The carts of “cartoneros” or garbage pickers stand in front of a merchandise purchase warehouse in the La Paternal neighborhood in the city of Buenos Aires. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Apr 6 2023 (IPS)

It’s a Monday morning in April on Florida, a pedestrian street in the heart of the Argentine capital, and a small crowd gathers outside the window of an electronic appliance store to watch a violent scene on a TV screen. But it is not part of any movie or series.

The scene, broadcast live, is happening a few kilometers away, in a poor suburb of Buenos Aires: colleagues of a city bus driver who was murdered during a robbery throw stones and fists at the Minister of Security of the province of Buenos Aires, Sergio Berni, who had come to talk and offer the government’s condolences in front of the cameras.

No one seems surprised among the office employees watching the scene on TV, and several make no effort to hide a certain sense of satisfaction that other ordinary people have decided to take action against a representative of the political leadership, the target of widespread discontent, as reflected by the opinion polls.“There is growing social polarization in Argentina, with an increasingly weak middle class. Each crisis leaves another part of society outside the system.” -- Agustín Salvia

“This was bound to happen sometime, if the politicians earn a fortune for doing nothing and we work all day to earn a pittance… And on top of that you go out on the street and they kill you just to rob you,” comments one of the viewers, as the rest listen approvingly.

The scene reflects the climate of tension and the sense of being fed-up that is felt in large swathes of Argentine society, in the midst of a long, deep economic crisis, which in the last five years has constantly chipped away at the purchasing power of wages, due to inflation that occasionally stops growing for a couple of months, only to surge again with greater force.

If there was room for modest optimism in 2022, as the result of a recovery in economic activity after the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, it seems distant today, since the beginning of this year brought news that reflects the magnitude of the breakdown of the social fabric in this Southern Cone country.

On Mar. 31, the official poverty rate for the second half of 2022 was announced: 39.2 percent of the population, or 18.1 million people in this South American country of 46 million, according to the most up-to-date figures.

Since 2021 ended with a poverty rate of 37.3 percent, this means that in one year a million people were thrown into poverty, despite the fact that the economy, thanks to the rebound in post-pandemic activity, grew 4.9 percent, above the average for the region, according to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

But these data are already old and the figures for 2023 will be worse due to the acceleration of inflation, which is surprising even by the standards of Argentina, a country all too accustomed to this problem.

The price rise in February reached 6.6 percent, exceeding the 100 percent year-on-year rate (from March 2022 to February 2023) for the first time since 1991.

When you look a little closer, perhaps the worst aspect is that prices grew much more than the average, 9.8 percent, for food, the biggest expense for the lowest-income segments of society.

To this picture must be added an extreme drought that has affected the harvest of soybeans and other grains, which are the largest generator of foreign exchange in Argentina. The estimates of different public and private organizations on how much money the country will lose this year in exports range between 10 and 20 billion dollars.

This is one of the reasons why the World Bank, which had forecast two percent growth for the Argentine economy this year, revised its estimates at the beginning of April and concluded that there will be no economic growth in 2023.

Luis Ángel Gómez sits in the soup kitchen that he runs in the municipality of San Martín, one of the most densely populated areas in Greater Buenos Aires. For the past 10 years, he has been serving lunch and afternoon snacks to about 70 children, but lately he has also been helping their parents and grandparents. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

Soup kitchens

About 15 kilometers from the center of Buenos Aires, in the Loyola neighborhood, the cold statistics on the economy translate into ramshackle homes separated by narrow alleyways, with piles of garbage at the corners and skinny dogs wandering among the children playing in the street.

In a truck trailer that carries advertising for a campaigning politician, a dentist extracts teeth free of charge for local residents, who have increasing problems accessing health services.

The neighborhood is in San Martín, one of the municipalities on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. Eleven million people live in these working-class suburbs (almost a quarter of the country’s total population), where the poverty rate is 45 percent, higher than the national average.

“I have never before seen what is happening today. Before, only men went out to pick through the garbage (for recyclable materials to sell), because the idea was that the streets weren’t for women. But today the women also go out,” Luis Ángel Gómez, 58, born and raised in the neighborhood, who does building work and other odd jobs, told IPS.

Indeed, the carts of the “cartoneros” or garbage pickers, which used to be seen only in the most densely populated working-class neighborhoods of Buenos Aires after sunset, when the building managers take out the garbage, are now seen throughout the city and at all hours.

A market selling clothes at low prices in Parque Centenario, one of the best-known markets in Buenos Aires, located in Caballito, a traditional upper middle-class neighborhood of Buenos Aires. This type of street fair has mushroomed in Argentina in the face of persistent inflation that is destroying the purchasing power of wages. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

Gómez has been running a soup kitchen in Loyola for 10 years, where he provides lunch three times a week and afternoon snacks twice a week to more than 70 children and adolescents. It is in a room with a tin roof, a couple of gas stoves and photos of smiling boys and girls as decoration.

“The municipality gives me some merchandise: 20 kilos of ground meat and two boxes of chicken per month. Besides that, I cook with donations,” said Gómez. “This box was given to me by the company that collects garbage in the municipality,” he added, pointing to cartons of long-life milk.

But the soup kitchen cannot meet all the needs of the local residents, said Gómez. “My concern was to give the kids a better future and I fed them until they were 14 or 15 years old. Today I also have to help their parents and grandparents.”

The carts of “cartoneros” or garbage pickers, which until a few years ago were only seen after sunset in the most densely populated low-income neighborhoods, today have become a common image in every part of Buenos Aires at all times of the day. One is seen here in the neighborhood of Flores. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

The middle class on the slide

The crisis has picked up speed since 2018 and deepened with the pandemic, but Argentina is going through a period of stagnation, with low economic growth and very little formal private sector job creation for more than a decade.

A study recently presented by the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina (UCA) shows that since 2010 access to food, healthcare, employment and social security have steadily worsened, despite social assistance, affecting five million households out of a total of 12 million.

“There is growing social polarization in Argentina, with an increasingly weak middle class. Each crisis leaves another part of society outside the system,” sociologist Agustín Salvia, director of the UCA’s Social Observatory on Argentine Social Debt, which is considered a chief reference point in the country, told IPS.

Salvia explained that the improvement in economic activity after the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic drove the creation of new jobs until the third quarter of last year, although poverty grew just the same because they were almost all precarious low-wage jobs.

“The post-pandemic recovery cycle is over. Since the last quarter of 2022 there has been no more job creation, which added to inflation will cause poverty to grow in 2023,” added Salvia.

The expert said structural or chronic poverty used to be 25 or 30 percent in Argentina, but has now held steady at 40 or 45 percent, with a deterioration marked by the stagnation of quality employment, which has pushed many formerly middle-class families into poverty.

Mit Al Korama’s youth (left) spent five months at the warehouse waiting for the trip to Italy (Ahmed Emad is in the middle and Ibrahim Abdullah is on the left). The group (right) during their kidnapping ordeal by Libyan militias. The group were waiting for the ransom to be paid. Credit: Supplied

By Hisham Allam
Cairo, Egypt, Apr 21 2022 (IPS)

Last June, Mit Al Korama’s youth gathered in front of one of their homes on a summer evening to tell stories of citizens from the village and neighboring villages who had successfully crossed the Mediterranean to Europe.

Some, they heard, returned with a large sum of money and built European-style homes for their families. Others chose to stay in the European Union and encouraged their brothers to do so.

A young man in his thirties from Talkha named “Mohamed Fakih” was among the group, and he said he assisted many people illegally migrating to the Italian coasts.

Despite the Egyptian government’s warnings against illegal immigration and not visiting Libya, some young people continue to attempt to migrate illegally to Italy via Libya. Egyptian and Libyan smugglers put them at risk of drowning or kidnapping by gangs and armed militias demanding ransoms.

Fakih informed the Mit Al Korama youth that spots on a boat leaving for Italy in ten days were available. That spot could be theirs if they paid him 5000 US dollars.

Ahmed Emad, a 27-year-old with a diploma in tourism and hotels but no job, was one of five young people from the village keen on seeking a better life in Europe. To fund this trip to Italy, his family sold everything they owned and borrowed the rest.

Ahmed Emad’s story of a dream for riches in Europe is one experienced by many desperate youths seeking a better life. Credit: Supplied

“The mediator directed us to the Egyptian-Libyan border city of Salloum, where we met a group of smugglers who assisted us in crossing the border through mountain roads and out of sight of border guards. We arrived in Al-Masad, Libya,” Emad told IPS. “The smugglers began to treat us differently there.”

“As soon as we arrived, they pushed us into a huge building full of smuggled goods, fuel, sheep and cows, and people like us waiting for their turn to emigrate,” Emad added.

The smugglers never stopped abusing and insulting the immigrants in the warehouse. When they complained to Fakih, the mediator who had taken their money, he advised them to wait patiently until the boat arrived to take the group to their final destination.

“We were held captive in the warehouse for five and a half months, sleeping in the cow barn, drinking from empty gasoline containers, and eating only one meal per day,” Emad added.

Emad Eldanaf, his father, said they had no contact with the smugglers in Libya and were initially unable to reach the young men, making them highly anxious. Finally, contact was made.

“There were 28 men from our village on the boat. The most recent group returned in the last two weeks, and we’re still negotiating with the militia about the remaining three,” Eldanaf told IPS.

Emad’s experiences were mirrored by Ibrahim Abdullah and his younger brother Kamal.

“We moved between several warehouses between Sabratha and Zuwara – 120 km west of Tripoli. On the eve of November 9, they told us we would sail from the Ajilat coast to Italy in hours,” Abdullah told IPS.

“Eventually, we all moved to the boat, about 50 of us.”

The boat set sail at 11 pm.

“By dawn, water was seeping into the boat. We tried to drain the water until we became frustrated,” Abdullah explained. “Death was only a few feet away.”

According to Abdullah, the immigrants requested assistance from the Italian authorities, who said they would wait until the boat was closer to the Italian coast before intervening.

Tunisian authorities also ignored them. It was evident that they would sink with the boat and perish.

“We knew calling the Libyans would get us arrested, but we went ahead and did it anyway,” Abdullah said, explaining their desperation.

“At noon, Libyan militia troops captured us and transported us to Tripoli port, splitting us into two groups, one sent to Prison 55 and the other in Bir Al Ghanam prison.

Bir al-Ghanam is a town in western Libya, located south of Zawiya. It was the site of several battles during the Libyan Civil War. Anti-Gaddafi forces took control of it on August 7, 2011, just weeks before taking Tripoli.

“We were referred to as ‘the goods’ by Libyan militias. They made us wish for death to be free of this agony. My father agreed to pay the ransom for our release after I pleaded with him,” Abdullah recalls. “When the militias suspected that some families would not pay the ransom, they killed the detainees and threw their bodies in the desert. Two members of my group died and were thrown into the desert without being buried.”

Emad, Kamal, and Abdullah remained with their militia for another four months. Lice and scabies were their lieutenants the entire time. Finally, their family reached an agreement with the kidnappers, agreeing to pay US dollars 6000 for Kamal and Abdullah, while Emad’s family had to pay US dollars 5000 to free him.

Haj Riad, a Libyan smuggler, acted as the middleman in the ransom payment. The money was transferred to several Libyan bank accounts, where he distributed it to militias and transported the three young men back to the Egyptian border.

Umm Ayman, a 60-year-old mother, sold a few of her land carats to raise 150,000 Egyptian Pounds (10,000 US dollars) to assist her two sons with their travels. Two of her three sons were then kidnapped with Emad and Abdullah.

A few months later, she had to sell her house, sheep, a cow, and the rest of her belongings, to pay US dollars 13,000 to have them back.

“We sold everything we owned to allow our children to travel, and we borrowed to bring them back. Even my mother’s gold earrings had to be sold to pay the ransom,” Ayman told IPS.

“When my children returned by the end of January, they sought out Fakih, the mediator, and found he had fled with his family.”

The family believes he continues to entrap victims into the vicious circle as young people try to seek a better life in Europe.

A Son’s Desperate Plea to his Father

“I beg you, father, get us out of here; my friend Muhammad Misbah is in good health, and I was on the verge of death yesterday. Do whatever it takes to get us out of here; pay the ransom, whatever it takes. You and Ibrahim’s mother try to do anything. We are so insulted here; our bodies are weak and sick. – An audio message from Ahmed Emad to his father.

 
This article is part of a series of features from across the globe on human trafficking. IPS coverage is supported by the Airways Aviation Group.
The Global Sustainability Network ( GSN ) is pursuing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal number 8 with a special emphasis on Goal 8.7, which “takes immediate and effective measures to eradicate forced labour, end modern slavery and human trafficking and secure the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour, including recruitment and use of child soldiers, and by 2025 end child labour in all its forms”.
The origins of the GSN come from the endeavours of the Joint Declaration of Religious Leaders signed on 2 December 2014. Religious leaders of various faiths gathered to work together “to defend the dignity and freedom of the human being against the extreme forms of the globalization of indifference, such as exploitation, forced labour, prostitution, human trafficking”.

IPS UN Bureau Report

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Fire fighters from Working on Fire on fire line at recent Muizenberg fires. Credit: IPS-WoF1

By Munyaradzi Makoni
CAPE TOWN, South Africa, Jan 20 2016 (IPS)

Nolukhanyo Babalaza finished her final year of high school and received her diploma in 2000, but this was not an immediate passport to a good life. She was frustrated to see some people making it while she struggled to afford basic things like everyday food.

“It gives one negative thoughts. One ends up doing things you regret,” she said.

A breakthrough came three years later. Babalaza became a fire fighter. She joined the South Africa’s Department of Environmental Affair’s Working on Fire Programme (WoF).

Fires are considered a persistent problem in South Africa, a merciless destroyer of life, property and environment.

Either in the dry summer months in the Western Cape, or in the dry winter months in the rest of the country, wildland fires are started by lightning or, in mountainous regions, by falling rocks or accidentaly from careless individuals. Millions of properties are lost annually. Lives and the environment are wasted.

Good things have, however, emerged from this perennial problem.

South Africa’s Department of Environmental Affair’s Working on Fire Programme started in 2003 has become a means to fight unemployment and poverty.

Youths have been drawn from the ranks of the unemployed and poor.

“These young people are trained to help fight unwanted veld and forest fires across the country and often they use their skills as a stepping stone into the formal job market,” says Linton Rensburg, WoF National Communications Manager.

The youths are trained as drivers, brush cutters, dispatchers, helicopter safety leaders and in environmental education. It isn’t big money but it offers a gateway to the future.

The jobless rate in South Africa increased to 25.5 per cent in the third quarter of 2015 from 25 per cent in the previous period, according to Trading Economics. The unemployment rate rose 3.6 per cent while employment went up 1.1 per cent and more people joined the labour force. The unemployment rate in South Africa averaged 25.27 per cent from 2000 until 2015, reaching an all time high of 31.20 per cent in the first quarter of 2003 and a record low of 21.50 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2008. The unemployment rate data in South Africa is reported by Statistics South Africa.

Fire employees

Babalaza has grown with the programme. From her start as an ordinary fire fighter she became a crew leader, and then moved to become an administration assistant. Today she is a finance control officer in the programme in the Western Cape.

She admits the programme has greatly improved her life.

“Things are much better. I am able to at least support my family and I can pay my bills,” she said.

Babalaza’s story is one of many involved in the programme, Rensburg told IPS.

“Thousands of young people first found meaningful work opportunities in the programme and later on through the training and skills development aspects of WoF they were able to progress from being a fire fighter earning a stipend to being a salaried employee in WoF,” he said.

Take Justine Lekalakala’s story, for instance. Lekalakala, a former fire fighter at the Dinokeng Base in Hammanskraal North of Pretoria, now works in the South African National Defence Force.

“I was able to use the stipend I earned at WoF to apply for other jobs and educate myself by doing computer courses. It was easier for me to be absorbed into the military as I had the self-discipline and fitness which I acquired in WoF,” he said.

Christalene De Kella was clueless about what she wanted out of life after completing her secondary school in 2004. She grabbed the opportunity to become a fire fighter in her hometown, Uniondale. The single mother of a seven-year old daughter, she has since established a career path for development.

Starting as an entry level fire fighter, she attended several intensive fire management training courses and even participated in opening a new base. In 2005 she was promoted to a stock control officer for WoF.

In 2009 Kella became the media and community liaison officer in the Southern Cape Region and in 2013 she was given the opportunity of becoming a video journalist for the WoF video unit.

“Working on Fire has had a positive impact on my life,” she said, adding she currently travels across the country to interview and record stories for the WoF TV news as featured on You Tube.

The progression could not be sweeter for two former fire fighters who started two-year training in May last year to become spotter pilots at the Kishugu Aviation Academy in Mbombela, Mpumalanga.

Themba Maebela, 27, from Mpumalanga and Siyabonga Varasha, 26, from the Eastern Cape are employed as helicopter personal assistants.

“It was like I was dreaming, my family did not believe me when I told them that I will train to become a pilot,” said Maebela, who joined working for the fire unit in 2010.

South African youth who do not have this necessary diploma must excel in their work and employers will then recognise their talents and skills, he advised.

As Naome Nkoana patrols the streets as a metro police officer in Pretoria. She recalls how participation in the WoF programme, where she underwent advanced driver training in Nelspruit, helped her to not only pass the metro police fitness tests, but her advanced driving skills and made it easier to become a metro police officer.

Rensburg says since the Working on Fire Programme started, it has changed the lives of the 5,000 participants and indirectly benefited 25,000 other dependents.

A 2012 Social Impact Study on participants said that the training presented by WoF boosted beneficiaries’ knowledge and self-worth.

“Through the WoF programme, they were able to get to know their own weaknesses and strengths better,” the study concludes.

(End)

A small boy plays with his toys. Poor nutrition in Zimbabwe is exposing vulnerable children nutrition to mental health challenges according to humanitarian agencies. Credit: Ignatius Banda/IPS

By Ignatius Banda
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Jan 12 2016 (IPS)

Mildren Ndlovu* knows the mental toll of Zimbabwe’s long-drawn economic hardships in a country where a long rehashed statistic by labour unions puts unemployment at 90 per cent.

Ndlovu, a 27-year-old single mother is raising two children, both under 5-years old, and survives on menial jobs such as doing laundry and dishes in neighbouring homes, says she has watched their health deteriorate and not just physically.

“I know they are not growing up the way other children are,” Ndlovu said, as she changed the underwear of her four-year who had just soiled himself.

“At his age, he should be able to visit the toilet by himself, yet I still have to change him,” she said from her one roomed shack in one of Bulawayo’s poor townships that litter the city’s north.

Ndlovu’s concerns about the slow development of her children point to the broader effects of Zimbabwe’s economic decline on vulnerable groups, with the UNICEF early this month releasing the Zimbabwe Poverty Atlas 2015 (http://unicef.org/zimbabwe/resources_17478.html) showing high poverty levels across the country that are affecting children’s mental health.

At the launch of the report, UNICEF, the World Bank and government officials said the poverty atlas is an attempt recognise that “Children are rarely recognised in poverty alleviation efforts and their needs are not properly addressed.”

According to the report, no child from the poorest health quintile reaches higher education, with eight of the country’s ten provinces registering poverty levels between 65 and 75 per cent.

“Child poverty has reduced (their) mental health and is reponsible for poverty when they are adults,” said Dr. Jane Muita, UNICEF’s deputy resident representative in Zimbabwe.

“It (child poverty) results in lower skills and productivity, lower levels of health and educational achievement,” Dr. Muita said.

According Zimbabwe’s health and child welfare, the country has witnessed an increase in mental health diagnoses, and has put in place a Mental Health Strategy 2014-18 to deal with the crisis.

The ministry blames the tough economic conditions that have thrown millions into the streets of unemployment.

There are no available figures of how mental health has affected children, but concerns by parents such as Ndlovu are giving a human face to a crisis that has been highlighted by the UNICEF report on child poverty and their mental health.

In some parts of Zimbabwe in the south-west districts such as Nkayi were found to have up to 95.6 per cent of poverty, while Lupane poverty levels stood at 93 per cent according to the UNICEF’s Zimbabwe Poverty Atlas.

There are concerns that this will slow the country’s march towards realising its Sustainable Development Goals to reduce child poverty by 2030.

Last year, the Zimbabwe Vulnerable Assessment Committee found that up to 36 per cent of children in Zimbabwe have stunted growth which experts say has not only affected them physically, but has also slowed their mental growth because of poor diets.

“The problem with children’s health and their mental development is that the attitude of both parents and some health workers is that these children will soon grow out of these challenges,” said Obias Nsamala, a Bulawayo pediatrician.

“But what I have seen with many children under 5 years is that these mental deficits can be detected when they come for treatment but only become an issue by the time they have began school. I think that is why for a long time this country had something like special classes for children not intellectually gifted,” Nsamala told IPS.

“I believe its been a wrong approach because some of these children may be slow learners or intellectually challenged not because of some genetic deficit but because all the signs were ignored earlier on based on their backgrounds and access to adequate meals,” he said.

As the country seeks to improve the lives of vulnerable groups such as children with government officials saying the country needs to grow the economy in order to reduce poverty, there is no consensus on how exactly this will be achieved to attract investment, with the country continuing to rely on international development partners to create safety nets for the poor.

From 2014 to June last year, UNICEF says it spent 363 million dollars on social services, this at time the country’s critical social services ministries are facing budget cuts which officials have admitted made it impossible to provide adequate assistance such as health care.

Under the 2016 national budget, the health and child welfare ministry received 330 million dollars which will largely be funded by donor countries, leaving a huge deficit which Minister David Parirenyatwa said is not enough to meet such such sectors as the poorly funded psychiatric clinics.

Perhaps to highlight these funding challenges, officials at the country’s largest psychiatric institution which caters for adults, Ingutsheni Hospital in Bulawayo early this year told Minister Parirenyatwa that the mental health hospital requires 23 doctors but only had six.

The social welfare ministry, also previously offering financial support for vulnerable group’s such Ndlovu’s children, has complained of poor funding from government.

Aid agencies say millions will require food assistance in 2016, further pushing Ndlovu and many others on the edge of what UNICEF’s Poverty Atlas says are their mental needs.

