Africa

A crowd of about 60,000 pack a stadium in the capital to witness the transfer of power.

The UN General Assembly in session. Credit: UN Photo/Manuel Elias

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 13 2022 (IPS)

When the high-level segment of the UN General Assembly sessions begin September 20, the official list of speakers include 92 heads of state (HS) and 56 heads of government (HG).

But the “usual suspects,” mostly leaders of authoritarian regimes, are missing, including Vladimir Putin of Russia, Xi Jinping of China, Kim Jong-un of North Korea, Bashar al-Assad of Syria, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia and the much-maligned military leaders of Myanmar.

Some of these autocrats stand accused of war crimes, genocide, human rights abuses, persecution of journalists and clamping down on gender empowerment and civil society organizations (CSOs)—all at cross purposes with the UN.

A Western diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, described the absentees as “a veritable political rogues gallery”.

And as world leaders gather, the UN will also go into a lockdown mode next week with movements within the Secretariat severely restricted—and the building a virtual “no-fly zone.”

Thomas G. Weiss, a distinguished scholar of international relations and global governance, with special expertise in the politics of the United Nations, told IPS: “I don’t believe you can read much into their absence as they have held forth in previous sessions.”

“The General Assembly is an equal opportunity forum—thugs and champions have the podium and need not respect time limits”, said Weiss, who has been Presidential Professor at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, and Director Emeritus of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies.

Other authoritarian leaders, who skipped the UN in a bygone era include Saddam Hussein of Iraq, Hafez al-Assad of Syria and the two Kims from North Korea: Kim Jong-il and Kim Il-Sung.

So did some leaders from the West, including Germany, which for unaccountable reasons skipped he UN sessions and sent in their second-in-command.

But Fidel Castro of Cuba, Muammar el Qaddafi of Libya and Yasir Arafat of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) did address the General Assembly (GA) in the 1960s and 70s.

Samir Sanbar, a former UN Assistant Secretary-General and one-time head of the Department of Public Information told IPS the level of participation and the extent of coverage would reflect a degree of U.N. relevance at these uncertain times of perplexed international disorder.

He said “distinguished speakers would aim to present their national credentials to an international audience and display their international standing to their national audience.

“Despite political rhetoric, even heads of state with public criticism of the United Nations find a personal need to appear there,” he noted.

Sanbar pointed out that former US President Donald Trump, who had persistently attacked the UN, appeared at the main table of the GA opening luncheon.as head of the host country (and later welcomed a number of visiting heads of state at his nearby Trump Tower residence).

President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil would seek to maintain his country’s habitual place as the first speaker. In the past, Libya’s Qaddafi marked his GA attendance by theatrically tearing the UN Charter. But still he sought to keep his delegate Abdel Salam Ali Treki as President of that same GA session.

“Let us hope that the attendance of so many heads of state and governments this session would draw more coverage and public interest than the past two years (when the UN suffered a pandemic lockdown).

“As you would recall, statements by over 90 heads of state at a previous session did not receive a single mention while a number of participant left for a “Global Concert” in Central Park, said Sanbar who had served under five different secretaries-generals during his UN career.

Andreas Bummel, Executive Director, Democracy Without Borders, told IPS it is sad that the UN is a stage for totalitarian autocrats to disseminate their propaganda.

“Whether or not they come to New York to do this each September can depend on many variables. Each case needs to be looked at separately. In general terms, if they stay away, I believe one should not read too much into it,” he noted.

UN Spokesperson Stephane Dujarric told reporters September 9 “the mood within the UN Secretariat is business like and very busy, as we do before any General Assembly. Of course, this is the first General Assembly we’ve had in person since 2019. So, it does create a sense of excitement and a return to in person.”

“I think the message is to look around and look at all the challenges that we face today. Not one of them can be solved unilaterally by one country. Whether you look at climate change, whether you look at conflict, hunger, which are all interlinked, I don’t know what more… what greater definition we can give than multilateral problems that need multilateral solutions,” he argued.

“And we hope that Member States will recommit to finding solutions for future generations and for these generations in an atmosphere of cooperation, even if they continue to disagree on many issues,” declared Dujarric.

Speaking at the closing of the 76th session of the General Assembly, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the current session, like the previous one, was marked by a series of deepening challenges.

“Rising prices, the erosion of purchasing power, growing food insecurity and the gathering shadows of a global recession”, plus a “global pandemic that refused to be defeated — and the emergence of another health emergency in monkeypox”.

And deadly heatwaves, storms, floods and other natural disasters, he added.

But speaking of the coming 77th session, Guterres said it will continue to test the multilateral system like never before.

“And it will continue to test cohesion and trust among Member States. The road ahead will be challenging and unpredictable.”

“But by using the tools of our trade — diplomacy, negotiation and compromise — we can continue supporting people and communities around the world. We can pave the way to a better, more peaceful future for all people”.

“And we can renew faith in the United Nations and the multilateral system, which remain humanity’s best hope,” he declared.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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Elizabeth II dancing with Nkrumah, 1961.

By Anis Chowdhury and Jomo Kwame Sundaram
SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, Sep 13 2022 (IPS)

After a quarter century of economic stagnation, African economic recovery early in the 21st century was under great pressure even before the pandemic, due to new trade arrangements, falling commodity prices and severe environmental stress.

European scramble for Africa
Africa’s borders were drawn up by European powers, especially following their ‘Scramble for Africa’ from 1881 ending by World War One. Various culturally, linguistically and religiously different ‘ethnic’ groups were forced together into colonies, to later become post-colonial ‘nations’.

Europeans came to Africa seeking slaves and minerals, later building colonial empires. The US attended the 1884 Berlin Congress, dividing Africa among European powers. Colony-less ‘latecomer’ Germany got Southwest Africa and Tanganyika, now Namibia and mainland Tanzania respectively.

Namibia’s Herero and Nama peoples revolted unsuccessfully against German occupation in 1904. General Lothar von Trotha then ordered “every Herero … shot”. Four-fifths of the Herero and half the Nama died!

Communities were surrounded, with many killed. Others were held, with many dying in concentration camps, or driven into the desert to die of starvation. In 1984, the UN Whitaker Report concluded the atrocities were among the worst 20th century genocides.

