Africa

Three children under three and a teenager are reportedly seized from a leprosy centre in Zaria.

By External Source
Jul 5 2021 (IPS-Partners)

Jan Egeland has been the Secretary General of the Norwegian Refugee Council since August 2013, a role which oversees the work of the humanitarian organisation in over 30 countries affected by conflict and disaster.

In June 2021, he was appointed Eminent Person of The Grand Bargain initiative. Within this role he is responsible for promoting and advocating for the advancement of The Grand Bargain’s commitments to better serve people in need. It is a two-year position he will hold alongside his day-to-day NRC position.

From January to May 2021, Egeland was appointed by UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, as Chair of the Independent Senior Advisory Panel on humanitarian deconfliction in Syria.

In 2015, he was appointed by former UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, as Special Adviser to the UN Special Envoy for Syria. Within this position he chaired the humanitarian task force responsible for the safety and protection of Syrian civilians. He stepped down from this role on 1 December 2018.

From 2011 to 2013 Jan Egeland served as the European Director at Human Rights Watch. He was appointed Special Adviser to the UN Secretary General for Conflict Prevention and Resolution from 2006 and 2008.

Prior to that, Jan Egeland was UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator from 2003 to 2006. In that role he helped reform the global humanitarian response system and organized the international response to the Asian Tsunami, and crises from Darfur to the Democratic Republic of Congo and Lebanon.

In 2006, Time magazine named Jan Egeland one of the “100 people who shape our world.”

He served as Director of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs from 2007 to 2011. He was the UN Secretary-General’s Special Adviser on Colombia from 1999 to 2001, where he led shuttle diplomacy efforts between armed groups and the government.

From 1992 to 1997, Jan Egeland served as State Secretary of the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He has also been Secretary General of the Norwegian Red Cross and has held leading positions at Amnesty International.

Jan Egeland has 30 years of experience from international work with human rights, humanitarian crises and conflict resolution, and was among the initiators of the peace negotiations that led to the Oslo accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation in 1993.

Jan Egeland published ‘A Billion Lives: An Eyewitness Report from the Frontlines of Humanity‘ in 2010.

ECW: World Refugee Day commemorates the resilience of refugees around the world. This year’s theme is inclusion, noting that together we heal, learn and shine. With this in mind, how do you see NRC moving forward with ECW and other organizations, to ensure that refugee children are included in education programmes in host communities so it is a win-win situation for all involved?

Jan Egeland: When the Covid-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, about 1 billion students had their access to education completely disrupted. A year on, and three quarters of a billion students remain affected. The past year and a half has been particularly tough on displaced children and youth, who often do not have connectivity or access to distance learning that many school goers in richer nations had.

At NRC, we promote including displaced children and youth in formal education systems, in line with global policy to mainstreaming refugees into national education systems. We strive to be a champion for durable solutions, by prioritising recognised certification of learning so that displaced children and youth can continue their education and use their skills through local integration, resettlement or return.

Only when it is not possible or appropriate to include refugees in formal education systems, e.g. in cases where government policy or the age of learners are barriers to inclusion, will we engage in alternative learning opportunities. Working with ECW and other partners, NRC will continue to advocate for governments to include refugee children in their national education programmes.

ECW: The Norwegian Refugee Council works in more than 30 countries around the world as a global advocate to help those forced to flee their homes. With 82.4 million forcibly displaced people worldwide and so many urgent needs, which are the refugee emergencies that you feel have most been forgotten by the international community and why is it so important to address them, now?

Jan Egeland: The three most forgotten crises in the world today are DR Congo, Cameroon and Burkina Faso, according to NRC’s World’s Most Neglected Displacement Crises report. These countries have become utterly neglected in terms of the scale of humanitarian needs, a massive lack of funding, as well as media and diplomatic inattention.

DRC is top of that list. We see it as one of the worst humanitarian crises of the 21st century. A lethal combination of spiralling violence, record hunger levels and total neglect has ignited a mega-crisis that warrants a mega-response. But instead, millions of families on the brink of the abyss seem to be forgotten by the outside world and are left shut off from any support lifeline.

When I visited DRC in May, it gained international attention momentarily when a volcano erupted in Goma. Sadly, when there is no volcanic eruption, the thousands that flee their homes each day go unnoticed. They do not make headlines, they seldom receive high-level donor visits and are rarely prioritized by international diplomacy. This is the case for many of the crisis areas we operate in.

It is therefore so good to see ECW’s emergency investment in DRC, from which NRC has received new multi-year funding that runs through to 2024. We hope the international community follows suit and better supports these neglected crises, otherwise the human suffering will continue and likely worsen. Many conflicts risk spreading across regions, embroiling countries that are comparatively more stable. For example, insecurity in Venezuela, South Sudan and Nigeria have all led to refugee crises in neighbouring countries.

ECW: As strategic partners of Education Cannot Wait, the Norwegian Refugee Council and other partners develop and implement plans to address refugees’ needs. A key advantage of the arrangement is funding to address not only emergency relief and early recovery responses, but to also link this to sustainable development. What are some impactful NRC/ECW projects and how are the funding needs?

