to IPS, Barak Granot, spokesperson for the Israeli Ministry of Industry, Trade, and Labour, confirmed that an additional 5,000 permits would be issued to Palestinians to work in the Israeli construction industry.

“The increase was decided in order to assist and ease the stress and lack of employment in the West Bank on one hand, and to ease the shortage of workers in the Israeli construction sector on the other hand. This decision was made according to the government policy to favour Palestinian workers, rather than other foreign workers,” Granot stated.

The Israeli Civil Administration (ICA), the Israeli military body that controls over 60 percent of the occupied West Bank, echoed this sentiment. “The increase in permit granting is supposed to reduce the activity of the foreign workers who stay in Israel for long periods, and might settle here. As opposed to them, Palestinians arrive in Israel (during the) day and usually leave in the evening,” the ICA told IPS in an e-mailed statement.

As Israel imposed restrictions on Palestinian freedom of movement after the outbreak of the second Intifadah (Palestinian uprising), migrant workers from the Philippines, China, Thailand and Eastern Europe, among other areas, gradually replaced the Palestinian workforce.

Recently, however, an influx of migrant workers and asylum seekers in Israel has caused panic among Israeli leaders, who say the presence of non-Jewish foreigners threatens the country’s Jewish character.

In response, the government has decided to gradually lower its quota of work permits for foreign workers, and has placed more limits on these workers’ freedoms once in the country, including binding caregivers to their employers and to specific places in Israel.

The Israeli Civil Administration told IPS that there are currently 57,095 Palestinian workers employed in Israel and in Israeli settlements, and that permits for 8,000 more Palestinian workers would soon be approved, in addition to the 5,000 extra permits for construction workers.

Palestinians must be over 26 years old, married, and must pass a security check to be eligible for the permits, the ICA stated.

According to an April 2012 World Bank report titled ‘Towards Economic Sustainability of a Future Palestinian state’, between 2000-2004 the number of Palestinians working in the Israeli labour market fell from 26 percent to less than 12 percent. In 2010, approximately 14 percent of the West Bank workforce was employed in Israel or in Israeli settlements.

Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip, however, have been barred from entering Israel or the West Bank for work since 2006. Israel also stops almost all Palestinian products from being exported from the Gaza Strip.

“Gaza is undergoing a process of de-development where the economy is being dismantled. It’s an economy that is not allowed to be productive. Certainly allowing workers in Gaza to return to their jobs in Israel would provide a boost of hard-earned income to families who need it desperately,” said Sari Bashi, director of Gisha, the Israeli legal centre for freedom of movement.

According to the United Nations, the unemployment rate in the occupied Palestinian territories was 26 percent in 2011. Unemployment among youth, aged 15-29, was even higher, sitting at 35 percent and 53 percent in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, respectively.

“There needs to be recognition that Israel has obligations to those that are under occupation and who are trying to make a living,” Bashi told IPS.

Gisha estimates that approximately 60,000 Palestinians from the West Bank – half with permits, half without – enter Israel every day for work. A better-regulated system could reduce the risks involved for Palestinian labourers who enter Israel illegally, Bashi added.

In late July, a Palestinian man was killed and three others were wounded when Israeli soldiers manning a Jerusalem-area checkpoint opened fire at their car which was carrying over a dozen Palestinian workers trying to enter Israel without permits.

“I am sure that it will not be the last incident and it’s not the first against Palestinian workers,” Shawan Jabarin, director of Palestinian human rights organisation Al Haq told IPS. “Most of the people have no salaries. They just want money to feed their families.”

Hassan Hader knows people who enter Israel illegally for work, but the consequences of getting caught – both for himself and for his family – deter him from even trying.

“It’s too risky to go into Israel without a permit,” he said. “I want to go through the door, not through the window.”

