Africa - INTER PRESS SERVICE

Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg has faced massive backlash for supporting the Indian farmers’ protests. (File photo) Credit: Anders Hellberg/CC BY-SA 4.0

By Samira Sadeque
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 25 2021 (IPS)

The United Nations Peacebuilding Commission must prioritise the protection of youth activists who face retaliation from state and non-state actors, said UN Youth Envoy Jayathma Wickramanayake.

Wickramanayake was speaking at the Peacebuilding Commission high-level virtual meeting on Youth, Peace and Security, where she outlined numerous ways the commission can assist youth activists around the world — especially with their grassroots efforts.

“I hope you will consider including young people in your delegation to building commissions, consult young people in your own countries to input to your work and, most importantly, ensure the protection of young people who you decide to engage with as we have seen many incidents of retaliation against young activists by state and non-state actors for simply deciding to speak up and working with the UN,” Wickramanayake, from Sri Lanka, told the commisison.

Other speakers at the event included Mohamed Edrees, chair of the Peacebuilding Commission, Allwell O. Akhigbe of Building Blocks for Peace Foundation in Nigeria and Oscar Fernández-Taranco, UN Assistant Secretary-General for Peacebuilding Support.

Wickramanayake comments come when youth activists are facing attacks and harassment online and offline. Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg has faced massive backlash for supporting the Indian farmers’ protests, while Indian youth activist Disha Ravi was arrested because of her activism in support of the protests.

Wickramanayake further highlighted the importance of acknowledging and promoting local grassroots organisations working in the field of youth peacebuilding.

“Young people around the world are building national coalitions, conducting baseline studies and monitoring efforts in support of youth-led peacebuilding,” she said.

She added that these organisations require “adequate, predictable and sustained” financing to thrive but this was yet to be explored.

“I would like to challenge this commission today to consider what the peacebuilding commission can do to encourage this critical support and resources at the local level where they are actually making a big difference,” she said.

Wickramanayake recommended that the commission should not only support a “substantial increase in the financial resources” for peace and security, but it should also make sure that the resources go directly to youth working on “homegrown building strategies”. 

Mia Franczesca D. Estipona, from the Generation Peace Youth Network in the Philippines, also shared the importance of involving youth who are directly affected by issues such as conflict.

“In creating facilities for youth projects and capacity building for support, we must make an effort to directly engage with youths in areas affected by conflict, understand their work and how it contributes back to the community,” Estipona said. “This is highly important especially for community-based youths who have programmes and projects but cannot be sustained due to lack of access to funding and support.” 

Both Estipona and Wickramanayake emphasised the importance of representation and being inclusive of marginalised youths or those whose stories are often left behind.

Wickramanayake highlighted the work of a colleague who promotes the voices of youth with disabilities and had reportedly briefed the Security Council on the situation in the Central African Republic by broadcasting the issue of youth, peace and security in sign language.

“[Their] organisation removes barriers limiting the participation of young people with disabilities in peacebuilding, actively mobilising the deaf community to act on Resolution 2250,” she said, referring to the UN Security Council Youth, Peace & Security thematic resolution that deals with the topic of youth from an international peace and security perspective.

Meanwhile, Estipona pointed out: “Many youth organisations have established strong programmes that truly represent and attend to youth who are in areas affected by conflict – their voices are most left behind.”

“We should pursue representation that truly represents and focuses on the collective efforts of youth as a community — and as a sector of society, not just as a different individual,” she said.

Other speakers at the event agreed with both Wickramanayake and Estipona.

Ambassador Rabab Fatima, the Permanent Representative of Bangladesh to the UN, said that it’s crucial to address the “distinct needs” of the youth as the world recovers from the coronavirus pandemic.

She highlighted the importance of access to education, sufficient funding, and including youth participation in peacebuilding as part of the “broader national policy framework”. 

Estipona said the engagement of the youth must be sustained in various stages of the process of peacebuilding: consultation, crafting, implementation and monitoring.

“Continuity of these efforts is still a challenge because they are constantly shifting priorities of stakeholders and leadership,” she said.

In offering recommendations on how to strengthen youth participation and involvement, Wickramanayake said there must be a periodic review of the efforts to increase engagement with young people.

“Accountability is key,” she said, “[we] want to hear your strategic plan. Also think beyond security and think about the intersection of peace, sustainable development, and human rights.” 

She also urged leaders to “walk the talk” – and prioritise the development of dedicated local, national and regional road maps and action plans.

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Forest women in Anantagiri forest in the south-east of India check out their solar dryer. (file photo) There is a growing shift and awareness in mainstream political, corporate and public debate about the need for climate action. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS.

By Samira Sadeque
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 25 2021 (IPS)

A keen awareness about the intersection of our ecosystem and the “accelerating destabilisation of the climate” is helping shift the narrative for climate action and can help us transition from being polluters to becoming protectors of the climate, said Marco Lambertini, Director General at the World Wide Fund for Nature.

“Science has never been clearer. We are currently witnessing a catastrophic decline in our planet’s ecosystems and biodiversity, and an accelerating destabilisation of the climate. And today we also understand that the two are interconnected,” Lambertini told IPS. “This isn’t in fact new.”

Lambertini spoke to IPS following the Fifth Session of the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA-5) which took place this week, with the launch of the “Medium-Term Strategy” by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).

Over two days, world leaders gathered virtually to discuss climate sustainability and how deeply the coronavirus pandemic worsened the current climate crisis.

“Humanity continues to misappropriate nature, commoditise it, destroy it,” Keriako Tobiko, the Cabinet Secretary for the Ministry of Environment and Forestry, Kenya, said on Monday. “The consequences of our actions are obvious – we’re paying a heavy price for that.”

Indian environmental activist Afroz Shah, a UNEP Champion of the Earth, said during UNEA-5 that leaders must go beyond talk and ensure implementation of measures to protect the environment.

“There must be a paradigm shift in the narrative, to go from being a polluter to a protector,” he said, urging leaders to make sure this message was given to every citizen.

Lambertini told IPS this “shift” in the narrative was already happening.

“What is new is that this awareness is beginning to reach mainstream political, corporate and public debate,” Lambertini added. “The narrative is also shifting. Conserving nature is not only being seen as an ecological and moral issue, but also an economic, development, health and equity issue. This is a true cultural revolution in our civilisation.”

Lambertini’s insight complemented what was said during UNEA-5.

Inger Andersen, Executive Director of UNEP, said during the assembly that a “green recovery” from the COVID-19 pandemic would be a step in the right direction of implementing changes to protect the environment.

Tackling environmental sustainability was, after all, another means to ending poverty, she said.

“We need to start putting words into action after UNEA-5 and that means backing a green recovery from the pandemic, stronger and national determined contributions to the Paris Agreement, more funding for adaptation, agreeing on an ambitious and implementable post-2020 biodiversity framework, and a new progress on plastic pollution,” Andersen said.

Meelis Münt, Estonia’s Secretary General of the Ministry of the Environment, echoed Andersen’s point.

“We are confident that a green and digital transition will support our post-pandemic recovery,” he said, adding Estonia aims to achieve climate neutrality by 2050, with their government’s plans to “lead the production of solid coastal fuel based electricity by 2035”.

Other speakers at UNEA-5 included ministers from Kenya, Brazil, Jamaica and Malawi, among others, many of whom shared the initiatives their countries were implementing to protect the environment.

Marcus Henrique Morais Paranaguá, Brazil’s Deputy Minister for Climate and International Relations, pointed out that for Brazilians it was a unique situation where development and preservation of the Amazon forest had to be balanced.

“The Amazon forest alone occupies 49 percent of our territory and over 60 percent of our territory is covered today with natural vegetation,” he said. “Brazil must implement innovative public policy to balance nature conservation and the promotion of sustainable development.”

Pearnel Charles Jr., Jamaica’s Minister of Housing, Urban Renewal, Environment and Climate Change, shared that his country’s government was in the process of updating their climate change policy so that it complemented the Paris Agreement. He added that Jamaica’s administration also increased its “emissions reduction ambition,” and was implementing a tree planting initiative to reduce biodiversity loss. 

Tobiko of Kenya said a big milestone for the country was banning single-use plastic in public conservation areas. Kenya has recently been acknowledged and applauded for its successful fight against single use plastic.   

“We cannot afford another lost decade for biodiversity,” Lambertini told IPS. “Many ecosystems like coral reefs and tropical forests are heading towards tipping points and one million species are now threatened with extinction.”

“If we are to collectively survive and thrive, particularly in this COVID-19 pandemic, we must take the opportunity to review, reevaluate and possibly reinvent in charting the most sustainable way forward,” Charles Jr. said.

Overall, Lambertini was hopeful, citing a heightened awareness of climate justice among activists, and the fact that nature conservation was now seen as an economic, health and equity issue.

“We need clarity and alignment, to create a level playing field, and a north star/southern cross able to unite governments, businesses, investors and consumers around the ambition science demands,” he told IPS. “Only in this way we will meet the challenge to transition to an equitable, nature-positive and net-zero carbon world and forums like UNEA-5 must pave the way for these commitments and more importantly, concrete actions.”

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Vulnerable people need support, not stricter laws

By Simona Marinescu
APIA, Samoa, Feb 25 2021 (IPS)

Earlier this month, and in December 2020 the Government of Samoa conducted operations that resulted in the confiscation of a total of 1,400 grams of methamphetamine at the border, smuggled from the US.

The law enforcement officials (from the Ministry of Customs and Revenue and the Ministry of Police and Prisons) that intercepted these drugs deserve congratulations for their professionalism and skill. Meth is destructive and harmful – and it is good to see this potential threat removed from the community.

Simona Marinescu

As small as this bust is by global standards, 1,400 grams in a couple of months is a record for Samoa (there were only two convictions for methamphetamine possession in Samoa in 2017). Perhaps it is inevitable that we will see an increase in seizures. As COVID-19 ravishes the economy and exacerbates inequality, some may look to less than legal means to supplement their dwindling incomes, and drug use is known to increase in communities facing economic hardship. Governments need to work to reduce drug consumption – especially with respect to more harmful substances like meth and opioids, which have devastated communities around the world. For example, there were more than 67,000 overdose deaths in the US alone in 2018. Thankfully, so far, Samoa has avoided this degree of harm.

But while it is sometimes tempting to “crack down” (no pun intended) in the face of an emerging perceived threat, we must resist the urge to increase legal penalties. We should be decriminalizing drug use and possession. Drugs are a serious health and social issue, not a moral one. Reducing consumption requires a health and socially focused response, not moral panic. This must include carefully thought-out laws that emphasize prevention, education and harm reduction. We need properly funded community-based support services that help and protect vulnerable people, and assist them in escaping degrading and difficult circumstances. Stopping drug use will not be achieved through hastily drafted legislation that further criminalizes addiction. By discouraging the demand for drugs, we can actually be more effective in tackling drug trafficking and putting an end to the human suffering caused by increased consumption.

This is not just my opinion – but the official policy of the United Nations, the Global Commission on Drug Policy, and multiple governments around the world. Canada, the Netherlands, Portugal, Switzerland, and numerous Australian and US states are among the many jurisdictions that have embraced the global trend towards less repression of drug users. A recent example of this is New Zealand’s 2019 Misuse of Drugs Amendment Bill, which gives police discretion to take a health-centred approach rather than prosecuting those in possession of drugs.

Since its enactment in 1967, Samoa’s Narcotics Act has only been amended twice, in 2006 and 2009 respectively. An official report in 2017 says that these amendments “were inadequate to address the prevalence of drug-related issues in Samoa and the new developments in the evolving drug environment.” There is a clear need to reform Samoa’s ancient drug legislation, but we must reform in line with the best available evidence. Tougher prison sentences have not been shown to deter possession, reduce offending or diminish the social or health issues associated with drug use. They have only been shown to intensify and complicate these problems.

Calling for decriminalization is by no means an endorsement of drug use – but an appeal to look towards the evidence. Samoa has been a willing participant in the global “war on drugs” – adopting the broken criminalization model for more than 50 years. (If you are fighting a “war” for more than five decades and you haven’t “won,” you need to reassess your strategy.) Prohibition has only succeeded in creating an illegal market ruled by violence, corruption and insecurity. Samoa must adopt better practices and distance itself from the failings of this ideologically-driven approach.

The author is United Nations Resident Coordinator, Cook Islands, Niue, Samoa, and Tokelau.

 

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Excerpt:

Vulnerable people need support, not stricter laws

The post Drug Use is a Health Issue – We Need to Decriminalize appeared first on Inter Press Service.

A UN patrol team, deployed for monitoring ceasefire, drives through the Smara area of Western Sahara. Meanwhile, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres says he ‘remains committed’ to maintaining the 1991 ceasefire in Western Sahara. Credit: UN Photo/Martine Perret

By Ambassador Sidi Omar
NEW YORK, Feb 25 2021 (IPS)

The question of Western Sahara, known as Africa’s last colony, has recently gained great visibility in international media interestingly due to two drastic developments.

The first occurred on 13 November 2020 when Moroccan forces breached the 1991 ceasefire by attacking Sahrawi civilians who were demonstrating peacefully in Guerguerat in southern Western Sahara.

The second took place on 10 December 2020 when the outgoing U.S. President Donald Trump made a proclamation declaring U.S. recognition of “Moroccan sovereignty” over Western Sahara, which Morocco has been occupying since October 1975.

As expected, Morocco’s breach of the ceasefire forced the people of Western Sahara under the leadership of their legitimate representative, the Frente POLISARIO, to resume their legitimate liberation struggle put on hold since 1991.

At that time both parties, the Frente POLISARIO and Morocco, under the UN-OAU auspices, mutually agreed on a ceasefire that came into effect on 6 September 1991.

This arrangement was the first step in a process leading to the holding of a referendum on self- referendum in which the people of Western Sahara would choose, without military or administrative constraints, between independence and integration with Morocco.

