By Mandeep S.Tiwana
JOHANNESBURG, Mar 23 2015 (IPS)

For those of us interested in a vibrant civil society, it seems to be best of times and the worst of times.

In recent months, there has been great progress in recognising the importance of civil society in shaping the so-called ‘post-2015’ agenda and an explicit recognition of the important role that civil society will play in delivering sustainable development. However, in many countries around the world, the actual conditions in which civil society operates are getting worse not better.

As we come closer to a new global agreement on sustainable development goals (SDGs), we need to push for an agreement – backed by robust indicators – that will make a tangible difference in protecting civic freedoms.

Mandeep S. Tiwana

Indeed, a perceptible rise in bureaucratic harassment and raids on NGO offices, violent dispersal of citizen demonstrations, attacks on and illicit surveillance of activists, combined with the application of draconian laws to silence dissent and restrict funding, has many civil society observers worried about shrinking space for the sector.

Over the course of last year, CIVICUS, the global alliance for citizen participation, monitored severe threats to civic freedoms in roughly half of the globe’s 193 countries. Amnesty International’s Annual Report for 2014/2015 calls it “a devastating year” for those seeking to stand up for human rights. Front Line Defenders, which works to protect human rights defenders at risk, reports the killing or death in detention of over 130 human rights defenders in the first ten months of 2014 alone.

All of this is happening while the United Nations is making unprecedented efforts to ensure greater civil society participation in the post-2015 global development framework.

While the next generation of sustainable development goals, their associated targets and indicators will be decided by world leaders at their Sep. 25-27 summit in New York this year, civil society’s role in grounding the framework in people’s aspirations and holding duty bearers to account is crucial.“Assurances for a civil society enabling environment and respect for the freedoms of expression, association and peaceful assembly in the post-2015 framework are integral to greater public involvement and accountability in development”

In light of recent trends which point to shrinkage of civil society space, in both democracies and non-democracies, there is naturally a high level of anxiety whether guarantees on civic freedoms and civil society participation will be included in the final framework. Indeed, a major criticism of the current Millennium Development Goal (MDG) framework is that it has failed to recognise and thereby institutionalise the role of active citizens and civil society organisations in development.

Assurances for a civil society enabling environment and respect for the freedoms of expression, association and peaceful assembly in the post-2015 framework are integral to greater public involvement and accountability in development.

So far, some progress has been made but the gains remain shaky because many governments which will be involved in adopting the final framework in September are themselves complicit in serious violations of civic freedoms. These include some influential states such as China, Cuba, Egypt, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia and Turkey whose developmental models are predicated on top-down governance with scant role for independent civil society.

Positively, the U.N. Secretary General’s Synthesis Report on the Post-2015 Agenda, released in December last year, calls for the creation of an “enabling environment under the rule of law for the free, active and meaningful engagement of civil society and advocates reflecting the voices of women, minorities, LGBT groups, indigenous peoples, youth, adolescents and older persons.”

Notably, participatory democracy – without which civic freedoms cannot meaningfully exist – has been described as both an enabler and outcome of development.

From the perspective of civic freedoms and civil society participation, the U.N. Secretary General’s report has done well to elaborate on the proposal submitted to the U.N. General Assembly by the Open Working on Sustainable Development Goals (OWG) in July 2014.

Comprising 30 representatives nominated by U.N. member states from all the regions of the world, the OWG recommended 17 goals and 169 corresponding targets which are the basis of intergovernmental negotiations on the SDGs this year.

Two goals are particularly relevant from the standpoint of civil society’s ability to freely operate and monitor progress on the framework.  These are proposed Goal 16 (“promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels”) and proposed Goal 17 (“strengthen the means of implementation and revitalise the global partnership for development”). 

The proposed goals are further sub-divided into targets. For instance, targets under Goal 16 include “responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative decision making at all levels” and “public access to information and protect fundamental freedoms, in accordance with national legislation and international agreements.” A key target under Goal 17 is to “encourage and promote effective public, public-private, and civil society partnerships, building on the experience and resourcing strategies of partnerships.”

Progress on the proposed targets will be measured by indicators currently being developed by various U.N. bodies, including the U.N. Statistics Division. Ultimately, it will be the indicators that will anchor the post-2105 agenda because gains will be gauged through their prism. It is therefore crucial that the United Nations is able to identify suitable tools to measure civic space and civil society participation.

Although, the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) has produced a report titled ‘Accountability through Civic Participation in the Post-2015 Development Agenda’, much more needs to be done to put in place relevant indicators that are linked to the targets identified by the OWG.

For instance, in relation to proposed Target 16.10 with its focus on “fundamental freedoms”, it would be valuable to evaluate whether both legislation and practice protect civic space, in particular the freedoms of expression, association and peaceful assembly.  Similarly, under proposed Target 17.17 with its focus on encouraging and promoting civil society partnerships, it will be vital to measure the existence of enabling conditions such as mandated requirements for civil society involvement in official policy making processes at the national level.

Currently, there are a number of initiatives that measure civic space and civil society participation. Some of these, such as the World Press Freedom Index, the Freedom in the World survey and the Enabling Environment Index, are led by civil society organisations, while others such as the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation are being developed by multi-stakeholder initiatives.

With post-2015 negotiations entering the final phase, it is vital that political negotiators and technical experts are convinced that adoption of the above and associated methodologies will lead to better service delivery, citizen monitoring and accountability.

With the attention on the post-2015 agenda now focused on measurement, civil society advocates have their work cut out to also engage and influence the statisticians. Ambitious goals and targets will count for nothing if not backed by relevant indicators. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

Sahar Baker (left), with Ahed Baker (right) and sister-in-law in front of their beach camp house, with photographs of the four cousins killed by Israeli gunboats in summer 2014 while playing football on the beach in Gaza. Credit: Khaled Alashqar/IPS

By Khaled Alashqar
GAZA CITY, Mar 3 2015 (IPS)

“I have lost all meaning in life after the death of my child, I will never forgive anyone who caused the tearing apart of his little body.  I appeal to all who can help and stand with us to achieve justice and punish those who killed my child.”

As the tears rolled down her cheeks and with a rattle in her voice, 47-year-old Sahar Baker recalled the last moments of her ten-year-old son Ismail, who was killed along with three of his cousins after being targeted by Israeli gunboats while they were playing football on the beach during the Israeli attacks on Gaza last summer."We will not forget how our children were killed in cold blood without any reason. We hope that the Israeli army commanders will be tried before international justice and that they will be punished for the killing of the children" – Ahed Baker

Sahar’s plea for justice may soon be one step nearer now that the Palestine Government is set to formally join the International Criminal Court (ICC), which deals with war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas signed the Rome Statute, the ICC’s founding treaty, on Dec. 31, after the U.N. Security Council rejected a Palestinian attempt to set a deadline for Israel to end its occupation of territories it captured in 1967. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has said the Palestinians will formally join the ICC on Apr. 1.

Mohammad Shtayyeh, a member of the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), is reported as having said that a first complaint will be filed against Israel at the ICC on Apr. 1 over the Israeli war against Gaza last year and Israeli settlement activity.

Palestinian membership of the ICC “provides an opportunity to raise the issues on Israel’s use of force based on occupation and crimes against the people and the land in Palestine, where we did not have the capacity before to sue Israel for its crimes against the Palestinians,” Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Al-Malki told the press during a visit to Brazil to attend the inauguration ceremony of President Dilma Rousseff at the beginning of January.

The Baker family, who live in a beach camp in Gaza, is now hoping that Palestinian membership of the ICC will open the door for the prosecution of Israeli leaders and army officers for their crimes.

