Africa - INTER PRESS SERVICE

Credit: Elena L. Pasquini

By Elena L. Pasquini
ROME, Aug 24 2021 (IPS)

It is a metallic sound, harmless. It lasts just over a second, but it can become as sharp as a machete blade or as devastating as the burst from an assault rifle. It is a beep, just the beep of a phone notification. A woman is on the ground, her belly open, her intestines exposed and her severed head resting on her arm. A pagne of colorful fabric still girds her hips. Where? Why? Then, a video. Do you hear those voices? It happened there, in that village. It was them who did it, it was them.

Forwarded many times, the message overwhelms anyone who has enough courage to look at it. However, here, in Ituri, in the East of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, looking at horror is not a choice. Even so, with just a beep, terror spreads. It grows at each sharing, like water swelling along muddy roads. An instant and it is everywhere, ready to be turned into hatred.

In the villages, as in Bunia, the provincial capital, everyone seems to know who those “them” are. Yet no “them” is ever equal to another in a war that is stubbornly narrated, at home and abroad, as the eternal struggle between Cain and Abel, between the Lendu and the Hema, a war between farmers and herders.

It is said to have started again with the death of a Catholic priest in December 2017—a mystery for many, like the mystery hiding the reasons and hands behind a conflict that is blood from an open wound. Ituri has forgotten peace. It remembers only fragile truces.

“We fled because our brothers made war on us,” says François. “The bandits, whom we always consider our brothers, always our brothers, came to us,” says Jean de Dieu. “We shared meals, and the same market,” Emmanuel recalls. They fled, joining the over 1.7 million internally displaced people in this province of just over 65,000 square kilometers in the Great Lakes region.

Michael Barongo Kiza doesn’t use the word Lendu. Sitting with his hands on his legs and wearing a large golden watch, which shines against his brown trousers, he lives in the IDP camp of Kigonze, on the outskirts of Bunia: “The problem is the CODECO who kill people. When I was the chief of Fataki, almost twenty-seven people were killed at the minor seminary, including a priest from Jeiba.”

Irumu. Credit: Elena L. Pasquini

The Ituri war is one of armed groups, a guerrilla war. Irregular fighters, rebels, sometimes hidden in the forest, increasingly confused among their people. The CODECO, Cooperative for the Development of the Congo, is an association of militias founded in the 1970s and described as a sect where animist rituals and Christianity fade into each other. To the CODECO is ascribed most of the violence in the North, in the territories of Djugu and Mahagi. The majority of its militiamen belong to the Lendu ethnic group.

The ADF, the Allied Democratic Forces, an Islamist formation that is threatening North Kivu, began operating in the South, in Irumu. However, Irumu is the territory of the FPIC, the Patriotic force and integrationist of Congo. It is a group related to another tribe, the Bira, and its organization is still obscure. Its main target is the Hema community, which would constitute the majority of the fighters of Zaïre—a militia to which a limited number of attacks have been attributed. However, the geography of the conflict is much more complex: Mai Mai in the Mambasa area, factions, self-defense groups, dissidents of the FRPI (the Front for Patriotic Resistance in Ituri, which, in February 2020, concluded a peace agreement with the government), and many others. What they share is the strategy: targeting civilians.

That’s who “them” is—the perpetrators. That’s the easy narrative of violence generated from ethnic hatred. Yet, in the ISP camp of Bunia, Jean de Dieu Amani Paye looks out of his earthen house. He just knows that had to flee, suddenly. He farmed the land and taught at a school in a rural center, but he can’t say why it happened. “We lived well,” he says. “Someone you were with yesterday is now burning your house. It wasn’t easy. Searching for the cause was difficult for us. What prompted them to do so? We would like to ask them this question so that they can answer and we are reassured.”

Jean de Dieu’s question leads to a look into the eyes of a “many-headed monster,” as this war of multiple roots could be defined, according to Rehema Mussanzi, executive director of the Center for Conflict Resolution in Bunia. “If you go within the communities, communities will tell you different things depending on what has affected them most,” he explains. However, the roots lie in the wounds inflicted by an uninterrupted chain of conflicts.

Before the Congo became a possession of Leopold II, King of Belgium, in 1885, the tribes who migrated in Ituri had a history of clashes over land and resources that time had taught them to manage. It was the white colonizer, with his racist system, who laid the foundations for the hatred that would fuel future violence. It was said that there were superior and inferior races—races that would receive power and races for menial jobs; friends and enemies of Belgium. An “encyclopedia of the black races” crystallized the discrimination.

In 1998, the Second Congo War—the bloodiest contemporary war since the Second World War, with its more than five million deaths and the involvement of eight African countries—brought tension between ethnic groups to the boiling point. The following year, and up to 2003, it would have been a massacre. Then, there were new waves of acute violence until 2007. The victims of those conflicts are only estimates.

Irumu. Credit: Elena L. Pasquini

Even in the village of Sombuso, people died, and Emmanuel Kajole does not know why. “We lived very well with them. They suddenly came to attack us without us knowing what was the problem. … They kill us for no reason,” he says, sitting on a low stool, his hat on his head even though his shelter in the IDP camp of Kigonze is only half-lit.

A draped sheet separates the slightly raised mat from the corner, where the coal burns to cook the food. Emmanuel had a large house in Sombuso, with a living room and three bedrooms. He was a tailor and carpenter, but also the head of a small Hema community, traditionally herders. Seventy-six people raised goats, cows, and other animals, with someone fishing or trading. It was up to the elderly to ensure harmony between the generations. “Our ancestors ate sorghum and corn with meat. If you have a guest, you have to welcome him with meat, so kill an animal and offer him Malofu, a tea,” he says. “Life was too good before this war because the best meat in the region came from us,” he adds.

Traditionally farmers, instead, the Lendus. Today, however, shared lifestyles and intermarriages have caused one culture to fade into another to the point that, even more than in the past, what unites is now greater than what divides. Communities that in the North speak the same Central-Eastern Sudanese language, that have trod the same land for centuries, traded products, and lived with the same frugality that makes this region a place where everything is taken care of as if it were the most precious. A house, a field, or a road.

Joshua Marcus Mbitso has no doubts: “The world today talks of inter-ethnic conflict and that is what we have always rejected.” Joshua is the president of Lendu youth; he lives in Bunia, and the militiamen who perpetrate what the United Nations believes could be crimes against humanity belong mainly to his ethnic group, to his people. “We live together,” explains Joshua. “The Hema and Lendu chiefdoms are side by side, they are like leopard skin: a Lendu entity, then a Hema entity, and so on.”

Joshua talks about how it is easy to generate a fire. He tells of a young Lendu on his way to the market, stopped by the Congolese army at one of those “barriers” that can cost a headshot to those who do not pay. The soldier asks for 200 francs, but the young man has a 500 note—barely twenty cents of euro—and wants his 300 back. “There were young Hema at the barrier because it was in a Hema village. When the young Lendu claimed his 300 francs, he was mistreated by the soldier and the young Hema. They beat him … Do you understand what’s the problem?” he asks. Nobody was punished, Joshua says.

“(The war) began with individual problems. Some young people from our community and neighboring communities—I am talking about the Hema community—have had issues (with each other),” he explains. A trigger, like the death of Father Florent, a Lendu priest who died in circumstances never clarified, according to the Lendu community. The suspicion that he was murdered by a Hema member would have ignited violence. A war built on a chain of retaliation and the actions of armed groups with vague claims: “self-defense,” integration into the army, defense of the nation from “balkanization,” the protection of minerals.

Irumu. Credit: Elena L. Pasquini

“We didn’t know they were planning a war. We lived with them in goodness. In just three days, we have seen changes: No one went to the fields or to the market.” François Mwanza Lwanga talks while his son, still a child, looks at him intently, with his legs curled up. His wife sits silently beside the empty dishes in the small house at the IDP camp where they have found shelter. The space is so small that clothes are hanging from the ceiling and every object can only be neatly stacked. François explains that in 1999, the same thing happened and so, when killings began, they fled. Seventeen died in his village. The ethnicity of the authors: again, Lendu. Yet, he, like Jean, Michael, Emmanuel, and Joshua, refuses to call it an ethnic war, even though the victims are for the most part Hema, to the point that the word “genocide” has been invoked.

“It is an international media campaign (aiming at saying that) in Ituripeople are being killed for ethnic reasons,” says David Mambo Kiza, a lawyer who defends the victims, almost all of Hema, but also Mbisa and Nyali. There is no war between rival groups, only a runaway community, killed by a militia that is a “well-organized mafia, a mafia of criminals.”

The Lendu, unlike the Hema, are not targets of such widespread violence, but they live a different form of suffering in a land where their name is the one given to the slaughters. Christian Ngabo Micho is a young Lendu and lives in a small town in the Djugu area, in the region from which the Hema flee while they remain, sometimes forced to move in search of help in other villages of their community. “It is very difficult to find community members in large sites for internally displaced persons … NGOs and humanitarian workers also find it difficult to understand that the Lendus are suffering … This is why they are confused, they fail to understand that (our) community is also a victim of this war … We are really suffering and the world should know,” he says.

Militias that bring death and devastation to the villages would not be an expression of the communities to which their members belong, as happened in the previous conflicts. However, they find shelter or impose silence in those communities. “The armed groups in some cases live within these communities even when the communities attempt to distance themselves from the armed groups,” explains Rehema. They are still their children, husbands, and youth, but first of all, they are armed. “Even communities and chief of villages, in Djugu in particular, have been targeted by some of these armed groups whenever they tried to advocate against the use of force to retaliate against the other community. In many cases communities are against them, but they have very small bargaining power to convince them otherwise,” he adds. “Often (the militias) say: “We are fighting (for our community) …. This is why we are taking arms. But do they have a mandate from the community to do it? No,” says Josiah Obat, head of the Monusco of Bunia, the UN peacekeepers who have been in Ituri since the early 2000s.

The word that would explain a conflict of an ethnic nature that, however, is not ethnic, is the one that is on everyone’s lips, the one that stirs up the anger of those who do not hold a Kalashnikov or brandish a knife: “manipulation.” Those who want chaos would blow on the burning embers of ancient tribal grudges, fueled by recent wars and the memory of a colonial past that would have rewarded one tribe with spaces of power to the detriment of another—the Lendus. “If the conflict were ethnic, we would not have had to live with them since the wars of 1999,” explains François, who fled with his family, abandoning his village where he was a pharmacist and cultivated a small patch of land. “We ask ourselves whether behind these conflicts there are string-pullers who hide to create conflicts”, says Jean.

It is a genocide armed by “black hands,” internal and foreign. Wilson Mugara Komwiso, provincial deputy elected in Irumu and a notable Hema who works with the youth of his community, wants his message to reach the world. His is a cry: The narrative of the ethnic war would move the attention from the deep reasons for the violence and from finding those “black hands” that use the ancient hatred to incite fighting.

People know the Roman adage “divide et impera,” but here it becomes “divide and extract.” In Bunia, shops facing asphalt-free streets sell all kinds of goods, mostly cheap plastic, imported from China. They arrive along the road that leads to Uganda, the dirt road where trucks raise dense dust and challenge the insecurity of the region to supply a city that is an expanding bubble—the bubble of a war economy. From that street, where rickety and loaded scooters whiz by and women let colored fabrics sway over their bodies, gold reaches international markets, passing through the Emirates. “There are people who may not want the conflict to end because they are profiting from it. They are using their capability to have ammunition to exploit mineral resources.” This is from Joseph Obaith, at the head of the blue helmets.

Leaning against the entrance of one of those shops, three men wait. They lead the way to a small bare office in the back. There is little or nothing on the walls, a plastic tablecloth with geometric designs on a table, chairs also made of colored plastic. And a scale. The deal is silence; don’t even register a sigh. “Gold is brought to us from artisanal mines, small quantities at a time, always the same people,” says one of the three. Sitting down, he takes a plastic bag out of his wallet, inside crumbs of what lives under the thin crust of Ituri. No one speaks. They almost seem to hold their breaths while the camera shoots two suspended saucers with a few coins and a little gold. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, the men ask to clear the room.

You need a license to sell gold, but it is often a façade. A little of its trade goes to the state, and much more ends up in the pockets of a few. Buying it without a trace is now a habit. In 2019, Ituri and North and South Kivu declared just over 60 kg of artisanal gold production. The United Nations estimates that 1.1 tons were smuggled, in Ituri alone. “It is quite easy for gold to illicitly … leave the country into Uganda or into Sud Sudan, or going south into North Kivu and taking the road to Rwanda,” explains Rehema.

Monusco soliders. Credit: Elena L. Pasquini

This is a country where everyone digs if they can and where borders have always remained only pencil drawings on a map. That pencil has never been able to draw the right boundaries even inside, on that land under which gold never seems to run out, and which Hema and Lendu must take care of to produce meat, cheese, fruit, and cereals. It is the same land that the Belgian colonizers divided and distributed among the ethnic groups in a semi-feudal system that after independence changed the actors, but remained the same. Even for those boundaries and for their control, Ituri dies: “To my knowledge, there is no formal land registry for customary land. It is just known that the boundaries of certain collectivities are here, but formally it is really difficult to find a piece of paper that clarifies that this is land belonging to such and such tribe. Actually, it is just historical because those tribes settled on those lands,” explains Rehema.

That is the same land that Bile Luchobe cultivated. Surprised by the war, she fled to Bunia, too. “We lived in peace and security. The CODECO members knew us very well. We do not know where they got the thought of killing us.” The blue mask is lowered on her chin and she has a handkerchief on her head, as do almost all the women here, like those who return home along the road that runs to Uganda. She wears a necklace framed by the ruffles of a pink and yellow dress. “We lived in peace with our brothers. We even went to the market with them without any problems and now they are starting to kill us with machetes and guns.”

She sits in a crowded hangar with other women and children at the IDP camp. She waits to go back home. “I can’t live with them anymore. I can’t live with people who kill like that. But after the war, in peace, we will live together.” Bile is sure of that. Still, however, it is a beep that turns pain into terror and spreads a hatred fed by hunger and misery. These, too, are the heads of the monster that arms men and snatches childhood from children, leads them to pick up rifles and set houses on fire when killing seems the only way to live.

THE FORGOTTEN WAR OF ITURI
Fleeing war, weaving life in IDP camps of Bunia
Between horror and hope in the villages of Ituri
“Don’t call it ethnic. Ituri confict is a mystery”

This feature was first published by Degrees of Latitude

Akilimali Saleh Chomachoma as producer and Sahwili interpreter

 

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A mother and her child in the Haji camp for internally displaced people in Kandahar, Afghanistan. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has called on Taliban militants to “immediately halt” their offensive against Government forces and return to the negotiating table in good faith, “in the interest of Afghanistan, and its people.” Credit: UNICEF Afghanistan

By Rahul Singh
NEW DELHI, India, Aug 24 2021 (IPS)

As I write this, India has just celebrated the 75th anniversary of its independence from British rule (Pakistan celebrated it a day earlier). But there is little cause for celebration. A dark shadow looms over both countries, indeed over much of the world as well.

I am referring to the astonishingly swift takeover of Afghanistan by the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban. For the past two decades, the Taliban had confronted the 14,000 troops of the USA and its NATO allies. These troops and their advisers had been trying to arm and train 300,000 soldiers of the Afghan National Army (ANA) which, it was hoped, would eventually be able to hold its own against the Taliban, and continue Afghanistan on its democratic path.

That hope was cruelly shattered with the announcement by US President Joe Biden that all American troops would be withdrawn from Afghanistan by the end of this month. Even then, it was expected that the ANA would be able to resist the Taliban. That expectation has also been belied.

First, the rural military outposts held by the ANA surrendered without a fight. Then, the main districts, including towns and cities like Herat, Mazhar-e-Sharif, and Kandahar, fell, with hardly a shot being fired. The capital, Kabul (population: six million), which was surrounded by what had been described as a “ring of steel”, was expected to repel the Taliban, and perhaps even take the initiative against them.

