A Berlin Wall monument stands next to a Soviet sculpture at United Nations headquarters in New York. Credit: UN Photo/Rick Bajornas

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 26 2016 (IPS)

As the campaign for a new UN Secretary-General (UNSG) gathers momentum, there is one lingering question that remains unanswered: does the now-defunct Eastern European political alliance have a legitimate claim for the job on the basis of geographical rotation?

Of the nine candidates in the running, seven are from the former Eastern Europe. All previous secretaries-general have come from the four other regional groups, including Africa, Asia-Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean and Western Europe and Other States.

But none from Eastern Europe, which exists as a geographical entity only within the precincts of the United Nations.

After the end of the Cold War in 1990-1991, Eastern European nations joined either the European Union (EU) or the North Atlantic Organisation (NATO), or both.

These include: Bulgaria (joined the EU in 2007), Croatia (2013), Czech Republic (2004), Estonia (2004), Hungary (2004),Latvia  (2004), Lithuania (2004),Poland  (2004), Romania  (2007), Slovakia (2004) and Slovenia (2004).

And four countries awaiting membership in the EU include: Albania, Montenegro, Serbia and the former Yugolav Republic of Macedonia.

Jayantha Dhanapala, a former UN Under-Secretary-General for Disarmament Affairs and a one-time candidate for the post of Secretary-General, told IPS the end of the Cold War has transformed Eastern Europe from a political and geographical entity to a purely geographical group.

“Many of the East European countries are in NATO and the EU and their interests are closely linked to Western Europe – although some strains are showing in the wake of economic pressures and the recent migrant waves.

He said the principle of “geographical rotation” with regard to the UNSG position is therefore less strong than the vitally important gender equality criterion.

“The appointment of a competent and qualified woman as SG is therefore essential,” said Dhanapala, who lost out to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon nine years ago.

Eastern Europe should rightfully be an integral part of Western European and Other States. But the geographical group continues to exist at the UN purely to claim seats, including as non-permanent members of the Security Council, under the banner of Eastern Europe, according to some diplomats.

At elections for subsidiaries of the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) last week, Belarus got a seat in the Statistical Commission purely on the basis of its non-existent Eastern European credentials.

So did many others: Estonia in the Commission on the Status of Women; Belarus and Montenegro in the Executive of UN Women; Romania in the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and Albania and Moldova in the Executive Board of the UN Development Programme (UNDP)/ UN Population Fund (UNFPA)/UN Office for Project Services (UNOPS).

Since the creation of the UN over 70 years ago, the post of Secretary-General has been held by: Trygve Lie of Norway (1946-1953); Dag Hammarskjold of Sweden (1953-1961); U. Thant of Burma, now Myanmar (1961-1971); Kurt Waldheim of Austria (1972-1981); Javier Perez de Cuellar of Peru (1982-1991); Boutros Boutros-Ghali of Egypt (1992-1996); Kofi Annan of Ghana (1997-2006); and Ban Ki-moon of South Korea (2007 through 2016).

The nine candidates for the post of UNSG who made their presentations to delegates recently include: Dr Srgjan Kerim of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia; Ms Vesna Pusic of the Republic of Croatia; Dr Igor Luksic of Montenegro; Dr Danilo Turk of Slovenia; Ms Irina Bokova of Bulgaria; Ms Natalia Gherman of the Republic of Moldova and Vuk Jeremić of Serbia – all from the former Eastern Europe.

The two non-Eastern Europeans who are in the running include Helen Clark of New Zealand and Antonio Guterres of Portugal, the former from a Pacific nation and the latter from Western Europe.

When Clark was asked about Eastern European claims, she told reporters: ”When nominations were called for from Member States, they were called for from all Member States”.

“Already one senior representative from outside Eastern Europe has been nominated (Guterres of Portugal). I anticipate there will be other nominations. I judge it to be an open contest and my hope is that Member States will look at what are the challenges that the Secretary-General’s going to have to lead the organisation forward on and who has the best skills for that job.”

Currently, the strongest claims for the jobs are from women candidates.

Although the UN is one of the strongest advocates of gender empowerment, only three women have so far been elected President of the General Assembly, the highest policy making body at the UN: Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit of India (1953), Angie Brooks of Liberia (1969) and Sheikha Haya Rashed Al Khalifa of Bahrain (2006).

With women comprising half the world’s 7.2 billion people, the move to install a woman is perhaps the most legitimate of the claims.

James Paul, a former executive director of the New York-based Global Policy Forum who monitored the politics of the UN for nearly 19 years, told IPS there is the important question of whether a woman will finally be chosen for the post and the secondary issue of whether the East European bloc will be represented.

As for the longstanding complaints about secrecy, the recently-announced “open process” and “dialogues” with candidates, provide a small step forward in what has always been an outrageously secretive procedure, he said.

“But predictably little attention is directed at the biggest issue of all – a selection still based on the will of a small oligarchic group.”

This year, as in the past, the Secretary General will effectively be chosen by the “P-5,” the five Permanent Members of the UN Security Council (the US, UK, France, China and Russia), Paul pointed out.

“As in previous years, there will be little reference to the will of all the other countries, the concerns of the world’s people or the pressing leadership needs of the organisation.  Polite conversation in the General Assembly will not stop the P-5 juggernaut,” he argued.

“The P-5, with Washington always in the lead, has a record of choosing weak and compliant candidates for this post – people who will reliably cater to the interests of the powerful and agree to a weak and relatively inactive UN,” said Paul, an onetime writer and consultant on several projects with Human Rights Watch, Oxford University Press and Physicians for Human Rights.