Sahar’s cousin Ahed Baker, father of Zakaria (10) and grandfather of Ahed Atif (9), shares her pain and bitterness. He is still looking for a way to bring the Israeli army to trial for the murder of his son and grandson, another two of the four young cousins killed on the beach. He told IPS that he and his family would do everything possible to ensure that their case makes its way to the ICC.

Sahar Baker holds a photograph of her ten-year-old son Ismail, killed along with three of his cousins during the Israeli attacks on Gaza in summer 2014. Credit: Khaled Alashqar/IPS

“We will not forget how our children were killed in cold blood without any reason,” said Ahed. “We hope that the Israeli army commanders will be tried before international justice and that they will be punished for the killing of the children.”

Palestinian leaders have long waved the card of membership of the ICC as a form of pressure on the Israeli government in their attempt to secure a Palestinian state.

However, apart from its political and legal benefits, Palestinian membership of the international court has created some serious implications for the Palestinians.

Israel has already frozen the transfer to the Palestinian Authority of tax funds owed to it. These funds are generally allocated for the salaries of Palestinian public employees and government operating expenses in Gaza and the West Bank, and the freeze is hampering the functioning of the Palestinian Unity Government and undermine the already weak public sector in Palestine.

Israel has also indicated that further ‘punitive’ steps will be taken soon against the Palestinians as a result of joining the ICC. Membership of the ICC thus appears to be the start of a new lengthy battle for Palestinians.

Some Palestinian human rights centres, including the Al Mezan Centre for Human Rights in Gaza City, are now working against the clock to compile documentation on the numerous cases of civilians who were killed during last summer’s Israeli war against Gaza, to be able to submit all the documents required for the ICC to investigate war crimes in Gaza and hold Israel accountable.

“Over the long years of occupation, there has been no equity for civilian victims and this, in my point of view, was a key reason that Israel waged three wars in less than five years. In fact, it has been due to the absence of justice and a sense that occupation is immune to accountability,” Issam Younis, Director of the Al Mezan Centre told IPS.

“Going to the ICC will bring justice to victims through international justice and ensure that there are no repeated offences of occupation without accountability,” he said.

According to Palestinian human rights advocates, membership of the ICC carries two overlapping purposes for Palestinian people and their leaders.

For the Palestinian people, of Gaza in particular, it not only opens an important door to achieving justice but also helps to criminalise the entire Israeli occupation establishment and its vicious atrocities against humanity.

For the Palestinian leadership, on the other hand, it seeks to strengthen the political, legal and diplomatic status of Palestine at the international level and pressure Israel to accept the creation of an independent Palestinian state in future negotiations.

What underpins the two goals is a historical desire for real justice and protection. Whether the ICC can deliver, only time will tell.

Edited by Phil Harris   

Food security and a balanced diet for all must be combined with the knowledge of indigenous peoples’ food systems and livelihoods as a contribution to sustainable development. Credit: IFAD

By Valentina Gasbarri
ROME, Feb 23 2015 (IPS)

Overcoming hunger and malnutrition in the 21st century no longer means simply increasing the quantity of available food but also the quality.

Despite numerous achievements in the world’s food systems, approximately 805 million people suffer from chronic hunger and roughly two billion peoples suffer from one or more micronutrient deficiencies while, at the same time, over 2.8 billion people are obese.

Unfortunately, the debate over how to address this challenge has polarised, pitting agriculture and global commerce against local food systems and traditional ecological knowledge, land-based ways of life and a holistic, interdependent relationship between people and the Earth.“Arrogantly and insolently, humanity has cultivated the idea of development and progress based on the belief that the planet’s resources are infinite and that human domination of nature is limitless” – Carlo Petrini, founder of the International Slow Food Movement

Organised to reflect on this, among other issues, the second Global Meeting of the Indigenous Peoples’ Forum, held at the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) from Feb. 12-13 in Rome, discussed solutions that combine the need to ensure food security and a balanced diet for all with the knowledge of indigenous peoples’ food systems and livelihoods as a contribution to sustainable development.

According to IFAD President Kanayo F. Nwanze, “indigenous peoples’ lands are some of the most biologically and ecologically diverse places on earth … It is only now, in the 21st century, that the rest of the world is starting to value the biodiversity that is a core value of indigenous societies.” Occupying nearly 20 percent of the Earth’s land area, indigenous groups act as custodians of biodiversity.

Participants at the Forum debated the potential of indigenous livelihood systems and practices – thanks to an age-old tradition of inter-generational knowledge transmission – to contribute to and inspire new transformative approaches of sustainable development, synthesising culture and identity, firmly anchored in respect for individual and collective rights.

However, the Forum described how many indigenous communities and ecosystems are at risk due to the lack of recognition of their rights and fair treatment by governments and corporations, population growth, climate change, migration and conflict. According to participants, the on-going exclusion of indigenous people devalues not only the importance of their communities but also the traditional ecological and agricultural knowledge they possess.

“Arrogantly and insolently, humanity has cultivated the idea of development and progress based on the belief that the planet’s resources are infinite and that human domination of nature is limitless,” Carlo Petrini, founder of the International Slow Food Movement, said at a Forum side event focused on the interconnections among nutrition, food security and sustainable development.

“The march towards this idea of progress has left women, youth and elderly people and indigenous populations at the end of the line with no one left to give a voice to them,” he continued. “All the drama of modern reality is now revealing itself: the ‘glorious march’ of progress is now on the edge of a precipice, the present crisis the fruit of greed and ignorance.”

Largely addressing the so-called developed world, the Forum described how many of the good practices and traditional empirical wisdom of indigenous peoples deserve to be studied with care and attention. For example, boosting local economies and agriculture, along with respect for small communities, are ways of reconciling man with the earth and nature.

At the same time, many indigenous communities have certain foods – including corn, taro and wild rice – that are considered sacred and are cultivated through sustainable land and water practices.  This contrasts with the global production, distribution and consumption of food which pays little attention to loss of water and soil fertility, genetic plant and animal erosion and unprecedented food waste.

The Forum also heard how issues related to the paramount role of indigenous peoples’ food systems are central to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) projects managed by the Center for Indigenous Peoples’ Nutrition and Environment (CINE) at Montreal’s McGill University in Canada.

“Years of work have documented the traditional food systems of indigenous peoples and their dietary habits to understand matriarchy and the role of women in food security and community peace in Canada,” said Harriet V. Kuhnlein, Professor Emerita of Human Nutrition and founding Director of CINE.

Kuhnlein described one of CINE’s projects, the Kahnawake Schools Diabetes Prevention Project, a three-year community-based project focused on a primary prevention programme for non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus in a Mohawk community near Montreal.

Among others, the project organised community-based activities promoting healthy lifestyles and demonstrated that “a native community-based diabetes prevention programme is feasible through participatory research that incorporates native culture and local expertise,” said Kuhnlein.

According to Forum participants, the reintroduction of local food products is essential for feeding the planet – “here we see real democracy in action,” said one speaker – and a major effort is needed to avoid practices that exacerbate the negative impacts of food production and consumption on climate, water and ecosystems.

There was also a call for the post-Millennium Development Goal (MDG) agenda to ensure a healthy environment as an internationally guaranteed human right, with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which will replace the MDGS at the end of 2015, encouraging governments to work towards agricultural policies that are compatible with environmental sustainability and trade rules that are consistent with food security.

It was agreed that none of this will be easy to implement and will require both a strong accountability framework and the will to enforce it, including through recognition of corporate responsibility in the private sector.