An Aug. 16, 2012 rally in support of Camp Ashraf. Credit: Newtown graffiti/cc by 2.0

By Walter García, Jim Lobe, and Jasmin Ramsey
WASHINGTON, Sep 22 2012 (IPS)

In a move certain to ratchet up already-high tensions with Iran, the administration of President Barack Obama will remove a militant anti-regime group from the State Department’s terrorism list, U.S. officials told reporters here Friday.

The decision, which is expected to be formally announced before Oct. 1, the deadline set earlier this year by a federal court to make a determination, was in the process of being transmitted in a classified report to Congress, according to the Department’s spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland.

The decision came several days after some 680 members of the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), or People’s Mojahedin, were transferred from their long-time home at Camp Ashraf in eastern Iraq close to the Iranian to a former U.S. base in at Baghdad’s airport in compliance with Washington’s demands that the group move. The transfer leaves only 200 militants at Camp Ashraf out of the roughly 3,200 who were there before the transfers began.

Most analysts here predicted that the administration’s decision to remove the MEK from the terrorism list would only worsen already abysmal relations with Iran and possibly make any effort to defuse the gathering crisis over its nuclear programme yet more difficult.

“Delisting will be seen not only by the Iranian regime, but also by most Iranian citizens, as a hostile act by the United States,” Paul Pillar, a former top CIA analyst who served as the National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, told IPS.
“The MEK has almost no popular support within Iran, where it is despised as a group of traitors, especially given its history of joining forces with Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War,” Pillar added.

“Any effect of the delisting on nuclear negotiations will be negative; Tehran will read it as one more indication that the United States is interested only in hostility and pressure toward the Islamic Republic, rather than coming to terms with it.”

The decision followed a high-profile multi-year campaign by the group and its sympathisers that featured almost-daily demonstrations at the State Department, full-page ads in major newspapers, and the participation of former high-level U.S. officials, some of whom were paid tens of thousands of dollars to make public appearances on behalf of the MEK.

Officials included Obama’s first national security adviser, Gen. James Jones, former FBI chief Louis Freeh, and a number of senior officials in the George W. Bush administration, including his White House chief of staff, Andrew Card, attorney general Michael Mukasey, and former U.N. ambassador John Bolton.

Created in the mid-1960s by Islamo-Marxist university students, the MEK played a key role in the 1979 ouster of the Shah only to lose a bloody power struggle with the more-conservative clerical factions close to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

The group went into exile; many members fled to Iraq, which they used as a base from which they mounted military and terrorist attacks inside Iran during the eight-year war between the two countries. Its forces were also reportedly used to crush popular rebellions against President Saddam Hussein that followed the 1991 Gulf War.

During a brief period of détente between Washington and Tehran, the administration of President Bill Clinton designated the group as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation (FTO) in 1997 based in part on its murder of several U.S. military officials and contractors in the 1970s and its part in the 1979 U.S. Embassy takeover, as well as its alliance with Saddam Hussein.

When U.S. forces invaded Iraq in 2001, the MEK declared its neutrality and eventually agreed to disarm in exchange for Washington’s agreement that its members could remain at Camp Ashraf as “protected persons” under the Geneva Convention, an arrangement that expired in 2009.

The government of Prime Minister Nour Al-Maliki, however, has been hostile to the MEK’s continued presence in Iraq. Two violent clashes since 2009 between Iraqi security forces and camp residents resulted in the deaths of at least 45 MEK members.

Last December, the UN reached a U.S.-mediated accord with the MEK to re-locate the residents to “Camp Liberty” at Baghdad’s airport, which would serve as a “temporary transit station” for residents to resettle in third countries or in Iran, if they so chose, after interviews with the UN High Commission on Refugees.

Until quite recently, however, the group — which Human Rights Watch (HRW) and a significant number of defectors, among others, have described as a cult built around its long-unaccounted-for founder, Massoud Rajavi, and his Paris-based spouse, Maryam — has resisted its wholesale removal from Ashraf. Some observers believe Massoud may be based there.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s increasingly blunt suggestions that the MEK’s failure to co-operate would jeopardise its chances of being removed from the terrorism list, however, appear to have brought it around.