The selections of Secretary General in 2006 and 2011 showed clearly that strong and dynamic candidates are set aside, that poor performance in the job is no barrier to re-election, and that the overwhelming majority of member states – even those sitting on the Security Council – have almost no influence over the outcome, he declared.

“Could this despotic arrangement be changed in favour of a more democratic process and a far better end-result?,” he asked.

Paul said no small-scale, incremental reforms will do.  Excluded governments and ignored citizens will have to say “no” in this round and again five years from now.

“The public is increasingly fed up with those who govern.  The P-5 will not be able to continue their despotism forever.”

But in the meanwhile, can the UN survive as the climate clock ticks towards midnight?, asked Paul.

Samir Sanbar, a former UN Assistant Secretary-General who headed the Department of Public Information (DPI) told IPS the Eastern European Group was initially a political alliance supporting the former Soviet Union balancing Western Europe and Other States.

While political lines were scrambled with the fall of the Berlin Wall, it seemed politically expedient to interpret it geographically mainly for balancing purposes, he added.

“Some would push the boundaries around to interpret it in general European terms,” he noted.

Geographical rotation was obviously not essential in electing two Scandinavians successively (Trygve Lee and Hammarskjold), he pointed out.

And a third European, an Irish General Assembly President, was in line when an Asian, U Thant became a surprise candidate, by a practical consensus, initially as “acting” UNSG, said Sanbar who served under five different UN secretaries-general.

When U Thant refused a second term “as a glorified clerk” it was not extended to another Asian. Instead Kurt Waldheim of Austria was elected.

While African diplomats presented Salim Salim of Tanzania to succeed him on geographical grounds, a Latin American Javier Perez de Cuellar was elected in a last minute vote in 1982.

As long as geographical groupings remain, however nominally, Eastern European candidates would naturally stake an obvious claim, said Sanbar.

But qualified women from anywhere in the European continent would have a more credible claim, he declared.

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

By Prem Shankar Jha
NEW DELHI, May 10 2015 (IPS)

In the following months, reports of the use of chemical weapons by Syrian forces multiplied. The most serious was an allegation that the Syrian army had used sarin gas on Mar. 19, 2013 at Khan al Assal, north of Aleppo, and in a suburb of Damascus against its opponents. This was followed by two more allegations of small attacks in April.

Prem Shankar Jha

Seymour Hersh has reported that in May 2013, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdoğan visited Obama, accompanied by his intelligence chief, and pressed him to live up to his “red line” commitment to punish Syria if it used chemical weapons.

But by then U.S. intelligence knew, and had conveyed to Barack Obama,  that it was Turkey’s secret service, MIT, that had been working with the Nusra front to set up facilities to  manufacture sarin, and had obtained two kilograms of the deadly gas for it from Eastern Europe, with funds provided by Qatar. Obama therefore remained unmoved.

Israel’s role in the planned destruction of Syria was to feed false intelligence to the U.S. administration and lawmakers to persuade them that Syria deserved to be destroyed.

On May 13, 2013, Republican Senator John McCain paid a surprise visit to Idlib on the Syria-Turkey border to meet whom he believed were moderate leaders of the Free Syrian Army (FSA).

Photos and videos posted on the web after the visit and resurrected after the rise of the Islamic States (IS) showed that two of the five leaders whom he actually met were Mohammed Nour, the spokesman of ‘Northern Storm’ an offshoot of the brutal Jabhat Al Nusra, and Ammar al Dadhiki, aka Abu Ibrahim, a key member of the organisation. The third was Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, known as the ‘Caliph of the Islamic State’.“Israel’s role in the planned destruction of Syria was to feed false intelligence to the U.S. administration and lawmakers to persuade them that Syria deserved to be destroyed”

The visit had been organised by Salim Idris, self-styled Brigadier General of the FSA, and the Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF), a U.S. not-for-profit organisation that is a passionate advocate for arming the ‘moderate’ FSA.

McCain probably did not know whom he was meeting , but the same could not be said of Idris and SETF, because when McCain met them, Nusra was already on the banned list  and Baghdadi was on the U.S. State Department’s list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists, with a reward of 10 million dollars on his head. What is more, by then he had been the Emir of IS for the previous six weeks.

As for the SETF, investigations of its connections by journalists after the McCain videos went viral on the internet showed a deep connection to AIPAC.  Until these exposure made it ‘correct’ its web page, one of its email addresses was “syriantaskforce.torahacademybr.org”.

The “torahacademybr.org” URL belongs to the Torah Academy of Boca Raton, Florida, whose academic goals notably include “inspiring a love and commitment to Eretz Yisroel [Land of Israel] .” SETF’s director was also closely associated with AIPC’s think tank, the Washington Institute of Near East Policy (WINEP).

When Obama ‘postponed’ the attack on Syria on the grounds that he had to obtain the approval of Congress first, Israel’s response was blind fury.

Obama had informed Netanyahu of his decision on Aug. 30, four hours before he referred it to Congress and bound him to secrecy. But Netanyahu’s housing minister, Uri Ariel, gave full vent to it the next morning in a radio interview, saying: “You don’t have to wait until tens of thousands more children die before intervening in Syria.”

Ariel went on to say; “When you throw gas at the population, it means you know you’re going to murder thousands of women, children indiscriminately. [Syrian President Bashar Assad] is a murderous coward. Take him out.”

Netanyahu reprimanded Ariel because he did not want Israel to be seen to be pushing the United States into war, but by then there was no room left for doubt that this is exactly what he and his government had been trying to do.