Asymmetric interdependence?
Europe’s post-Second World War recovery benefited immensely from their primary commodity exporting colonies. After the wartime devastation, European imperial powers relied on colonial currency arrangements for precious foreign exchange.

Imperial power also ensured captive colonial markets for uncompetitive post-war European manufactures. Recovery and competition brought down commodity prices, especially after the Korean War boom. For well over a century, such prices have declined against those for manufactures.

As decolonization became inevitable, French politicians promoted the notion of ‘Eurafrica’, mimicking the US Monroe Doctrine’s claim to Latin America. French elite discourse insisted African independence should be defined by (asymmetric) ‘interdependence’, not ‘sovereignty’.

Although Germany lost its few colonies in Africa after losing the First World War, the influential West German Die Welt wondered wistfully in 1960, “Is Africa getting away from Europe?”

From decolonization to Cold War
The US was the first nation to recognize Belgian King Leopold II’s personal claim to the Congo River basin in 1884. When Leopold’s brutal atrocities and exploitation of his private Congo Free State domain, killing millions, could no longer be denied, other European powers forced Belgium to directly colonize the country!

Since then, the US has shaped the Congo’s destiny. The US has been keenly interested in its massive mineral resources. Congolese uranium, the richest in the world, was used in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombs. But Washington would not allow Africans control of their own strategic materials.

Patrice Lumumba became the first elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). An advocate of pan-African economic independence, his wish for genuine independence and sovereign control of DRC resources threatened powerful interests.

Lumumba was brutally humiliated, tortured and murdered in January 1961. The shameful assassination involved both US and Belgian governments which collaborated with Lumumba’s Congolese rivals.

Struggling to stand up
Pan-Africanist leader Kwame Nkrumah wanted independent Ghana to chart an ‘anti-imperialist’ path, staying non-aligned in the Cold War. He wanted hydroelectric dams to power Ghana’s industrial progress, beginning by smelting its bauxite to develop an aluminium value chain.

The US, UK and World Bank agreed to finance the Akosombo Dam, on condition it provided cheap energy to a Kaiser Aluminium subsidiary to process alumina for export to Kaiser. This arrangement was only rescinded decades later, early this century.

Ghana made technical cooperation agreements with the Czechs and Soviets to build two other dams. But both were ended after Nkrumah was overthrown in a military coup abetted by Washington in February 1966. Thus, Nkrumah’s development ambitions for Ghana were killed.

A scaled-down Bui dam was finally built by Chinese contractors decades later. Nkrumah’s 1965 book, Neo-colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, was probably the final straw in embarrassing the West.

Elsewhere, Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere’s Ujamaa ‘African socialism’ focused on developing villages and food security. Western antagonism ensured Ujamaa’s failure, while his efforts were harshly condemned to deter other Africans from trying to chart their own paths.

Meanwhile, Nyerere’s pro-Western contemporaries were supported by the West. Such countries, e.g., neighbouring Kenya and Uganda, received much more Western aid although their development records have not been much better.

A luta continua
At independence, Zambia had no universities, with only 0.5% completing primary education. The country’s copper mines were mostly in British hands. Most people survived on limited land for the villagers, without electricity and other amenities.

Hemmed in by Western-supported racist states, President Kenneth Kaunda – a devout Christian – sought foreign help to bypass hostile South Africa and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to change the landlocked nation’s fate.

After the US and World Bank refused to help, he reached out to the Soviet bloc and China. China built a $500 million railway linking Zambia to the Indian Ocean through Tanzania.

Côte d’Ivoire has long been a major producer of cocoa and coffee. But three decades of misrule by its pro-Western founding father, Felix Houphouet-Boigny, ensured endemic poverty and stark inequalities, culminating in civil war.

In 2020, almost 40% of its people lived in ‘extreme poverty’. In 2019, the middle-income country’s human development index score was a low 0.538, which dropped to 0.346, when adjusted for inequality.

Both Kaunda and Houphouet-Boigny later abandoned their early, more neo-colonial policies. Zambia nationalized copper mines, hoping to improve living conditions, instead of enriching foreign investors.

Meanwhile, Ivorian cocoa was withheld to secure better prices. But both efforts failed, as copper and cocoa prices collapsed. Thus, both nations were severely punished for trying to better their fates.

Non-alignment best
During the first Cold War, Western hostility to African aspirations forced many to turn to the ‘socialist camp’ to build infrastructure and develop human resources. Washington then was as concerned with economic gain as countering ‘Reds’.

The Kennedy administration had increased foreign aid, urging allies to do likewise. But instead of supporting African aspirations, the West pursued its own economic interests while claiming to support post-colonial aspirations.

Increasing African government indebtedness over the 1970s forced many to accept structural adjustment programme policy conditions imposed by international financial institutions from the 1980s. Of course, developing countries following International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank prescriptions became Western darlings.

Nyerere observed: “The IMF … makes conditions and says, ‘if you follow these examples, your economy will improve’. But where are the examples of economies booming in the Third World because they accepted the conditions of the IMF?”

Cold War considerations have also meant US interest in Africa has waxed and waned. Now, the West warns of imminent Chinese ‘take-overs’ and nefarious Russian designs. China seems more interested in financing and building infrastructure, while Putin promotes Russian exports.

Neglected by the US after the first Cold War until its 21st century African initiatives, including Africom, African nations have increasingly welcomed alternatives to the West, albeit somewhat warily.

Together, the world can help Africa progress. But if support for the long cruelly exploited continent remains hostage to new Cold War considerations, Africans will choose accordingly. Non-alignment is now the pan-African choice.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Leonida Odongo, an activist from Kenya’s Haki Nawiri Africa, and Global Development and Environment Institute fellow Dr Timothy Wise agree that Africa’s food systems revolution should not be based on costly imports. Credit: Aimable Twahirwa/IPS

By Aimable Twahirwa
Kigali, Sep 12 2022 (IPS)

The 2022 Africa Green Revolution Forum (AGRF) Summit ended in Kigali, Rwanda, with policymakers, activists, researchers, business leaders, and agricultural experts divided over the right pace to build resilient agri-food systems on the continent.