To this end, on 29 April 1991, the Security Council established under its authority the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO).

Notwithstanding the ups and downs, in January 2000 MINURSO was able to establish the list of potential voters for the referendum thus paving the way for the vote to take place. It was precisely at that moment that Morocco declared that it was no longer willing to procced with the self-determination referendum, obviously for fear of losing at the ballot box. It was as simple as that.

The failure of the UN Security Council to hold Morocco accountable for reneging on its solemn commitment to the mutually agreed referendum on self-determination brought the UN peace process in Western Sahara to a standstill, which continues to date.

Despite Morocco’s complete volte-face, for almost three decades the Frente POLISARIO maintained its commitment to the ceasefire and made many—often painful—concessions for the UN peace process to succeed.

The almost thirty years’ ceasefire in Western Sahara was however violently broken when Moroccan forces attacked Sahrawi civilians on 13 November 2020 forcing the Frente POLISARIO to respond in self-defence.

Morocco’s new aggression has not only put an end to the UN peace process but has also unleashed a second war that has the potential to endanger peace and stability in the region. Once again, the UN Security Council, which has primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security, has remained silent in the face of Morocco’s new aggression.

The proclamation made by the outgoing U.S. President on 10 December 2020 has dealt another heavy blow to the UN peace process in Western Sahara. It is no secret that Trump’s ill-advised decision was a quid pro quo for the deal that Morocco concluded with Israel to normalise their relations—another example of his transactional diplomacy.

Trump’s decision however violates UN resolutions, including Security Council resolutions that the United States drafted and approved over the past decades, and upends the traditional U.S. policy regarding Western Sahara.

It flies in the face of fundamental rules underpinning the international order that prohibit the acquisition of territory by force and establish peoples’ right to self-determination and as an inalienable right and a peremptory norm.

It also hampers the ongoing efforts of the United Nations and the African Union to achieve a peaceful solution to the question of Western Sahara, thereby fuelling tension and threatening peace and stability in the region.

The legal status of Western Sahara is unequivocally clear. The International Court of Justice (ICJ), which is the United Nations principal judicial organ, issued an advisory opinion on Western Sahara on 16 October 1975. The ICJ ruled that there was no tie of territorial sovereignty between the Territory of Western Sahara and the Kingdom of Morocco.

By rebutting Morocco’s claims of sovereignty over Western Sahara, the ICJ established clearly that the sovereignty over the Territory was vested in the Sahrawi people who have the right to decide, through the free and genuine expression of their will, the status of the Territory in accordance with UN General Assembly resolution 1514 (XV) of 1960 on the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples.

The United Nations and the Organisation of African Unity (now the African Union) as well as the European Union have never recognised Morocco’s forcible and illegal annexation of parts of Western Sahara that remains on the UN list of Non-Self-Governing Territories to be decolonised.

Trump’s proclamation also affirmed the U.S. support for Morocco’s autonomy proposal. Nonetheless, the so-called Moroccan “autonomy proposal”, besides its proven illegality, emanates from an autocratic regime that seeks only to legitimise its forcible acquisition and occupation of parts of Western Sahara.

The United States should therefore advise Morocco to address the legitimate grievances of its own people instead of trying to pursue its expansionism that has had disastrous consequences for the entire region.

As a matter of historical fact, Morocco did not only claim Western Sahara but also Mauritania in 1960s. It was Morocco that included “the problem of Mauritania” in the agenda of the 50th session of the UN General Assembly in 1960 on the grounds that Morocco had legitimate rights over Mauritania. It then took Morocco nine years to recognise Mauritania as an independent country.

Morocco moreover used force against Algeria in October 1963 and Spain (Perejil Island) in July 2002, always in pursuit of its territorial claims, which demonstrates the real nature of the ruling regime in Morocco.

This also shows the extent to which the regime owes its survival to territorial conquest as a tool to divert attention from its deep-rooted domestic legitimacy crisis that had led to two coups against the monarchy in July 1971 and August 1972.

Morocco’s expansionism is therefore the root cause of the enduring tension in North Africa and the main obstacle to the achievement of a united, prosperous, and inclusive Maghreb that brings together all its nations and peoples.

As expected, strong voices from the US Congress, civil society, and the political arena, including former US Secretary of State, James A. Baker III, have expressed their shock and disappointment regarding the attempt to trade away the self-determination of the people of Western Sahara.

They have also called on the incoming President to reverse Trump’s decision, which is at odds with the new Administration’s declared pledge to recommit the US to multilateralism. Now the question is whether President Joe Biden is willing to reverse Trump’s decision and bring back the United States to its traditional position on Western Sahara.

It is certain that Trump’s proclamation—if maintained—will not change anything substantially in terms of the realities on the ground and the legal status of Western Sahara that is determined by the UN resolutions. It will however put the United States in a rather difficult situation given its membership of the Group of Friends on Western Sahara and the penholder for MINURSO.

In other words, it will not only cast doubt on U.S.’s neutrality vis-à-vis the question of Western Sahara but will also raise the question of whether the United States could continue to play a constructive role in the UN peace process.

For these reasons, the Sahrawi people remain hopeful that President Biden would rescind Trump’s proclamation so that the United States could return to its traditional position on Western Sahara.

The legal and political nature of the issue of Western Sahara as a decolonisation case is unquestionably clear. Therefore, the question before the international community, in particular all peace- and justice-loving countries, comes down to this: do they allow the rule of “might makes right” to prevail in the case of Western Sahara, and thus allow the Moroccan military occupation of parts of the Territory to continue with impunity, or do they defend the fundamental principles underpinning the existing international order and thus implement UN resolutions on the issue?

The solution of the question of Western Sahara is clearly defined in successive UN General Assembly and Security Council resolutions, which call for a peaceful, just, and lasting solution that provides for the self-determination of the people of Western Sahara.

This means that no solution will prove either just or lasting if it does not have the consent and full support of the Sahrawi people.

This support can only be expressed through a credible, democratic, and genuine self-determination process that gives our people the opportunity to make their choice among a full range of options including independence.

United Nations resolutions, rules of international law and basic democratic principles all support this understanding of self-determination and its implementation. It is time the international community support it, too, not only in words but also in deeds.

 

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The post Western Sahara, Africa’s Last Colony, to Resume Liberation Struggle on Hold Since 1991 appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Ambassador Sidi Omar is Frente POLISARIO Representative at the United Nations

The post Western Sahara, Africa’s Last Colony, to Resume Liberation Struggle on Hold Since 1991 appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Sudanese youth live with continuous insecurity due to climate change vulnerability, including droughts, desertification, land degradation and food insecurity. Courtesy: Albert Gonzalez Farran/ UNAMID/ CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

By Nalisha Adams
BONN, Germany, Feb 24 2021 (IPS)

For Sudanese youth, climate change is synonymous with insecurity.

“We are living in a continuous insecurity due to many factors that puts Sudan on top of the list when it comes to climate vulnerability,” said Nisreen Elsaim, Sudanese climate activist and chair of United Nations Secretary General’s Youth Advisory Group on Climate Change.

She said this was directly linked to insecurity within Sudan. She noted that even a Security Council resolution from 2018 which acknowledged “the adverse effects of climate change, ecological changes and natural disasters, among other factors,”, including droughts, desertification, land degradation and food insecurity influenced the situation in Dafur, Sudan.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) ranks Sudan as one of the world’s most vulnerable countries when it comes to climate change. Increased frequency of droughts and high rainfall variability over decades has stressed Sudan’s rainfed agriculture and pastoralist livelihoods, which are the dominant means of living in rural areas like north Dafur.

“In a situation of resources degradation, hunger, poverty and uncontrolled climate migration will [mean] conflict is an inevitable result,” Elsaim said, adding that climate-related emergencies resulted in major disruptions to healthcare and livelihoods and that climate-related migration increased the risk of gender-based violence.

She also pointed out that women, youth and children where the groups most adversely affected by climate insecurity.

In January, inter-communal violence in Darfur displaced over 180,000 people — 60 percent of whom are under the age of 18. “Displacement has declined in recent years in Sudan, but many of its triggers remain unaddressed. Ethnic disputes between herders and farmers over scarce resources overlap with disasters such as flooding and political instability,” the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre said in a statement. There are currently 2.1 million internally displaced persons in Sudan.

Elsaim was speaking yesterday, Feb. 23, during a high-level United Nations Security Council debate focusing on international peace and security and climate change, led by United Kingdom Prime Minister Boris Johnson. The UK currently holds the Security Council presidency and will also be host to the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26), which will take place in November in Glasgow, Scotland.

“Land and resources in Africa and in many other parts of the world, because of climate change, can no longer maintain young people,” Elsaim cautioned.

She said in the youth’s search for decent lives, jobs and proper access to services, the new challenge of COVID-19 meant the only solution for many was in country, cross-border or international migration.

The issue is a global one.

Natural historian Sir David Attenborough addressed the council in a video message also giving a stark warning that the “stability of the entire world” could be altered by climate threats.

“Today there are threats to security of a new and unprecedented kind,” Attenborough said.

“They are rising global temperatures, the despoiling of the ocean — that vast universal larder which people everywhere depend for their food. Change in the pattern of weather worldwide that pay no regard to national boundaries but that can turn forests into deserts, drown great cities and lead to the extermination of huge numbers of the other creatures with which we share this planet.”

He cautioned that no matter what the world did now, some of these threats could become a reality, destroying cities and societies.

“If we continue on our current path, we will face the collapse of everything that gives us our security: food production, access to fresh water, habitable ambient temperature, and ocean food chains,” Attenborough cautioned.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres said the last decade was the hottest in human history and that wildfires, cyclones and floods were the new normal which also affected political, economic and social stability.

“Climate disruption is a crisis amplifier and multiplier,” Guterres told the Security Council. “While climate change dries up rivers, reduces harvests, destroys critical infrastructure and displaces communities, it [also] exacerbates the risks of instability and conflict.”

He referred to a study by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute which noted that 8 of the 10 countries hosting the largest multilateral peace operations in 2018 where in areas highly exposed to climate change.

“The impacts of these crises are greatest where fragility and conflicts have weakened coping mechanisms,” Guterres said.

The UN has already stated that 2021 will a be critical, not only for curbing the rapidly spreading COVID-19 pandemic, but also for meeting the climate challenge. Guterres has already stated that he plans to focus this year on building a global coalition for carbon neutrality by 2050.

Alongside the Security Council debate, the Fifth session of the United Nations Environment Assembly wrapped up yesterday. The assembly, world’s top environmental decision-making body attended by government leaders, businesses, civil society and environmental activists, met virtually on Feb. 22 to 23 under the theme “Strengthening Actions for Nature to Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals”.

The assembly concluded with member states releasing a statement acknowledging “the urgency to continue our efforts to protect our planet also in this time of crisis”, and calling for multilateral cooperation as they “remain convinced that collective action is essential to successfully address global challenges”.

Joyce Msuya, the Deputy Executive Director for the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), noted that 87 ministers and high-level representatives participated during the two days. She shared some of the points of the dialogue noting that the health of nature and human health were inextricably linked. 

“For our own well-being we must make our peace with nature in a way that demonstrates solidarity,” Msuya said, making reference to a recent UNEP report. 

The report serves a blueprint on how to tackle the triple emergencies of climate, biodiversity loss and pollution and provides detailed solutions by drawing on global assessments.

Msuya added that the nature crisis was linked with the climate and pollution crisis and that the world now had the chance to put in place a green recovery “that will transform our relations with nature and heal our planet”.

She said the green recovery should put the world on a path to a low-carbon, resilient, post-pandemic world.

Meanwhile, Elsaim said that as a young person, she was “sure that young people are the solution”. She urged world leaders to engage with the youth and listen to them.

“Stop conflict by stopping climate change. Give us security and secure the future,” she said in conclusion.

 

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Tractor caravan to Mexico City farmer protest demands "Mexico Free of Transgenics". Credit: Enrique Perez S./ANEC

By Timothy A. Wise
CAMBRIDGE MA, Feb 24 2021 (IPS)

Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador quietly rocked the agribusiness world with his New Year’s Eve decree to phase out use of the herbicide glyphosate and the cultivation of genetically modified corn. His administration sent an even stronger aftershock two weeks later, clarifying that the government would also phase out GM corn imports in three years and the ban would include not just corn for human consumption but yellow corn destined primarily for livestock. Under NAFTA, the United States has seen a 400% increase in corn exports to Mexico, the vast majority genetically modified yellow dent corn.

The bold policy moves fulfill a campaign promise by Mexico’s populist president, whose agricultural policies have begun to favor Mexican producers, particularly small-scale farmers, and protect consumers alarmed by the rise of obesity and chronic diseases associated with high-fat, high-sugar processed foods.

In banning glyphosate, the decree cites the precautionary principle and the growing body of scientific research showing the dangers of the chemical, the active ingredient in Bayer/Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide. The government had stopped imports of glyphosate since late 2019, citing the World Health Organization’s warning that the chemical is a “probable carcinogen.”

The prohibitions on genetically modified corn, which appear toward the end of the decree, have more profound implications. The immediate ban on permits for cultivation of GM corn formalizes current restrictions, ordered by Mexican courts in 2013 when a citizen lawsuit challenged government permitting of experimental GM corn planting by Monsanto and other multinational seed companies on the grounds of the contamination threat they posed to Mexico’s rich store of native corn varieties. The import ban cites the same environmental threats but goes further, advancing the López Obrador administration’s goals of promoting greater food self-sufficiency in key crops. As the decree states:

“[W]ith the objective of achieving self-sufficiency and food sovereignty, our country must be oriented towards establishing sustainable and culturally adequate agricultural production, through the use of agroecological practices and inputs that are safe for human health, the country’s biocultural diversity and the environment, as well as congruent with the agricultural traditions of Mexico.”