For, on Aug. 27, alongside U.S. foreign minister John Kerry’s denunciation of the Ghouta sarin gas attack, the right-wing daily, Tims of Israel, had published three stories quoting defence officials, titled ‘Israeli intelligence seen as central to US case against Syria’; ‘IDF intercepted Syrian regime chatter on chemical attack’; and, significantly, ‘For Israel US response on Syria may be a harbinger for Iran’.

The hard “information” that had tilted the balance was contained in the second story: a retired Mossad agent who refused to be named, told another German magazine, Focus, that a squad specialising in wire-tapping within the IDF’s elite ‘8200 intelliogence unit’ had intercepted a conversation between high-ranking officials discussing the sue of chemical agents at the time of the attack.

The similarity of method between this and the earlier leak to Der Spiegel makes it likely that it too was part of an Israeli disinformation campaign designed to trigger a fatal assault on Assad.

Obama gave his first hint that he intended to reverse the [George W.] Bush doctrine while talking to reporters on a tour of Asia in April 2014: “Why is it,” he observed, “that everybody is so eager to use military force after we’ve gone through a decade of war at enormous cost to our troops and our budget?”

He unveiled the change in a graduation day speech at West Point on May 28, 2014. “Here’s my bottom line”, he said. ”America must always lead on the world stage. If we don’t, no one else will. The military that you have joined is, and always will be, the backbone of that leadership.

“But U.S. military action cannot be the only – or even primary – component of our leadership in every instance. Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail.

“And because the costs associated with military action are so high, you should expect every civilian leader – and especially your Commander-in-Chief – to be clear about how that awesome power should be used.”

Obama’s choice of venue was not accidental, because it was here that Bush had announced the United States’ first strike security doctrine 12 years earlier.

Obama’s repudiation of the Bush doctrine sent a ripple of shock running through the U.S. political establishment. Republicans denounced him for revealing America’s weakness and emboldening its enemies. But a far more virulent denunciation came from Hilary Clinton, the front runner for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 2016.

“Great nations need strong organising principles”, she said in an interview with The Atlantic, “’Don’t do stupid stuff’ (Obama’s favourite phrase) is not an organising principle.”

Netanyahu got the message: he may have lost the U.S. president, but Israel’s, more specifically the Israeli right’s, constituency in the United States remained undented. No matter which party came to power in the next election, he could continue his tirade against Iran and be guaranteed a sympathetic hearing.

Since then he has barely bothered to hide his contempt for Obama and spared no effort to turn him, prematurely, into a lame duck President.

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. 

* The first part of this two-part analysis can be accessed here.

Excerpt:

Young boy sitting on a wall outside 'Way Home', a UNICEF-assisted shelter providing food, accommodation, literacy trainings and HIV/AIDS-awareness lessons to street children in Odessa, Ukraine. Because of unsafe sex and injecting drug use, street adolescents are one of the groups most at risk of contracting HIV. Credit: UNICEF/G. Pirozzi

By Pavol Stracansky
KIEV, Dec 9 2014 (IPS)

Marginalised communities and civil society groups helping them are warning of a “tragedy” in Eastern Europe and Central Asia (EECA) as international funding for HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis (TB) programmes in the regions is cut back.

The EECA is home to the world’s only growing HIV/AIDS epidemic and is the single most-affected region by the spread of multi-drug resistant TB (MDR-TB). For years, HIV/AIDS and TB programmes in many of its countries have been heavily, or exclusively, reliant on funding from theGlobal Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria.

But this year has seen the Global Fund move to a new financing model based on national income statistics, under which funding in many EECA countries has already been – or will soon be – heavily cut.“This [reduction in Global Fund financing] could lead to tragedy because governments are not yet ready to take on the responsibility for addressing the HIV/AIDS epidemic. I would like decision-makers to understand that this is not just [about] epidemiological statistics but that our lives and health are at stake” – Viktoria Lintsova of the Eurasian Network of People Who Use Drugs (ENPUD)

Some of those likely to be most heavily affected by the cuts say that the reduction in Global Fund financing is putting essential HIV/AIDS and TB services, and with it lives, at risk.

Viktoria Lintsova of the Eurasian Network of People Who Use Drugs (ENPUD) told IPS: “This could lead to tragedy because governments are not yet ready to take on the responsibility for addressing the HIV/AIDS epidemic. I would like decision-makers to understand that this is not just [about] epidemiological statistics but that our lives and health are at stake.”

At the heart of their concerns are worries over funding for not just medical treatment for existing patients but prevention and other services for at risk and marginalised communities.

Injection drug use has been identified as the main driver of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the EECA but HIV/AIDS is also being increasingly spread among men who have sex with men and sex workers – groups which are heavily marginalised because of political and societal attitudes to homosexuality and women.

TB, an equally severe health problem in the EECA, is closely linked to the HIV/AIDS epidemic because co-infection rates are often high.

Throughout the region, prevention and harm reduction services for marginalised groups are provided by civil society groups which rely almost exclusively on international funding.

Sveta McGill, health advocacy officer at international advocacy NGO Results UK, told IPS that the withdrawal of Global Fund funding could see many sick people slip under the health care radar.

She said: “It is affecting services provided by NGOs covering at-risk groups. These ‘low threshold entry’ services, while not necessarily medical interventions, are crucial to keep people from risk groups coming to centres where they get referred to medical institutions to get treatment and can access medical services as well.

“Often, they would not feel comfortable going straight to state health care institutions, and closing down these venues would mean that less people would be referred to state health care institutions.”

Critics point to rising HIV/AIDS infections in Romania in recent years as a sign of what could happen in other EECA countries when the Global Fund cuts back its financing.