*name changed to protect her identity

(End)

The rubble of twisted concrete and metal bakes in the hot Mediterranean sun of a regional heat wave. A year on from Israel’s 51-day military operation in 2014, not a single one of the 11,000 destroyed homes in Gaza has been rebuilt. Photo credit: UNRWA Archives/Shareef Sarhan

By Charlie Hoyle
BETHLEHEM, Palestine, Aug 15 2015 (IPS)

The rubble of twisted concrete and metal bakes in the hot Mediterranean sun of a regional heat wave.

Eight months ago, the infrastructural devastation in the Gaza Strip was the same, except floodwater and freezing winter temperatures swept over the heaped remnants of people’s homes and businesses.

A year on from Israel’s 51-day military operation – in which over 2,200 Palestinians were killed, including more than 500 children – not a single one of the 11,000 destroyed homes has been rebuilt.

The task of large-scale reconstruction work was entrusted to the Gaza Reconstruction Mechanism (GRM), a United Nations-brokered agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority which would oversee the distribution of building materials entering Gaza.“Most of the 100,000 Palestinians displaced by the [2014] war continue to live in makeshift shelters, often in the rubble of their former homes, and the landscape is littered with miles upon miles of apocalyptic decay where homes, shops, and restaurants once stood”

To date, only 5.5 percent of the building materials needed to repair and rebuild homes and other damaged infrastructure has entered the coastal enclave, according to Israeli rights group Gisha, founded in 2005 to protect the freedom of movement of Palestinians, especial Gaza residents.

Failed promises by donor countries which pledged 5.4 billion dollars last October, political tensions between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, and Israel’s continued restrictions on materials entering the territory have all impeded reconstruction efforts.

However, many hold the GRM directly responsible for the glacial pace of reconstruction, arguing that the terms of the agreement have entrenched Gaza’s underdevelopment by granting Israel control over nearly every aspect of the rebuilding process.

“Israel actually has deep power over every single house built in Gaza,” says Ghada Snunu, a reporting officer at Ma’an Development Centre in Gaza.

“We cannot build a house if Israel says no. Israel decides whether homes are built or not.”

As part of the GRM, Israel has case-by-case approval over individual applications for building materials, veto power over construction companies put forward by the Palestinian Authority to provide those materials, and access to the Authority’s Ministry of Civil Affairs database, which registers the ID numbers and GPS coordinates of Palestinians whose homes were destroyed.

According to Gisha, private owners, building plans, locations and the quantities all require Israeli approval, with companies and merchants who store the construction materials – mostly aggregate, cement and steel bars – forced to place security guards and install cameras to supervise the goods 24 hours a day.

This lengthy and expensive bureaucratic process, designed specifically to meet Israel’s stated security concerns, has meant the process is at a virtual standstill.

“The GRM has failed because it gives Israel veto power over everything. There are no changes on the ground so far,” complains Snunu.

In January, the Brookings Doha Centre said in a policy briefing that the GRM has effectively seemed to offer “legitimacy to the Israeli blockade” and placed “exclusive reliance on Israel’s willingness to allow the flow of reconstruction materials” for success of the mechanism.

In recent months, Oxfam says that more building materials are entering Gaza, but the levels are still only 25 percent of those before Israel’s blockade was imposed some eight years ago.

“At this pace it could take 19 years to finish just the rebuilding of homes destroyed in 2014 and at least 76 years to build all the new homes that Gaza needs,” said Oxfam’s Arwa Mhunna.

Most of the 100,000 Palestinians displaced by the war continue to live in makeshift shelters, often in the rubble of their former homes, and the landscape is littered with miles upon miles of apocalyptic decay where homes, shops, and restaurants once stood.

The vast infrastructural damage last summer, caused by an unprecedented amount of explosive weaponry used by Israel’s military, compounds the effects of an eight-year blockade and two other Israeli military offensives since 2008, with damage from those conflicts barely addressed.

Gazan institutions and stakeholders have been largely excluded from the rebuilding process following the three wars, placing the civilian population at the mercy of political infighting, unfulfilled international promises and Israel’s blockade.

“Gaza had already been destroyed completely before the war. This agreement did not change anything, Palestinians were told their homes would be rebuilt, but these promises have been broken by the international community and the PA,” says Snunu.

In May, the World Bank reported that Gaza had the highest unemployment rate in the world at 43.9 percent, with 67 percent of under 24-year-olds unemployed. Real per capita income is now 31 percent lower than it was 20 years ago, at 970 dollars a year, the report added.

At least 80 percent of Gazans are dependent on humanitarian aid.

“The situation in Gaza is getting more serious and dire,” says Mhunna. “The humanitarian crisis is continuing and now affects all aspects of life. Displacement has lasted for over a year since the war and there is a devastating economic situation.”

Hamas officials, rights groups, and both local and international NGOs had repeatedly stressed last year during ceasefire negotiations that Gaza must not return to a status quo of blockade.

Since Israel disengaged from Gaza in 2005 – withdrawing some 9,000 settlers and military forces – it has repeatedly claimed that it is no longer occupying the territory and has held Hamas responsible for the civilian population.

Yet 10 years later, Israel controls the movement of Palestinians in and out of Gaza, the food they can have access to, whether they can receive medical treatment or not, and now under the terms of the GRM, whether their homes can be rebuilt.

“The GRM harms Palestinians more than it benefits them. What is clear in our demands is that the GRM heightens the blockade and Gaza will not be rebuilt unless the blockade is lifted,” says Snunu.

“Palestinians need solutions for the crisis, not mechanisms that manage the crisis.”

Edited by Phil Harris   

By Emma Bonino
ROME, Jul 24 2015 (IPS)

“A serious political and social crisis will sweep through the euro countries if they do not decide to strengthen the integration of their economies. The euro zone crisis did not begin with the Greek crisis, but was manifested much earlier, when a monetary union was created without economic and fiscal union in the context of a financial sector drugged on debt and speculation.”

Emma Bonino

These words, which are completely relevant today, were written by a group of federalists, including Romano Prodi, Giuliano Amato, Jacques Attali, Daniel Cohn-Bendit and this author, in May 2012.

Those with a federalist vision are not surprised that the crisis in Greece has dragged on for so many years, because they know that a really integrated Europe with a truly central bank would have been able to solve it in a relatively short time and at much lower cost.

In this region of 500 million people, another example of the inability to solve European problems was the recent great challenge of distributing 60,000 refugees among the 28 member countries of the European Union. Leaders spent all night exchanging insults without reaching a solution.

Unless the federalist programme – namely, the gradual conversion of the present European Union into the United States of Europe – is adopted, the region will not really be able to solve crises like those of Greece and migration.

It can be stated that European federalism – which would complete Europe’s unity and integration – is now more necessary than ever because it is the appropriate vehicle for overcoming regional crises and starting a new phase of growth, without which Europe will be left behind and subordinated not only to the United States but also to the major emerging powers.“Unless the federalist programme – namely, the gradual conversion of the present European Union into the United States of Europe – is adopted, the region will not really be able to solve crises like those of Greece and migration”

Furthermore, its serious and growing social problems – such as poverty, inequality and high unemployment especially among young people – will not be solved.

Within the federalist framework there is, at present, only the euro, while all the other institutions or sectoral policies (like defence, foreign policy, and so on) are lacking.

Excluding such large items of public spending as health care and social security, there are however other government functions which, according to the theory of fiscal federalism (the principle of subsidiarity and common sense), should be allocated to a higher level, that of the European central government.

Among them are, in particular: defence and security, diplomacy and foreign policy (including development and humanitarian aid), border control, large research and development projects, and social and regional redistribution.

Defence and foreign policy are perhaps considered the ultimate bastions of state sovereignty and so are still taboo. However, the progressive loss of influence in international affairs among even the most important European countries is increasingly evident.

To take, for instance, the defence sector: as Nick Witney, former chief executive of the European Defence Agency, has noted: “most European armies are still geared towards all-out warfare on the inner-German border rather than keeping the peace in Chad or supporting security and development in Afghanistan.

“This failure to modernise means that much of the 200 billion euros that Europe spends on defence each year is simply wasted,” and “the EU’s individual Member States, even France and Britain, have lost and will never regain the ability to finance all the necessary new capabilities by themselves.”

It should be noted that precisely because the mission of European military forces has changed so radically, it is nowadays much easier, in principle, to create new armed forces from scratch (personnel, armaments, doctrines and all) instead of persisting in the futile attempt to reconvert existing forces to new missions, while at the same time seeking to improve cooperation between them.

Why should it be possible to create a new currency and a new central bank from scratch, and not a new army?

Common defence spending by the 28 European Union countries amounts to 1.55 percent of European GDP. Hence, a hypothetical E.U. defence budget of one percent of GDP appears relatively modest.

However, it translates into nearly 130 billion euros, which would automatically make the E.U. armed forces an effective military organisation, surpassed only by that of the United States, and with resources three to five times greater than those available to powers like Russia, China or Japan.

It would also mean saving an estimated 60 to 70 billion euros, or more than half a percentage point of European GDP, compared with the present situation.

Transferring certain government functions from national to European level should not give rise to a net increase in public spending in the whole of the European Union, and could well lead to a net decrease because of economies of scale.

Taking the example of defence, for the same outlay a single organisation is certainly more efficient than 28 separate ones. Moreover, as demonstrated by experiences with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) during the Cold War, efforts to coordinate independent military forces always produced disappointing results and parasitic reliance on the wealthier providers of this common good. (END/COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Translated by Valerie Dee/Edited by Phil Harris    

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

Excerpt:

A man fishes in the Elephant Pass lagoon, the narrow waterway that connects the Jaffna Peninsula with the rest of Sri Lanka and the site of many bloody battles during the civil conflict. Much of the population here still relies on farming and fisheries for survival. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
JAFFNA, Sri Lanka, Jun 25 2015 (IPS)

It is an oasis from the scorching heat outside. The three-storey, centrally air-conditioned Cargills Square, a major mall in Sri Lanka’s northern Jaffna town, is the latest hangout spot in the former warzone, where everyone from teenagers to families to off-duty military officers converge.

Once a garrison town with army checkpoints at every street corner, nervous soldiers armed to the teeth would patrol the streets around the clock tower. Claymore mine explosions were not unusual occurrences, and streets were deserted by dusk.

That was during Sri Lanka’s bloody civil war, which dragged on for nearly 30 years until the army declared victory over the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in May 2009.

Both during the war years and immediately following, anyone traveling to this region could not but notice stark disparities between the war zone and the country’s southern provinces.

As you venture deeper into the north or further into the east, cars give way to bicycles and large buildings taper down into more modest dwellings.

Even six years after the fighting stopped, signs of devastation are everywhere: bus stops riddled with bullet holes and the remains of armored vehicles littering roadsides are not uncommon.

Internally displaced people and civilians and former combatants maimed during the conflict make up bulk of the population here, and post-war reconstruction is an unfinished task.

But in Jaffna, the cultural and political nerve centre for a majority of the island’s Tamil people, is slowly shedding its wartime scars.

The Cargills Square, a 3.7-million-dollar investment by Cargills (Ceylon) PLC – which operates the largest supermarket chain in Sri Lanka – opened in late 2013 and today, business is booming.

Its location, on a main road once infamous for skirmishes, assassinations and grenade attacks, now represents prime commercial real estate: the establishment is surrounded on all sides by clothing stores boasting the best of both eastern and western dress.

The smiling eyes and girlish laughter of young women trying on new dresses in street-side shops have replaced the sharp stares of soldiers, once visible through small windows in concrete bunkers surrounded by sandbags.

“Finally the city is thriving on its own potential, there is lot of talent and confidence here,” says Cargills Square Manager Samuel Nesakumar, referring to the district’s 600,000 residents.

Indeed the city, capital of Sri Lanka’s Northern Province, has not looked this vibrant in decades. While poverty rates in other parts of the former war zone are thrice and sometimes close to five times greater than the national average of average 6.7 percent, Jaffna is slowly closing this gap, and is even outperforming some districts in the south.

While many developmental challenges remain, external investments, including in infrastructure and from the banking and telecom sectors, combined with increased trade and internal tourism, means that this former war-torn territory is gradually pulling itself out of decades of despondency and getting back on its feet.

It is a success story in the making, but wide wealth gaps in various other districts in the north and east, as well as gaping developmental holes throughout areas once controlled by the LTTE, point to the need for even growth and equal distribution of resources throughout this country of 20 million people.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Jun 9 2015 (IPS)

Only 50 years of Cold War (and the fact that German Chancellor Angela Merkel grew up in East Germany) can possibly explain the strange political power of the United States over Europe.

After a bilateral meeting between Merkel and U.S. President Barack Obama (so much for transparency and participation), the Jun. 7-8 G7 summit opened in Germany and we found out that there had been a trade-off.

Roberto Savio

Merkel agreed that Europe should continue the sanctions against Russia – and so the other members of the G7 duly agreed – and Obama toned down the U.S. position on Greece.

That position had been forcefully expressed by U.S. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew a few days earlier to European leaders: solve the Greek problem, or this will have a global impact that we cannot afford. This had suddenly accelerated negotiations, with the hope then that everything would be solved before the G7 summit.

But Greece did not accept the plan of the President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, which was suspiciously close to International Monetary Fund (IMF) positions.

At the G7 summit, Obama softened the U.S. position on Greece, and even said that “Athens must implement the necessary reforms.”

Obstinacy on sanctions against Russia ignores the fact that, in a very delicate economic moment, Europe has lost a considerable part of its exports because of Russia’s retaliatory block on European imports. It is also difficult to see what advantage there is for Europe in pushing Russia into the arms of China. We will soon be seeing joint naval exercise between the two countries, which will only escalate tensions.

But let us look at Greece given that its tug of war with Europe has now been going on for five years.

Let us recall briefly. Greece had been spending much more than it could by distributing public jobs under any government, by giving easy pensions to everyone, and so on. Then, in 2009, the centre-left Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) won the elections and we found out that the figures Athens had been giving Brussels were false.

The real deficit stood at almost 12.5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), confirmation of what the European Union and its bodies had long suspected but which it had done nothing about.“Europe is now led by Germany and the Germans are convinced that what they did at home is valid everywhere. Together with the countries of northern Europe, they look on the people of southern Europe as unethical, people who want to enjoy life beyond their means”

To avoid going into the agonising details of the continuous negotiations between Greece and the European Union, I jump to the January elections this year which the left-wing Syriza party won and its leader Alexis Tsipras was named Prime Minister on a clear programme: stop the austerity programme imposed by the “Troika” – IMF, EU and the European Central Bank (ECB) – on behalf of the European countries, led by Germany, Netherlands, Austria and Finland.

Greece is on its knees. Officially, unemployment has gone from 11.9 percent in 2010 to 25.5 percent today, but it is widely considered to be around 30 percent. Among young people, it is close to 60 percent. GDP has gone into a 25 percent decline, Greek citizens have lost about 30 percent of their revenues and public spending has been slashed to the point that hospitals have great difficulty in functioning.

Yet, the request (order) of the “Troika” is simple – cut everything the deficit has been eliminated.

So, for example, cut pensions, which have been already been cut twice. In any case, this would reap a paltry 100 million euros but would cripple people who are living on less than 685 euro a month. Or, raise VAT on tourism, from the present 6.5 percent to 13.6 percent, which would be a deadly blow to Greece’s only important source of income.

This is the plan presented by Juncker, whose arrival as head of the European Commission was accompanied by a grandiose Marshall Plan for Europe, a plan which has since disappeared totally from the scene.

In an article a few days ago titled ‘Europe’s Last Act?”, Joseph E. Stiglitz, Nobel laureate in economics, argues that the idea of austerity as a uniform recipe for Europe is missing reality.

“The troika badly misjudged the macroeconomic effects of the program that they imposed. According to their published forecasts, they believed that, by cutting wages and accepting other austerity measures, Greek exports would increase and the economy would quickly return to growth. They also believed that the first debt restructuring would lead to debt sustainability.

“The troika’s forecasts have been wrong, and repeatedly so. And not by a little, but by an enormous amount. Greece’s voters were right to demand a change in course, and their government is right to refuse to sign on to a deeply flawed program.”

It is on austerity that the paths of the United States and the European Union divide.

The United States has embarked on investing for growth, despite pressure from the Republican party for austerity, and the U.S. economy is picking up again.

But Europe is now led by Germany and the Germans are convinced that what they did at home is valid everywhere. Together with the countries of northern Europe, they look on the people of southern Europe as unethical, people who want to enjoy life beyond their means. As The Economist put it in an article on the Greek crisis: “In German eyes this crisis is all about profligacy”.

It did not help that another very minor crisis – that of Cyprus between 2012 and 2013 – confirmed Germany’s view about the profligacy of the south of Europe. In the case of Cyprus, the “Troika” settled the crisis at a cost of 10 billion euros.

There is widespread agreement that the crisis of Greece, which represents just two percent of the total European budget, could have been settled at the beginning with a 50-60 billion euro loan. But only since Tsipras became prime minister, and with popular support started to refuse to accept the creditors’ plan, has Greece has become a very important issue.

There is now talk of a “Grexit”, or Greece’s exit from the European Union. This would have a cascade effect, and it would mean the end of Europe as a common dream, of a Europe based on solidarity and communality.

In the G7, Obama has insisted on investments and demand as a way out of the crisis. Merkel has again repeated that Europe does not need stimulus financed by debt, but stimulus coming from the reform of inefficient economies. At this point, perhaps “everything is always about something else”, as the late award-winning Sri Lankan journalist Tarzie Vittachi once told me.

An enlightening comment on the Greek situation has come from Hugo Dixon writing in The New York Times of Jun. 7. The Greek prime minister “will have to choose between saving his country and sticking to a bankrupt far-left ideology. If he is smart, he can secure a few more concessions from creditors and a goodish deal for Greece. If not, he will drag the country into the abyss.”

And then, it is interesting to note that one of the main reasons for being so hard with Syriza is that the citizens of Spain, Portugal and Ireland, who were the first to swallow the bitter pill of austerity, would revolt if they saw a different path for Greece, and it just happens that those countries have conservative governments.

The entire European political system reeled with shock at the victory of Syriza, and again a few days ago at the victories of the left-wing anti-establishment Podemos party in municipal elections in Spain.

For some reason, the very authoritarian and conservative government of Viktor Orbán in Hungary, the victory of the very conservative Andrzej Duda as president in Poland, as well as the rise of Matteo Salvini’s anti-European and anti-immigration Lega Nord party in Italy create no panic, not even if Salvini looks to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s right-wing Front National, as figures of reference.

So, the real issue now in the case of Greece is to punish an anti-establishment figure like Tsipras and show that the radical left cannot run a country.

Who really believes that there will masses of citizens in Madrid, Lisbon or Dublin taking to the streets to protest if Europe does a somersault of solidarity and idealism, and lowers its requests or dilutes them over more time? (END/COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

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

Excerpt:

It is astonishing that every week we see action being taken in various part of the world against the financial sector, without any noticeable reaction of public opinion.

It is astonishing because at the same time we are experiencing a very serious crisis, with high unemployment, precarious jobs and an unprecedented growth of inequality, which can all be attributed, largely, to speculative finance.

Roberto Savio

This all began in 2008 with the mortgage crisis and the bursting of the derivatives bubble in the United States, followed by the bursting of the sovereign bonds bubble in Europe.

It is calculated that we will need to wait until at least 2020 to be able to go back to the levels of 2008 – so we are talking of a lost decade.

To bail out the banks, the world has collectively spent around 4 trillion dollars of taxpayers’ money. Just to make the point, Spain has dedicated more than its annual budget on education and health to bail out the banking sector … and the saga continues.

Last week, five major banks agreed to pay 5.6 billion to the U.S. authorities because of their manipulations in the currency market. The banks are household names: the American JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup, the British Barclays and the Royal Bank of Scotland, and the Swiss UBS.“To bail out the banks, the world has collectively spent around 4 trillion dollars of taxpayers’ money”

In the case of UBS, the U.S. Department of Justice took the unusual step of tearing up a non-prosecution agreement it had reached earlier, saying that it had taken that step because of the bank’s repeated offences. “UBS has a ‘rap sheet’ that cannot be ignored,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney General Leslie Caldwell.

This is a significant departure from the Justice Department’s guidelines issued in 2008, according to which collateral consequences have to be taken into account when indicting financial institutions.

“The collateral consequences consideration is designed to address the risk that a particular criminal charge might inflict disproportionate harm to shareholders, pension holders and employees who are not even alleged to be culpable or to have profited potentially from wrongdoing,” said Mark Filip, the Justice Department official who wrote the 2008 memo.

Referring to the case of accounting giant Arthur Andersen, which certified as valid the accounts of the Enron energy company that went into bankruptcy for faking its budget, Filip said that “Arthur Andersen was ultimately never convicted of anything, but the mere act of indicting it destroyed one of the cornerstones of the Midwest’s economy.”

This was in fact a declaration of impunity, which did not escape the managers of the financial system, under the telling title of “Too Big to Fail”.

Two weeks ago, a judge from the Federal District Court of Manhattan, Denise L. Cote, condemned two major banks – the Japanese Nomura Holdings and the British Royal Bank of Scotland – for misleading two mortgage public institutions, Fannie Mae [Federal National Mortgage Association] and Freddie Mac [Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation], by selling them mortgage bonds which contained countless errors and misrepresentations.

“The magnitude of falsity, conservatively measured, is enormous,” she wrote in her scathing decision.

Nomura Holdings and the Royal Bank of Scotland were just two of 18 banks that had been accused of manipulating the housing market. The other 16 settled out of court to pay nearly 18 billion dollars in penalties and avoid having their misdeeds aired in public.

Nomura Holdings and Royal Bank of Scotland refused any settlement and instead went to court against the U.S. government, arguing that it was the housing crash which caused their mortgage bonds to collapse. Judge Cote, however, wrote that it was precisely the banks’ criminal behaviour which had exacerbated the collapse in the mortgage market.

It is worth noting that, until now, the cumulative fines inflicted by the U.S. government on just five major banks since 2008 amount to a quarter of a trillion dollars. No one has yet gone to jail – fines have been paid and the question closed.