Chronicle of a decree foretold

Such policies should come as no surprise. In his campaign, López Obrador committed to such measures. Unprecedented support from rural voters were critical to his landslide 2018 electoral victory, with his new Movement for National Renewal (Morena) claiming majorities in both houses of Congress.

Still, industry and U.S. government officials seemed shocked that their lobbying had failed to stop López Obrador from acting. The pressure campaign was intense, as Carey Gillam explained in a February 16 Guardian expose on efforts by Bayer/Monsanto, industry lobbyist CropLife, and U.S. government officials to deter the glyphosate ban. According to email correspondence obtained by the Center for Biological Diversity through Freedom of Information Act requests, officials in the Trump Administration’s Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Department of Agriculture and office of the U.S. Trade Representative were in touch with Bayer representatives and warned Mexican officials that restrictions could be in violation of the revised North American Free Trade Agreement, now rebranded by the Trump Administration as the U.S. Mexico Canada Agreement (USMCA).

According to the emails, CropLife president Chris Novak last March sent a letter to Robert Lighthizer, USTR’s ambassador, arguing that Mexico’s actions would be “incompatible with Mexico’s obligations under USMCA.” In May, Lighthizer followed through, writing to Graciela Márquez Colín, Mexico’s minister of economy, warning that GMO crop and glyphosate matters threatened to undermine “the strength of our bilateral relationship.” An earlier communication argued that Mexico’s actions on glyphosate, which Mexico had ceased importing, were “without a clear scientific justification.”

Nothing could be further from the truth, according to Victor Suárez, Mexico’s Undersecretary of Agriculture for Food and Competitiveness. “There is rigorous scientific evidence of the toxicity of this herbicide,” he told me, citing the WHO findings and an extensive literature review carried out by Mexico’s biosafety commission Cibiogem.

And even though most imported U.S. corn is used for animal feed, not direct human consumption, a study carried out by María Elena Álvarez-Buylla, now head of CONACYT, the government’s leading scientific body, documented the presence of GM corn sequences in many of Mexico’s most common foods. Some 90% of tortillas and 82% of other common corn-based foods contained GM corn. Mexico needs to be especially cautious, according to Suárez, because corn is so widely consumed, with Mexicans on average eating one pound of corn a day, one of the highest consumption levels in the world.

While the glyphosate restrictions are based on concerns about human health and the environment, the phaseout of GM corn is justified additionally on the basis of the threat of contamination of Mexico’s native corn varieties and the traditional intercropped milpa. The final article in the decree states the purpose is to contribute “to food security and sovereignty” and to offer “a special measure of protection to native corn.”

The ban on GM corn cultivation has been a longstanding demand ever since the previous administration of Enrique Peña Nieto granted permission to Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta and a host of other multinational seed companies to begin experimental planting in northern Mexico. Such permits were halted in 2013 by a Mexico court injunction based on a claim from 53 farmer, consumer and environmental organizations – the self-denominated Demanda Colectiva – that GM corn cultivation threatened to contaminate native varieties of corn through inadvertent cross-pollination.

“It is difficult to imagine a worse place to grow GM corn than Mexico,” said Adelita San Vicente, the lead spokesperson for the plaintiffs who is now working in López Obrador’s environment ministry, when I interviewed her in 2014 for my book, Eating Tomorrow (which includes a chapter on the GM corn issue). Such contamination was well-documented and the courts issued the injunction citing the potential for permanent damage to the environment.

As Judge Walter Arrellano Hobelsberger wrote in a 2014 decision, “The use and enjoyment of biodiversity is the right of present and future generations.”

Mexico’s self-sufficiency campaign

Mexico’s farmer and environmental organizations were quick to praise the decree, though many warned that it is only a first step and implementation will be key. “These are important steps in moving toward ecological production that preserves biodiversity and agrobiodiversity forged by small-scale farmers over millennia,” wrote Greenpeace Mexico and the coalition “Without Corn There is No Country.”

Malin Jonsson of Semillas de Vida (Seeds of Life), one of the plaintiffs in the court case, told me, “This is a first step toward eliminating glyphosate, withdrawing permits for GM maize cultivation and eliminating the consumption of GM maize. To end consumption we have to stop importing GM maize from the United States by increasing Mexico’s maize production.”

Mexico imports about 30% of its corn each year, overwhelmingly from the United States. Almost all of that is yellow corn for animal feed and industrial uses. López Obrador’s commitment to reducing and, by 2024, eliminating such imports reflects his administration’s plan to ramp up Mexican production as part of the campaign to increase self-sufficiency in corn and other key food crops – wheat, rice, beans, and dairy. Mexican farmers have long complained that since NAFTA was enacted in 1994 ultra-cheap U.S. corn has driven down prices for Mexican farmers. The proposed import restrictions would help López Obrador’s “Mexico First” agricultural policies while bringing needed development to rural areas.

Will Biden Administration block action?

Industry organizations on both sides of the border have complained bitterly about the proposed bans. “The import of genetically modified grain from the U.S. is essential for many products in the agrifood chain,” said Laura Tamayo, spokeswoman for Mexico’s National Farm Council (CNA), who is also a regional corporate director for Bayer. Bayer’s agrochemical unit Monsanto makes weedkiller Roundup and the GMO corn designed to be used with the pesticide.

“This decree is completely divorced from reality,” said José Cacho, president of Mexico’s corn industry chamber CANAMI, the 25-company group that includes top corn millers like Gruma, cereal maker Kellogg, and commodity trader Cargill.

Juan Cortina, president of CNA, said his members might sue the government over the bans. “I think there will need to be legal challenges brought by all the people who use glyphosate and genetically-modified corn,” he told Reuters, adding that he also expects U.S. exporters to appeal to provisions of the USMCA trade pact to have the measures declared illegal.

Industry sources also warned that Mexico would never be able to meet its corn needs without U.S. exports and that U.S. farmers would be harmed by the presumed loss of the Mexican export market. Others quickly pointed out that Mexico was not banning U.S. exports, just GM corn exports. U.S. farmers are perfectly capable of producing non-GM corn at comparable prices, according to seed industry sources, so the ruling could encourage the development of a premium market in the United States for non-GMO corn, something U.S. consumers have been demanding for years.

Such pressures may present an early test for President Joe Biden and his nominee for U.S. Trade Representative, Katherine Tai, whose confirmation hearing is scheduled for February 25. Tai won high marks for helping get stricter labor and environmental provisions into the agreement that replaced NAFTA. Will she and the Biden administration respect Mexico’s sovereign right to enact policies designed to protect the Mexican public and the environment while promoting Mexican rural development?

Victor Suárez certainly hopes so. “Our rationale is based on the precautionary principle in the face of environmental risks as well as the right of the Mexican government to take action in favor of the public good, in important areas such as public health and the environment,” he told me.

“We are a sovereign nation with a democratic government,” he continued, “which came to power with the support of the majority of citizens, one that places compliance with our constitution and respect for human rights above all private interests.”

Timothy A. Wise is a senior advisor with the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy and the author of Eating Tomorrow: Agribusiness, Family Farmers, and the Battle for the Future of Food.

 

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Presidential Decree Comes Despite Intense Pressure from Industry, U.S. Authorities appeared first on Inter Press Service.

National civic space ratings from the CIVICUS Monitor, which uses up-to-date information and indicators to assess the state of freedom of association, peaceful assembly and expression for all UN Member States. Credit: CIVICUS Monitor

By Emily Standfield
TORONTO, Canada, Feb 24 2021 (IPS)

A month into Joe Biden’s presidency, the U.S. has rejoined nearly all the multilateral institutions and international commitments that it withdrew from under Trump. These include the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Accords.

Most recently, on February 8th, the U.S. announced it would also rejoin the United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC) as an observer. The U.S.’ role in the human rights forum looks different than it did four years ago in light of its recent track record on civil liberties.

The HRC has two primary functions: to draft and adopt new standards for human rights and to conduct investigations into specific human rights issues. In 2018, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley and U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the U.S. would be leaving the HRC, claiming that it was a barrier to any genuine global human rights protection. The U.S. had two primary grievances.

First, that the HRC has an “unconscionable” and “chronic bias” against Israel. And second, that the HRC’s membership criteria allows chronic human rights abusers to have a seat on the Council. Neither of which are entirely baseless claims.

Israel remains the only country-specific agenda item covered at every HRC meeting and Russia, China, and Eritrea — to name a few — all currently hold seats on the Council and have some of the worst human rights records in the world.

Emily Standfield. Credit: CIVICUS

On Monday, the HRC’s 47 member states met for its 46th session, it’s third time meeting since the beginning of the pandemic. The further decline of political and civil rights as enshrined in international law will be an unavoidable hot topic.

The CIVICUS Monitor which rates UN member states’ track records of upholding the legal tenets of freedom of expression, freedom of peaceful assembly and freedom of association finds that 30 of the Council’s full member states routinely and severely restrict these rights.

And in the case of its newest observer state, the USA was recently downgraded to the Monitor’s third worst civic space rating of ‘Obstructed’. The body is a long way off from adequately representing its values.

In the case of the USA, the rating change and decline in rights is reflected by the police response to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protest movement. During protests in 2020, law enforcement detained thousands of demonstrators, used teargas and projectiles to disperse crowds, and attacked journalists, despite the fact that most wore media credentials.

President Trump and other authority figures encouraged police officers to respond forcefully and, in some cases, requested such violent actions for their own benefit. In a perfect example of this, the Attorney General ordered the use of teargas against peaceful protesters so that President Trump could have a photo-op in front of a church.

While the BLM protests may have made the decline in civic freedoms abundantly clear, this rating change represents a longer deterioration of political and civil rights.

In response, in June the HRC unanimously passed a mandate that called for a report on ‘systemic racism’ targeted at individuals of African descent. Philonise Floyd, the brother of George Floyd, whose murder at the hands of white police officers began the mass protests, called on the human rights body to examine the U.S.’ history of racial injustice and police brutality.

In the end, the final resolution passed by the HRC called for an investigation of systemic racism globally and regrettably did not single out the U.S.

While Biden has rejoined the HRC as an observer, the U.S. must win elections in October 2021 if it wants to regain its seat on the Council. In 2019, Biden said, “American leadership on human rights must begin at home” and — in some ways — it has.

The BLM protests have sparked a degree of state and local level police reform, and Biden has made a commitment to achieving racial equity. While the U.S. should focus on improving freedoms within its borders, it should also not exempt itself from becoming a full member of the HRC again in October.

Former President Barack Obama ran for a seat on the Council because he believed the U.S. could do more to advance human rights as a member of the body. This turned out to be true— the U.S. supported the creation of several important international commissions of inquiry to investigate human rights violations.

If the rationale by Trump was that leaving the council would do more for human rights than holding a seat, it’s clear that this has not come to fruition. Whether it is freedom of speech or the right to peacefully protest, today more of the world’s population lives in ‘Closed’, ‘Repressed’ or ‘Obstructed’ countries as compared to four years ago, finds the CIVICUS Monitor.

Leadership is needed at the UN Human Rights Council on these issues, but it must come from those that have a full seat at the table and have a demonstrated track record of upholding their commitments. The U.S. is currently disqualified on both accounts. Credibility and moral leadership must come from somewhere else.

Instead, the U.S. must support other member states that are leading by example on these issues. Seven members of the HRC — Denmark, Germany, Uruguay, Netherlands, Marshall Islands, and Czechia — are rated ‘Open’ by the CIVICUS Monitor, the highest civic space rating a country can achieve.

These countries are adequately representing the values that the HRC is committed to defending. While there are surely other issues at the HRC that the U.S. will prove influential, the country is far from the inspirational example it often likes to present itself on these world stages.

At the current session of the HRC, which began on February 22nd, the U.S. should champion these members who have made meaningful progress on civil liberties and be prepared to take a backseat on issues that it so obviously falls short on.

 

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Excerpt:

Emily Standfield is CIVICUS Member and data volunteer.

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High-density polyethylene pipe is laid on a street in the Cuban capital, where the Aguas de La Habana water company is upgrading the water supply networks in the municipality of Centro Habana. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Luis Brizuela
HAVANA, Feb 23 2021 (IPS)

With the construction of aqueducts, water purification and desalination plants, and investments to upgrade hydraulic infrastructure, Cuba is seeking to manage the impacts of droughts and floods that are intensifying with climate change.

The “initiative to strengthen hydrological monitoring” in Cuba, signed in Havana on Feb. 11, aims to boost capacities to measure, transmit, process and analyse hydrological variables and systematically assess water availability at the national level.

According to water sector authorities, the modernisation and optimisation of hydrological observation networks will be an essential component of early warning systems for floods and droughts.

The initiative will be implemented by the National Water Resources Institute (INRH), with the support of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and funding from Russia.

It also plans to redesign the observation network for both groundwater and surface water quality, explained INRH Director of Hydrology and Hydrogeology Argelio Fernandez.

The initiative is in line with Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6, which calls on governments to ensure availability and sustainable management of water, as well as sanitation.

It also responds to national policies and priorities contained in “Tarea Vida”, the government plan in place since 2017 to address climate change.

Among its multiple strategic guidelines, the plan aims to ensure the availability and efficient use of water to cope with droughts, based on the application of technologies to save water and meet local demand.

It also urges the optimisation of hydraulic infrastructure and its maintenance, as well as the introduction of actions to measure water efficiency and productivity.

The Ejército Rebelde reservoir is located near the Parque Lenin recreational complex in Havana. Cuba has more than 240 dams with a reservoir capacity of over nine billion cubic metres of water, as part of the infrastructure designed to guarantee a water supply to the population and promote industrial development plans, agricultural irrigation and flood control. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

Pathways for water

The long, narrow shape of the island of Cuba, the largest in the Cuban archipelago, means many rivers are short and the water flow is low and highly dependent on rainfall, more abundant in the May to October wet season and during the passage of tropical storms.

With average annual rainfall of 1,330 mm, the records show that rains are increasingly scarce, particularly in the eastern region where the country’s longest and largest rivers, the Cauto and Toa, respectively, are located.