The MEK claims that it halted all military actions in 2001 and has lacked the intent or the capability of carrying out any armed activity since 2003, an assertion reportedly backed up by the State Department.

Earlier this year, however, NBC News quoted one U.S. official as confirming Iran’s charges that Israel has used MEK militants in recent years to carry out sabotage operations, including the assassination of Iranian scientists associated with Tehran’s nuclear programme.

“The Iranian security establishment’s assessment has long believed that foreign intelligence agencies, specifically the CIA, Israeli Mossad, and the UK’s MI6 utilise the MEK for terror attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists, nuclear sabotage and intelligence gathering,” noted Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a former senior Iranian diplomat and nuclear negotiator currently at Princeton University.

“Therefore, the delisting of MEK will be seen in Tehran as a reward for the group’s terrorist actions in the country,” he wrote in an email exchange with IPS. “Furthermore, Iran has firmly concluded that the Western demands for broader inspections (of Iran’s nuclear programme), including its military sites, are a smokescreen for mounting increased cyber attacks, sabotage and terror of nuclear scientists.

“Delisting MEK would be considered in Tehran as a U.S.-led effort to increase sabotage and covert actions through MEK leading inevitably to less cooperation by Iran with the IAEA (the International Atomic Energy Agency).”

He added that government in Tehran will use this as a way of “demonstrating to the public that the U.S. is seeking …to bring a MEK-style group to power” which, in turn, “would strengthen the Iranian nation’s support for the current system as the perceived alternative advanced by Washington would be catastrophic.”

That view was echoed by the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), which noted that the decision opens the doors to Congressional funding of the MEK and that leaders of the Iran’s Green Movement have long repudiated the group.

“The biggest winner today is the Iranian regime, which has claimed for a long time that the U.S. is out to destroy Iran and is the enemy of the Iranian people,” said NIAC’s policy director, Jamal Abdi.

“It will certainly not improve U.S.-Iranian relations,” according to Alireza Nader, an Iran specialist at the Rand Corporation, who agreed that the “delisting reinforces Tehran’s longstanding narrative regarding U.S. hostility toward the regime.

“Nevertheless,” he added, “I don’t think it is detrimental to U.S. interests as Tehran suspects U.S. collusion with the MEDK anyhow, whether this perception is correct or not.”

Karim Sadjadpour, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the move was unlikely to be “game-changer” in that “the MEK will continue to be perceived inside Iran as an antiquated cult which sided with Saddam Hussein during the (Iran-Iraq) war, and U.S. Iran relations will remain hostile.”

“It doesn’t help (Washington’s) image within Iran, certainly, and some Iranian democracy activists may misperceive this as a U.S. show of support for the MEK, which could have negative ramifications,” he noted.

Another casualty of the decision may be the credibility of the FTO list itself, according to Mila Johns, a researcher at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland.

“The entire atmosphere around the MEK’s campaign to be removed from the FTO list – the fact that (former) American government officials were allowed to actively and openly receive financial incentives to speak in support of an organisation that was legally designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, without consequence – created the impression that the list is essentially a meaningless political tool,” she told IPS.

“It is hard to imagine that the FTO designation holds much legitimacy within the international community when it is barely respected by our own government,” she said.

No other group, she noted, has been de-listed in this way, “though now that the precedent has been set, I would expect that other groups will explore this as an option.”

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (left) and Aung San Suu Kyi, Chairperson and General Secretary of the National League for Democracy of Myanmar, speak to journalists following their bilateral meeting on Sep. 21. Credit: UN Photo/Mark Garten

By Walter García and Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 21 2012 (IPS)

When world leaders heading politically shaky authoritarian regimes lead their country’s delegations on overseas visits or attend international conferences, including the annual U.N. General Assembly sessions in September, there is always a lingering fear of either an insurrection or an attempted military coup back home.