Now the question: is all this due to the misconduct of a few greedy managers or is it due to the new “ethics” of the financial sector?

By the way, let us not forget that it was revealed recently that 25 hedge fund managers took close to 14 billion dollars only last year and that the highest paid manager took for himself the unthinkable amount of 1.3 billion dollars, equal to the combined average salaries of 200,000 U.S. professionals.

Well, just a week ago, the respected University of Notre Dame was reported as having published a startling report, based on a survey of more than 1,200 hedge fund professionals, investment bankers, traders, portfolio managers from the United States and the United Kingdom, in which about one-third of those earning more than 500,000 dollars a year said that they “have witnessed or have first-hand knowledge of wrongdoing in their workplace.”

The report went on to say that “nearly one in five respondents feel financial services professionals must sometimes engage in unethical or illegal activity to be successful in the current financial environment” and in any case,  nearly half of the high income professionals consider authorities to be ”ineffective in detecting, investigating and prosecuting securities violations.”

A quarter of respondents stated that if they saw that there was no chance of being arrested for insider trading to earn a guaranteed 10 million dollars, they would do so.

And nearly one-third “believe compensation structures or bonus plans in place at their companies could incentivise employees to compromise ethics or violate the law.”  It should also be noted that the majority were worried their employer “would likely to retaliate if they reported wrongdoing in the workplace.” So, the bonus that goes to those in the financial sector every year practically amounts to a bribe for silence on misconduct.

At the same time, we have learned that in Guatemala the Governor of the Central Bank has been arrested for embezzling 10 million dollars. Of course, everything is a question of scale…but in sociology there is a mechanism called “demonstration effect”.

The example of Wall Street and the City will increasingly seep down once a new “ethic” is in place. It will propagate if it is not stopped … and this is not happening.

A final note. In the same week (how many things have happened in such a short space of time), the Federal Trade Commission of Columbia accused four respected cancer charities of misusing donations worth millions of dollars.

One of them, the Cancer Fund of America, declared that it spent 100 percent of proceeds on hospice care, transporting patients to chemotherapy sessions and buying medication for children. The Federal Trade Commission found in fact that less than three percent of donations was spent on cancer patients.

The “new ethic” is in reality a cancer, and it is metastasising rapidly. (END/COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

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

By Roberto Savio
ROME, May 19 2015 (IPS)

The victory of the Conservative Party and the debacle of the Labour Party in the recent British general elections is yet another sign of the crisis facing left-wing forces today, leaving aside the question of how, under the British electoral system, the Labour Party actually increased the number of votes it won but saw a reduction in the number of seats it now holds in Parliament (24 seats less than the previous 256).

Roberto Savio

If the proportional rather than uninominal system had been used, the Conservative Party with its 11 million votes would have won 256 and not 331 seats in Parliament (far short of the absolute majority of 326 needed to govern), while at the other extreme the United Kingdom Independence Party with nearly four million votes would have landed 83 and not just the one seat it ended up with – results that would be hard to imagine anywhere else and a good example of insularity.

To an extent, the recent British general elections mirrored the U.S. presidential elections in 2000 when Democratic candidate Al Gore won around half a million more popular votes than Republican candidate George W. Bush but failed to win the majority of electoral college votes on which the U.S. system is based. The outcome was eight years of George W.  Bush administration, the war in Iraq, the crisis of multilateralism, and all the paraphernalia of “America’s exceptional destiny”.

Let us venture now into an analysis that will have the politologues among us cringing.“The left has tried to mimic the winners, instead of trying to be an alternative to the process of neoliberal globalisation and, since the beginning of the world financial crisis in 2008 … it has had no real answer to the crisis”

It is now generally recognised that the end of the Soviet Union has given free way to a kind of capitalism without control, marked by an unprecedented supremacy of finance which, in terms of volume of investments, overwhelmingly exceeds the real or productive economy.

In its wake, neoliberal thinking has found the left totally unprepared, because part of its function had been to provide a democratic alternative to Communism, which was suddenly no longer a threat.

The left therefore has tried to mimic the winners, instead of trying to be an alternative to the process of neoliberal globalisation and, since the beginning of the world financial crisis in 2008 (with its bail-out cost so far of over four trillion dollars), it has had no real answer to the crisis.

Ever since the industrial revolution, the identity of the left had been to press for social justice, equality of opportunities and redistribution, while the right placed the emphasis on individual efforts, less role for the state and success as motivation.

Continuing with this brutal simplification, we have to add that the left, from Marx to Keynes, always studied how to create economic growth and redistribution – Marx by abolishing private property, social democrats through just taxation.

But it never studied the creation of a progressive agenda in the event case of an economic crisis such as the one we are now facing, with structural unemployment, young people obliged  to accept any kind of contract, new technologies which are making the concept of classes disappear, and rendering trade unions – erstwhile powerful actors for social justice – irrelevant.

It is unprecedented that the top 25 hedge fund managers received a reward in 2014 of 11.62 billion dollars, yet neither U.S. President Barack Obama nor Ed Miliband, then still leader of the Labour Party at the recent British general elections (until he resigned after election defeat), saw it fit to denounce this obscene level of greed.

Meanwhile, Europe as a political project is clearly in disarray, and now faces a “Grexit” on its southern flank and a “Brexit” on its northern flank.

In the case of a “Grexit” (the possible abandonment of the European Union by Greece), Greece faces the prospects of having to make substantial concessions to Europe, thus reneging on the promises of Alexis Tsipras who was voted in as prime minister in rebellion against years of dismantlement of public and social structures imposed in the name of austerity.

What is at stake here is the very neoliberal model itself and not only is ordoliberal Germany supported by allies like Austria, Finland and the Netherlands erecting a wall against any form of leniency, but countries which accepted painful cuts and where conservatives are now in power, like Spain, Portugal and Ireland, see leniency as giving in to the left.

A “Brexit” (the possible abandonment of the European Union by Britain) is a different affair. It is a game being played by British Prime Minister David Cameron to negotiate a more favourable agreement for Britain with the European Union.

A referendum will be held before the end of 2017 and the four million people who voted for the UKIP in the recent elections, plus the country’s “Euro-sceptics”, threaten to push Britain out of the European Union, especially if Cameron does not manage to obtain some substantial concessions from Brussels.

Meanwhile, if Europe is in disarray, the United States has a serious problem of governance. Analyst Moisés Naím, who served as editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy magazine from 1996 to 2010, has pinpointed a few examples of how this has translated into self-inflicted damage.

One concerns China which, after waiting five years trying to get the Republican-dominated Congress to authorise and increase in its stake in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) from a ridiculous 3.8 percent to 6 percent (compared with the 16.5 percent of the United States), got fed up and established an alternative fund, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB).

Washington tried unsuccessfully to kill the initiative by putting pressure on its allies but first the United Kingdom, then Italy, Germany and France announced their participation in the new bank, which now has 50 member countries and the United States is not one of them.

Another example was the attempt by the Republican-dominated Congress to kill the Export-Import Bank of the United States (Ex-Im Bank) which has provided support for U.S exporters to the tune of 570 billion dollars since it was set up by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1934.  In just the last two years, China has provided 670 billion dollars in support for its exporters. Moral of the story: U.S. companies will be at a clear disadvantage.

As Larry Summers, a great proponent of U.S. hegemony, put it, “the US will not be in a position to shape the global economic system”.

The latest snub to the U.S. role of world leader came from four Arab heads of state who snubbed a U.S.-Gulf States summit at Camp David on May 14. The summit had been called by Obama to reassure the Gulf states that the ongoing negotiations with Iran over a nuclear agreement would not diminish their relevance, but the rulers of Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Oman and Bahrain deserted the summit.

However, there is no more striking example of mistake-making than the joint effort by the United States and Europe to push Russian President Vladimir against the wall over his engagement in Ukraine by imposing heavy sanctions.

There was no apparent reflection on the wisdom of encircling a paranoid and autocratic leader, albeit one with strong popular support, by progressively also bringing in all Eastern and Central European countries. The result of this encirclement of Russia is that China has now come to the rescue of Russia, by injecting money into the country’s asphyxiated economy.

China will invest around six billion dollars in the construction of a high speed railway between Moscow and Kazan, is financing a 2,700 kilometre pipeline for the supply of 30 billion cubic metres of Russian gas over a period of 30 years, plus several other projects, including the establishment of a two billion dollar common fund for investments and a loan of 860 million dollars to the Russian Sberbank bank.

So, the net result is that Russia has been pushed out of Europe and into the arms of China, and the two are now starting joint naval and military manoeuvres.  Is this in the interest of Europe?

At the end of the day, the decline of Europe and the United States perhaps comes down to a decline of political vision, with democracy being substituted by partocracy, and the statesman of yesteryear being substituted by very much more modest and self-referential political leaders.

This is all taking place amid a growing disaffection with politics, which is now aimed basically at administrative choices, making corruption easy. At least this is what around one-third of electors now appear to believe when they are asked if they think that they can make a difference at elections … and this is why a rapidly growing number of people are deserting the ballot box. (END/COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

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

Excerpt:

Mohammed (left) and Ahmed, two Somali migrants who survived crossing the Mediterranean and are now hosted in one of Syracuse’s first aid and reception centres, although they are not planning to remain in Italy for long. Credit: Silvia Giannelli/IPS

By Silvia Giannelli
AUGUSTA, Syracuse, Italy , May 11 2015 (IPS)

Not even a month has passed since over 700 hundred migrants lost their lives in their attempt to reaching the shores of Italy and the media spotlights have already faded on the island of Sicily, Italy’s southern region and main gateway to Europe.

Yet, the migration flows have not stopped.

Five days ago, on May 3, 300 people arrived in the port of Augusta, in the province of Syracuse, and among them were 19-year-old Ahmed and 22-year-old Mohammed.“That boat trip was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life, but I’m here, I’m OK and it will get better now” – Mohammed, a Somali migrant who survived crossing the Mediterranean to reach Italy

Both come from Somalia but they met in Libya, where they had worked for several months in order to save enough money to pay the smugglers running the traffic in migrants across the Mediterranean.

Ahmed and Mohammed are now hosted in one of Syracuse’s first aid and reception centres, but they are not planning to remain in Italy for long. Ahmed wants to go to Belgium, where some of his relatives already live, while Mohammed hopes to continue his trip towards Germany.

Crossing the Mediterranean was frightening, but they seem to have left all of their fears on the Libyan shores and their eyes are full of hope for the future.

“The sight of the sea from Libya was so scary, but when I look at it from here, it’s beautiful again,” says Ahmed, who is hoping to be able to study in Europe and become a doctor.

For Mohammed, “that boat trip was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life, but I’m here, I’m OK and it will get better now.”

Before leaving Libya, Ahmed had heard about the tragedy of the 700 who lost their lives, but that did not stop him because, he says, the risks are higher in Somalia than on the boats.

“The weather has been bad these days, but look how calm the sea is today,” a carabiniere standing in front of the centre told IPS. “We are getting ready for many, many more to arrive.”

Despite the fact that more than 25,000 migrants have already made it to Italy this year, the actual ‘migration season’ is just about to start. Meanwhile, Europe is lurching to answer southern European states’ request for help.

Currently, the Mediterranean is patrolled under Operation Triton, a border security operation conducted by Frontex, the European Union’s border security agency, which aims to deter migrants. Operation Triton replaced Operation Mare Nostrum, which had been a broader Italian search and rescue initiative.

During an extraordinary European summit on the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean held on Apr. 23, E.U. leaders agreed to triple funding for rescue operations in the Mediterranean, but this is far from being the ‘European solution’ to the migration crisis.

“Of course more capacity and more boats and early detection by planes increase the possibility of saving more people,” the Frontex press officer in Catania, Ewa Moncure, told IPS.

“But even with the best efforts, if people are put on these boats and sent to sea with no safety equipment, with not enough water, then nobody can guarantee that they will be found on time and that the rescue services will save everybody, because that would be simply a lie.”

While E.U. leaders continue to discuss possible naval blocks off Libyan territorial waters and southern European states try to open a debate on quotas of refugees to be shared among all member states, local authorities and Sicilian citizens are left with the task of handling the first aid and reception operations.

Augusta, a town of around 40,000 inhabitants, is one of the main bases of the Italian Navy in Sicily and it served as the headquarters of the Mare Nostrum operation, until it ended in October 2014.

Between April and October 2014, the town also hosted an emergency centre for unaccompanied minors, raising concerns and complaints of around 2,000 people who signed a petition to move the centre somewhere else and to propose naval blocks at the departure ports.

“This petition suggested exonerating from the allocation of migrants those municipalities that already suffer from economic insolvency and high unemployment levels, as is the case of Augusta,” Pietro Forestiere, local spokesperson for the right-wing Fratelli d’Italia party and one of the initiators of the petition, explained to IPS.

“The logic behind it is that you cannot ask someone who is already struggling to deliver proper services to its citizens to take care of migrant reception as well.”

The emergency centre of Augusta was eventually closed in October, but its example could be easily extended to the whole region, which suffers from the highest levels of poverty and the second highest unemployment rate in the whole of Italy.

Yet, despite the voices calling for strong action against immigration, it is very common to hear people in Augusta sympathise with the migrants, especially when it comes to refugees.

“They are made of flesh and blood, just like us. We simply can’t let them drown,” Alfonso, who owns a stand in the fish market, told IPS. “They are escaping war and poverty. If we can’t prevent them from coming, once they approach the coast, we must help them.”

Most citizens in Sicily do not appear to fear future arrivals. The problem is rather the feeling of being abandoned in handling the situation, as a customer at the market pointed out:

“This is a port, we have always been used to seeing foreigners around. The impact on our daily life is quite limited. Yet, something needs to be done, not so much for us but rather to help them, and we can’t do it on our own. This is a European – if not global – issue, and Europe must act.”

Edited by Phil Harris   

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Apr 27 2015 (IPS)

The results of a survey of what 3,500 young people between the ages of 18 and 24 – in all Arab countries except Syria – feel about the current situation in the Middle East and North Africa have just been released.

The report of the survey, which was carried out by international polling firm Penn Schoen Berland (PBS), is not a minority report given that 60 percent of the population of the Arab population is under the age of 25, which means 200 million people. Well, the outcome of the survey is that the large majority of them have no trust in democracy.

Roberto Savio

The word democracy does not exist in Arabic, being a concept totally alien to the era in which Muhammad created Islam. However, it is worth noting that the concept of democracy as it is known today is also relatively recent in the West, and we have to wait from its origins in the Greek era for it to make a comeback at the time of the French Revolution.

It became an accepted value just after the end of the Second World War, and the end of the Soviet, Nazi and Japanese regimes.

As a matter of fact, it is still not a reality in large parts of Asia (just think of China and North Korea) and Africa.

Then we have governments, as in Hungary where Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is openly preaching a style of governance à la Russian President Vladimir Putin, followed by several of his esteemers, including the National Front party in France, and the Northern League in Italy. But few have such a negative view of democracy as young Arabs.After the Arab Spring revolutions in 2012, a massive 72 percent of young Arabs believed that the Arab world had improved. The figure dropped to 70 percent in 2013, then 54 percent in 2014, and now it stands at just 38 percent

After the Arab Spring revolutions in 2012, a massive 72 percent of young Arabs believed that the Arab world had improved. The figure dropped to 70 percent in 2013, then 54 percent in 2014, and now it stands at just 38 percent.

According to the survey, 39 percent of young Arabs agreed with the statement “democracy will never work in the region”, 36 percent thought it would work, while the remaining 25 percent expressed many doubts.

It is clear that the Arab Spring has been betrayed by the return of the army to power as in Egypt, or by the clinging of the old guard to power regardless of the costs, like Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

If you add to this the fact that 41 percent of young Arabs are unemployed (out of a total unemployment figure of 25 percent), and of those 31 percent have completed higher education and 17 percent have graduated from university, it is not difficult to understand that frustration and pessimism are running high among Arab youth.

It also contributes to explaining why so many young people feel attracted to the Islamic State (ISIS) which wants to topple all Arab governments, defined as corrupt and allied to the decadent West, and create a Caliphate as in Muhammad’s times, where wealth will be distributed among all, the dignity of Islam will be enhanced, and a world of purity and vision will substitute the materialistic one of today.

This is why ISIS is attracting youth from all over. Besides, according to experts, for the terrorist to have a geographical space and run it  as a state, where hospitals and schools function and there is a daily life to prove that the dream is possible, represents a great difference with previous terrorist movements like Al-Qaeda, which could only destroy, not really build.

But the survey also reveals something extremely important. To the question “which is the biggest obstacle for the Arab world?”, 37 percent indicated the expansion of ISIS and 32 percent the threat of terrorism. The problem of unemployment was mentioned by 29 percent and that of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by 23 percent.

It is worth noting that the threat of a nuclear Iran was mentioned by only 8 percent (contrary to the declarations of Arab governments), while 17 percent consider that the real problem is the lack of political leaders, while only 15 percent denounce the lack of democracy.

It is important to note that no interviews were carried out in Iran, which is not an Arab country but is a Muslim country. However Iranian Muslims are Shiites and not Sunnis, as in all Arab countries, except for Iraq and Bahrein, and perhaps Yemen, where Shiites are a majority. Of the world’s total Islamic population of 1.6 billion people, Shiites make up only 10 percent.

It is within Sunnite Islam that a dramatic conflict is going on, where Wahabism, a Sunni school born in Saudi Arabia and the official religion of the Saudi reigning house, has now split into those who want to return to the purity of the early times and those are considered “petrowahabists” because they have been corrupted by the wealth created by petrol (they are also called sheikh wahabists because they accept government by sheikhs).

Saudi Arabia has been spending an average of 3 billion dollars a year to promote Wahabism. It has built over 1,500 mosques throughout the world, where radical preachers have been asking the faithful to go back to the real and uncorrupted Islam.

It was with Osama Bin Laden that the Wahabist movement escaped from the control of Saudi Arabia, very much like the radical Hamas movement, originally supported by Israel to weaken the Palestinian Liberation Organisation and Yasser Arafat, turned against the Israeli state. It is not possible to ride radicalism.

The survey also reveals that young Sunnis see ISIS and terrorism as their main threat, but we are talking here of a poll which should represent 200 million people between the ages of 18 and 25. Even if just one percent of them were to succumb to the call of the jihad, we are talking of a potential two million people … and this is now being felt acutely.

The polarisation inside Sunni society (Shiites are not part of that – there are no Shiite terrorists) is felt as the most important problem for the future.

In Europe and the United States, this should be the clearest of examples that ISIS and terrorism are first and foremost an internal problem of Islam and that to intervene in that problem will only unify the Arab world against the invader. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

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

Excerpt:

The 28 Ethiopian migrants of Christian faith murdered by the Islamic State (IS) on Apr. 19 in Libya had planned to cross the Mediterranean Sea in search of work in Europe.

Commenting on the killings to Fana Broadcasting Corporation (FBC), Ethiopian government spokesperson Redwan Hussien urged potential migrants not to risk their lives by using dangerous exit routes.

Hussein’s call sparked anger among hundreds of Ethiopian youths and relatives of the deceased, who took to the streets in the capital Addis Ababa this week before the demonstration was disbanded by the police, local media reported.

Protestors cited the government’s lukewarm response to the massacre of Orthodox Christians for their outrage, the Addis Standard reported. Later in the week, during a public rally organised by the government in the capital, violence again broke out between security forces and protesters resulting in injuries and the detention of over a hundred protesters, local and international media reported.“Pervasive repression and denial of fundamental freedoms has led to frustration, alienation and disillusionment among most Ethiopian youth” – Yared Hailemariam, former senior researcher for the Ethiopian Human Rights Council (now Human Rights Council)

Almost two-thirds of Ethiopians are Christians, the majority of those Orthodox Copts – who say that they have been in the Horn of Africa nation since the first century AD — as well as large numbers of Protestants.

In the widely-reported incident in Libya, IS militants beheaded 16 Ethiopian migrants in one group on a beach and shot 12 in the head in another group in a desert area. Eyasu Yikunoamilak and Balcha Belete, residents of the impoverished Cherkos neighbourhood in Addis Ababa, were among the victims, it was learnt, along with three other victims from Cherkos.

Seyoum Yikunoamilak, elder brother of Eyasu Yikunoamilak, told FBC that Eyasu and Balcha left their country for Sudan two months ago en route to reach the United Kingdom for work to help themselves and their families, but this was not meant to be.

“I used to talk to them on phone while they were in the Sudan,” Seyoum said in grief. “But I never heard from them since they entered Libya one month ago.” Eyasu had previously been a migrant worker in Qatar and had covered his friend’s expenses with his savings to reach Europe, said Seyoum.

In defiance of the warning of the government spokesperson, Meshesa Mitiku, a long-time friend of Eyasu and Balcha living in Cherkos, told the Associated Press on Apr. 20: “I will try my luck too but not through Libya. Here there is no chance to improve yourself.” Meshesha’s intentions came even after learning about the fate of his friends.

Ethiopian lawmakers declared a three-day national mourning on Apr. 21. The government also expressed its readiness to repatriate all migrants in dangerous foreign countries, the Washington-based VOA Amharic radio reported.

The rally earlier in the week came one month before Ethiopia holds parliamentary elections, the first since the death of long-time leader Meles Zenawi, and current prime minister Hailemariam Desalegn is expected to face little if any opposition challenge.

“We will redouble efforts to fight terrorism,” foreign ministry spokesman Tewolde Mulugeta said in response to demands for action from protesters.

Ethiopia is trying to create jobs so that people do not feel the need to leave to find work, he added. “We’re trying to create opportunities here for our young people. We encourage them to exploit those opportunities at home.”

Nevertheless, disenchantment marked by asserted claims of repression, inequality and unemployment has spurred a series of protests against the regime over the last few years.

These and other issues have prompted the exodus of Ethiopian migrants to Europe, according to several observers. “The idea that the majority of Ethiopian migrants relocate due to economic reasons appears flawed,” contends Tom Rhodes, East Africa Representative of the Committee to Protect Journalists, in an email interview with IPS. Rhodes also maintained that the violation of fundamental freedoms is closely tied with poverty and economic inequality.