From 2014 to 2017, the country faced the greatest drought in 115 years, affecting 70 percent of the national territory.

Studies predict that Cuba’s climate will tend toward less rainfall, higher temperatures and more intense droughts, and that by 2100 water availability could be reduced by more than 35 percent.

Another consequence of climate change is that sea levels are projected to rise, a phenomenon that will aggravate saltwater intrusion, to which 574 human settlements and 263 water supply sources are currently vulnerable, according to official figures.

Law No. 124 of the Land Water Law has been guiding the integrated and sustainable management of water since 2017, while the new constitution in force since April 2019 protects the right of Cubans to drinking water and sanitation, with due remuneration and rational use.

Since 1959, the government has promoted an ambitious engineering programme for artificial water reservoirs, to guarantee the water supply for a population that almost doubled to 11.2 million inhabitants since then, and to promote plans for industrial development and agricultural irrigation.

The data shows that from just over a dozen small reservoirs six decades ago, there are now more than 240 in the 15 provinces and the special municipality of Isla de la Juventud – the second largest island in the archipelago – with a storage capacity of more than nine billion cubic metres.

According to the 2020 Statistical Yearbook, more than 95 percent of the Cuban population has access to drinking water, but only 86.5 percent of the urban population and 42.2 percent of the rural population receives piped water at home.

Workers of the Aguas de La Habana water company lay a high-density polyethylene pipe to supply drinking water in the Peñas Altas district, near Guanabo beach, in eastern Havana. Part of the hydraulic investments made by Cuba in the sector are supported by international cooperation through projects and funds from other countries and international organisations. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

Despite the economic crisis the country has suffered for three decades and the impact of the U.S. embargo since 1962, in recent years millions of dollars have been invested to mitigate the water deficit and improve water quality.

Among the engineering works, the water transfer aqueducts stand out, with more than a dozen throughout the country, considered strategic pillars in building resilience to the effects of climate change.

These interconnected systems of dams, canals, aqueducts, tunnels and bridges transfer water hundreds of kilometres from places where it is abundant to agricultural and industrial areas and human settlements.

They also make it possible to control floods, lessen the impact of drought and allow the siting of hydroelectric power plants.

Cuba has three plants that produce high-density polyethylene pipes 1,200 mm in diameter for laying new aqueducts and to replace the aging and leaking hydraulic infrastructure that in some cities is over 100 years old.

It also seeks to prioritise the manufacture of fittings and parts for domestic water supply networks, where almost a quarter of the piped water is lost.

Of the total investment in the water system, which in recent years has averaged more than 400 million pesos (16.5 million dollars) a year, more than half comes from the government budget for construction and assembly.

The rest comes from international cooperation through projects and funds from nations such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Japan, Spain, France and the OPEC Fund for International Development.

Thanks to these investments, in the 2018-2020 period, desalination plants were inaugurated in the provinces of Havana, Matanzas, Santiago de Cuba, Granma, Guantánamo and the municipality of Isla de la Juventud, in order to create easy access points in populations affected by high levels of salinity in their water supply sources.

Meanwhile, in Camagüey, the third most populated city in Cuba located 538 km east of the capital, a water treatment plant with a capacity to process 1,800 litres of water per second is nearing completion, which will make it the largest in the country.

Although the water that reaches most homes is treated and chlorinated, people remain concerned about the presence of microorganisms or salt that require boiling.

“It would be useful if shops sold water filters more frequently and at affordable prices, because they help protect our health,” a Havana resident, Yolanda Soler, told IPS.

However, building resilience also involves encouraging a water culture in the business and private sectors and among citizens as a whole, hydroeconomics engineer Luis Bruzón, who lives in the western province of Mayabeque, told IPS in a telephone interview.

“Do we know how much water is used to produce a ton of a given agricultural or industrial product or to provide a specific service?” asked Bruzón, who believes that having such data would improve decision-making in a nation that must increasingly optimise and save water.

Related Articles

• Four-Year Drought Forces Cuba to Find Ways to Build Resilience

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By Jan Lundius
STOCKHOLM / ROME, Feb 23 2021 (IPS)

Myanmar’s State Counsellor was recently deposed and arrested along with other leaders of her ruling party – National League for Democracy (NLD). The Leader of Tatmadaw, the Military, Min Aung Hlaing, announced that elections in November last year had been fraudulent and in an “effort to save democracy” the military would now rule the nation for at least one year, until new elections could be organised. Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi is accused of “importing ten or more walkie-talkies” and of violating the nation’s “Natural Disaster Law”. Some might agree that Suu Kyi deserves to be locked up. As an admired role model and Nobel Peace Prize winner, she was globally depicted as an almost saintlike being, canonized in movies like Luc Bessons’s The Lady. U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, watched the movie before she in 2011 visited Suu Kyi, who by then had spent altogether fifteen years in house imprisonment, deprived of the company of an ailing and eventually dying husband and two sons. In spite of her forced isolation she became an eloquent representative for her compatriots’ resistance and perseverance under almost fifty years of military dictatorship.

Since 25 August 2017, over 742,000 Rohingyas have fled to Bangladesh. While Thailand continues to host some 99,000 Burmese refugees in nine temporary camps along the Thai/Myanmar border. The inmates are in their great majority ethnic Karen, who have fled eastern Myanmar due to army persecution. Furthermore, there are approximately 600,000 Burmese migrant workers residing in Thailand. The income gap in Myanmar is among the widest in the world, while a large proportion of the economy remain in the control of supporters of the military.

The 2020 election proved Suu Kyi’s popularity among the majority of Myanmar’s electorate. She is after all the daughter of the nation’s founding father, Aung San, who together with seven council members was murdered in 1947, on the brink of Burma’s liberation from sixty years of British colonial rule. None of the perpetrators were caught, but a former prime minister placed by the British was hanged as instigator of the crime. It was later established that the killers had been provided with arms by “low-ranking British officers”. Upholding her father’s inheritance as a fighter for the rights and well-being of the Burmese people, Suu Kyi suffered intimidation and discrimination from the military regime, as well as being targeted by several murder attempts. Why is such a brave woman now is severely criticised by international governments, UN organisations and human rights groups?

For sure, no role model is exempt from human flaws. As a convinced Buddhist and proud Bamar it might happen that Suu Kyi fears Muslim fundamentalism and ethnic disaggregation, at the same time as she has to safeguard support from her acolytes. Furthermore, being a gifted speaker and author does not automatically make you into a stout politician and economist. After becoming State Counsellor, Suu Kyi has been globally criticised for her failure to effectively address Myanmar’s economic and ethnic problems. The latter has since the end of World War II caused one of the worlds biggest ongoing refugee crises and continuous ethnic cleansing. Furthermore, a slow economic recovery and a weakening of the freedom of the press have led to a mounting criticism of Suu Kyi’s leadership, which by foreign media has been described as “imperious, distracted and out of touch” (The Economist, 26 Oct. 2017).

The government of Myanmar recognizes 135 different ethnic groups, about 70 percent is constituted by the Buddhist Bamar people, who speak Burmese and live on the river plains and in the delta. The country is since 1948 a confederate nation, though a significant number of minority peoples demand increased self-government, and even nationhood, something that in several areas have resulted in endemic armed struggle.

One of these minorities are the Rohingyias, of whom most are Muslims and reside in the western Rakhine state, bordering the sea and Bangladesh. This area has for centuries above all been influenced by “Bengali People”, strengthened by British colonial rule that integrated Burma with its colonial Indian empire, the Raj, causing a strong influx of Bengali workforce and traders, an influence resented by several Burmese. During World War II many Muslims joined the British army, while Burmese, among them Aung San, Suu Kyi’s Father, sided with the Japanese invaders, hoping for liberation from British rule. By the end of the war the Japanese supporting Burmese Army, lead by Aung San, changed sides and ousted the Japanese alongside British troops.

The Myanmar government has until now considered Rohingyas as colonial and postcolonial migrants, while avoiding the term Rohingya by referring to them as Bangali. Under the 1982 Myanmar Sate Nationality Law approximately 1.5 million Rohingyas are denied Burmese citizenship; their freedom of movement is restricted and they are excluded from state education and civil service. In 2012, the Burmese President declared that all Rohingyas should be deported or placed in UNHCR refugee camps, while Suu Kyi recently has stated that a proper investigation is needed to find out which country the Rohingya people should belong to.

After a militant group, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) in 2017 killed 99 Hindus the Myanmar military conducted a violent campaign against the entire Rohingya population and 690,000 Rohingyas fled across the border to Bangladesh, where most of them now remain confined in huge refugee camps. At the same time, ethnic conflicts escalated in the north-eastern federal states of Shan and Kachin causing thousands of refugees to enter China.

On 13 September 2017, Suu Kyi announced that she would not be attending a UN General Assembly debate to discuss the Rohingya humanitarian crisis and in December 2019, she defended in the International Court of Justice at the Hague the Burmese military against allegations of genocide. In her speech of over 3,000 words, Suu Kyi did not use the term Rohingya and stated that the allegations of genocide were “incomplete and misleading”, claiming hat the situation had actually been a legitimate Burmese military response to terrorist attacks. Suu Kyi’s government has apparently taken steps to issue ID cards for residency for Rohingyas, but so far they have not been given any guarantees of citizenship.

It is unreasonable to put all the blame of the wrongdoing of an entire government on one specific woman, just as well as it is wrong to canonize a living person, particularly within such an extremely complicated situation as the one prevailing in Myanmar. However, it might be viable to accuse the military leadership from profiting from endemic ethnic tensions and use them as a means to increase their power and enrichment.

In 1962, the Burmese military overthrew a corrupt government and instituted military rule. The state ideology came to be known as The Burmese Way to Socialism and aimed at centralizing the economy, as well as limiting foreign influence on businesses. The emphasis on socialism and nationalism projected an image of the army as a revolutionary institution able to ensure the population’s “social demands”. The military government nationalized the economy while pursuing a policy of autokraty, self-sufficiency, involving economic isolation from the world. However, the implementation of autokraty eventually led to the growth of the black market and rampant smuggling, while the central government slid into bankruptcy.

The constant struggle with separatist armed groups in federal states bordering China, Laos and Thailand toughened the army and turned it into an effective war machine, as well as the constant fighting became an excuse to militarise vast areas, providing the army with control of lucrative natural resources, like timber, petrol, natural gas and the mining of gems, zinc, copper and lead. During the decades leading up to 2011 two military-owned conglomerates, Myanmar Economic Corporation (MEC) and Myanmar Economic Holding Ltd (MEHL) made it possible for military leaders and associates to grab licenses, land and economic concessions. At the same time Government bureaucracy was dominated by retired military personnel. Suu Kyi’s government eventually became bolder and in 2019 gradually began to de-militarise the country, a major achievement was ending the military-controlled Ministry of Home Affairs’ right to appoint government officials across the country.

If Besson’s The Lady focused on Ms. Suu Kyi as a human rights’ icon, Ridley Scott’s 2007 movie American Gangster paid attention to Khun Saa, a war lord in the federal state of Shan. Saa’s opium founded empire may serve as an illustration of the fatal symbiosis between Myanmar military regimes, illegal drug trade and ethnic guerillas. Khun Saa originally received equipment and training from both the remnants of the Chinese Kuomintang army and the Burmese army. Between 1976 and 1996 he commanded a private army, alternately fighting and co-operating with the Burmese military, as well as Laotian and Thai generals. During the Vietnam War he co-operated with corrupt U.S. officers. During the 1980s the share of heroin sold in New York originating from the so called Golden Triangle rose from 5 to 80 percent. Khun Sa was responsible for almost 50 percent of the U.S. heroin trade.

In return for fighting local Shan rebels the Burmese army allowed Khun Saa to use their land and roads to grow, process and trade heroin and several Burmese military leaders profited from this co-operation. In 1996, Khun Saa disbanded his army and moved to Yangon. After his retirement some of Khun Saa’s forces joined the Burmese military, others fought the Government, while Khun Saa engaged in “legitimate” business, especially mining and construction. After his death in 2007 Khun Saa’s children have remained as prominent business people in Myanmar.

Myanmar is after Afghanistan the world’s largest producer of opium and the greatest manufacturer of synthetic opioid fentanyl, which is 50 times stronger than heroin. Its production is rising and it is known that militias from the northern Shan State are allied with government troops, which are engaged in resource extraction, logging, money laundering and, of course, illicit narcotics. A constantly unruly and militarised countryside benefits from illicit activities, enriching both sides of a conflict, a reality which combined with the self-interest and economic power of a military regime do not bode well for Myanmar’s future.

Nevertheless, let us hope that the latest unfortunate development will be a wake-up call for Myanmar’s young people, whom a taste of democracy has made aware of how power abuse has infested military leaders, who consciously have used ethnic strife to benefit their politics and economy. Maybe peace, solidarity and prosperity now are coming to the forefront in the minds of young people who for so long have been poisoned by political narratives about ethnic minorities.

Jan Lundius holds a PhD. on History of Religion from Lund University and has served as a development expert, researcher and advisor at SIDA, UNESCO, FAO and other international organisations.

 

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Mango farmers Susan and Batsirai Zinoro from Mutoko District, Zimbabwe are using Integrated Pest Management methods to control a fruit fly pest. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Feb 23 2021 (IPS)

Every harvest season, Susan Zinoro, a mango farmer from Mutoko, Zimbabwe, buries half the mangoes she’s grown that season. They have already started rotting either on the tree or have fallen to the ground before harvest. It’s a difficult task for Zinoro because she knows she is throwing away food and income meant for her family.

But this has been happening for the last seven years, when she first began to notice that more and more fruit would rot and litter the ground.

Zinoro from Zinoro village in Mutoko, 143km north-east of Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital, has earned an average $400 per season from selling mangoes over the last five years. This is a shift from many years ago when she would earn more than $1,000 a season.