While some believe that mobilizing private and public investments, innovations, and country-based solutions is still crucial to moving forward the transformation of Africa’s food systems, others observe that the agricultural revolution on the continent needs to start from the bottom up, from the inside out, starting with small-scale farmers.

“The Green Revolution is an imported, top-down approach reliant on imported fertilizers and other inputs,” Dr Timothy Wise, a Senior Research Fellow at the Global Development and Environment Institute of the US-based Tufts University, told IPS.

Wise adds that the bias in public policies toward the private sector works against small-scale farmers, even though they, too, are technically part of the private sector.

“Markets [in Africa] can benefit farmers, and farmers need fair markets, but they cannot be dominated by large corporations and middlemen,” he says.

Latest estimates by the African Development Bank (AfDB) show that for the green revolution to happen in Africa, there is an urgent necessity to increase productivity and to move up the value chain into processed foods. Africa cannot feed itself while getting only a quarter of its potential yields and without processing what it grows, the bank says.

Africa’s green revolution’s main purpose is to transform African agriculture from a subsistence model to strong businesses that improve the livelihoods of millions of small-scale farmers across the continent.

The ambitious plan, according to officials, aims especially at advancing the commitments made at the Malabo Heads of State Summit and working hard to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals with a focus on improving the income and productivity of farmers with concrete actions that can build sustainable and resilient food systems to feed nearly 256 million reportedly suffering from severe food insecurity on the African continent.

While the Malabo declaration, to be attained by 2025, stresses concerns over Africa’s growing dependence on foreign markets for food security, arguably due to changes in consumption patterns, some experts believe that African Governments need to promote territorial markets that provide a level playing field to small-scale agroecological producers and entrepreneurs.

The Comprehensive African Agricultural Development Programme (CAADP), one of the continental frameworks under Agenda 2063 of the African Union to help countries eliminate hunger and reduce poverty by raising economic growth through agriculture-led development, but activists say there remains much unexploited intra-African trade in agricultural commodities.

According to the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA), an organization that brings together small-scale farmers from across Africa advocating for food sovereignty, seed and trade issues are highly politicized and complicated on the continent with a lot of baggage to unpack.

Africa is on the verge of losing its diverse crop varieties due to restrictive and draconian laws that prohibit the centuries-old free exchange of seeds between farmers, it said.

With the importation of seeds in the name of high-yielding and climate-smart varieties becoming common policy for most countries; activists point out that their performance is intricately and heavily dependent on the use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides.

In a brief interview with IPS, activists from AFSA said the adoption of these solutions in most African countries has proved ineffective because they end up creating dependency among farmers, forcing them to lose their own farmer varieties, and forcing them only to plant monocultures, all of which contribute to food insecurity.

The most pronounced opposition came from Leonida Odongo, an activist from Kenya Haki Nawiri Africa, who observed that thousands of hectares of land in Africa are owned or leased to plantations that grow what is not eaten on the continent.

The major challenge, according to Odongo, is that most of the western companies producing seeds and agrochemicals come to convince African farmers to buy seeds and chemicals, and, in some cases, they get these as loans in form of these imported agricultural inputs.

“If Green Revolution is working for Africa, why are the rates of hunger soaring, and if climate-smart technologies are working, why does Africa continue to be ravaged by droughts?” she asked.

Both Odongo and Tim are convinced that the kind of intensification Africa’s small-scale farmers need is ecological, not based on the adoption of costly inputs.

This is because subsidizing purchases of expensive inputs, which are two to three times more expensive, and which are derived from fossil fuels, as is the current case in most African countries, is bound to fail.

While reacting to the current efforts to achieve food security in Africa, Hailemariam Desalegn, the former Prime Minister of Ethiopia and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) chair, noted that while some African countries have shown commitment to support food systems transformation, collective action would be needed to accelerate progress and real change.

“African governments should lead these efforts by prioritizing and integrating policies […] that call for healthy and nutritious diets, decent income for the farmers, and that address climate fragility,” Desalegn told delegates at the AGRF summit.

Rwandan President Paul Kagame agreed; he noted that Africa should not be struggling with food insecurity, given “our” natural endowments.

“By transforming food systems [in Africa], we can feed ourselves, and even feed others,” Kagame said.

With current preferential trade liberalization through the Africa Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCTA), some members of the business community observed that there were still challenges to linking food-deficit areas with food-surplus areas across the continent.

Latest estimates by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) indicate that Africa is a net food-importing region of commodities such as cereals, meat, dairy products, fats, oils, and sugar, importing about USD 80 billion worth of agricultural and food products annually.

Gilbert Musonda, an agribusiness manager from Zambia who processes oil from sunflower, told IPS that in his experience, smallholder farmers are the first ones to be part of the solution, but also governments should support the private sector and ensure there are dynamic regional markets established.

African Heads of State and governments are committed in 2014 to triple intra-African trade in agricultural commodities and services by the year 2025. Recent evidence by the World Bank suggests that the export of agro-processed and other value-added goods made in Africa is greater in regional markets than in external markets outside Africa

“There is still an urgent need to invest in agribusiness in order to sustainable Africa’s food systems,” Musonda told IPS.

With a new five-year strategy adopted on the sidelines summit in Kigali to build Africa’s food system, activists say there is little attention to farmers’ needs.

“The anecdotal evidence from farmers in Africa shows that the promises of high yields distribution are not working,” says Odongo.
IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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Independent UN human rights experts condemned the death sentence of a university lecturer charged with blasphemy in Pakistan, calling the ruling "a travesty of justice". December 2019. Credit: UNICEF/Josh Estey

By Christine M. Sequenzia and Soraya M. Deen
NEW YORK, Sep 12 2022 (IPS)

In nations lacking certain religious freedoms, the bold multi-faith membership of the International Religious Freedom Roundtable’s Campaign to Eliminate Apostasy and Blasphemy Laws, would be forbidden.

This archaic, and at times, violent fact is driving a biblical justice authority, an international activist and a team of culturally and religiously diverse advocates to raise their voices with member states, just before world leaders arrive for the high-level segment of the 77th UN General Assembly session which commences in New York City September 20.

The trip will highlight the twelve nations currently imposing the death penalty for apostasy and blasphemy charges, calling for its immediate repeal.