The Global Fund ended financing for programmes in the country in 2010. According to data from the Romanian government, since then there has been a dramatic rise in HIV infections among people who use drugs: in 2013, about 30 percent of new HIV cases were linked to injection drug use compared with just three percent in 2010.

Under the Global Fund’s New Financing Model (NFM), the major change is a reduction in financing to middle income countries. Many EECA countries are now classified as middle income and critics say that while the organisation’s goal of looking to prioritise use of finite resources is sensible, national income data does not always accurately reflect the ability of people to access health care services, nor whether a country has the funds for an adequate disease response.

They point to studies showing disease burdens shifting from low income countries to middle income states, and poverty being greatest in middle income countries. Also, most people living with HIV live in middle income countries.

But some have also dismissed as naive the notion that, as the Global Fund wants, national governments will automatically fill the gap in funding left as the Global Fund cuts back its financing.

Many point to the situation in Ukraine as an example highlighting the problems of the NFM.

According to a report from the Open Society Foundations, Global Fund spending on HIV will drop by more than 50 percent for Ukraine between 2014 and 2015. This includes reductions in unit cost spending for people who use drugs by 37 percent, for sex workers by 24 percent and for men who have sex with men by 50 percent.

Meanwhile, the national HIV prevention budget was slashed by 71 percent in 2014 amid political and economic upheaval.

Lintsova, who lives in central Ukraine, told IPS of the problems drug users are currently facing.

She said that not only are there shortages of the right drugs to treat TB in some parts of the country, but that very few drug users have access to them. Places on opiate substitution treatment (OST) programmes are very limited and waiting times to join them long, sometimes fatally so.

“I know two people who died waiting to get on an OST programme,” she told IPS. “And there are other problems like a lack of needle exchange centres in rural areas, in fact a lack of any harm reduction services in small towns, which leads to high rates of HIV in those places.”

She added that without proper funding, the situation would not improve. “The only solution to these problems is financing,” she said.

But other stakeholders have also privately raised fears that a greater government role in fields such as drug procurement could see authorities looking to save money and procuring larger quantities of cheaper TB drugs of worse quality. Meanwhile, local legislation also makes procurement tenders long and difficult, leading, some health care experts predict, to governments running out of stocks of some essential medicines.

It is unclear how governments will deal with the reduction of Global Fund financing. The transition from Global Fund to domestic funding, although widely announced and anticipated, is not going smoothly in all countries.

Many are often unclear when the Global Fund will actually leave because no straightforward timing plan has been set. There are also specific problems in individual states. In Ukraine, in particular, domestic TB funding has been severely affected by the military conflict, struggling economy and currency fluctuation.

Late last month, these growing fears prompted 24 prominent NGOs in the region to send an open letter to the Global Fund warning of their ‘grave concerns’ over the allocation of funding in the region and calling for it to work with local groups and affected communities.

They specifically asked it to look at each country individually, rather than adopt a “one size fits all” approach.

The Global Fund declined to respond when contacted by IPS.

However, drug users who spoke to IPS said there was little hope of an improvement in the region’s HIV/AIDS and TB epidemics if the Global Fund fails to heed NGOs’ warnings.

Lintsova told IPS: “A lack of reaction to our calls could lead to problems accessing prevention and treatment programmes and a deepening of the EECA’s HIV/AIDS and TB epidemics.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

By Joaquín Roy
BARCELONA, Sep 11 2014 (IPS)

At last, after the obligatory summer break, the European Union (EU) has some new faces to fill the top vacancies on the team that began to emerge from the May 25 parliamentary elections.

Before the recess, conservative Luxembourger Jean-Claude Juncker had been appointed to the presidency of the European Commission, the executive body of the 28-nation bloc.

Joaquín Roy

There was stiff opposition from some governments, particularly from British Prime Minister David Cameron, but in the spirit of the Treaty of Lisbon the post was offered to the candidate of the political group winning most seats in the new European Parliament, the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP).

The second agreement was to leave German socialist Martin Schultz in his present post as president of the Parliament for another two and a half years. A balance was thereby struck between moderates of the right and of the left.

The thorniest issues remained to be faced. The traditional “Carolingian” (Franco-German) Europe was still in control of the bloc, and renewal was needed. Eastern Europe was demanding a larger role and there was a notable absence of women.

Juncker had already made it known that he would not accept a new Commission that did not have at least one-third women members. The established order, an unabashedly male-dominated club, gave no signs of correcting itself. The EU’s customary intricate balancing act was set in motion.“Renzi wanted to attack head-on Italy’s poor track record in European affairs in recent years, tarnished by the deplorable presence of former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi in power and in opposition, a handicap that affected his predecessor Enrico Letta before him”

The jigsaw pieces began to fall into place. Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt’s candidacy fell out of favour. Then followed a dual move by the community. First, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, a conservative from the entourage of former president Lech Walesa, was appointed president of the EU Council, made up of its heads of state and government.

Secondly, Federica Mogherini, the Italian foreign minister, was catapulted to the position of High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (FASP).

Proposing her candidacy, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi doggedly fought resistance from representatives of the Baltic states who regarded her as too soft on Russia, citing the example of her invitation to President Vladimir Putin to a meeting in July.

The sweetener of Tusk’s designation mollified the resistance of Eastern European countries, but not the reluctance of other nations that regarded the inexperienced Mogherini, just 41 in June, as not strong enough to face external enemies in a convulsed world.

However, Renzi, himself only 39, was playing a risky juggling act with several balls in the air. Mogherini was his message to the power clique in Rome to try to end the illusion that political respect requires having reached an age of around 100.