Another farmer, Pelegrina Msingwini, from Mhondiwa village in Murehwa, which neighbours Mutoko, remembers just two years ago when she harvested and sold 150 (20-litre) buckets of fruit from her plot. Half were rejected at the market because they were damaged. In 2020, she harvested even less mangoes, only 30 buckets.

Warming climate brings destructive pest

As the climate warms, a destructive pest is spreading its wings and damaging the livelihoods of fruit growers in southern Africa. The invasive fruit fly, Bactrocera dorsalis, is so small it’s often mistaken for a mosquito.

It has become is a serious impediment to mango farmers as it can cause total fruit loss, the ruin livelihoods and export prospects for the tropical fruit, Shepard Ndlela, an entomologist with the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE), based in Nairobi, Kenya, tells IPS.

Mutoko, Murehwa and Zvimba are Zimbabwe’s top mango-producing areas.

“In Mutoko [Zimbabwe] only, about 55 percent of households produce and sell mangoes together with other fruits such as bananas, guava and citrus,” Ndlela tells IPS, adding that, “They call mango “the golden fruit” thus depicting the true value of the fruit for food, nutrition and source of income.”

But approximately half of the 400,000 metric tonnes of mangoes produced each year are lost as a result of the fruit fly, says Ndlela. Uncontrolled, the pest can inflict 100 percent yield loss.

Scientists at ICIPE, supported by various donors, have developed an Integrated Pest Management (IPM) package.

It’s an approach to crop production and protection which the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) describes as combining different strategies and practises to grow healthy crops, minimising the use of pesticides. The environment-friendly methods, which include use of natural enemies of crop pests and bio-pesticides, discourage the development of pest populations by encouraging the natural pest controls.

According to the Food Sustainability Index (FSI), developed by The Economist Intelligence Unit and the Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition, best practice in sustainable food production also involves efforts to eradicate worst practices which include the overuse of chemical fertilisers and pesticides.

In 2020, in Zimbabwe’s top mango producing areas, the farmer have started doing just that when a natural enemy to the fruit fly was introduced.

A farmer’s friend for a nasty fly

Parasitoids are small insects that are natural enemies of the fruit fly, which lay their eggs in the body of the insect pest, completing their development inside the host and killing it. They are naturally found in Asia where the fruit fly pest is indigenous.

Scientists from ICIPE imported parasitoids for the fruit fly from Hawaii in 2006 for multiplication. Since then parasitoids have been multiplied in Kenya and have been distributed in Malawi, Zambia, Mozambique and Zimbabwe.

Parasitoids have been successfully used in East and West Africa where the fruit fly has been controlled with an up to 33 percent success rate, Ndlela says.

“What we have done is to unite the pest (fruit fly) and its natural enemies (parasitoids),” Ndlela tells IPS.

“Once released into the environment in good numbers, they multiply themselves in the field and move around. This is a biological control programme where we release parasitoids and nature takes its course,” Ndlela says.

Ndlela explains that farmers do not have to buy the parasitoids because ICIPE is training its partners in Southern Africa to mass produce the parasitoids for release to farmers.

Wide-scale adoption of other IPM interventions such as baiting techniques, killing of male flies to reduce their population, using bio pesticides and orchard sanitation, are being promoted in Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe under a four-year pilot project targeting 4,000 farmers across the region.

The project seeks to improve food security and nutrition, provide income-generation opportunities, and reduce the poverty of small- and medium-scale mango growers, particularly women and youth.

Zinoro and her husband, Batsirai, are part of 1,000 Zimbabwean farmers trained on IPM methods.

More than 1,500 parasitoids were released at Zinoro’s mango orchard during the launch of the project. Once established on the farm the parasitoids do not need farmer intervention and will populate and prey on the pest.

“We have learnt that these insects (parasitoids) are friends of the farmer but an enemy of the fruit fly which is the enemy of our mangoes,” Zinoro says.

“The programme is helping improve our livelihoods because we are eliminating a pest that has affected mangoes from which we get income,” Zinoro, tells IPS from outside her homestead overlooking a field of towering mango trees. Some of the fruit trees have bright yellow plastic buckets dangling under fruit-laden branches — fly traps.

Research by ICIPE has found that in East Africa, farmers using the IPM package spent 46 percent less on synthetic insecticides per acre, reducing rejection of their fruit by half. As a result, farmers earned 22 percent more income than those not implementing IPM.

“We want to get to a point where the fruit fly is not causing any economic damage,” says Ndlela, explaining that the project was inviting agro-dealers to supply traps, lures and bio-pesticides at affordable prices to farmers to promote the wide use of IPM methods.

Adding value

The use of IPM strategies will enable fruit growers from Zimbabwe to meet the phytosanitary requirements for both domestic and export markets like the European Union, said John Bhasera, Zimbabwe’s Permanent Secretary of Agriculture, at the project launch in Mutoko last December.

Bhasera commented that increased mango productivity and quality will support horticulture farmers and open opportunities for value addition of the fruit.

The European Union, a key market for fruit, including mangoes from Africa, requires a phytosanitary certificate from exporting countries to indicate the fruit is free from pests.

Horticulture farmer, Phineas Chinomora, from Chinomona village in Mutoko, grows tomatoes and green mealies and has 56 mango trees on his farm. He is excited about IPM and sees an opportunity to improve his mango production while doing away with commercial pesticides.

“Over the years, I have lost a lot of mangoes to pests and was not sure about the cause. This programme will help me improve my production as I have introduced a lot of grafted mango trees under the programme and reducing pesticides will cut costs,” Chinomora tells IPS.

“We have to send our mangoes to Harare, incurring huge transport costs and we get low prices, so improving production and the quality of my mangoes will help us make more money,” Chinomora says. “We can now look at adding value to our mangoes by making juice and jam.”

 

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The post Natural Enemies: How Mango Farmers are Tackling an Invasive Fruit Fly Pest appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

As the climate warms, a destructive pest is spreading its wings and damaging the livelihoods of fruit growers in southern Africa. The invasive fruit fly, Bactrocera dorsalis, is preventing farmers like Susan Zinoro, a mango farmer from Mutoko, Zimbabwe, from literally and figuratively enjoying the fruits of their labour.

The post Natural Enemies: How Mango Farmers are Tackling an Invasive Fruit Fly Pest appeared first on Inter Press Service.

At a 2018 joint meeting of the UN’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and its Economic and Social Committee, a robot named Sophia had an interactive session with Deputy Secretary-General Amina J. Mohammed. Credit: UN Photo/Manuel Elias

By Ian Richards and Mohamed Chiraz Baly
GENEVA, Feb 23 2021 (IPS)

Some of you may remember Sophia, the talking robot.

In 2017 and 2018 she toured UN meetings and TV studios, wowing audiences with her thoughts on the future of technology and seemingly engaging in conversations with UN deputy chief, Amina Mohammed and British broadcaster, Piers Morgan.

The UN declared her an innovation champion, Elle magazine put her on their cover and Saudi Arabia granted her citizenship, a hat trick of “firsts” for a robot.

Many were impressed by her human qualities. Yet her ability to follow gazes and respond to questions masked the human input required to provide a lifelike experience and pithy one-liners. Those interviewing her reported (https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42616687) having to send questions in advance.

And while Sophia certainly created an important debate on the future of artificial intelligence, even her makers, following much criticism, admitted (https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/10/16617092/sophia-the-robot-citizen-ai-hanson-robotics-ben-goertzel) that people had been too quick to overestimate her technological ability. Behind the wishful thinking, she was more airline customer service chatbot than human.

Yet while Sophia appears to have disappeared from public view, perhaps as a result of Covid-19 (which also appears to have diminished our faith in airline customer service chatbots), digital diplomacy, as we discovered during this year’s International Mother Tongue Day, isn’t immune to technological overhype.

Credit: UN Photo/Manuel Elias

Next month the UN will test a new virtual interpretation system at the 14th Congress on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice to be held in Kyoto. A number of delegates will be travelling there, but the UN’s interpreters in Vienna and New York, that would have normally joined the conference, will instead be staying at home.

Working early morning and late night shifts they will interpret the meeting’s negotiations into the six UN languages over the internet. Think of it as being in a Teams or Zoom meeting. Not only do you have to try and understand exactly what is being said, but you also need to interpret it into another language and feed it back down the same line.

The biggest challenge won’t be “you’re on mute,” but the poor sound quality.

Experience from using the system during lockdown, when there was no other choice, showed how poor sound quality and failing connections made the work more daunting, as interpreters need a higher quality of sound than a normal listener to perform their job correctly.

Interpreters reported acute acoustic shock, tinnitus, headaches, and nausea. The poor sound quality is because the platforms currently on the market compress the sound to push the back and forth of languages down the line at the same time. None of the systems are ISO-compliant.

The UN is not alone with these problems.

An article (https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/virtual-parliament-interpreters-injuries_ca_5eb55c99c5b6a67335415963) on the Canadian parliament, which operates in English and French, noted that, “coping with iffy audio quality, occasional feedback loops, new technology and MPs who speak too quickly has resulted in a steep increase in interpreters reporting workplace injuries”.

Assumptions about the powers of technology have also affected the UN’s translators. Following the introduction of a new computer-assisted translation tool, they have been told to increase their daily productivity target from 5 pages of often dense technical text, to 5.8.

The software has been hyped as a google translate on steroids. But a recent survey of its users showed that view was far from shared.

While recognizing its benefits, eighty percent of translators said they would not be able to meet the new productivity targets while maintaining minimum standards of quality. One said the software was “often slow and time consuming, rather than time-saving, and its role is way overrated.”

Another commented that rewriting poor machine translations demanded more time than translating from scratch. Several noted that computer-assisted translations could not compensate an overall decline in the quality of the original texts that translators received.

This year’s International Mother Tongue Day was devoted to multilingualism.

But two years ago, the UN General Assembly rightly noted that “multilingualism promotes unity in diversity and international understanding, tolerance and dialogue”, and recognized its contribution in “promoting international peace and security”.

Technology has an important role in promoting communications between linguistic groups, and has already made an important difference. But as with Sophia, this year we need to be as much aware of what it can do as what it can’t.

 

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The post How Technology Can Promote Multilingualism & How it Cannot appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Ian Richards is a UN economist, staff representative and is fluent in two UN languages; Mohammed Chiraz Baly is a UN statistician, staff representative and speaks three UN languages fluently.

 
The following is an analysis marking International Mother Language Day, which was commemorated on February 21, on “How Technology Can Promote Multilingualism While Being Realistic -- & How it Cannot”

The post How Technology Can Promote Multilingualism & How it Cannot appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Anis Chowdhury and Jomo Kwame Sundaram
SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 23 2021 (IPS)

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is adversely impacting most developing countries disproportionately, especially the United Nations’ least developed countries (LDCs) and the World Bank’s low-income countries (LICs).

Years of implementing neoliberal policy conditionalities and advice have made most developing countries much more vulnerable to the COVID-19 pandemic by undermining their health systems and fiscal capacities to respond adequately.

Anis Chowdhury

Less taxes
Four decades of ‘neoliberal’ policy influence has resulted in a ‘race to the bottom’ to cut direct taxes, particularly corporate tax rates, ostensibly to promote investments and spur growth.

But most LDCs and LICs were left high and dry as foreign direct investment (FDI) seeks profitable locations considering various relevant criteria besides tax rates. Thus, tax cuts have not induced the promised investments, but also resulted in net revenue losses.

Revenue loss due to such tax competition could be five times that due to illicit financial flows seeking to evade taxes. Low and middle-income countries lose US$167~200 billion annually, around 1.2~1.5% of their national incomes, to corporate tax competition.

Poor countries’ tax bases have narrowed since the 1990s, with Sub‐Saharan African countries suffering the highest revenue losses as a share of national incomes. More indirect taxes have not compensated for less direct tax revenues.

Less government spending
As the tax system became less progressive, tax cuts also depleted the public coffers in most developing countries. Pressures on governments to pursue fiscal consolidation and austerity grew, with devastating impacts for public health.

Implementing IMF-World Bank structural adjustment program conditionalities, most sub-Saharan African countries drastically reduced their healthcare budgets. Per capita public spending on health in LICs fell during 2004–2012, while their shares of national income declined during 2004-2015.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Years of public sector underinvestment seriously undermined public health systems in most developing countries, especially LDCs and LICs. Government provision was deliberately reduced to promote for-profit private healthcare, adversely affecting public service quality, effectiveness, costs and access.

Unsurprisingly, these economies not only lacked fiscal resources to cope with the pandemic, but their fiscal systems had also been made incapable of responding to the challenge. Thus, these poorly funded, inadequate health systems were grossly unprepared for the pandemic.

Uneven impacts
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres cautioned last July that COVID-19 was making achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) “even more challenging” as many developing countries were already “off track” in 2019, before the pandemic.

On 3rd April, International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva warned that the worst recession since the Great Depression would hit developing countries hardest, as they have “less resources to protect themselves”. World Bank President David Malpass also acknowledged that it would “hurt world’s poorest countries the most”.

The pandemic has already set back decades of modest and uneven progress in developing countries. The World Bank recently estimated those falling into extreme poverty worldwide in 2020 at between 119 and 124 million people, i.e., by around 15%.

And the situation is getting worse. Rich country resistance to the developing countries’ request for a TRIPS waiver, vaccine imperialism and the flawed COVAX arrangements are deepening the crisis in poor countries as most remain far behind in the vaccine queue.

To boost their profits, vaccine developers restrict greater output. Despite having received various generous government subsidies, they refuse to share research findings needed to massively scale up generic production. Meanwhile, rich countries have secured many times more vaccines than they need.

Limited fiscal space
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, low income countries already had the largest deficits, higher borrowing costs and more debt relative to government revenue than high-income countries. Thus, they devote ever larger shares of their modest revenues to pay interest.