Jan Egeland: NRC is doing important work in education that supports longer-term sustainable development. For example, ECW supports NRC’s Better Learning Programme in the Middle East, a programme designed to provide learners with mental health and psychosocial support to deal with the trauma and stress of being forced to flee. Through the ECW investment, we strengthen regional capacity to integrate school-based mental health and psychosocial support into education programming, advocate for enhanced mental health services for children and youth, and ensure the programme is available as a public good that can be scaled up and replicated across education in emergency projects.

In Nigeria, we are partnering with ECW for the first time this year through the country’s multi-year resilience programme. Working with other NGOs, including local actors, the UN and the government, we will target nearly 3 million young people, half of whom are displaced, over the next three years. The programme will build and renovate classrooms and learning spaces, support stipends for teachers, and increase continuity of learning by working with local partners to keep children and youth in school. Part of this programme also focuses on working with local and national educational authorities to develop capacity and have the resources to promote, administer and manage quality education programmes. This will be essential for long-term progress for Nigeria’s next generation.

ECW: Congratulations! While continuing to lead the Norwegian Refugee Council, this month you also assume the position of ‘Eminent Person of the Grand Bargain.’ The Grand Bargain was launched at the World Humanitarian Summit with a key goal being to increase the amount and effectiveness of aid delivery to people in need. How will you promote, and seek funds, for refugee children’s education?

Jan Egeland: The Grand Bargain aims to shift resources away from draining backroom activities to frontline delivery. This means that by making our work more efficient, we will release more resources for those who need it, including education for children and youth.

At the Grand Bargain Annual Meeting in June, we agreed to make our efforts in the next two years more focused and strategic, and in addition to accelerating localisation of aid, our priority is to increase quality funding. This would make our programmes much more predictable, which is especially important in planning reliable and quality education programmes. Strengthened engagement of local actors and participation of people affected by crises are also key priorities of the Grand Bargain. If we get these objectives right, we will have more stable, secure, meaningful school programmes for all children.

ECW: The World Humanitarian Summit recognized that children’s education in crisis situations must be part of a life-saving response. Refugee children are among the furthest left behind in responding to crises. Why is it so important to continue refugee children’s education from the outset of their refugee experience until they safely return home, or a longer-term solution is found for them and their families?

Jan Egeland: Education is a fundamental human right for all children and youth. Quality education provides children and young people with the skills, capacities and confidence they need to allow them to live lives that they have reason to value. Education also creates the voice through which other rights can be claimed and protected. These rights are particularly important for refugee and other displaced children and youth, and quality education provides protection, a sense of normality and hope for the future. Evidence consistently shows that education is a top priority for people who are displaced, and it should be made available from the onset of an emergency.

NRC works with displacement-affected and refugee children and youth to support them with education throughout the whole learning cycle – including after they finish school. We provide young women and men with opportunities for post-primary education, including technical and vocational education and training, agricultural training, and tertiary educational opportunities.

These opportunities are essential to the development of young people, to ensure that they have opportunities to pursue longer-term solutions and remain contributing members of the communities to which they belong, especially if they return home.

ECW: Climate change-induced disasters increasingly contribute to forced displacement, with +30 million people fleeing disasters in 2020; up 5 million from 2019. Such disasters mean many refugees are forced to flee multiple times, making them even more vulnerable. What are the main challenges in addressing climate change as it affects refugee children and what are NRC and partners doing to address them?

Jan Egeland: All aid organisations can, and should, do more to address climate change. At NRC, we are working to do better. We are currently in a process called ‘greening the orange’ – developing a new climate strategy, through which we aim to become carbon neutral in the future. This was a pledge I made at the Global Refugee Forum in 2019. Greening the Orange started as a grassroots initiative by staff and it will lead our climate work internally and externally.

In the meantime, we are already working on education projects that are climate-friendly. For example, in Colombia we are running a renewable energy and education project called Zero Carbon Education. In this project we installed an energy system with nine solar panels at a school in the Colorado community. This lit up six school classrooms, a kitchen, a communal church and two outdoor lamps for a sports centre. The project also provided environmental training on recycling practices, ecology and sustainable food to promote environmental awareness in school. The installation of the solar panels was accompanied by the construction and adaptation of a community garden for students and teachers. The children and adults received the panels and learned to maintain the new solar energy system through trainings.

We need to implement more projects like this across the world that tackle education and climate change at the same time.

ECW: We’d love to learn a bit more about you on a personal level. Could you tell us what are the three books that have influenced you the most – personally and/or professionally – and why you’d recommend these books to other people?

Jan Egeland: The first book I read as a child was “Nobody’s Boy” about the orphan Remi who was sold to a street musician at age 8. It made a huge impression on me, as I was the same age as Remi.

Then in my student years I was shocked by reading Eduardo Galeano’s “The Open Veins of Latin America” about the systematic exploitation and imperialism in South and Central America.

Now I am fascinated by “Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth” by Reza Aslan. It is a masterly account of the historic Jesus.

