The Government of Romania, a Balkan state to the south of Ukraine, and its humanitarian partners have offered extensive support to Ukrainians fleeing the escalation of the conflict with Russia since 2022. Beneficiaries receive food and humanitarian provisions from the Romania Red Cross. Credit: Filip Scarlat/Romanian Red Cross

By Catherine Wilson
BUCHAREST, Romania , Dec 23 2024 (IPS)

The days are short with bitterly cold rain in Bucharest, the capital of Romania, the largest Balkan country located south of the Ukraine. Over the border, temperatures in Kyiv will plummet to a daily average of zero in December as the Ukraine war grinds on.

Wars are bringing suffering and heightened insecurity to millions around the world, and food is not only a casualty of bombing and devastation but also being used as a weapon against civilians by warring parties.

Conflict is now the greatest driver of major food crises in the world, says the World Food Programme, and the situation is acute in the Ukraine, which continues to defend itself against Russian invasion, and Gaza, still under siege by Israel. And the threat of severe hunger for civilians caught in hostilities will only rise as winter sets in during the coming months.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, an escalation of tensions since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, triggered massive human displacement, with many fleeing into neighbouring countries. By 2023, Romania, with a population of 19 million, had witnessed more than 3 million Ukrainians arrive at its border, the vast majority being women and children.

“The bombs fell down near my house. I woke up; my 13-year-old daughter woke up. I got up my son and said, ‘You have five minutes; grab your things, and we are going to the metro station.’ We found a car to pick us up with the children and to the house of my sister, her newborn baby, and two more children of her husband. It was crazy. Everywhere there were queues. You couldn’t get money from the ATM, you couldn’t get fuel—nothing.” Iryna Sobol, a 45-year-old Ukrainian who fled her Kyiv home in 2022 and now resides in Bucharest, recounted to IPS. And, as the conflict spread, food prices rose.

As with other basic needs, food systems face collapse when military attacks destroy agricultural land and crops, forcing farmers to flee and damaging the critical infrastructure for transporting, storing, and selling food. Since 2022, the agricultural industry in the Ukraine has been hit with losses of USD 80 billion. And as people under siege face increasingly scarce food supplies, prices rise for what is available, making basic sustenance an even greater struggle for those who have lost their income.

Since mid-year, Russian forces have made aggressive advances into the east and Donetsk region of Ukraine, where more than 137,000 people have been forced to flee since August.

Ukraine refugees receive food provisions from the Romania Red Cross in Bucharest. Credit: Filip Scarlat/Romanian Red Cross

“The humanitarian situation is further exacerbated now that winter has set in. Russia’s targeted destruction of critical energy infrastructure has led to massive losses in Ukraine’s energy generation capacity, and the attacks continue, disrupting electricity, heating, and water supply and already affecting millions of households,” Elisabeth Haslund, spokesperson for the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) in the Ukraine, told IPS. Food is also a critical need, with 7.3 million Ukrainians, or 20 percent of the population, facing food insecurity this year, reports the United Nations.

In Bucharest, Andrei Scarlat, Manager of the Romanian Red Cross Humanity Concept Store, said he had witnessed a recent increase of newly arrived Ukrainian refugees registering for humanitarian supplies, such as flour, sugar, rice, canned foods, and hygiene products.

The Romanian Red Cross, which has assisted more than 1.3 million displaced Ukrainians with food, water, shelter, and health, is one of many humanitarian organizations that are partnered with the Romanian government in its acclaimed state response to the Ukraine refugee crisis. Within days of its neighbour coming under attack, the Balkan state coordinated an emergency operation at border crossings with the provision of shelter, food, and medical care to those fleeing. And it offers temporary protection to refugees with access to services such as health, education, housing, and employment.

An Action Against Hunger aid worker measures a baby girl’s arm using a MUAC band to assess nutritional health in Gaza, August 2024. Credit: Action Against Hunger

But, more than 2,000 kilometres to the southeast, conflict in the besieged Palestinian enclave of Gaza has already brought it to the brink of famine. In the tiny 365-square-kilometer territory, sandwiched between the Mediterranean Sea to the east and Israel to the west, 2.23 million Palestinians have endured years of suffering under an Israeli blockade. Now the military onslaught by the Israeli Defence Force in retaliation for a Hamas-led attack inside Israeli territory on 7 October last year, which left 1,200 Israelis dead, has killed more than 44,000 Palestinians.

And the destruction of basic infrastructure for habitation, including water, sanitation, health and medical facilities, and food systems, with the elimination of 70 percent of Gaza’s crops, has created unbearable living conditions for the more than 90 percent of Gazans who are displaced. In October, the World Food Programme warned that famine was imminent.

“The Gaza Strip is currently in a human-made famine. We are long past the point of ‘imminent famine.’ The first child was killed by Israeli-imposed famine many months ago and many more since,” Yasmeen El-Hasan of the Palestinian Union of Agricultural Work Committees in Ramallah, Palestine, told IPS. “The use of food and essential resources as weapons of war is a hallmark of Israeli systematic violence against Palestinians… aimed at starving Palestinians into elimination.”

In Northern Gaza, the focus of Israeli air and ground assaults over the past two months, more than 65,000 people are barely surviving in overcrowded tent shelters with no water and sanitation. The dire lack of food is causing severe malnutrition, especially in mothers and children.

And since October, Israeli border authorities have blocked and delayed food and humanitarian deliveries into the territory through the Kerem Shalom crossing. Consequently, in October only 5,000 metric tons of food succeeded in reaching Gaza, or one fifth of what was required, claims the World Food Programme.