The pandemic has undoubtedly worsened public finances. Average deficits in LICs increased from -4.0% of GDP in 2019 to -5.7% in 2020, with debt rising from 43.3% to 48.5% of GDP.

Fiscal responses have been influenced by access to financing. Global fiscal support reached nearly US$14 trillion in 2020, comprising US$7.8 trillion in additional spending or foregone revenue, and U$6 trillion in equity injections, loans and guarantees.

Nearly US$12 trillion (about a fifth of GDP) was deployed in advanced economies to address the pandemic and its economic fallout. Meanwhile, LICs could only afford US$26.6 billion (1.2% of GDP), as emerging market economies deployed around 5%.

Declining fiscal space
Countries relying on primary commodity production, tourism or manufacturing for transnational supply chains have been most disrupted by the pandemic. More open to the outside world, their government revenue and fiscal space have been more severely affected.

Revenue shortfalls from output drops, concurrent commodity price drops and debt demands have limited many LICs’ fiscal capacities. The pandemic is thus more likely to leave lasting impacts, including worse poverty and malnutrition.

The IMF head urged countries not to hesitate to “spend, but keep the receipts”, suggesting a major U-turn in IMF fiscal policy advice. Likewise, despite her earlier reputation as a ‘debt hawk’, World Bank Chief Economist Carmen Reinhart advised “First fight the war, then figure out how to pay for it”.

But most LICs have little alternative but to rely heavily on foreign aid. Even before the pandemic, aid from the OECD countries only reached 0.31% of their gross national income (GNI), less than half the 0.7% of national income target agreed to more than half a century ago.

Had donors met their LDCs aid target of 0.15~0.20% of their national incomes, LDCs would have received an extra US$32 billion more annually at least. Donor government cuts in bilateral aid commitments by almost 30%, from US$23.9 billion in the first five months of 2019 to US$16.9 billion during January-May 2020, have only made things worse.

Meanwhile, despite Boris Johnson’s rhetoric about reviving Commonwealth, i.e., colonial, connections now that Britain has ‘Brexited’, he plans to cut bilateral aid by 50~70% following the £2.9 billion cut in July 2020!

Britain is now paying “Covid bills off the backs of the poor”, even breaching UK law! Ever clever on the hoof, BoJo may yet donate the excess vaccines he has ordered to the ‘most deserving’ in another typically spectacular, grandiloquent gesture while continuing to block much broader access by denying developing countries’ TRIPS vaccine waiver request.

 

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The post Developing Countries Struggling To Cope With COVID-19 appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Tejero, moments after breaking into the Chamber of Deputies, on the afternoon of February 23, 1981, which began a coup in Spain, with the seizure of Parliament and armed uprisings in several cities. Its failure ended up consolidating the recently restored democracy. Credit: RTVE.

By Joaquín Roy
MIAMI, Feb 22 2021 (IPS)

Forty years ago, on February 23, 1981 (later known as 23-F), in the middle of the afternoon in a cold Madrid atmosphere, the most serious attack against the reborn Spanish democracy took place. An armed contingent of more than 200 Civil Guard agents invaded the Congress of Deputies and threatened the dissolution of the government and the establishment of a dictatorship.

Under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Tejero, wielding a regulation pistol, the invaders interrupted the voting process for the new President of the Council of Ministers, Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo, who was to succeed Adolfo Suárez, who had resigned a few days earlier. Tejero claimed that his action was endorsed by King Juan Carlos I.

The dramatic incident had been inaugurated by the firing of machine-gun bursts by the invaders towards the roof of the building, while the parliamentarians were ordered to lie on the ground under their seats. Only three deputies stood upright: President Suárez, Communist leader Santiago Carrillo, and the outgoing vice president of the government and Minister of Defense, General Manuel Gutiérrez Mellado.

Joaquín Roy

Suárez, who had been the architect of the recovery of democracy in 1978 with the approval of the new Constitution together with King Juan Carlos, had ended up exhausted in an environment full of confrontations caused mainly by the harassment that the terrorist group ETA had been imposing in the political environment through attacks against police, civilians and military.

The serious event was resolved after intense hours of action when King Juan Carlos issued a statement on television in which, in clear terms, he remembered the coup plotters and their possible collaborators as Head of State about their obligations.

The previous context of the serious events was full of danger signals that were confirmed. Among the details that led the King to make the drastic decision, the environment of his family stands out, it was overpopulated with historical errors that were paid dearly. That panorama extended as much in time as in space.

In the first place, the most remote antecedent was the mistake made by Juan Carlos’ own grandfather, Alfonso XIII, when in the twenties of the previous century, he was pressured by the military and ended up accepting the role of General Primo de Rivera in 1923.

A few years until 1930 were enough for his influence to be exhausted and the evolution of national politics to testify to the triumph of the left in the important cities in the municipal elections of 1931. The Second Spanish Republic survived until the coup General Franco’s military force that unleashed the Civil War of 1936-39, and the subsequent establishment of the Franco dictatorship until 1975.

Juan Carlos also had the latent impact of such a political error on his wife’s own family, Queen Sofía. Her brother, King Constantine of Greece, could not resist the pressure of the military, to whom he handed over the initiative to power in 1967. Later this decision meant the end of the Greek monarchy and the establishment of a republican regime in 1973.

The atmosphere that presided over Madrid that fatal 23 February insisted on the memory of the monarchical errors of the past. Therefore, avoiding the jerky decisions of the past prevented the repetition of historical tragedies.

Today’s circumstances, given the apparent survival of certain social and political instability, in the midst of an economic-pandemic crisis, advise an analysis of the feasibility of a serious and drastic resolution of political discrepancies. It is convenient, therefore, to meditate on attempts of indiscipline in certain military sectors, as they have been expressed in manifestos issued by sectors of military leaders under the retirement statute.

A serene analysis of these incidents generates deserves an evaluation as they consider themselves limited to those sectors led by a nostalgic minority. In contrast, the professionalism of the sectors that have served in the last decades in peace missions, development aid, and even assistance in the fight against the pandemic, are claimed. But that does not totally eliminate the latent threat of discontent, accompanied by the poor performance of political parties when faced with new dangers.

With some concern, therefore, one must observe the deterioration in the exercise of the once important position of the Popular Party, whose advantage on the national stage has been notably eroded. In addition to the fact that the PP has practically disappeared from the Catalan scene, the failure of the centrist parties (UCD was the best example of the transition) that could act as hinges in the manner of liberal-centrist formations in some European countries, like UK and Germany.

The knockout given to Ciudadanos (which aspired to be a supermodern UCD), coupled with the stratospheric rise of ultra right-wing VOX, should be placed into the center of the meditation on the instability of the political fabric.

It must also occupy a prime place in speculation about the threat of a coup, hard or soft, or simply expendable concern. The 23-F anniversary is a good occasion to detect the latent presence of Tejero on the congressional floor or consider that the removal of Franco’s body from the Valley of the Fallen means something permanent.

 

Joaquín Roy is Jean Monnet Professor and Director of the European Union Center at the University of Miami

 

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By External Source
Feb 22 2021 (IPS-Partners)

Here is a glance at our journey as a non-profit organisation, like all successful endeavors strong relationships stem from time, effort and patience.

Credit: NESFAS

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By Mintu Deshwara and Pinaki Roy
Feb 22 2021 (IPS-Partners)

Since her husband Abrahm Soreng died two years ago, 70-year-old Veronica Kerketa doesn’t get the chance to talk in her mother tongue at home. None of her children or grandchildren speak the Kharia language.

In her village, under Bormachhara tea garden area of Moulvibazar’s Sreemangal upazila, only one other person — her younger sister, 65-year-old Christina Kerketa — speaks Kharia.

“Except for the two of us, the nearest person who knows this language, Jaharlal Pandey Induar, lives three kilometres away from our village,” said Veronica.

“I talk with my sister or sometimes talk with him in this language when we meet.”

She added, “Nobody else from my own family speaks this language now. So, I need to talk in Sadri or Bangla with them.”

The use of Sadri is largely prevalent across the various ethnic communities in the tea gardens.

“After our death, nobody will speak this language [Kharia]. I tried to teach the language to the younger people but they do not show interest and laugh at me when I speak in Kharia,” said Veronica.

Jaharlal Pandey Induar, 65, of Sreemangal’s Mangrabasti, said that as a tea workers’ family, they are always under financial stress. “We do not have enough time to give for our own language.”

He said, “I still can’t speak Kharia fluently, as I have mostly used Sadri for a long time now.”

Dayaram Kharia, 60, also from Mangrabasti, said 110 Kharia families live in the village.

“There is no one in our village who can speak our own language fluently — there are only five people who know a few words of Kharia.”

In Krishnanchura village of Habiganj’s Chunarughat, of 41 Kharia families living in the village, only four old women can speak a few words in the language when they meet each other, said 45-year-old Manik Kharia.

Rajshahi University student Simon Kerketa, 23, from the Bormabosti area of Sreemangal upazila, said at least six members of his father’s family still know Kharia.

“But I myself can’t speak the language,” he said.

A DYING LANGUAGE

Mashrur Imtiaz, assistant professor in the department of linguistics at the University of Dhaka, who conducted a survey on the language in 2018, found less than 20 people in Sylhet speak Kharia.

“Only 10 to 12 people from their community know this language. And a few others know some Kharia words and some stories and rituals. But they cannot really make sentences or continue a conversation,” he said.

“There is no written form of this language in Bangladesh. I wanted to work on their grammar but did not get adequate people who speak the language.”

Kharia, a language belonging to the Munda branch of the Austro-Asiatic language family, is one of Bangladesh’s endangered languages, he said.

George Abraham Grierson’s “Linguistic Survey of India”, published in 1928, described Kharia then as a “dying” language, noted Mashrur.

Kharia people, who live in various tea gardens in Sylhet, were enlisted in the government’s updated list of 50 small ethnic communities, which was made in 2019.

Before this, they were not even recognised as a separate ethnic group in Bangladesh.

Pius Nanuar, a Kharia social activist, who conducted a study on the Kharia population in early 2020, told this correspondent they found around 5,700 Kharia people in 41 villages in Sylhet division.

“New generations do not talk in this language — they hardly know one or two words. This language is going to be lost from our country very soon as only 12 people from the community can speak the language,” he said.

Pius, who knows a little bit of Kharia, said he learned it from his grandmother when he was a school student in the ’90s.

His grandmother used to take classes informally every evening, telling stories of Kharia heroes, myths, riddles, rhymes, singalongs, harvest stories, Karam (a harvest festival) and other festivals, hunting, and folk traditions.

“In our boyhood, a good number of Kharia children at least learnt a few Kharia words and came into connection with our Kharia roots and culture. But after her death, that effort was lost,” he said.

In 2017, an initiative was taken to teach the language to the younger generation through a youth organisation called “Beer Telenga Kharia Language Learning Centre”, Pius said.

But it was a failed effort to save the Kharia language and culture in his community.

“Kharias in Bangladesh do not have our own alphabet. Kharias in India too use Roman and Latin alphabets,” Pius added.

According to the website Omniglot, an encyclopedia of writing systems and languages, Kharia is spoken in the Simdega and Gumla districts of Jharkhand state, in the Surguja and Raigarh districts of Chhattisgarh, and in the Sundargarh district of Odisha in India.

There are about 256 speakers of Kharia in the Mechi and Kosi zones of Nepal along the border with India.

Kharia is written also with Devanagari, Odia and Bangla alphabets, according to the website.

NOT JUST A LANGUAGE LOST

The majority of Kharia people in Moulvibazar, Habiganj and Sylhet districts are descendants of people who were brought to the plantations from various parts of India by the British colonists around a century and a half ago, according to the Society for Environment and Human Development (SEHD).

In 2016, SEHD identified 658 Kharia households in 16 tea estates in Sylhet division.

Not just Kharia, even the more commonly spoken ethnic languages are in danger of disappearing.

Pranesh Goala, chairman of Kalighat Union Parishad in Sreemangal, said those who still speak Sadri also mix in Bangla and Hindi words while speaking.

AFM Zakaria, professor in the anthropology department of Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, told The Daily Star losing a language means closing the entrance to a civilisation, to a storehouse of cultural resources.

Sukra Kharia, 65, a younger brother of 70-year-old Gopia Kharia, a freedom fighter from Nalua tea garden in Habigang’s Chunarughat upazila, said as Bangladeshis, they are proud to be part of the country’s history and culture.

At least six Kharia people participated in the Liberation War in 1971.

“But it is very sorrowful to say we are waiting to see the death of our own language,” he said.

In the month of February, Pius Nanuar said, Kharia children pay homage to those who sacrificed their lives for the Bangla language but will never know how to speak the Kharia language, their own mother tongue.

Director General of the International Mother Language Institute Prof Dr Jinnat Imtiaz Ali told The Daily Star it is difficult to preserve a language spoken by less than 20,000 or 30,000 people.

“Finding the source of the language then becomes very difficult. We do not know then what exactly the oral form of the language was.”

“However,” he added, “we have formed a committee to compile the grammar in a dictionary to save endangered languages. We have started work.”

The post The Last of the Kharia Speakers appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana
BANGKOK, Thailand, Feb 22 2021 (IPS)

The past year is one that few of us will forget. While the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have played out unevenly across Asia and the Pacific, the region has been spared many of the worst effects seen in other parts of the world. The pandemic has reminded us that a reliable and uninterrupted energy supply is critical to managing this crisis.

Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana

Beyond ensuring that hospitals and healthcare facilities continue to function, energy supports the systems and coping mechanisms we rely on to work remotely, undertake distance learning and communicate essential health information. Importantly, energy will also underpin cold chains and logistics to ensure that billions of vaccines make their way to the people who need them most.

The good news is our region’s energy systems have continued to function throughout the pandemic. A new report Shaping a sustainable energy future in Asia and the Pacific: A greener, more resilient and inclusive energy system released today by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) shows the energy demand reductions have mainly impacted fossil fuels and depressed oil and gas prices. Renewable energy development in countries across the region, such as China and India, has continued at a healthy pace throughout 2020.