Moreover, Renzi wanted to attack head-on Italy’s poor track record in European affairs in recent years, tarnished by the deplorable presence of former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi in power and in opposition, a handicap that affected his predecessor Enrico Letta before him.

Furthermore, Renzi wanted to create an opportunity to influence European Union foreign policy through Mogherini’s cooperation.

Renzi’s bold proposal may backfire on him, precisely because of the weakness of the Italian system, which is tolerating leadership by a moderate Socialist so long as he does not shake its foundations.

Within the European community, Renzi will have to rely on the support of his Socialist counterparts, who have been going through a bad patch recently. They have suffered from the crisis, which has forced them to apply neoliberal austerity policies, causing heads to roll from Scandinavia to Portugal and Greece.

For her part, Mogherini will have to face traditional problems and new challenges. The establishment already mistrusts her because of her age. She will find little support from a group of people, most of whom could be her parents.

On the Commission, where she is vice president, she will hardly be comforted by the handful of women Juncker manages to recruit. On the Council she will have the support of only four ladies, led by Angela Merkel, in a boardroom full of boring men in dark suits and dreadful ties, each of them obsessed with managing foreign policy on their own terms and at their own risk.

The worst of the bad omens for the appointment is the suspicion that the EU’s hard core does not believe the position of High Representative to be important, given that the main security and defence competences remain in the national domains.

Mogherini’s second challenge, like that of her predecessor Catherine Ashton of the United Kingdom, is to cope with the enduring imprint of the founder of the position, Javier Solana of Spain.

However, her ambition and track record already surpass those of the eminently forgettable Ashton, a Brussels official who had already booked her ticket on the Eurostar train under the Channel back to London when she was unexpectedly appointed to FASP.

Mogherini can document her solid preparation for such a high-profile job over two decades, with her degree in Political Science, her exchange experience on an Erasmus scholarship in the French city of Aix-en-Provence, and her thesis on political Islam.

A mother of two with a gentle smile and light-coloured eyes, she gives the impression of an assistant professor working up the academic ladder towards a full professorship. But she could surprise some of the detractors who are already prophesying her failure.

She is a professional in a field that needs new vocations and fresh vision. She will lead the most impressive diplomatic team on the planet, made up of the ministries of 28 countries and the European External Action Service. She deserves good luck, not just for herself and Renzi, but for all Europeans and people beyond. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Excerpt:

This wall in Michalovce town in Eastern Slovakia was erected after complaints that Roma were walking through a non-Roma estate to the town centre. Credit: Ingrid Hruba/IPS.

By Pavol Stracansky
KOSICE, Slovakia, Aug 24 2013 (IPS)

The European Commission (EC) has demanded that Slovakia’s second city, Kosice, tear down a wall put up to segregate Roma – the 14^th such wall in the country and the eighth built in the last four years.

The 30 metre-long and two-metre high wall went up in Kosice, currently the European Capital of Culture, in June after locals in part of the city complained about repeated car thefts and anti-social behaviour from Roma living on nearby estates.

The EC has written to city officials telling them that the wall is a breach of the human rights values the EC holds.

Authorities in the Kosice-Zapad area of the city where the wall has been put up claim that it is not anti-Roma and has instead been built solely to provide secure parking space.“Walls such as these in Slovakia or anywhere else are not only physical barriers but also psychological dividing lines."

But activists say it is a symbol of how entrenched the exclusion of the minority Roma population is in the country and how desperate the need is for new policies on social inclusion.

Executive director of the European Roma Rights Centre (ERRC) Dezideriu Gergely told IPS: “Walls such as these in Slovakia or anywhere else are not only physical barriers but also psychological dividing lines, an illusory policy of protecting ‘us’ from ‘them’ which hinders any possible social inclusion of Roma in their respective societies.

“There are 13 other walls in Slovakia. They should all be removed. Governments and local authorities must invest their time and energy into developing inclusive policies that work, and discourage segregation in every manner possible.”

The wall in Kosice is the latest in a number that have gone up in locations across Slovakia with large Roma communities. Some have been financed by private individuals and built on private property, but many are erected using public funds.

International rights groups have repeatedly criticised the walls and called for their removal. But successive governments have failed to act on the issue.

Critics say that while politicians publicly call for racial equality and minority rights to be upheld, in reality little concrete is done to address the issue of Roma segregation and the condition of the estimated 400,000 Roma across the country – almost a tenth of Slovakia’s population.

As in many other parts of Eastern Europe, Roma in Slovakia claim that they face systematic discrimination at all levels of society. Some schools in Slovakia and other countries in the region are de facto segregated, with Roma educated in separate classes.

Many Roma live in poverty, sometimes in what are effectively shanty towns or on estates such as those in Kosice near where the new wall was put up. Criminality among such poor communities is a problem.

But in places where walls have been put up there has been no effect on problems with crime, according to local media. Police say they cannot verify the claim though, as they do not keep records of ethnicity when recording crimes.

Activists say that the walls are not just ineffective but that they simply reinforce divisions in society and prejudices against the Roma.

Laco Oravec of the Bratislava-based anti-racism and human rights advocacy group the Milan Simecka Foundation, told IPS: “These walls are more a symbolic than physical barrier, they won’t stop anyone physically walking through a particular area.

“But their symbolism is of course very dangerous and negative for the inclusion of the minority population.”

He added that the only way to improve the situation would be to ensure more is done to include Roma in society. “The walls always go up in places where not much effort has been taken to deal with Roma inclusion. These walls are the consequences of not dealing with Roma inclusion and the expression of a deep frustration on both sides.”