 

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In March 2021, the UN Human Rights Council was given a mandate to collect and preserve information and evidence of crimes related to Sri Lanka's 37-year long civil war that ended in 2009. Meanwhile, Western nations taking a cue from the Human Rights Council’s highly critical resolution on Sri Lanka appear to be tightening the noose. Credit: UN Photo / Violaine Martin. 43rd session of the Human Rights Council.

By Neville de Silva
LONDON, Jul 5 2021 (IPS)

For well over a century Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, has been known to the world as the ‘Pearl of the Indian Ocean’ for its multifaceted attractions. That is until blurb writers ruined it all with hyperbolic epithets that obscured the country’s magnetic charms, which attracted visitors from around the globe.

But one particular epithet has lived up to its name. Called ‘a country like no other’, Sri Lanka is increasingly beginning to prove this true – though not for the reasons that originally prompted it.

Over the years, groups of professional politicians and those drawn to the sphere, not to serve the public but by thoughts of self-aggrandisement and avarice, have dragged this once prosperous country, with its many natural resources and strong democratic institutions, towards its nadir.

From being Asia’s first democracy, with universal franchise granted in 1931– even before independence from Britain in 1948– political commentators and increasingly the public now fear that the country is teetering on the brink of militarism, with retired and serving senior officers in key positions in the civil administration, and others appointed to virtually oversee Sri Lanka’s 25 administrative districts.

While there is both international and local disquiet over the deterioration of democratic values, of more immediate concern is the country’s dire economic state. The situation is so critical that less than two weeks ago, the respected Sunday Times wrote that President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s government is ‘steps away from bankruptcy’.

At the same time, well-known economists were pressing alarm bells, warning about the possible breakdown of the banking system ‘causing a collapse of the economy’. The direct cause of the current crisis was the sudden hike in fuel prices in late June, which is bound to have a ripple effect on other commodities and services.

Bakers are already threatening to raise their prices, which could well have happened by the time this article appears.

A thermometer gun is used to take a boy’s temperature in Sri Lanka. Credit: UNICEF/Chameera Laknath

With the prices of staples such as rice and vegetables unbearably high, the average consumer, already burdened by the steepening cost of living, is being pushed to the wall by a government that came to power some 20 months or so ago promising to reduce poverty and improve living standards.

Rising living costs are compounded by a still uncontrollable Covid pandemic. This has compelled the government to impose lockdowns and curb travel – restrictions which are haphazardly lifted and re-imposed, despite the best medical advice – as daily wage earners run out of cash to buy food for their families and meet other domestic needs.

Political commentators and increasingly the public fear that the country is on the brink of militarism

Last month, the Sri Lanka Medical Association urged President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to continue lockdown restrictions without interruption–”considering that over 2,000 Covid 19 cases and over 50 deaths are being reported daily” and also the detection of the highly dangerous Indian variant’.

At the time of writing, health authorities reported another 52 fatalities and put the daily count of positive cases at 2,098. But such statistics seems to matter little to politicians and their military and medical cohorts, tasked with combating the spreading pandemic but ignoring the accumulating data and the advice of specialist medical professionals.

Meanwhile, the vaccination of the population, according to a pre-determined programme, has been disrupted by politicians who have drawn up their own priority lists and even threatened doctors and health workers who refused to accept their dictates, raising law enforcement issues and public criticism.

Those with power and influence find backdoor means to gain access to vaccinations, at the expense of an increasingly frustrated and angry public, who stand in long queues for hours awaiting their turn.

While the overall Covid containment programme is reportedly in a mess, along with an economy going steadily downhill, another pearl turned up in the Indian Ocean close to Colombo port. The X-Press Pearl, a Singapore-registered container ship, was carrying noxious cargo, including a leaking nitric acid container. With Qatar and India refusing to admit the vessel for repairs, it turned up in Colombo

That poisonous pearl spewed nitric acid into the ocean and then self-immolated, burning for days before part of it went down on June 2. As a result of the incident, more than 150 marine animals, including 100 turtles, 15 dolphins, three whales and scores of birds and fish beached in various parts of the country, not to mention the kilometres of beach covered with plastic pollutants, leading a UN representative in Colombo to describe the episode as a ‘significant damage to the planet’.

Meanwhile, the original pearl of the Indian Ocean is struggling to keep its head above water. The Sunday Times’ economics columnist Dr Nimal Sanderatne, an agricultural economist, former central banker and academic, painted a bleak picture in his weekly column in late June: ‘The external finances of the country are in a perilous state. External reserves have fallen, the trade deficit is widening, the balance of payments deficit is increasing and there are foreign debt repayments of about US$4 billion during the rest of the year.’

His views about the parlous state of the economy were echoed by several other economists, including the spokesman of Sri Lanka’s main opposition party SJB, Dr Harsha de Silva, and Dr Anila Dias Bandaranaike, a former assistant governor of the Central Bank.

In a desperate bid to boost reserves, Sri Lanka went for a currency swap of US$200 million with Bangladesh, once a struggling new nation in South Asia. Prudent economic policies and management, and national interest, brought Bangladesh to its current flourishing status.