Freedom of religion or belief is universally regarded as fundamental human right and is protected by international covenants and national constitutions alike.

However, courts continue to mete out unjustifiably long prison sentences and even death sentences to individuals for non-violent, victimless conduct such as committing blasphemy or apostasy.

Recently, Nigerian humanist Mubarak Bala was sentenced to an unimaginable 24 years’ imprisonment for an allegedly blasphemous Facebook post he made expressing his disbelief in an afterlife.

Though the death penalty is not actually imposed upon a convicted individual in a vast majority of cases, the sentence itself relegates convicts to years and decades of prolonged imprisonment on death row, denial of medical care while in prison, withholding of legal counsel, and endless interrogation.

Pakistanis rally in support of Mumtaz Qadri who was convicted and executed for a blasphemy-motivated killing of a former governor, in Lahore, Pakistan, Feb. 2016. Credit: Voice of America

Previously, Asia Bibi, a Pakistani woman, languished on death row for eight years on charges of blasphemy simply for drinking water from a canteen while picking berries with a group of Muslim women.

After her release and acquittal in 2019, Asia was forced to flee her home country in fear of reprisal attacks by radical Islamists.

In 2014, a pregnant Sudanese woman Mariam Ibrahim – who was imprisoned on apostasy charges for her marriage to a Christian man, and as a woman born to a Muslim father – was forced to give birth to her second child while her legs remained shackled to the cell floor.

As a Christ follower, I am reminded of times when God revealed his heart for justice through stories like that of Esther, whom was strengthened to boldly intercede for an oppressed group of religious minorities.

The time is now for United Nations Member States to do the same, through their set own of convictions, in an effort to create communities of human flourishing and safety for those who are persecuted for freedom of religion or belief.

Speaking on Islam’s position on blasphemy, there is much evidence that Prophet Muhammad pardoned his worst critics. Blasphemy laws and inhumane punishments for blasphemy have no legitimacy in the Quran.

The Quran does not command Muslims to kill blasphemers.
Surah (verse) 4:140 of the Quran states – “If you hear people denying and ridiculing God’s revelation, do not sit with them unless they start to talk of other things…”

There is no reference to killing and or issuing fatwas.

Even where moratoriums on the death penalty exist, faith minorities and individuals who express views and perspectives deviating from those prescribed by the majority religion can be in tremendous danger.

Mauritania, which has upheld a moratorium on the death sentence since 1987, convicted blogger Mohamed Cheikh Ould Mkhaitir of apostasy and sentenced him to death as recently as 2014 for an article he wrote criticizing the use of Islam to justify the caste system in his country. Fortunately, Mkhaitir was released from prison in 2019.

In Pakistan, where the death sentence is often issued to perceived blasphemers – most often Christian and Ahmadi Muslim minorities – but not carried out– laws criminalizing apostasy and blasphemy embolden state and non-state actors alike to commit acts of violence against innocent civilians.

In July 2021, a police constable slashed and killed a man named Muhammad Waqas who had been previously acquitted of blasphemy charges; the perpetrator explicitly stated perceived blasphemy as the crimes’ impetus.

A few months later, in December 2021, a Sri Lankan national Priyantha Kumara was lynched by a mob and had his body burned by an angry mob in the Pakistani city of Sialkot.

Kumara was a garment factory manager who had been accused of committing blasphemy after removing an Islamic poster from the factory’s walls to prepare for a renovation project.

These non-state actors, fortified by lackluster laws, pose a serious obstacle to human rights, free speech and dignity, creating a system where sometimes even state supported religious leaders call for the death penalty and other inhumane punishments.

A more recent and equally horrific incident occurred in Sokoto Nigeria, when young Christian college student Deborah Samuel Yakubu was stoned to death and set on fire by her very own Muslim classmates.

Days prior, Yakubu had angered the perpetrators by questioning why her school course’s WhatsApp chat was being used to discuss contentious religious affairs rather than focusing on academic issues.

Currently, twelve nations that maintain the death penalty for apostasy, blasphemy, or both; these include Afghanistan, Brunei, Iran, Maldives, Mauritania, Nigeria, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. * [New Penal Code implemented in 2022 in UAE removes hudud punishments – including apostasy from the penal code]

Additionally, approximately 40% of UN Member States – some of them holding seats in the Human Rights Council – criminalize apostasy and blasphemy, despite their lack of the death sentence for such ‘crimes’.

However, it is not without criticism and attention by human rights and religious freedom activists and even representatives of the United Nations who have emphasized the inhumanity of apostasy and blasphemy laws and called for their repeal.

This includes the UN General Assembly, the UN Secretary-General, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Human Rights Council, and the Special Rapporteurs on freedom of religion or belief, and on extrajudicial killings, respectively.

Now, civil society is taking matters into its own hands.

Efforts to work toward the abolition of the death penalty for apostasy and blasphemy have been a bottom-up grassroots approach. Next week, a delegation of human rights and religious freedom advocates will travel to the United Nations to meet with representatives from the missions of numerous UN Member States, including Luxembourg, Canada, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Niger, and Australia.

Their goal is to increase support among UN Member States for the insertion of language in the UNGA Resolution on Extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions stating that “the death penalty should never be imposed as a sanction for apostasy, blasphemy, or other perceived religious offense.

As a capstone to the multifaith, multicultural and multidisciplinary United Nations advocacy fly-in, the group will host an issue briefing pointing to the critical proposed resolution language, calling for the immediate repeal of the death penalty for apostasy and blasphemy charges.

The briefing, which is open to the press, will spotlight survivors in their own voice. The development of pluralistic resilient communities which uphold basic human rights and allow for human flourishing amongst inevitable interdependent globalized societies depend on the undaunted actions those in power.

We call upon all Member States to join us in this fight toward international religious freedom by supporting the IRF Campaign’s resolution language today.” More info here.

Dr. Christine M. Sequenzia, MDiv. is Co-Chair, International Religious Freedom Roundtable Campaign to Eliminate Blasphemy and Apostasy Laws

Soraya Marikar Deen, is a Lawyer, Community Organizer, International Activist; HumanRights & Gender Equity Advocate. She is also Co-chair Women’s Working Group @ Int. Religious Freedom Roundtable and Founder MuslimWomenSpeakers

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Credit: United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation

By Deepali Khanna and Siddharth Chatterjee
BANGKOK / BEIJING, Sep 12 2022 (IPS)

The world today faces a future that is in peril. Our challenges have become more complex and interconnected, as we see the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, an uneven economic recovery, a climate emergency, growing inequalities, and an increase in conflicts globally. This year also marks a grim milestone, with over 100 million people forcibly displaced.