As the Asia-Pacific region transitions its energy system to clean, efficient and low carbon technologies, the emergence of the pandemic raises some fundamental questions. How can a transformed energy system help ensure our resilience to future crises such as COVID-19? As we recover from this pandemic, can we launch a “green recovery” that simultaneously rebuilds our economies and puts us on track to meet global climate and sustainability goals?

A clean and sustainable energy is central to a recovery from COVID-19 pandemic. By emphasizing the importance of the SDGs as a guiding framework for recovering better together, we must focus on two critical aspcets:

First, by making meaningful progress on the SDGs, we can address many of the systemic issues that made societies more vulnerable to COVID-19 in the first place – health, decent work, poverty and inequalities, to name a few.

Second, by directing stimulus spending to investments that support the achievement of the SDGs, we can build back better. If countries focus their stimulus efforts on the industries of the past such as fossil fuels, we risk not creating the jobs we need, or moving in the right direction to achieve the global goals that are critical to future generations. The energy sector offers multiple opportunities to align stimulus with the clean industries of the future.

The evidence shows that renewable energy and energy efficiency projects create more jobs for the same investment as fossil fuel projects. By increasing expenditure on clean cooking and electricity access, we can enhance economic activity in rural areas and bring modern infrastructure that can make these communities more resilient and inclusive, particularly for the wellbeing of women and children.

Additionally, investing in low-carbon infrastructure and technologies can create a basis for the more ambitious climate pledges we need to reach the Paris Agreement targets of a 2-degree global warming limit. On this note, several countries have announced carbon neutrality, demonstrating a long-term vision and commitment to an accelerated transformation to sustainable energy. Phasing out the use of coal from power generation portfolios by substituting with renewables, ending fossil fuel subsidies, and implementing carbon pricing are some of the steps we can take.

The COVID-19 crisis has forced us to change many aspects of our lives to keep ourselves and our societies safe. It has shown that we are more adaptive and resilient than we may have believed. Nevertheless, we should not waste the opportunities this crisis presents for transformative change. It should not deflect us from the urgent task of making modern energy available to all and decarbonizing the region’s energy system through a transition to sustainable energy. Instead, it should provide us with a renewed sense of urgency.

We must harness the capacity of sustainable energy to rebuild our societies and economies while protecting the environment in the pursuit of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana is Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations and Executive Secretary of ESCAP

 

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By Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury
SINGAPORE, Feb 22 2021 (IPS)

Bangladeshis at the present time share a modicum of justifiable pride in the fact that the world merits this country worth watching in terms of its economic potentials. To my mind , we have reached this stage for the following reasons: First, effective utilization of early foreign assistance; second a steady ,albeit sustained, move away from a near -socialistic to an open and liberal economy; third , a shift from agriculture to manufacturing as land-space shrank to accommodate urbanization; fourth , an unleashing of remarkable entrepreneurial spirit among private sector captains of industry, as evidenced in the Ready Made Garments industry: fifth, the prevalence of a vibrant civil society intellectually aiding the social transformation with its focus on health, education, and gender issues: and finally ,a long period of political stability notwithstanding the traditional predilections of Bengali socio-political activism.

Dr. Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury

The philosophical underpinning behind the concept of ‘Least Developed Countries’ (LDCs) devised at the UN in the 1960s was to identify a set of States whose impediment to development was structural, and not due to their own faults. Hence the idea that the global trading system needed to be adjusted by providing these nations ‘special and differential treatment’, such as entailed in non-reciprocal preferential market access. This would, hopefully, create for them a level playing field. Bangladesh joined the Group in 1975, immediately following its UN membership. The conditions for joining the list of LDCs or graduating from it , are determined by the Committee for Development Policy (CDP) based on certain criteria. Out of original 48 six countries have already graduated: Botswana, Cape Verde, Maldives, Samoa, Equatorial Guinea, and Vanuatu. Nepal and Bangladesh are in the cusp of graduation.

Graduation is for Bangladesh a mix of boon and bane. It is a boon because it is an acknowledgment of progress, a major milestone in the nation’s development journey. It would improve the country’s global image which should give it better credit ratings. This would allow it to borrow more cheaply on the world market. It is a bane because it would ultimately lose all the preferences accorded to LDCs in global trade such as under the European Union’s Everything but Arms (EBA) initiative. However, Bangladesh has not quite optimized on those advantages.

Incidentally, as chair of the WTO Committee of Trade and Development, as also of the LDC Group in Geneva in the late 1990s and early 2000, and also as Special Advisor to Secretary General Rubens Ricupero of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), I was involved with the related deliberations with the European Union. Bangladesh has always played a leadership role on behalf of the LDCs in all multilateral negotiations, both at the WTO in Geneva and at the United Nations in New York. Sometimes these involved not only tough deliberations with developed countries and ‘economies in transition’ (former socialist countries) , but also with developing member-States of the Group of 77 (because it entailed the sharing of the cake).Bangladesh’s graduation will in many ways deprive the LDCs of this capacity. Across the diplomatic scene, Bangladesh could also depend on the support of fellow-LDCs on a broad range of issues. I would gratefully recall the contribution in this regard of the so-called “Utstein Sisters” of Europe (named after a venue in Northern Europe where they met), five women Development Cooperation Ministers, including Evelyn Herfkens of the Netherlands and Claire Short of the UK. They were ardent advocates of LDC aspirations, and were instrumental, among other things, in the WTO’s acceptance, unlike in the case its predecessor, the General Agreement on Trade and Tariff (GATT), of the broad principle that trade is a key tool of development.

Following graduation, Bangladesh will need to negotiate a continuation of international support measures to render the graduation process smooth and sustainable. If needs be, even after the grace period of quota-free duty- free market access vis-à-vis Europe till 2029. Though in Brussels the EU could cut Bangladesh some slack because of its performance, at the WTO, Bangladesh, will be well advised to attempt a norm setting exercise with regard to graduating countries with the new Director General, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, who is empathetic, as well as with the membership. This will take some skillful diplomacy. But I would like to strongly underscore that negotiations are but the tip of the ice- berg. The main challenge would lie in tackling the fundamentals beneath. For instance, in addressing domestically the 27 requirements, including corruption, non-compliances, and other inadequacies, across the governance spectrum to achieve GSP -plus status. Also, to derive other global market benefits.

Comparative advantages would have to be transformed into competitive advantage. Low-wages will tend to perpetuate poverty. So wage-rise, an essential tool for poverty mitigation, would need to be carefully calibrated with the increase in productivity. Economy should diversify, particularly into services, which do not face goods tariff and hence less affected by loss of preferences. The Internet sector, on which the government is prudently laser-focused, can help Bangladesh leapfrog into economic modernity. The pharmaceutical industry should seriously reflect on how to navigate WTO regulations on Trade in Intellectual Property, or TRIPS. Mutually rewarding arrangements with other Asian economic powerhouses are called for. For instance, Free Trade Agreement with a country like Singapore could, and I use the word ‘could’ advisedly, unlock potentials, but that would require further serious study and examination.

Throughout my negotiating career I had felt that preferences tend only to prolong pain. There are no such things as friends in the marketplace. The sooner we start to confront the real world of competition the better off we are. Indeed, if we can play our cards right, the graduation could be our ‘’break-out” moment to reflect on reforms, on raising productivity and on boosting growth. Efforts must be directed towards moving up the value chain by attracting quality FDI. From my current perch in the corporate sector in Singapore, I see Vietnam as an example worthy of emulation.

So, to conclude, graduation is inevitable if progress is the goal, as it must be, and indeed desirable, just as, in our individual lives, coming of age, that is of turning 21, is. Readiness is key. From what I see, there is nothing like the last minute in speeding up requisite preparations. Doubtless, there is much work to be done. But we must bear in mind that if there is a hill to climb, waiting will not make it any smaller!

Dr Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury is the Honorary Fellow at the Institute of South Asia Studies, NUS. He is a former Foreign Advisor (Foreign Minister) of Bangladesh and President & Distinguished Fellow of Cosmos Foundation. The views addressed in the article are his own. He can be reached at: isasiac@nus.edu.sg

 

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By Ramu Damodaran
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 22 2021 (IPS)

Legends are the lodestars of history, the marriage of Sir Dorabji Tata with Meherbai on Valentine’s Day of 1898 among the most lyrical of them. Two years later, he gifted her the Jubilee Diamond, the sixth largest diamond in the world, twice as large as the Kohinoor.

Less than fifty months later, Tata Steel, the business in which he played so pivotal a role, was enveloped in a financial crisis; Dorabji and Meherbai pledged the whole of their wealth, including the Diamond, to the Imperial Bank, to make it possible for wages to be paid and not a job sacrificed.

Tata Steel returned to profitability within a quarter century, Meherbai and Dorabji died soon after, bequeathing their wealth to the Sir Dorabji Tata Charitable Trust – including the Diamond which was sold in 1937, yielding funds to create institutions such as the Tata Memorial Hospital, the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and the Tata Institute of Social Sciences.

That history came to mind this past Sunday – February 14 – when I opened a carefully wrapped package with my address on it in Russy Sumariwalla’s gentle hand. It was a publication I had not come across earlier, the FEZANA Journal, its cover pictured above, produced by the Federation of Zoroastrian Associations of North America.

As its editor-in-chief, Dr. Dolly Dastoor, notes in her editorial, “FEZANA through its members, young and old, has been supporting the SDGs much before the pandemic started,” a pandemic which, in the phrase of FEZANA President Arzan Sam Wadia, “hit the pause button on our planet.”

The wealth of reading in this issue included a reflective piece by Narges Kakalia on the Cyrus Cylinder and its “glimmers of universality”, notably its injunction that slavery “should be exterminated the world over”, glimmers that brighten each day with our global interdependence on the SDGs reaffirmed.

Interdependence also in a relatively unexpected area, faith. One of the articles brings together three authors, Joshua Basofin of the Parliament of World’s Religions, David Hales, a former Chair of the World Heritage Convention and Michael Terrin, an Oblate of St Benedict.

It notes that “nearly every religious, indigenous, and spiritual tradition teaches a moral obligation to protect the planet“, an obligation which they can help exercise in practice as faith based organizations “control 8% of the habitable land surface of Earth, 5% of all commercial forests, 50% of schools worldwide and 10% of the world’s financial institutions.”

The journal made engrossing reading in the middle of a month which began with World Interfaith Harmony Week. A quick search on the agile website of the Yearbook of the United Nations suggests the General Assembly resolution which established the Day is the only one in the 75 years of United Nations history that makes a direct reference to “God” in the paragraph where it “encourages all States to support, on a voluntary basis, the spread of the message of interfaith harmony and goodwill in the world’s churches, mosques, synagogues, temples and other places of worship during that week, based on love of God and love of one’s neighbour or on love of the good and love of one’s neighbour, each according to their own religious traditions or convictions.”

There is also a reference in a 1966 judgment by the International Court of Justice, in a case challenging South Africa’s occupation of present-day Namibia, with a twist in its tail that “all mankind are children of God, and, consequently, brothers and sisters, notwithstanding their natural and social differences, namely man and woman, husband and wife, master and slave, etc.”

George Macaulay Trevelyan, the historian, whose birthday fell last Tuesday, once cautioned “never tell a young person that anything cannot be done. God may have been waiting centuries for someone ignorant enough of the impossible to do that very thing.”

The FEZANA Journal carried a story about a young girl in Lahore, Pakistan, “a tinkerer by nature, she often got up to her elbows in grease as she absorbed herself in the mechanics of bike repair.”

Some forty years later, and five years ago last week, Nergis Mavalvala “was among the team of scientists whom, for the first time, observed ripples in the fabric of spacetime called gravitational waves.”

She has since been appointed Dean of the School of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the first woman to hold the post.

The institutions Dorabji and Meherbai Tata’s bequests helped found continue to engage the young in adventures of discovery; at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research scientists have noted “what we experience as a child often has a lasting impression on our behaviour throughout the course of our life.

Stressful and adverse experience during early life of an individual can often lead to a lasting vulnerability towards developing psychiatric disorders in adult life, a question particularly pertinent to the current times when depression has emerged as one of the greatest challenges to global health.

In a recent study, the Vaidya lab has tested the idea via switching on the signalling pathway that leads to overactivation of excitatory neurons within the forebrain, using genetically engineered mice.”

And the Tata Institute of Social Sciences is working with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Maharashtra state government in India on an “Inclusive Disaster Preparedness and Risk Reduction Programme” in the district of Bhiwandi, focusing specifically on people with disabilities (PWD), it is the first of its kind, mainstreaming pre-disaster vulnerability reduction programme, designed to mainstream disability in disaster management, train and sensitize professionals on disability and emergency response and establish a resource centre providing advisory and informational services for PWD.

The Foundation for Ecological Security, supported by Tata Trusts, aims to create sustainable livelihoods for 38 million rural poor by strengthening local governance and conserving 30 million acres of Commons in India totalling to a fifth of India’s total Commons land.

An indicator of how directly this is related to faith came to mind as I read the “Final Report of the Independent Review on the Economics of Biodiversity” published earlier this month by the government of the United Kingdom; it says “Our economies, livelihoods and well-being all depend on our most precious asset: Nature.

We are part of Nature, not separate from it. We rely on Nature to provide us with food, water and shelter; regulate our climate and disease; maintain nutrient cycles and oxygen production; and provide us with spiritual fulfilment and opportunities for recreation and recuperation, which can enhance our health and well-being. We also use the planet as a sink for our waste products, such as carbon dioxide, plastics and other forms of waste, including pollution.”