However, the resistance simply melted away and, incredibly, within a day, Taliban fighters were roaming the city and even reached the airport, stopping all commercial flights out of the country. Images of helicopters ferrying Americans from the embassy to the Kabul airport were eerily reminiscent of a similar evacuation in Saigon in 1975.

The desperation of Afghans to leave their country, clearly because they fear reprisals from the vindictive Taliban, was evident from TV footage of hundreds on the runway of the Kabul international airport, trying to get on to departing planes. Incredibly and tragically, two of them were shown falling to their death after the plane had taken off.

How will the Taliban treat the thousands of Afghans who were, in some way or the other, partnering the Americans and their allies in trying to rebuild the country? Will they be seen as collaborators of the “enemy”, against whom punitive action needs to be taken, or will they be left alone?

That is the troubling question many Afghans must be asking themselves. Then, there is the issue of refugees. Quite a few scared Afghans are bound to try and flee to surrounding countries, like Iran in the West and Pakistan in the south, across porous borders.

Afghanistan has no land border with India, but hundreds of Afghans have been thronging the Indian Embassy, trying to get visas to enter India. Will they be permitted to leave Afghanistan? And will India, as well as Pakistan and Iran, accept them?

India and Pakistan have had close ties with Afghanistan. In fact, Afghanistan was part of the Sikh Emperor, Ranjit Singh’s kingdom in the early 19th century. Thousands of Afghan students have been to Indian colleges.

Hundreds of diplomats from many countries, personnel of the United Nations, of other international organisations, and those who had been working in non-governmental organisations (NGOs), helping to re-build the shattered nation, also find themselves stranded and abandoned, not knowing when and if they will be able to leave Afghanistan.

Perhaps most tragic of all, Afghan girls and women who had been able to go to schools and colleges, and to work, during the past two decades, don’t know if they will be able to do so now. Reports from Herat say that when girls turned up at schools, they were turned away and told to stay at home.

If that is a sign of things to come, all the gains that women had made in the country since 2001 may be nullified. Some of the worst aspects of Islamic Shariah law, such as the barbaric stoning to death of women found guilty of adultery, and the amputation of hands and feet of those guilty of theft, which was prevailing when the Taliban were in power from 1996 to 2001, might now be reimposed.

How has Afghanistan come to such a perilously sorry situation?

For an answer, we need to go back into Afghan history. The region first came to world attention at the time of Alexander the Great of Macedonia, three centuries before Christ. He married a princess of Bactria, an area which is now part of Afghanistan.

In his attempt to expand his empire, his all-conquering army went from present-day Greece eastwards, through what is now Turkey and Iran, then Afghanistan and Pakistan, right up to north-west India. His exhausted troops, threatening to mutiny, refused to go further.

But while returning, he left commanders of his army behind, to rule over and govern some of the regions he had conquered. Hence, even after his death, the Greek influence on Afghanistan survived for several centuries, in art and culture. This is still known as “Gandhara” art, named after the Afghan city of Kandhara.

After the Greek impact, came Buddhism. The sixth century gigantic images of the Buddha carved into the mountainside in Bamiyan, are testimony of the Buddhist influence (they were blown up and destroyed by the Taliban in March 2001).

Buddhism was replaced by Islam, which is when the Afghans became formidable fighters. They also formed a loose federation of various clans and tribes, ruled by warlords.

When the British gained control over India, Afghanistan became a buffer zone between India and Russia. This was the era when “the great game” was played. It was also the time that Afghanistan became a fiercely independent country, resenting all foreigners.

Nadir Shah was the last Iranian ruler who was able to take his army through Afghanistan, on his numerous raids to plunder the treasures of India, including the sacking of the rich Somnath temple in western India.

A revolt against Iranian rule eventually culminated in the establishment of the Durrani Afghan Empire under Ahmed Shah Durrani in 1747. After the collapse of the Durrani Empire in 1823, Afghanistan became a kingdom. Its last King, Mohammed Zahir Shah was deposed in a 1973 coup, and the country became a Republic.

Since 1978, however, it has been in constant political turmoil. The Russians occupied Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989, when it felt its interests were being threatened. Big mistake. They should have learnt from the British.

The occupation drained the resources of the Soviet Union to such an extent that it partly led to the Soviet collapse and break-up. Not without reason has Afghanistan been called “the graveyard of empires”. The British had tried to occupy it in the 19th century and suffered a catastrophic defeat.

The withdrawal of the Russians in 1989 left Afghanistan under the control of the Mujahideen (freedom fighters), who had been armed and financed by the Americans. “Charlie Wilson’s War”, a Hollywood film starring Tom Hanks, graphically describes how the conflict between the Russians and the Mujahideen (who were aided by the Americans) resulted in the Soviet defeat.

The Americans, their objective accomplished, withdrew from the scene. The ensuing vacuum was filled by a medley of battle-hardened fighters, many of them jihadists from other countries, armed to the teeth with American and Russian arms, with no enemy to fight against.

They would soon transform into the Taliban (which ironically means “students”) and become radicalized, believing in a fundamentalist interpretation of the Islamic Shariah law. Quite a few of them crossed the porous border into Pakistan, creating a Pakistani Taliban. Not knowing how to cope with so many jihadist fighters, Islamabad sent them to the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, to join the separatist movement there.

Meanwhile, within Afghanistan, a churn was taking place within the Taliban and out of the churning emerged El Qaeda and Lashkar-e-Toiba, the world’s foremost terrorist outfits. This was the prelude to 9/11, the infamous 2001 attack on the New York World Trade Centre.

The conspirators, led by Osama Bin Laden, may mostly have been of Saudi Arabian descent, but the conspiracy was hatched in Afghanistan, which is where they holed themselves up after the attack.

The retaliation against the perpetrators of 9/11 and subsequent two-decade-long occupation of Afghanistan by American and NATO troops may have subdued El Qaeda and the Taliban, but they were never really defeated.

Their opportunity to rise up again came with the announcement by Joe Biden that all American troops would be withdrawn by the end of this month. The withdrawal was unplanned and American intelligence failed to gauge the strength of the Taliban and the weakness of the Afghan army. It was a colossal miscalculation, the consequences of which are being felt now.

A huge sum of one trillion dollars has been spent by the American tax-payer to rebuild Afghanistan, and to finance 14,000 combat troops for two decades, while training and arming 300,000 troops of the Afghan army. Much of that money has probably gone into the pockets of corrupt Afghan politicians and officials.

The former President of Afghanistan is reported to have fled with a plane loaded with hard cash. As for the army which was meant to resist the Taliban, it simply handed over its arms, and either surrendered or disappeared into the shadows.

As I write this, fear and foreboding fills the Afghan air. This is evident from what is being shown on all the news channels. Fear of what the Taliban, now clearly in control of the whole nation, will do, especially to the girls and women, who had enjoyed the right to education and to work, since 2001. And the foreboding is over the heavily armed Taliban, its main enemy, the US and NATO troops, no longer confronting them.

Basically, the USA has been defeated, as it was in Vietnam, and it has left Afghanistan in a mess, as it did with Iraq. What will the triumphant Taliban do now? The situation parallels that of 1989, after the Russian defeat and the withdrawal of its troops from Afghanistan, leaving the Mujahideen in full control.

The vacuum then had led to the creation of El Qaeda, 9/11, and world-wide terrorism. Will history repeat itself? The world is holding its breath.

Rahul Singh is a writer and journalist. A former editor of Reader’s Digest, Sunday Observer, The Indian Express and Khaleej Times (Dubai), he has also contributed to the International Herald Tribune, The New York Times, Newsweek and Forbes.

 

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By Anis Chowdhury and Jomo Kwame Sundaram
SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 24 2021 (IPS)

Instead of a health system striving to provide universal healthcare, a fragmented, profit-driven market ‘non-system’ has emerged. The 1980s’ neo-liberal counter-revolution against the historic 1978 Alma-Ata Declaration is responsible.

Alma-Ata a big step forward
Neoliberal health reforms over the last four decades have reversed progress at the World Health Organization (WHO) Assembly in the capital of the then Socialist Republic of Kazakhstan, now known as Almaty.

Anis Chowdhury

Then, 134 WHO Member States reached a historic consensus reaffirming health as a human right. It recognised that heath is determined by environmental, socio-economic and political conditions, not only medical factors narrowly understood.

The Declaration stated, “Governments have a responsibility for the health of their people which can be fulfilled only by the provision of adequate health and social measures”. Also, “The people have the right and duty to participate individually and collectively in the planning and implementation of their health care”.

Countries committed to the fundamental right of every human being to enjoy the highest attainable standard of healthcare without discrimination. They agreed that primary healthcare (PHC) is key to addressing crucial determinants of health.

Alma-Ata eschewed overly ‘hospital-centric’ and ‘medicalised’ systems, instead favouring a more ‘social approach’ to medicine. In the Cold War divided world, the Declaration was a triumph for humanity, promising progress for global health.

It recognised the crucial contributions of multilateral cooperation, peace, social health determinants, health equity norms, community participation in planning, implementation and regulation, and involving other ‘sectors’ to promote health.

Primary healthcare
Some developing countries – e.g., China, Costa Rica, Cuba and Sri Lanka – had already achieved impressive health outcomes at relatively low cost, raising life expectancy by 15 to 20 years in under two decades.

Instead of just curative medicine and clinical care, prevention and public health were given more emphasis. Basic health services, improved diets, safe water, better sanitation, health education and disease prevention became central to such initiatives.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Mainly rural community health workers (CHWs) were trained to help communities address common health problems. Differences in national government approaches, contexts and needs have also shaped PHC outcomes, reach and efficacy, e.g., in delivering healthcare to the poor.

But despite reversals elsewhere, some efforts have continued, even expanded. Even in the 21st century, large-scale PHC efforts have made remarkable health gains, e.g., Brazil’s Programa Saude da Familia and Thailand’s Universal Coverage Scheme.

Lalonde Report turning point
Thus, Alma-Ata inverted health policy priorities, as 90% of health problems were recognised as due to lifestyles, environments and human biology, with only 10% due to the “healthcare system”, as noted by Canada’s 1974 Lalonde Report.

The Lalonde Report reaffirmed WHO’s basic approach. Its 1946 constitution had affirmed, “Health is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”.

The Report’s multidimensional approach to human health marked a turning point, reshaping policy approaches. Similar health assessments, with more holistic understandings, were also influential.

Reports from the UK, USA, Sweden and elsewhere also challenged the dominant medicalised approach to healthcare promoted by big pharmaceutical and other health-related businesses.

Neo-liberal ascendance
Developments since the 1980s have set back and reversed the Alma-Ata commitments. Latin American and other debt crises paved the way for the neo-liberal ‘Washington Consensus’ counter-revolution.

‘Rescue packages’ from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, especially structural adjustment programmes (SAPs), demanded public spending cuts. These reduced social spending, cutting funding for health.

Thus, many PHC, including CHW programmes did not last. Citing cost recovery, SAPs pressed to impose user fees and privatise health services. The outcomes betrayed Alma-Ata’s promise of greater health equity, and ‘Health for All’ by 2000, undermining prospects for universal health coverage.

The World Bank’s 1993 World Development Report, ‘Investing in Health’, also undermined Alma-Ata. Justifying state healthcare provisioning cuts, it promoted for-profit health financing and other private solutions.

Healthcare financing key
In neoliberal dialect, strengthening health systems meant “enhancing public-private partnerships” among other such interventions. The Bank provided substantial financial support to fund its recommendations.

Despite Alma-Ata, the WHO’s 2000 World Health Report (WHR 2000) criticised developing countries for “focusing on the public sector and often disregarding the – frequently much larger – private provision of care”. It argued, “Health policy and strategies need to cover the private provision of services and private financing”.

Addressing health progress became more ‘siloed’ with the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) indicators’ focus on curing and preventing particular diseases. Neither WHR 2000 nor the MDGs reiterated Alma-Ata’s emphasis on social justice, equity and community participation.

Instead, that era saw more healthcare privatisation, public-private partnerships and contracting out of services. After this neo-liberal eclipse, WHO’s attempted U-turn, starting over a decade ago, has emphasised universal health care (UHC) and socio-economic determinants, but the Alma-Ata betrayals prevail.

Thus, the Bank’s International Finance Corporation has been promoting private investments in healthcare services and infrastructure. Deploying billions, it buys public policy influence in Africa, India and beyond.

Philanthropy rules
Unsurprisingly, cash-strapped governments have welcomed financial support from supposed ‘do-gooder’ philanthropists. Many states have to cope with fragile, even crumbling health systems, often overwhelmed by old killers and new epidemics.

Such MDGs-inspired support has typically been via ‘vertical funds’ targeting specific diseases – contrary to Alma-Ata. With more money than WHO’s paltry budget, corporate philanthropy has been remaking policies the world over.

Thus, the policy and ideological prejudices of the Gates Foundation, Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation and Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria have obscured Alma-Ata, also reshaping national health priorities.

COVID-19 has unveiled some more effects of various profit-driven healthcare inequities, chronic under-investment in PHC, and over-investment in profit-driven healthcare. They have not only hastened the retreat from ‘health for all’ and UHC, but also made the world more vulnerable to epidemics.

Worse, the interests and priorities of corporate philanthropy have not only raised the costs of, and thus delayed containing the pandemic, but also reversed much of the modest and uneven progress of recent decades, besides worsening inequalities.

 

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Organic vanilla farmer, Shelley Burich, works on her farm at Vaoala. Credit: FAO.

By Keni Lesa
APIA, Samoa, Aug 23 2021 (IPS)

A woman farmer in Samoa is using innovation and technology to overcome economic hardship as the Pacific Island nation seeks ways to adapt to the challenges resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic.

Although Samoa, with a population of less than 200,000, remains one of a few countries in the world without a positive Covid-19 case, its border closed in March 2020 after the government declared a state of emergency, dealing the country’s economy a decisive blow.

The woman farmer from Samoa will soon share her story with the world in a bid to inspire others who have found themselves in a similar situation. Burich’s innovations will be among the solutions showcased at the Small Island Developing States Solutions Forum, scheduled for 30-31 August 2021

Tourism, regarded as the mainstay of the economy, has been crippled by the absence of foreign visitors for nearly two years. Hotels, restaurants and tourism-related businesses have had to shut their doors and look elsewhere to make ends meet. But it’s not just the inner circle of the tourism industry that has been affected. Domestic growers and farmers, who had relied on the steady and frequent influx of visitors, suddenly found themselves on the back foot.

Among them is Shelley Burich, the owner of an organic vanilla farm, which profited from the tourism industry. Burich’s farm and business, perched on the cool heights of Vaoala, overlooking Apia, the capital of Samoa, was booming prior to the pandemic.

“Before Covid I was relying a lot on tourists that would be coming to the islands,” said Burich. “I was getting people looking to come and tour the vanilla farm, and a lot of my business was word of mouth. So when the borders closed, that stopped.”

Like other farmers, Burich needed to be innovative to survive. She did not sit idle. Days of studying social media and innovation gave birth to her new baby, “Long Distance Vanilla.”

“I make my own composting and mulching to feed the vanilla, and from the vanilla beans we export our premium beans, which are the grade ones and twos,” she explains. “From the other beans I make value-added products like vanilla syrup, vanilla extract and vanilla powder.”

Outside-the-box thinking and digitalization were critical to transforming her fortunes.

“I decided to go full-time into the social media realm. I created an online store, and I had to figure out a way to keep my business generating products and getting it out of Samoa. My products are now being sold to Ireland, Japan, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the (United) States and all over.”

While Covid is an unwelcome challenge, Burich said it forced her to diversify. “And now I am doing a lot more on the social media platform. Even though I am sitting here in Samoa, I am actually building an online store for customers in Canada.”

But this woman farmer is not done — she has big plans in the pipeline.

“My dream is really to use (my experience) as a training farm, to get people more into growing and also teach them how to build a business online.”

The woman farmer from Samoa will soon share her story with the world in a bid to inspire others who have found themselves in a similar situation. Burich’s innovations will be among the solutions showcased at the Small Island Developing States (SIDS) Solutions Forum, scheduled for 30-31 August 2021. She will share the stage with other success stories from SIDS around the globe.