As far back as 1966, Ghana’s then-president Kwame Nkrumah was ousted from power when he was visiting China. And in March 1970, Prince Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia was dethroned – immediately after returning from visits to Moscow and Beijing – in a bloodless coup led by Lt. Gen. Lon Nol.

General Idi Amin overthrew the government of Prime Minister Milton Obote of Uganda when he was at the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting (CHOGM) in Singapore in January 1971.

But the CHOGM political curse did not stop there.

In June 1977, the President of Seychelles James Mancham was deposed in a coup while he was attending the London Commonwealth summit six years later.

And most recently, Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra was ousted in a military coup 24 hours before he was to address the General Assembly sessions in September 2006.

Perhaps Thaksin made the supreme mistake, like all others, of leaving his army chief back home. He paid a heavy price for it, and still lives in political exile.

As the weeklong high-level segment of the General Assembly begins next week, a new generation of Arab leaders will be at the United Nations.

But these are heads of state and heads of government who succeeded authoritarian leaders who were ousted by revolts and insurrections during the “Ärab Spring” – in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Yemen.

The line-up of Arab leaders expected at the United Nations includes President Moncef Marzouki of Tunisia who took power in December 2011 after Zine El Abdine Ben Ali fled the country; Mohamed Yousef el-Magariaf, president of Libya’s National Congress who took over after Muammar el- Gaddafi was killed in the October 2011 civil war; President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Al-Hadi of Yemen who succeeded Ali Abdullah Saleh who went into exile in February 2012; and President Mohammed Morsi of Egypt who took power from Hosni Mubarak who was ousted in February 2011.

Since all of them assumed power either after popular revolts on insurrections, the chances of these leaders being ousted when in New York seems remote.

At his press conference Wednesday, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told reporters he expects 123 heads of state and government – besides deputy prime ministers and foreign ministers – to attend the current 67th session of the General Assembly where the high-level debate is scheduled to begin Tuesday.

Besides the “deteriorating situation” in Syria, he said, the United Nations will be hosting a series of mini-summits and special meetings focusing on the emergency in the Sahel; progress in Somalia (whose new president Hassan Sheikh Mohamud is also due here); the transitions in Myanmar and Yemen; instability in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; and the relations between Sudan and the new neighbouring country of South Sudan.

“We will also discuss the threat of nuclear terrorism and press for the early entry into force of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty,” he added.

But Samir Sanbar, a former U.N. assistant secretary-general and a longtime observer of Middle Eastern politics, is sceptical of the “new generation” of Arab leaders.

Asked for his political insight, Sanbar told IPS, “Whatever speeches are made at the General Assembly next week, there are certain facts on the ground.”

First, Arab Women and Youth who spearheaded the dynamic protests two years ago will argue that the so-called Arab Spring has been hijacked through a deal with Islamist movements mediated by two regional sub-contractors (no naming required), he pointed out.

Second, the new generation is new to governance but they are of the old generation; it is therefore the forces behind them that would matter- and they have not shown their hand yet, said Sanbar, who served under five different secretaries-general and is currently editor of an electronic newsletter titled U.N. Forum.

Third, he said, the rulers who had emerged after the Palestinian Nakbah of 1948 were military coup leaders who suppressed freedom ostensibly to liberate Palestine (“the outcome was no liberation and no freedom”).

And the new leaders are already attempting to control freedom, especially of women, the media and creative arts, under the guise of religion, he observed.

“We may end up again loosing freedom and distorting the holy message of religion,” Sanbar said.

Political rhetoric during confused times may tend to conceal more than reveal, he said, pointing out that as recent events show, “more of the same trouble is likely to continue”.

“God help the people – decent, honest dedicated – of that region who always end up paying the price,” declared Sanbar.

A militia group in Tripoli. Credit: Rebecca Murray/IPS.