Nature and spiritual fulfilment have been at the heart of many festivities around the world last week: the start of the Lunar new year in Asia, the Carnival in Brazil and the Caribbean, Basant Panchami, the celebration of spring, in India which coincides with tribute to Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge, and her injunction to cultivate an organized, clutter free mind, much like the SDG tree on the FEZANA Journal cover, or the language tree devised by the German linguist August Schleicher, whose birth bicentennial falls today, a model, as Wikipedia the Wise informs us, that “as with species, each language is assumed to have evolved from a single parent or “mother” language, with languages that share a common ancestor belonging to the same language family.”

Could that symbol, the tree, not work for faith as well , its many sturdy branches unfurling from an integral and common whole, each branch sustaining, and being sustained by, the leaves and shoots that from its recesses thrive?

Beethoven, whose 250th birth anniversary we have just celebrated, signed his manuscripts with the letters SDG, standing for Soli Deo Gloria, or “Glory to God Alone”. His momentous music was nurtured in an age where faith had begun to assimilate reason, manifest often in challenges to those who sought to represent the divine rather than divinity itself.

As Eamon Duffy writes in this week’s “The New York Review of Books”, the European reformation owed much to “the burgeoning of charismatic spiritual and apocalyptic movements that seemed to threaten the stability of the institutional Church, and the mounting theological and political challenges to the centralizing authority of the papacy.”

And, writing in the “New Theatre Quarterly” in 2009, Katie Normington, a scholar in the field of drama, and the just appointed Vice Chancellor of De Montfort University in the United Kingdom, UNAI’s hub on SDG 16, observed that “in being treated as religious dramas rather than community plays – plays which evolved from the Church service rather than from a street procession – the sense of communitas disappeared from the staging, and the division of actor and audience space became very apparent.

There are no easy answers: as Dario Fo’s versions suggest, to emphasize the subversive voices of the citizens within the plays seems equally alien in late twentieth-century Britain. If political theatre is an endangered species (or an outdated beast, if that’s how you see it), then Mitchell’s production would seem to suggest that the most we can hope for is an altruistic individualism.”

My college lecturer in history, Dr. “Eric” Kapadia, a gentle and noble Zoroastrian himself, was fond of quoting the Tony Judt axiom that “geography is full of maps, history is full of chaps.” In elaborating the thought, he elevated it from glib to the “glimmer” we spoke of earlier, of the individual’s formidable role, a role far more defined than circumstance, in shaping her own history and, all too often, the histories of those around her.

“Altruistic individualism”, in Dr. Normington’s elegant phrase, allows a shaping that cares, a shaping within a community, whether of faith, geography or vocation, but a shape that draws its imagination and malleability from the reason and conviction, the “dignity and worth” of the individual within whose altruism it has tenancy.

 

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Excerpt:

Ramu Damodaran is Chief, United Nations Academic Impact

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By Sania Farooqui
NEW DELHI, India, Feb 22 2021 (IPS)

On February 1st, 2021 the military of Myanmar overthrew the country’s democratic government in a coup d’etat followed by arresting more than 40 government officials including Aung San Suu Kyi. The military declared a year-long state of emergency under the rule of it’s Commander-in-Chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing. Troops took over the streets, a night-time curfew has been put into force. Tens of thousands of protestors have taken to the streets across Myanmar, in what is seen as the biggest street protests in more than a decade. The anti-coup demonstrators are undeterred by police attacks and increasing violence from the security forces.

Yasmin Ullah

According to this list, the military has arrested multiple members of civil society, including activists, writers, musicians, filmmakers. Monitoring group Assistance Association for Political Prisoners said “more than 384 people have been detained, in a wave of mostly night-time arrests”.

The first known casualty of the coup, Mya Thwe Thwe Khaing died on February 9 when a police officer opened fire with live ammunition, hitting her in the head while she was protesting in Naypyidaw. Two more protestors were killed in the city of Mandalay, marking Myanmmar’s bloodiest day since the military seized power. Myanmar’s minority community fears renewed violence after the military coup.

United Nations Secretary General António Guterres condemned the use of deadly violence in Myanmar, “The use of lethal force, intimidation & harassment against peaceful demonstrators is unacceptable. Everyone has a right to peaceful assembly. I call on all parties to respect election results and return to civilian rule,” António Guterres said.

The military in Myanmar alleges that the recent landslide election win by Aung San Suu Kyi was marred by fraud. Following the coup, the military has already announced replacements for a number of ministers.

Witnesses in Mandalay reported seeing soldiers from the 33rd Light Infantry Division, which led the deadly campaign against Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine state in 2017. The United Nations Special Rapporteur, Tom Andrews said, “The 33rd Light Infantry Division was reportedly involved in the lethal attacks in Mandalay today – the same division responsible for mass atrocity crimes against the Rohingya in 2017. A dangerous escalation by the junta in what appears to be a war against the people of Myanmar.”

“The very idea of Aung San Suu Kyi taking the trip to Hague at the end of 2019 to defend the actions of the military spoke volume about who she is as a person, and where she stands in her understanding of how democratic transition in Myanmar should progress,” says Yasmin Ullah, a Rohingya Social Justice Activist to IPS News.

“We have had three coups so far since 1962, and that memory still lives very deeply with a lot of Myanmar citizens. The pain and hurt that comes with it still reminds them of the glory that the country could never actually achieve.

“We have lived under a military regime for decades, without unifying, without taking to the streets, and making it known to the world that we reject this unconstitutional ceasing of power. The citizens are out on the streets because they will not have another chance at this, people are done with the fact that they will have to live under a culture of impunity where the military is untouched,” says Yasmin.

Following the coup in Myanmar, Washington has imposed sanctions on the military, urging other U.N members to follow suit. The UK too announced asset freezes and travel bans on three generals in Myanmar and is also going to be putting in place new measures to prevent UK aid. Singapore warned that there will be “serious adverse consequences” for Myanmar if the situation there continues to escalate. The European Union’s foreign affairs chief Joseph Borrell urged the military and “all security forces in Myanmar to immediately stop violence against civilians.”

Rights group Human Rights Watch in its report, Myanmar, Sanctions, and Human Rights said, “it supports the use of certain types of sanctions – including targeted sanctions and travel bans, and restrictions on military, trade, financial, economic, and other relations – as a means to condemn situations involving grave widespread human rights abuses or humanitarian law violations, to assert pressure to end those abuses, to hold those responsible to account, and as a means to deter other parties from becoming complicit in abuses.”

“We are calling on the United Nations Security Council to impose a global arms embargo. Separately, the UN General Assembly can also endorse individual governments or regional organizations imposing unilateral sanctions on Myanmar’s military, something the General Assembly has done in the past (e.g., during South Africa during apartheid.), the report stated.

International rights defenders have expressed concerns over grave human rights violations in Myanmar following the Feb. 1 military coup. “What we are witnessing in Myanmar didn’t just suddenly happen. You cannot leave the perpetrators of grave crimes under international law on the loose and then act surprised when they trample human rights again,” said Amnesty International’s Deputy Director of Advocacy Sherine Tadros.

“It was already ingrained in us Rohingyas to be intimidated, to fear the military, to fear authority, because that has always been the tactics used on us. The same kind of tactics we see now – the psychological warfare, night raids, shooting of people, arbitrary arrest, restrictions of movements – all of the things that the protestors are dealing with right now have been used on every single ethinic community and the Rohingyas,” says Yasmin.

It’s been thirty-three years since the uprising in 1988 in Myanmar against the military dictatorship, also known as the 8-8-88 Movement. The armed forces continued to rule until 2011, when a new government began a return to civilian rule. The military’s current threat to revoke the constitution only revealed the fact that it is willing to overturn any political – democratic system when its interests are threatened.

“Without a real change and reform within Myanmar to the very foundation to rip off the military power because they have infested different parts of the country that makes Myanmar what it is, without doing that there is no democracy that could take place,” says Yasmin.

The author is a journalist and filmmaker based out of New Delhi. She hosts a weekly online show called The Sania Farooqui Show where Muslim women from around the world are invited to share their views.

 

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Joyce Msuya, the Deputy Executive Director for the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), says environmental issues are development issues and therefore are everybody’s issues. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

By Isaiah Esipisu
NAIROBI, Feb 22 2021 (IPS)

Its time for the world to radically change our ways if we are to make peace with the planet and create the environmental conditions so that all of humanity can thrive, delegates attending the Fifth Session of the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA-5) heard this morning.

The assembly, world’s top environmental decision-making body attended by government leaders, businesses, civil society and environmental activists, met virtually today under a theme “Strengthening Actions for Nature to Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals”. It concludes Feb. 23.

Ahead of the assembly, IPS interviewed Joyce Msuya, the Deputy Executive Director for the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), to find out what to expect from the two-day event.

Excerpts of the interview follow:

Inter Press Service (IPS): What outcome should African countries expect from the fifth session of the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA)?

Joyce Msuya (JM): UNEA is the highest international authority on environmental issues, and is focusing on nature and Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).

In terms of African countries, I will put three things on the table.  One is Action. Science has already spoken. Climate change is an issue, and biodiversity loss is happening at a faster rate than ever before, and lastly, pollution, especially plastic pollution is a big problem. So what we need is to bring the African voices and leadership to UNEA, to collectively see what African countries plan to do in terms of actions in delivering around these three planetary crises.

The second thing is partnerships. Environmental issues are development issues and they are everybody’s issues. Citizens can make little changes in their households, communities can make little changes for example on waste management, and those who live around the oceans can take care of the blue economy. So we need to see how the governments work together with the private sector, indigenous communities, with the youth and even children to address the environmental changes.

The third issue is the support to the UNEP. UNEP is the only United Nations largest entity located in the Southern Hemisphere. So this is the time it needs to be supported not just by the government of Kenya, but by African governments.

IPS: How is the COVID-19 situation going to affect these outcomes?

JM: COVID-19 has already impacted and is still going to impact the meeting in three ways. The pandemic has actually shown us the interconnectedness of environment as well as of human health. Last June for example, UNEP released a study on zoonotics to show the connection between nature and viruses.

In terms of the impact on the meeting, this is the first virtual meeting with over 100 countries participating online. This virtual connectivity was driven by COVID-19.

Thirdly, because of the virtual connectivity, countries and member states that are not represented in Nairobi will be able to join through internet connectivity. So the inclusive multilateralism will also be showcased as part of the meeting. 

IPS: What informed the choice of UNEA-5’s theme, ‘Strengthening Actions for Nature to achieve the 2020 agenda on SDGs’?

JM: The design and the agreement of the theme was grounded on a consultative process. For example in Africa, there was the African ministerial meeting looking at environmental issues. The theme was proposed for member states consideration and so they debated for its relevance, it’s implication for different countries and they collectively decided on this theme. It is a timely theme for the nature, but also for the SDGs. We are nine years away for the 2030 deadline for the SDGs.

As the UN Secretary General has already said, this is the UN decade for action when it comes to agenda 2030.

IPS: The UN Secretary General has also said that this is the year he is pushing for commitments from all member states for zero emissions by 2050, and the COP is the most appropriate forum where this should materialize. What does the UNEP want to see in terms of commitments?

JM: We work under various teams under the Secretary General and what he said is actually what has been guiding our work. We work very closely with the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) on the upcoming Conference of Parties (COP) on climate change and we are providing science to help the discussions. As well, we should not forget about the COP on biodiversity, which will be hosted by China because nature and climate change go hand in hand.

In addition, we are providing science to inform for example businesses. Recently we launched the Global Environmental Outlook for Business to provide data and science to help businesses understand what role they can play in reducing the impact of climate change.

IPS: In many African countries, people have invaded wetlands with buildings being constructed in such areas especially in urban areas to accommodate the surging population. Is this a concern to you? If so, how can it be addressed?

JM: In UNEP we believe that wetlands are important in maintaining micro-climates in the areas where they occur, as well as releasing moisture into the atmosphere through evaporation.

At the global level we advocate for the preservation of the wetlands. We have worked with a number of countries in sharing experiences that are working very well on preservation of wetlands  from one country to another. Our science also helps inform how wetlands can be preserved and in Kenya here for example, we work with the government at their request to provide technical assistance and science to support their efforts in protecting the wetlands.

Overall in many African countries, we are starting a discussion with ministries of environment where we are advocating for the preservation of wetlands.

IPS: What kind of policies do we need to put in place to reverse the biodiversity loss across the world?

JM: One of the places where UNEP has been working with the Biodiversity Secretariat is on the post 2020 Biodiversity Framework. Parties, member states and the environment community have been looking at the lessons learned from previous studies. And now there is a new biodiversity framework that will be discussed at the COP.

So, one, is providing substantive support to the work of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). The second, for example in Kenya, we are working with the Ministry of Interior on tree planting. The government has set out a goal of planting millions of trees over the next two years, and through our Africa department. We are supporting those efforts. We have had some of our staff members join hands with local communities to plant trees.

Then third area is on partnerships. Trees are important not only for the environment, but also for the agriculture sector. So we are joining hands with other parts of the UN to advocate and support tree planting.

IPS: How has COVID-19 and subsequent lockdowns impacted on climate action globally?

JM: That is a very interesting question. From the time the pandemic came in place almost a year ago, a number of countries shut down including offices and economic activities. What anecdotal evidence seems to suggest is that air pollution has been addressed. This is because there were no many cars in the streets, and there was no much pollution into the air.

However, we should not forget that the pandemic is still a humanitarian problem and a crisis because people have lost jobs and many more have lost lives. We have been working with the World Health Organisation for example to try and understand the link between nature and health.

We are also mindful that this is also an economic problem, and we are seeing a number of countries now rebuilding their economies.

But the post COVID-19 era provides us with an opportunity for a green reconstruction of our economies. So the pandemic has been a reflecting time, but it has also shown that UNEP, member states and multilateralism can still function virtually.

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Excerpt:

IPS interviews JOYCE MSUYA, the Deputy Executive Director for the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), to find out what to expect for the Fifth Session of the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA-5)

The post Q&A: UN Environment Assembly Kicks Off With a Call to Make Peace with Nature appeared first on Inter Press Service.