As the world prepares for the post-2015 scenario, the Indigenous Peoples’ Forum in Rome said that it was crucial to incorporate food security, environmental issues, poverty reduction and indigenous peoples’ rights into discussions around the new goals of sustainable development involving citizens, governments, academic institutions, private corporations and international organisations worldwide.

Edited by Phil Harris

By Kerry Kennedy
WASHINGTON, Jul 9 2014 (IPS)

Visiting Bangladesh has been a lifelong dream of mine, but all that I had heard about a people who love freedom so much that they have withstood great armies, famine and intractable poverty could not prepare me for what I’ve seen in the last three days.   The Bengali patriots’ courage and endurance in the face of the Pakistani army forty years ago is the stuff of legend in our family. I remember your great uncle Teddy (Kennedy) telling us about his visit to the Calcutta refugee camps, where tens of thousands lived not in tents but in sewer pipes.

Kerry Kennedy

In a small wooden room packed with women in bright saris, we met a proud shareholder of the Grameen Bank – ­the transformative micro-lending institution founded by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammed Yunus ­– who borrowed 5,000 taka (about 80 dollars) and bought a rickshaw, and then 20,000 taka (240 dollars) and bought a cow, and then 30,000 taka (480 dollars) and bought land.

Thanks to her hard work and the Grameen Bank, she now has a house full of furniture, a field full of food, water, a working toilet and a television set. She saves 100 taka a month, and this year she will receive 100,000 taka (750 dollars) from her savings.

We met a store owner and her husband, who borrowed from Grameen to buy solar panels, which have allowed them to expand their storefront and provide light to the brick house they share with three siblings and their in-laws. “I hope we can take inspiration from the people of Bangladesh and rededicate ourselves to democracy and freedom, knowing that the price may be high, but the sacrifice is well worthwhile” – Kerry Kennedy, President of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights

We met a young woman on a Grameen scholarship who will be the first woman in her family to go to college. She is majoring in computer science and plans to start a business in the Information Technology sector that will transform her neighbourhood.

We met ten women who sit on the board of the Grameen Bank, all borrowers. They’re angry at the government and concerned for the future of the bank. The government recently ousted Muhammed Yunus from the board of his own bank on the pretence that he had overstayed the mandatory retirement age of sixty.

Then, finding no other legal way to do so, the government cajoled the rubber-stamp Parliament to change a banking law for the specific purpose of ousting the impoverished women from the Grameen board and replacing them with ruling party toadies, who, the women fear, will transform the multibillion-dollar bank that has helped so many escape poverty into just another slush fund for kleptocrats to draw upon.

We met a dozen women, many of them lawyers, all of them leaders of NGOs that address pressing issues like indigenous rights, due process of law, violence against women, dowry battles, rape and environmental justice. Many have been arrested, and many live under daily threat. One said her husband had been “disappeared” in apparent retaliation for her work. They are scared of the nation’s security forces, which are known for kidnappings, torture and extrajudicial executions.

And yet they wake up in the morning, kiss their children and their husbands, and return to work, a daily show of quiet courage.

We met a woman who worked at the collapsed Rana Plaza sweatshop who said she never wants to work in the clothing industry again. I met another who said the same thing but, he added, “we are poor, and we must work.”

They were among a crowd lining the hallway and sitting at intake tables at the offices of the Rana Plaza Claims Administration, the non-profit group charged with addressing reparations for the victims of the Rana Plaza disaster [which left more than 1,000 dead after its collapse in April 2013].

It is an impressive operation, manned by a team of dedicated professionals in labour, law and computer science, intent on making pay-outs to every single victim for physical and psychological injuries and to the scores of dependents who lost the family breadwinner in the tragedy. They have 17 million dollars to hand out, and calculate the need will be closer to 40 million dollars, but the fund is voluntary and no law compels the brands to pay their fair share. While some have been generous, too many others have refused to participate, because no law compels them to do so.

We met Adil Rahman Khan, who has organised a team of 400-plus human rights monitors and defenders across the country to investigate and report on violations of voting rights; on crackdowns on free speech and assembly; on torture, extrajudicial execution, disappearances; and, moreover, ­on holding the government accountable for its failures to protect the freedom that the Bangladeshi people won at such great cost 40 years ago.

Adil seeks accountability in a country where 197 anti-corruption officers are presently under investigation for corruption themselves. For his actions, Adil lives under constant threat of death. Last year, after issuing a report documenting a massacre by government forces of 61 protestors, he was taken away and held without trial for 62 days in a filthy cell, ridden with bedbugs and rotten food.

And, of course, we met with my dear friend  [Muhammed] Yunus. He invited us to come to Dhaka for Social Business Day, where people from scores of countries across the globe gathered to share their designs and experiences with creating businesses which seek not profits for shareholders but solutions to problems like housing or food access.

I have always been struck by the sense of peace and joy he conveys.  But I never appreciated how incredible that was until I saw him in Bangladesh.  He is under unremitting pressure from a government that seeks to destroy all he has given his life to build. And yet he endures, and invites us to somehow find peace amidst the chaos in our lives and find our joy through service.

What an amazing place, what an amazing country.  As we in America celebrate our own Independence Day these days, I hope we can take inspiration from the people of Bangladesh and rededicate ourselves to democracy and freedom, knowing that the price may be high, but the sacrifice is well worthwhile. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

* Kerry Kennedy is also a member of the IPS Board of Directors.

Excerpt:

“Peace at home, peace in the world” is the official motto of the Turkish Republic. Coined in 1931 by the republic’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, it implies a causal relationship, but the events this week in Istanbul and dozens of other cities of Turkey suggest that causality can work in reverse order, too.

With protests continuing over the past week, two years of Arab Spring and intense socioeconomic unrest in southern Europe seem to be spilling into Turkey, which until now had stayed out of trouble.

Still, the economy is strong, although not as strong as it has generally been in the past decade. As a result, the similarities Turkey shares with northern and southern Mediterranean countries that are also going through a crisis have more to do with poor leadership.

Financial success, fuelled by foreign direct investment (FDI) in luxury real estate in Istanbul and along Turkey’s Aegean coast and by massive privatisation of state enterprises, has given the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) unparalleled popularity as well as an increasing feeling of invincibility."The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has unparalleled popularity as well as an increasing feeling of invincibility."

Since AKP’s 2011 electoral victory, this sentiment has translated into diminishing transparency and accountability by key government figures. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, AKP’s leader and the Turkish prime minister, and a handful of close collaborators have ostentatiously disregarded calls by trusted advisors to consider the average citizen’s concerns and be more inclusive of the 50 percent of Turkey’s population that has not voted for AKP.

Lack of government transparency, such as in southern Europe, and arrogance towards citizens and their fundamental freedoms, such as in the Middle East, have paved the way to an explosive manifestation of the sense that enough is enough, resulting in three deaths, over 1,000 injuries and 1,700 arrests.

Some observers claim that the crisis started with a kiss, referring to a ban in May by Ankara’s authorities of displays of affection by couples in public areas that triggered youth demonstrations in the capital. Others point to earlier signs of discontent.

In May 2012 and the following fall, Erdogan challenged women’s rights to abortion and caesarean section for giving birth, repeatedly proclaiming that women should have a minimum of three children. Women’s associations took to the streets.

More recently, the Turkish parliament, where the AKP holds 326 of 550 seats, passed legislation severely restricting the promotion and consumption of alcohol, and Erdogan has promised high taxes on alcoholic drinks.