By Walter García and Rebecca Murray
TRIPOLI, Sep 21 2012 (IPS)

The dark rain clouds and circling military helicopter accentuated the mood of the small, sombre crowd gathered in Tripoli’s Martyr’s Square to commemorate Libya’s dead heroes.

The quiet assembly was in stark contrast to the euphoric Feb. 17 rally on the same spot marking the one-year anniversary of the uprising against the Gaddafi regime. Then thousands of Libyans – some holding framed pictures of ‘martyred’ loved ones – thronged the downtown sidewalks and expressed optimism for a future of democracy, prosperity and peace.

That optimism has been replaced by anxiety. The killing of U.S. ambassador Christopher Stevens in Benghazi has highlighted the dangers posed by a proliferation of armed groups since the revolution. Many are part of the loose-knit, undertrained government auxiliary forces that seem to act with impunity throughout Libya, and fuel the anxious public perception that the government is too weak to rein them in.

The government’s call for citizens to voluntarily hand in their weapons is now pushed back to the end of September because of security concerns. Prime Minister Mustafa Abu Shugar has proposed giving cash for weapons.

After fighting in the revolution and receiving three weeks formal training, Rami Ezzadine Tajari, 22, and Mohammed Nagy, 19, wearing mismatched military uniforms and carrying battered AK47s, are part of the Ministry of Interior’s sprawling auxiliary force, the Supreme Security Council (SSC).

The SSC, like the Ministry of Defence’s affiliated Shield of Libya brigades, is a collection of armed groups operating across Libya under the interior ministry’s loose control.

“A lot of people came to hand in their weapons,” says Tajari. “We told them to bring them back on the 29th. After that, citizens will be forbidden to carry them.”

Human rights lawyer Salah Marghani, commended by Human Rights Watch for his advocacy work with detainees under the Gaddafi regime, is outraged by the buy-back weapons scheme. “It will create a lucrative trade of arms for profit and won’t take many arms off the street,” he says. “What we need to get rid of is the heavy weapons.”

Marghani divides Libya’s armed groups operating in the government security vacuum into five categories. He explains that three are “easy to deal with”: former revolutionary fighters who believe their sole duty is to protect citizens and will voluntarily disarm; those who guard national interests motivated by a mix of doing public good and making profit; and those who benefit exclusively from small economic kickbacks.

“The remaining two categories are the dangerous ones,” says Marghani. These are ex-convicts who commit violent crimes, including armed robbery and drug dealing, or groups of “phantom-like” fighters that operate under a banner of Gaddafi loyalists or Islamist extremism.

In light of the Benghazi attack, he describes Libyans as feeling a collective ‘shame’. “They are scared right now,” he adds. “They don’t want their country to be another Somalia with warlords.”

An International Crisis Group (ICG) analysis of Libya’s armed groups sheds light on the new government’s complex challenge.

ICG states that the Gaddafi regime’s ‘divide-and-rule’ policy manipulated communities with a draconian security apparatus and selective disbursal of Libya’s rich resources.

“Once the lid was removed, there was every reason to fear a free-for-all, as the myriad of armed groups that proliferated during the rebellion sought material advantage, political influence or, more simply, revenge,” says the report. “This was all the more so given the security vacuum produced by the regime’s precipitous fall.”

Bill Lawrence, ICG’s North Africa analyst, in an interview with IPS says that Salafist leaders he has met blame rogue elements for the Benghazi attack. “Salafists who are in general skeptical of the political transition in Libya in some cases – not in every case – are definitely disassociating themselves from this act of violence, and condemning both the assassination and the film (on Islam that is leading to worldwide protests in Muslim countries).”

Some Libyans voice concerns that the U.S. drones, intelligence and military personnel in Libyan territory since the ambassador’s death might be here to stay.

Sami Khaskusha, professor of international relations, is a driving force on Tripoli University campus. An active member of the civil resistance against Gaddafi, he energetically organised a wide range of civil society discussions after the capital’s liberation under an ambitious banner: ‘Tripoli University’s programme for rebuilding Libya’.