These events accompany increasing division in the community of nations which threatens to push the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) further out of reach for the Global South.

Adding to these crises, rising food and energy prices driven by the conflict in Ukraine, could push 71 million people into poverty, according to UNDP. The Global South, typically comprised of countries in South America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania, was already grappling with economic issues now exacerbated by the triple planetary crisis.

With limited resources, high vulnerability, and low resilience, people in the Global South will bear the brunt of our inaction, on climate and elsewhere. Solely depending on external aid from the Global North or G7 countries cannot be the panacea. Here, countries of the Global South can empower themselves and combine efforts to achieve sustainable development.

Cooperating to catalyse change

In the face of global threats, international cooperation remains vital, as highlighted by the International Day for South-South Cooperation. South-South cooperation seeks to complement traditional development models by throwing light on the transformations needed to deliver on priorities, including the SDGs. It offers possible solutions from Global South to Global South.

Countries of the Global South have contributed to more than half of global economic growth in recent times. Intra-South trade is higher than ever, accounting for over a quarter of world trade. It is time to further leverage these partnerships in the development space.

We already saw this while many countries were trying to obtain COVID-19 vaccines. Citizens of low and middle-income countries faced systemic discrimination in the global COVID-19 response, leaving millions without access to vaccines, tests, and treatments. India sent over 254.4 million vaccine supplies to nations across the world, under Vaccine Maitri – a vaccine export initiative.

Likewise, China has supplied over 200 million doses of vaccines to the COVAX Facility, in addition to providing millions of dollars in medical supplies to countries in the Global South, including in Africa, throughout the pandemic.

Informing partnership models with Africa & China

To advance development priorities, partnerships need to be rooted in shared interests that can lead to shared gains, as seen in traditional development models and assistance from the Global North. This dynamic needs to be at the core of the China-Africa relationship as well.

China, an economic powerhouse, has the potential to advance development in the Global South, especially in Africa, by bringing its experience, expertise, and resources to bear, and its assistance must advance both its interests and those of the countries where it operates.

Investments in shared goals are reflected in efforts by China to improve public health in Africa, including in the construction of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Ethiopia, and in clean energy, through projects such as the Kafue Lower Gorge Power Station in Zambia.

China promises to invest US$60 billion cumulatively in Africa by 2035, directed at agriculture, manufacturing, infrastructure, environmental protection, and the digital economy. This is most welcome, and those planned investments must answer the needs of the local economies and societies.

What works in one country may not work elsewhere, but true collaboration allows for learning from mistakes and sharing successes. This is where the UN’s expertise can ensure cooperation is demand-driven, in line with local expectations and needs, national development priorities, and relevant international norms and standards.

Platforms like the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) can work to improve that essential partnership. This mechanism has identified shared priorities like climate change, agriculture/food systems, global health, and energy security, among others, between China and Africa.

For the first time in FOCAC’s history and with support from The Rockefeller Foundation, the UN in China is engaged as a strategic partner in this bilateral mechanism between China and Africa. The UN in China is continuing similar efforts in close consultation with relevant counterparts, including the China International Development Cooperation Agency.

For The Rockefeller Foundation, it is a nod to its legacy in China dating back to 1914, rooted in redesigning medical education to improve healthcare and its current priorities to advance Global South collaboration, especially in public health, food, and clean energy access—all global public goods.

Beyond the Global South: Action Together

With less than eight years to achieve the SDGs, truly international cooperation is our only hope. Emerging trends in technology and innovation can get us there, along with enhanced South-South cooperation efforts. But doing so requires us to “flip the orthodoxy”, as UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina J. Mohammed advised.

The Ebola crisis is an example of where global cooperation, including South-South cooperation, enabled Sierra Leone to defeat the disease’s spread, notably through a brigade of 461 health workers sent to Sierra Leone to support their overburdened system. Later, other countries made similar efforts to support Sierra Leone and nearby countries, such as Guinea and Liberia. This example shows the potential of South-South cooperation, but also triangular cooperation and North-South partnerships. Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) are another mechanism for financing and capacity building.

This can be seen in Kenya, where the Government and the UN System convened an SDG Partnership Platform with companies such as Philips, Huawei, Safaricom, GSK, and Merck. The outcomes include a downward trend of maternal and child mortality in some of the country’s most remote regions. Similar PPPs can hold promise in unlocking global progress on the SDGs.

Today, while we face a more volatile world, the spirit of South-South cooperation shows a core value that we need: solidarity. As UN Secretary-General António Guterres said, “The last two years have demonstrated a simple but brutal truth – if we leave anyone behind, we leave everyone behind”.

Deepali Khanna is Vice-President of the Asia Region Office at The Rockefeller Foundation. Siddharth Chatterjee is the United Nations Resident Coordinator in China.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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In its premises located in a middle-class district of Lima, the organization Féminas Perú holds meetings of trans women every Tuesday night. They began meeting in 2015 and today they are taking on the challenge of strengthening their leadership and empowering their community. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

By Mariela Jara
LIMA, Sep 12 2022 (IPS)

“Without recognition of your identity by the State and society, there is no exercise of citizenship or rights,” said Leyla Huerta, director of Féminas Perú, an organization that has been working since 2015 to empower transgender women in the face of the highly vulnerable situation they find themselves in.

She is 44 years old and as a trans woman has experienced multiple situations of discrimination because of her gender identity.

“We have all had the experience of being told ‘I don’t want to discriminate against you, I’m just reading what your identity document says.’ That legalizes discrimination,” she said in her dialogue with IPS during one of the days of meetings and activities held every week at Féminas Perú’s headquarters in Pueblo Libre, a middle-class residential district in the capital."I am a visible trans person and I have been prey to moments of vulnerability not only of my rights but of my identity, in many ways and places. It is complicated for us to go to the bank, to use health services, to ride a bus, to just walk down the street. You feel people watching you, my body is a disturbance.” -- Gretel Warmicha

Huerta said “we saw this clearly in the case of Rodrigo and Sebastián, in which the denial of rights crossed borders and exposed them to extortion, torture and death.”