In an email interview with IPS, Yared Hailemariam, a former senior researcher for the Ethiopian Human Rights Council, agreed. “Pervasive repression and denial of fundamental freedoms has led to frustration, alienation and disillusionment among most Ethiopian youth.”

“Citizens have the right to peacefully protest,” said Felix Horne, East Africa researcher with Human Rights Watch. “It’s no surprise given the steps government takes to restrict peaceful protests that disenfranchised youth would use the rare opportunity of an officially sanctioned public demonstration to express their frustrations. That’s the inevitable outcome when there are no other means for them to express their opinions.”

The main opposition parties say that the government has failed to create job opportunities, making migration inevitable. The regime, they charge, favours members of the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front and creates economic inequality.

Recently dubbed an “African tiger”, Ethiopia is one of Africa’s most populous nations with 94 million people (Nigeria has 173.6 million). It has been celebrated for its modest economic growth over the last years. But the average unemployment rate (the number of people actively looking for a job as a percentage of the labour force) was stuck at 20.26 percent from 1999 to 2014.

“The regime allocates state resources and job opportunities to members of the ruling party who are organised in small-scale and micro enterprises,” noted Horne. The CPJ representative agreed. “Ethiopian government authorities tend to reward their political supporters and ethnic relations with lucrative political and business positions” at the expense of ingenuity in the business sector.

In its 2015 report, the World Bank shared this discouraging view. Some 37 million Ethiopians – one-third of the country’s population – are still “either poor or vulnerable to falling into poverty”, the World Bank said, adding that the “very poorest in Ethiopia have become even poorer” over the last decade or so.

The U.N. Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) has estimated that about 29 percent of the population lives below the national poverty line. This explains Ethiopia’s rank at 174 out of 187 countries on the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) Human Development Index.

The Oakland Institute, a U.S.-based non-governmental organisation that spotlights land grabs, was recently denounced by Ethiopian officials for its latest report ‘We Say the Land is Not Yours’. According to the government, the institute used “unverified and unverifiable information”.

In a reply to the Ethiopian Embassy in the United Kingdom on Apr. 22, Oakland Institute challenged the government’s claim that ongoing development was improving life standards in the country.

The institute maintained that the government’s development endeavours are “destroying the lives, culture, traditions, and livelihoods” of many indigenous and pastoralist populations, further warning that the strategy was “unsustainable and creating a fertile breeding ground for conflict.”

More than half of Ethiopia’s farmers are cultivating plots so small as to barely provide sustenance. These one hectare or less plots are further affected by drought, an ineffective and inefficient agricultural marketing system and underdeveloped production technologies, says FAO. Several studies indicate that this phenomenon has induced massive rural-urban migration.

According to Yared Hailemariam, state ownership of land has contributed to poverty and inequality. “People don’t have full rights over their properties so that they lack the motivation to invest,” he stressed. The ruling regime insists that land will remain in the hands of the state, and selling and buying land is prohibited in Ethiopia.

Yared also pointed out that the ruling party owns several huge businesses which has created unfair competition in the economy. “The party’s huge conglomerates have weakened other public and private businesses” he told IPS. “Only the ruling party’s political elites and their business cronies are benefitting at the expense of the majority of the people.”

The tragic news of the massacre in Libya came amid news of xenophobic attacks against Ethiopian migrants in South Africa last week including looting and burning of properties. Unknown numbers of Ethiopian economic migrants are also trapped in the Yemeni conflict, according to state media.

Edited by Lisa Vives/Phil Harris    

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Apr 20 2015 (IPS)

This month’s World Economic Outlook released by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) only confirms that consequences of the collapse of the financial system, which started six years ago, are serious. And they are accentuated by the aging of the population, not only in Europe but also in Asia, the slowing of productivity and weak private investment.

Roberto Savio

Average growth before the financial crisis in 2008 was around 2.4 percent. It fell to 1.3 percent between 2008 and 2014 and now the estimates are that it will stabilise at 1.6 percent until 2020, in what economists call the “new normal”. In other words, “normality” is now unemployment, anaemic growth and, obviously, a difficult political climate.

For the emerging countries, the overall picture does not look much better. It is expected that potential growth is expected to decline further, from an average of about 6.5 percent between 2008 and 2014 to 5.2 percent during the period 2015-2020.

The case of China is the best example. Growth is expected to fall from an average 8.3 percent in the last 10 years to somewhere around 6.8 percent. The result is that the Chinese contraction has worsened the balance of exports of raw materials everywhere.

The crisis is especially strong in Latin America, and in Brazil the fall in exports has contributed to worsening the country’s serious crisis and increasing the unpopularity of President Dilma Rousseff, already high because of economic mismanagement and the Petrobras scandal.“Progressive parties were able to build their success during economic expansion but the Left has not developed much economic science on what to do in period of crisis”

This, by the way, opens up a reflection which is fundamental. From Marx to Keynes, redistribution theories were all basically built on stable or expanding economies.

Progressive parties were able to build their success during economic expansion but the Left has not developed much economic science on what to do in period of crisis. What it tends to do is mimic the receipts and proposals from the Right and, when the crisis is over, it has lost its identity and has declined in the eyes of the electorate.

From this perspective, the situation in Europe is exemplary. All those right-wing xenophobic parties which have sprouted up – even in countries long held to be models of democracy such as the Nordic countries – have developed since 2008, the beginning of the financial crisis. In the same period of time, all progressive parties have lost weight and credibility. And now that the IMF sees some improvement in the European economy, it is not the traditional progressive parties that are the beneficiaries.

The term that the IMF gives to the current economic moment is “new mediocrity” – which is a franker way of saying “new normal” – and it observes that in the coming five years, we will face serious problems for public policies like fiscal sustainability and job creation.

In fact, every day, the macroeconomic figures, which have become the best way to hide social realities, are becoming less and less realistic if we go back to microeconomics as we have done during the last 50 years.

The best example is the United Kingdom, which is the champion of liberalism. Each year it has cut public spending and now claims to have growth in employment, with 600,000 new jobs in the last year. The only problem is that if you look into the structure of those jobs, you will find that the large majority are part-time or underpaid, and employment in the public sector is at its lowest since 1999.

A clear indicator is the number of people who visit the food banks created to meet the needs of the indigent. In the world’s sixth largest economy, their numbers have grown from 20,000 before the crisis seven years ago to over one million last year. And the same has happened all over Europe, albeit to a lesser extent in the Nordic countries.

U.K. economists have published studies on how austerity has affected growth. According to the Office for Budgetary Responsibility, established by the U.K. government, austerity blocked economic growth by one percent between 2011 and 2012. But, according to Simon Wren-Lewis of Oxford University, the figure is actually about five percent (or 100 billion pounds).

In other words, fiscal austerity reduces growth, and this creates large deficits which call for more fiscal austerity. It is a trap that Nobel laureate Keynesian economists Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman have described in detail to no avail. We are all following the “liberal order” of Germany, which think its reality should be the norm and that deviations should be punished.

Now, while we can all agree that much of this is obvious to the average citizen in terms of its impact on everyday life, what is important and new is that the IMF, the fiscal guardian which has imposed the Washington Consensus (basically a formula of austerity plus free market at any cost) all over the Third World with tragic results, has woken up to reality.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not implying that the IMF is becoming a progressive organisation, but there are signs that an important pillar of neoliberal thinking is vacillating.

Of course, those responsible for the global crisis – bankers – have come out with impunity. The world has exacted over three trillion dollars from its citizens to put banks back on their feet. The over 140 billion dollars in fines that banks have paid since the beginning of the crisis is the quantitative measure of illegal and criminal activities.

The United Nations calculates that the financial crisis has created at least 200 million new poor, several hundred millions of unemployed, and many more precarious jobs, especially for young people. And, yet, nobody has paid, while prisons are full of people who are there for minor theft, the social impact of which is infinitesimal by comparison.

In 2014, James Morgan, the boss of Morgan Stanley, cashed in 22.5 million dollars, Lloyd Blanfein, the boss of Goldman Sachs, 24 million, James Dimon, the boss of J.P. Morgan, 20 million. The most exploited of all, Brian Moynihan of the Bank of America, a paltry 13 million. Nobody stops the growth of bankers.

Edited by Phil Harris   

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

Excerpt:

According to the United Nations, nearly two-thirds of all Syrians are now estimated to be living in extreme poverty. Credit: European Commission DG ECHO/CC-BY-ND-2.0

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 27 2015 (IPS)

A cash-strapped United Nations, which is struggling to reach out to millions of Syrian refugees with food, medicine and shelter, is desperately in need of funds.

The current status on humanitarian aid looks bleak: an appeal for 2.9 billion dollars for Syria’s Response Plan has generated only about nine percent of funding, and Syria’s Regional Refugee and Resilience Plan’s appeal for 4.5 billion dollars is only six percent funded, according to a statement released by the Security Council Thursday.

“Today, a Syrian's life expectancy is estimated to be 20 years less than when the conflict started. Unemployment is around 58 percent, up from around 10 percent in 2010; and nearly two-thirds of all Syrians are now estimated to be living in extreme poverty." -- Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Valerie Amos
Still, the United Nations is hoping for a more vibrant response from the international community at a pledging conference for humanitarian aid to Syria, scheduled to take place in Kuwait next week.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says the Syrian people feel increasingly abandoned by the world as they enter the fifth year of a war that has torn their country apart and claimed the lives of over 200,000 civilians.

The pledging conference, scheduled to take place Mar. 31, “is an opportunity to raise some of the resources required to maintain our life-saving work. I encourage governments to give generously,” the U.N. chief said.

According to the United Nations, the devastating five-year old military conflict in Syria has also triggered “the greatest refugee crisis in modern times.”

Over half of Syria’s pre-war population — some 12.2 million people — and the more than 3.9 million Syrian refugees arriving in countries such as Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan and Egypt, “are in desperate need of humanitarian assistance”.

For the third consecutive year, the pledging conference is being hosted by the government of Kuwait, which has taken a significant role in alleviating the humanitarian crisis in Syria.

The conference will be chaired by the U.N. secretary-general, and hosted by the Emir of Kuwait, Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah.

The last two pledging conferences were held in January 2013 and January 2014. The total pledged in 2013 was about 1.5 billion dollars and in 2014 about 2.4 billion dollars.

The largest contributions came from the host country, Kuwait, which pledged 300 million dollars in 2013 and 500 million dollars in 2014, which included 200 million dollars from non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Kuwait, amounting to a total of 800 million dollars at both conferences.

Asked about the rate of delivery, a spokesman for the Kuwaiti Mission to the United Nations told IPS that Kuwait had delivered 100 percent of pledges to U.N. agencies, funds and programmes, plus international NGOs such as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

Asked about next week’s conference, he said more than 78 countries and 40 mostly international organisations are expected to participate.

U.N. Deputy Spokesperson Farhan Haq said a very big part of Ban’s message next week would be: “As long as the crisis in Syria is not solved, you’re going to see millions of Syrians travelling to other countries in the region, and that has a tremendous effect on the livelihoods and the services and the way of life for people in all of the countries in the region.”

“So, we need to solve the problem in Syria, but we also need to give support to these countries at this time of need.”

Addressing the Security Council Thursday, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Valerie Amos said civilians continue to bear the brunt of the conflict in Syria, which she described as “characterised by breathtaking levels of savagery.”

She said the secretary-general has submitted report after report highlighting the failure of the warring parties to meet their basic minimum legal obligations.

Amos pointed out indiscriminate aerial bombings, including the use of barrel bombs, car bombs, mortar attacks, unguided rockets and the use of other explosive devices in populated areas, are the hallmarks of this conflict.

“I have previously reported on the worsening socio-economic situation in the country, which has eroded the development gains made over a generation.

“Today, a Syrian’s life expectancy is estimated to be 20 years less than when the conflict started. Unemployment is around 58 percent, up from around 10 percent in 2010; and nearly two-thirds of all Syrians are now estimated to be living in extreme poverty,” she told the Council.

The inability of this Council and countries with influence over the different parties at war in Syria to agree on the elements for a political solution in the country means that the humanitarian consequences will continue to be dire for millions of Syrians, she warned.

Children are particularly badly affected with 5.6 million children now in need of assistance. Well over two million children are out of school. A quarter of Syria’s schools have been damaged, destroyed or taken over for shelter. It will take billions of dollars to repair damaged schools and restore the education system, Amos said.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Mar 21 2015 (IPS)

The “surprise” re-election of incumbent Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Mar. 17 elections has been met with a flood of media comment on the implications for the region and the rest of the world.

However, one of the reasons for Netanyahu’s victory has dramatically slipped the attention of most – the support he received from young Israelis.

According to the Israeli daily Haaretz, 200,000 last-minute voters decided to switch their vote to Netanyahu’s Likud party due to the “fear factor” and most of these were voters under the age of 35.

Roberto Savio

Perhaps the “fear factor” was actually an expression of the “Masada factor”. Masada is a strong element in Israeli history and collective imagination. The inhabitants of the mountain fortress of Masada, besieged by Roman legions at the time of Emperor Tito’s conquest of the Israeli state, preferred collective suicide to surrender.

Israelis today feel besieged by hostile neighbouring countries (first of all Iran), the continuous onslaught by the Caliphate and the Islamic State, overwhelming negative international opinion and growing abandonment by the United States.

Netanyahu played a number of cards to bring about his last-minute election success, including his speech to the Republican-dominated U.S. Congress on Mar. 3, which was seen by many Israelis as an act of defiance and dignity, not a weakening of fundamental relations with the United States.

His support for Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza, his denial of the creation of a Palestinian state and his show of contempt for an international community unable to understand Israel’s fears led Netanyahu’s Likud party to victory.

In Israel, being left-wing mean accepting a Palestinian state, being right-wing means denying it. In the end, the Mar. 17 vote was the result of fear.“Taking refuge in parties that preach a return to a country’s ‘glorious’ past, blocking immigrants who are stealing jobs and Muslims who are challenging the traditional homogeneity of society, country … is an easy way out”

Israeli’s young people are not alone in moving to the right as a reaction to fear. It is interesting to note that all right-wing parties which have become relevant in Europe are based on fear.

Growing social inequality, the unprecedented phenomenon of youth unemployment, cuts in public services such as education and health, corruption which has become a cancer with daily scandals, and the general feeling of a lack of clear response from the political institutions to the problems opened up by a globalisation based on markets and not on citizens are all phenomena which are affecting young people.

“When you were like us at university, you knew you would find a job – we know we will not find one,” was how one student put it at a conference of the Society for International Development that I attended.

“The United Nations has lost the ability to be a place of governance, the financial system is without checks and corporations have a power which goes over national governments,” the student continued. “So, you see, the world of today is very different one from the one in which you grew up.”

As Josep Ramoneda wrote in El Pais of Mar. 18: “We expected that governments would submit markets to democracy and it turns out that what they do is adapt democracy to markets, that is, empty it little by little.

This is why many of those of who vote for right-wing parties in Europe are young people – be it for the National Front in France, the U.K. Independence Party (UKIP) in Britain, the Lega Nord (North League) in Italy, the AfD (Alternative for Germany) in Germany and Golden Dawn in Greece, among others.

Taking refuge in parties that preach a return to a country’s “glorious” past, blocking immigrants who are stealing jobs and Muslims who are challenging the traditional homogeneity of society, country, and bringing back to the nation space and functions which have been delegated to an obtuse and arrogant bureaucracy in Brussels which has not been elected and is not therefore accountable to citizens, is an easy way out.

This is a major – but ignored – epochal change. It was long held that an historic function of youth was to act as a factor for change … now it is fast becoming a factor for the status quo. The traditional political system no longer has youth movements and its poor performance in front of the global challenges that countries face today makes young people distrustful and distant.

It is an easy illusion to flock to parties which want to fight against changes which look ominous, even negative. It also partially explains why some young Europeans are running to the Islamic State which promise a change to restore the dignity of Muslims dignity and whose agenda is to destroy dictators and sheiks who are in cohort with the international system and are all corrupt and intent on enriching themselves, instead of taking care of their youth.

What can young people think of President Erdogan of Turkey building a presidential palace with 1,000 rooms or the European Central Bank inaugurating headquarters which cost 1,200 million euro, just to give two examples? And what of the fact that the 10 richest men in the world increased their wealth in 2013 alone by an amount equivalent to the combined budgets of Brazil and Canada?

This generational change should be a transversal concern for all parties but what is happening instead is that the welfare state is continuing to suffer cuts. According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), young people in the 18-23 age group will retire with an average pension of 650 euro. What kind of society will that be?

Without the safety net now being provided by parents and grandparents, how can young people in such a society avoid feeling left out?

We always thought young people would fight for social change, but what if they are now doing so from the right?

Edited by Phil Harris   

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

Excerpt:

Islam Iliwa lost her home and cleaning products business in Gaza following an Israeli bombardment. She is one of many single, divorced mothers struggling to survive under the siege. Credit: Mel Frykberg/IPS

By Mel Frykberg
GAZA CITY, Mar 21 2015 (IPS)

Israel’s siege of Gaza, aided and abetted by the Egyptians in the south, has aggravated the plight of Gazan women, and the Jewish state’s devastating military assault on the coastal territory over July and August 2014 exacerbated the situation.

In a resolution approved by the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women on Mar. 20, Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestinian territory was blamed for “the grave situation of Palestinian women.”

The 45-member commission adopted the resolution – which was sponsored by Palestine and South Africa – by a vote of 27-2 with 13 abstentions. The United States and Israel voted against, while European Union members abstained.The collective suffering of Palestinian women extends beyond death and injury, with forcible displacement and surviving in overcrowded shelters with inadequate facilities, including inadequate clean drinking water and food, lack of privacy and hygiene issues.

“Women’s suffering doubled in the Gaza Strip in particular due to the consequences of Israel’s latest offensive, as they have been enduring hard and complicated living conditions,” said Gaza’s Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) in a statement released on Mar. 8 to mark International Women’s Day.

“During the 50-day Israeli offensive, women were exposed to the risks of death or injury because of Israel’s excessive use of lethal force as well as Israel’s blatant violations of the principles of distinction and proportionality under customary international humanitarian law,” said PCHR.

During the war, 293 women were killed (18 percent of the civilian victims) and 2,114 wounded, with many sustaining permanent disabilities.

However, inherent cultural, religious and legal implications have also played a part in making life untenable for Gaza’s female population.

The world of 40-year-old Islam Iliwa from Zeitoun in Gaza City was shattered during a night of heavy bombardment last year during the war.

The divorced mother of three children, aged 10 to 16, lost nearly everything when an Israeli air strike destroyed her home and with it the business that she had worked so hard for years to build up.

Iliwa had been living in Dubai when she and her husband divorced, a move that makes it particularly hard for women to reintegrate into conservative Arab society.

The divorce was traumatic but Iliwa was determined to make a go of her life and moved back to Gaza in 2011 with the money she had saved up while working in Dubai.

Under Islamic law, the father would have been given automatic custody of their three children at their respective ages.

However, Iliwa decided she would pay her husband to sign custody of the children over to her as well as forfeit her rights to child support.

“I told him I would survive without him and make a good life for myself and my children,” Iliwa told IPS.

“On arriving back in Gaza, I poured my life savings of 20,000 dollars into a small business which sold cleaning materials,” she said.

“In a good month before the war I was able to earn about 2,400 dollars and my business was growing. However, my home and the little factory I built were both destroyed during the Israeli bombing attack. My son Muhammad was also injured,” recalled Iliwa, as she broke down and wept at the bitter memory.

Iliwa and her three children were forced to flee to a U.N. shelter, along with hundreds of thousands of other desperate Gazans.

When it was safe to leave the shelter, after a ceasefire had been reached, Iliwa and her children were destitute and homeless.

However, the plucky mother of three has been able to rent a new home and slowly rebuild her business with the help of Oxfam, even though she is now making a fraction of what she used to.

The collective suffering of Palestinian women extends beyond death and injury, with forcible displacement and surviving in overcrowded shelters with inadequate facilities, including inadequate clean drinking water and food, lack of privacy and hygiene issues.

A rise in domestic violence has aggravated the situation with women having little recourse to societal or legal support with many Palestinians believing that this is a private matter between spouses.

Under Palestinian law, the few men that are arrested for “honour killings” receive little jail time and women beaten by husbands would have to be hospitalised for at least 10 days before police would consider intervening.

According to PCHR’s documentation, 16 women were killed last year in different contexts related to gender-based violence.

Last year, U.N. Women in Palestine released a statement saying that they it was “seriously concerned” about the killings, highlighting that the “worrying increase in the rate of femicide demonstrated a widespread sense of impunity in killing women”.

A 2012 survey by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) said that 37 percent of Palestinian women were subject to some form of violence at the hands of their husbands, with the highest rate in Gaza at 58.1 percent and the lowest in Ramallah at 14.1 percent.

Gaza’s Palestinian Centre for Democracy and Conflict Resolution (PCDCR) explained that the difficult economic circumstances, poverty and unemployment, were the reasons behind the spike in domestic violence.

“These factors reflect negatively on men’s psychological status. They became more stressed and angry as they can’t support their families financially, live in crowded conditions and have no privacy,” PCDCR told IPS.

“There has also been a reversal in gender roles where women accept low-paying jobs which men consider below their status as the head of families or single women/widows are forced to take on the breadwinner role.

“This has all fed into men’s feelings of inadequacy and to them taking their frustrations out on their female relatives,” PCDCR told IPS.

Edited by Phil Harris    

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Mar 12 2015 (IPS)

The world is clearly splitting into two parallel worlds, with each going their own way, in what we could call the ‘Acapulco paradox’.

Take the official version of the image of Acapulco – a splendid Mexican resort, with horse riding on the beaches, a place blessed by nature and enriched by beautiful villas, gourmet restaurants, a place of bliss and relaxation.

Roberto Savio

Now take the version of the people living there – a place torn by criminal gangs with several deaths every day, where locals live in fear and total insecurity.

In the same way, there are now two ways to look at global reality.

One is the macroeconomic approach based on global data and, according to which, Greece has been doing better along with Italy, Portugal and Spain. In those countries, macroeconomic data are improving. Spain is even being touted as the example of how a country, which went through the bitter pill of austerity, now has growth at the same level as Germany.