Local authorities’ approach to inclusion is generally one of apathy or ignorance, rights groups argue, with a complete lack of any systematic approaches to minority inclusion.

The Kosice municipality was recently criticized by Slovakia’s human rights ombudsman for demolishing a Roma settlement in Kosice under environmental laws, classifying homes as communal waste.

Kosice is home to a notorious conurbation of housing estates where Roma live. Criminality and anti-social behaviour is commonplace and there are often conflicts between authorities and residents while water, gas and electricity supplies are regularly stopped over claims of non-payment and theft.

The continued absence of any long-term programmes is only deepening already existing divides and prejudices among the majority non-Roma population in areas where anti-social behaviour is a problem.

Oravec said: “It should not be forgotten that it is hard from the non-Roma majority as well. They often face criminal activity in situations like this and they are sometimes as big a victim as the Roma in this all.”

For the meantime, the fate of the wall in Kosice remains unclear. The local council which had the wall built has denied that it is anti-Roma. It says the wall is a response to years of complaints from local residents.

But the higher Kosice city authority has said the wall was built without planning permission and a decision will soon be made on whether it should be legalised or pulled down.

It has also invited European Commission (the executive arm of the European Union) representatives to come to the city to see at first hand the problems caused by parts of the local community behaving anti-socially.

Roma rights activists believe that even if the wall is removed, it is not just one wall which needs to come down.

The ERRC’s Gergely told IPS: “These walls are a reflection of the misconceptions about and negative views of Roma. They clearly spell out for Roma that they are unwanted in their own countries…these walls segregate the Roma from the rest of society.

“In the very near future, Europe will be celebrating the 24th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. This should be marked by taking down dividing walls in Europe that separate Roma from the rest of the community.”

The United States is applying different standards in its public criticism of the human rights record of authoritarian states of the former Soviet Union (FSU), according to a new report released here Monday by the Open Society Institute (OSI).

The key variable, according to “Human Rights and the Failings of U.S. Public Diplomacy in Eurasia”, appears to be the perceived strategic importance of the specific country.

While the Belarus government is consistently criticised harshly for suppressing dissidents, reproaches to no-less authoritarian regimes in other FSU countries whose cooperation is needed to supply U.S. troops in Afghanistan, for example, are muted, according to the report.

“No one expects U.S. rhetoric with respect to adversaries like Belarus to be identical to its rhetoric about countries with which it has a security partnership,” said Tom Malinowski, Washington director of Human Rights Watch (HRW), after reading the report.

“But the degree to which U.S. diplomats in Central Asia sometimes seem to be apologising for U.S. policies on human rights was surprising to me. It would be a good idea if we hadn’t learned any lessons from the days of supporting dictators before the Arab Spring,” he told IPS.

Indeed, the 11-page report noted that, “U.S. officials publicly laud countries such as Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan that are vital to the U.S. mission in Afghanistan or other key interests, while saying as little as possible about these countries’ failings in the areas of human rights and democracy,” according to the report.

It said that such double standards not only invite cynicism toward Washington and undermine its credibility on rights-related issues, but could also eventually prove counter-productive.

“The long-term danger this perception creates is amply visible in public opinion surveys of attitudes towards the United States carried out in Egypt after the fall of Hosni Mubarak,” the report noted.

Mubarak, who resigned in the face of a popular revolt two years ago, was rarely criticised by Washington for his human rights record and manipulation of elections during his 29-year reign in major part because of his role in upholding the 1979 Camp David peace accords with Israel.

Washington’s long-time support for Mubarak, despite an 11th-hour call by President Barack Obama for him to resign, is widely blamed for the low regard in which the Egyptian public appears to hold the U.S.

Eighty-five percent of respondents in a University of Maryland survey of Egyptian opinion last May said their overall opinion of the U.S. was negative.

As indicated by the Egypt experience, the problem of double standards in U.S. human rights positions is hardly a new one.

During most of the Cold War, for example, Washington defended or only mildly criticised military dictatorships in Latin America and apartheid in South Africa for fear that harsh criticism could open the way for left-wing governments sympathetic to the Soviet Union.

The Obama administration’s more-recent reaction to the so-called “Arab Spring” has not been much different.

While repression by authoritarian regimes perceived as hostile or marginal to U.S. interests, notably Libya and Syria, were strongly denounced, the Gulf monarchies, including Bahrain where the regime has cracked down hard against the majority Shi’a population, has been handled with kid gloves. The U.S. Fifth fleet is based in Bahrain.

The OSI report recognises that “a completely uniform response to human rights is unrealistic given the many different relationships the United States has around the world.”

But, it argues, “it is imperative that U.S. public diplomacy around these issues be more consistent so that other governments take U.S. pronouncements on human rights more seriously and public opinion abroad is less cynical when the U.S. does speak out.”

In particular, the report contrasts the public treatment of abuses in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan – both of which host key components of the Northern Distribution Network (NDN), the land-based transport network used by the U.S. and its NATO allies to ship supplies to coalition troops their 90,000 troops in Afghanistan – with that of Belarus and Tajikistan whose strategic importance to Washington is far less, but whose governments are no more repressive.

Reviewing public statements by senior administration officials, including Obama himself, and U.S. ambassadors about bilateral relations, the report’s author, Amy McDonough, found a consistent “focus on the positive” for Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, as well as an emphasis on the notion that they were “key partners” with which Washington intended to “co-operate closely”.

“While democracy and human rights are sometimes mentioned as part of the bilateral dialogue, they literally take a backseat, coming farther down the list of issues addressed than those that the United States the United States deems more pressing,” the report noted.