“There has been no significant easing of restrictions on the entry of food and humanitarian aid into Gaza… and we were only able to deliver aid to half as many distribution points in North Gaza over the past month,” the spokesperson for Action Against Hunger, a humanitarian organization addressing hunger and malnutrition around the world, told IPS.

El-Hasan added that “the minimal food that is available is not accessible. The food consumer price index has increased 312 percent; aid that does enter is concentrated in small areas, and the Israeli occupation forces often attack Palestinians as they seek aid.”

A child in northern Gaza drinks water provided by Action Against Hunger to support displaced communities, October 2024. Credit: Action Against Hunger

A scene of destruction in northern Gaza shows demolished buildings and scattered debris, with a lone tree standing amidst the ruins, October 2024. Credit: Action Against Hunger

As the winter months unfold, the people of Gaza will face catastrophic conditions, with 90 percent of Gazans likely to experience severe hunger. “Cold and rainy weather is already affecting those in makeshift shelters, which are often constructed from tarpaulins, blankets, and cardboard, offering little protection. Children and the elderly are particularly at risk,” said Action Against Hunger.

On 12 December, the UN General Assembly voted for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza. But the survival of Gazans during the coming months will depend on the untrammelled passage of humanitarian aid. “There must be an immediate reopening of all border crossings, a substantial increase in the influx of aid into Gaza, and a guarantee of safe, unobstructed access for humanitarian organizations to deliver aid to all areas,” the spokesperson for Action Against Hunger continued. El-Hasan added that “the international community must also abide by their legal obligations and hold Israel accountable for its violations of international law, including the use of starvation as a weapon of war.”

In the Ukraine, the UNHCR and its humanitarian partners are responding to those who continue to flee fighting and need support as weather conditions deteriorate. But, as in Gaza, only an end to the conflict will provide the conditions for reconstructing Ukraine’s agricultural industry and food production, a goal that will take years and an investment of at least USD 56 billion.

IPS UN Bureau Report

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

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)

Organic farmer Slawek Dobrodziej with volunteers from Warsaw helping on his farm. Credit: Courtesy of Malgosia Dobrodziej

By Claudia Ciobanu
WARSAW, Aug 21 2014 (IPS)

Polish farmer Slawek Dobrodziej has probably the world’s strangest triathlon training regime: he swims across the lake at the back of his house, then runs across his some 11 hectares of land to check the state of the crops, and at the end of the day bikes close to 40 kilometres to and back from a nearby town for some shopping.

That Dobrodziej would still want to enter the triathlon, despite working daily in the fields from dawn until well into the night, speaks volumes about his supra-human levels of energy.

But it takes this kind of stamina to succeed as an ecological farmer in Poland.Community-supported agriculture “could help promote farm biodiversity because consumers buy different types of vegetables and products in this scheme, and it could also help to spread the certified organic model, which is only marginally developed in Poland today” – organic farmer Sonia Priwieziencew

Today, around 3.5 percent of Poland’s agricultural land is taken up by organic farms. Their number has been growing steadily over recent years, yet farmers complain of obstacles. Of the country’s some 1.8 million farmers, just 26,000 have organic certification (though some of these farms are just meadows and do not necessarily produce food), and only 300 of these are vegetable producers.

Under the most recent national policies (adopted in parallel to the new European Union’s 2014-2020 budget, which will finance Polish agriculture), Polish authorities have been cutting subsidies for medium and large organic farms, and they have practically eliminated public support for organic orchards.

Smaller organic producers have to struggle with complicated bureaucratic procedures in place for obtaining national or European funding.

Slawek Dobrodziej and his wife Malgosia clearly have the determination to penetrate these procedures. Over the past eight years, the couple have managed to build up a successful organic farm in the village of Zeliszewo, near the western city of Szczecin. They sell some 100 types of fruit and vegetables to consumers in several Polish major cities, including the capital Warsaw.

According to Malgosia, the book-keeper of the family farm, the first years were particularly rough. Selling large quantities of one product to food processing companies did not pay off: organic farming, which uses no pesticides, is labour-intensive, and the prices paid by the companies were not enough to cover costs.

The family managed to access some national and European funds, but the amounts were barely sufficient to buy some basic machinery. European money must often be co-financed by the recipient, meaning that obtaining more funds would be impossible without becoming heavily indebted to banks.

The Dobrodziej’s fortunes improved once they diversified their vegetable production and found opportunities to sell their produce directly to consumers in big cities. Selling to a bio bazaar in Warsaw was a turning point.

Additionally, for the first time this year, they started selling to consumers via two community-supported agriculture (CSA) schemes in the cities of Szczecin and Poznan, through which the roughly 30 consumers in each scheme pay them in advance for vegetables they will receive weekly throughout the summer and autumn months.

The CSA model is based on the idea that consumers share risks with the farmers: consumers enter the scheme agreeing to take whatever vegetables the farmer is able to produce given weather conditions. They are also able to volunteer on the farm, which provides an understanding of seasonality and farm work that few city inhabitants have. Malgosia says that CSA is an excellent way of offering financial stability to a small farm.

The first CSA was created in Poland in 2012 in Warsaw, and this year six such schemes are operational in the country, including the two served by the Dobrodziej. More schemes are expected to be launched next year, given the warm welcome the model has received from city consumers and the farming community.

At the moment, the Dobrodziej’s week is a mad rush among various cities in Poland, with night-long drives to deliver fresh products, followed by days in the field. Yet Malgosia hopes that next year, once the bank credits are paid, they will be able to rely only on the two CSA schemes and sales to bio bazaars in Warsaw and Katowice. Meanwhile Slawek dreams of setting up an organisation to promote the model nationally.

“We do absolutely too much work right now, and we spend too much time packaging half kilos of vegetables to sell to small organic shops,” explains Malgosia. “The CSA model seems very promising, because we get rid of the packaging ordeal and we also get money in hand at the start of the season from which we can make investments in the machinery we need.”

“I think many Polish farms could go this way, because the model is really economically viable for farmers,” says Sonia Priwieziencew, who together with her partner Tomasz Wloszczowski, runs a 6 hectare organic farm in the village of Swierze Panki, 120 km northeast of Warsaw, which has been serving the first CSA in Poland for three years.

Priwieziencew and Wloszczowski had been active for years in NGOs promoting organic farming in Poland and they wanted to put theory into practice.

“CSA could help promote farm biodiversity because consumers buy different types of vegetables and products in this scheme, and it could also help to spread the certified organic model, which is only marginally developed in Poland today,” says Priwieziencew.

After years of experience with advocacy work and promotion of the organic model among farmers, Priwieziencew is quite critical of the authorities’ approach to ecological farming. According to her, despite the fact that the vast majority of farmers in Poland today have small plots of land, the policies issued both by the Polish government and the European Union are more favourable to large-scale industrial farming.

Despite the new Common Agricultural Policy adopted this year in Brussels, which is supposed to provide guidance to farming in the European Union for the coming years, paying much lip service to organic farming and small-scale agriculture as means to ensure food security, limit climate change and preserve biodiversity, national policies and financing do not necessarily follow this direction, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe.

Yet, over recent years, citizens in these regions have become increasingly aware of the faults of industrial food production and numerous initiatives intended to safeguard small farming and promote ecological agriculture have been created across both regions.

This month, Warsaw saw the opening of the first cooperative shop bringing vegetables and other foods directly from producers, most of them local, and selling them at a discount to members of the cooperative who volunteer work.

Cooperatives and vegetable box schemes exist in most big Polish cities and are even developing at the level of neighbourhoods. A newly discovered passion for urban gardening in the country has led museums in Warsaw and other cities to open up their green areas to local inhabitants who want to grow vegetables.

Other countries in the region are not lagging behind. At least 15 CSA initiatives exist in the Czech Republic and, in addition, vegetable box schemes and urban gardens are continually appearing. In Romania, CSA groups exist now in at least six different cities, with some of the farms explicitly employing people from marginalised social categories.

”Every such new initiative gives small-scale ecological farmers a new chance to sell more and develop in Poland,” says Warsaw-based food activist Piotr Trzaskowski, who set up the first CSA in Poland. ”These farmers must survive because they are real caretakers of the land and the environment, unlike large-scale conventional producers who commodify the land, buying it, using it up and ignoring the impact on biodiversity, people and the environment.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Among the labyrinth of winding narrow streets just outside a major shopping centre in the Kumkapi neighbourhood of Istanbul is a rundown road, congested with shops and apartments stacked atop one another.

Istanbul’s “Somalia Street” – so called because immigrants from Somalia (and elsewhere in Africa) have adopted it as a staging post during long, rigorous journeys to find permanent homes. Credit: Hannah Tayson

Cars somehow manage to come barrelling down the street as people slowly move to the narrow pavement already full of food carts and clothes strewn out on blankets for sale. Trash lazily rolls past groups of men engaged in conversation while sitting on buckets or leaning against shop windows. The area feels oddly serene.

This street is host to a community of African refugees, with the majority comprising Somali natives, and aptly named “Somalia Street”. Through word of mouth and family ties, Somali refugees seek a temporary home in this nook of Istanbul, in order to find some respite from the political and natural disasters that have devastated Somalia for decades.

Istanbul has become a staging post for Somalis hoping to eventually travel on to Australia, Canada or the United States, migration trend watchers say.  Because of the constant population flux, it is difficult to estimate the number of refugees actually living on the street at any given moment, but street residents say that there are a few hundred Somalis living there.

Dalmar, 30, a Somali refugee, has only been in Istanbul for a month with his brother Amet, 20, and lives in a small apartment with 12 other refugees. This arrangement is very common here. Often, refugees will live in small apartments with 20 or 30 other people.

“Istanbul is very temporary,” said Dalmar. “The living conditions are poor. Istanbul is expensive, and it is very hard to find work here.”

Turkish labour laws require a passport and residence card for employment, neither of which refugees can easily obtain. This has led to much illegal work, usually consisting of manual labour and odd jobs.Through word of mouth and family ties, Somali refugees seek a temporary home in this nook of Istanbul [Somalia Street], in order to find some respite from the political and natural disasters that have devastated Somalia for decades

A refugee who has lived in Turkey for many years, Liban, 31, said he worked in various manual labour jobs when he first arrived in Istanbul. He pointed out that that the language barrier between Arabic and Turkish makes it “difficult to get jobs in the first place.”

Yet inhabitants appear to have established a unique community along the littered, cobblestone street. Most Somalis interviewed said they enjoy life in Istanbul. The community takes care of them as they arrive in droves. Often, refugees will find work with Kurdish shop owners, who seem rather protective of them.

During one interview with a group of refugees, a Kurdish man popped his head of his shop out to make sure they were not being harassed.

The Katip Kasim mosque stands on Somali Street, its low brick wall recently painted white and orange. The mosque is rather unassuming compared to the grandiose and elegant mosques around Istanbul.

Muammer Aksoy has worked as Katip Kasim’s imam for 19 years, and has seen the community change significantly. This area of Istanbul has always been a refuge for minority groups in Istanbul, beginning with Kurdish migrants from Turkey’s east. Romanian refugees arrived in the 1980s and 1990s. There has since been an increase in African refugees to the area, the majority arriving within the last five years.

During the holy month of Ramadan, Somalia Street unites. Somalis are very devout Muslims. Once the sun begins to set, the Katip Kasim mosque courtyard fills with people waiting in line to receive their dinner to break the fast, or iftar.