Then, speak with young people, among whom unemployment is close to 40 percent, or with pensioners, or with those working in the hospital and education sectors, and you get a totally different picture. According to Caritas, the number of people living in misery has doubled in the last seven years.

The alternative model is the United States, which invested in growth and not in austerity like Europe. Its growth is running at 2.4 percent against an anaemic 0.1 percent for Europe. Again, the positive macro data do not coincide with the people’s data.

“Take the official version of the image of Acapulco, a place of bliss and relaxation. Now take the version of the people living there, a place torn by criminal gangs, where locals live in fear and total insecurity. In the same way, there are now two ways to look at global reality”
Let us take the latest example of economic recovery: the decision of the Walmart retail chain, one of the largest employers in the United States to increase the hourly wage from 8.9 to 10 dollars. This looks like very positive news, but the fact is that 60 percent of Walmart staff do not work sufficient hours to make a living – some work just two days a week, and with 640 dollars a month you are still into poverty.

Maybe it is just a coincidence, but the suicide rate rose from 11 per 100,000 people in 2005 to 13 seven years later. In the time it takes to read this article, six Americans will have tried to kill themselves and in another ten minutes one will have succeeded. More than 40,000 Americans took their own lives in 2012, more than died in car crashes, says the American Association of Suicidology.

If you start looking into the macro data, things become clearer. Profits from the financial sector are now over 20 percent of the total, double the level from the Second World War to the 1970s, and since 1970 productivity has grown by less than half. What this means is that the real economy has grown by half that of finance.

It is now clear that it is growth of the finance industry which is really holding back the rest of the economy, and far fewer people are employed in the financial sectors than in production and services.

These data come from nothing less than the Bank of International Settlements, the Gotha of the banking world, which also reports that brilliant people are trying to move into the financial sector, to the detriment of other sectors of the economy.

Looking into the figures opens up fascinating analyses. One of them from Hong Kong, published in the New York Times in the first week of March, deals with the personal wealth of lawmakers from China and the United States.

The NYT reported that according to the Shanghai-based Hurun Report, of the 1,271 richest people in China – a record 203 – nearly 16 percent are in the Parliament or its advisory body. Their combined net worth is 463.8 billion dollars, which is more than the annual economic output of Austria.

By comparison, American lawmakers are poorer. Eighteen of the Chinese lawmakers have a net worth greater than the 535 members of the U.S. Congress, the nine members of the U.S. Supreme Court and U.S. President Barack Obama’s cabinet.

We should pity the U.S. lawmakers, the 22 richest members of whom have only an average of 124 million dollars (70 percent of the senators are millionaires anyhow) and make up only four percent of the Senate, while four percent of the richest Chinese lawmakers are the country’s 203 billionaires.

Statistics in Europe also open the way to illuminating reflections. Take Spain, for example, where billionaires are in decline. In the Forbes list of the richest men in the world, Spain now has 21, five less than last year. Their combined wealth is 116,300 million dollars, and they increased their wealth in a year by only 500 million dollars, against the 3,200 million dollars of the richest man in the world, Bill Gates.

Yet, 500 million dollars is the equivalent of 35,714 average yearly  salaries, close to the population of the sunny town of Teruel in eastern Spain (around 36,000), and 116,300 million dollars is the equivalent of 8.3 million yearly salaries, equal to the combined population of Andalusia, the largest Spanish region, and the Balearic Islands.

The problem is that those two worlds are supposed to meet and relate through political institutions: Parliament, which represents everybody, and Government, which is supposed to regulate society for the good of every citizen.

Well, a good case study comes again from Spain, where it is possible to become a Spanish resident without going to Spain. It is sufficient to buy two millions euros’ worth of the country’s public debt, or buy one million euros’ worth of shares, or buy a house that costs at least 500,000 euros plus taxes, to become a Spanish resident. Since September 2013, 530 foreigners have obtained that right.

It is probable that the experience of obtaining a Spanish residence permit of the tens of thousands who crossed the Mediterranean at risk of their lives (it is estimated that over 20,000 have died up to now) looks very different. And many European countries have taken a similar path, including the United Kingdom, Cyprus and Portugal

In the United Kingdom, there is now a debate on a law from 1914 which excludes “non-domiciled” residents (‘non-doms’) from paying taxes on their foreign income or assets. It is enough to have a domicile abroad, usually by declaring permanent home in a tax haven. The number of ‘non-doms’ surged by 22 percent between 2000 and 2008 (year of the last available date), to reach 130,000 people.

This is part of an effort to reduce taxation on rich people, by creating loopholes and new regulations, to attract as many rich people as possible. President François Hollande in France has learnt at his expense what it means to speak of taxing the rich and had to make a quick turnaround. Obama is doing the same, and the only ‘leader’ who is speaking about taxing the rich is now Pope Francis.

However, one of the best examples of the ‘Acapulco paradox’ comes from the City in London.

After all the popular uprising about the disproportionate salaries of bankers, with public declarations from the U.K. government, the Church of England and the Bank of England, the announcement of an improvement in the U.K. economy by the European authorities has been taken at face value.

Barclays, for example, is increasing salaries by 40 percent, and an increase in salaries of 25 percent is expected all over the City this year. A young financial analyst, just out of university, at entrance salary could expect to take home the equivalent of 100,000 dollars per year.

While this will be good for statistics on average incomes, the yearly incomes of the 10 percent poorest British citizens will keep them at survival level. It is likely that their view of economic recovery will be different from those in the City. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris    

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

Excerpt:

For most Sri Lankans seeking asylum in Australia, there is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, just a sad return journey home. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
COLOMBO, Feb 25 2015 (IPS)

Weerasinghearachilage Ruwan Rangana had it all planned out last year in September: the big break that would change his life and those of his extended family had finally arrived.

The Sri Lankan youth in his early twenties was not too worried that the arrangement meant he had to make a clandestine journey in the middle of the night to a beach, board a two-decade-old trawler with dozens of others and be ready to spend up to three weeks on the high seas in a vessel designed to carry loads of fish.

“Besides trade and security, a large driver of the Australian government’s foreign policy is its single-minded focus on ensuring that all asylum seekers or refugees are processed at offshore facilities." -- Human Rights Watch
He and his fellow commuters prayed that the boat would not crack in two before it reached Australian waters, where they all expected to find a pot of gold at the end of the proverbial rainbow.

Rangana told IPS that most of the roughly three-dozen people on board were leaving in search of better economic prospects, though members of the minority Tamil community are known to take the same journey to escape political persecution.

The boat ride was the relatively easy part. After reaching Australia, Rangana would have to seek asylum, land a job and secure an income, before beginning the process of bringing his family there to join him.

“At least, that was the plan,” said the young man who was a contract employee of the state-owned Ceylon Transport Board in the remote village of Angunakolapelessa in Sri Lanka’s southern Hambantota District earning a monthly salary of 12,000 rupees (about 90 dollars) when he took the boat ride.

Half of the plan – the life-threatening part – worked. The other part – the life-changing one – did not.

Despite a leaking hull, the vessel did reach Australian waters, but was apprehended by the Australian Navy, newly emboldened by a policy to turn back boatloads of asylum seekers after fast-tracked processing at sea, sometimes reportedly involving no more than a single phone call with a border official.

By mid-September Rangana was back in Sri Lanka, at the southern port city of Galle where he and dozens of others who were handed over to Sri Lankan authorities were facing court action.

Thankfully he did not have to spend days inside a police cell or weeks in prison. He was bailed out on 5,000 rupees (about 45 dollars), a stiff sum for his family who barely make 40,000 rupees (about 300 dollars) a month.

Now he sits at home with no job and no savings – having sunk about 200,000 rupees (1,500 dollars) into his spot on the rickety fishing boat – and makes ends meet by doing odd jobs.

“Life is hard, but maybe I can get to Australia some day. I did get to the territorial waters; does that mean I have some kind of legal right to seek citizenship there?” he asks, oblivious to the tough policies of the Australian administration towards immigrants like himself.

Clamping down on ‘illegal’ entry

Since Australia launched Operation Sovereign Borders in September 2013 following the election of Tony Abbott as Prime Minister, at least 15 boats have been turned back at sea, including the one on which Rangana was traveling, to Indonesia and Sri Lanka.

Last year only one boat reached Australia, according to the government.

The programme has resulted in a significant drop in the number of illegal maritime arrivals in Australia. Compared to the one boat that reached Australia in 2014, the 2012-2013 period saw 25,173 persons reaching the country safely.

In the 10 months prior to the controversial military programme, 281 unauthorized boats arrived with a total of 19,578 people on board, according to the Australian Department of Immigration.

Just this past week, Australian authorities interviewed four Sri Lankans at sea, and sent them back to the island. Officials claim that the new screening process saves lives and assures that Australian asylum policies are not abused.

“The Coalition government’s policies and resolve are stopping illegal boat arrivals and are restoring integrity to Australia’s borders and immigration programme. Anyone attempting to enter Australia illegally by sea will never be resettled in this country,” Immigration Minister Peter Dutton’s office said in a statement this week.

As of end-January, there were 2,298 persons in immigration detention facilities in Australia, of whom 8.1 percent were Sri Lankans.

The policy has been criticised by activists as well as rights groups, including by the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

“UNHCR’s position is that they (asylum seekers) must be swiftly and individually screened, in a process which they understand and in which they are able to explain their needs. Such screening is best carried out on land, given safety concerns and other limitations of doing so at sea,” the agency said in a statement earlier this month.

According to the international watchdog Human Rights Watch, “Besides trade and security, a large driver of the Australian government’s foreign policy is its single-minded focus on ensuring that all asylum seekers or refugees are processed at offshore facilities.

“The government has muted its criticism of authoritarian governments in Sri Lanka and Cambodia in recent years, apparently in hopes of winning the support of such governments for its refugee policies,” the rights group added in a statement released last month.

The end of Sri Lanka’s 26-year-long civil conflict and the election of a new, possibly more democratic government in January this year add to Canberra’s justification for turning away those who seek shelter within its borders.

In reality, the risk for asylum seekers is still high. Newly appointed Minister of Justice Wijeyadasa Rajapakshe told IPS that the government was yet to discuss any changes to accepting returnees. “They will face legal action; change in such a policy is not a priority right now,” he added.

Lawyers working with asylum seekers say their clients are unlikely to face extended jail terms, but could be slapped with fines of up to 100,000 rupees (750 dollars), still a lot of money for poor families.

Even if the legal process is swift, and those impounded are able to post bail, their reasons for wanting to leave remain the same.

Take the case of Kanan*, a young man from the war-torn northern town of Kilinochchi. He took a boat in August 2013 after paying a 750-dollar fee, agreeing to pay the remaining 6,750 dollars once he reached Australia.

He never even made it halfway. Six days into the journey, the boat broke down and was towed ashore by the Sri Lankan Navy.

He was fleeing poverty – his home district boasts unemployment rates over twice the national figure of four percent – and possible political persecution, not an unusual occurrence among the Tamil community both during and after Sri Lanka’s civil war.

He knows that very few have gotten to the Australian mainland and that even those whose cases have been deemed legitimate could end up in the Pacific islands of Nauru or Papua New Guinea.

But Kanan still hopes to give his ‘boat dream’ another try. “There is no hope here; even risking death [to reach Australia] is worth it,” says the unemployed youth.

*Name changed on request

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

In the remote Mohonpur village, home to just 140 families, children are benefitting from a free preschool founded by a development NGO that promotes early childhood education in rural Bangladesh. Credit: Mahmuddun Rashed Manik/IPS

By Naimul Haq
JAMALPUR, Bangladesh, Feb 4 2015 (IPS)

Shanta* is only four years old, but already she loves school. Every morning, her mother walks her to the small pre-primary facility in Mohonpur village, about 140 km away from Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka, and leaves her in the care of a young female teacher, who oversees the day’s activities: storytelling, drama, reciting poetry.

The little girl’s mother, Mosammet Laily Begum, is a housewife of humble means. She and her husband, a rickshaw puller who earns about 100 dollars each month carting passengers back and forth, live in a thatched-roof home. They grow vegetables in the garden to supplement their income, and between them only just manage to scrape together the funds to feed and clothe their three kids.

Bangladesh has made huge strides in improving education in the last two decades. It currently has one of the largest primary schooling systems in the world, with an estimated 20 million pupils between the ages of six and 10 years old, along with some 365,000 teachers working in over 82,000 schools.
Education is a luxury, one that – in a different time and place – they would have had to forego in favour of life’s necessities.

But the preschool located close to their home is free. Before Shanta, Laily’s two older children also passed through these classrooms, where they learned the alphabet in both English and Bangla. They have gone on to do very well in elementary school. She credits their love of lessons to the foundation they received here in Mohonpur.

“My daughter now plays with nothing but her school books at home,” Laily tells IPS. “She would rather do that than play with other children in the neighbourhood.”

This family is lucky; unlike scores of others across rural Bangladesh who have no access to preschool facilities, they live within walking distance of one of the several thousand schools run by BRAC, one of the world’s largest development organisations that focuses on early education for kids between the ages of three and five.

Laily knows that her children could easily have fallen into the same category as the 3.3 million ‘out-of-school’ youth in Bangladesh. Until 2012, the government offered no options for families like hers, that couldn’t afford private preschooling.

This meant that the roughly 45 million Bangladeshis who subsist on less than 1.25 dollars a day had little chance of preparing their offspring for mainstream education.

This fueled a vicious cycle: poorer children who couldn’t get a head start lagged behind their more privileged peers, with inequities continuing on into the secondary and tertiary levels.

Many of these disadvantaged youth make up the bulk of Bangladesh’s unemployed, who constitute some 4.5 percent of the population of 156 million people.

Organisations like BRAC have attempted to level this uneven playing field.

With 12,450 pre-primary schools across the country, which provide schooling for nearly 360,000 students each year, the BRAC (Pre-Primary) Education Programme (BEP) is the largest free preschool programme in the country.

Altogether, over 5.2 million kids have benefited from these facilities since BRAC first rolled out the initiative in 1997.

Easing the transition into mainstream schooling

Standing inside the small tin shed that serves as her classroom, 27-year-old Rowshanara Begum is in her element. She handles a group of 30 kids, 18 of them girls – a 50-percent female enrolment rate being a top priority for BRAC – and she knows she is making a difference.

For two-and-a-half hours a day, six days a week, she painstakingly takes her charges through the alphabet, peppering the tedious process with drawings, nursery rhyme recitals and games. The flexible, informal structure keeps families coming back for more.

“There is tremendous pressure from parents to open another such free school for the children here in Mohonpur village,” she tells IPS.

Poor families can seldom afford the cost of private preschooling. They rely on free education provided by NGOs like BRAC to give their children a leg-up in life. Credit: Mahmuddun Rashed Manik/IPS

Teachers are trained to nurture a child’s creativity, which in turn encourages better communication, language and social skills. Equal emphasis is placed on improving motor ability, using exercises such as free-hand drawing and painting.

In short, the whole curriculum is geared towards easing the transition into the public education system.

This is no small undertaking in a country where the average child takes 8.6 years to complete the five-year primary school cycle. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) chalks this up to low standards in public institutions, and the fact that 24 percent of all teachers in government-run or registered non-government schools are untrained.

The NGO has a lot to show for its efforts. A senior BRAC official who did not wish to be named stated that they have achieved a “remarkable” transfer rate of students from preschool into primary school, touching 99.14 percent.

Still, this is only half the battle won.

Bangladesh has made huge strides in improving education in the last two decades. It currently has one of the largest primary schooling systems in the world, with an estimated 20 million pupils between the ages of six and 10 years old, along with some 365,000 teachers working in over 82,000 schools.

Since 1990, it has raised its enrolment rate from 72 to 97 percent and its completion rate from 40 to 79 percent. The number of primary schools receiving free textbooks has increased from 32 percent in 2010 to over 90 percent in 2014.

According to Rasheda K Choudhury, executive director of the Campaign for Popular Education (CAMPE) – a network comprised of over 1,000 NGOs working on education issues – Bangladesh has also lowered the dropout rate from 33 percent just a few years ago to 20 percent in 2014.

“Improved teacher trainings, a narrower gap in the student-teacher ratio [which now averages 49:1, compared to 67:1 in 2005], and provisions for stipends for students are among the reasons for its success,” she told IPS.

But there are gaping holes that need to be filled. Policy makers insist that the current allocation of 2.5 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) on the education sector must be upped to at least four percent in order to truly provide high-quality education for all.

Much work also needs to be done to improve access for the 71 percent of the population living in rural areas, as well as for indigenous communities who dwell in the country’s remote hill districts and residents of ‘chars’ – little islands formed from sedimentation that dot the country’s largest rivers.

According to Johannes Zutt, the World Bank’s country director for Bangladesh, the government is reaching out to those left behind by educational reform, “including slum dwellers, working children, indigenous children and children with disabilities.”

But unless programmes’s like BRAC’s BEP are rolled out on a massive scale all around the country, Bangladesh will continue to nurse a patchy educational track record, and the goal of universal primary education will remain out of reach.

*Not her real name

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

A small child and a woman sit next to LTTE cadres training in a public playground in Kilinochchi, a district in the Northern Province, in this picture taken in June 2004. The Tigers held sway over all aspects of life in areas they controlled until their defeat in 2009. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
VAVUNIYA, Sri Lanka, Feb 3 2015 (IPS)

In four months’ time, Sri Lanka will mark the sixth anniversary of the end of its bloody civil conflict. Ever since government armed forces declared victory over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) on May 19, 2009, the country has savored peace after a generation of war.

Suffocating security measures have given way to a sense of normalcy in most parts of the country, while steady growth has replaced patchy economic progress – averaging above six percent since 2009.

But these changes have largely eluded the area where the war was at its worst: the Vanni, a vast swath of land in the Northern Province that the LTTE ruled as a de facto state, together with the Jaffna Peninsular, for over a quarter of a century.

Home to over a million people, one-fourth of whom are war returnees, the Vanni has been in the doldrums since ballots replaced bullets.

“Peace should mean prosperity, but that is what we don’t have. What we have is a struggle to survive from one day to another,” Kajitha Shanmugadasan, an 18-year-old girl from the northern town of Pooneryn, told IPS.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Jan 22 2015 (IPS)

Every day we receive striking data on major issues which should create tumult and action, but life goes on as if those data had nothing to do with people’s lives.

A good example concerns climate change. We know well that we are running out of time. It is nothing less than our planet that is at stake … but a few large energy companies are able to get away with their practices surrounded by the deafening silence of humankind.

Roberto Savio

Another example comes from the world of finance. Since the beginning of the financial crisis in 2009, banks have paid the staggering amount of 178 billion dollars in fines – U.S. banks have paid 115 billion, while European banks 63 billion. But, as analyst Sital Patel of Market Watch writes, these fines are now seen as a cost of doing business. In fact, no banker has yet been incriminated in a personal capacity.

Now we have other astonishing data from Oxfam – if nothing is done, in two years’ time the richest one percent of the world´s population will have a greater share of its wealth than the remaining 99 percent.

The richest are becoming richer at an unprecedented rate, and the poorest poorer. In just one year, the one percent went from possessing 44 percent of the world´s wealth to 48 percent last year. In 2016, therefore, it is estimated that this one percent will possess more than all the other 99 percent combined.

The top 89 billionaires have seen their wealth increase by 600 billion dollars in the last four years – a rise of five percent and equal to the combined budgets of 11 countries of the world with a population of 2.3 billion people.

In 2010, that figure was owned by 388 billionaires, and this striking and rapid concentration of wealth has, of course, a global impact. The so-called middle class is shrinking fast and in a number of countries youth unemployment stands at 40 percent, meaning that the destiny of today’s young people is clearly much worse than that of their parents.“In a world where the value of solidarity has disappeared (Europe’s debate on austerity is a good example), apathy and atomisation have become the reality. We are going back to the times of Queen Victoria, substituting a rich aristocracy with money coming from trade and finance, not production”

It will probably take some time before those figures become part of general awareness but it is a safe bet that they will not lead to any action, as with climate change. U.S. President Barack Obama is the only leader who has announced a tax increase on the rich, although he stands little chance of succeeding with his Republican-dominated Congress.

In a world where the value of solidarity has disappeared (Europe’s debate on austerity is a good example), apathy and atomisation have become the reality. We are going back to the times of Queen Victoria, substituting a rich aristocracy with money coming from trade and finance, not production. But up to a point: 34 percent of today’s billionaires inherited all or part of their wealth, and – interestingly – “inheritance tax is the most avoidable of levies”, as James Moore noted Jan. 20 in The Independent.

The “father of modern times”, late U.S. President Ronald Reagan, saw it clearly when he said that the rich produce richness, the poor produce poverty. So let the rich pay less taxes.

Well, in a just-released report, the U.S. Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy notes that in 2015 the poorest one-fifth of Americans will pay on average 10.9 percent of their income in taxes, the middle one-fifth 9.4 percent, and the top one percent just 5.4 percent.

Now, 20 percent of the richest billionaires are linked to the financial sector and it is worth recalling that this sector has grown more than the real economy, and has regulations only at national level. At global level, finance is the only activity which has international body of some kind of governance, as do labour, trade and communications, to name just a few.

Finance is no longer at the service of the economy and citizens. It has its own life. Financial transactions are now worth 40 trillion dollars a day, compared with the world’s economic output of one trillion.

At national level, there are now attempts half-hearted attempts to regulate finance. But let us look what is happening in United States. The new bland regulation is the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, commonly known as the Dodd-Frank, and it does not go as far as restoring the division between deposit banks, which was where citizens put their money and which could not be used for speculation, and investments banks, which speculate … and how!

This separation was abolished during the U.S. presidency of Bill Clinton, and is considered the end of banks at the service of the real economy. In any case, the lobbyists on Wall Street are intent on having the Dodd-Frank chipped away at, little by little.

There is some schizophrenia when we look at the relations between capital and politics. The U.S. Supreme Court has eliminated any limit to contributions from companies to political elections, declaring that the companies have the same rights as individuals. Of course, there are not many individuals who can shell out the same figures as a company, unless you’re one of the 89 billionaires!

Meanwhile, banks are not only responsible for the corruption of the political system, and for the illegal activities which have earned them billions of dollars, they are also responsible for funding only big investors, and leaving everybody else out from easy credit. The efforts of the Chairman of the European Central Bank,  Mario Draghi, to have banks give credit to small companies and individuals has gone largely nowhere.