She was referring to the case of two young Peruvian transsexuals, Rodrigo Ventosilla and Sebastián Marallano, who had just been married in Chile – where same-sex marriage is legal – and were detained upon arrival at the Bali airport on their honeymoon and subjected to cruel treatment between Aug. 6 and 10, according to their families.

The abuse caused the death of Rodrigo, while according to the families and their lawyers the Peruvian government and its diplomats in Indonesia failed them. They have denounced the Peruvian and Indonesian authorities for the crime of torture resulting in death.

The case is considered a hate crime by human rights activists and has helped bring to the forefront the discrimination faced on so many fronts by transgender people from this country.

Féminas emerged with the idea of creating a space for the community empowerment of trans women. Huerta promoted it while coordinating a project to approve a health care model for trans women.

“Instead of continuing to be a target population of NGO projects, we wanted to be the ones to lead them ourselves and with the resources we also wanted to build capacity in our community,” she explained at the Féminas office.

They have met at the organization’s office every Tuesday for the past seven years, offering a safe, welcoming meeting space for learning about their rights, while at the same time taking on the challenge of leading and running their organization.

“It is hard for Féminas to find leaders, people who want to join, because trans people have such pressing day-to-day needs, and the exclusion they face is much stronger,” she said.

Leyla Huerta, a 44-year-old Peruvian activist and trans woman, has achieved through a judicial process the recognition of her right to her lived identity. She has initiated new legal proceedings for the recognition of her gender. The identity documents of trans persons still carry the names assigned to them at birth and the Peruvian government has thrown up barriers to changing them. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

Barriers in the State

The Peruvian constitution recognizes the right to equality and non-discrimination, but it is a dead letter for trans people, who face barriers from the State when trying to modify the identity assigned to them at birth.

This South American country of 33 million people lacks an administrative procedure for recognizing an individual’s chosen gender identity and lived name. This legal vacuum forces transgender people to initiate legal proceedings that require financial resources and time.

In 2019, the National Commission Against Discrimination of the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights issued a report recommending that civil registry offices rectify their procedures for non-discriminatory access to the National Identity Card (DNI).

It stated that in the case of trans persons, the fact that the information on their DNI does not coincide with their lived identity causes them to receive humiliating treatment, increasing their vulnerability.

However, administrative barriers persist.

The report indicated that by 2019 there were 140 judicial proceedings seeking identity change, of which only nine had been completed and four had obtained rulings.

Only six percent of 400 trans women interviewed had managed to change their identity document, according to a survey conducted in Lima and neighboring Callao, the country’s main port city, carried out in 2020 on behalf of various organizations, including Féminas Perú, and published by the non-governmental Promsex.

A group of trans women involved in the performing arts with whom IPS spoke in the room of a mutual friend of theirs identify as women but still have the male names assigned to them at birth on their ID cards, because they can’t afford the legal proceedings to try to get them changed.

They said they would need at least 775 dollars – money they do not have because of their pressing day-to-day needs.

A group of trans women involved in the performing arts told IPS about their forms of resistance to a system that discriminates against them and leaves them “last in line”. From left to right, Gretel, Brisa, Victoria and Gía are friends, they support each other, share their experiences and they all yearn for a dignified life that “deserves to be livable”. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

“My body is a disturbance”

Gretel Warmicha, 30, is a multidisciplinary artist. She considers herself a trans woman, transvestite and transsexual and she has transitioned – as the process of changing from one sex to another is called – not only in her gender, but in her religion and in “practices that one follows, to detach oneself from this rigid and ignorant masculinity.”

She was living in the Andean city of Cuzco and is now in Lima for work. She considers herself fortunate to have been able to study and to have a support network, but she feels that the most difficult thing is to recognize that she deserves a livable life “due to the heteronormative system” that marginalizes and violates them, and that she and the others experience on a daily basis.

“I am a visible trans person and I have been prey to moments of vulnerability not only of my rights but of my identity, in many ways and places. It is complicated for us to go to the bank, to use health services, to ride a bus, to just walk down the street. You feel people watching you, my body is a disturbance.”

Making the transition to a gender expression that corresponds to their identity and way of life is very difficult for them. Even though in most cases they felt like girls from an early age, they do not have the conditions to live that way in freedom and dignity due to rejection by society.

“In Peru there is no such thing as a trans childhood, many of us transitioned as adults. I did it when the pandemic started,” said Victoria, 32, who preferred not to give her last name.

“They locked us all up at home and I said to myself: how would I want to live if I only had a month left? Is this the life I really want, is this who I really am, is this how I really want to see myself? That was what pushed me to do it, since life is so short and trans life is even shorter, I wanted to enjoy every moment being who I really am,” she said.

To live the identity they identify with means beginning to make changes in their physical appearance that require hormonal therapies. They usually go through this process without proper medical care due to its high cost and their distrust in the system.

“I confess that during the pandemic I had to do sexual service to be able to buy my hormones. Being a trans woman is expensive, you need about 200 soles a month (51 dollars),” she said.

“The state does not give you treatment, only testosterone blockers and condoms, because it is part of the anti-HIV/AIDS program (to which they have access even if they do not have the virus). If there aren’t funds for treatment for HIV, there are even less for us. We will always be the last in line,” she lamented.

She acknowledged that the “word of mouth” system among friends to help each other make the transition is not safe in terms of health because it is likely, for example, that the estrogen that works for one is harmful to another. “But we have no choice, it’s Russian roulette,” she said.

Gia, 33, also gave only her first name. A poet and artist like her friends, she transitioned during the pandemic as well. She recently moved out of the family home due to pressure from her mother; it was no longer a safe environment for her. When asked how she sees herself in the future, she replies: “dead”.

Although if she thinks about what she would like to do in the future, she draws a picture where she owns a television production company and she and her friends have decent jobs. An aspiration shared by all of them, since the precariousness of employment and income is a constant in their lives.

When asked about the life expectancy of trans women, they said the average was 35 years.