Imam Aksoy began the community iftar dinners eight years ago, after seeing a Somali refugee attempt to break his fast with a small piece of bread, and by drinking soiled water from the fountains used to wash feet before entering the mosque.

“It is my responsibility as the imam to take care of my community,” said Aksoy. “I don’t discriminate between people here. Everyone is welcome.”

The imam has enlisted a different shop owner on the street each evening to provide the iftar dinner for 300 people.

A long-time resident and family friend of the imam, Arzu, has also seen the change in the community. “Refugees come because they heard people take care of them here,” she said proudly.

Turkey and Somalia have an unlikely partnership. According to a 2013 report by the Norwegian Peace Building Centre, Turkey has established networks in Africa, Somalia in particular, to enable peace-building efforts and humanitarian initiatives. In turn, says the report, this “strengthens Turkey’s international image as a global peace actor.”

“The relationship between Somalia and Turkey is very recent. It was just in 2011 that this relationship began,” said Dalmar. “Now there are scholarships and programmes for students.”

Somalia receives more aid from Turkey than any other African nation, with 93 million dollars in 2011, and 1,500 Somali students received scholarships to study at the public Istanbul University in 2013.

Abdifitah, 25, who has been living in the community for one year, was a scholarship recipient. To take advantage of the opportunity, Abdifitah and his family moved together from Somalia. His family cannot find work, but has moved with him in order to support him.

“Istanbul gave me a chance to learn,” said Abdifitah.

Recently, Somali refugees have been moving to Turkey’s capital, Ankara, because work is easier to find, and housing is cheaper than in overcrowded Istanbul.

Liban lives with his family in Ankara, but makes a living as a translator for the local African football league in Istanbul. When asked if he would like to go somewhere else, he shook his head.

“When I was younger, I really wanted to go to America. Now, if someone handed me an American passport, I wouldn’t take it,” said Liban. “I have everything I want here.”

Freelance writer Hannah Tayson was a foreign correspondent intern with the Institute for Education in International Media (ieiMedia) in Istanbul during the summer of 2014. She can be contacted at htayson@scu.edu

Fifty Greenpeace activists were arrested on Dec. 9 during a symbolic action of "digging for gold" in front of the Romanian parliament. Credit: Courtesy of Greenpeace Romania

By Claudia Ciobanu
BUCHAREST, Dec 10 2013 (IPS)

Authorities in Romania have been attempting to bulldoze through public opposition to push through controversial extractive projects such as gold mining at Rosia Montana and shale gas drilling at Pungesti.

However, amendments to the national mining law, which would have given Rosia Montana Gold Corporation extraordinary powers to implement its project to build Europe’s biggest gold mine in the Apuseni mountains, failed to be passed by the Romanian parliament Dec. 10 mainly because of a lack of quorum.

Tuesday’s vote was part of a long-term strategy by the Romanian government to give the project a green light despite public opposition and legal objections.

While the parliament voted, hundreds of protesters occupied the headquarters of the ombudsman in Bucharest and camped outside the offices of political parties in the western city of Cluj.

If the law had been adopted, projects involving the extraction and processing of mineral resources could have been declared “of exceptional public interest” allowing project promoters to receive extraordinary powers, such as the right to conduct expropriations, skip permitting procedures for working on archaeological sites, and be reissued permits within 60 days if they were cancelled by courts.

The new law represented a means for the authorities to push the Rosia Montana project – and potentially others like it – in a less than transparent manner after a previous attempt to give special powers to Gold Corporation had been dropped due to public pressure.

In August, the Romanian government led by Social Democratic Prime Minister Victor Ponta proposed a draft law that declared the Rosia Montana gold project one “of national interest” and gave Gold Corporation extraordinary powers – expropriations, automatic reissuing of permits, etc.

The draft law sparked massive protests in Romania starting Sept. 1, with tens of thousands taking to the streets for weeks in a row across the country.

Faced with such discontent, the special parliamentary commission analysing the Rosia Montana law rejected the text in November, arguing that the project would be illegal on multiple counts.

In appearance, the decision by the special commission meant the project had been rejected.

Yet as the commission announced its conclusions, the Romanian parliament – dominated by Ponta’s party – was preparing amendments to the mining law which meant potentially giving all mining companies the same controversial extraordinary powers intended to be granted to Gold Corporation.

The political bet was that the amended mining law would be passed under the radar, as the text did not single out Rosia Montana and some of the public thought the project dead with the rejection of the first law.

It was only on Monday Dec. 9 that the public learned that the mining law would be voted on by parliament the next day. The full text of the new law was not available to the public at the time of the Tuesday Dec. 10 vote.

On Monday, the mining law was debated by parliamentary commissions. According to Stefania Simion, a lawyer who has been working for years on the Rosia Montana case and who observed the proceedings, most of the parliamentarians did not have a chance to study the amendments and there was virtually no debate.

In the Rosia Montana case, Romanian authorities are using secrecy and legal artifice to try to push through a project facing significant public opposition.

In the case of drilling for shale gas at Pungesti, in the eastern county of Vaslui, they are relying instead on policing.

During the months of battle over Rosia Montana, at the other end of the country a new campaign was born: in October, as U.S. energy giant Chevron was preparing to start exploratory works for shale gas in Pungesti, locals mobilised to stop the company’s operations. They set up a camp next to the land where Chevron was preparing to install exploratory drills and tried to block access by machinery to the site.

The villagers, mostly farmers, were worried about the impacts that fracking – hydraulic fracturing, the technique used to extract natural gas from shale – on a perimeter inside their village could have on their lands and water. Some told the Romanian media they had seen movies about the negative effects of fracking in U.S. communities.