Secularist Turks, some of whom have voted AKP in past elections because of the government’s economic performance, have begun complaining that Erdogan is interfering with people’s lifestyles in an unacceptable way.

At the same time, citizens are tired of an excessively liberal economy that has increased the income gap between the bourgeoisie and the working classes.

The decision to turn Gezi, the only green park in central Istanbul, into a shopping mall and luxury apartment complex was the trigger rather than the cause of the Gezi revolt. Cumhuriyet Avenue, adjacent to the park, has already been demolished to make way to a large complex of expensive shops, residences and shopping malls, while Taksim Square, a landmark of Istanbul, will be converted to a large mosque.

Independent research by a non-governmental organisation published in 2012 showed that Turkey, with a total population of 75 million, possesses 85,000 mosques, 17,000 of which were built in the past 10 years.

In comparison, the country has 67,000 schools, 1,220 hospitals, 6,300 health care centres and 1,435 public libraries. The annual budget of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism is less than half of that of the Directorate General of Religious Affairs, which represents the Sunni Muslims of the country (80 percent of the population).

FDI that has flowed into Turkey since 2002, mostly from Qatari and Saudi investors and U.S. and Dutch pension funds, has concentrated on speculative high-end real estate projects. The number of shopping malls grew from 46 in 2000 to 300 in 2012. Istanbul alone currently has 2 million square metres of malls under construction, according to CBRE, an international consulting firm.

A series of privatisations announced this year – a railway system, the national airline, major energy state enterprises, the highways and bridges network – will provide funds for undertaking grandiose construction projects: a third bridge over the Bosporus, a third airport in Istanbul, an artificial second Bosporus that will facilitate even more premium real estate developments, and the largest mosque in the Middle East, to be built in Istanbul.

The demonstrations that began ten days ago were spontaneous and peaceful and appeared to reflect citizen frustration with aloof state governance, but the zero-tolerance attitude adopted by the police and incendiary statements by Erdogan and certain ministers have transformed them into an unexpected political crisis that has uncertain implications for Turkish democracy.

IPS has spoken with political personalities and well known journalists who have been reluctant to discuss the situation as it evolves.

The personal secretariat of Fetullah Gulen, a Turkish Muslim theologian and head of a worldwide movement promoting moderate Islam and inter-faith dialogue, told IPS that Gulen will issue a statement at the end of this week. Currently living in self-exile in the state of Pennsylvania in the United States, he is followed by millions of Muslims.

As rallies continued Wednesday and student mobilisation has been announced for Thursday, the Turkish president, Abdullah Gul, and the vice prime minister, Bulent Arinc, both known for political maturity and moderation, have tried to offer limited excuses for police excessive force.

The true litmus test for the evolution of Turkey’s political climate will take place upon Erdogan’s return from North Africa later this week. But statements similar to those he made before his departure, such as “I will press with the Gezi project—if you don’t want a mall I will build a mosque” or labelling the protesters “marauders”, are unlikely to restore social peace.

To old hands in Turkish politics, the current unrest is reminiscent of the hegemonic style of the Democrat Party leadership of the 1950s.

“In 1957, Prime Minister Adnan Menderes and President Celal Bayar were quite confident because they had received 47 percent of the votes in the elections,” said Huseyn Ergun, a veteran politician and current chairman of the Social Democrat Party (SODEP), described.

“They had started to put sanctions on the opposition party and its deputies. They also had an investigation commission in parliament against the opposition and destroyed Istanbul landmarks. You know how all this ended.”

Indeed, their reign ended in 1960 with a military coup, history that Turks are not eager to see repeated in their lifetimes.

President Obama's new executive order could make the U.S. government among the world’s most transparent. Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, May 9 2013 (IPS)

President Barack Obama has initiated a potential sea change in U.S government accountability, unveiling Thursday an executive order mandating all federal agencies to make openness and public accessibility the default methods for handling official data.

Depending on how the order and related rules are implemented, the change could make the U.S. government among the world’s most transparent, at least with regard to non-secret information. Elated supporters – including many longstanding critics of government secrecy – suggest that the move now offers a potent model for other countries that have expressed interest in increasing their transparency."If you release the data, people will be able to find ways to analyse it in ways that make sense.” -- Dave Maass of the Electronic Frontier Foundation

“It’s really reassuring to see this issue get formalised in an executive order, which constitutes a major step in updating how government information gets disseminated,” Dave Maass, a spokesperson for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital-rights advocacy group, told IPS.

“One of the most important aspects of this order is that it will force the government not only to release vastly more data but to do so in a more standardised format. Over the past several years, many policy experts have been doing great stuff with ‘big data’, but so far not much of that has been machine readable, meaning that it’s been very difficult to collate and analyse.”

Maass notes that the move will impact on both agencies’ input and output responsibilities, and thus will do much to ensure that government information is accurate to begin with, prior to its release. Still, that now puts additional onus on analysts to come up with inventive ways of using any massive new streams of data.

“While some journalists have had trouble with big data dumps, there have been notable examples – for instance, surrounding WikiLeaks – in which we’ve seen that people are able to sort through huge amounts of data and come up with innovative ways of parsing that information,” he says.

“I think the key here is that if you release the data, people will be able to find ways to analyse it in ways that make sense.”

New mindset

The new moves are mirroring a broader international discussion over digital standards among fast-changing industries. While governments, including Washington, have been relatively slow to adopt such new standards, Thursday’s executive order should now speed that process up.

The new policies build on but greatly expand a series of steps taken by the Obama administration in recent years, beginning with a directive in 2009 that set a series of deadlines towards increased transparency. March 2012 then saw the release of a new government-wide strategy paper.

While advocates of government openness cautiously applauded these moves, many continued to push the administration to do far more, urging the adoption of a new mindset altogether.

Thursday’s order “is significantly different from the open data policies that have come before it”, John Wonderlich, policy director at the Sunlight Foundation, a Washington advocacy group that has been at the forefront of the push for greater government transparency, wrote Thursday on the group’s website.

“This Executive Order and the new policies that accompany it cover a lot of ground, building public reporting systems, adding new goals, and laying out new principles for openness … Most importantly, though, the Executive Order takes on one of the most important, trickiest questions that these policies face – how can we reset the default to openness when there is so much data?”

At least 48 governments have now committed to the Open Government Partnership, a set of principles in favour of greater transparency. Concrete implementation has been slow, however, and Wonderlich suggests says the United States now offers an important model.

The partnership “has spawned a huge number of similar commitments from governments around the world … [exhibiting] enthusiasm that needs an example of where to head next,” he writes, noting that Obama’s policy changes constitute a “new approach to open data, moving beyond rhetoric and aspiration”.

Troves

While many advocates are seeing the new policies in terms of facilitating public oversight, the White House is emphasising the entrepreneurial potential of this new data availability.

“One of the things we’re doing to fuel more private sector innovation and discovery is to make vast amounts of America’s data open and easy to access for the first time in history,” President Obama said Thursday.

The administration is calling the executive order “historic”. But it also points to previous examples of government data leading to major consumer services, including regarding government weather satellites, agricultural advisory services and the Global Positioning System (GPS).

“This move will make troves of previously inaccessible or unmanageable data easily available to entrepreneurs, researchers and others who can use that data to generate new products and services, build businesses and create jobs,” Todd Park, the White House’s chief technology officer, told reporters Thursday.

“In fact, just … two types of open government data, weather and GPS, alone have added tens of billions of dollars in annual value to the American economy, as basically the government has given taxpayers back the data that they pay for.”