“Suddenly we turned the university into a huge workshop,” Khaskusha remembers. “There was a lot of euphoria and enthusiasm then.”

But he says the mood changed and activities were curtailed when the transitional government’s more traditional, conservative mindset inherited power at the ministries.

“At that same time every thug took over offices and declared himself to be a military brigade. They submitted lists to the defence and interior ministries and demanded money and cars, and extorted businesses,” Khaskusha says.

“The Ministry of Interior is now run by the militia rather than the opposite. The ministry gave armed groups the legitimacy to arrest, interrogate, and secure banks, government offices and embassies in the absence of state power.”

An escalation of crime with impunity, tribal clashes and intolerant attacks against religious sites and non-governmental organisations are contributing to an atmosphere of instability and fear.

Salah Marghani is working against this. In light of torture in detention centres documented by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, he educates armed groups – including former prisoners now supervising jails – to adhere to human rights protocols.

“In one incident, I asked a military brigade if they torture inmates. One man said: ‘No we don’t, we only do ‘falaqa’ (beating prisoners’ feet). What struck me was he didn’t comprehend this is wrong,” sighs Marghani.

“I think it will take ten to 15 years for people to understand the role of democracy and civil society,” Khaskusha says. “We need to practise a peaceful struggle of ideas, culture of tolerance and acceptance of ‘the other’. Now when we disagree, we run to our weapons.”

Coptic Christians demonstrate in Cairo's Tahrir Square following last October's 'Maspero massacre' in which dozens of Copts were killed. Credit: Khaled Moussa al-Omrani/IPS.

By Walter García, Adam Morrow, and Khaled Moussa al-Omrani
CAIRO, Sep 20 2012 (IPS)

Many of Egypt’s Coptic Christians met the recent assumption of the presidency by the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi with trepidation, even panic – some even made plans to leave the country. Almost three month’s into Morsi’s term, these fears, say some experts, appear largely unfounded.

“Copts were mortified when Morsi won. It was as if the sky had fallen,” Youssef Sidhoum, editor-in-chief of Coptic weekly Al-Watan and expert in Coptic affairs, told IPS. “But such fears appear be to be overblown. Since assuming the presidency, Morsi hasn’t done anything – at least until now – to justify such alarmism.”

The largest concentration of Christians in the Middle East, Egypt’s Coptic community is thought to account for about ten percent of the country’s population, which currently stands at some 91 million. The rest of the Egyptian population is almost entirely Sunni Muslim.

In an effort to reach out to Egypt’s wary Christian minority, Morsi, shortly after assuming the presidency, met with representatives from all of Egypt’s churches. Speaking to Coptic, Catholic and Evangelical leaders, he stressed his intention to serve as a “president to all Egyptians” – in what has become a common refrain – regardless of religion or political orientation.

Such moves, however, have been greeted with scepticism on the part of some Copts, who question the new president’s sincerity.

“I don’t trust them,” Joseph, a 47-year-old Coptic resident of Cairo, said of the Brotherhood, preferring not to give his last name. “Morsi’s nice words to the Christian community are only cosmetic. We know that the Brotherhood wants to Islamise the country and Egyptian society.

“They say they’ll respect Christians’ rights, but they’ll end up enforcing strict dress codes – like in Iran – and banning alcohol, thus destroying Egypt’s tourism industry,” added Joseph, who is currently mulling emigration to New Zealand.

Sidhoum, however, sees such attitudes as unnecessarily alarmist.

“We’ve now had a Muslim Brotherhood presidency for three months, and up until this point we’ve been given no reason to fear for our community’s well-being,” said Sidhoum. “We ought to give Morsi a chance; see what he does before drawing conclusions.”