Opposition to shale gas exploration – albeit not massive – has grown gradually in Romania over the past two years as successive governments gave exploration permits to several companies; rejecting fracking was one of the themes brought up by protesters during the January 2012 anti-austerity protests and this year’s Rosia Montana demonstrations.

When locals in Pungesti started protesting against Chevron in October, anti-Rosia Montana activists were already mobilised in major cities and ready to offer some support.

The villagers’ attempts to block Chevron operations and the police response were broadcast live on the internet from the early days. The national media also reported on Pungesti, after being criticised for failing to properly cover the anti-Rosia Montana mobilisation.

In their turn having learned from the Rosia Montana case, Romanian authorities responded decisively from the start to prevent the opposition from escalating. For weeks now, the hundreds of villagers protesting at Pungesti are outnumbered by military police deployed on the ground. Tens of people have been arrested. Protesters complain of police brutality and systematic harassment.

“As I camped at Pungesti last Friday, I saw the police attacking people, I witnessed at least four people who had to be saved by the crowds from police abuse,” retired engineer Gherghina Vladescu told IPS.

Responding to the accusations of police brutality in Pungesti, Romania’s minister of interior, Radu Stroe, told the national media Dec. 8: “Others were violent too, they broke down fences…Everyone is free to protest in this country as long as they do it peacefully.”

The minister was referring to the protesters’ tearing down Dec. 7 of a wire fence protecting the area for which Chevron was granted the exploration permit.

In November, villagers from Pungesti submitted an official complaint to the National Anti-Corruption Agency in which they accuse the mayor of Pungesti, who leased land to Chevron, of obtaining property rights over it through an illegal land exchange.

Since protests began at Pungesti, Chevron has suspended operations repeatedly saying that it “is committed to having constructive and positive relations with communities where it conducts operations”. Each time, it resumed works; this month, it filed criminal complaints against villagers for destruction of property.

On Dec. 8., Romanian authorities declared Pungesti “a special public safety zone”. This was needed to justify the ongoing police practices of checking all cars coming into Pungesti, keeping guard outside homes, ID-ing people at will and removing protesters from the site.

Claudiu Craciun, one of the prominent figures in the Rosia Montana and shale gas protest movements, said the situation in Pungesti brought to mind a dystopian future: “Imagine for a second a country where hundreds of industrial perimeters are permanently guarded by tens of thousands of police and private contractors.”

Resistance will continue, he said, adding, “The more the government tries to appear in charge of things, the weaker it is. Legitimacy and the use of force are in an inverse proportionality relation to one another.”

Eugen David, former miner turned farmer and inhabitant of Rosia Montana, speaking to protesters in Piata Universitatii in Bucharest. Credit: Claudia Ciobanu/IPS.

By Claudia Ciobanu
BUCHAREST, Sep 17 2013 (IPS)

Street protests are snowballing in Romania against a Canadian-led gold mining project in the Rosia Montana area in the Apuseni Mountains. More than 20,000 people joined a protest march in Bucharest on Sunday, and thousands in other Romanian cities took to the streets.

The Sunday marches represent the third major countrywide weekend mobilisation to oppose the project since Sep. 1. They drew the biggest numbers of participants so far. Smaller numbers of people have been protesting daily in Bucharest, in the western city of Cluj, and in others cities.

The protests erupted after the Romanian government proposed a draft law Aug. 27 that gives extraordinary powers to the project promoter, Rosia Montana Gold Corporation (in which Canadian group Gabriel Resources is the majority stakeholder). “It is also about the right of people to keep their properties, about our duty to safeguard a patrimony that belongs not only to us, but also to the world and to future generations." -- Claudiu Craciun, an active participant in the protests

According to the text, the company can relocate people whose homes are on the perimeter of the mine. Additionally, the law asks state authorities to grant the company all necessary permits within set deadlines regardless of national legislation, court rulings or public participation requirements.

Gold Corporation plans to build Europe’s largest gold mine at Rosia Montana to extract 300 tonnes of gold and 1,600 tonnes of silver over 17 years. The operation would involve the destruction of three villages and four mountains.

In all, 12,000 tonnes of cyanide would be used yearly and 13 million tons of mining waste produced each year, according to a project presentation submitted by the company to the Ministry of Environment.

The proposed law is meant to give the project a definitive green light after over 14 years in which Gold Corporation has not been able to secure all necessary permits.

In 2004, the Romanian Academy of Science – the most authoritative scientific body in the country – called for the project to be scrapped because environmental and social costs far outweigh benefits. Apart from environmental risks and displacements, the large-scale mining proposed by Gold Corporation would threaten the cultural heritage in Rosia Montana, a mining area since Roman times.

Hundreds of people in the 3,000-strong village have been opposing the project for years, setting up the NGO Alburnus Maior and successfully battling the corporation and state authorities in courts.

Contributing to the growth in public sympathy for the movement has been the seemingly close alliance between Gold Corporation, politicians across the political spectrum and mainstream media.

Political arch-rivals, such as centre-right President Traian Basescu and Socialist Prime Minister Victor Ponta, have at various points declared themselves in favour of the project.

Most major media outlets in the country have run Gold Corporation advertisements while failing to cover arguments against the exploitation. In a country where corruption is a big feature of public life, this consensus in favour of gold mining at Rosia reeked of backroom deals.

The predominant discourse about Rosia Montana in the public sphere has been that gold mining would create employment and enrich state coffers. According to the most recent agreement between the Romanian government and the company (annexed to the Aug. 27 draft law), Gold Corporation would employ 2,300 people during the two-year construction phase and 900 during the 17 years of exploitation. Over the duration of the operation, the Romanian budget is set to win 2.3 billion dollars while other benefits for the Romanian economy are estimated at 2.9 billion dollars.