The forum will create a space for government leaders, development partners, farmers, fishers, community development practitioners and leaders, entrepreneurs, women and youth to discuss, share, promote and encourage home-grown and imported solutions to respond to the challenges posed by Covid-19, and others that existed before the pandemic.

The ultimate goal is to accelerate the achievement of the agriculture, food and nutrition-related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in SIDS.

 

Excerpt:

Keni Lesa works on SIDS Solution Platform Communications for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in Samoa

Increasing agricultural output and consumption of nutritious food are major priorities in small island developing states in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Central food market, Apia, Samoa. Credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS

By Catherine Wilson
CANBERRA, Australia, Aug 23 2021 (IPS)

The urgency of finding solutions to the most pressing development challenges of our times has increased as the Covid-19 pandemic threatens to reverse the global momentum in recent years toward achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). And small island developing states (SIDS), with their physical remoteness, restricted land and resources and dependence on trade and tourism, are experiencing growing hardship caused by closed borders and plummeting economies.

Boosting food security and better nutrition, which falls under SDG 2, is a priority in the current crisis and imperative to succeeding more widely to raise living standards and economic growth. By 2019, the year before the COVID-19 outbreak, the Pacific Islands had made few advances on this goal. Now, the sub-region will be the focus of a high level virtual international conference, the SIDS Solutions Forum, 30-31 August.

The forum initiative is driven by the belief that each SIDS already has many solutions and innovations that are either home grown or generated from similar situations elsewhere, and have the potential to be scaled up. With increasing access to the internet, there are other opportunities for innovation and knowledge sharing

Takayuki Hagiwara, FAO

“The forum initiative is driven by the belief that each SIDS already has many solutions and innovations that are either home grown or generated from similar situations elsewhere, and have the potential to be scaled up. With increasing access to the internet, there are other opportunities for innovation and knowledge sharing,” Takayuki Hagiwara, Regional Programme Leader at the Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), in Bangkok, told IPS.

The two day event, co-hosted by FAO and the Fiji Government, will bring together heads of governments, public policy makers, non-government organizations, private sector leaders, farmers, and community representatives to explore how ‘digitalization and innovation’ can fast-track gains in sustainable agriculture, food, nutrition, environment and health in island states.

Many of the issues to be discussed are not new. For instance, declining agricultural output and low levels of food processing and value addition have been problems for years. And Pacific Islanders have suffered from lack of food following natural disasters, such as cyclones and earthquakes, for generations. In 2019, the FAO reported that 5.9 million people in Oceania, or 50 percent of the region’s population of about 11.9 million, were suffering moderate to severe food insecurity. Meanwhile 20 percent of people in the Pacific and 16 percent in the Caribbean were undernourished.

Initiatives have already begun at the national level. In the Cook Islands, the government launched the SMART Agritech Scheme in July last year as part of the country’s response to some of these issues.

“Targeting commercial farmers and agribusiness ventures, the scheme’s objective was to encourage investment in technology and smart processes to improve yield, efficiency, and profitability… The scheme has approved a range of applications including honey production, establishing temperature-controlled greenhouses, aquaponics, and the processing of agricultural produce. I am excited for the future of this important sector,” Hon. Mark Brown, Prime Minister of the Cook Islands, told IPS.

SIDS account for just under 1 percent of the world’s population. Among them are UN member states Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Guinea-Bissau, Haiti, Singapore, Seychelles, Papua New Guinea, Tuvalu and Vanuatu.

Experts point to food insecurity associated with loss of incomes and lower availability of affordable food in the Pacific Islands following the pandemic as a major issue. Post-harvest losses of farming produce are expected to rise, too, because of disruptions to transport networks, supply chains and inadequate storage options.

The present high rates of malnutrition in SIDS, including under-nutrition and obesity, and the overwhelming burden of non-communicable diseases (NCDs), such as diabetes, could also worsen. For decades, increasing reliance on imported food has occurred alongside higher consumption of processed sugar-laden foods and beverages. The majority of Pacific and Caribbean nations import more than 60 percent of their food, while one-third of adults in the Caribbean are obese and 75 percent of all adult deaths in the Pacific are due to NCDs, reports the FAO.

The forum’s hosts believe that indigenous and introduced innovative ideas to address problems at any stage in the value chain, from pre-harvest to market access, can be enhanced and optimized by digital tools.

“Not only is it pertinent, the emphasis on ‘digitalization and innovation’ at the forum is crucial for the needed technological transition of the region’s collective effort towards enhancing current and future agriculture and food systems,” said Mani Mua, Plant Health Field Coordinator, Land Resources Division, at the regional development organization, Pacific Community, in Fiji.

In Papua New Guinea, the use of blockchain technologies, involving the RFID (radio frequency) tagging of livestock pigs, which are then monitored through a computer database, is ensuring the tracing of pork and other food products, a vital process for meeting food safety standards. Meanwhile, a mobile application developed in Fiji enables users to quickly analyse the nutritional value of meals captured on camera. And digital payment platforms, an enormous asset for farmers and businesses, are being supported by mobile providers in Samoa, Fiji and Vanuatu.

But promoting digital-based solutions has its challenges in countries where infrastructure and connectivity can be poor. While 73 percent and 49 percent of people in Antigua and Barbuda and Fiji respectively have access to the internet, this falls dramatically to 11 percent in Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, and 3.9 percent in Guinea-Bissau, according to the World Bank.

“The digital divide is a developmental challenge in SIDS, but also in many developed countries… FAO is working with governments, the private sector, development partners and communities to pursue an incremental approach by leveraging the current connectivity to improve the livelihoods of those with access, and then linking their success with remote farmers. If digitalization helps urban food processors and handlers to earn more, chances are that the remote producers will also earn a bit more while digital access is being gradually improved,” Joseph Nyemah, Food and Nutrition Officer at the FAO Pacific Sub-regional office in Samoa, told IPS.

The International Telecommunications Union (ITU), a key partner in delivering the forum, is also working to guide and implement the Smart Islands initiative, an integrated strategy with governments to upgrade affordable broadband access and expand digital services in island nations.

Bringing digital tools into the households and businesses of Pacific Islanders will require large-scale investment by international donors and partners. However, David Dawe, a Senior FAO Economist in Bangkok, believes that: “Much of the investment should come from the private sector. The pandemic has increased demand for digital services and expanded their customer base, so these companies should see an opportunity in the current situation.”

During the forum, a SIDS Solutions digital platform will be launched. It will be a virtual space in which stakeholders, from government ministers to local entrepreneurs, can continue seeking out ideas from around the world and pulling together the support and resources for those that successfully match nations and their needs.

Ultimately, “new partnerships will be built and, more importantly, local innovations in SIDS that are not always spoken of will be brought to the front and leveraged to catalyse the achievement of the SDGs,” declared Nyemah.

There are calls to include migrants and other vulnerable groups in the vaccine rollout programmes in the Southern Africa region. Credit: UNICEF/Nahom Tesfaye

By Kevin Humphrey
Johannesburg, South Africa, Aug 23 2021 (IPS)

Migrants across the Southern Africa region are massively disadvantaged as they find themselves excluded from vaccine programmes – even when the global vaccine initiative COVAX often funds these programmes.

This is the latest in a long list of struggles migrants have experienced since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Migrant is a catch-all word that includes a diverse set of people, including non-citizens, asylum seekers, refugees and those who have acquired permission to dwell in the country they have settled.

However, vaccines are just one of the issues faced by migrants. Border shutdowns, travel restrictions and lockdowns have severely restricted large swathes of the region’s economic activities. Relationships between friends, family and social, religious, and other groups have also suffered.

Experts believe that ending the pandemic can only be achieved if vaccines are available in all countries – to all populations, including refugees and displaced people fleeing conflict and other crises – but this regional cooperation is not yet on the region’s agenda.

“In terms of the Southern African region, we are currently not seeing a conversation in place around a regional response,” Public health researcher and Associate Professor and Director of the African Centre for Migration & Society at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, Jo Vearey told IPS.

“In a region of such high levels of population mobility, we need to ensure that our response to COVID-19, in access to vaccinations and testing and other related issues, can reflect the forms of movement that people undertake in the region.”

The Southern African Nationality Network (“SANN”) has called on governments in the South African Development Community (SADC) region to ensure all have access to vaccines. The group advocates for equitable treatment for vulnerable groups such as refugees, asylum seekers, internally displaces persons, undocumented persons, and stateless persons. They also asked authorities to “enable irregular migrants, undocumented persons and stateless persons to access health care without fear and risk of arrest or detention”.

Vearey agrees, saying that “if a person is in a location other than their normal place of residence, we need to ensure that they can access vaccines easily and safely regardless of documentation status. We need firewalls to be in place – where the firewall acts as a legal provision so that undocumented people have no fear of penalty should they be accessing COVID services”.

She says extraordinary measures were needed. National departments of health, home affairs, foreign affairs, and the Southern African Development Community (SADC) should ensure a smooth and inclusive rollout.

“There are, however, questions about the capacity of the SADC structures,” Vearey says.

“There are also issues around how we respond appropriately to the myths and assumptions around the movement of people. We know foreign nationals tend to be scapegoated and blamed for various issues. There is also the issue of giving out numbers of foreign nationals in a given country, particularly South Africa, often inflated. We know that immigration, in particular, is a heavily politicised issue. Some political leaders make use of rhetoric to blame foreign nationals for failures in delivery by the state.”

It was time to set aside differences, and there was no place in this pandemic for xenophobia.

“This is a pandemic, it affects everyone, and obviously, a pandemic by definition doesn’t respect borders, doesn’t care who someone is. It works by moving from person to person. Unless we effectively break that train of transmission, we won’t get a grip on the pandemic and will probably see more variants emerge, which will lead to more ill-health and fatalities,” Vearey says.

“It will also mean a further impact on people’s livelihoods because of more lockdowns and restrictions. Migrant labour is so important in the region through various forms of employment, both formal and informal. Particularly in the sectors of mining, agriculture and construction work. The sooner we can get everyone vaccinated, the sooner we will return to some semblance of normality.”

Traditional forms of migrant labour in the region were established during the minerals super boom in South Africa during the colonial era. Kicked off by the discovery of diamonds (1867), a handful of mining magnates accumulated enough capital to develop deep level gold mining on the Witwatersrand (1886) which is now part of modern-day Gauteng province. This history still exerts massive influence and attracts people with expectations of jobs and business opportunities.

Covid 19 has interfered significantly with these economic crosscurrents.

Senior economist at Trade and Industrial Policy Strategies (TIPS), Dr Neva Makgetla, former lead economist for the Development Planning and Implementation Division at the Development Bank of Southern Africa, among many other roles, told IPS significant impacts of the pandemic were on tourism and mining.

“International and regional tourism has collapsed, and mining has seen a run-up in prices. According to the World Bank, tourism accounted for 9% of South African export revenues in 2018, which is a real blow.

Mira Gaspar outside her studio in Kempton Park, South Africa talks about the devastating impact of COVID-19 on her and her business. Credit: Kevin Humphrey

“The recovery will depend above all on the rollout of vaccinations, which has made good progress but is expected to reach the majority of adults only toward the end of 2021,” Makgetla said.

“The loss of tourism revenues has, however, to date been offset by mining prices, which rose to 2011 levels this year. The question, of course, is how long they will remain so high; the answer depends in part on monetary policy in the global North, and in part on Chinese growth prospects.”

Down at street level, Mira Gaspar, a single mother (originally from Mozambique but now, after many years of struggle, has a South African permanent resident status), tells of her earth-shattering experiences since the COVID-19 Tsunami hit the world and her neck of the woods.

“I had managed to open up a hair salon in a part of Kempton Park where I did not have too much competition. I basically had a reasonably sized area where I was the nearest salon. It was not easy to establish the business, but I did manage to build a steady clientele of women and girls and even went into men’s hair. I added to my income by working with a close friend to import and export items between Johannesburg and Maputo,” Gaspar said.

She sold hair extensions – and even prawns from Mozambique to make a living.

“It was hard, but it worked. COVID wrecked it. The big lockdown took my salon. The border closures took my import-export business. Now I am slowly trying to pick up the pieces, but I have used any money I had for my daughter and me to survive during this time. It is hard, but God will help us through this time.”

 

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Delegates from Asia and Africa met during a two-day conference to discuss ICPD25 programme of action. Credit: APDA

By Cecilia Russell
Johannesburg, South Africa, Aug 23 2021 (IPS)

Politicians from Asia and Africa shared activism anecdotes demonstrating their determination to meet ICPD 25 commitments. They were speaking at a hybrid conference held simultaneously in Kampala, Uganda, and online.

Ugandan MP Kabahenda Flavia dramatically told the conference that women parliamentarians in her country “stampeded the budget process” to ensure there was potential to recruit midwives and nurses at health centres. Another told of a breastfeeding lawmaker who brought her child to parliament, forcing it to create inclusive facilities for new mothers.

Yet, despite these displays of determination, there was consensus at the meeting, organised by the Asian Population and Development Association and Ugandan Parliamentarians Forum of Food Security, Population and Development, that the COVID-19 pandemic had set the ICPD25 programme of action back, and it needed to be addressed.

In his opening remarks, former Prime Minister of Japan and chair of the APDA, Yasuo Fukuda, commented that the pandemic had “dramatically changed the world. It has exposed enormous challenges faced by African and Asian countries, which lack sufficient infrastructure in health and medical services.”

With only nine years until 2030 to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
Fukuda told parliamentarians they needed to respond to the swift pace of global change.

His sentiments were echoed by Ugandan MP Marie Rose Nguini Effa, who said in Africa, the pandemic had “affected the lives of many people, including the aged, youth and women. Many young people lost their jobs while girls’ and young women’s access to integrated sexual and reproductive health information, education and services have plunged.”

Addressing how parliamentarians can make a difference, Pakistani MP Romina Khurshid Alam intimated legislation was not the only route.

Other actions were needed to achieve SDGs, especially those relating to women. For example, the act of paying women the same as their male counterparts would more than compensate for the estimated $264 billion costs over ten years of achieving SDG 5 on gender equality.

Alam, who is also the chair of the Commonwealth Women Parliamentarians forum, quoted figures from the World Economic Forum, which had looked at the benefits of pay equity. Each year the discrimination “takes $16 trillion off the table”.

“If we just started paying women the same amount of money that we pay men for the same job. Your country will generate that GDP. We will not have to beg anyone for that money,” she said.

The ‘shadow pandemic’ also threatens to destroy any progress made on agenda 2030, Alam said.
People were put into lockdown to prevent the spread of the disease – but not all people live in three-bedroom houses. Overcrowding in poor areas, the stress of lockdowns led to a 300 percent increase in violence.

Flavia said in Uganda, women’s issues were taken extremely seriously – their role, she said, should not be underestimated.

“Women don’t only give birth. They are the backbone of most economies,” she noted, adding that more than 80 percent of the informal sector is made up of women. She listed various laws created to ensure women are accorded full and equal dignity, including article 33 of the Ugandan constitution, which enshrined this.

Women parliamentarians saw their role as custodians of the ICPD 25 programme as action – and were prepared to act if their demands were not taken seriously, including holding up the budgeting process until critical health posts were funded.

Constatino Kanyasu, an MP from Tanzania, called for collective action.

“Developing countries should merge those efforts with other issues, by addressing Covid-19 together with ICPD+25 commitments horizontally,” she said.

In a presentation shared at the conference, Jyoti Tewari, UNFPA for East and South African regions, showed some progress indices since the ICPD conference, including a 49 percent decrease in maternal mortality before the pandemic.

However, he said there was still a long way to go, with 80 000 women dying from preventable deaths during pregnancy. However, the lockdowns during the two waves of the COVID-19 pandemic had prolonged disruptions to SRHR services.

It was necessary to “sustain evidence-based advocacy to promptly
detect changes to service delivery and utilization, and support countries to implement mitigation strategies,” Tewari said.
Ugandan Deputy Speaker Anita Annet Among expressed concern that one in five adolescent girls falls pregnant in Africa – many of whom drop out of school. With schools closed, the situation had worsened.

She called on parliamentarians to be the voice of the voiceless and ensure “you make strong laws that protect the women and youth. Ensure the appropriation of monies that support these marginalized people.”

A declaration following the meeting included advocating for increased budgets to meet the ICPD 25 commitments, including sexual and reproductive health services for all and contributing to the three zeros – preventable maternal deaths, unmet family planning needs, and eliminating gender-based violence.

• The meeting was held under the auspices of the Asian Population and Development Association (APDA) in partnership with The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and hosted by Ugandan Parliamentarians Forum of Food Security, Population and Development (UPFFSP&D).

 

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María Santos Hernández, 66, poses outside her home in the village of Huisisilapa, municipality of San Pablo Tacachico, in central El Salvador, on Aug. 17, a day before leaving for the United States, in her case with a visa and by plane, to reunite with three sons who live in the town of Stephenson, in the state of Virginia. A fourth son is on his way through Mexico to try to enter the country as an undocumented immigrant and join his family. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN PABLO TACACHICO, El Salvador , Aug 23 2021 (IPS)

The Joe Biden administration’s call for undocumented Central American migrants not to go to the United States, as requested by Vice President Kamala Harris during a June visit to Guatemala, appears to have fallen on deaf ears.

In towns in countries such as El Salvador, people continue to set out every day on their way to the U.S. in search of a better future. But there are no hard numbers to indicate whether the flow is larger or smaller than in previous years.

It remains to be seen whether the number of undocumented Salvadoran migrants has significantly decreased as a result of the public policies implemented since June 2019 by the government of Nayib Bukele, as his administration claims, said experts interviewed by IPS.

What is clear is that people continue to undertake the journey that could offer them an opportunity for a better future, given the poverty and social exclusion they face in this country of 6.7 million inhabitants, as well as in the rest of Central America, especially Guatemala and Honduras.

Oscar left on Aug. 14 for Stephenson, a small town in Virginia, a state on the east coast of the United States, from his native Huisisilapa, a village in San Pablo Tacachico municipality in the central Salvadoran department of La Libertad.

“I don’t know where in Mexico I am right now, I’m going with the guide,” Oscar told IPS in a WhatsApp conversation on Tuesday, Aug. 17, asking to be identified only by his first name.

A photo of Oscar and his son Andrés, when they lived together in Huisisilapa, a village in central El Salvador. Five years ago the boy left with his mother for the small town of Stephenson, Virginia, and now Oscar is making his way across Mexico as an undocumented migrant, with the aim of living in the U.S. with his son, who is now eight years old. CREDIT: Courtesy of the family

The 27-year-old peasant farmer who used to mainly grow corn undertook the journey with the aim of being reunited with his son Andres, who is now eight and has been living in that town since his undocumented mother took him with her to the United States five years ago.

“It’s dangerous, but my desire to be with him outweighs my fears of the trip,” Oscar added.

Irregular migration of Salvadorans to the United States skyrocketed in the 1980s with the outbreak of the civil war, which left some 70,000 people dead between 1980 and 1992.

An estimated three million Salvadorans live in the U.S., many of them undocumented, contributing enormously to the economy of this Central American nation, sending home some six billion dollars in remittances.

The decades that followed the 1992 peace agreement saw a rise in crime, especially gang activity, which spurred another surge in migration to the United States.

El Salvador became one of the most violent countries in the world, with rates sometimes exceeding 100 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants.

A picture of the main street in the village of Huisisilapa, San Pablo Tacachico municipality in the central El Salvador department of La Paz. Many undocumented migrants set out from farming towns like this one, where there are few possibilities of finding work, heading to the United States in search of the “American dream”. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

Has “Bukelismo” reduced undocumented migration?

Bukele became president in June 2019 at the age of 39, after a landslide victory in the February elections when he wrested power from the former Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) guerrillas, who were in power since 2009.

Just two years into his term, Bukele, described as a millennial populist who governs through tweets, has achieved a significant decrease in crime rates.

Since he took office, the homicide rate has plunged from 50 per 100,000 population to 19 per 100,000 – a drop that the president attributes to his Territorial Control Plan to crack down on crime.

According to the government, the programme has also reduced the numbers of Salvadorans heading to the United States.

“Don’t ask me if the territorial control plan is really a success, or if the government’s plan to generate jobs has worked, because most likely neither has been that good,” analyst Oscar Chacón, of Alianza América, told IPS in a telephone interview from Chicago, Illinois.

He added, however: “But a good percentage of people want to believe that there is hope that things are going to get better in El Salvador; that is what I call the hope factor.”

Bukele achieved his overwhelming victory by arguing that the parties that preceded him, the leftist FMLN and the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), which governed from 1989 to 2009, plunged the country into crisis during three decades of corruption and failed policies.

Lito Miranda, a relative of María Santos, husks ears of tender corn in the Salvadoran village of Huisisilapa to prepare the tamales that the mother of three young Salvadorans living in the United States insists on bringing them to enjoy at their family reunion. Some three million Salvadorans live in the United States, many of them undocumented. The flow of migrants from the country continues, despite the administration of Joe Biden’s plea urging them not to come. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

But more and more information is coming out that some of his officials may be involved in embezzlement, and the president’s style of governing, always at loggerheads with the opposition and social movements, has not created a climate of stability.

In any case, the hope factor should make Salvadoran families less likely to leave the country than families from Guatemala and Honduras, Chacón said.

In April, El Salvador’s ambassador in Washington, Milena Mayorga, said in a tweet that, thanks to the government’s policies, there has been an “unprecedented” reduction in migratory flows to the United States, since only 5.11 percent of the total number of migrants arriving at the southern U.S. border are Salvadorans.

However, the diplomat did not offer more data, nor did she mention the source of her information.

In March, Mayorga reported in another tweet that, in the case of unaccompanied minors, the number of Salvadorans reaching the southern border was lower than the numbers of Guatemalans, Hondurans and Mexicans so far in fiscal year 2021 (which began in October 2020).

But other data indicates that the influx may actually be growing.

Local media reports, citing U.S. Customs and Border Protection figures, have indicated that 12,643 Salvadorans were apprehended at the southern border in July. That represented a 9.2 percent increase over the 11,575 apprehensions reported in June.

Pieces of chicken that formed part of the filling of the tamales cooked in the home of María Santos Hernández, on Aug. 17, in the village of Huisisilapa in the central Salvadoran municipality of San Pablo Tacachico. She flew out the next day to join her sons in the small town of Stephenson, Virginia, carrying with her 60 tamales: 30 filled with chicken and 30 stuffed with corn, to remind them of the land they left behind in search of a better future in the United States. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

“It seems so simplistic to me to say that the government is doing things right and that’s why fewer people are supposedly leaving,” migration expert Karla Castillo told IPS.

Irregular migration is a complex phenomenon with many different facet, she said, and has to do with structural causes that cannot be solved in one or two years.

Chacón said that overall, U.S. authorities have reported 1.24 million people apprehended at the southern border from October to date, but he stressed that the figure was not entirely reliable.

That is because the number counts “events” rather than people, since the same person may be arrested and deported several times.

“Unfortunately, I couldn’t say that there is an accurate measurement method, because we only have partial measurement units,” Chacón said, adding that “we have no way of counting the people who make it in undetected. It’s as simple as that, we just don’t know.”

Some of the 60 tamales made in the home of María Santos Hernández, which she successfully brought with her to the United States, where she traveled by plane with a visa on Aug. 18 to visit three of her sons who live in a small town in the eastern state of Virginia. A fourth son, Oscar, is currently making his way up through Mexico as an undocumented migrant, to try to join his mother and brothers. CREDIT: Courtesy of the family

Taking tamales to Virginia

Oscar is hopeful that he will make it. While he was crossing Mexico, his mother, Maria Santos Hernández, was packing her bags at her home in Huisisilapa to also travel to Stephenson, Virginia, on Wednesday, Aug. 18.

But she travelled by plane with a temporary visa, planning to return home after spending some time there. Her son Walter, who emigrated 13 years ago and “already has papers,” arranged her visa a few years ago.

Maria Santos also has two other sons living in Stephenson, but without documents: Moises and Jonathan.

“We are praying that Oscar will make it through so we can all be reunited there,” the 66-year-old told IPS, adding, “I have a mixture of feelings: the joy of seeing my three sons who live there, and concern for Oscar, who is making his way through Mexico right now.”

Maria, her husband Felipe, and their children lived in Huisisilapa after they were relocated to their land there at the end of the war. And they were able to build their home thanks to the remittances sent back by their sons.

In her suitcase she was carrying 60 tamales that she made on Tuesday the 17th, to celebrate the family reunion in Stephenson with Walter, Moises and Jonathan, and later with Oscar, who is still en route.

“They love tamales, that’s why I’m bringing them,” María told IPS, who was with her on her last day at her home, as she stirred with a large wooden paddle the liquid that bubbled inside a huge pot on the stove.

Tamales are a kind of corn cake with savory or sweet fillings, which are wrapped in banana leaves or corn husks. María was making two different kinds of fillings: chicken and fresh corn.

And as IPS learned, the tamales made it through customs and her family in the United States is enjoying them – though they have saved some for Oscar, who everyone is waiting for.

Credit: Goma, North Kivu. Elena L. Pasquini

By Akilimali Saleh Chomachoma
GOMA, NORTH KIVU, DRCongo, Aug 23 2021 (IPS)

On May 6, 2021, after a decision by President Félix Tshisekedi, a state of siege was established in Ituri and North Kivu, two provinces that are located in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo and that are in the grip of endless violence.

Earky this month the National Assembly voted on a fifth extension of the measure. Under the state of siege, local administration – including justice and security – is in the hands of military authorities, and local deputies are suspended from their duties.

Bunia, as well as Goma’s airports, experienced enthusiasm and popular jubilation when the new military authorities arrived. Almost three months later, however, mistrust is growing.

“Three months after the declaration of a state of siege in the provinces of North Kivu and Ituri, the violence coming from negative armed groups and elements of the army has intensified, the rights of citizens are more and more trampled and the local administration is completely at a standstill, the citizens’ movement Lucha, movement Lutte pour le changement, notes in a press release.

The pro-democracy movement indicates that since its establishment at least 533 people have been killed in the two provinces, an average of six civilians killed per day. A measure without expected results despite the financial efforts made.

The FARDC, the Congolese army, is still plagued by “businessism” and the consequent lack of logistical and financial support from the government. As a result, the army “only helplessly witness the killings of civilians which, to date, have spread to geographic areas that were once calm.” As it happened in town of Kalunguta, in the territory of Beni, which suffered its very first murderous attack on July 15, 2021, or the town of Beni, which was attacked again on 01July 2021, after nearly 15 months of relative calm.

Among those who support the measure is Jordan, a student. “The province of North Kivu has been scarred for too long by politicians in need of opportunities. This has to be changed quickly. Putting aside politicians will mean a lot for restoring peace, and putting them aside will help the military to act in sovereignty and then restore peace,” he says. Joseph Ombeni does not share this vision. “We see how people are being killed in the town of Goma even during the state of siege. So far, I don’t see any change on the security front. We must strengthen the local authorities for administrative and political affairs and then strengthen the military with the means to search for (criminals). The state of siege is just a waste of time for the country,” he explains.

On July 22, the Study Group on Congo released a publication entitled: “State of siege or state of dysfunction in North Kivu.” The think tank considers that “the relationship between the new executive and the suspended animators of the provinces is not no longer regulated. The military officials, all from other provinces and sometimes without much knowledge of the environments in which they are assigned, are free to consult or not those they are temporarily replacing, and who will normally have to take over the management of their respective entities at the end of the state of siege. The suspended governor of North Kivu is reduced to a passive role of a ‘mere notable’ in the province. The suspended provincial deputies, now deprived of their immunities from prosecution, are more cautious.”

Provincial deputies broke their silence. In an open letter to the President of the Republic, seventeen elected members of provincial authorities denounced the disregard of the state of siege and a plot against them by the government of Kinshasa: “In view of the discourteous, humiliating and degrading remarks made towards the provincial deputies by the military governor, the latter seems to have come with heavy prejudices and presumption according to which the notabilities and social layers of North Kivu would be involved in the destabilization. Everything suggests that there would be a plot against the provincial deputies of North Kivu.” No military authority has received the deputies despite their multiple requests, according to the letter.

Several elected officials in the country hardly support the state of siege any more. Ayobangira Sanvura calls for the “return of the civil administration” and says that “the military [should] concentrate on the security aspect only” for more efficiency. The same applies to Jean-Batiste Kasekwa, elected from the city of Goma.

In a video that went viral, one of the officials responsible for customs declarant people in North Kivu decried the abuse of the new authorities: “We have a blatant case today. Five vehicles that were collected from Bunagana. This merchandise was taken care of to be transferred to the customs of Goma … to be cleared in Goma where the economic operator is located. The customs declarant who was responsible for this commodity began to be worried by the military administrator of Rutshuru. The administrator changed the destination of the goods to Rutshuru territory. This is a serious customs violation,” he said.

“Now is not the time to say that (the state of siege) has succeeded or failed. Rather, now it is the time to make recommendations and exercise maximum vigilance so that the state of siege does not distract those in power and start to become something else,” said Hubert Furuguta, the national deputy elected from Goma.

The fifth extension, voted on last week, was preceded by an assessment demanded by the deputies of the two provinces. According to them, everything is in place to ensure that the state of siege achieves the expected objectives. However, it emerged that despite the efforts made, several security, administrative, and financial problems persist.

Responding to the criticism, Brigadier General Sylvain Ekenge highlighted, to the local press, the work that the army has carried out. Above all, he admitted that the state of siege will not end a conflict that has lasted for over three decades. “Do you think that it is with the state of siege that we will put an end to all the insecurity? No,” conceded the general. “The state of siege will reduce violence, and the army and the police will continue their action for stabilization and achieve total pacification of the country. The state of siege has been put in place so that the violence is reduced as much as possible.”

This article was first published by Degrees of Latitude

 

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A man selling fresh produce in a green market in Skopje, Macedonia. Credit: FAO/Robert Atanasovski

By Ruben G. Echeverría
WASHINGTON DC, Aug 23 2021 (IPS)

A population of more than 9 billion people, hotter temperatures, decaying ecosystems and increasingly severe natural disasters. That is what our world is facing by 2050 because of climate change.

Even before the addition of some two billion people, the world still struggles to ensure enough food for all, with around 700 million people going hungry worldwide today.

An ever-growing population demands an intensification of agriculture to provide greater amounts of food if we are to avoid the spectre of an even greater hunger crisis.

In low-income countries, where investment in intensification is most needed, less than five per cent of agricultural output is spent on innovation, accounting for $50 to $70 billion. Of this, only seven per cent of investment is dedicated specifically towards more sustainable forms of intensification.

Therein lies our problem. Without new ideas, methods, and innovation, intensification means expanding agriculture onto finite uncultivated lands, such as rainforests, and placing an even greater burden on essential resources like water.

This tension between sustainability and productivity is the dilemma at the heart of our twin hunger and climate challenges, both of which demand a solution, but neither of which can be tackled alone. Solving this dilemma is the answer to a $15 billion question.

A new study has revealed an annual investment gap of US$15.3 billion to fund the research and technologies that can help farmers worldwide produce more food without eating up more natural resources.

By increasing our current levels of investment by at least 25 per cent, and channelling it into targeted areas for maximum impact, we can help alleviate global hunger and climate change at once.

But investing our time, energy, and money smartly and efficiently requires understanding which existing practices already work, where there are gaps in our knowledge, investment, and research, and how best we can fill them.

Crucially, the research also shed new light on the areas where investment can have the greatest impact on productivity while minimising the environmental footprint of food and agriculture.

For example, by investing in new technologies that allow farmers to use water more efficiently, it is possible to increase crop yields while bringing down agricultural water use by 10 per cent by 2030. These kinds of technologies can help increase profits, reduce food prices and save farmers – and the planet – water.

The clear benefits of improving the efficiency of water use for agriculture warrant an additional investment of $4.7 billion, which is all the more critical given that only seven per cent of existing investments target environmental outcomes.

Secondly, investing in better training and learning services for smallholders in developing countries, would provide more equitable access to the latest agricultural knowledge and support.

More knowledgeable and efficient farmers will then be empowered to produce more safe and nutritious food, potentially lifting as many as 140 million people out of poverty and hunger.

Currently, around half of the private sector’s investments into developing countries focus on agricultural inputs such as seeds, pesticides, and fertilizers. Complementary public investments in technical assistance would equip farmers to deliver healthier and greener food for their communities.

Finally, investing in smallholder finance will meet the unmet demand among farmers in developing countries for more capital with which to acquire the technologies and systems for a more efficient and sustainable agricultural intensification.

Investing into new and emerging financial mechanisms for agriculture offers the unique proposition of providing critical lines of credit and finance for farmers while also incentivising more sustainable practices, through green and blue bonds, or payments for ecosystem services.

For example, an additional $6.5 billion a year by 2030 would be enough to subsidise the uptake of innovations that would bring down greenhouse gas emissions to deliver a mitigation trajectory in line with the Paris Agreement.

There is no escaping from the problems posed by the future. As the population of the world grows, so too do the pressing challenges of climate change and hunger. But investors should not settle for solving one problem without addressing the other and should look to the agricultural innovations that make decisive action on both fronts possible.

With smarter investment in new agricultural technologies and policies we can feed the world without harming it, addressing our dual climate and hunger problems at once, and providing a healthier and greener world for future generations.

 

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Excerpt:

The writer is Chair of the Commission on Sustainable Agriculture Intensification (CoSAI)

A family runs across a dusty street in Herat, Afghanistan. Credit: UNAMA/Fraidoon Poya

By Alon Ben-Meir
NEW YORK, Aug 20 2021 (IPS)

President Biden’s decision to finally withdraw US forces from Afghanistan was the correct decision and certainly overdue. However, the lack of preparation to do so orderly and safely was yet another terrible mistake in a string of mistakes that have plagued the US from day one.

Righting the wrong

In his address to the nation last Monday, President Biden used the majority of it to try to justify the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan, which needed hardly any justification given that after 20 years the US has not come any closer to defeating the Taliban permanently.

The vast majority of the American people supported his decision when he first announced his intention to end the war based on the agreement concluded between Trump and the Taliban last February.

Biden’s decision to withdraw was certainly the right one and was overdue by 19 years. His determination not pass the war onto a fifth president was wise, as it would spare the country from continuing to invest blood and treasure in an unwinnable war.

The problem was not the need to withdraw, but the manner in which it was conducted. Why on earth did he begin to pull out troops without the proper preparation to ensure that US and other foreign diplomats and civilians, along with thousands of Afghan interpreters and other support staff and their families, departed orderly and safely?

To subsequently dispatch thousands of troops to secure the airport to ensure safe passage for the departees was certainly necessary. But this happened only following the chaos that swept Kabul and sent shivers down the spines of tens of thousands of Afghans and foreign diplomats and civilians.

As I see it, this last sorry chapter is continuing a string of mistakes committed by Biden’s predecessors Bush, Obama, and Trump. They have learned nothing about the nature of Afghan society nor from the Soviet Union’s experience in the 1980s, when it departed Afghanistan after ten years of fighting with its tail between its legs.

Miscalculation from the onset

Following the defeat of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in less than a year, former President Bush rushed to invade Iraq in 2003 through the concerted effort of his Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney. He failed to make any arrangement with the then-transitional government led by Hamid Karzai over the prospect of continuing Taliban resistance.

He lost focus on the unfinished Afghanistan campaign and subjected American troops to an uncertain future, as neither he nor his military brass had any plans as to how to conclude the campaign once the main objective of removing the Taliban from power was accomplished.

Imposition of democracy

The decision to introduce democracy and engage in nation-building was doomed from the start. Yes, progress was made, a democratically-elected government was installed, and human rights and social reforms provided the hallmark of the American enterprise. But then the US ignored the fact that the imposition of a western-style democracy on a country that lived for millennia as a tribal society would be short lived at best.

The US should not be in the business of spreading democracy by force. We seem to have learned nothing from Vietnam, let alone the US’ long history of instigating and interfering in regime changes. Instead of providing a model of a functioning democracy and human rights through the use of soft power to influence other countries, we come in charging with massive military to change the political landscape, only to end up retreating and delivering the country straight to insurgent forces.

Military miscalculation

Three successive presidents before Biden made their decision on the continuing efforts in Afghanistan based on the recommendations of military leaders who insisted that the war was winnable and wanted to secure a total victory.

Troop surges have continuously been sent on the promise that victory over the Taliban was in sight, which obviously was proven to be completely misguided. In addition, the military strength of the Afghan National Army was grossly overstated; thousands deserted over the years and many sold their weapons to the Taliban. Over 2,300 American soldiers were killed and more than a trillion dollars were spent with little to show for it.

Mis-assessing the source of the Taliban’s resiliency

All three administrations preceding Biden’s never fully appreciated or understood the nature of this tribal country, its culture and history, and the Taliban’s resolve to resist regardless of the heavy toll it would sustain. The Taliban are indigenous to Afghanistan, fighting for their country and their culture guided by a deeply religious way of life, following Sharia law using a strict interpretation of the Quran.

As they see it, no power would be allowed to exercise any prerogatives in their land and they have no reason to tolerate any foreign intrusion, not to speak of conquest. They are patient and know how to persevere.

Sadly, Biden has shown no better understanding of the Taliban’s resolve and tenacity. In his press conference only a week and a half ago, Biden declared that the Taliban’s takeover was not inevitable, as “the Afghan troops have 300,000 well-equipped [soldiers] and an air force against something like 75,000 Taliban,” later stating that “the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.”

However, Biden’s announcement of the withdrawal three months ago only gave the Taliban time to prepare for their takeover. Intelligence agencies warned the administration of the rapid collapse of the Afghan military and the extreme likeliness of a Taliban victory, and the Afghan government itself was simply unprepared for the Taliban’s onslaught.

Failure to engage the tribal chiefs

Another mistake common to all four administrations is that they did not involve the chiefs of the Afghan tribes, who hold tremendous sway in the country, alongside the central government. A tribal leader with whom I spoke a while ago was adamant that without the tribal chiefs’ participation, the war will go on.

After all, the Taliban come from these tribes and tribal leaders can pose a much greater influence on their tribespeople than the Taliban. Had the US engaged the chiefs in the negotiations, the outcome might have been different.

Rampant corruption

In spite of the US’ efforts to reform the country and establish a legitimate government that responds to the public’s needs, corruption by top officials and the military consumed the country from within. The US knows only too well that unless corruption is weeded out, little social, economic, or political reforms can be made and sustained.

Sadly, the US did not insist that the government make every effort to systematically weed out corruption. Billions of dollars have been squandered, bribes were rampant, and as a result many social programs have suffered.

No cohesive and goal-oriented policy

Through mission creep, the US’ goal became to create a functional and stable democracy, but there was no mechanism in place to secure this outcome once the US withdraws from the country. Although several sets of negotiations took place between Taliban representatives and US officials regarding the eventual withdrawal, the US failed to establish a policy of carrot-and-stick.

The US could have committed to providing the Taliban financial assistance should they adhere to a certain level of human rights, especially in regard to girls and women, yet failed to implement any sort of arrangement in this regard.

Now that the US is coming to the end of a war that should have ended 19 years ago, the question is, what have we learned from this bitter experience. Leadership bears major responsibility and foresight. We should not be the policeman of the world, but must use our soft power to address injustices and human right abuses wherever they may occur. Our experiment in democracy should be emulated voluntarily, and not forced down the throats of other nations.

Finally, now that the Taliban will govern Afghanistan once again, it’s time to heal the wounds and extend to them a helping hand, which may well be the only way we can persuade them to treat their people humanely and with dignity. If nothing else, if we can affect even such a limited outcome, we can look back and take comfort that the longest war in American history and our sacrifices were not totally in vain.

 

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Excerpt:

The writer, a professor of international relations at the Center for Global Affairs at New York University (NYU), teaches courses on international negotiation and Middle Eastern studies.

Dr Shafi Bhuiyan is pictured here with a team of ITMDs. Foreign-trained doctors are underutilized in Canada despite shortages of trained personnel.

By Shafi Bhuiyan and team of ITMDs
Toronto, Canada, Aug 20 2021 (IPS)

Canada is ranked number one out of 78 countries globally, with the highest marks in social purpose indicators, emphasizing human rights, social justice, and racial equity commitment, according to a recent U.S. News & World Report survey.

The country follows the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) principles, incorporating them into research and workplace environments, and it acknowledges challenges vulnerable populations face. Adopting these principles in every aspect of people’s lives makes Canada one of the most attractive places for numerous immigrants worldwide, with more than 13 000 internationally trained medical doctors (ITMDs) calling Canada home.

Canada’s health care is based on social equity fundamentals, having universal health coverage for essential medical services free of charge. Nevertheless, in 2019, about 4.6 million Canadians claimed that they do not have regular medical practitioners to seek advice or help.

In 2020, the highest record of 10.5 weeks waiting time from a family physician referral to specialist consultation was documented, with additional 12.1 weeks interval before treatment was initiated.

The COVID-19 pandemic aggravated these issues resulting in about 16 million healthcare services backlogs in Ontario alone. These will need up to almost two years to be resolved.

At the same time, Canada possesses significantly underutilized skilled healthcare professional resources trained abroad. According to the survey conducted among recent ITMDs graduates, 35% have passed the required licensing exams, including Medical Council of Canada Qualifying Examination Part I (MCCQE1), the National Assessment Collaboration Objective Structured Clinical Examination (NAC OSCE). This means they are eligible to enter the residency.

Very few will secure a residency position. The residency quotes retrieved from the Canadian Resident Matching Service (CaRMS) website showed that only 325 out of 3,365 (less than 10 %) spots were available for international medical graduates (IMGs) for the first iteration of the 2021 matching process.

Out of 1,358 IMGs participants, 948 (almost 70%) were unmatched this year partly due to a lack of transparency and understanding of the process rules.

Not to mention the cost associated with licensing examination, the CaRMS application process is a significant financial burden and even a barrier in many cases for the newcomers. According to Statistics Canada report, 47% of foreign-educated health professionals are either unemployed or employed in non-health-related positions that required only a high school diploma.

Nevertheless, internationally trained medical doctors play a significant role in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, supporting the vaccination clinics, working as contact tracing managers and mental health advisors.

Another issue that needs an urgent solution is physician wellbeing. A recent study in Vancouver showed that the burnout rate reaches 68% among doctors, with 63% feeling emotionally exhausted and 39% depersonalized. Moreover, 21% of them had resigned or have thoughts about leaving their career.

On top of that, the aging population required complex care, along with a growing diverse population of Canada, underserved racialized, and newcomers’ communities need a considerate strategy to encompass community-based, culturally sensitive approaches to health care.

The ITMDs is a culturally diverse group with rich experience in different fields of medicine and research. Thus, foreign-educated health care professionals are fit perfectly to engage underprivileged communities, promote health and disease prevention, and manage multiple health priorities. Hence, the integration of internationally trained health care professionals could be a turning point to solve the current and prospective issues.

Moreover, 80% of Canadians stated that they feel comfortable being cared for by doctors who obtained mainly their training outside Canada, with 83% claimed that it should be more action to ensure fairness and opportunities for IMGs to practice medicine.

The question is: Why are internationally trained medical doctors still sidelined? The action is for the government to bring Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) principles into the Canadian health care system.

Thus, a clear roadmap to integrate internationally trained healthcare professionals is necessary to address all existing challenges and strengthen Canada’s health care system. A move considered to be highly beneficial for all stakeholders (patients, physicians, ITMDs, government).

Collaboration is vital to move forward and make the ‘no one left behind ‘strategy a reality.

• The authors are from Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and South American countries.   
• The co-authors are: Drs Bhuiyan S, Krivova A, Orin M, Azam S., Shalaby Y, Tasnim N, Badran H, Al-Chetachi W, Radwan E, Tazrin T, Biswas M, Min K. S, Mehrotra M, Anuradha, Quintanilla E, Begum N, Adhikary I, Fatima N

 

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The fast-evolving conflict reached, Kabul, the centre of Afghanistan’s social and political life. Credit: UNAMA/Fardin Waezi

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 20 2021 (IPS)

As the 20-year-old occupation of Afghanistan came to an inglorious end last week, there were heavy losses suffered by many– including the United States, the Afghan military forces and the country’s civilian population.

But perhaps there was one undisputed winner in this trillion-dollar extravaganza worthy of a Hollywood block buster: the military-industrial complex which kept feeding American and Afghan fighters in the longest war in US history.

US President Joe Biden, in a statement from the White House last week, was categorically clear: “We spent over a trillion dollars. We trained and equipped an Afghan military force of some 300,000 strong. Incredibly well equipped. A force larger in size than the militaries of many of our NATO allies.”

“We gave them every tool they could need. We paid their salaries, provided for the maintenance of their air force, something the Taliban doesn’t have. We provided close air support. We gave them every chance to determine their own future.”

“What we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future,” he declared.

Of the staggering $1 trillion, a hefty $83 billion was spent on the military, at the rate of over $4.0 billion annually, mostly on arms purchases originating from the US defense industry, plus maintenance, servicing and training.

The Afghan debacle also claimed the lives of 2,400 US soldiers and over 3,800 US private security contractors, plus more than 100,000 Afghan civilians.

Norman Solomon, Executive Director, Institute for Public Accuracy and National Director, RootsAction.org told IPS that in drastically varying degrees, the real losers are everybody but war profiteers.

The U.S. military-industrial complex thrives on the organized killing that we call “war,” and the 20-year war on Afghanistan, waged courtesy of U.S. taxpayers, was a huge boondoggle for a vast number of military contractors and wealthy investors, he pointed out.

The colloquial phrase “making a killing” is all too apt here, he argued, because that’s what many U.S. corporations did over the course of the last two decades as part of the so-called “war on terror” that the U.S. government launched in October 2001 with its attack on Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, “the high-ranking officials and rich looters in the Afghan government who fled the country in recent days were also the big winners.”

“They lived high on the hog for two decades, and now have absconded with what they’ve been able to siphon off and retain as personal wealth, said Solomon author, “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death”.

All in all, it’s an unspeakably vile and truly obscene reality that George W. Bush and his bipartisan accomplices in Washington set in motion during the autumn of 2001. They “won” a vastly pernicious game for themselves while so many people have suffered tremendously as a direct result, said Solomon.

“Unfortunately, NATO countries served as enablers in this terrible protracted massacre that ravaged so much of Afghanistan and its people. By any other name, the blend of warfare and purported statecraft that accompanied the U.S.-led war on Afghanistan turned out to be a long-term sadistic exercise in narcissism, stupidity and greed,” he declared.

Since Fiscal Year (FY) 2010, the United States provided over $3.2 billion for the Afghan Air Force (AAF), including nearly $1 billion for equipment and aircraft. Still, equipment, maintenance, logistical difficulties, and defections continued to plague the Air Force, according to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), which prepares reports for members and committees of the US Congress.

The AAF was equipped with about 104 aircraft including four C-130 transport planes and 46 Mi-17 (Russian-made) helicopters. The target size of its fleet was 140 total aircraft. US Defense Department purchases for the AAF of 56 Mi-17s was mostly implemented.

The AAF also took delivery of the first eight out of 20 A-29 Super Tucano aircraft plus MD-530 helicopters, and 3 Cheetah helicopters donated by India—all of which will be inherited by the Taliban.

Asked about winners and losers, Alon Ben-Meir, professor of international relations at the Center for Global Affairs at New York University (NYU), told IPS: “Needless to say, the Taliban are the ultimate winners”.

In the process of the 20-year-old war, however, there’s no doubt that the military-industrial complex certainly benefitted from the ongoing war, which to some extent explains why the US military continued to support the continuation of the war despite the string of mistakes that plagued the US from day one, he said.

He also pointed out that the military-industrial complex also benefitted especially because “traditionally our military likes to win wars rather than end them indecisively or lose them entirely”.

Another winner at this juncture, he said, would be China, which will unquestionably capitalize on the United States’ retreat and will engage the Taliban without demanding any kind of domestic reform.

Unlike the United States, he noted, China never conditions its support to any shift in domestic policies of the countries involved. The biggest loser, however, in this sad situation is obviously the Afghani people, especially girls and women.

“We can only hope that the Taliban modifies its traditional position on restricting girls and women from schools and the workplace, and allow them to seek an education and job opportunities, and become contributors to the welfare and well-being of the country” declared Dr Ben-Meir.

The longstanding 20-year-old battle pitted an estimated 75,000 Taliban fighters against more than 300,000 Afghan forces armed and trained by the US.

As a fighting force, Taliban captured the besieged country without the traditional weapons of war, including sophisticated fighter planes, combat helicopters, missiles or warships, which are an integral part of most militaries engaged in conflicts.

A ragtag guerrilla force, the Taliban depended heavily on small arms, AK-47 assault rifles, artillery, improvised explosive devices (IEDs) – and multiple suicide bombers.

The US-trained Afghan military forces were virtually beaten to a standstill or fled their posts abandoning their arms, including US-made M-16 rifles and Humvees which fell into hands of the Taliban.

Dr. Natalie J. Goldring, a Senior Fellow and Adjunct Full Professor with the Security Studies Program in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, told IPS the US government invested immense time and treasure in its invasion of Afghanistan, a war that should never have been fought.

“US weapons manufacturers have profited from selling weapons that were used in Afghanistan. Yet these weapons suppliers are not held responsible for the use – and abuse – of the weapons they sell’, she noted.

Because of the lack of accountability, they may seem to be the only “winners” on the US side of the conflict. They sell the weapons to the US government without apparent consideration of the risks of doing so, make their money, and go on to the next sales opportunity, said Dr. Goldring, a Visiting Professor of the Practice in Duke University’s Washington DC program.

Yet the arms manufacturers “winning” is at the expense of US military and civilian personnel. Years before the recent collapse of the Afghan government, for example, Taliban forces routinely captured US military equipment and used it against our forces.

With the Afghan government’s fall, some of those weapons are also likely to be sold or given to forces outside Afghanistan, exacerbating the risk of US weapons being used against our own military or civilian personnel, said Dr Goldring, who also represents the Acronym Institute at the United Nations on conventional weapons and arms trade issues.

Meanwhile, an analysis of social media footage, corroborated by the New York Times, shows that since the beginning of the Taliban’s offensive in May, they captured at least 24 of the Afghan Air Force’s roughly 200 aircraft, including U.S.-supplied helicopters and a light attack aircraft.

It is unlikely the Taliban will be able to operate these aircraft without an air force of their own. Most of the abandoned helicopters are damaged or mechanically unable to fly. Experts say the ones that can fly require extensive maintenance and skilled pilots, the Times said.

What may be more advantageous for the Taliban are the hundreds of Humvees and pickup trucks they captured, along with countless caches of weapons and ammunition. In social media videos, Taliban insurgents showed off their newly acquired weapons and vehicles.

Thalif Deen, Senior Editor at the UN Bureau of Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency, is a former Director, Foreign Military Markets at Defense Marketing Services; Senior Defense Analyst at Forecast International; and military editor Middle East/Africa at Jane’s Information Group.

 

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Madrelle, Loubiere, Dominica 2017, a few days after Category 5 Hurricane Maria struck the island. Credit: Alison Kentish/IPS

By Alison Kentish
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 19 2021 (IPS)

Just over six months after launching its Youth Engagement Plan, the NDC Partnership, the coalition assisting governments with their climate action plans, has brought together youth climate advocates for its inaugural NDC Global Youth Engagement Forum.

NDCs, or Nationally Determined Contributions, refer to governments’ commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, an integral part of the Paris Climate Agreement. NDCs are scheduled for revision every five years and are expected to be increasingly ambitious to tackle the climate crisis effectively.

Countries and the NDC Partnership want to ensure that, as agents of implementation, young people have platforms for engagement and a say in national climate action.

The Partnership recently brought youth together in 3 regional groupings: Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, Asia and the Pacific, and Latin America and the Caribbean. The young people engaged with representatives of partners such as the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) through sessions like ‘agriculture and climate change,’ and ‘equipping young people to engage in the NDC process.’

The NDC Partnership, the coalition assisting governments with their climate action plans, has brought together youth climate advocates for its inaugural NDC Global Youth Engagement Forum. Credit: NDC Partnership

The participants say the teaching element was bolstered by the opportunity to be heard, as the organizers asked for their input in areas that include NDC enhancement, structures needed to strengthen youth involvement, and ways young people are already impacting climate action.

For youth like Natalia Gómez Solano of Costa Rica, the forum provided a space to share experiences and ideas.

“Working for a more resilient and a more just, low-emissions world moves us, and that is why we are here today,” she told the virtual event.

“We are already experiencing the impacts of climate change, and they are worsening. We need increased adaptation and mitigation action, and the NDCs are the key instruments to achieve that. The NDCs are the roadmaps for climate ambition in which young people are key in bringing new climate solutions to the conversations and to raise action.”

Jamaica’s Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Housing, Urban Renewal, Environment, and Climate Change, Dr Alwin Hales, told the Latin America and Caribbean forum that the virtual event and Youth Engagement Plan hope to leverage the ‘leadership and power’ of youth into NDC implementation and enhancement.

“Today’s children and young people are caught in the center of climate change, for it is they who have to live with and manage its consequences,” he said.

“The NDC Partnership launched the Youth Engagement Plan (YEP). It aims is to build young people’s capacity on climate change matters and engage the youth in global NDC partnership activities. This is in direct support of our mission to increase alignment, coordination, and access to resources to link needs with solutions.”

The forum was proposed by the NDC Partnership’s Youth Task Force but is a priority of the NDC Partnership’s Steering Committee and Co-Chairs, Jamaican Minister of Housing, Urban Renewal, Environment, and Climate Change Pearnel Charles Jr. and U.K. Minister Alok Sharma, who also serves as President of COP 26.

Noting that young people are vital to effective action on climate change, NDC Partnership Global Director Pablo Vieira Samper reminded them that their input also ensures that action is inclusive.

“We want to hear about what capacity or technical support is still needed and what learning you are eager to share with your peers,” he said.

“The Youth Engagement Plan was the starting point for greater action for youth engagement in NDCs. Today the NDC Partnership is thrilled to be turning this plan into concrete steps for more meaningful engagement and bringing new ideas to this framework to inspire action. We look forward to your insights as we collaborate across the Partnership to build a low carbon, climate-resilient future by supporting sustainable development.”

The youth attending the forum have described it as an important platform for highlighting the challenges faced by young climate activists.

“It is important to increase climate finance to support projects that are led by children and youth and integrate a rights-focused education curriculum in schools and universities,” said Xiomara Acevedo, the Founder and Chief Executive of Barranquilla+20, an NGO run by young people who empower their peers to tackle issues of biodiversity, sustainability, policy inclusion, and climate change.

Acevedo’s NGO has reached over 2,000 young people. She says it is clear that youth have a unique role to play in climate activism.

“We have seen that involving young people at the local and subnational level has also helped to ensure that a lot of citizens are seeing that climate action is not something beyond their territories, or is not only a topic that is managed at the national level. They can relate our message to their narrative, to their realities. We engage climate action as an important topic in the local agendas,” she said.

According to UNICEF, including youth in climate change action is important to achieving Sustainable Development Goals 13,2 which urges urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts; 16,3 which calls for the promotion of peaceful, inclusive societies for sustainable development and 17,4 with its target of assistance to developing countries in attaining debt sustainability.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) released its NDCs scorecard in February. It applauded countries for strengthening their commitments to the Paris Agreement but encouraged them to further step up their mitigation pledges, adding that greenhouse gas emissions targets were falling ‘far short’ of what is required to achieve the Agreement’s goals.

Young people like Natalia Gómez Solano say as custodians of the planet, youth must be mobilized, and their voices amplified to arrive at the deep emissions reductions needed in the NDCs.

“We need to integrate more voices and reach more places. As the Latin America and Caribbean Region, we need to keep working, keep asking, keep demanding, and doing more. Not all youth know how to be involved in climate action, and we need to work with more young people, for example, in the rural areas,” she said.

The delegates at the NDC Partnership’s inaugural Youth Engagement Forum say they are hoping for more opportunities at the table.

They say it takes persistence, organization, time, and passion to achieve climate goals. It also takes an empowered, well-connected, and financed global network of youth.

 

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Angélica María Posada, teacher and principal of the school in the village of El Guarumal, in the municipality of Sensembra, in the department of Morazán, in eastern El Salvador, poses with some of her primary school students in front of the tank that supplies drinking water to the school and also to 150 families in this and other neighboring villages. Rainwater is collected on the tin roof and channeled into an underground tank. It is then pumped to a station where it is filtered and purified, before flowing into the tank, ready for consumption. Credit Edgardo Ayala

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Aug 19 2021 (IPS)

Access to water is a constant struggle in Central America, a region with more than 60 million people, many of whom live in rural areas where conditions for good quality water and enough for food production are becoming increasingly difficult.

Climate change has further deepened water scarcity in Central America, especially in the so-called Dry Corridor where some 11 million people live, but instead of sitting back and do nothing, they have sought ways of obtaining water.

Rural communities living within this 1,600-kilometer-long strip of land “harvest” rainwater: first, it is collected in the roof of the houses and then channeled to water storage tanks, or to large ponds to grow fish, irrigate home gardens and produce food.

Local residents of El Guarumal, a hamlet near Sensembra, a municipality in the eastern department of Morazán, in El Salvador, have done exactly that.

Other villages have had access to a piped water supply, but have lacked electricity.

Those communities, settled on the banks of the rivers, have set up then their own community hydroelectric projects, such as the one built in Joya de Talchiga and Potrerillos, hamlets located in eastern El Salvador, as well as those in the Zona Reyna Ecoregion, in the northwestern department of Quiché, Guatemala.

IPS has been following all these efforts in the region for several years, as shown in the images we display now, which reveal the resolution of these poor and rural communities to gain access to increasingly scarce water resources.

An innovative and efficient system for collecting and purifying rain water has been installed in the school of El Guarumal, a hamlet in eastern El Salvador. Teachers report that gastrointestinal ailments have been significantly reduced since the students started to drink purified water. The initiative is part of the Mesoamerica Hunger Free programme, implemented since 2015 by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and financed by the Mexican Agency for International Development Cooperation (Amexcid). Similar projects have been promoted in five other countries out of the nine that make up the programme. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

 

A system for collecting and purifying rainwater, similar to the one installed in El Guarumal, in eastern El Salvador, was built in Mata Limón, a small town in the province of Monte Plata, north of Santo Domingo, in República Dominicana, one of the six countries that are part of an initiative promoted by FAO and Mexican cooperation. Thanks to this effort, the students can drink purified water, which is stored not in a tank, as in El Salvador, but in smaller containers. Credit: FAO

 

Santos Henríquez, from the village of El Guarumal in El Salvador, checks his net to see if he has caught any tilapia from the reservoir built on his 1.5-hectare land. In addition to aquaculture, this farmer harvests green peppers, tomatoes, cabbages, a local variety of bean called “ejote” and fruits such as mangoes and oranges, among others. “We grow a little bit of everything,” Henríquez, 48, said proudly. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

 

The reservoir that Santos Henríquez has set up on his parcel of land, in the hills of the hamlet of El Guarumal, in eastern El Salvador, provides him with tilapias to feed himself and his family, and the surplus production, both of fish and vegetables, is sold it in the village of Sensembra, a town located in the so-called Dry Corridor, a 1,600-kilometer-long belt that crosses Central America where water is scarce and food production, a challenge. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

 

Tilapia farming is one of the activities that provide quality protein to families in El Guarumal, in eastern El Salvador, located in the Central American Dry Corridor. The fish multiply in the reservoirs as fry are born, which means that production is not only enough for family consumption but can also produce a surplus that can be sold in the village or in neighboring areas. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

 

Some families living in coastal hamlets near San Luis La Herradura have dug ponds for sustainable fishing, which was of great help to local residents during the quarantine period imposed to prevent the spread of covid-19 in this coastal area of southern El Salvador. The pond is regularly filled by the tide. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

 

Pedro Ramos, Víctor de León, Ofelia Chávez and Daniel Santos (from left to right), from La Colmena, a hamlet in the Salvadoran municipality of Candelaria de la Frontera, in the western department of Santa Ana, show the huge collective reservoir built in their village to irrigate their home gardens and corn crops, as well as to water their livestock. The reservoir, with a capacity of 500,000 litres, is a rectangular pond dug into the ground, 2.5 m deep, 20 m long and 14 m wide, covered by a polyethylene membrane that prevents filtration and retains the water. It was built as part of a climate change adaptation project implemented by FAO. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

 

Víctor de León serves himself freshly purified water from a seven-litre container fitted with a filter that purifies rainwater collected from the roof, given to his family and to 12 others as part of a project designed to address the effects of climate change in his village, La Colmena, located in the so-called Central American Dry Corridor. The extreme climate, characterized not only by prolonged droughts but also by heavy rains, makes it difficult to produce food and keep alive the few head of cattle that some families own. But rainwater “harvesting” provides water to drink and to fill the two reservoirs built in the community, to irrigate their gardens and water their cows. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

 

Corina Canjura loads a jug of water that she has just filled from a system of rainwater collection located on the ground next to her house, in the village of Los Corvera in the municipality of Tepetitán, in the central Salvadoran department of San Vicente. Here, 13 families benefited from this project promoted in 2017 by the Global Water Partnership, the Australian cooperation and the Ford Foundation. The rainwater that falls on the roof of Canjura’s house is then channeled through a pipe into a huge polyethylene bag, with a capacity of 25,000 liters. From there, it is manually pumped into a tank with a faucet used collectively by all of the families. “Now we just pump, fill the tank and we have water ready to use,” said the 30-year-old woman to IPS, during a tour around the area in 2018. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

 

Drip irrigation from rainwater “harvesting” is one of the most efficient and therefore one of the most used in the communities settled in the Central American Dry Corridor. International organizations have supported these families to set up this irrigation system to be able to produce food during the severe climate that hit this area: prolonged droughts and extreme rains. Credit: FAO

 

Women play an important role in the efforts of rural communities in El Salvador to gain access to water and to set up drip irrigation systems to ensure food production, and thus people can cope with the impacts that climate change is having on the territory. IPS has witnessed how women have played a leading role in the search for food security in villages and towns across the country. Credit: FAO

 

Dennis Alejo is a Salvadoran who was deported while trying to cross into the United States from Mexico. Once in his country, he began growing tomatoes for a living in his town, Berlín, in the department of Usulután, in eastern El Salvador. Producing food in regions of Central America is becoming increasingly difficult with the impacts of climate change, and access to water is vital to prevent crops from drying up. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

 

Several villages located near San Luis Talpa, a municipality in the central department of La Paz, in El Salvador, have for years denounced the burning and logging of the forest in that area by the sugar industry in its quest to expand sugar cane fields. In this photograph, Judge Samuel Lizama, of the Environmental Court of San Salvador, verifies in June 2016 the damage in a deforested area in the Santo Tomás Cooperative, in that municipality. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

 

A woman in the hamlet of Las Monjas, in the municipality of San Luis Talpa, in central El Salvador, tries to draw some water from her well, which is increasingly running dry because groundwater in the area is scarce due to intensive sprinkler irrigation used by the sugar industry in a 209-hectare sugar cane field that surrounds the village of 800 people. The study Situation of water resources in Central America, published by Global Water Partnership, already warned in 2018 that of the total water available, only 30.6 percent goes for human consumption, while 70 percent is distributed in irrigation (50.6 percent), industrial (3.7 percent), thermoelectric power generation (13 percent), aquaculture (1.8 percent) and hotel (0.02 percent). Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

 

Over the years, IPS has run stories of communities affected by the country’s sugar industry, which blocks streams to build small dams to irrigate their sugar cane crops with irrigation systems. This has impacted the flow of many rivers in the country, as shown in this image by activist Silvia Ramírez, in the hamlet of San Fernando, near San Marcos Lempa, in eastern El Salvador. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

 

According to official figures published in 2020, 89.7% of Salvadoran households have direct access to a piped water supply, a definition including faucets inside or outside the home, a neighboring sink or communal faucet. This data shows that 5.4% of homes are supplied by wells, and the remaining 4.8%, obtain water from other sources, including: springs, rivers and streams; water truck, ox cart or waterpipe; protected and unprotected springs; rainwater harvesting; and other means. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

 

Nearly 5% of the Salvadoran population relies on rivers or springs to meet their needs of water, and that´s why it is still common to see families washing clothes or doing the dishes in streams and creeks, like this woman and her children, submerged waist-deep in the Aguas Calientes river, part of the Lempa river basin, near San Marcos Lempa, in the department of Usulután, El Salvador. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

 

Juan Benítez, president of the Nuevos Horizontes Association of Joya de Talchiga, rests on the edge of the dike built as part of the El Calambre mini-hydroelectric dam. The 40 plus families in the village have had electricity since 2012, thanks to the project they built themselves, in the mountains of eastern El Salvador. The small dike dams the water in a segment of the river, and part of the flow is directed through underground pipes to the engine house, 900 metres below, inside which a turbine makes a 58-kW generator roar. Credit: Edgardo Ayala

 

Carolina Martínez and her children stand in front of their house, lit inside by a light bulb, in the village of Joya de Talchiga in the eastern Salvadoran department of Morazán. The 36-year-old teacher is one of the beneficiaries of the community hydroelectric project, which since 2012 has provided electricity to more than 40 local families. The small hydroelectric plant was built by local residents in exchange for becoming beneficiaries of the service. The total cost of the mini-dam was over 192,000 dollars, 34,000 of which were contributed by the community with the many hours of work that the local residents put in, which were assigned a monetary value. Credit: Edgardo Ayala

 

Local residents of Potrerillos, a hamlet located in northeastern El Salvador, check the turbine and generator of the community mini-hydroelectric plant installed by the families of the village, which supplies them with cheap and sustainable energy. The mini power plant, with a capacity of 34 kilowatts (kW), harnesses the waters of the Carolina River to move a turbine that activates a generator to produce enough electricity for 40 beneficiary families, not only in Potrerillos, but also in another nearby community: Los Lobos, in the neighbouring municipality of San Antonio del Mosco. The initiative was carried out with the assistance of the Basic Sanitation, Health Education and Alternative Energies (Sabes) association. Credit: Edgardo Ayala

 

The powerhouse installed on the banks of the Carolina River, whose water puts in motion the mini-hydroelectric plant built in the Potrerillos hamlet, near the municipality of Carolina, in the eastern department of San Miguel. The mini power plant, with a capacity of 34 kilowatts (kW), produce enough electricity for 40 beneficiary families that had to work hard to get their village electrified, after being marginalised by the private electricity distribution companies in El Salvador. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

 

A man shows the 27-cubic-meter tank of the La Taña community hydropower system, one of four installed in this remote mountainous region populated mostly by indigenous people in the northwestern department of Quiché, Guatemala. This village followed the example of the first project in the area, the 31 de Mayo power plant, called Light of the Heroes and Martyrs of the Resistance, consists of a turbine that generates 75 kW and is powered by the waters of the Putul River, channeled by a two-kilometer concrete channel into a 40-cubic-meter tank. Credit: Edgardo Ayala

Surface water talks to groundwater and vice versa. A holistic conjunctive approach to the utilisation of these co-existing resources is indispensable to build resilience. Credit: Bigstock.

By James Sauramba
BLOEMFONTEIN, South Africa, Aug 19 2021 (IPS)

Even as COVID-19 ravages communities across the continent, climate change is widening the gap between those who have access to water and sanitation – key elements in fighting the pandemic.

We know that only about 61% of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) population has access to safe drinking water and only 39% has access to adequate sanitation facilities.

Climate change continues to widen those gaps in SADC communities where an estimated 44 million people are food insecure. Climate change may have been a looming disaster in the past, but it has now materialised, ravaging our communities in the COVID-19 pandemic. We are compelled to act prudently, fast and sustainably.

If strategies are not followed by implementation, then all our efforts would be futile. Sadly, we have seen a regional trend where a lot of projects in SADC countries are piloted – and remain pilot projects, year after year. We cannot afford to have designs that gather dust.

This year’s World Water Week, held from 23-27 August under the theme “Building Resilience Faster”, recognises the need to find solutions to counter climate change and other water-related challenges.

The sustainable use of groundwater offers us a way to build resilience.

The majority of sub-Saharan Africans live in rural areas, and regionally, at least 70% of SADC inhabitants rely on groundwater. This calls for sustainable management of groundwater resources to protect vulnerable communities and strengthen them to build resilience during climate change.

However, there cannot be a silo response in our fight to build water resilience. Surface water talks to groundwater and vice versa. A holistic conjunctive approach to the utilisation of these co-existing resources is indispensable to build resilience.

As you would know, when there’s no surface water, you just see soil, but it does not mean that there is no more water. It just means the water has receded into groundwater. We can build resilience if we have well streamlined and robust strategies to manage these two water resources conjunctively.

Strategies are an integral part of realising our goals. However, if strategies are not followed by implementation, then all our efforts would be futile. Sadly, we have seen a regional trend where a lot of projects in SADC countries are piloted – and remain pilot projects, year after year.

We cannot afford to have designs that gather dust. We have pilots that demonstrate the viability of certain innovative principles and methodologies that have not reached the level of being upscaled or replicated. This means that these innovations do not reach the point of application where they could contribute to water security for the communities’ livestock, industrial development and other human settlement activities that support people’s livelihoods.

Yes, some challenges impede the successful implementation of projects including the lack of capacity and finances. However, the challenge of supporting the region’s growing population of impoverished communities amidst dwindling resources is a daunting task that we need to overcome.

SADC-GMI has seen the tangible impact of safeguarding and uplifting communities through our pilot projects implemented at community level to provide groundwater. In Chimbiya Trading Centre, in the Dedza District, Malawi, a 100-metre deep borehole was drilled and equipped to supply potable water to about 15 000 people who benefit from the groundwater for their livelihood activities. This project boosted the economy of the local trading centre. The vision is to upscale this project model in Malawi to other communities across the SADC region to help build resilience.

Besides Malawi, we have also piloted innovative infrastructure projects to benefit communities in eight other SADC Member States. SADC-GMI constantly strives to demonstrate groundwater’s invaluable role in building resilience through its sustainable use in the communities’ livelihood and WASH activities.

Development is a collaborative process. SADC-GMI has partnered with River Basin Organisations and national water ministries across the SADC region to drive their mandate of promoting sustainable groundwater management and provide solutions to groundwater challenges in the SADC region.

At the core of our strategy is the continued endeavour to involve the very community members that we serve. Communities’ customs and traditions have been around much longer than any strategy that SADC-GMI may hope to implement to serve them. We, therefore, leverage citizen science and the knowledge that they have in supporting their communities in changing conditions.

Capacity-building is an integral part of building resilience in communities. SADC-GMI partnered with World Vision Zimbabwe to offer groundwater relief in the drought-prone Dite and Whunga communities in Zimbabwe.

The communities have committees that are greatly involved in the management of the borehole infrastructure and growing vegetables in the community gardens to support their local economy and livelihoods. Collaborative efforts such as these provide holistic and sustainable management of water resources.

SDG 6 is summarised by the United Nations (UN) as ensuring “availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all. Our work in the water sector – including groundwater should ensure pivotal contributions to the achievement of SDG 6.

If COVID-19 has taught us anything, is that we need to proactively respond to the challenges we face. It has also taught us that we can successfully overcome these difficulties. Our actions need to be fast yet measured and should be inclusive of the people we intend to serve. That way, we can build water resilient communities.

James Sauramba is the Executive Director of the Southern African Development Community Groundwater Management Institute (SADC-GMI)

Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid looks on as he addresses the first press conference in Kabul on Aug. 17, 2021 following the Taliban stunning takeover of Afghanistan. Credit: Voice of America (VOA) News

By Naomi Zeveloff
NEW YORK, Aug 19 2021 (IPS)

Steven Butler describes it as “mass panic.” As the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator has been fielding “hundreds and hundreds” of daily pleas from journalists asking for help to flee the country.

Butler, along with CPJ Asia research associate Sonali Dhawan and the organization’s Emergencies team, are now in the process of vetting those requests.

Many Afghan journalists told CPJ they are too afraid to speak on the record. To get a picture of what’s happening on the ground, I spoke to Butler and Dhawan via video about what they have learned. Their interview has been edited for length and clarity.

CPJ contacted Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid for comment via messaging app but received no response. CPJ also emailed the U.S. State Department for comment but received no response; several calls to the U.S. military failed to connect.

When did CPJ begin getting requests for help from Afghan journalists?

Butler: The requests for help from journalists who wanted to leave Afghanistan because they saw the Taliban coming started early this year. It was a trickle at the time and then it started to crescendo in July and increased by early August.

We are getting hundreds and hundreds of requests for help every day now. Many of them are journalists and some of them are not journalists, they are just trying to find a way out. It has completely flooded our system. We are doing the best we can. We have four people working on analyzing and looking into individual cases.

We value our reputation for thorough documentation on everything we do and are applying our same standard to this — we are trying to document the cases as the best we can, because we are recommending them to the U.S. government for emergency evacuation.

What can you tell us about the chaotic scenes at the airport and what it means for journalists?

Butler: As of Tuesday the area has been secured and there is a perimeter. Anytime you have a military perimeter you have a problem, because there is an outside and there is an inside, and the outside is going to be controlled by the Taliban in one way or another, so the challenge has been to figure out how to get people through an insecure situation on the streets of Kabul, how to get them checked in through this military perimeter including additional checks by the U.S. military, and then get them on to flights. We have had people that have failed to get through.

Why are Afghan journalists so desperate to leave?

Butler: As the Taliban have extended their control over the provinces, we have seen them close down media outfits and substitute their own personnel. That hasn’t always led to people being killed or put in prison necessarily, but nonetheless journalists in Afghanistan are concerned that they are going to be pushed out of their profession — at the minimum. There are a number of very prominent journalists who have been harassed or chased by the Taliban and who have gone into hiding.

What specific threats against journalists are you hearing about?

Dhawan: Journalists who identify as women and ethnic minorities, specifically the Hazara, are at particular risk. The Hazara are an ethnic minority group who were subject to mass killings during the Taliban regime in the late 1990s. Journalists who have critically covered the Taliban are also terrified.

I spoke to a journalist who was covering the Taliban takeover of a northern province — the Taliban came to his home after his reporting and they chased him out of the home. He ran away and they fired shots behind him and he managed to escape and get to Kabul. In the days after he escaped, he continued to receive calls that said, “We will find you.” Another prominent female journalist told me she received threatening calls in recent days from the Taliban that said, “Your time is over.”

One other case that I want to highlight is the takeover of the TOLO News compound, which is arguably the most prominent news channel in Afghanistan, a 24-hour channel that has covered a wide range of events and produced very critical coverage as part of this post-2001 media boom in Afghanistan.

The Taliban have interestingly taken over the compound but are still allowing journalists to broadcast, and female journalists actually came back on the air today. But we are seeing that a number of women and ethnic minority journalists are continuing to be threatened and the Taliban are showing up at their homes.

What is the Taliban presence like at TOLO News? How are the journalists there continuing to report?

Butler: It looks like the Taliban have stationed armed people around the outside of the compound mainly. When they entered the premises [on August 16] they took away government issued weapons from TOLO security but they allowed privately purchased weapons to remain.

People who have watched the recent news broadcast say it is much toned down. The women are appearing with headscarves and more conservative dress. It is really unclear what is going to happen and why the Taliban have taken what seems to be a softer approach to TOLO compared to other radio or broadcast operations in the provinces.

Are they trying to create a kind of appearance for the international community because TOLO is the best known? That is one possibility. Have they changed? They say they welcome press freedom and they are allowing women to operate in certain professional positions. I don’t think that people are taking what they say at face value. There is a lot of skepticism given the documented history of brutality by the Taliban.

What specifically did the Taliban say about press freedom?

Dhawan: The Taliban spokesperson, Zabihullah Mujahid, conducted a press conference [yesterday] and it really goes to show how brave Afghan journalists are because they were asking really tough questions, particularly about women in the country.

He said the Taliban will allow all media outlets to continue their activities on three conditions, the first being there should be no broadcast that will contradict Islamic values, the second that they should be impartial, the third that no one should broadcast anything against the national interest. What we are seeing on the public platform is not matching the realities on the ground, because several radio stations in provinces, newspapers, and news outlets have shut down amid fighting as the Taliban took over.

What is the Taliban trying to convey with these comments about press freedom?

Butler: I would look on it pessimistically. Governments use this kind of double talk all over the region and all over the world to find ways to restrict what journalists do. It could well be that the Taliban have seen what other countries are doing in terms of rhetoric and are imitating it.

It is a fact that democracy and press freedom are values that are universally spoken about but only rarely fully embraced. I think that we may see that pattern repeat itself in Afghanistan. Hopefully not. Hopefully they actually believe what they are saying, but we will have to see.

You mentioned that female journalists are at particular risk. What else are you hearing from women?

Dhawan: Most of the female journalists I have spoken to are absolutely terrified and have left their homes and gone into hiding somewhere. This is because there are several local reports of women journalists who have had their homes searched or the Taliban have showed up at their homes. And that is a particularly traumatizing experience.

A lot of women journalists who work in the fields of arts and culture or education are equally terrified. I know of several women journalists that work in these fields and are actively receiving threats from the Taliban. The Taliban did show up at the home of one very prominent journalist and said they would come back to her home and are looking for her.

What other journalistic beats could draw the attention of the Taliban?

Butler: Journalists have a history of their own work that lives on social media. I have been told that many journalists are now trying to scrub their social media profiles and deleting articles to try to hide that past. It is hard to say going forward what are going to be the sensitive issues, but journalists who were highly critical of the Taliban in the past could face a kind of reckoning.

There’s a journalist I have been in touch with quite a lot. He and his wife were able to get out. But they are desperate now to get their families out. They say that the Taliban is going to go after their families because of their highly critical reporting on the Taliban in the past. I don’t know if that is going to be the case. I hope it is not. But they are convinced that their families will be killed.

You described a “media boom” in Afghanistan after 2001. Can you say more about what is at risk of being lost at this moment?

Dhawan: Afghan journalists have done incredibly thoughtful and diligent work over the past 20 years to build a thriving press. They have braved the dangers of a military occupation, the presence of militant groups in the country and they have reported critically during these extremely dangerous times.

The precipitous withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan has led to a complete collapse of the government and security forces, leaving journalists at severe risk of violence. There are simply no avenues for journalists to seek protection from authorities and they are essentially relying on their own community, their neighbors, and family members for protection at this point.

As much as there is a need for journalists to get out of the country and CPJ is doing its best to do that work, journalists who want to remain in the country must be allowed to freely report on the extent of a humanitarian crisis that is about to occur.

Butler: The international community totally failed to create a stable democracy, but they did succeed in creating a thriving press. There was a lot of money – U.S. government money, USAID, private foundation money — to support and get these operations going because of course a free press is the absolute foundation of democracy. It stuck.

We had a case a couple of weeks ago of people being forced into an interview with a Taliban local commander and made to promise that they would broadcast the interview. They came back and refused to do it because it wasn’t good journalism just to broadcast one side, so they went into hiding in Kabul.

They got some of the lessons of what good journalism consists of and if you look at TOLO News, all these news outlets, a lot of it is quality journalism. And, of course, the international press relied heavily on local journalists. This is really a remarkable achievement and it would be a terrible shame for it to disappear completely. It would be wonderful for some of that spirit of press freedom and quality journalism and reporting to live on even if the previous government, the collapsed government of Afghanistan, no longer exists.

Before I let you get back to your work, is there anything else that has struck you from this past week that you’d like to share?

Dhawan: I was in contact with a journalist who is being actively threatened by the Taliban. She has been messaging me every day, afraid for her life. She is sheltered in a hotel right now and I told her we are working with the U.S. government to evacuate her and will continue to provide updates about her case as soon as we receive them. She said, “I may not be alive by that time.”

Source: Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ)

 

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Excerpt:

The writer is Features Editor, Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ)

By Marty Logan
KATHMANDU, Aug 18 2021 (IPS)

Do you think it’s possible to transform communities that are stagnating from a lack of currency into places where people’s income-generating activities create a vibrant, self-sustaining circular economy?  It is in parts of Kenya that are using the community currency Sarafu, according to today’s guest.

Shaila Agha is Director of Grassroots Economics, which developed Sarafu. She tells us how coupling the currency—which is traded via wallets on mobile phones—with a development initiative, like more sustainable farming techniques, can transform communities. They go from places where a shortage of Kenya shillings can squelch economic activity to being communities where each person is given an equal chance to participate and is rewarded for being an active member.

This is such an intriguing initiative and seems so full of promise. That probably explains why the number of users has jumped 500% since January 2020, and why Sarafu could soon be expanding from Kenya into Cameroon. A bonus is that the currency works on blockchain technology, making it fully transparent, a feature that attracted a recent investment from UNICEF’s Innovation Centre.

If you enjoyed this episode of Strive, please help spread the word by rating or reviewing the show on Apple podcasts. You can also subscribe, follow or favourite Strive on any podcast app.

Stay up-to-date with us between episodes on Twitter and Facebook, at IPS News. You can email me at mlogan@ipsnews.net.

Resources

Grassroots Economics

 

Adama Dieng (centre), visited Yei River State in South Sudan while he was the United Nations Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide. He now calls for urgent action to alleviate the humanitarian crisis. Credit: UN Photo/Isaac Billy

By Alison Kentish
NEW YORK, Aug 18 2021 (IPS)

Despite a June 30 unilateral ceasefire declaration by Ethiopian President Abiy Ahmed, United Nations agencies say a recent escalation in fighting has been ‘disastrous’ for children, amid reports of over 100 children being killed in an attack on displaced families.

It follows continuing reports of human rights abuses and warnings that over 400,000 face famine. Recently, a group of renowned peace leaders wrote to the President, urging him to take immediate action to end the crisis in the northern Tigray region.

The region has been embroiled in conflict since November 2020, when long-standing tensions between the federal government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) came to a head, with the Prime Minister launching a military operation he described at the time as a ‘law and order operation.’ He had accused the TPLF of targeting government military units and holding illegal elections.

“Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed was praised as a great reformer when he assumed office in 2018. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 for a peace deal that ended a two-decade war between Ethiopia and Eritrea. But today, he is presiding over a civil war that has escalated out of control, with reports of mass atrocities committed by Ethiopian forces, and no end in sight,” former president of East Timor-Leste and Nobel Peace Laureate José Ramos-Horta wrote in Newsweek.

The group of concerned peace leaders includes Former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, former Slovenian President Danilo Turk, Former President of Finland Tarja Halonen, former UN and Arab League Special Envoy for Syria Lakhdar Brahimi, Former Member of the Nobel Peace Committee, Chair of Religions for Peace Emeritus Bishop of Oslo Dr Gunnar Stålsett and former UN Under-Secretary-General and Special Envoy for Prevention of Genocide Adama Dieng.

They called on the leader to end this war – along with the suffering on the people of the region ‘which has already been too great.”

The following is an interview with Adama Dieng.

Inter Press Service (IPS): What are some of your biggest concerns regarding the situation in Tigray?

Adama Dieng (AD): What is happening in Tigray is a tragedy. It is a reminder that conflict is never a solution to any dispute! Dialogue is the way out of any such situation.
My biggest worry is the well-being and safety of the people of Tigray. Innocent lives have been lost unnecessarily. Women and children, and people with disabilities have been clamped into IDP makeshift camps with little or no access to vital humanitarian support.

Humanitarian access is a challenge that warring parties need to address. The United Nations and other partners should be granted unequivocal access to deliver much-needed humanitarian assistance to the population in need.

But also, the looming, indeed actual famine that is threatening the livelihood of the local population. All reports we get from the region indicate that famine is looming. How do we avert this?

This is a farming/planting season in the region. Yet, people are in camps, unable to go back to their homes ready for planting season. Without addressing the conflict, it is evident that there is a looming catastrophe because people cannot go back to their homes.

(IPS): The UN Secretary-General expressed shock at the murder of 3 humanitarian workers in Tigray, stating that this was ‘an appalling violation of International Humanitarian Law.’ With this development, along with the casualties over the past eight months, is it time for the international community to take a firmer stance?

(AD): As you may know, very well, the Secretary-General and the United Nations family have called for an unconditional ceasefire to allow free and unhindered access to humanitarians. These voices should be heeded by both parties.

Any death is tragic. Leave alone humanitarian workers who sacrifice their comfort and life to work in such dangerous and insecure areas. People who commit such heinous crimes should be held to account and face the full force of the law.

The warring parties should know very clearly that there are consequences for the ongoing and continued violations of international humanitarian law and human rights. I have no doubt that those responsible will be held to account for these violations. Unfortunately, accountability will come when people have suffered and continue to endure suffering. It is critical that the conflict stops.

I understand, some member states and regional organizations continue to put pressure on the government of Ethiopia to stop this war. By ensuring the full withdrawal of foreign forces and ensure safety and security of the people in Tigray.

The priority should be to stop the war and guarantee peace and safety for the people to resume their normal lives. As we speak, The United Nations in Ethiopia has reported a spiraling number of IDPs running to seek sanctuary in other areas of Ethiopia and indeed in Sudan. We need to return to normal to allow people to return to their homes. And people can’t return without a guarantee of peace and security.

(IPS): Many aid agencies have expressed concern over the plight of Eritrean refugees in the Region. What must be done now to do right by the thousands of refugees in urgent need of assistance?

(AD): Of course, I share this concern. However, Eritrean refugees are protected under the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1969 OAU Convention. Ethiopia has an inherent obligation to ensure that these refugees on its territory are afforded protection as required under international law. I believe, Ethiopia as a signatory to these critical documents, understands this obligation and will ensure that Eritrean refugees are afforded requisite protection under national and international law.

(IPS): Do you support calls for independent investigators to probe allegations of human rights abuses?

(AD): Certainly. Ethiopia is a signatory to a wide range of international and regional human rights treaties. It is a headquarter of the African Union and other regional institutions. It has an obligation to ensure that those who commit crimes on its territory are investigated and punished in accordance with these international laws and standards, which are part of Ethiopian laws. I am therefore confident that the Ethiopian government is willing and will be fully supportive of independent investigations for alleged violations of international human rights and humanitarian law that may have been committed on its territory.

(IPS): Does the declaration of a ceasefire bring hope to this situation?

(DG): This ceasefire gives me hope. But again, as you know, declaring the ceasefire and respecting the ceasefire are two different things. My primary concern is whether, both parties will respect the ceasefire. The key aspect is that we need to support all efforts that end this war which, has tragically led to the loss of life, livelihood, and dignity of innocent people in the region. If warring parties feel that they may need external support to action this, I am sure the international community, through wide range of tools and mechanisms, would be happy and ready to support them to ensure that the ceasefire endures!

(IPS): As someone who has helped establish mechanisms like early warning systems to prevent genocide and atrocity crimes, what comes to mind when you assess this situation?

(AD): The situation in the Tigray reminds us that early warning can be successful only if it is linked to early action. If we are serious about prevention, we must be prepared to act earlier, when we see the first signs of concern. One can say that we are failing the populations in Tigray.

The primary responsibility to protect the Tigrean populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity, as well as their incitement, lies first and foremost with the State of Ethiopia. Such responsibility to protect was reaffirmed by the United Nations Member States when adopting, in 2005, the World Summit Outcome Document. They committed to assisting each other to fulfill this responsibility and to act collectively when States “manifestly failed” to protect their populations from these crimes. This was the first such international commitment to protect populations from atrocity crimes. It is deplorable that many states use the principle of sovereignty to resist external assistance to their affected populations.

In case leaders are serious about preventing violent conflict, they must be open to seek assistance to protect their populations in the framework of the Summit Outcome Document. Failure or unwillingness to seek such assistance, may imply that the state is either implicitly or explicitly responsible for the violence. That is why I always caution leaders around the world that if they don’t take demonstrable action to prevent atrocities against their own citizens, then under the principle of command responsibility, they could be held accountable.

It is urgent also to remind African leaders that the African Union, under its Constitutive Act, has one of the most developed early warning mechanisms with a requisite legal framework for prevention. The Act under Article 2 obligates AU Member states to intervene in situations to prevent genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. This legal framework, if put into practice, goes way ahead of the United Nations to prevent armed conflicts. The serious crimes being committed in Tigray could have been prevented as there were credible assessments of imminent threats to populations.

It would mean that our governments, regional and international organizations build resilient and cohesive societies. And when we see signs of fragility, we should take early preventative actions. We should be open to mediation, dialogue, and technical assistance in areas that could trigger conflict, for example, in electoral processes or constitution-making.

 

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A person browsing through social media on a laptop computer (content blurred to protect privacy). Meanwhile, a group of UN-appointed experts called for a moratorium on the sale of surveillance technology, warning against the danger of allowing the sector to operate as “a human rights-free zone.” August 2021. Credit: World Bank/Simone D. McCourtie

By David Balaban
AMSTERDAM, the Netherlands, Aug 18 2021 (IPS)

Ransomware is deploying its encryption right on your computer. The malicious process runs in the background as you continue your everyday activities suspecting no cyber disaster ahead.

Out of the blue, a message appears reading something like this:

“Your files are encrypted. Don’t worry, you can get your files back. If you want to have your data decrypted, send 0.5 BTC to the following wallet: [Wallet address].

Once you pay, send the payment details to [email].”

How are you going to respond to such an attack? To pay or not to pay? That is the question. You may resort to negotiating a paid decryption with the ransomware operators or run a data recovery campaign.

The latter is preferable and should involve enough IT security skills. Industry professionals have been fighting ransomware for quite a while. Their key suggestion is that victims should never panic and learn some basics on the threat they face instead.

Encryption for ransom is on the rise

Ransomware evolved to a top threat back in 2013 as the hackers figured out they could apply sophisticated yet quite accessible encryption and collect a good deal of money for the decryption key.

According to CNBC, in 2020 the cybercrooks operating encryption campaigns collected $350 million from their victims.

Ransomware deploys two basic scenarios. One targets the files that are the most critical for their holder. This saves time avoiding early detection.

The other does not bother with any selection encrypting all the files it can reach. This takes time but ensures all your important data get locked.

Once the ransomware completes its encryption, its removal does not help in recovering your data. All your business processes may get stuck if critical data is inaccessible.

Ransomware common infection vectors

The extorters keep on refining propagation methods for the malware that encrypts computer data for ransom. The majority of the tactics leverage a deception whereby the users get lured into enabling ransomware installation.

That is to say, they use social engineering scams. Other techniques resort to vulnerabilities in the software and OS and require no human intervention at all.

Phishing messages

Email attachment is a common source of encrypting ransomware. A spoofing email looks like a routine message. A user does not suspect any fraud and either downloads the content attached or follows the link included. This entails ransomware installation that executes its encryption payload and comes up with its demands.

Highly targeted phishing campaigns are the most popular among these scams. Also known as spear phishing, such fraudulent practices avoid spamming and mass-mailing. They target specific persons while impersonating somebody they know or would trust.

To increase the credibility of their messages, the phishers use data available through open-source inelegance (OSINT). LinkedIn, Facebook, and other social accounts tell a lot about their owners, and the hackers take advantage of that. On the other end, the attackers draw up their email as if it were dispatched by your current counterparty or client.

Encryption-for-ransom coming from the pages you visit

Certain pages host a malicious script that exploits your browser and other software vulnerabilities or use a variety of drive-by download tactics enticing users to enable the ransomware installation.

The misleading letters circulated by the fraudsters may contain links to such websites. Your browsing also gets redirected to the corrupted web pages as you click hyperlinks, banner ads, or pop-ups.

Vulnerabilities in data sharing and networking

Not a single operating system is flawless. Bugs and security breaches in cyber environments and software provide a range of options for viruses and trojans to propagate without user participation.

A recent example is Qlocker ransomware exploiting vulnerabilities in QNAP apps to compromise NAS devices.

Impacts and scale of vulnerability-based attacks are critical. A malicious executable can spread across computer systems and networks infecting a great number of devices in a very short time.

Best practices of preventing ransomware

Ensure your staff members acquire security skills and awareness.

Drive-by downloads and other prevailing methods of ransomware propagation exploit a human factor. A rule of thumb is to provide security training to your personnel that would include insights into encryption-for-ransom.

The key point is to teach every person in your company to verify and examine contents and links in the emails and on the websites before opening them. Pay special attention to training your staff on dealing with the letters that look like spam or sent by persons unknown to them.

This will help to mitigate the risks of ransomware attacks originating from contaminated email attachments and spear phishing.

Update your apps and OS in time

Did you know that the most successful extorters exploited the same security flaw in Windows back in 2017? Their ransomware campaigns distributed NotPetya and WannaCry encryption viruses. They affected the greatest number of computers at the end of the spring and the beginning of summer.

Meanwhile, the patch for the vulnerability was made available already in March. The businesses affected had two months to apply the patch. That only required them to allow Windows update, but they ended up with multi-billion losses.

So. the best practice here is to not reinvent the wheel. Just enable automatic updates for your apps and OS. Yes, I also hate those update alerts and forced relaunching. This is but a slight annoyance compared to the damages this routine prevents.

Keep your data backed up

Maintaining backups is a sure way to avoid any fund transfers to ransomware accounts even if they encrypt every bit of data on your computer. Some items that you would love to retain might remain beyond this measure as backing up all the data bulk is not feasible.

So, make sure you secure your critical files at least. These usually are the files that your business cannot operate without.

Restrict your staff data access privileges to what is required

People tend to underestimate the impacts of this routine. Meanwhile, it can reduce the exposure of your business to encryption dramatically. If there is no truly critical data to encrypt, there is no truly critical encryption.

Even if you have your data available in backup copies, restoring all the files might take too long and still result in significant outages and losses.

Does this particular employee need all the data available for the account? Perhaps, you can restrict the amount of data available at times while most of the staff members would not even notice that. They will still be able to do their job without any inconvenience.

Dealing with encrypting malware and conclusions to be made

You will recover from ransomware in no time if you have your data backed up and response measures implemented.

Upon eliminating intimidate impacts of the attack, it’s time to learn your lessons. Let’s figure out why and how the malware managed to infect your system and encrypt your data. Have your staff members handled an infected message without due caution?

Or maybe one of your employees visited a website that contained a malicious redirect? Have you checked your software for bugs and vulnerabilities? This checklist is not exhaustive. In any case, apply the best practices laid down above to avoid further instances of successful ransomware attacks.

In most cases, the malware manages to encrypt files due to the user’s oversight or lack of awareness. That is why cybersecurity training is a must-do.

Do not try to blame it all on a particular person. Even if there is one, the key reason is the lack of IT skills and information provided in a way that meets each employee’s skills and behavior. Scapegoating is a bad idea as that would not let you duly review the accident and derive valuable conclusions.

Where you deal with a human factor behind the encryption scam, notify your employees of the mishap, and invite cybersecurity experts to redesign and maintain the IT infrastructure of your business.

 

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Excerpt:

The writer is a computer security researcher with over 17 years of experience in malware analysis and antivirus software evaluation.