In line with promises made before June’s presidential runoff (in which Morsi defeated Mubarak-era premier Ahmed Shafiq by a slim margin), Egypt’s first civilian president has not issued any decrees affecting Egyptian social norms, such as dress codes, alcohol sales, or so-called ‘morality’ policing.

Early this month, the presidency expressed its annoyance when the Netherlands formally began accepting applications for political asylum from Egyptian Coptic Christians based on claims of alleged ‘religious persecution’.

“It is not acceptable under any circumstances for any foreign parties to intervene in this matter (Muslim-Christian relations in Egypt),” presidential spokesman Yasser Ali declared at a press conference on Sep. 9. “This is an entirely Egyptian affair in which we will not accept any outside interference.”

The spokesman added: “The position of the presidency is clear on this issue – all Egyptians have the same rights and responsibilities vis-à-vis the state. The presidency does not draw any distinctions between Egyptians, Muslim or Christian.”

Yet despite these sentiments, many Coptic Christians point to the sporadic eruptions of sectarian violence that have followed last year’s revolution as proof of their worsening situation.

Last October, during Egypt’s military-administered ‘interim phase,’ dozens of unarmed protesters – most of them Christians – were killed during clashes with security forces in Cairo’s Maspero district. The incident sparked days of angry Coptic demonstrations, in which charges of state-sponsored religious persecution were frequently aired.

More recently, in early August, crowds of angry Muslims in the city of Dahshur south of Cairo destroyed several Coptic-owned shops and homes after a young Muslim man was killed by a Coptic neighbour in a personal quarrel. Calm was eventually restored, however, following the convention of a traditional ‘reconciliation council’ through which the damaged parties were satisfactorily compensated.

Facing the first such flare-up of his presidency, Morsi dismissed the episode’s “sectarian nature”, insisting that what had happened in Dahshur had been an “isolated incident” not reflective of Muslim-Christian relations in Egypt.

Sidhoum, for his part, is critical of the traditional mechanisms employed to defuse such sectarian explosions, which, under the Mubarak regime, had become an increasingly frequent phenomenon.

“Incidents like these always end with reconciliation councils and compensation for the Christian victims, but the perpetrators are never penalised,” he said.

Reconciliation councils are the traditional method by which local disputes between clans or families are resolved, especially in rural or desert regions. Family heads and community leaders – along with local clergymen if the dispute has a sectarian dimension – usually take part in such councils, through which a mutually acceptable agreement is negotiated, generally involving compensation to the more injured party.

Such councils are conducted outside the purview of the state, which, in such cases, has been historically inclined to let local tradition take its course.

But according to Sidhoum, this antiquated method of conflict resolution does little to deter such sectarian venting, since it allows the perpetrators of sectarian crimes to go unpunished.

“If the law were applied to whoever participated in sectarian aggression, be they Muslim or Christian, it would serve to re-establish the standing of the state and guarantee coexistence,” he said. “It would go a long way towards ending the phenomenon of sectarianism once and for all.”

Mena Thabet, a Coptic Christian rights activist specialised in Coptic affairs, agreed.

“The Mubarak regime used to actively promote division between Muslims and Christians for its own political interests,” Thabet told IPS. “It allowed sectarian problems to persist by failing to execute the law and bring perpetrators to justice. Had it done so, such incidents would have been much less common.”

Both men also agree that the issue will ultimately depend on the country’s new constitution, currently being drafted by Egypt’s majority-Islamist Constituent Assembly.

“The problems traditionally faced by Egypt’s Christians will be resolved when there’s a constitution that ensures Egypt’s democratic and civil nature,” said Sidhoum. “Such a charter would lead to the passage of laws that don’t draw distinctions between citizens based on race or belief.”

“If the new constitution genuinely guarantees equality for all Egyptians, the political orientation of the president – Brotherhood, Salafist, or whatever – will become irrelevant,” Thabet concurred.

Egypt’s Constituent Assembly is expected to unveil a draft constitution within the next two months, after which the proposed charter will be put before a nationwide referendum for public approval.