Residents of Clara Town, a low-income neighbourhood of Monrovia, Liberia, face sanitation challenges with the onset of the rainy season. Credit: Travis Lupick/IPS

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 19 2013 (IPS)

When the General Assembly unanimously adopted the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) back in 2000, water and sanitation were reduced to a subtext – never a stand-alone goal compared with poverty and hunger alleviation.

Now, as the United Nations begins the process of formulating a new set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for its post-2015 agenda, there is a campaign to underscore the importance of water and sanitation, so that the world body will get it right the second time around.

Ambassador Csaba Korosi of Hungary, whose government will host an international water summit in the capital of Budapest in October, says, “Sustainable development goals for water should be designed in order to avoid the looming global water crisis.”

Speaking to reporters last week, Hungary’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations said water resources have remained virtually unchanged for nearly 1,000 years.

“But the number of users have since increased by about 8,000 times,” he said.

With global food production projected to increase 80 percent by 2030 – and with 70 percent of water consumption flowing into the agricultural sector – Korosi said 2.5 billion people will very soon live in areas of water scarcity.

Addressing the Special Thematic Session of the General Assembly on Water and Disasters last week, Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson was blunt: “We must address the global disgrace of thousands of people who die every day in silent emergencies caused by dirty water and poor sanitation.”

The theme of the Budapest water summit, scheduled for early October, will be “The Role of Water and Sanitation in the Global Sustainable Development Agenda.”

The summit will be preceded by a High-Level International Conference on Water Cooperation in Tajikistan in August and World Water Week sponsored by the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) in Sweden in September, plus several regional summits and conferences in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

The meetings take place at a time when the General Assembly has declared 2013 the International Year of Water Cooperation – and even as the United Nations commemorates World Water Day next Friday.

Torgny Holmgren, SIWI’s executive director, told IPS that in a survey of U.N. member states on priority areas for post-2015 goals, food, water and energy were “a distinct top trio”.

For a second year in a row, he said, the water supply crisis was also among the top three global risks in the yearly survey by World Economic Forum in Switzerland.

“We are also seeing how water issues are being prioritised by actors outside of the traditional water community, most significantly from the food and energy sectors,” said Holmgren, a former ambassador and head of the Department of Development Policy at the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Amidst all this, he said, there is significant talking and thinking going on to develop new ambitions that will support the movement towards a sustainable and desirable world for all the so-called post-2015 development agenda.

“I am optimistic that the newfound awareness about the importance of water will be converted into far-reaching goals and targets on water as a resource, as a right and as a service,” said Holmgren.

John Sauer, head of external relations at Water for People, told IPS the United Nations took an important step to make water and sanitation a human right through a General Assembly resolution (64/292) in 2010.

Despite this effort, he said, its work to ensure lasting and affordable water and sanitation service delivery must evolve and innovate to meet the immensity of this challenge.

“As the U.N. shifts attention to the post MDG goal of universal coverage, monitoring should shift to ongoing service delivery,” he said.

This is critical to prevent the large number of projects that presently fail, Sauer noted.

“This means looking beyond projects funded, and beneficiaries reached, and instead looking at systematic capacity building within government, civil society and the private sector institutions. This also means creating stronger partnerships,” he said.

“If the U.N. could better demonstrate their impact, for example, by using indicators to show capacity built, this would be progress in the right direction.”

Together with non-governmental organisations (NGOs), the U.N. must rise to the occasion and increase transparency to reveal the true impact of their operations, he added.

Asked about the role of international organisations in resolving the impending global water crisis, Richard Greenly, president of Water4, had a different take.

He told IPS that organisations like the U.N. will always have little to no effect on the growing crisis in water and sanitation.

“But it is not for lack of very good intentions or much effort,” he added. “The fact is, we as a civilisation cannot give or grant another country into prosperity and health.”

It has never worked in the history of the world and it will not ever work in the water and sanitation crisis, he added. Every developed country paid for their own water development by developing water businesses, he argued.

“Commerce is the way out of poverty and although the U.N. is well-meaning, sustainable water development must be put in the hands of local citizens to solve their own water issues.”

What these people desperately need from the U.N. is the opportunity to develop their own water resources, he added.

Rather than a 10,000 dollar “donated” borehole or even 10,000 donated boreholes, they need the opportunity to develop their own way out like non-profit organisation Water4 (www.water4.org), which gives people the opportunity to hand drill water wells as a business for one-tenth the cost of a mechanised rig.

“This will allow rapid sustainable gains in the world water crisis,” Greenly argued.

SIWI’s Holmgren told IPS, “I am also seeing clear indications of both the need for and the openness to new collaborations and ideas.”

He said the post-2015 goals are being discussed as inclusively as our electronic means of communication permits. “We do see more cooperation emerging between governments, the private sector, academia and civil society.”

He said there are even cases where common ground for collaboration for a more water-wise world is found between competitors.

“It is of course most fitting that all these efforts are emerging during the International Year of Water Cooperation, and we at SIWI look forward to contributing even further towards improved cooperation and more concrete outcomes through the World Water Week on the same theme in September in Stockholm,” he added.

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”.