But a new and imaginative initiative comes from the very stern Dutch bankers. All 90,000 bankers in the Netherlands are now required to take an oath: “I swear that I will endeavour to maintain and promote confidence in the financial sector. So help me God”.

This is not so much oriented towards the customer, and it is very self-serving; and it brings God in as the regulator of the Dutch banking system. Perhaps the Dutch bankers have been paying heed to the words of Goldman Sach’s CEO Lloyd Blankfein who said at the time of the financial crisis in 2009 that bankers were “doing God’s work”.

Well God will have to be actively involved. All the three biggest Dutch banks – Rabobank, ABN Amro and ING Groep – have been involved in scandals that have hurt consumers, or were nationalised during the financial crisis, costing taxpayers more than 140 billion dollars. In one case, Rabobank was fined one billion dollars.

New York’s Wall Street and London’s City are said to be open to the idea of introducing a similar oath.

It is probably only that kind of Higher Power which could turn the tide in this world of growing inequality and lack of ethics. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

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

The author can be contacted at utopie@ips.org

Excerpt:

Many in the Vanni struggle due to a combination of poverty, war-related injuries and untreated trauma. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
VAVUNIYA, Sri Lanka , Jan 20 2015 (IPS)

In four months’ time, Sri Lanka will mark the sixth anniversary of the end of its bloody civil conflict. Ever since government armed forces declared victory over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) on May 19, 2009, the country has savored peace after a generation of war.

Suffocating security measures have given way to a sense of normalcy in most parts of the country, while steady growth has replaced patchy economic progress – averaging above six percent since 2009.

But these changes have largely eluded the area where the war was at its worst: the Vanni, a vast swath of land in the Northern Province that the LTTE ruled as a de facto state, together with the Jaffna Peninsular, for over a quarter of a century.

Home to over a million people, one-fourth of whom are war returnees, the Vanni has been in the doldrums since ballots replaced bullets.

“Peace should mean prosperity, but that is what we don’t have. What we have is a struggle to survive from one day to another,” Kajitha Shanmugadasan, an 18-year-old girl from the northern town of Pooneryn, told IPS.

She said youth her age were frustrated that multi-billion dollar infrastructure projects have failed to deliver decent jobs. “Look around, we have new highways, new railway lines, but no jobs, for five years people have been suffering, and it should not be [so] when there is peace,” she asserted.

Youth from the Northern Province have historically performed well at national exams, even during conflict times. That trend has held true: at the 2013 university entrance exam, 63.8 percent of those who sat their papers gained the scores required to enter the country’s top universities, a national high.

But with unemployment also at record levels here, and hardly any jobs for university graduates, those like Shanmugadasan are either staying out of universities or leaving the province in search of better prospects.

A new government, the result of presidential elections just a week into the New Year, and the Papal visit to the heart of the former battle zone on Jan. 14, have given rise to new hopes in the Vanni that life will improve for the ordinary people, who suffered during the war and have had little respite since the guns fell silent.

The 72-percent voter turnout in the Northern Province at the Jan. 8 presidential poll – an all-time high for the region – is a reminder to the new regime how desperate the people here are for real change.

During Sri Lanka’s civil conflict, life in the war zone was dominated by the fighting. Thousands of youth either joined the Tigers or were conscripted into their units. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

A small child and a woman sit next to LTTE cadres training in a public playground in Kilinochchi, a district in the Northern Province, in this picture taken in June 2004. The Tigers held sway over all aspects of life in areas they controlled until their defeat in 2009. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

Now, young people have more freedom than they did under the Tigers, but many are frustrated by the lack of proper employment opportunities six years after being promised a peace dividend by the government in Colombo. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

A youth who lost his leg during the conflict stands by his vegetable stall in the town of Mullaitivu in northern Sri Lanka. He has a small family to look after and says he finds it extremely hard to provide for them. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

A quarter of a million people who were displaced during the last phase of the war, along with tens of thousands of others who fled at other stages of the conflict, have moved back to the Vanni. Many families with small children continue to live in slum-like conditions, as a funding shortfall has left many without proper houses. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

Women have been forced to take up the role of breadwinner, with aid agencies suggesting that single females – either widows or women whose partners went missing during the war – now head over 40,000 households in the province. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

A woman stands in front of this small business she operates in Mullaitivu. The single mother was able to open the shop with the help of a grant she received from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

The war left tens of thousands disabled, but six years on there are hardly any programmes or facilities that cater to this community. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

This man, a former member of the LTTE who was blinded in one eye during the war, bicycles over 20 km each day in search of work. A father of one, he has found it hard to adjust to post-war life. Credit: Amantha Perer/IPS

Other former Tigers, like this rehabilitated cadre-turned-barber, were fortunate to benefit from government-sponsored aid programmes. Here, the one-time militant attends to a client at his barber’s shop in the village of Mallavi in Sri Lanka’s north. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

Many in the Vanni struggle due to a combination of poverty, war-related injuries and untreated trauma. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

The immediate aftermath of the war saw thousands of tourists flocking to the region, gawking at the remnants of a bloody past. Their numbers have since dwindled and a war tourist trail now remains mostly deserted. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

The election of a new president and the visit of Pope Francis to the former war zone – two monumental events coming within five days of each other in early January – have raised hopes in the north that real, lasting change is close at hand. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Over 500,000 people gathered at the Madhu Shrine in Sri Lanka’s former conflict zone to hear Pope Francis talk of national reconciliation and healing after two-and-a-half decades of sectarian bloodshed. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
MADHU, Sri Lanka, Jan 15 2015 (IPS)

Jessi Jogeswaran, a 20-year-old woman from Sri Lanka’s northern Jaffna district, waited over six hours with 18 friends in the sweltering heat just to get a glimpse of Pope Francis on Jan. 14.

The much-anticipated Papal visit brought well over a million people out into the streets to hear the pontiff’s sermons, first in the capital Colombo and later on in Madhu, a village in Sri Lanka’s northwestern Mannar District.

“If we know what happened to all those who went missing, or what will happen to all those still in prison after the war, we will know that things have changed." -- Ramsiyah Pachchanlam, community empowerment officer with the Vanni Rehabilitation Organisation for the Differently Abled (VAROD)
Young and old alike congregated at designated sites, including those like Jogeswaran who traveled miles to be present for the historic occasion.

The young woman with a disarming smile hides a terrible tale: as an 11-year-old, she endured three years of death and mayhem in her native village of Addankulam in Mannar, caught between advancing government forces and military units of the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) who at the time controlled a vast swath of land in the north of Sri Lanka.

The six-member family’s flight began in 2007, at the tail-end of the country’s civil conflict, and would last almost two years before, in tattered clothes, they escaped the final bouts of fighting in April 2009.

“The nightmare has not ended, it has become less intense,” Jogeswaran told IPS, sitting in the compound of the Madhu Shrine, a church nestled in the jungle that is home to a statue of the Virgin Mary, which millions around the country believe to be miraculous.

Jogeswaran said that despite the war’s end, thousands of people in the north were still fighting to escape the crutches of abject poverty, recover from the traumatic events of the last days of the war and reunite with relatives lost in the chaos of prolonged battles over a period of 26 years.

“We need peace, both within and without,” she added.

Delivering a short sermon at the shrine, Pope Francis echoed her sentiments.

“No Sri Lankan can forget the tragic events associated with this very place,” he said, referring to the attacks on the church and its use by local residents as a place of refuge during extreme bouts of fighting.

He also acknowledged that the healing process would be hard, and that sustained effort would be required “to forgive, and find peace.”

For scores of people here, however, the wounds are too many to forget. The over 225,000 who were displaced during the war have now returned to a region where some parts boast poverty rates over four times the national average of six percent.

There is an urgent need for some 138,000 houses, amidst a funding shortfall of 300 million dollars. Nearly six years after the war’s end there could be as many as 40,000 missing people, although the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has records of little above 16,000 dating back over two decades.

While the completion of several large infrastructure projects suggested rapid development of the former war zone – including reconstruction of the 252-km-long rail-line connecting the north and south at a cost of 800 million dollars – few can enjoy the perks, with 5.2 percent unemployment in the Northern Province.

A lack of job opportunities is particularly hard on war widows and female-headed households – estimated at between 40,000 and 55,000 – and the nearly 12,000 rehabilitated LTTE combatants, among whom unemployment is a soaring 11 percent.

Untreated trauma, coupled with a lifting of the LTTE’s long-standing ban on the sale and production of liquor, has pushed alcohol dependency to new heights.

With scores of people seeking solace in the bottle, the northern Mullaitivu District recently recorded the second-highest rate of alcohol consumption in the island: some 34.4 percent of the population identify as ‘habitual users of alcohol’.

Finally, despite the war’s end, there has been no progress on power devolution to the Tamil-majority Northern Province, a root cause of the war.

A new political era: A bright future for the North?

The week before the Papal visit, Sri Lanka underwent a seismic change in its political landscape, when long-time President Mahinda Rajapaksa was defeated by Maithripala Sirisena, who campaigned with the support of a wide array of political parties including those representing Sinhala extremists and others representing the minority Tamil and Muslim populations.

Jogeswaran, who voted to elect a national leader for the first time at the Jan. 8 poll, told IPS that she felt nervously optimistic that things would change.

“We have a new president, who has promised change, now it is up to him to not deceive the voters,” she said.

Ramsiyah Pachchanlam, community empowerment officer with the Vanni Rehabilitation Organisation for the Differently Abled (VAROD), told IPS the northern population was desperate for things to improve.

“There are new roads, new electricity stations and a new train line, but no new jobs,” Pachchanlam said, commenting on the over three billion dollars worth of infrastructure investments made under the former Rajapaksa administration that has not trickled down to the people.

The Sirisena government has shown some signs that it was much more amenable to the needs of minority Tamils than its predecessor.

In his first week in office, Sirisena replaced the long-standing governor of the Northern Province, G. A. Chandrasiri – a former military officer – with G. S. Pallihakara, a career diplomat.

The appointment of a civilian officer to the post was a key demand of the Northern Provincial Council controlled by the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), which had previously accused the former governor of stifling the council’s independence by carrying out instructions received directly from Colombo.

Many hope that greater political autonomy will pave the way to resolution of the most burning issues plaguing the people.

“If we know what happened to all those who went missing, or what will happen to all those still in prison after the war, we will know that things have changed,” social worker Pachchanlam said.

It remains to be seen if change will happen on the ground, but for a brief moment, in that jungle shrine, thousands came together in hope and expectation of a brighter future.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Violence in the lead-up to the Jan. 8 presidential election in Sri Lanka has poll monitors on edge. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
COLOMBO, Jan 6 2015 (IPS)

As 14.5 million Sri Lankans prepare to select their next leader, there is growing fear that violence could mar the Jan. 8 elections, billed as the closest electoral contest in the island’s history.

Election monitors were worried that as incumbent President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his rival Maithripala Sirisena wound down their campaigns on Jan. 5, violence would scare off voters.

Keerthi Tennakoon, executive director of the national election monitoring body Campaign for Free and Fair Elections (CaFFE), observed that a worrying precedent has been set by police who have by and large remained inactive against violations of election laws, especially those perpetrated by government supporters including at least two parliamentarians.

“The last 48 hours before the election are crucial; ordinary voters will not want to risk being assaulted, or worse, if they feel that there is such a risk." -- Keerthi Tennakoon, executive director of the Campaign for Free and Fair Elections (CaFFE)
“The police always appear to be late on the uptake when decisive action by law enforcement can be the most effective deterrent [to violence],” he told IPS.

He pointed to recent clashes in Kahawatta, a town in the central Ratnapura District, as an example. In the early hours of the morning on Jan. 5, while a group of opposition supporters were busy setting up the stage for a rally by common opposition candidate Sirisena in the town’s public grounds, a band of government supporters arrived in eight vehicles and began attacking them.

Rather than running away, the opposition group retaliated. The situation escalated, and shots were fired. Three opposition supporters were injured, and one was rushed to the hospital in critical condition.

Enraged, the opposition supporters launched a retaliatory attack on election offices set up by government followers. The main roads of the town were blocked for at least four hours while the mayhem unfolded.

“Police [did not] take any action until two hours after the initial incident,” CaFFE noted in an update. “They only reacted when the [opposition] United National Party (UNP) supporters started attacking [Deputy Minister Premalal] Jayasekara’s offices,” the monitoring body added.

A couple of hours earlier, another group of government supporters loyal to a deputy minister assaulted officials from the election commissioner’s department in the eastern town of Trincomalee after they had gone to investigate a digital screen in a public space relaying election propaganda.

The attack took place despite the officials being provided security by nine policemen.

“The last 48 hours before the election are crucial; ordinary voters will not want to risk being assaulted, or worse, if they feel that there is such a risk,” Tennakoon said.

Voting for equality?

The elections have been billed as one of closet in recent history. President Rajapaksa, who called elections two years before they were due, is facing a stiff challenge in the form of his one-time health minister Sirisena.

The run-up to the election has been dominated by personal attacks against the top contenders, and has remained largely empty of policy discussions.

Despite robust growth, Sri Lanka still faces vast economic disparities. The richest 20 percent of the population enjoys half of all national income, while the poorest 20 percent has access to just five percent of the country’s wealth.

According to the latest Household Income Survey by the government’s Department of Census and Statistics, the monthly income of the poorest 20 percent of the population was 10, 245 rupees (about 78 dollars), while the richest 20 percent earned a monthly income of 121,368 rupees (about 933 dollars).

Furthermore, the war-ravaged North is mired in poverty despite the civil war ending in May 2009.

Anushka Wijesinha, an economist and policy advisor, observed that the election manifestos are full of promises relating to public spending and low on strategic policies that would ensure long-term stability.

“Unsurprisingly, both manifestos are populist and full of public spending goodies – from welfare handouts to public sector salary hikes. These will boost short-term consumption, and are unlikely to be inflationary as recent inflation has been low. But the spending will hurt the fiscal consolidation efforts of the past few years and public finances may come under increased pressure,” he said.

The elections are likely to create economic uncertainty at least in the short term and will in all likelihood be followed by parliamentary elections. A day after elections were announced on Nov. 20, the Colombo Stock Market recorded its worst slide in over 15 months, and has remained sluggish ever since.

“Both [leading candidates] have a heavy emphasis on state-led initiatives and taxpayer-funded programmes, which in the past have been notoriously inefficient. Instead, focus of policies should be on making it easier for private sector entrepreneurship and innovation to thrive,” Wijesinha asserted.

The election has also seen a crumbling of the broad-based support President Rajapaksa enjoyed in Sri Lanka’s parliament since the war’s end.

Since late 2010, the President has had a two-thirds majority in the 225-member parliament. But a little over a month after elections were called on Nov. 20, 26 members from the government’s camp have crossed over to the opposition.

The Sirisena campaign has also gained the support of parties representing Muslim and Tamil minorities, who together comprise some 15 percent of the country’s population of 21 million.

There has been some attention paid to issues of importance to the minorities, especially development in the Northern Province.

President Rajapaksa campaigned in the North twice and pledged to revitalise the economy and create jobs.

Still, the unemployment rate in the Northern Province is stubbornly high at 5.2 percent, well above the national rate of 4.4 percent and the third highest in the country.

The island’s highest unemployment rate of 7.9 percent was recorded in the Kilinochchi District last year, according to government statistics. Poverty is also rampant in the North, with four of the five districts that make up the province registering rates higher than the national poverty rate of 6.7 percent.

But Muttukrishna Sarvananthan, who heads the Point Pedro Institute of Development based in northern Jaffna, told IPS that if the Northern economy is to regain momentum, more private investment needed to be channeled in.

“I would argue that more private capital investment that could generate a large number of [jobs] is the critical need, rather than foreign aid,” he said, pointing out that policies needed to be formulated with long-term stability in mind.

He also feels that decentralising power could help address political as well as economic grievances. “Fiscal devolution to the provinces should be undertaken immediately to provide the necessary financial resources for the provinces (including the Eastern and Northern Provinces) to operate independently and effectively without interference from the national government,” he stated.

Power devolution has been a critical demand of minority Tamil groups throughout the island’s post-independence history. In fact, the lack of political power was a major catalyst for the growth of separatism and the rise of the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which waged a protracted battle for an independent ‘homeland’ for the Tamil people from 1983 until 2009.

However, Ponnadurai Balasundarampillai, former Vice Chancellor of the Jaffna University, told IPS that power devolution would be a tricky subject for any administration.

“If it is a new president, he will have to take stock of the situation. The incumbent presidency has already shown that it favours a more centralised form of governance and administration,” he said.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

By Guillermo Medina
MADRID, Dec 22 2014 (IPS)

Political and institutional corruption has become the main concern of Spanish citizens after unemployment and the dramatic social consequences of the economic crisis, according to opinion polls.

The systemic nature of corruption – recognised by most analysts but denied by Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy of the right-wing People’s Party (PP) – is coinciding exasperatingly with the impoverishment of most of society and the enrichment of a few of its members, leading to a rejection of current politics and institutions that verges on social rebellion.

In the 2011 municipal elections, 39 percent of candidates under investigation for corruption throughout Spain were re-elected, according to a report by the Politico analytical group. Some notoriously corrupt officials even claimed that the “favourable judgment of the electorate” was a kind of absolution.“The systemic nature of corruption is coinciding exasperatingly with the impoverishment of most of society and the enrichment of a few of its members, leading to a rejection of current politics and institutions that verges on social rebellion”

But indifference towards corruption was transformed into intolerance when the crisis arrived and scandals began to emerge.

In October 2004, a poll by the Centre for Sociological Research (CIS) found that only 0.6 percent of respondents mentioned corruption among their main concerns; by October 2014, according to the same source, 42.3 percent were naming it as their second-highest concern.

Citizens have now made a direct connection between corruption and the crisis, profligacy, unemployment, impoverishment, inequality and a political style. Irritated and provoked by their observation of the obscene ostentation and impunity of the corrupt, many have reached the conclusion that it will not be possible to eradicate corruption without profound change.

In the view of many Spanish citizens, corruption has its origins in a model of party politics that reduces democracy to a mere mechanism for deciding – every four years – which party will occupy the seats of power, with no substantial change for the people.

The meteoric rise of Podemos (“We Can”), the movement and political party proposing radical change, is therefore not surprising. Founded in January this year, Podemos secured 25 percent of voter intentions in a survey published on Dec. 7 by the newspaper ‘El País’.

Due to deficiencies in the electoral law and certain flaws in their original make-up, the other parties have thwarted the wishes of the electorate and have created a crisis of representation.

Frequently, lax laws, long criminal proceedings, short statutes of limitations and the most varied tricks of judicial ingenuity conspire to grant impunity to conduct that is harmful to the common interest and causes public scandals.

No wonder Carlos Lesmes, president of the General Council of the Judiciary, said recently: “We have a criminal system devised to penalise the petty thief, but not the large fraudster; it does not work in cases such as we are seeing now, in which there is so much corruption.”

People today are aware of the relationship between politics and corruption. One of the most pernicious effects of this omnipresent phenomenon is that it monopolises and conditions political debate, weakening institutions like Congress and the government itself, which should be focusing their attention on solving the country’s crucial problems.

Politics are deadlocked. Accords have become unviable because the country is divided by two contrary and reactive forces, between those who are enraged at the “caste” and are seeking a radical alternative, and those who are frightened by what they rightly consider to be a threat to their interests and prioritise attacking their rivals, while trying to convince us that they are fighting corruption.

At this point, the corruption and disrepute of the political class has resulted not only in the growth of Podemos, but is perceived as a curse even by the business community, which sees it as a hindrance to economic recovery.

A survey among the 500 participants at the recent National Congress of Family Business awarded only 1.08 out of 9 points to the political situation. Last year the result was 1.66 out of 9.

Democracy does not create corrupt people, but corrupt people end up corrupting democracy, and then corruption becomes a structural, systemic problem. Multiple abscesses turn into gangrene and after that, ending corruption means cleansing the entire system.

Fighting corruption is only possible in the broader context of political and institutional regeneration. So it seems to those who demand regeneration, and because they feel that the established parties are lacking in political will, they state their intention to vote for Podemos.

The anti-corruption measures proposed so far by the government are uninspiring and lack depth because they do not make the necessary connection between corruption and political regeneration. The opposition Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) goes further than the PP although its proposals are also inadequate and somewhat vague.

It is impossible to fight corruption effectively without reforming the bipartisan model, introducing internal democracy and carrying out a thorough reform of the system of justice to guarantee the independence of the judiciary, as judges and magistrates are demanding.

Political corruption goes hand-in-hand with the exercise of power, whether in Andalusia (PSOE), Catalonia (Convergence and Union), Valencia (PP) or Spain as a whole (PP). Therefore the existence of regulatory institutions, a real separation of powers, and free and independent media are essential for combating it.

Even if it is accepted that ending poverty and unemployment is more important than regeneration, I do not see how the former can be achieved without the latter.

The idea that the economic crisis has generated a political crisis is widespread, but the reverse is equally true, so we are up against the question of which came first, the chicken or the egg.

For a time, the Spanish government has tried to face the economic crisis, leaving aside the political crisis, with dire consequences. Unfortunately the Prime Minister does not take this view and believes instead that the long-heralded economic recovery will be the panacea for all ills. The results are clear for all to see. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

(Edited by Phil Harris)

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

Excerpt:

Faced with starvation, hordes of jobless Zimbabweans in towns and cities here have turned to vending on streets pavements to put food on their tables. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, Dec 9 2014 (IPS)

As unemployment deepens across this Southern African nation and as the country battles to achieve the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) ahead of the December 2015 deadline, thousands of urban Zimbabweans here are facing starvation.

The MDGs are eight goals agreed to by all U.N. member states and all leading international development institutions to be achieved by the target date of 2015. These goals range from halving extreme poverty to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary education.

Zimbabwe has a total population of just over 13 million people, according to the 2012 National Census – of these, 67 percent now live in rural areas while 33 percent live in urban areas.