A website, data.gov, soon to be expanded, will serve as a central hub for the new initiatives. Indeed, while the new policies are unique in their application across the federal government, recent years have seen a substantial increase in “open data” projects in federal agencies, covering health, education, finance and other fields.

Foremost among these is the State Department’s foreign assistance “dashboard”, which began operating in late 2010 and is seen as a central component in bringing the United States in compliance with a global standards agreement known as the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI). Aimed at offering regular data updates on all federal agencies with foreign assistance budgets, the U.S. system is to be fully up and running by 2015.

“Endorsed by the [Obama] administration in 2011, IATI has demonstrated that it is only through the use of open data standards and a presumption to publish that information can be understood, compared and become useful to a wide range of users. To its great credit, the new Executive Order recognises these principles,” David Hall Matthews, managing director of Publish What You Fund, a London-based advocacy group, told IPS, calling the policy a “step change” in Washington’s approach to open data.

“In the specific area of foreign assistance, data from U.S. agencies will be most helpful to other agencies – as well as to other international donors and to recipients – when it is accessible, timely, complete and as granular as possible. We are delighted that the new policy indicates exactly that.”

A Roboski solidarity march in Istanbul this past December. Credit: Jillian Kestler-D’Amours/IPS

By Jillian Kestler-D'Amours
ISTANBUL, Jan 15 2013 (IPS)

After over a year without accountability for a Turkish aerial bombing that killed 34 Kurdish men and boys, Turkey has come under heavy criticism for what many say is a widespread culture of impunity, especially when it comes to the treatment of its Kurdish citizens.

“It has been one year and there are no important steps we can see. Nobody has been arrested,” said lawyer Tahir Elci, head of the Diyarbakir Bar Association, which represents over 800 lawyers working in Turkey’s largest Kurdish-majority city.

“Usually, the prosecutors and other authorities protect the perpetrators and there are many barriers before the victims when they try to get justice,” Elci told IPS. “Even if perpetrators have not been punished, it is very important for relatives of victims to learn the truth.”

On Dec. 28, 2011, Turkish air force jets bombed a group of Kurdish villagers who were smuggling goods – sugar, fuel and cigarettes – from Iraqi Kurdistan back over the Turkish border along a well-known trading route.

Using drone footage of the area, Turkey reportedly mistook the group for fighters from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which is deemed a terrorist group by the United States and the European Union, among others.

Seventeen children were among those killed in the bombing, known as the Uludere or Roboski massacre, after the name of the village (in Turkish and Kurdish, respectively) where it took place.

The government set up a commission of inquiry into the incident in January 2012, but conclusions are yet to be released. The prosecutor’s office in Diyarbakir, which has been tasked with leading a criminal investigation into the killings, has neither completed its work nor released any of its findings.

“The lack of progress in an entire year on completing any investigation of the Uludere (Roboski) incident is very troubling because it is consistent with (authorities’) overall reluctance to account to the public for the government’s wrongdoing,” said Emma Sinclair-Webb, a researcher on Turkey at Human Rights Watch, in a statement.

“Holding state authorities who killed civilians accountable is crucial to upholding democracy and the rule of law,” she stressed.

The murder of three Kurdish human rights activists – including a co-founder of the PKK – in Paris last week has also drawn international attention to the ongoing struggle for Kurdish rights.

Some analysts have said the killings, which local police described as professional executions, may have been meant to derail a potential peace agreement, as Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan re-started peace talks with imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan in early January.

Umut Suvari is a board member of the Diyarbakir city council, and founder of the Youth and Change Association, which provides training and empowerment activities for Kurdish youth.

He explained that a young generation of Kurds is growing up more radical than their parents, thanks to increasing political pressure on Kurdish citizens.

Human rights groups estimate that the Turkish government has arrested thousands of Kurdish citizens over the past few years, including local mayors, academics, and lawyers. Many have been rounded up for alleged affiliations to the Union of Kurdistan Communities (KCK), a civil society group that the government views as the urban wing of the PKK.

In 2012, Turkey had jailed the most journalists of any country worldwide. Most of these journalists were Kurds imprisoned on terrorism-related charges.

According to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), “Broadly worded anti-terror and penal code statutes have allowed Turkish authorities to conflate the coverage of banned groups and the investigation of sensitive topics with outright terrorism or other anti-state activity.”

Kurdish language instruction was also only introduced to Turkish public schools as an elective course earlier this year. Before that, students were prohibited from speaking their mother tongue.

“People don’t care anymore. They are joining demonstrations knowing they are going to be arrested,” Suvari told IPS from his office in Diyarbakir, referring to increasingly disenfranchised Kurdish youth.

“But we are teaching (youth) something different here. They can see how they are powerful when they get involved. When you give them a chance, they are doing great things.”

Twenty-eight-year-old Kurdish activist Emrah Ucar was raised in Diyarbakir, but never learned to speak his family’s native language. Despite this, he said growing up in the city gave him a heightened political consciousness at a young age.

“It would be different if I grew up in Istanbul, but I grew up in Diyarbakir and witnessed many things,” Ucar told IPS. “We’re not afraid to lose anything because a lot of family and friends are already in jail.”

Ucar helped organise an event in Istanbul in late December to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the Roboski killings. Dozens of intellectuals and artists participated, and the event was broadcast live online, where it has since garnered over 500,000 views.

“In order to understand Roboski, (people) have to understand history. Kurds have been killed regularly and systematically since the establishment of the (Turkish) Republic. You don’t have to be a guerilla in order to be killed by the Turkish state. The Kurdish question did not start with the PKK,” he said.

(END)

By Terna Gyuse and Isaiah Esipisu
ARUSHA, Tanzania, Sep 27 2012 (IPS)

African leaders should take note of the lessons learned from the Arab Spring and realise that ensuring good governance and food security will avoid crises on the continent, says Kofi Annan, chairman of the Africa Green Revolution Alliance.

The former United Nations Secretary General said that food shortage was one of the triggers of the protests in North African and Middle-Eastern countries that lead to the ousting of Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in January 2011 and Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak in February that same year.

Annan was speaking at the African Green Revolution Forum (AGRF) being held in Arusha, Tanzania from Sep. 26 to 28. One of the forum outcomes is to develop concrete action plans for growing Africa’s agricultural sector and to promote food security on the continent.

“These are people who wanted to have a real say, on how they are governed, and by whom. They also wanted to play a role in their own political system,

“I think that if African leaders were to pay attention and understand that democratic systems have to work in Africa, we have to accept democratic rotation periodically and listen to the people and the civil society. With this we may avoid crises that we have witnessed in Africa. Remember, it is not just food, it is about food and political systems,” said Annan.

Several hundred delegates – representing African governments, U.N. and donor agencies, and transnational agribusiness companies like Yara and Cargill – have gathered in Arusha, Tanzania, to discuss the transformation of Africa’s agriculture. Even some of Africa’s farmers are present.

Agricultural and economic analysts at the forum told IPS that food security in Africa can be assured only if countries work and trade together without restrictions.

“The East African region has a huge potential for agricultural development. The only enabling environment to ensure that there is food security, is to harmonise policy issues in order to avoid bans on exportation of agricultural goods, and to avoid imposition of unaffordable levies,” Anne Mbaabu, the director for the Market Access Programme at AGRA, told IPS.

“We also need to harmonise grades and standards so that they are the same in all the five countries that form the East African Community (EAC). Yet, this will only succeed after putting in place proper infrastructure in terms of ports, roads and railway lines,” she said.

Tanzanian Minister for Agriculture, Food Security and Cooperatives Christopher Chiza, echoed her sentiments.