When the currency swap was announced, one Sri Lankan wag remarked that it would have made more sense if Sri Lanka had swapped its advisors for those from Bangladesh, and the swap should be permanent to protect the country’s self-respect

Only a country that has lost its political sense and perceptiveness, or has abandoned all concern for its struggling people, could seek government sanction to import nearly 300 vehicles costing Rs 3.7 billion for its 225 parliamentarians and unnamed others, in the midst of a severe foreign currency crisis, when begging and borrowing seem the only options.

What is even worse, Sri Lanka’s premier state bank was ordered to open letters of credit one month or so before cabinet approval had been sought. Whoever ordered this remains unknown to the public at the time of writing.

Critics of the government say it is fast losing its one-time popularity as ill-considered and sudden policy decisions are heaped on existing economic and health problems, such as the snap decision to ban chemical fertiliser and pesticides, so essential right now for agriculture and export crops such as tea.

Scant wonder the government is being assailed by even close associates of the Rajapaksa family. One such is the head of the Catholic Church, Malcolm Cardinal Ranjith, who, in a strongly critical statement recently said that ‘even nature seemed to be turning against the rulers’.

Meanwhile, western nations taking a cue from the UN Human Rights Council’s highly critical resolution on Sri Lanka last March appear to be tightening the noose.

At the end of June, the European Parliament moved a resolution, with almost 90 per cent voting for it, urging the EU authorities to consider suspending the Generalised System of Preference (GSP Plus) trade concessions to Sri Lanka, which would be a serious blow to exports.

Later the Core Group of Western nations that sponsored the UNHRC resolution issued a statement condemning Sri Lanka’s human rights situation and new changes to the Prevention of Terrorism Act.

Bleak times lie ahead.

Source: Current Affairs Magazine

Neville de Silva is a veteran Sri Lankan journalist who held senior roles in Hong Kong at The Standard and worked in London for Gemini News Service. He has been a correspondent for foreign media including the New York Times and Le Monde. More recently he was Sri Lanka’s deputy high commissioner in London

 

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Estimates reveal that there are 40.3 million people in slavery worldwide as part of a US$32 billion business. Credit: UN images.

By External Source
Jul 4 2021 (IPS)

Few people want to buy products that involve the exploitation or enslavement of the workers who make them – but that’s exactly what most of us do on a daily basis.

Estimates reveal that there are 40.3 million people in slavery worldwide as part of a US$32 billion business. Extreme labour exploitation and other forms of modern slavery are embedded within the supply chains of many of the products and services that we choose to consume regularly, such as laptops, mobile phones and clothing.

This raises important questions: how responsible are we for the slavery that is directly connected to our consumption, and what role should consumers play in reducing the demand and supply of products and services made by exploited workers?

How responsible are we for the slavery that is directly connected to our consumption, and what role should consumers play in reducing the demand and supply of products and services made by exploited workers?

On the one hand, the few examples of government legislation – including the UK’s 2015 Modern Slavery Act – clearly place some level of responsibility on consumers to be informed, to act, and to make choices that help to eradicate modern slavery. These actions include reporting suspected instances of exploitation and boycotting known products of slavery.

In contrast, however, others are increasingly arguing that it’s not up to consumers to police modern slavery. Commentators such as Sarah O’Connor and Emily Kenway remind us that the causes of slavery are systemic, embedded within the processes and structures of commerce and governance. They rightly suggest that slavery and forms of extreme labour exploitation cannot be reduced without addressing the structural role of government and business.

 

Consumer-citizen action

Global supply chains are complex and generally not visible or well understood by consumers. So asking them to take responsibility for how products are made may let businesses (who do understand this) and governments (who do have the power to change things) off the hook. Government and business do need to do more to address slavery in production systems through, for example, greater transparency, but where does that leave the role of the consumer?

Focusing on UK consumer understanding of modern slavery, our research highlights a more complicated and active role for consumers in challenging the exploitation of workers who produce the goods and services they consume.

It points to the broader observation that shoppers are often “complicit” when it comes to the social and environmental consequences of their consumer choices. Indeed, we find that consumers are not ignorant of the risks of slavery and extreme labour exploitation. More worryingly still, some consumers explicitly express their indifference towards such issues.

Reviewing the Modern Slavery Act and similar legislation reveals how our current system relies on consumers to report and boycott instances of slavery as a key mechanism in the overall eradication plan. We agree with the likes of Kenway that shifting responsibility away from businesses and governments and on to the consumer risks relieving these powerful players of their duties and commitments.

Yet, should this argument be used to negate all attempts to mobilise consumers? While it’s right to be suspicious of attempts to pass the buck on to consumers, we argue that removing all responsibility from consumers and insisting that the realm of consumption remains a seemingly benign and apolitical arena is not a useful way forward either.

The considerable consumer inertia in response to scandals in the UK such as Boohoo – which saw the company accused of sourcing its clothes from factories with poor health and safety records and paying staff less than the minimum wage – illustrates a need to sensitise consumers to the slavery in their consumption, and to elevate their power to act. This may be framed as calling on consumers to take positive citizenship action (lobbying) or negative action (boycotting).