According to the Poverty, Income, Consumption and Expenditure Survey report for 2011-2012 from the Zimbabwe Statistical Agency (ZIMSTAT), 30.4 percent of rural people in Zimbabwe are “extremely poor” – and are also people facing starvation – compared with 5.6 percent in urban areas.“The current inability of the economy to address people’s basic needs is leading to hunger in most urban households, with almost none of urban residents in Zimbabwe being able to afford three meals a day nowadays” – Philip Bohwasi, chairperson of Zimbabwe’s Council of Social Workers

Social workers find the stay of urban dwellers in Zimbabwe’s cities justifiable, but ridden with hardships.

“Remaining in towns and cities for many here is better than living in the countryside as every slightest job opportunity often starts in urban areas in spite of the expensive living conditions in towns and cities,” independent social worker Tracey Ngirazi told IPS.

According to Philip Bohwasi, chairperson of Zimbabwe’s Council of Social Workers, urban starvation is being caused by loss of jobs – the World Food Programme (WFP) estimates unemployment in Zimbabwe to be at 60 percent of the country’s total population.

“The current inability of the economy to address people’s basic needs is leading to hunger in most urban households, with almost none of urban residents in Zimbabwe affording three meals a day nowadays,” Bohwasi told IPS.

True to Bohwasi’s words, for many Zimbabwean urban residents like unemployed 39-year-old qualified accountant Josphat Madyira from the Zimbabwean capital Harare, starvation has become order of the day.

“Food stores are filled to the brim with groceries, but most of us here are jobless and therefore have no money to consistently buy very basic foodstuffs, resulting in us having mostly one meal per day,” Madyira told IPS.

Madyira lost his job at a local shoe manufacturing company after it shut down operations owing to the country’s deepening liquidity crunch, thanks to a failing economy here that has rendered millions of people jobless.

Asked how city dwellers like him are surviving, Madyira said: “People who are jobless like me have resorted to vending on streets pavements, selling anything we can lay our hands on as we battle to put food on our tables.”

The donor community, which often extends food aid to impoverished rural households, has rarely done the same in towns and cities here despite hunger now taking its toll on the urban population, according to civil society activists.

“Whether in cities or remote areas, hunger in Zimbabwe is equally ravaging ordinary people and most of the donor community has for long directed food aid to the countryside, rarely paying attention to towns and cities, which are also now succumbing to famine,” Catherine Mukwapati, director of the Youth Dialogue Action Network civil society organisation, told IPS.

Apparently failing to combat hunger in line with the MDGs, over the years Zimbabwe has not made great strides in eradicating extreme poverty and hunger due to the economic decline that has persisted since 2000.

As a result, earlier this year, the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF), in partnership with the Zimbabwean government, extended its monthly cash pay-out scheme to urban areas.

Under this scheme, which started at the peak of Zimbabwe’s economic crisis in 2008, families living on less than 1.25 dollars a day receive a monthly pay-out of between 10 and 20 dollars, depending on the number of family members.

Economists and development experts here say that achieving the MDGs without food on people’s tables, especially in cities whose inhabitants are fast falling prey to growing hunger, is going to be a nightmare, if not highly impossible for Zimbabwe.

“Be it in cities or rural areas, Zimbabwe still has a lot of people living on less than 1.25 dollars a day, which is the global index measure of extreme poverty, a clear indication that as a country we are far from successfully combating hunger and poverty in line with the U.N. MDGs whose global deadline for world countries to achieve is next year,” independent development expert Obvious Sibanda told IPS.

According to the 2013 Human Development Index of the U.N. Development Programmer (UNDP), Zimbabwe is a low-income, food-deficit country, ranked 156 out of 187 countries globally and UNDP says that currently 72 percent of Zimbabweans live below the national poverty line.

Although hunger is now hammering people in both urban and rural areas, government sources also recognise that the pinch is being felt more by urban dwellers.

“The decline in formal employment, mostly in towns and cities, with many workers engaged in poorly remunerated informal jobs, has a direct bearing on both poverty and hunger, which is on a sharp rise in urban areas,” a top government economist, who declined to be named, admitted to IPS.

For the many hunger-stricken Madyiras in Zimbabwe’s towns and cities, meeting the MDGS by the end of next year matters little.

“Defeating starvation is far from me without decent and stable employment and whether or not my country fulfils the MDGs, it may be of no immediate result to many people like me,” Madyira told IPS.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

“It’s like putting explosive, gasoline and matches all in one shed. These are things that should be stored in separated places.”

Giuseppe Giorgioli, an inhabitant of the Tor Sapienza district of Rome and a member of the Tor Sapienza Committee, was explaining the mid-November outburst in the district against a reception centre for asylum seekers and refugees, in which dozens of paper bombs were thrown.

The Tor Sapienza district, situated in the east side of the Italian capital, is home to almost 13 thousands citizens and, according to Giorgioli, is treated as a “second class quarter” by the Rome administration because of its relatively small dimensions.Episodes like the attack on a reception centre for asylum seekers and refugees “are being worsened by a growing poverty that now affects 13 million people in Italy, with 42 percent of young people unemployed” – Monsignor Giancarlo Perego

“For the last 10 to 15 years there has been a progressive phenomenon of disruption-parking in our suburb. This is how we ended up hosting four reception centres for migrants and two gypsy camps, while other districts in the city have none,” Giorgioli complained.

The residents’ uprising followed an alleged attempt of rape by a Romanian citizen against a local resident and a series of attempted robberies in apartments in the neighbourhood.

The Tor Sapienza Committee had organised a demonstration to ask the Rome Town Council to act against the urban decay the neighbourhood is suffering but once the march was over, a group of people – about one hundred according to witnesses – gathered in front of the building where the ‘Il Sorriso’ cooperative manages different services, including a reception centre for asylum seekers and refugees and three structures hosting foreign unaccompanied minors.

“When I arrived in the centre the following morning, I found huge pieces of asphalt, broken glass and people – both adults and minors – suffering from panic attacks,” recalls Alessia Armini of Italy’s System of Protection for Asylum Seekers and Refugees (SPRAR), who is coordinator of the cooperative. “Let’s not forget the kind of vulnerable guests we have in such centres,” she adds.

While no one denies the critical conditions suffered by many suburbs in Rome, with cuts in transport services, council houses not having been refurbished for decades and inefficient garbage collection among others, the explanations for such a violent outburst vary widely.

“People are not racists, they are exasperated. Rome is just the tip of the iceberg, but this is about the whole country,” Paolo Grimoldi, MP for right-wing Northern League party, told IPS. “When you receive 150 thousand migrants – we say illegal, the government says refugees – in one year who are given a house, money and are taken care of by the State, this inevitably destabilises our social fabric.”

However, according to Monsignor Giancarlo Perego who runs Migrantes, the foundation of the Italian Episcopal Conference (CEI) for migrants, the numbers tell a different story: “Migrants are abandoning our country because it no longer represents an economic opportunity for many of them,” he told IPS.

“The reasons must be found in a management of the suburbs that looked at the interests of building speculators rather than guaranteeing common assets such as meeting places that are necessary to build a feeling of safety within a territory.”

In addition, the economic crisis also plays an important role also in this context. “Episodes [like the Tor Sapienza] incident are being worsened by a growing poverty that now affects 13 million people in Italy, with 42 percent of young people unemployed,” said Perego.

“But such a difficult situation does not exempt us from the need of building relationships, delivering correct information and managing the places where people live in order to encourage encounters and not social clashes.”

For their part, the citizens of Tor Sapienza firmly reject any accusation of racism. “We welcome everybody and we’ve been welcoming everybody for twenty years,” Giorgioli told IPS.

“You don’t become racist in four days. But there are rules that need to be respected and services that the town council needs to provide. If such services are not provided, unfortunately someone with less patience begins to see red.”

In the days that followed the attack on the reception centre, both local and national politicians visited the neighbourhood, provoking strong criticism – and not only from angry citizens – that they were using the situation for instrumental reasons.

“I think that any form of manipulation, whether from left or right, is a serious aspect to be avoided. Politicians must govern a city, not pour in new reasons for social clashes,” Perego said.

Meanwhile, the violent episode in Tor Sapienza and signs of social unrest in other Italian neighbourhoods that have sparked debate and drawn attention to the migrant issue are not to be underestimated.

“In these suburbs, the level of social distress is extremely high, but all that hate, taking a symbol and pouring everything out on it … it’s frightening,” said Armini. “We heard people [outside the centre] screaming ‘let’s burn them all, let’s make soap out of them’. This issue brought out the worst in people.”

While condemning the recent violence, Giorgioli of the Tor Sapienza Committee is not sure that such situations will not be repeated

“I have reasons to fear that the same people who have already shown that they are capable of violent actions will repeat them if there are no signs of change. They could feel disrespected, as if the institutions were making a fool of them.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

UNIDO Director General LI Yong at the Second ISID Forum, Nov. 4-5, 2014. Credit: Courtesy of UNIDO

By Ramesh Jaura
VIENNA, Nov 6 2014 (IPS)

The United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) has come a long way since 1997, when it faced the risk of closure in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War.

At that time, it was threatened with the withdrawal of Canada, the United States – its largest donor – as well as Australia on the grounds that the private sector was better suited to foster industrial development than an inter-governmental organisation.

Nearly one-and-a-half year after UNIDO’s 53-member Industrial Development Board appointed LI Jong – who had served as China’s Vice-Minister of Finance since 2003 – as Director General, the organisation is set to respond to post-2015 global development priorities by treading the path to inclusive and sustainable industrial development (ISID).

“We have a vision of a just world where resources are optimised for the good of people. Inclusive and sustainable industrial development can drive success" – U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon
It was not surprising therefore that some 450 participants from 92 countries, including Heads of State and government, ministers, representatives of bilateral and multilateral development partners, agencies of the United Nations system, the private sector, non-governmental organisations and academia, joined hands to interact at UNIDO’s Second ISID Forum on Nov. 4 and 5 at the United Nations headquarters in Vienna.

The first Forum was convened in June 2014, at which government officials and key policy-makers exchanged views on policies and ISID instruments and examined what had worked in one country and could inspire another.

“The promotion of inclusive and sustainable industrial development is a very clear mandate given by our Member States at the General Conference of UNIDO in Lima, Peru, last December,” LI told the Forum on Nov, 4.

“Since then, we have been implementing the new mandate in various ways … Today we send a strong statement: technical assistance cannot remain isolated from the main forces that shape the course of progress in your countries. We have to combine our efforts to enhance the developmental impact of our endeavours. Together we will grow; the partnership will make us stronger.”

The rationale behind the UNIDO Director General’s thinking is obvious. Strategic partnerships are the best response to increasingly complex development challenges because there is no single development strategy and no single actor that can address all the social, environmental and economic challenges the world faces today.

“Integrated and multi-actor responses are required to tackle problems like climate change, economic recovery, rising youth unemployment, conflict, and emerging problems such as global health pandemics,” argues Ll.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon also believes that “the overarching imperative for our planet’s future is sustainable development.” In opening remarks to the Second Forum, Ban said:  “We have a vision of a just world where resources are optimised for the good of people. Inclusive and sustainable industrial development can drive success.”

Amid applause, Ban added that among the main area of action – climate change – presents an opening for inclusive and sustainable industrial development.

“Smart governments and investors are exploring innovative green technologies that can protect the environment and achieve economic growth. For industrial development to be sustainable it must abandon old models that pollute. Instead, we need sustainable approaches that help communities preserve their resources,” he said.

The UNIDO forum closely examined and endorsed new pilot programmes for country partnerships to promote inclusive and sustainable industrial development in Ethiopia and Senegal.

The programmes are based on close analysis and insights gained by UNIDO experts during visits to the two countries in the course of the previous months. They have identified a number of strong partners, both local and international, and accordingly designed the two partnership programmes.

From left to right: Ethiopia’s Prime Minister, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, UNIDO Director General LI Yong and Senegal’s Prime Minister at UNIDO’s Second ISID Forum, Nov. 4-5, 2014. Credit: Courtesy of UNIDO

UNIDO’s work in the field of inclusive and sustainable industrialisation in Africa was lauded by Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn and Senegalese Prime Minister Mahammed Dionne.

Commending the creation of the new partnership approach, Prime Minister Desalegn said that inclusive and sustainable industrialisation would help his country develop. He said Ethiopia was looking forward to enhancing its economic transformation and that such a partnership model will help implement this vision.

Prime Minister Dionne said economic growth must lead to the eradication of poverty and address the problem of unemployment, adding that inclusive and sustainable industrialisation would help implement Senegal’s development plan by providing the collective action needed to make it happen.

Director General Ll assured the two prime ministers that “UNIDO is fully committed to supporting the governments of Ethiopia and Senegal in implementing the two programmes.”

“These pilot programmes,” he said, “mark the beginning of a larger, more comprehensive and ambitious approach to how UNIDO undertakes technical cooperation with and for Member States to support their industrialisation agenda.”

“If we want to achieve the scale of development needed, we have to explore the full potential of inclusive and sustainable industrial development,” Ll added.

“We have to strengthen productive capacities. We must build enterprises. We must reach out to farmers and entrepreneurs, and promote economic diversification and structural transformation based on adding value to the natural resources of these countries.”

The need for moving away from activities that are low value-added and low-productivity to activities that add more value and boost productivity was explained by the U.N. Secretary-General at the high-level thematic roundtable of the United Nations Conference on Landlocked Developing Countries (LLDCs) on Nov. 3 in Vienna.

There, Ban said: “Think of a coffee bean, just a simple coffee bean. All LLDCs can sell just a coffee bean as it is. But more developed creative countries … grind this coffee bean and sell as a manufactured product at a much higher price.

“The same with unprocessed minerals. Lots of developing countries … sell minerals just as they are. Many foreign companies come and bring all these minerals, and then they sell back with processed manufactures, [at a] much higher [price]. Then with their own mineral resources they have to buy, they have to pay a lot of money.”

ISID takes into account factors such as the structural and knowhow bottlenecks faced by developing countries by “the mobilisation of partners and their resources to synergise with UNIDO’s technical cooperation”, LI told the ISID Forum.

Commenting on the agreed cooperation with Ethiopia and Senegal, he said: “I would say that these two pilot programmes for country partnership mark the beginning of a larger, more comprehensive and more ambitious approach of how UNIDO undertakes technical cooperation with and for Member States to support their industrialisation agendas.”

“Together with our partners, we will finalise the planning of the partnership country programmes, based on the inputs we receive in this Forum.”

Those inputs included recognition that the concerns and development objectives of countries seeking international support must be taken into account and that there is no alternative to public-private partnerships.

These partnerships, participants agreed, must aim at eradication of poverty and not maximisation of the profits of the private corporations involved in such partnerships.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Nov 3 2014 (IPS)

The Oct. 23 attack on the Canadian Parliament building by a Canadian who had converted to Islam just a month earlier should create some interest in why an increasing number of young people are willing to sacrifice their lives for a radical view of Islam. 

Until now, this was dismissed as fanaticism, but when you have over 2,000 people who blow themselves up, it is time to look to this growing reality and put stereotypes to the side.

Roberto Savio

It is worth noting that there are a growing number of voices arguing that the Muslim world and its values are intrinsically against the West. Well, basic data do not support that theory, even although it is being used by all xenophobic parties which have sprung up everywhere in Europe.

Let us recall that there are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, with Indonesia the world’s largest Muslim country followed by India. The entire Middle East-North Africa region has 317 million, compared with 344 million in Pakistan and India alone. There are 3.4 million Muslims in the United States and 43.4 million in Europe, making perhaps one jihadist for every 100,000 Muslims.

There are four historical reasons for jihadism that are easily forgotten.“Unemployment is a great habitat for frustration with its lack of perspective on a future, especially when you have no participation and no voice in the political system ... And the fact that the Arab Spring did not bring any tangible change in economic terms has exacerbated frustration into rage or resignation”

First of all, all the Arab countries are artificial. In May 1916, Monsieur Picot for France and Lord Sykes for Britain met and agreed on a secret treaty, with the support of the Russian Empire and the Italian Kingdom, on how to carve up the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War.

Thus the Arab countries of today were born as the result of a division by France and Britain with no consideration for ethnic and religious realities or for history. A few of those countries, like Egypt, had an historical identity, but countries like  Iraq, Arabia Saudi, Jordan, or even the Emirates lacked even that.

It is worth remembering that the Kurdish issue of 30 million people divided among four countries was created by European powers.

As a consequence, the second reason. The colonial powers installed kings and sheiks in the countries that they created. To run these artificial countries, strong hands were required. So, from the very beginning, there was a total lack of participation of the people, with a political system which was totally out of sync with the process of democracy which was happening in Europe.

With a European blessing, these countries were frozen in feudal times.

As for the third reason, the European powers never made any investment in industrial development, or real development. The exploitation of petrol was in the hands of foreign companies and only after the end of the Second World War, and the ensuing process of decolonisation, did oil revenues really come into local hands.

When the colonial powers left, the Arab countries had no modern political system, no modern infrastructure, no local management. When Italy left Libya (it did not know that there was petrol), there were only three Libyans with university degree.

Finally, the fourth reason, which is closer to our days. In states which did not provide education and health for their citizens, Muslim piety took on the task of providing what the state was not. So large networks of religious schools and hospital were created, and when elections were finally permitted, these became the basis for legitimacy and the vote for Muslim parties.

This is why, just taking the example of two important countries, Islamist parties won in Egypt and Algeria, and how with the acquiescence of the West, military coups were the only resort to stop them.

This compression of so many decades into a few lines is of course superficial and leaves out many other issues. But this brutally abridged historical process is useful for understanding how anger and frustration is now all over the Muslim world, and how this leads to attraction to the Islamic State (IS) in poor sectors.

We should not forget that this historical background, even if remote for young people, is kept alive by Israel’s domination of the Palestinian people. The blind support of the West, especially of the United States, for Israel is seen by Arabs as a permanent humiliation. The July-August bombing of Gaza, with just some noises of protest from the West but no real action, is for the Arab world clear proof that the intention is to keep Arabs down and seek alliances only with corrupt and delegitimised rulers who should be swept away.

Not many decades ago, a modernised school system started to produce local cadres, with many at university level. But the lack of political modernisation, combined with the lack of economic development, has led to a generation of disaffected and educated young people, who made their voices heard during what was called the Arab Spring.

But that was an outburst, which did not lead to the creation of a vibrant civil society or real grassroots movements. The only grassroots movement remains the Muslim network of mosques, religious schools and assistance structures.

Besides, there are no modern political parties in Arab countries – this is the difference with the large Muslim countries of Asia, like Indonesia and Malaysia, with Pakistan half way between.

Unemployment is a great habitat for frustration with its lack of perspective on a future, especially when you have no participation and no voice in the political system. Rich countries, like Saudi Arabia, can buy people’s allegiance by offering them a generous subsidy system, but other countries cannot. And the fact that the Arab Spring did not bring any tangible change in economic terms has exacerbated frustration into rage or resignation.

It is highly instructive to read David Kirkpatrick of the New York Times in Tunisia ( from where the majority of jihadists come), Steven Erlanger, also of the New York Times, in London (on the phenomenon of women joining the ranks of IS as fighters or as the wives of fighters) or Ana Carbajasa from Melilla, the Spanish enclave in Morocco (onIslam in Melilla and the radicalisation of women). Few newspapers have given a voice to young Arabs, despite the need to understand them.

Kirkpatrick, Erlanger and Carbajasa found that, for many, the Islamic State has an image of historical revenge against the past, a place free from corruption, It is a beacon for the many young people who  have no way to study or find a job, and have nothing to lose.

Those interviewed declared that to join the radical movement – in the Middle East, in Paris or in Manchester – is to become part of an international moral elite, of a global and magnetic movement. It means having a life project and passing from frustrated anonymity to glorious recognition.

What is creating this mobilisation is that IS is a state, not a secret organisation like Al-Qaeda. And its unprecedented use of social media is attracting hundreds of new recruits every week, who feel that they can escape from their daily frustrations to enter a world of dignity and fairness.

Ahmed, a young Tunisian supporter of the Islamic State who did not want to give his family name for fear of the police, told the New York Times: ”The Islamic State is a true caliphate, a system that is fair and just, where you don’t have to follow somebody orders because he is rich or powerful. It is action, not theory, and it will topple the whole game”.

Another Tunisian, 28-year-old Mourad, with a master’s degree in technology but unemployed, called the Islamic State the only hope for “social justice”, because it would absorb the oil rich monarchies and redistribute their wealth. He said: “It is the only way to give people back their true rights, by giving the natural resources back to the people. It is an obligation for every Muslim.

This dream of a different Muslim world of identifying with the fight to get there finds an easy echo in the European ghettos where a large proportion of the young unemployed is Arab.  We should not forget the Parisian banlieu violence of 2005 or the riots in Birmingham, England, in the same year.

Meanwhile, the French police estimate that there are now at least 1,200 French citizens in the IS, and the British police estimate an equivalent number of British citizens. Those numbers will grow, as long ISIS can show in its efficient social media campaign that it is a successful reality.

So now we have the phenomenon of disaffected Westerners who have drifted away because they feel rejected by the society they live in and are joining Islam, as a radical change to their lives, and the armed struggle as a way to be part of a tidal change.

In their time, European anarchists were not drifters – they were convinced that to have a new world of social justice and human dignity, it was necessary to destroy the present one – and they were part of a very large political movement.

If some in Europe were able to a dream with violence as a necessary instrument, why can the Muslim world not have a similar dream, with much more justification? The attraction of radical Islam is destined to continue, especially if the Islamic State is destroyed by the West. (END/IPS COUMNIST SERVICE)

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Excerpt:

Estefanía reads in the top bunk while Encarni does homework on a table in her small room. This 12-year-old girl from Málaga is one of the faces of child poverty, which according to a new UNICEF report affects 36.3 percent of children in Spain. Credit: Inés Benítez/IPS

By Inés Benítez
MÁLAGA, Spain, Nov 1 2014 (IPS)

“I would like to have a big house, and I wish my family didn’t have to go out and ask for food or clothes,” Encarni, who just turned 12, tells IPS in the small apartment she shares with five other family members in a poor neighbourhood in the southern Spanish city of Málaga.