Kofi Annan (r), chairman of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) and former Secretary-General of the United Nations, and Melinda Gates (l), co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, from their visit to rural cassava farmers and a commercial village dedicated to cassava processing near Arusha, Tanzania.Courtesy: AGRF

“It is important to note that with security concerns, it is not easy for neighbouring countries to trade easily even if your neighbour is in a deep food crisis,” he said referring to the situation in Somalia, which made it difficult for humanitarian organisations to deliver food aid during the recent famine that hit the Horn of Africa region.

However, Chiza noted that there are still bottlenecks that the EAC must deal with before opening borders for uncontrolled import and export markets in the region.

“Political environments in our countries are an existing trade barrier. We need a fair amount of trust. One of the things many people are talking of is nationalisation of land and other agricultural resources in Tanzania. We should make it easy for people to invest in our countries without problems. There is also need for a common currency within the region, and many other complicated issues that must be sorted out within member countries before we finally unite,” he said.

The focus of the forum, said Annan, is to push on past a tipping point in scaling up the transformation of African agriculture.

“In the past, African governments did not focus on agriculture, but today it presents an opportunity to feed, employ and create global food security,” he said, adding that the goal is to support African smallholders’ transition from subsistence farming to running their farms as businesses, producing a surplus for sale.

Africa has the majority of the world’s viable but uncultivated land. And the land that is being farmed is under-utilised. The key to securing the rural livelihoods, strengthening food security, and Africa taking up its proper place in the global food system includes investments in rural infrastructure, expanding the adoption of better seed, fertiliser and techniques by Africa’s farmers, large and small.

“This is what we need,” Annan said. “To make sure farmers are well-organised and given the knowledge and support to play their full part in transformation.”

Annan addressed journalists alongside Melinda Gates, whose Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is one of AGRA’s major supporters.

Gates said her foundation’s agriculture strategy always starts with thinking of farmers’ goals, and how to make investments to support these.

“Smallholder farmers are incredible engineers,” said Gates. “They have the difficult task of running smallholder farms.”

She spoke about the way in which farmers she has met across Africa prioritise things like education and nutrition for their children, carefully assessing their options to try to create a surplus despite the challenges.

“Farmers need to be connected to larger market and not put their produce on market when price is low so that they can earn better incomes,” she said.

In order to ensure farmers are able to take advantage of changes in the countryside, AGRA and others are encouraging small-scale farmers to form collectives and associations to amplify their voices and efforts.

“Agriculture offers us the real opportunity not only to feed ourselves, but also to create employment opportunities for young people and make living in rural areas comfortable,” said Annan.

Rights groups denounced the decision not to pursue prosecutions of CIA officers who may have been responsible for the deaths of two prisoners in their custody. Credit: Fahim Siddiqi/IPS

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Sep 1 2012 (IPS)

U.S. human rights groups have roundly condemned Thursday’s announcement by Attorney General Eric Holder that the Justice Department will not pursue prosecutions of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officers who may have been responsible for the deaths of two prisoners in their custody.

The announcement appeared to mark the end of all efforts by the U.S. government to hold CIA interrogators accountable for torture and mistreating prisoners detained during the so-called “Global War on Terror” launched shortly after the Al Qaeda attacks on Sep. 11, 2001.

For rights activists and for supporters of President Barack Obama, it was the latest in a series of disappointing decisions, including the failure to close the detention facility at the U.S. base in Guantanamo, Cuba. They had hoped Obama would not only end the excesses of President George W. Bush’s prosecution of the war, but also conduct a full investigation of those excesses, if not prosecute those responsible.

“This is truly a disastrous development,” said Laura Pitter, counter-terrorism advisor at Human Rights Watch (HRW). “To now have no accountability whatsoever for any of the CIA abuses for which there are now mountains of evidence is just appalling.”

“It completely undermines the U.S.’s ability to have any credibility on any of these issues in other countries, even as it calls for other countries to account for abuses and prosecute cases of torture and mistreatment,” she told IPS.

“Continuing impunity threatens to undermine the universally recognised prohibition on torture and other abusive treatment and sends the dangerous signal to government officials that there will be no consequences for their use of torture and other cruelty,” noted Jameel Jaffar, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

“Today’s decision not to file charges against individuals who tortured prisoners to death is yet another entry in what is already a shameful record.”

In his announcement, Holder suggested that crimes were indeed committed in the two cases that were being investigated by Assistant U.S. Attorney John Durham but that convictions were unlikely.

“Based on the fully developed factual record concerning the two deaths, the department has declined prosecution because the admissible evidence would not be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt,” he said.

The two deaths took place at a secret CIA detention facility known as the Salt Pit in Afghanistan in 2002 and at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison the following year. The victims have been identified as Gul Rahman, a suspected Taliban militant, and Manadel Al-Jamadi, an alleged Iraqi insurgent.

The two were the last reviewed by Durham, who had originally been tasked by Bush’s attorney general, Michael Mukasey, in 2008 with conducting a criminal investigation into CIA interrogators’ use of “waterboarding” against detainees and the apparently intentional destruction of interrogation videotapes that recorded those sessions.

In August 2009, Holder expanded Durham’s mandate to include 101 cases of alleged mistreatment by CIA interrogators of detainees held abroad to determine whether any of them may be liable to prosecution.

At the time, he also stressed that he would not prosecute anyone who acted in good faith and within the scope of the controversial legal guidance given by the Bush administration regarding possible “enhanced interrogation” techniques that could be used against detainees.

Such techniques, which include waterboarding, the use of stress positions and extreme heat and cold, are widely considered torture by human rights groups and international legal experts. As such, they violate the U.N. Convention Against Torture (CAT), as well as the Geneva Conventions and a 1996 U.S. federal law against torture.

Holder’s position was consistent with Obama’s statement, which human rights groups also strongly criticised, shortly after taking office in 2009 that he did not want CIA officials to “suddenly feel like they’ve got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders and lawyering” to escape prosecution and that he preferred “to look forward as opposed to…backwards”.

In his first days in office, Obama ordered all secret CIA detention facilities closed and banned the enhanced techniques authorised by his predecessor.

In late 2010, Durham announced that he would not pursue criminal charges related to the destruction of the CIA videotapes. Seven months later, he recommended that, of the 101 cases of alleged CIA abuse referred to him, only two warranted full criminal investigations in which CIA officers had allegedly exceeded the Bush administration’s guidelines for permissible interrogation techniques.

Now that Holder and Durham have concluded that prosecutions of the individuals involved are unlikely to result in convictions, it appears certain that no CIA officer will be prosecuted in a U.S. jurisdiction. Prosecutions of Bush officials responsible for authorising the “enhanced interrogation” techniques have also been ruled out.

In 2006, a private contractor for the CIA was successfully prosecuted and sentenced to six years in prison for beating an Afghan detainee to death three years before.

Some commentators suggested that these decisions, including the dropping of the two remaining cases, have been motivated primarily by political considerations. Indeed, HRW director Kenneth Roth wrote in an op-ed last year that “dredging up the crimes of the previous administration was seen as too distracting and too antagonistic an enterprise when Republican votes were needed”.

In a statement Thursday, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee praised Holder’s decision. Republicans protested Holder’s referral of the 101 cases to Durham in 2009.

But rights activists expressed great frustration. Holder’s announcement “is disappointing because it’s well documented that in the aftermath of 9/11, torture and abuse were widespread and systematic,” said Melina Milazzo of Human Rights First (HRF), which has been one of the most aggressive groups in investigating and publicising torture and abuse by U.S. intelligence and military personnel.

“It’s shocking that the department’s review of hundreds of instances of torture and abuse will fail to hold even one person accountable.”

Similarly, the Centre for Constitutional Rights (CCR) noted that Holder’s announcement “belies U.S. claims that it can be trusted to hold accountable Americans who have perpetrated torture and other human rights abuses”.

It said the decision “underscores the need for independent investigations elsewhere, such as the investigation in Spain, to continue”. Victims and rights groups including CCR filed criminal complaints against former Bush officials in Spanish courts in 2009, launching two separate investigations by judges there.

The Nepali government is receiving significant national and international blowback for a draft ordinance that rights groups, including ones in the United States, say would allow for a widespread amnesty for some accused of human rights and other abuses perpetrated during Nepal’s decade-long civil war.

On Wednesday, Bishal Khanal, head of Nepal’s National Human Rights Commission, publicly complained that the body had not been consulted on the executive ordinance, endorsed by the Maoist-led cabinet and which would finally create a truth and reconciliation commission (TRC). Nepali activists said that government officials had acted unilaterally and failed to engage in public consultations on the issue.

Such a commission has been a longstanding demand following the end in 2005 of the civil war that led to roughly 13,000 deaths and more than a thousand disappearances. But observers are outraged because the proposal would empower the TRC to grant individual or collective amnesties during investigations into wartime atrocities. Those powers would not be contingent upon public input.

On Friday, four international rights and legal groups called on President Ram Baran Yadav to reject the ordinance on the basis that the plan would allow “political expediency to prevent accountability, entrench impunity and deny the right of the Nepali people to justice”. Their letter warns that the plan would violate both national legal decisions and Nepal’s international agreements.

Similar warnings came in a joint statement from the United Kingdom, United States, European Union, and nine other foreign missions in Nepal, pushing the Kathmandu government to listen to both the NHRC and victims groups in crafting the TRC and related decrees. For his part, President Yadav has expressed reluctance to accept the ordinance.

The proposal would set up a single Commission of Inquiry on Disappeared Persons, Truth and Reconciliation, despite the call for two separate bodies. Observers warn a single commission would result in a weakened process.

Furthermore, all of the proposed commission’s members, including the attorney-general, would be “political appointees”, the watchdog letter notes, “and are thus very much vulnerable to the kind of political pressure that international standards explicitly seek to avoid”.

Follow the self-interest

“This is a crucial point on the long and contentious road toward reconciliation with regards to Nepal’s civil war – there is almost a body that can investigate and bring light to a very dark chapter in the country’s history,” says Phelim Kine, a South Asia researcher with Human Rights Watch.

Human Rights Watch, along with Amnesty International, the International Commission of Jurists and TRIAL, the Swiss Association against Impunity, sent the letter to President Yadav.

“This ordinance is completely against the spirit of the move towards reconciliation,” Kine told IPS, and an amnesty “would undo much of the credibility that the Nepali government has in moving towards creating a body to examine this dark period”.

Impunity and shaky due process have long been grinding problems for Nepal, but they are being highlighted as the country negotiates a post-conflict transition while simultaneously attempting to write a new constitution. The body vested with overseeing the latter, which doubled as the national parliament, was disbanded in May.

New elections are slated for November, but the presence of the former Maoist rebels at the head of government has created widespread mistrust throughout Kathmandu politics and broader society.

The Maoist leadership has never hid its distaste for a truth and reconciliation process that didn’t include some amnesty component – particularly over worries that the top leaders could end up in the International Criminal Court, an option that international observers have repeatedly said would not happen.

Further, any reconciliation process in Nepal would almost certainly implicate prominent members of nearly all of Nepal’s political parties and security forces. Even the Nepal Army has long sided with the Maoists in pushing for a blanket amnesty for war-era wrongdoings.

For this reason, coupled with the infighting and power jockeying that has increasingly characterised Nepali politics during the transition period, those at the centre of power in Kathmandu are some of the least interested in ensuring a robust truth and reconciliation process.

“At this particular juncture in Nepali politics, the opposition will seek to use all issues it can find to build opinion against the government,” Prashant Jha, a political analyst, told IPS from Kathmandu.

“But in fact, even sections of the democratic parties are not averse to amnesty for war-time crimes. The greater opposition, then, will come from the international community, civil society, lawyers and sections of the media.”

Others have gone so far as to suggest that a truth and reconciliation process is being foisted on the country from outside.

“There is generally consensus on the need for a blanket amnesty, while many see the international community as ‘creating problems’ by demanding a powerful TRC, which would be a headache for the parties and the army,” one Kathmandu journalist told IPS on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the subject.

“Most politicians see the TRC as an alien concept that is being imposed on Nepal by foreigners. It is not and has never been a major issue in Nepali politics.”

Society-wide investment

While each post-conflict situation is different, Human Rights Watch’s Kine says that the evidence from similar experiences around the world is unusually compelling.

“If you look at the record of post-conflict countries that have been wracked by internal conflict, what is unanimous is that there must be some type of reconciliation mechanism,” he says.

“We recognise that internationally there have been other mechanisms that have been put forward to address the issue. But the Nepali government has already embarked on the road of setting up a TRC, and any mechanism that allows for amnesty would only widen divisions rather than heal them.”

Most importantly, the push for such a process has become part of Nepal’s society-wide investment in a post-conflict transition. Throughout this week, public events took place across Nepal, bringing together victims of war, lawyers, activists and politicians to express anger at the ordinance and to try to decide on a future course of civic action.

At an event on Wednesday in Kathmandu, according to a report by a leading human rights group, former Maoist leader Ekraj Bhandari accused political leaders of failing to engage on the issue because they were “focused on gaining power”, adding that the proposed commission “cannot address the problems of conflict victims”.

As the situation in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) continues to deteriorate in the wake of an armed rebellion that began in April, some activists have strengthened calls for foreign military intervention.

“The idea of an international force has divided us, but we have decided that there is indeed a need for a military force in the region,” Baudoin Hamuli Kabarhuza, national coordinator with the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region, told a panel discussion here on Wednesday, speaking from Kinshasa.

Kabarhuza stipulated that such a force would need to be international and under the auspices of both the African Union and the United Nations.

The issue is also currently being debated within the U.S. government.

“Is there a military solution to this problem? Can we effect a military change on the ground militarily to change a political outcome?” Steven Koutsis, acting director of the Office of Central African Affairs in the U.S. State Department, said on Wednesday. “If you boil everything down, that is the question we are discussing within the U.S. government and with our partners.”

Since April, eastern Congo has been increasingly torn apart by rebels that have specifically targeted civilian populations. Taking advantage of desertions among the Congolese armed forces in the spring, multiple armed groups have launched a series of bloody sectarian attacks.

At least one of these groups, known as the M23, accuses the Kinshasa government of violating a 2009 peace agreement with Rwanda. According to a U.N. report released in June as well as multiple other sources, the M23 is receiving support directly from the Rwandan government.

While there is currently an unofficial cessation in fighting between the M23 and the DRC government, there is no ceasefire agreement and no monitoring is taking place.

Meanwhile, according to Koutsis, “Both sides are reinforcing their positions, and if for some reason the ceasefire fails, the return to military action would be much more violent than we’ve seen so far.”

According to the U.N.’s refugee agency, more than 470,000 Congolese have fled their homes since April.

On Wednesday, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay noted the “sheer viciousness” of the violence, stating, “In some cases, the attacks against civilians may constitute crimes against humanity.”

Most capable force?

The United Nations itself already has a military contingent operating in Congo, an 18,000-strong peacekeeping force known as MONUSCO. But this “stabilisation mission” has come under increased criticism for a perceived failure to protect civilians.

“We are facing, again, a fundamental humanitarian crisis in eastern Congo, and thus far the international community, and in particular MONUSCO, have not taken the action essential to bring it to a rapid end,” Mark Schneider, a senior vice president with the International Crisis Group, a watchdog organisation, said in Washington on Wednesday.

“We believe that unless there’s more demonstrated willingness by MONUSCO to use its forces in a more robust manner within its mandate, it’s very unlikely that you’re going to be able to get the political backing that’s necessary.”

While there are differences in perception over exactly what MONUSCO’s mandate allows for, and thus to what extent it would be able to unilaterally confront the armed groups in eastern Congo, Schneider suggested the issue is fairly clear.

“There is substantial authorisation for MONUSCO to give the protection of civilians top priority – this is not an offensive action, but rather is designed to protect civilians,” he said.

“MONUSCO is a capable military force if it is directed to carry out the mission. Yet in the DRC, the people cannot understand why the most capable military force in the country is unwilling to use its firepower to implement its mandate.”

At the United Nations Security Council on Wednesday, U.N. Special Representative of the Secretary-General for the DRC, Roger Meece, underlined the priority that MONUSCO places on civilian protection. Yet he also characterised the “deterioration of the overall security situation” in parts of eastern Congo as “extremely alarming”.

Time for durable peace

The Security Council meeting was convened to discuss the Rwandan government’s continuing support for certain armed groups operating in eastern Congo.

On Wednesday, citing the unique relationship between the United States and the Rwandan government, Kabarhuza repeatedly called on the United States to step up its engagement in Congo.

For the past two decades, Washington has been a major financial backer of the Rwandan government. The United States also provides more than a quarter of the budget for MONUSCO.

The international community must call on the DRC’s neighbours, Kabarhuza said. At the same time, “America has an important role to play in the region, as it has a good relationship with the DRC government as well as with Rwanda and Uganda.”

“We are fed up with war; we are fed up with suffering. It’s time for the international community to support durable peace here.”

While Washington has made clear its determination to assist the Congolese government in fighting the Lord’s Resistance Army, which operates in four central African countries, Kabarhuza said that U.S. officials as yet have “said nothing” about the armed groups’ fuelling violence in eastern Congo, particularly the DRC-based Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), a group associated with the 1994 anti-Tutsi genocide.

Following speculation that the U.S. government sought to hold up the June publication of the U.N. report for including critical reference to Rwanda’s continued support of rebels in the eastern DRC, Washington did in fact withhold a token amount of funding, around 200,000 dollars, from the Rwandan government.

But on Wednesday, the State Department’s Koutsis expressed frustration with the U.S. government’s failure so far to significantly sway the Rwandan government’s actions.

“What do you do when you have a partner and it does something that’s so against what we see as our interests and the interests of other partners and the interests of its neighbours? How do you convince that country to change its policies?” Koutsis asked.

“Sure, we’ve made some strong statements and done some actions against Rwanda, but ultimately we need to try to convince Rwanda that it’s not in its own interests to continue” to support the M23, he concluded.

As leaders of the Group of 20 (G20) countries head into a second day of talks at the grouping’s seventh summit this week in Los Cabos, Mexico, calls are strengthening for a new debate around the group’s lack of accountability.

“The G20 has liberally imposed itself over other institutions to mandate those other institutions to take on its agenda,” Gawain Kripke, a researcher with Oxfam America, said in Washington on Monday.

“That’s potentially a problem, when you have this fundamentally unauthorised organisation setting the agenda and work plans for other institutions that do at least have bylaws and so forth.”

Kripke pointed, in particular, to the example of the current debate over a set of reforms being pushed through the International Monetary Fund (IMF). These reforms, which in part would see developing countries significantly increase their voting powers within the Fund, have been spearheaded by the G20 as a signature issue.

While these reforms are widely seen as positive, the fact that the G20 is a non-institutionalised grouping – it lacks a secretariat, for instance, and operates largely on the whim of rotating host countries – is worrying for many, particularly as the group’s scope has widened significantly in recent years.

The G20, which calls itself an “informal forum”, was created in 1998 by the finance ministers of 20 of the world’s most developed countries. In particular, the group included the fast-rising “middle-income” countries such as India, Indonesia, Brazil, Turkey, Russia and China.

For the first decade of its existence, though, the G20 was of little relevance. “No one cared about the G20 – no one wanted to work with them,” Bernardo Lischinsky, a senior advisor at the IMF, told a panel discussion here on Monday, at an event organised by New Rules for Global Finance, a Washington non-governmental organisation (NGO), and the Heinrich Boell Foundation.

In the midst of the 2008 economic crisis, former U.S. President George W. Bush made a surprise call on the G20 to come together for an urgent meeting in Washington. The group was tasked with devising a coordinated response to the unfolding events.

While that leadership proved critical then, Lischinsky said, the G20 has since expanded into numerous other areas. “I think they need to slow down, to go back to what they were doing before the crisis,” he said. “They need to focus on strengthening other institutions.”

Shadowy overreach?

Today, the G20 has expanded its number of working groups to ten. Beyond the group’s core focus of finance, these groups take on a broad swath of issues, including development, food security, trade and the “social dimension of globalisation”.

Yet the agendas, negotiations and even composition of these groups have remained shrouded in mystery.

“There is a whole second G20 agenda on development that gets absolutely no headlines,” said Nancy Alexander, director of the Economic Governance Programme at the Heinrich Boell Foundation in Washington.

“The G20 has created an action plan for development in all 173 countries that are not part of the G20, with no mention of issues such as climate change or equity. This plan does not request or suggest, but mandates actions for 25 national and regional organisations.”

The website of the Economic Governance Programme is considered a treasure trove of documents – otherwise impossible to find – relating to the G20’s inner workings. She added that in simply trying to obtain information on the membership of the development working group, she was turned down by four governments citing “confidentiality”.

“This is wrong – this stifles democracy,” she argued. “The G20’s role should be to give suggestions to qualified bodies. We need to have a discussion on whether the G20 is actually accountable to more representative bodies – the U.N., say, or the international financial institutions.”

Few people realise that the G20 is “actually far less accountable than the IMF”, she pointed out.

The lack of accountability can be particularly problematic given the degree of influence that large-scale corporate interests have recently built up over the G20.

The new working group on transparency, for instance, is comprised entirely of people from the banking industry, according to Jo Marie Griesgraber, the executive director of New Rules for Global Finance. Similarly, until recently, U.S. participation at the G20 was solely through the commerce department.

Los Cabos summit

Monday’s events in Los Cabos were arguably dominated by the so-called B20 – the “business 20” – while Tuesday morning started with a breakfast for heads of state and select business leaders.

Even within the group’s core focus on global finance, critics point out an overly heavy reliance on dogmatic positions. “In times of crisis you need a forum to address macroeconomic coordination,” said Thea Lee, a labour organiser in Washington.

“Unfortunately, the G20 has often come up with the wrong solutions, with an undue focus on neoliberal fiscal solutions – for instance, promoting more austerity when the problem today is a lack of demand.”

In the run-up to the Los Cabos summit, many have pointed out that the space for civil society engagement has very limited, a situation exacerbated by the high level of secrecy.

“The G20 is at heart a negotiating forum, and we have very little sense of how those negotiations proceed,” warned Oxfam’s Kripke.

“We have no understanding of countries’ intentions, positions – the process isn’t subject to public discussion and as such civil society can’t offer any help. Ultimately, that’s less likely to produce a good outcome.”