The popular mobilisation now targets the Parliament, whose vote will effectively decide the fate of Rosia Montana. If the law is approved, even if it is challenged as unconstitutional in the Constitutional Court (the premises for such a procedure exist since a judicial committee in the Senate issued a negative opinion on the draft law), construction could begin immediately, pending the supreme court ruling.

“We cannot tell what will happen with this project, but all that we can say is that we keep fighting, that united we will save Rosia Montana,” Eugen David, leader of Alburnus Maior told IPS. “We are under siege right now in Rosia Montana, but in the end we will manage to lift it.”

The protests that began on Sep. 1 are remarkably strong for Romania. Since their start, misinformation in the public space has been abundant: the main television channels originally failed to cover the protests despite their size; on Sep. 10, media wrongly announced that the draft law had been rejected by the Senate; and Ponta declared that the project could not go ahead against popular will, only to later express again support for the project.

In spite of this, protesters – who function according to a non-hierarchical structure and have no official leaders – have skillfully kept the public informed and engaged via Facebook. The weekly hours-long marches go through neighbourhoods with the goal of spreading the word about opposition to the project and showing that protesters are not hooligans as depicted on TV.

Their strategy seems to have worked since numbers this Sunday were bigger than ever. The first days of mobilisation brought mostly youth to the streets, but older participants and youth-parent couples are increasingly visible. After two weeks of well-mannered street actions, police presence on Sunday can be considered symbolic.

“It is very interesting that such a revolt began with a case of protecting the environment, but this is not only about the environment,” Claudiu Craciun, an active participant in the protests, told IPS. “It is also about the right of people to keep their properties, about our duty to safeguard a patrimony that belongs not only to us, but also to the world and to future generations.

“The Rosia Montana case – in which you see legislation custom made to serve the interests of a corporation – highlights some failures of both democratic institutions and of the economic system, capitalism in a broader sense,” Craciun added.

“Rosia Montana is the battle of the present and of the next decades,” the activist said. “It illustrates the end of post-1989 cleavages [communist vs anti-communist, European vs. non-European] and the emergence of new ones. People today confront a corrupted political class backed up by a corporation and a sold out media; and they ask for an improved democratic process, for adding a participatory democracy dimension to traditional democratic mechanisms.”

Most migrant children within the European Union are from member countries like Romania and Hungary, as well as from Turkey. Credit: Daan Bauwens/IPS

By Sabine Clappaert
BRUSSELS, Apr 2 2013 (IPS)

Twenty-two-year-old Dario (not his real name) came to Belgium from Brazil in 2005. Just a teenager at the time, he told IPS he “came to escape the economic, social and political conditions in Brazil and to learn another language”.

“In the beginning it was hard. Not speaking the language prevented me from doing certain jobs and there was also the risk of getting sick because I have no health insurance.”

Luckily, he says, the large Brazilian community in Brussels welcomed him with open arms.

“Of course one also suffers from the financial and moral exploitation of certain people who take advantage, but I don’t complain. Life is a sequence of good and bad experiences; it is part of the risk I took to better my life.”

The promise of a better future remains the principle reason why scores of children – some as young as three years, others as old as seventeen – flock to Europe, even though there is no guarantee that what they find here will be worth the trip.

While it is estimated that there are between 1.6 and 3.8 million irregular migrants in the European Union, there are no reliable figures on the percentage that are children.

Hard data is almost impossible to pin down since these children represent a multifaceted and diverse group, experts say. Most hail from other European countries like Turkey, Hungary and Romania, but a large number also come from Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria.

Some enter the EU independently, some come with families, or were born to parents without legal status in a particular country.

Motives for migration also vary, and include family reunification, protection from persecution, or better living conditions, education and economic opportunities. A large number of these children, mostly those from Hungary and Romania, are also victims of trafficking.

Last year the UK police, with the help of Romanian authorities, rolled up a complex trafficking network run from Romania, which was using children to rake in hundreds of thousands of pounds through street crime and benefit fraud.

In a series of dawn raids codenamed “Operation Norman” officers found 103 migrant children crammed into just 16 addresses in London.

The operation took place against the backdrop of a steady rise in the number of children arriving unaccompanied in Europe, risking detention. Although some manage to enter state welfare systems, others end up living in hiding.

The financial crisis has intensified the situation, especially in EU border countries like Greece.

“Despite the European Commission’s efforts to promote harmonised regulations, the normative framework in the EU27 for the protection of undocumented migrant children is still quite diverse,” Maria Grazia Giammarinaro, special representative and coordinator for combatting trafficking in human beings at the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), told IPS.

“The implementation of national legislation is even more fragmented. Therefore, unfortunately, a common and effective child protection system does not exist at the EU level.”

Organisations like the Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants (PICUM) have raised the alarm about the need to guarantee the basic human rights of Europe’s “invisible” children.

“Undocumented children are in a position of triple vulnerability: as children above all, as migrants and because of their irregular status,” Michelle LeVoy of PICUM told IPS. Many families are simply unaware of their rights to housing, food and education, she said.

Despite numerous explicit and legally binding international and regional instruments that guarantee children access to their civil and social rights, countless barricades stand between rights on paper and rights in practice.

“In Spain, for instance, undocumented children in theory have the same access to healthcare as Spanish nationals do,” said LeVoy. But implementation of a new healthcare law in September 2012 aimed at restricting undocumented adults’ access to healthcare services also impacted their children.

In some countries only “essential” or “urgent” medical care may be free of charge for undocumented children, broadly defined terms that often lead to discretionary and unpredictable application of healthcare legislation.

Barriers around education are equally complex. While the constitutions of several countries grant everyone the right to education, red tape often keeps undocumented children out of the system.

“(P)ractical and concrete barriers, rather than direct legal discrimination, make integration (into the education system) almost impossible,” according to LeVoy. “Throughout the EU undocumented children are often prevented from enrolling in schools simply because they lack identification documents and a permanent address.

“Admission depends on the decision of directors and school administrators, and those decisions are arbitrary,” she said.

OSCE’s Giammarinaro believes that “member states should establish effective procedures based on the best interests of the child, whose actual implementation should be adequately monitored, especially in the case of unaccompanied and separated children”.

A second disturbing trend is the increasing number of reports of unaccompanied foreign minors disappearing from immigration reception centres 
and residential care, often without a trace.

A study by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights reveals that the disappearance of children from shelters and similar facilities is widespread, and that there is a high risk of these children falling victim to trafficking.

“Children and adolescents on the move are particularly vulnerable to abuse and exploitation,” says Giammarinaro. “They can be exploited in prostitution, forced labour, organised begging and can be compelled to commit crimes. Therefore, the prevention of trafficking and the protection of undocumented children are inextricably linked.”

Experts have identified teenagers between the ages of 13 and 
18 years as a major at-risk group for trafficking in Eastern Europe. Even those children aware of the dangers of trafficking say they were nonetheless ready to migrate using insecure channels, according to recent UNICEF research in Moldova.

Idealised perceptions of a better lifestyle coupled with stories of success from people who have been abroad encourage risk-taking among disadvantaged youth, researchers say.

With unemployment hitting record-levels across the EU, stemming the tide of young people in search of a better future seems almost impossible and for many governments the only perceived solution, albeit short-term, is the expatriation of so-called “unwanted immigrants”.

In 2010, the OCSE advised that migrant, undocumented, unaccompanied, separated and trafficked children should not automatically be returned to their country of origin, or resettled or transferred to a third country, stating that migration control concerns cannot override the best interests of a child.

“In the absence of the availability of care provided by parents or members of the extended family, return to the country of origin should, in principle, not take place without advance secure and concrete arrangements of care and custodial responsibilities upon return to the country of origin.”

New HIV infections among Romanian drug users have grown exponentially over the past couple of years, from three to five cases annually between 2007 and 2009, to 98 just in the first half of 2012.

The year 2011 saw 129 new cases of HIV among injecting drug users after 12 new cases had been registered in 2010. Injecting drugs has now become the second most common way to contract the virus in Romania (the first is heterosexual transmission), after being a negligible cause of infections for most of the post-socialist period.

International and national groups working for HIV prevention expect the emerging epidemic to expand over the next years, despite causes for the rise in cases being relatively easy to pin down.

For one, there has been a significant change in drug consumption patterns. In Romania, the vast majority of injecting drug users live in capital Bucharest. There were over 19,000 so-called problem drug users (who inject drugs or regularly use opioids, cocaine or amphetamines) in the city in 2010, in a total population of almost two million.

Bucharest users had been traditionally injecting heroin but have more recently switched to amphetamine-type stimulants – mostly synthetic cathinones such as mephedrone. In 2009, 97 percent of users reported heroin as the main drug of injection; in 2010 already 30 percent of users were injecting synthetic amphetamines.

Since 2008, Romania has seen a boom in the market for legal highs. While the authorities were struggling to understand the phenomenon and outlaw the synthetic substances one by one, numerous injecting users had switched already from heroin to the new drugs because of the perceived safety behind their legality and easier availability. A ‘heroin drought’ hitting Europe in 2010 because of lower opium production in Afghanistan may have played its indirect role as well, though causality is difficult to establish.

The injecting synthetic drugs available on the Romanian market require on average twice as high frequency of injection as heroin, meaning that users need more syringes and are likely to share more.

Importantly, while this change was happening on the drugs market, the number of syringes distributed through needle exchange programmes halved between 2009 and 2010 and remains low to date. In 2009, organisations working with drug users distributed 1.7 million syringes to Romanian users, while in 2010 only 965,000 were given out. According to the European Monitoring Centre on Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), 3.6 million syringes would be needed in Bucharest only to keep the risk of infectious diseases spread low.

In Romania, needle exchange programmes were set up and funded by international donors such as the United Nations, the Global Fund (to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria), or the Open Society Foundation. But as Romania started to be categorised as a better off country by donors, foreign funds dried up. For instance, the halting of grants from the Global Fund in 2010 was directly related to Romania’s being classified as an upper middle income country by the World Bank.

European Union regional funds, still used by local NGOs for some programmes, reportedly come with bureaucratic burdens often too big. For one, groups accessing these funds say that administrative tasks keep staff away from social work on the ground; additionally, disbursement of these EU funds requires submitting personal data of the beneficiaries, which may deter some users from seeking help in a country where drug use is heavily criminalised.

While international funding is getting increasingly harder to access, Romanian authorities are not stepping in to fill the gap.

The Romanian Ministry of Health is at the moment in charge of detoxification programmes in the country. The Ministry and the National Anti-Drug Agency also run in total seven opiate replacement centers across the country, which handle around 1,200 patients; in 2011, in Bucharest, only 9 percent of injecting drug users were covered by the available opiate treatments. However, authorities have so far failed to recognise the importance of financing syringes.

“The spike in HIV in Romania demonstrates a troubling dynamic we are expecting to see across Central and Eastern Europe, which is the withdrawal of international support for HIV programmes without any assurance that national governments will pick up the slack,” says Daniel Wolfe, director of the International Harm Reduction Development Programme at the Open Society Foundation.

“There was a fantasy that EU accession would help ensure the same kind of health protection and social support in countries like Romania that the richer EU countries have,” Wolfe told IPS. “But while some small support for programmes for drug users have come from EU social funds, these have been inadequate to the need and excluded support for the sterile injection equipment that is the core of HIV prevention efforts.”