“If you don’t die because of health problems, you die because they kill you, which happened to a trans man friend of ours, Rodrigo. He made it to the age of 32, he studied at the university, he had a scholarship to Harvard (in the United States) and a promising future. And despite all that he died for being trans. It’s a reminder that our life is not worth anything,” Gía said, clouding everyone’s faces and plunging the room into silence.

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Katy Rodríguez (R) and her son (in his father’s arms) when they were reunited after leaving the Migrant Assistance Centre in San Salvador following their deportation. Like thousands of other families, mother and son were separated for four months after entering the United States without the proper documents. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Peter Costantini
SEATTLE, USA, Sep 9 2022 (IPS)

For a while in 2018, the Donald Trump administration’s “family separation” policy looked like it might become the Stalingrad of his war on immigrants. It was clearly a bridge too far politically, given the global outcry it provoked. Even parts of the Republican party couldn’t stomach it. So Trump retreated strategically on family separation, and intentionally left the program so disorganized that reuniting parents and children became a still-incomplete ordeal.

At the same time, though, he launched other forms of bureaucratic blitzkrieg to punish and separate families seeking asylum and other legal statuses and move towards an immigrantenrein United States. His final offensive, Title 42, slammed the door on nearly all forms of immigration at the southwest border under the widely rejected pretense that it would prevent the spread of COVID-19.

Over four years later, the casualties of family separation are still being found and healed. According to the July 31 report of the White House’s Interagency Task Force on the Reunification of Families, there are still 941 children, about 17 percent of the total separated, who are not yet reunited or in the reunification process. But media attention has faded over time.

Over four years later, the casualties of family separation are still being found and healed. According to the July 31 report of the White House’s Interagency Task Force on the Reunification of Families, there are still 941 children, about 17 percent of the total separated, who are not yet reunited or in the reunification process. But media attention has faded over time

Now Caitlin Dickerson and The Atlantic magazine have done the wounded and the world a service by digging deep and doggedly to flesh out this ugly history, shining light into the back alleys of the Trumpist immigration project and onto the faces of its victims.

“’We need to take away children’ – The secret history of the U.S. government’s family-separation policy” is an exhaustive and meticulous investigation of the systematic jailing of immigrant parents and their separation from their children at the U.S.-Mexico border. It comes at an auspicious moment to remind us how much the guts of Trump’s immigration initiatives were infected with lawlessness and gratuitous sadism.

She provides powerful evidence that traumatizing kids and preventing their parents from finding them were precision-targeted, intentional thuggishness, rather than careless bureaucracy. And her research demonstrates that if Trump’s wholly owned subsidiary, the Republican Party, takes power again, it will double-down on its attacks on immigrants’ lives, which it sees as a winning political strategy.

Trump’s nose-thumbing at the Espionage Act and the various laws trashed at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, along with his reflexive obstruction of justice in many investigations, finally appear to be the target of serious attention from the Department of Justice and others.

However, his assaults on many thousands of immigrant families, while they struck a dissonant chord for even some of his supporters, were soon drowned out politically by other abuses and scandals. Now Dickerson’s full orchestration amplifies the original themes, counterpointing many of the current motifs of 45’s fugue of criminality. And critically, she gives eloquent voice to many of the families torn apart by the policies, along with the psychologists, lawyers, community groups, and a few bureaucrats with a conscience working to reunite and heal them.

This story of family separation broke in the spring of 2018 after Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced his “Zero Tolerance” policy, which included jailing asylum-seeking parents and taking away over 5,500 of their children, according to Physicians for Human Rights. But as Dickerson documents, pilot efforts to separate families began early in the Trump administration in 2017, although officials claimed that no such policy existed. (Note: I got a glimpse into a tiny corner of that landscape of pain volunteering to accompany a few parents and kids who had been separated.)

Even some Congressional Republicans and groups such as conservative evangelicals panned the policy as excessively cruel. Many organizations for human and immigrant rights insisted that what Sessions was trying to criminalize was in fact protected by U.S. and international law: migrants have the right to ask for asylum at or in between official ports of entry, or anywhere else in the U.S.

In fact, they have to be on U.S. territory to make their request. Zero Tolerance, which supposedly necessitated separating children because it threw their parents in jail for asking for asylum between ports of entry, was an attempt to sweep away the basic premises of asylum by executive fiat.

The last surviving prosecutor of the Nazis at Nuremberg decried family separation as a “crime against humanity”. Physicians for Human Rights issued a report condemning the policy as a form of torture and forced disappearance. And the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights called it “government-sanctioned child abuse”.

A report by the Department of Homeland Security’s own Office of the Inspector General criticized the agencies involved for inadequate recordkeeping and data management that made it difficult to reconnect parents and children.

Dickerson makes clear that the shoddy family tracking system was an intentional effort to render reunification more difficult. John Bash, a U.S. attorney in El Paso, Texas, testified in court that he was horrified by the policy’s effects on children. All that was needed, he reportedly said, was a simple spreadsheet to record the information linking parents and children. But none was created.

From recently disclosed internal emails, Dickerson discovered that plans to reunite parents and children were “faulty to the point of negligence” because “inside DHS, officials were working to prevent reunifications from happening.” Bash testified that he and other government attorneys made efforts to close cases against migrant parents within a few days in order to allow their children to be reunited with them rapidly, before they could disappear into the separate branch of the Department of Health and Human Services that took care of unaccompanied children. He said he was later outraged to learn that these efforts were quashed by Trump operatives within Immigration and Customs and Enforcement and the Border Patrol, who were determined to punish families by keeping them separately detained and incommunicado, long-term or permanently, against all legal and ethical standards.

A 2018 lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, Ms. L v. ICE, elicited a ruling that the family separation policy was unconstitutional. The court ordered the government to reunite all separated families, and the Trump administration went through the motions of complying. But as ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt later wrote: “The reason so many families have not been located is because the Trump administration withheld their names and then failed to disclose information that could have helped us find them.” Even after the judgement, Trump’s operatives continued to expand the jailing of immigrants and tearing apart of their families through other means.