It is important to recognise that consumer-citizens are not unfamiliar with taking action on important issues. For example, the understanding that we have environmental responsibilities as consumers is well rehearsed. It is accepted that “we must place on the consumer at least some of the responsibility for making the economy sustainable”, as Tim Jackson writes in Material Concerns: Pollution, Profit and Quality of Life.

Imagine action on climate change that didn’t include a role for consumers in taking some level of responsibility for their own impact through the consumer choices they make. Changing how we consume is a vital link in transitioning to a cleaner and more just society, even though businesses are disproportionately responsible for carbon emissions. It should be no different when we consider modern slavery.

While we don’t support the shifting of unrealistic levels of responsibility on to consumers when it comes to ridding society of modern slavery, our research does point to an important role for consumers, revealing that they do want to take action – just not on their own.

They want to be partners in this modern slavery equation, particularly with business and government. Greater consumer interest, involvement and action over modern slavery is bound to raise more, not fewer, questions about the role and responsibilities of other groups involved, leading to greater transparency.

The consumer perspective should be viewed as a useful ally to business and government strategies in the campaign to eradicate modern slavery. In our roles as consumer-citizens we can use our voices and actions to support and encourage positive change. And we must also focus our energies on holding those with greater power and involvement to account.

Deirdre Shaw, Professor Marketing and Consumer Research, University of Glasgow; Andreas Chatzidakis, Professor of Marketing, Royal Holloway University of London, and Michal Carrington, Senior Lecturer in Marketing, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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One of the flyers pasted on a tree in the city of Sonsonate, in eastern El Salvador, which on Jun. 28 called for help to find Flor Maria Garcia, 33, missing since March. The next day, the young woman's body was found in a vacant lot near Cojutepeque, the city in the centre of the country where she lived with her husband, Joel Valle, arrested as the main suspect in the case of femicide. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Jul 2 2021 (IPS)

The pain that María Estela Guevara feels over the disappearance of her niece Wendy Martínez remains as intense as it was four years ago, when she learned that the young woman, then 31, had vanished without a trace in eastern El Salvador.

“I still feel the same pain, I want to know what happened to her,” Guevara, 64, who has always considered Wendy her daughter because she raised her from a very young age after she was orphaned, told IPS between sobs.

Guevara’s plight is shared by thousands of families in El Salvador who have lost relatives who simply failed to return home one day and were never heard from again.

At least 2,383 complaints of missing persons were reported in 2019, against 2,457 in 2018, according to the report Desaparición de personas en El Salvador (Disappearance of people in El Salvador), published in April by the non-governmental Fundación de Estudios para la Aplicación del Derecho (Foundation of Studies for the Application of Law – FESPAD). The document covered the period 2014-2019.

The phenomenon has been occurring for years in a highly polarised political context in which the governments in power have sought to downplay the problem in order to show that they are efficiently fighting crime, and the political opposition has sought to draw attention to it.

A grieving process that never ends

Wendy went missing on Sept. 30, 2017 in San Miguel, the capital of the eastern department of the same name. She was studying cosmetology and that day she left at 7:00 a.m. to fix the hair of several clients.

“She said she was coming home again at 11:00 a.m. to give her nine-year-old daughter lunch, but she never returned,” Guevara said. “I kept calling her until 12:00 at night, and she never answered.”

Wendy Martínez’s aunt and daughter have been waiting for her to return since 2017, when the then 31-year-old disappeared without a trace in the city of San Miguel, in eastern El Salvador, after leaving home early one September morning to fix clients’ hair. CREDIT: Courtesy of María Estela Guevara

Disappearances – nothing new in El Salvador

The phenomenon of disappearances is not new in this Central American country that was torn apart by a bloody civil war between 1980 and 1992, which left some 75,000 dead and 8,000 missing.

In the wake of the armed conflict, El Salvador has experienced a maelstrom of violence, mainly at the hands of youth gangs that over time have grown into powerful organised crime groups that control significant chunks of territory in this poverty-stricken country of 6.7 million people.

Gangs have historically been behind many of the cases of missing persons, as they attempt to leave no evidence of their crimes, said analysts consulted by IPS, but without ruling out the involvement of other actors in recent years.

“There is certainly a high probability that this pattern (of gangs) will continue,” lawyer Zaida Navas, legal head of State of Law and Security at Cristosal, an NGO that works to defend human rights in Central America, told IPS.

She added: “But disappearances are also the result of murders in cases of femicide, and executions by organised crime groups that are not necessarily gangs, and also due to personal disputes.”

One of the latest femicides was the high-profile case of Flor María García, 33, who had been missing since Mar. 16.

That day, her husband Joel Valle reported to the authorities that Flor María was missing. According to him, she had left home early in Cojutepeque, a municipality in the central department of Cuscatlán, to head to the capital, San Salvador.

Valle, a dentist, said Flor María had gone to pick up materials for the dental clinic where she worked as his assistant.

But in a twist to the case, authorities arrested Valle on Jun. 25 as the main suspect in his wife’s disappearance, and charged him with the crime of disappearance of persons.

“We always had doubts about him; we as Flor’s family knew that she suffered psychological and economic violence in her home,” her brother, Jorge Garcia, told IPS a few days after Valle was arrested.

He added: “We found it strange that the day she disappeared, he, Joel, only sent us a WhatsApp message at about 7:00 at night, asking if she was with us, in Sonsonate,” the city where Flor María was originally from, in the west of El Salvador, and where her family still lives.

The authorities found Flor María’s remains on Jun. 29 in a vacant lot on the side of the road near Cojutepeque, under tons of dirt and gravel.

The charges will be changed from disappearance of persons to femicide, the authorities said.

“I should have warned my sister, I should have insisted that she leave him when the incidents of psychological and economic, and even physical, violence occurred,” Garcia added.

It is no consolation, but Flor María’s family will be able to give her a religious burial and begin the mourning process.

However, many other families have no sense of closure, as long as their relatives remain missing.

The numbers game

Given the strained relationship between the government of Nayib Bukele and his political opponents, the issue of missing persons has once again gained national prominence, with the president defending his security programme, the Territorial Control Plan, as the reason for the drop in murder rates.

But his opponents say that while it is true that homicides have declined, cases of missing persons are on the rise.

According to government figures, homicides have dropped significantly since Bukele took office in June 2019 and began to implement the plan.

When the government took office, there were 50 murders per 100,000 inhabitants in El Salvador, a rate that has dropped to 19 per 100,000, said Minister of Justice and Security Gustavo Villatoro in a television interview in March.

But establishing how many people are missing in the country, and whether the number is increasing, decreasing or remaining steady when comparing time periods, is not an easy task, said analysts consulted by IPS.

This is true above all because there is no official census of cases, but three separate institutions keeping track of figures that are sometimes in line with each other and sometimes quite different: the National Civil Police, the Attorney General’s Office and the Dr. Roberto Masferrer Institute of Legal Medicine, and each one handles its own data based on the complaints received.

“I think the most honest – although I don’t know if the most rigorous – answer is that the official figures allow us to conclude that we have a partial view of reality, historically,” lawyer Arnau Baulenas, legal coordinator of the José Simeón Cañas Central American University’s Human Rights Institute, told IPS.

He clarified that he was not only referring to the current Bukele administration, but that this has been a problem for decades.

A report by the Efe news agency, based on official figures, stated at the end of May that in the first four months of 2021, reports of missing persons had increased by 112 percent compared to the same period in 2020, climbing from 196 to 415.

“But it is very difficult to assess whether the increase in complaints filed actually means there are more cases, because there is a counterargument: that people are reporting cases more because they see that the authorities are taking action,” Baulenas said.

He added, however, that “Such a sharp rise would indicate that disappearances have indeed increased.”

Bukele, for his part, said on Mar. 26 that as homicides have gone down, investigators are better able to investigate other crimes.

“It is not the same to investigate 40 homicides as three homicides a day,” he said in reference to the drop in the daily murder rate.

Meanwhile, María Estela Guevara does not lose hope of one day finding out what happened to Wendy on that day in September 2017.

“Her little girl is now 13 years old, and she still has hopes that her mom will come home, she tells me not to remove things from Wendy’s room, in case she comes back,” said Guevara with a heavy voice.

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By External Source
Jul 2 2021 (IPS-Partners)

The Bangladesh government does not fully meet the minimum standards for elimination of trafficking but is making significant efforts to do so and has demonstrated overall increasing efforts compared to the previous reporting period, considering the impact of Covid-19 pandemic on its anti-trafficking capacity and therefore remained on Tier 2, according to a US Department of State report.

The report titled “2021 Trafficking in Persons Report” further said these efforts included initiating more prosecutions, particularly of labour traffickers, beginning to operate its trafficking tribunals and collaborating with foreign governments on a transnational trafficking case.

“The government also opened an investigation into—and Parliament revoked the seat of—a member of Parliament involved in bribing a Kuwaiti official to fraudulently send more than 20,000 Bangladeshi migrant workers to Kuwait,” the report added.

“However, the government did not meet the minimum standards in several key areas. The number of convictions decreased, while law enforcement continued to deny credible reports of official complicity in trafficking, forced labour and sex trafficking of Rohingya, and child sex trafficking, including in licensed brothels, and did not demonstrate efforts to identify victims or investigate these persistent reports,” it further said.

“While international organizations identified signs of trafficking in hundreds of migrant workers returning from Vietnam, the government, instead of screening them for trafficking indicators, arrested them on vague charges, including for damaging the country’s image.

“The government continued to allow recruiting agencies to charge high recruitment fees to migrant workers and did not consistently address illegally operating recruitment sub-agents, leaving workers vulnerable to traffickers. Victim care remained insufficient. Officials did not consistently implement victim identification procedures or refer identified victims to care, and the government did not have shelters or adequate services for adult male victims.”

The report also gave a set of recommendations which included increasing prosecution, taking steps to eliminate recruitment fees charged to workers and so on.

To read the full report: https://www.state.gov/reports/2021-trafficking-in-persons-report/banglad…

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

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A UN meeting on the International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, 26 September. Credit: UN Photo/Kim Haughton

By Daryl G. Kimball
WASHINGTON DC, Jul 2 2021 (IPS)

After more than a decade of rising tensions and growing nuclear competition between the two largest nuclear-weapon states, U.S. President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed at their June 16 summit to engage in a robust “strategic stability” dialogue to “lay the groundwork for future arms control and risk reduction measures.”

Just as importantly, the two men also reaffirmed the commonsense principle, agreed on by U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985, that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”

The summit communiqué, albeit modest and overdue, is a vital recognition that the status quo is dangerous and unsustainable. It is a chance for a course correction that moves the world further from the brink of nuclear catastrophe.

Now, each side must walk the talk. The first step is promptly beginning a robust, bilateral, results-oriented nuclear risk reduction and disarmament dialogue.

With the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, the last remaining bilateral nuclear arms control agreement, expiring in 2026, there is little time to negotiate new arrangements necessary to further reduce the bloated U.S. and Russian strategic and nonstrategic nuclear stockpiles.

Second, if the two presidents are serious about nuclear wars being unwinnable, they need to formally declare that the sole purpose of nuclear weapons is to deter or respond only to a nuclear attack, not non-nuclear threats.

Once a nuclear weapon is used first by design, accident, or inadvertence, there is no guarantee that all-out nuclear war can be averted.

Given the catastrophic effects of even limited nuclear use, neither side would be the winner.

Daryl G. Kimball

Unfortunately, current Russian and U.S. nuclear use doctrines suggest that each side believes regional nuclear wars can be fought and won because such wars somehow can be kept limited.

In its 2020 iteration of policy, Russia “reserves the right to use nuclear weapons…in response to the use of nuclear and other types of weapons of mass destruction against it and/or its allies, as well as in the event of aggression against the Russian Federation with the use of conventional weapons when the very existence of the state is in jeopardy.”

Whether Russia might contemplate an even lower threshold for use in a regional conflict has been the subject of much debate.

In 2018, the Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) expanded the “extreme circumstances” under which the United States would contemplate first use of nuclear weapons to include “significant non-nuclear strategic attacks” against “U.S., allied or partner civilian population or infrastructure, and attacks on U.S. or allied nuclear forces, their command and control, or warning and attack assessment capabilities.”

The document says “significant non-nuclear strategic attacks” could include chemical and biological attacks, large-scale conventional aggression, and cyberattacks.

These U.S. and Russian nuclear use policies are far too permissive and risky and must change. In a March 2020 Foreign Affairs essay, Biden said, “I believe that the sole purpose of the U.S. nuclear arsenal should be deterring—and, if necessary, retaliating against—a nuclear attack.” As president, Biden must put those words into practice.

Third, if a nuclear war cannot be won and should never be fought, the United States and Russia should not be expanding their capabilities to fight and prevail in such a war.

Russia has an obscene arsenal of some 1,500–2,000, lower-yield tactical nuclear weapons, and the United States believes this arsenal is poised to grow in the years ahead. The Trump administration meanwhile proposed to double the types of lower-yield nuclear options in the U.S. arsenal.

Even though Biden, as a presidential candidate, said “[t]he United States does not need new nuclear weapons,” his fiscal year 2022 budget proposes funding for a new nuclear-armed, sea-launched cruise missile, one of the two new low-yield options pursued by Trump to provide additional strike options in a regional war.

Another way in which the “nuclear war cannot be won” statement can serve as a steppingstone to global risk reduction would be for all five permanent members of the UN Security Council (P5) to support that principle.

At a P5 meeting last year, China proposed a joint statement along these lines, but the United States vetoed the idea. Shortly before the Biden-Putin summit, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi revived the proposal.

When the Security Council’s permanent members meet in France later this year on nuclear matters, it should endorse the Biden-Putin statement to signal a shared interest in avoiding nuclear war and agree to launch an expanded set of talks on nuclear risk reduction and arms control.

In addition, Washington and Beijing could launch their own bilateral strategic stability dialogue to explore practical ideas for heading off destabilizing nuclear competition.

Luckily, nuclear weapons have not been used in combat since the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But someday, our collective luck is certain to run out, with catastrophic consequences, unless the leaders of the world’s nuclear-armed states act now to forestall a new nuclear arms race and rediscover the path to a world free of nuclear weapons.

 

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Excerpt:

The writer is the Executive Director of the Arms Control Association in Washington DC.

Rama Hansraj

By Mariya Salim
NEW DELHI, India, Jul 2 2021 (IPS)

Two Indian women, one Muslim and the other Dalit (former untouchables), separated by culture and geography, have found common ground in leading change in conflict-torn South Sudan.

Rama Hansraj, a Dalit, grew up in a humble railway colony in Secunderabad. Huma Khan, a Muslim, born and raised in the controversial north Indian city of Faizabad, now Ayodhya, home to the demolished Babri Masjid. Both agree their personal experiences of experiencing and seeing discrimination in India and the world led to their decisions to work in the international humanitarian field in conflict zones.

The women are activists and feminists who, through their experiences of struggle and years of work with India’s most marginalised, decided to work in geographies and contexts which ordinarily many would avoid.

“What else do you expect someone, who has grown up five kilometres (three miles) away from the disputed Babri Masjid site in an atmosphere of constant conflict and communal strife, to want to pursue?” says Khan in an exclusive interview with IPS. She was answering a question on why she chose to work in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan instead of choosing a more comfortable position.

In her last role in South Sudan, Khan was the senior women’s protection advisor, leading the section on conflict-related sexual violence at the United Nations mission in South Sudan (UNMISS). She is now a senior human rights adviser to the UN in Bangladesh.

Hansraj, country director of Save the Children in South Sudan, shared with IPS how her work on the ground in India and her interactions with the development sector motivated her to take up positions outside the country and institutions with decision-making powers.

“For us Dalits, access to basic facilities like education and land is a challenge. We face discrimination even in disasters,” she says while sharing her experience of working post-Tsunami in India.

Here she saw how Dalits, affected by the disaster, were not even allowed to stand in the same queue as others to receive basic aid.

“We started working on developing donor principles in disasters, highlighting the fact that they need to look at the vulnerabilities within the response and how the beneficiary selection needs to be more inclusive. That is when I saw that not working in these bigger organisations was not going to help us,” recalls Hansraj.

Khan spent many years in Gujarat as an independent activist living in resettlement colonies after the communal violence of 2002. There she worked to help rebuild communities and assist in the case of a gang rape survivor. Her lived experiences made her “unapologetically Muslim”.

She recalled how she refused to share the stage at an event organised by an international NGO where women were made to “unveil” as a symbol of freeing them.

Huma Khan

“It was a month after 9/11 that I had a study-cum-work trip planned to the US which I did not want to cancel,” Khan says. “I have had an object thrown at me and been called ‘Taliban’ while walking down a street in the US because I had covered my head to escape the cold.”

Hansraj has been part of anti-caste movements for as long as she can remember, and shared caste discrimination crosses borders and continents and is not only an “Indian problem”.

“Caste travels where Indians travel, and the international development sector is no exception. Indians abroad always assume I am upper caste, because otherwise how could I be in such high positions, being a Dalit,’ she says with sarcasm.

Both Hansraj and Khan were Ford Foundation fellows and got their initial international academic exposure with the fellowship.

One of the driving factors for both moving from India to take up challenging positions in countries like Yemen (for Hansraj) and Darfur and Afghanistan (for Huma) was their disappointment with the development sector in India and its treatment of Muslim and Dalit communities.

“Even if you’re working for a Dalit organisation, the funding decisions were still with those upper caste people sitting in the international NGOs, who basically made decisions for us,” says Hansraj.

“Even today, most positions of power in the development sector are occupied by upper caste individuals who decide what to fund and what not to, instead of letting us decide on our own issues.”

Khan, who co-founded the feminist rights and advocacy group AALI in India, also felt the space to grow, especially for a Muslim woman in the development sector in India, was shrinking, with those who occupied powerful positions continuing to do so for decades.

Both women worked in South Sudan for close to three years. When Khan left the country late last year, she became a senior human rights adviser to the UN in Bangladesh. Hansraj continues to head Save the Children in South Sudan.

South Sudan is the youngest country globally, gaining its independence from the Republic of Sudan in 2011. The country experiences constant instability and conflict since then.

Both Khan and Hansraj, in leading roles, have held interactions, negotiations and led advocacy and action-oriented processes with the leadership in the country, with tribal chiefs and community elders alike.

Constant armed rifts and coming face to face with former armed groups where negotiations were needed to either release abducted women or children, or both did not deter them.

“My team and I were able to facilitate the process of the release of women who were abducted, many as sexual slaves, in the Western Equatoria region of South Sudan. To deal with the leadership in the capital city of Juba was one thing, and to negotiate with the commanders on the ground had challenges of threat for us and especially for those women,” recalls Khan. The negotiation led to the release of dozens of women and children, many of whom were subjected to repeated rape, sexual slavery and forced marriage by members of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-in-Opposition (SPLM-IO).

“For me, my identity and my experiences as a marginalised person mean I can identify myself with conflict-affected communities and communities that have been deprived of their basic freedoms, like South Sudan, ” says Hansraj.

Hansraj shared how she lived in constant fear of being raped when she was in the country in 2015-2016, having witnessed compound break-ins and rampant sexual violence.

“Women and children are abducted in the process of cattle-raiding here. There is intercommunal violence. In India, women and children from Dalit communities were abducted and trafficked for centuries into forced labour and sex work,” she says.

Hansraj feels she imported herself into a context, which is so similar and heart wrenching that sometimes she finds herself caught between emotions and practicalities.

Mariya Salim is a fellow at IPS UN Bureau

 

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