On those relatively rare occasions – usually after a violent incident, such as last year’s labour protests in Kazakhstan, in one of the two countries – that the administration has spoken out, it has expressed concern about rights abuses. But in such cases, the emphasis has tended to be Washington’s eagerness to “work with” the countries in addressing these problems.

Similarly, while Washington has publicly stressed its support for democratic reforms and free and fair elections, it has eschewed the stronger language – such as “insisting” that such reforms be implemented as a condition of improved relations – that it has applied to Belarus.

Similarly, it has denounced specific incidents of repression in both Belarus in particularly blunt terms.

The contrast in how Washington reacted to last year’s elections in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan – both found to have been deeply flawed by observers from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) – showed a similar double standard, according to the report.

The re-election of Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev – with 96 percent of the vote – was greeted warmly by Washington, which noted only in passing “the shortcomings” detailed in the (OSCE) report but “welcome(d) Kazakhstan’s commitment to further liberalise the political environment…”

Not so the election in Tajikistan – the only one of the three Central Asian countries that is not linked to the NSN – where the U.S. embassy published a statement that cited the many irregularities found by the observers in considerable detail.

“We feel that U.S. policy towards Central Asia should have been more forceful on human rights issues,” T. Kumar, director of international advocacy at Amnesty International USA, told IPS.

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

Lack of family planning has led to a surge in unsafe abortions in Eastern Europe. Credit: William Murphy/CC-BY-SA-2.0

By IPS Correspondents
PRAGUE/WARSAW, Nov 14 2012 (IPS)

Pressure from the Catholic Church, social stigma, a lack of information about sexuality and reproductive health and limited access to reproductive healthcare services are putting the lives of hundreds of thousands of women across Eastern Europe at risk.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), “Women are over four times as likely to die in childbirth in the newly independent states of the former USSR as in the European Union.

“In some countries unsafe abortions cause over 20 percent of all registered maternal deaths, and Eastern Europe has the highest abortion rate in the world.”

In the ‘State of World Population 2012’ report, released Wednesday, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) urges all developed and developing countries to “increase financial support and political commitment” to reproductive health and “promote family planning as a right” to ensure women’s health and safety.

But far from heeding the calls of the international community, Eastern Europe appears to be sliding further away from these goals.

“The reproductive health situation in Eastern Europe and Central Asia is quite dire. The contraceptive prevalence rate in some countries is as low as (the rate) in least developed countries,” Werner Haug, director of the UNFPA’s Eastern Europe and Central Asia regional office, told IPS.

While governments drag their feet on implementing national reproductive health policies, women are left at the mercy of a conservative society that offers very little space or support for family planning.

The last few years have seen a push, in many cases driven by the Church, to reinforce or tighten abortion legislation and deter access to or discussion of contraception.

This and other factors such as poverty, say women’s rights groups, have already led to a thriving underground abortion industry riddled with health risks and, in some countries, a growing practice of do-it-yourself terminations that are dangerous at best, but often fatal.

Poland: a laboratory of unsafe practices

Poland has some of Europe’s tightest restrictions on abortions, only allowing termination of pregnancy in the case of rape, incest or if the mother or baby’s health is at serious risk.

Yet even when those conditions are met, doctors in this staunchly Catholic society often refuse to carry out abortions for their own moral reasons, says Dr. Dorota Pudzinowska, a lawyer at the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights in Poland.

“In principle, the law states that abortions should be allowed in certain circumstances,” she told IPS. “But the law also protects doctors’ rights to refuse certain procedures,” which means women are often forced to seek illegal abortions or go abroad to terminate their pregnancies.

“Approximately every third private gynaecologist provides abortion services illegally, which cost between 400 and 700 euros, but women have no control over the conditions in which these termination are provided” nor can they determine the skill level of the so-called doctors who carry out these operations, according to Aleksandra Szymczyk, an activist belonging to a prominent women’s rights group in Poland that organises an annual demonstration on Mar. 8 to demand reproductive justice.

Under the constant threat of being caught and potentially jailed for assisting women to terminate their pregnancies, doctors generally carry out these procedures hastily, in unsterile conditions, away from the gaze of the medical establishment or law enforcement officials.

Several women in Poland unable to receive any kind of operation at all have taken their cases to the European Court of Human Rights.

One was the case of a 14-year-old rape victim from the southeast Polish town of Lublin, known only as ‘P’, who was turned away from a number of clinics where she sought a termination. Church leaders would wait at the clinics to try to persuade her not to terminate the pregnancy.

The Court condemned the Polish state for the inhumane and degrading treatment of the girl, and ordered it to pay compensation.

That case, say campaigners, was just an extreme example of a climate around reproductive health in Poland that puts moral strictures laid down by the church ahead of women’s well-being.

“A major issue is that nobody knows how many abortions are conducted every year and in what conditions. Official data indicates just over 600 legal terminations annually, but it is common knowledge that many more abortions happen every year – women’s groups estimate that the number could be anything between 100,000 to 200,000 annually,” Elżbieta Korolczuk, another activist from the ‘March 8’ group, told IPS.

“Most abortions are carried out at home without any medical assistance, and judging from the content of Internet forums, many of the women do not use abortion pills but drugs that cause abortion as a side-effect,” she said.

“As a result, they expose themselves to a number of other side-effects and health problems, which they often don’t report afterwards out of fear and shame.”

Family planning is an issue that desperately needs to be discussed in Poland, said Karolina Wieckiewicz, a lawyer at the Polish Federation for Women and Family Planning.

“There is no counselling, no family planning advice available as part of primary health services,” she told IPS. “Even if a woman knows about the possibilities of avoiding pregnancy, she often does not have access to contraception.”