Through his four years, Trump relentlessly cranked up the volume on the false narrative that an enormous “invasion” of dark-skinned “illegal aliens” had to be deterred by increasingly brutal, sometimes borderline psychotic, measures. The President reportedly proposed that the border wall should be electrified and that a water-filled trench should be dug the length of it and stocked with alligators or poisonous snakes. He also asked his advisors about the feasibility of shooting migrants in the legs to slow them down when they tried to cross the border. His immigration Rasputin, Stephen Miller, later allegedly floated the idea of reinstating family separation with a vicious twist.

Under “Binary Choice”, immigrant parents with children would be forced to choose: allow their children to be taken away from them, or waive humanitarian protections for juveniles so that the whole family could be imprisoned together indefinitely. A revelatory book by New York Times reporters Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael D. Shear, Border Wars, details many similarly unhinged policy debates in the Trump White House.

When the Biden administration took power with promises to humanize the immigration system, it appointed an interagency task force to finally reunite all of the families. But progress has been slow on the difficult cases remaining, largely because of the Trump administration’s poor record-keeping and obstructionism.

The task force reported that as of July 14, almost a year and a half after its establishment, there are still 1,217 children not known to be reunited with their families {although some of these may have found each other but not informed the government). Of these, 276 are “in process for reunification”. But of the rest, 764 have “contact information available but not reunified” and 177 have “no confirmed contact information available and reunification status unknown”. So a total of 941 are not yet in the reunification process. However, the total still not reunited has been reduced by 510 since September 2021.

Biden appointed Michelle Brané, director of the Migrant Rights and Justice program at the Women’s Refugee Commission, to run the task force. “The idea of punishing parents who are trying to save their children’s lives, and punishing children for being brought to safety by their parents by separating them, is fundamentally cruel and un-American,” she told Dickerson in 2018, prior to being appointed. “It really to me is just a horrific ‘Sophie’s Choice’ for a mom.”

Legal efforts to grant permanent legal status to affected families and to make illegal the separation of parents and children for purposes of deterrence are both on hold, ACLU attorney Gelernt told Dickerson. The Biden administration pulled out of negotiations with separated families on payment of restitution for their suffering, according to reporting by Jonathan Blitzer of The New Yorker. Allegedly, the administration withdrew partly out of fear of political damage from mendacious attacks by Republicans claiming that Biden was making immigrants millionaires by negotiating damages. In fact, the government had not yet made an offer, but was trying to settle because it believed that the court would hold it liable.

One positive Biden policy change, allowing unaccompanied children to request asylum when their families still could not, may have led to unintended consequences. As a result, more children were reportedly being sent to the border alone to get them out of perilous Mexican border areas controlled by organized crime. And in reality, many long-running immigration policies, from unjust deportations to long detentions, have also had the effect of tearing apart families.

Overall, Biden’s immigration initiatives have slowly eliminated some of Trump’s worst abuses, but have delayed removing others and in some cases extended them. A few of the most capable immigration advisors, such as Andrea Flores, former director of border management for the National Security Council, have left the Biden administration out of frustration with backsliding and delays on reform, according to a piece by Blitzer. Other high-level administration officials confirmed that “resistance to easing Trump-era restrictions” on immigration came from high up in the White House: “Ron Klain, the chief of staff; Susan Rice, the head of the Domestic Policy Council; and Jake Sullivan, the national-security adviser”. All three are “political people”, but none is an “immigration expert”, Blitzer’s sources told him.

Despite the threats to democracy exposed by the January 6 hearings and other investigations, some in the Administration seem to be underestimating the magnitude of the menace posed by Trump and the MAGA movement to a just immigration system.

The heart of Trumpism is a strain of white sado-nationalism. It is an explicitly racist and xenophobic ideology that proposes ethnic cleansing to ultimately end most immigration, legal or not, and kick out most immigrants, more than four out of five of whom are from Latin America, Asia and Africa.

It is motivated in part by the great replacement theory: in a nutshell, Make America White Again. And it is punctuated by brutality against vulnerable immigrant families and efforts to trample the civil and human rights of all people of color. As historian Mae Ngai of Columbia University told me in an interview, “I think there’s too many brown people in this country for their tastes — that’s what it all comes down to.” And Adam Serwer of The Atlantic nailed its essence: “The cruelty is the point.”

Trump has created “something akin to a fascist social and political movement,” as philosopher Jason Stanley of Yale University put it. And it has become the North American vanguard of a nascent fascist international, led by Trump and Vladimir Putin, and featuring luminaries such as Viktor Orbán of Hungary, Marine Le Pen of France, Matteo Salvini of Italy, and other mainly European leaders.

Fascism needs scapegoats to blame for the mythical fall from greatness, and immigrants are a favorite whipping boy for many of them. Other conservative but not fascist movements have also borrowed or innovated anti-immigrant ideas: for example, Boris Johnson and the British Conservatives’ failed plan to ship rejected asylum seekers to Rwanda, in Central Africa, is a crackpot variant on Trump’s now-defunct Remain in Mexico policy.

If Trump or another MAGA standard-bearer is elected in 2024, they will likely try to resurrect some form of family separation, along with other aggressive policies floated at the end of his term, such as further limits on asylum, an end to birthright citizenship, and more use of active-duty troops at the border. His closest immigration advisors, including Stephen Miller, Stephen K. Bannon and Kris Kobach, continue to publicly advocate for these sorts of scorched-earth measures, and will undoubtedly lobby hard for them in Congress if the GOP wins either house in November.

Regardless of the occupants of the White House or Congress, Trump successfully filled the ranks of Homeland Security and related departments with leadership and rank-and-file staff who shared his ideology. Dickerson fleshes out the rogues gallery with some lesser-known cadre and renders a detailed account of how they took control of the far-flung immigration bureaucracy.

The Washington Post recently editorialized on family separation: “There has been no accounting for the officials who conceived, pushed and carried it out. Nor has the U.S. government offered the traumatized families permanent legal residence in the United States, even as a means of reuniting deported parents with their children. … Congress must ensure future presidents never try this again.”

The Biden administration needs to stop looking over its right shoulder on immigration: negotiation with the MAGAfied GOP on this is futile, but it has managed to alienate many among the immigrant communities and allies essential to the Democratic coalition. It’s way past time to return to the kinds of immigration policies that Biden initially promised, based on global realities on the ground, human rights, and family values.