Neither the Ministry of Health nor the Municipality of Bucharest, which share responsibility for HIV prevention among and care for drug users in Bucharest, responded to requests from IPS to comment on how they plan to deal with the emerging epidemic.

According to Valentin Simionov from the Romanian Harm Reduction Network, an advocacy group working on HIV prevention and care, while HIV prevention policies in place in Romania look well on paper, implementation has been disastruous.

“Romanian authorities are ignoring public health,” says Simionov. “When they say that they do not have money for needle exchange programmes, we would rather answer that this is a case of bad management of public resources.

“We have estimated that it would cost the Romanian state four million euros annually to fully support needle exchange programmes covering 9,000 injecting drug users, from purchase of syringes to their safe disposal,” Simionov told IPS. “It’s common knowledge that this is the price that the Romanian state pays for one kilometre of highway in some cases, so how can they say the money does not exist? In reality, it is all a matter of setting the right priorities.”

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.

Romanian President Traian Basescu is close to being impeached after the Parliament suspended him Friday. The political crisis, however, distracts from citizens’ calls for a more responsive political class and a halt to declining standards of living.

Traian Basescu, originating from the centre-right Democratic Liberal Party (PDL), has been president since 2004 and is currently serving his second five-year mandate. He survived an earlier impeachment attempt in 2007: after the parliament suspended him, a referendum that went in his favour helped him keep power. But popular support for Basescu has dramatically decreased since.

Apart from the usual erosion of support for any politician in power, Basescu has lost sympathy on account of being the main proponent of austerity measures during the economic crisis, which in Romania were some of the harshest in Europe. State salaries were cut by 25 percent, most social benefits were slashed, and taxes increased to keep within budget deficit requirements associated with an IMF-EU loan of 20 billion euros contracted in 2009.

In January this year, Bucharest and other major cities saw unprecedented protests attended daily by thousands calling primarily for better political representation for citizens, and protesting declining standards of living. While the entire Romanian political class was a target of the January protesters, Basescu was particularly criticised for his perceived “authoritarianism”: the PDL government he appointed and kept a close grip on sought to pass important measures without parliamentary debate, including the healthcare privatisation law that sparked the January protests.

Basescu’s alleged authoritarianism and overstepping of his constitutional attributions has been invoked by the parliament as the reason for his impeachment both now and five years ago. This year, Romanians are expected to vote in a referendum on the impeachment by the end of the month. Preparing for this vote, the new Romanian anti-Basescu government has modified the referendum law through executive decree to make turnout irrelevant for the validity of the vote.

The current government is formed by an alliance (the Social Liberal Union, USL) made up of the centre-left Social Democratic Party of now Prime Minister Victor Ponta and the centre-right Liberal Party of current Senate President Crin Antonescu. USL took control of the executive two months back after the balance of power in the parliament shifted in their favour when a number of MPs changed their political affiliation from PDL to USL.

Despite using authoritarianism as a main criticism against Basescu, USL has been accused of using similarly heavy-handed tactics over the past two months. It replaced the heads of numerous public institutions, including the two chambers of parliament, the national ombudsman and the national television with USL members or allies.

In view of the impeachment, it not only modified the referendum law, but also changed the law governing the Constitutional Court to prevent the body from blocking the parliament’s impeachment decision. It additionally took control over the publication of the Official Gazette where laws have to be published to become binding.

Many people argue that the USL measures are forcing the limits of the law, rather than illegal. Nevertheless, the European Commission issued a press statement Friday expressing its “concern” about “the current developments in Romania, especially regarding actions that appear to reduce the effective powers of independent institutions like the Constitutional Court.”

In a consultative take on the impeachment, the Constitutional Court concluded that Basescu’s behaviour was stretching the limits of constitutionality, but nevertheless did not give grounds for impeachment. The Parliament voted for suspension nevertheless.

Responding to the impeachment vote, Basescu said: “Your main objective (of USL) is to achieve total control of the justice system (…) to defend criminals in your ranks. Your actions for the past two weeks are meant to deeply shake the rule of law and put it at the disposal of USL, with very negative consequences on the country.”

Both sides pitted against each other in the Romanian political crisis today stand accused of stretching legal limits. This is one of the main criticisms that the January protesters had against the Romanian political class.

“People on the streets in January were asking for Basescu’s resignation because of his authoritarian streak, the protests were targeting abuses of the rule of law,” sociologist Mircea Kivu told IPS.

In the days preceding the impeachment vote, hundreds of Romanians took to the streets of Bucharest and other cities again, with Bucharest clearly divided in three camps each located in a different square: pro-Basescu, anti-Basescu, and for the rule of law.

Kivu says protesters this week seemed more confused and less focused than those from January. “And this confusion will probably accentuate by the day,” he said, “there will be increasing divisions between the pro- and anti- Basescu camps as the referendum approaches even though this should not be the main concern, the main concern of people should be to distance themselves from abuses of power no matter their source.”

“January was for the first time when in Romania we heard protests against privatisations, against large corporations like Chevron (exploring for shale gas in Romania) or Rosia Montana Gold Corporation, against a deal with IMF that is absolutely destructive for the most vulnerable sectors of our society,” comments Costi Rogozanu from leftist platform Critic Atac.

“Now we have forgotten these issues,” Rogozanu told IPS. “While the Social-Democrats were raising some concerns about the IMF austerity requirements when in opposition, now they forgot about it and are rallying behind the predominant rightist discourse.

“The most serious threat to democracy we are seeing today in Romania is not the stretching of constitutional limits but the erosion of all social protection for our citizens,” Rogozanu added.