Contraceptives are available on prescription, but not every doctor will prescribe them. “And often pharmacists will refuse to hand over contraceptives because they say it is against their conscience,” Wieckiewicz said.

The problem is not limited to Poland, but is widespread throughout the region.

Reports in the former Soviet state of Armenia last month stated that there was evidence suggesting that the last few years have seen an upsurge in dangerous home abortions using freely available pharmaceuticals for the treatment of ulcers.

The pills have a contraindication of causing bleeding and miscarriages, and women have been using them to terminate unwanted pregnancies.

But doctors have reported that this method often results in severe bleeding and incomplete abortions, with many women being admitted to hospital needing emergency surgery.

Surgical abortions at a hospital cost up to 50 euros while these over-the-counter pills cost closer to 50 cents. The average monthly wage in Armenia is around 400 euros, effectively making professional surgical abortions cost-prohibitive.

No official record of mortality rates or serious health problems resulting from these illegal abortions can ever be obtained because of their clandestine nature.

However, the WHO has stated that even today up to 30 percent of maternal deaths are still caused by unsafe abortions in some countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

*Pavol Stracancsky contributed to this report from Prague and Claudia Ciobanu and Chloe Arnold from Warsaw.

Slovak doctors have launched an unprecedented campaign to rid their own profession of what is widely perceived as endemic bribery.

Launching the ‘Thank You, We Don’t Take Bribes’ campaign, officials from the Medical Trade Unions Association (LOZ) said the move would reassure the public of medics’ integrity and increase transparency in the healthcare system.

But experts believe it will do little to stop corruption in the sector.

Roman Muzik, an analyst at the Health Policy Institute (HPI) think-tank in Bratislava, told IPS: “It is an interesting and atypical measure, but it won’t significantly decrease corruption in the healthcare system. More effective measures are needed.”

The campaign – which will see hospital doctors wearing the stickers when treating patients and a special website set up showing which doctors have joined – comes amid a continuing overwhelming public perception of the country’s healthcare sector as having, as in many other Eastern European nations, a serious problem with bribery.

According to a 2010 study by Transparency International, Slovakia’s healthcare system was perceived to be the 18^th most corrupt out of 88 countries surveyed. Another study released this year showed one in four families in Slovakia had personal experience of bribery involving a doctor.

Patients often say that even when not directly asked for a bribe, they feel they must offer one to guarantee at least reasonable healthcare.

Interviews with patients have shown that payments of anywhere from tens of euros to thousands of euros are handed in return for priority on operation waiting lists or above-standard service.

The situation is the same, or worse, in other Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries, with healthcare in the Ukraine, Moldova, Romania and Hungary perceived as having particularly severe problems with medical workers taking bribes.

Healthcare in many countries in the region is grossly underfunded compared to the European average and very low pay and poor working conditions – which have caused mass strikes by medical workers in Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia in the last two years – are often cited as reasons for medics taking bribes.

But a recent research paper from HPI has dismissed this, instead suggesting doctors’ greed and the fact that “circumstances allow them” to demand bribes as more likely reasons for flourishing corruption.

A lack of clarity on patient rights and entitlements is also thought to contribute to the problem.

Gabriel Sipos, head of Transparency International Slovakia, told the local Sme newspaper: “It’s important that a basic package is defined showing what a patient is entitled to. If this is not clear, it creates room for ‘under the table’ negotiation.”

But others say that the causes of problems with corrupt doctors are more complex and date back to the communist regimes in place across the region until just over 20 years ago.

Handing over money and gifts in return for preferential treatment or access to certain products and services was regular and a normal way of life at all levels of society.

This created a culture and general acceptance of bribery which remains entrenched in some sectors today.

The World Bank has estimated that, in Romania alone, as much as 750,000 euros per day is received or offered in bribes. Local media have reported that staff at hospitals will demand from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of euros for anything from ensuring bed sheets are changed to approving operations abroad.

Romanian health minister Ladislau Ritli admitted to media earlier this year: “Corruption is so deeply rooted in our system that it’s really difficult to eliminate.”

HPI’s Muzik told IPS: “One of the reasons behind problems with bribery in healthcare is that corruption in general is deeply rooted in people’s behaviour. They used bribes before 1989, under the communist regime, and so they continue to use them now.”

He added that patients themselves also needed to play their part in stamping out bribery.

“Patients need to stop following the idea that ‘everybody is doing it, so why not me?’ and giving bribes.”

Patients have also been called on to make sure they report doctors who ask for bribes and along with its new campaign, LOZ has called for the Health Ministry to set up a special hotline where patients can report bribery.

While some doctors have been caught taking bribes after patients went to the police, prosecutions for corruption in the sector have been rare.

Many patients admit to being reluctant to report medics who demand bribes, fearing what some term as a “white-coat mafia” could do to them on an operating table.

Within the profession, few doctors ever speak openly of corruption or colleagues accepting bribes. But some will admit privately that it is not uncommon.

Sylvia Kucharova*, a psychiatrist from Zilina in northern Slovakia, told IPS that although she did not take bribes she was aware that the practice went on.

She said: “There are plenty of people looking for, and offering, ‘sweeteners’. It’s always been there.”

There is little expectation that the problem is likely to be resolved in the immediate future. But despite the doubts about the overall effectiveness of the campaign, the fact that it has been launched at all is a positive step.

Muzik said: “It has to be said that although the campaign is not likely to have much effect on corruption it is good that Slovak doctors are admitting there is corruption in the system, that they feel it is widespread and that they want to do something about it.”

*(Name changed on doctor’s request.)