This girl with shoulder-length straight brown hair, brown eyes and broad forehead is one of the faces of child poverty in Spain, which has grown 28.5 percent since 2008, according to a report released Tuesday Oct. 28 by the United Nations children’s fund, UNICEF.

The report, “Children of the Recession”, which studied 41 industrialised nations, says child poverty in Spain climbed from 28.2 percent in 2008 to 36.3 percent in 2013. It includes Spain on the list of countries hardest hit by the economic crisis, along with Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, Italy and Portugal.

Almost every day in the middle of the afternoon Encarni goes with her mother and her aunt to get food at the Er Banco Güeno, a soup kitchen run by the community in the Palma-Palmilla neighbourhood.

The soup kitchen has been operating for the last two years in what used to be a bank, which the local residents occupied for this purpose. They serve three meals a day to the needy.

“I worked in construction until the start of the 2008 crisis, when I was laid off,” Encarní’s stepfather, Antonio Delgado, tells IPS. Since then he has not found work, and has done a little of everything, ”from picking up junk to selling things in street markets.”

Antonio, with a lean face and teeth that have seen better days, brings in a few euros a day fixing things using a soldering machine and a tire pump, which he keeps in a corridor off the street, where several bird cages hang at the entrance.

Encarni explains that her mother, Inmaculada Rodríguez, found work for a couple of months taking care of an elderly person, but was fired.

The unemployment rate in this country of 47 million people currently stands at 23.6 percent. But in the autonomous community or region of Andalusia, where Málaga is found, it is 35.2 percent, according to the national statistics institute, INE.

“I really like to go to school. I especially love gymnastics,” Encarni says, with her sweet voice, although she adds that she gets sad when she feels they leave her out sometimes, “because they saw me go into the soup kitchen for food. But I just ignore them,” she adds, with a wan smile.

One of the apartment blocks in Palma-Palmilla, the poor neighbourhood in the southern Spanish city of Málaga where Encarni and her family live. Credit: Inés Benítez/IPS

A few days ago her aunt and three cousins moved to another house nearby. But until then there were 11 people living in Encarni´s house, the family said when they described their day-to-day life to IPS.

She slept in the top bunk with her cousin Estefanía, who is a year older than her. In the bottom bunk slept her aunt Ana María and her nine-year-old cousin Juan José. Encarni’s two-and-a-half-year-old cousin Ismael slept next to them in a crib.

Encarni’s mother, her stepfather, and four other members of her family slept in the rest of the rooms of the house, which only has one small bathroom which you reach by ducking under a clothesline, where the recently washed clothes are being dried by a fan, near the kitchen.

Estefanía and Ismael suffer from epilepsy, says their mother Ana María, who is unemployed and shows IPS the box where she keeps the medications that they have to take every day.

“Is your house big?” Encarni asks IPS while petting her dog, a friendly black pup named Gordo.

She goes on to ask: “Where do rich people get their money?”

According to the report “Even it Up: Time to End Extreme Inequality” by the international relief and development organisation Oxfam, the richest one percent of Spaniards have as much wealth as 70 percent of the entire population.

The report also says the number of billionaires around the world doubled to 1,645 as of March 2014, from 793 in March 2009, demonstrating that the rich actually benefited from the economic crisis.

Spain, in particular, is one of the 34 countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) where inequality between rich and poor grew the most during the crisis, according to its Society at a Glance 2014 report.

Between 2007 and 2010, the income of the poorest 10 percent of the population of Spain fell 14 percent, while of the other OECD countries it only dropped more than five percent in Mexico, Greece, Ireland, Estonia and Italy, and did not drop more than 10 percent in any other country.

Encarni wants to be a judge when she grows up. But she says that for now she would be happy just to be able to “dress well” and be able to buy more things in the supermarket.

“Everything we have was given to us because my parents don’t have enough money,” she explains, pointing to the clothes folded on the shelves, the packages of rice and lentils on a high shelf, and even the backpack that a neighbour gave her for school, where she eats lunch every day free of charge because she comes from a low-income family.

Encarni has fun skipping rope, playing Chinese jump rope and goofing off on the swings near her house. She also likes it when her stepfather gives her a ride on his bike.

She likes candy too, and enhoys singing and dancing with her cousin Estefanía, who swam in the sea this summer for the first time in her life, even though she lives only a few kilometres from the beach. “The water tasted salty,” Estefanía tells IPS.

Of every 100 children at risk of poverty in Spain, 25 are in the region of Andalusía, 15 are in Cataluña in the northeast, 10 are in Valencia in the east and 10 are in Madrid and the rest of the autonomous communities, according to INE figures cited by the report “Boys and girls, the most vulnerable in all of the autonomous communities”, by the organisation Educo.

The new UNICEF study warns that 2.6 million children have fallen into poverty as a result of the economic crisis in the most affluent countries, bringing the total number of poor children in the industrialised North to 76.5 million.

With her hair loose and recently combed, sitting on a bed near a window while the TV spits out news on the latest corruption scandals in the country, Encarni hugs her little cousin Ismael, who clasps a piece of bread in his hand while they wait for night to fall.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Youth ride on a southbound train on the newly laid northern rail track near Mankulam in the northern Kilinochchi District. Built in 1914 with the final aim of linking Sri Lanka with southern India, operations on the line ceased in 1990 before recommencing in late 2013. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
JAFFNA, Sri Lanka, Oct 11 2014 (IPS)

The kids of Kodikaman, a dusty village straddling the newly laid railway line in Sri Lanka’s northern Jaffna District, enjoy a special treat these days.

For hours on end, they wait expectantly at the edge of the rails for a track construction engine to pass by; when it nears, they rush to place metal coins on the track and when the trundling vehicle has passed, they run back gleefully to pick up the disfigured money.

This little ritual is just one of many signs that the new line, re-laid here after 24 years, is a big deal all over the Vanni, the northern region of Sri Lanka that bore the brunt of the country’s three-decade-old conflict that ended in May 2009.

Playful children run to the train track in the village of Kodikaman to collect their coins, which they had placed on the rails to be flattened by passing construction engines. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

The last train that plied the line through Kodikaman, some 380 km north of the capital, Colombo, ran on the night of Jun. 13, 1990, when the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) attacked the popular Yal Devi (Jaffna Princess) express.

The Yal Devi had previously been attacked in 1985, also by the Tigers, resulting in reduced train service throughout Sri Lanka’s northern province for almost an entire generation.

So when the first trains to enter the Vanni in over two decades did so in September 2013, school children came out in hordes just to catch a glimpse of the carriages passing through Kilinochichi, the town that was, for over a decade, the Tigers’ de-facto economic and administrative nerve centre.

Workers put the final touches on the main railway station in the northern Sri Lankan town of Jaffna, days before its scheduled opening on Oct. 13. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

“The entire public here is waiting for this dream to come true,” said S L Gupta, project director for IRCON, the government-owned Indian company – a subsidiary of Indian Railways – that is reconstructing 252 km of train links in the Vanni at a cost of 800 million dollars.

The project got off the ground in February 2011 and large sections have already been completed. Trains now ply up to Madhu Road on the northwestern line and up to Pallai, about 17 km south of Jaffna, on the northern line.

On Oct. 13, Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa will officially declare open the track all the way to Jaffna.

Mine warning signs keep visitors off the cleared jungle path where the northern railway once ran, near the village of Murukandhi, in the Kilinochchi District of Sri Lanka’s Northern Province. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

“It will be momentous,” Gupta asserted.

Vadevil Jayakumar, a native of Kilinochchi, agrees with this assessment. He takes the train weekly with his wife, his sister and his young niece.

“It’s cheap, it’s convenient and faster than the bus,” Jayakumar told IPS, riding on the footrest of one of the carriages, his sister and niece occupying the open door at the other end of the train car.

Indeed, a ticket from Colombo all the way up to the Vanni – covering a distance of some 264 km – costs just 180 rupees (about 1.25 dollars). But the novelty of the trains, many say, ends there.

“Very few take the train, they prefer the bus still,” said Nesarathnam Praveen, the 23-year-old stationmaster of the Madhu Road terminus. He says the bulk of his commuters pass through here only when there are festivals at the famous Madhu Church, which attracts thousands from in and outside the province.

On ordinary days, he confesses, this little station lies mostly empty.

Even on the Yal Devi, returning from Colombo on a stifling October afternoon, the bulk of the passengers are government military personnel returning to their posts up north.

A man sleeps in a virtually empty train car as it travels between Kilinochchi and Pallai. The bulk of the passengers on this train, hailing from the capital Colombo, were returning military personnel. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

Part of the problem, passengers say, is that trains here don’t run as regularly as they do elsewhere in the country. In fact, the most frequent carriers on the northwestern line are former road buses that have been converted into rail-friendly vehicles that move in pairs along the track.

Trains can’t outstrip poverty

Despite their multi-million-dollar price tag, the new rail links are yet to provide the spark needed to jumpstart the Vanni economy, still in the doldrums despite five years of peace and a massive reconstruction effort in the Northern Province exceeding three billion dollars.

A man on a bicycle watches the Yal Devi pass by near the northern town of Kilinochchi. Despite mega development projects, poverty is still rampant in the region and the bicycle remains one of the main modes of transport. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

Poverty is rampant in the region. The poverty headcount in the Mullaitivu District is a national high of 28.8 percent, almost six times the national average of 6.7 percent and 20 times that of the 1.4 percent recorded in the Colombo District.

Other districts in the north are not faring much better: Kilinochchi has a poverty rate of 12.7 percent, Mannar 20.1 percent and Jaffna 8.3 percent.

Only Vavuniya, the southern-most of the five northern districts and the gateway to the rest of the country, is performing well, with a poverty ratio of 3.4 percent.

Unemployment rates follow a similar trend, with Kilinochchi recording a rate of 7.9 percent, nearly double the national average of 4.4 percent, while all districts other than Vavuniya recorded rates higher than the national benchmark.

The primary reason for this, experts say, has been slow job creation. Fishing and agriculture constitute the bulk of the Vanni’s economic activity, but policies aimed at creating markets and bringing in buyers are rare.

Private sector involvement, while on the rise, has not been able to breathe life into an economy repeatedly amputated by the conflict.

Economists blame  a lopsided policy framework, that has poured millions into large infrastructure development without paying adequate attention to revitalising local income generation, for the chronic poverty in the north on

Anushka Wijesinha, economist and policy advisor at the Colombo-based think-tank Institute of Policy Studies, told IPS that if transporting bulk cargo by rail is made cheaper, goods from the Vanni could achieve a more attractive price.

But for the northern railway to become a real purveyor of economic success, more attention, more incentives and more funds need to be directed to the medium- and small-scale Vanni entrepreneur.

“The new transport [line] can certainly boost economic connectivity of businesses in Jaffna and Mannar,” Wijesinha said. “But enterprise policies must focus on helping to grow indigenous businesses in these regions. Otherwise the enhanced connectivity might benefit businesses coming from outside into these regions more than it helps businesses that are already struggling to grow.”

“Policies that improve the business climate, access to finance, technology and business skills will be key,” Wijesinha concluded.

Economist Muttukrishna Sarvananthan, who specialises in the northern economy, told IPS that before the conflict erupted, the northern region brought in the highest per-region revenue to the Railways Department. This was likely due to the fact that the Northern Line was the longest in the country, with 83 station stops.

Sarvananthan, who heads the Point Pedro Institute of Development in Jaffna, emphasised that the government needs to come up with an integrated plan to capitalise on cheaper costs made possible by the railway.

“The Government should incentivise private businesses to set up warehouses adjoining the main railway stations in order to spur cargo trade via railroads,” he stated.

“The re-opening of the rail line to the Northern Province provides healthy competition to road transport services, both cargo and passenger, thereby reducing the transport costs to passengers and businesses alike.

“The resulting reduction in the transaction costs of businesses is likely to benefit consumers by the reduction in prices of consumer goods and services,” he concluded.

If no such integrated plans are made, a familiar refrain will echo in the Vanni, with a large infrastructure project leaving a poverty-stricken community in awe, but in reality no better off than they were before.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

In Samoa two in three young people make a living in the informal economy, including selling food items in market areas and bus stops in the capital, Apia. Credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS

By Catherine Wilson
APIA, Oct 9 2014 (IPS)

The size of the youth population in the Pacific Islands is double the global average with 54 percent aged below 24 years, creating enormous challenges for slow-growing small island economies unable to create jobs fast enough.

Generating employment opportunities for tens of thousands of school leavers is now an urgent issue on the Pacific’s post-2015 development agenda. Otherwise a poor landscape of opportunity could jeopardise the potential of a generation whose public and economic participation is vital to progressing sustainable development in the region.

Youth unemployment is estimated at 23 percent in the Pacific Islands region, rising to 46 percent in the Solomon Islands and 62 percent in the Marshall Islands, compared to the global average of 12.6 percent.

"[Institutions] are still bringing out lawyers when there is a desperate need here for electricians and plumbers, and at the university they are producing hundreds of students with commerce degrees, but that is a market adequately filled." -- Jennifer Fruean, chair of the National Youth Council in Samoa
“Youth unemployment in this country is critical and one of our highest priorities,” Jennifer Fruean, chair of the National Youth Council in Samoa, a South Pacific Island developing state located northeast of Fiji, told IPS.

Approximately one quarter of Samoa’s population of 190,372 is employed and economically active and youth account for about half of the remaining unemployed, according to government statistics.

“In the villages, I think that is where most of the youth are static, but there is also a very noticeable shift with urbanisation that is causing a number of youth to come to Apia and they are becoming idle,” she continued.

Lack of sufficient job creation is affecting both young people who lack adequate education, as well as those who possess qualifications and experience. The only route for many of the latter is emigration to larger economies, such as New Zealand, Australia and the United States.

With 76 percent of those with a tertiary education leaving, the country is experiencing a ‘brain drain’ and 44.7 percent of private sector employers are experiencing skills shortages, reports the International Labour Organisation (ILO).

Samoa’s economy, dependent on agriculture, fisheries, tourism and remittances, has been severely impacted in the last 20 years by natural disasters. In 2012 Cyclone Evan devastated infrastructure and crops resulting in economic losses equal to 30 percent of GDP.

The global financial crisis also led to widespread formal sector job cuts in Samoa with waged employment declining from 28,179 in 2006 to 23,365 in 2011 and private sector jobs falling from 16,921 in 2007 to 12,711 in 2010.

Only one-quarter to one-third of Pacific Islanders finishing school are likely to secure formal sector employment, according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). This leaves a high proportion of an estimated more than 5,000 school leavers each year vulnerable to exclusion in Samoa, where formal sector employment is around 30 percent.

The social impacts of high teenage pregnancies and a low secondary school completion rate, with an estimated 35 percent of this age group in Samoa not in education, are also aggravating factors.

Fruean believes the main reason is the inability of families to pay school fees and suggests the government’s introduction last year of fee-free secondary education will help improve the final year retention rate of 48 percent.

But there are also questions about the quality and relevance of education for employment demand.

Institutions “are still bringing out lawyers when there is a desperate need here for electricians and plumbers, and at the university they are producing hundreds of students with commerce degrees, but that is a market adequately filled,” Fruean explained.

Somaya Moll, business, investment and technology expert with the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO), advocates private sector development, which “basically enables people to take charge of their own lives [by giving] them the tools to do so.”

“Self-sufficiency, ownership and accountability are important and it is proven to work,” she told IPS during the United Nations Third International Conference on Small Island Developing States (SIDS) recently held in Samoa’s capital, Apia.

The small size of Pacific islands and their populations is a drawback for ‘economies of scale’, keeping costs of production high. But Moll said introducing entrepreneurship awareness into school curriculums and encouraging financial institutions to consider the creditworthiness of young people could improve the business environment.

The informal economy, which accounts for up to 70 percent of economic activity in the Pacific Islands and Caribbean regions, is a potential growth area, say regional experts.

“It has always been an important source of sustainability [in the Caribbean],” Dessima Williams from Grenada and UNIDO Senior Policy Advisor said during an interview at the U.N. SIDS conference.

“And what has happened recently is that as the formal sector has crashed, more and more other people are entering the informal sector” as are “young people coming out of college who are finding no jobs in the formal sector,” Williams added.

Fruean sees the same potential in Samoa where two-thirds of young people are making a living through informal activities.

“There is so much potential in the informal and agricultural sectors and we encourage the unemployed youth to become economically active in these sectors”, for example, through organic farming or creative production. The cultural and creative industries in the Pacific are reportedly growing at about seven percent per year.

Also “the solution of co-operatives is coming back because the cost of production is so high. A lot of young people [in the Caribbean] are producing music all together, or somebody is writing it and somebody is mixing it, so it is sustainable,” Williams said.

But if the informal sector is to play a role in sustainable and decent job creation, training, skills, working conditions, value addition and production standards need to be improved, she continued. Low productive subsistence activities also need to be up-scaled and developed with greater market orientation and potential for export explored, where feasible. In the agricultural sector alone, which accounts for two thirds of the workforce, only one quarter of production is for the market with the remainder for domestic consumption.

Many young people in the informal sector don’t have experience of budgeting and managing their money, and this is an important area of awareness that needs to be addressed, too, according to the Samoan National Youth Council.

Efforts to galvanise the potential of Pacific Islander youth must be expanded to prevent increased poverty and inequality in the next generation and the social fallout of disaffection when aspirations for productive lives are not fulfilled.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Products made from collected garbage provide a new source of livelihood for many in the “gur districts” (urban outskirts) of Mongolia’s capital city, Ulaanbaatar. Credit: Jonathan Rozen/IPS

By Jonathan Rozen
ULAANBAATAR, Sep 22 2014 (IPS)

Ulziikhutag Jigjid, 49, is a member of a 10-person group in the Khan-Uul district on the outskirts of Mongolia’s capital Ulaanbaatar, which is producing brooms, chairs, containers, and other handmade products from discarded soda and juice containers.

“In the early morning we collect raw materials from the street, and then we spend the morning making products,” Jigjid told IPS. At four o’clock in the evening, she heads off to her regular job at a meat company.

The creation of her group’s business, and others like it, are part of an initiative called Turning Garbage Into Gold (TG2G), developed and supported by Tehnoj, an Ulaanbaatar-based non-governmental organisation.

“Ulaanbaatar produces about 1,100 tons of solid waste every day…This poses health risks to the population of the city and causes environmental damages." -- Thomas Eriksson, UNDP’s deputy resident representative in Mongolia
Founded in 2007, this organisation supports the creation of small businesses based on the sale of handcrafted products.

Defining itself as a “business incubator centre” for small and medium-sized businesses, Tehnoj estimates that it has organised trainings for approximately 30,000 people across Mongolia, through various projects.

The TG2G project is currently operational in three of Ulaanbaatar’s outer districts: Khan-Uul, Chingeltei and Songino Khairkhan, and includes 20 production groups of around five to six people each.

“The goal of this project is to recycle products and reduce unemployment,” Galindev Galaariidii, director of Tehnoj, told IPS.

The NGO receives its funding from the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP)’s Regional Bureau for Asia and the Pacific Innovation Fund, a new U.N. initiative to support innovative programmes that “provide the creative space and discretionary resources to prototype innovative solutions and experiment with new ways of working to tackle complex development challenges outside the traditional business cycle,” Thomas Eriksson, UNDP’s deputy resident representative in Mongolia, explained to IPS.

The Innovation Fund is currently supporting the creation of programmes in 32 countries and helps promote environmental sustainability and inclusive economic and social development, key components of the U.N.’s post-2015 development agenda.

Waste management and pollution are major problems in Mongolia, especially in the urban outskirts. With extremely limited infrastructure and a general lack of governmental resources, Galaariidii explains that 90 percent of garbage from these areas ends up on the street.

“Ulaanbaatar produces about 1,100 tons of solid waste every day… This poses health risks to the population of the city and causes environmental damages,” said Eriksson.

According to UNDP, over 10,000 households move to Ulaanbaatar every year. “Unfortunately, the migrant population [find it difficult to gain employment] and obtain access to already strained social services,” Eriksson continued.

The TG2G programme aims to mitigate the waste management issues while also tackling social inequalities by empowering the less fortunate members of some of Mongolia’s poorest communities.

According to World Bank data for 2012-2013, Mongolia’s poverty rate stood at 27.4 percent of its population of 2.9 million people.

Finding jobs in the landlocked country, comprised of some 1.6 million square km, of which only 0.8 percent is arable land, is no easy task. While the mining sector has led rapid economic growth over the last decade, with growth touching 16 percent in the first quarter of 2012, not everyone has benefitted. In fact, the unemployment rate in 2012 was roughly 11 percent.

“We target Ulaanbaatar’s poorest areas with high unemployment,” Galaariidii explained to IPS. “We focus on two main groups: women [often mothers of disabled children], and the unemployed.”

The programme currently focuses on training groups in the creation of six main products: brooms, chairs, foot covers (often used for walking in temples or schools), picnic mats, waterproof ger (yurt) insulation sheets and containers of all sizes.

But new product designs are constantly being created. Oven mitts, bags, hats and aprons are just a few of the new forms of merchandise being developed.

“Our technology design is improving day by day,” said Galaariidii. For example, where zippers once secured the fabric covers of chairs, now elastic rings are used.

Presently, city cleaning teams are testing products with the potential for a government contract, and soda-bottle-broom orders are already coming in from hairdressers in Ulaanbaatar.

Communities involved in the TG2G programme seem to have a fresh sense optimism about the future.

Unrolling a large hand-drawn poster, Jigjid and two other group members – Baguraa Adiyabazar, 54, and Baasanjav Jamsranjav, 37 – explained how they plan to use the funds they earn from selling their products.

They want to build a kindergarten school, achieve full employment in their area, build a chicken farm, expand their ability to grow their own food and increase the availability of cars. There are even plans to allot a certain amount of the money towards a savings account, which can then be used to make small loans within the community.

“We plan to have more registration for the projects and more training programmes,” Jigjid explained. “[Eventually] we want to replace products that are imported from other countries.”

Beyond the material level, the programme is also having a positive impact on the mentality of the community.

“We have a mission to become more creative,” Jigjid continued. “Now as a group we have a goal.”

Next year Jigjid will retire from her job with the meat company and focus on building their product development into a successful business.

“I will have something to do,” she said happily. “I can see my future is secure.”

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida