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Palestinians being displaced amid threats by Israeli settlers in Nablus area. (October 2023). Credit: UN OCHA
 
The unprecedented and unfathomable savagery that was inflicted by Hamas on 1,400 innocent Israeli civilians and off-duty soldiers has shaken to the core every human being with a conscience. Beyond that, it has also rattled the prevailing conditions between Israel and the Palestinians, making it impossible to return to the status quo ante. This incomprehensible massacre offers, though under horrifying circumstances, an unprecedented opportunity to bring a gradual end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This unparalleled breakdown resulting from Hamas’s savagery has fundamentally changed the dynamic of the conflict and created a new paradigm that could lead to a breakthrough of historic proportions to reach a permanent peace agreement based on a two-state solution.

By Alon Ben-Meir
NEW YORK, Nov 6 2023 (IPS)

Since the 1967 Six Day War, many efforts have been made to reach a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians through mediation conducted by an impartial mediator, face-to face negotiations, international conferences, offering incentives, back-channel talks, interim agreements (in particular the Oslo Accords), and occasionally by an influential party exerting pressure on both sides, especially the US.

None of the above approaches nor several others to reach a peace agreement have worked. The failures to reach an agreement are fundamentally attributed to the fact that both sides claim exclusive ownership to the entire land from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River, albeit they blame each other for failing to make the necessary concessions to reach a peace agreement.

While the prospect of a two-state solution was viable following the 1993 Oslo Accords, the outlook for such a solution became progressively dimmer as Israel moved to the right-of-center. Prime Minister Netanyahu, who was bent on sabotaging the Oslo Accords when he served as prime minister between 1996 and 1999, and has been in power for most of the past 15 years, made it clear repeatedly that there will be no Palestinian state under his watch.

The idea of a two-state solution was steadily losing traction in Israel, the occupation of the West Bank was normalized, and a de facto apartheid state was created, which became a way of life for most Israelis and Palestinians.

The changing dynamic of the conflict

It is well known in conflict resolution that sometimes it takes a major breakdown that precipitates an extraordinary crisis to change the dynamic of a conflict. The shockingly unexpected and devastating Yom Kippur War in 1973, which subsequently led to a peace agreement between Egypt and Israel, offers a potent example.

As such, it made it simply impossible to return to the status quo ante. Indeed, neither Israel nor the Palestinians, including Hamas, will be the same following this most heinous and unprecedented massacre and Israel’s retaliation that has already exacted (as of this writing) more than 8,700 Palestinian casualties—not to speak of the unimaginable death and destruction that will occur as Israel undertakes its ground invasion of Gaza.

This unfolding horror should have been expected because of what was happening on the ground in the West Bank and Gaza over the past few years, especially in the last 10 months since the formation of the most extremist right-wing coalition government in Israel’s history (as I pointed out in my article published on October 3, 2022). Indeed, it did not take a prophet to augur what would happen next.

The increasingly violent flareups in the West Bank have been claiming hundreds of Palestinian lives, mostly under the age of 30, each year (so far this year over 300 West Bank Palestinians have already been killed, as of the time of writing, over 100 since October 7 alone). The frequent night raids, evictions, incarcerations, demolition of houses, and gross human rights abuses became the norm.

Despair, depression, and hopelessness swept much of the Palestinian population, akin to the gathering of a ferocious storm that successive Israeli governments led by Netanyahu chose to brush off. Moreover, it is the psychological dimension of the conflict that has now come into full display, exposing decades-old mental and emotional trauma the Palestinians have been experiencing to which the wright-wing Israelis were oblivious and which was bound to manifest in an unprecedented way.

The Palestinians’ resentment and hatred of Israel were intensifying. Since the new government could not formally annex Palestinians territories, it has resorted to intimidation and harassment of the Palestinians under the watchful eye of the criminal Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, who gave the settlers free reign to rampage Palestinian communities in order to ‘encourage’ them to leave.

The Netanyahu government’s intent to slowly annex much of the West Bank became abundantly clear. Needless to say, none of the above can justify under any circumstances Hamas’ heinous attack on Israeli civilians. Hamas must pay for it dearly, and pay they will.

But such unthinkable carnage happened because of the perilous “strategy” that successive Israeli governments pursued that enabled Hamas and prevented the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. This also explains why Netanyahu consistently refused to negotiate with any prospective unity government between the PA and Hamas.

The creation of Hamas

Israel created Hamas to counter balance the secular national Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) movement led by Yasser Arafat, which was intended to divide the Palestinians into two camps and prevent the creation of a Palestinian state. The creation of Hamas by Israel, which has been confirmed by many top Israeli military and civilian officials over a number of years, is unquestionable.

Former Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who was the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s, told a New York Times reporter that he had helped finance Hamas as a “counterweight” to the secularists and leftists of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Fatah party, led by Yasser Arafat, stating “The Israeli Government gave me a budget and the military government gives to the mosques.” And among many others, Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal in 2009 that “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation.”

In a 2015 interview, Bezalel Smotrich, the current finance minister who is also in charge of Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), stated “The Palestinian Authority is a burden, and Hamas is an asset” [emphasis added]. And in an article published in the New York Times on October 18, 2023, entitled “Netanyahu Led Us to Catastrophe. He Must Go.,” author Gershom Gorenberg stated that “Bringing Gaza back under the Palestinian Authority was apparently never part of the prime minister’s agenda. Hamas was the enemy and, in a bizarre twist, an ally against the threat of diplomacy, a two-state solution and peace.”

Indeed, no Israeli prime minister has pursued this disastrous policy of divide and conquer more vigorously than Netanyahu. Although he maintained the blockade over Gaza, he allowed the flow of hundreds of millions of dollars from Qatar and other countries into Hamas’ coffers, knowing full well that more than 50 percent of these funds were used by Hamas to buy and manufacture weapons, including tens of thousands of rockets, and build a massive network of tunnels with command and control while readying itself for the next war.

Gorenberg further stated that “In 2019, for instance, Netanyahu explained why he allowed the Hamas regime in Gaza to be propped up with cash from Qatar rather than have it depend on a financial umbilical cord to the West Bank. He told Likud lawmakers that ’whoever is against a Palestinian state should be for’ the Qatari funding…” Yuval Diskin, head of Shin Bet from 2005-2011, stated in January 2013 that “If we look at it over the years, one of the main people contributing to Hamas’s strengthening has been Bibi Netanyahu, since his first term as prime minister.”

And in a more telling statement from someone who has been deeply immersed in Israeli politics and governance, Ehud Barak stated in August 2019, “His strategy is to keep Hamas alive and kicking… even at the price of abandoning the citizens [of the south] … in order to weaken the PA in Ramallah…”

Netanyahu’s ill-fated “strategy” was an illusion. He believed that he could control the monster that he nurtured over the years, which instead came back to slaughter hundreds of innocent Israelis who have been relying on their government for protection and were tragically let down.

They have been betrayed by a prime minister who has been fixated on bolstering Israel’s security in the West Bank while weakening the security of the southern front along the Gaza border. And while Netanyahu was sparing no efforts to ‘reform’ the judiciary, Hamas was planning, training, acquiring weapons, and perfecting the technique to wage an assault against Israel more daring than anyone could have possibly imagined.

It all happened under Netanyahu’s watch. And worse yet, how is it possible that the world’s most renowned intelligence agency, Israel’s Mossad, failed to detect the planning of an attack of such magnitude that it took perhaps more than a year to prepare? And why did Netanyahu ignore the warning of Egypt’s Intelligence Minister General Abbas Kamel, who personally called Netanyahu and warned him that Hamas was likely to do “something unusual, a terrible operation” only 10 days before the attack?

I do not suggest or even imply that Netanyahu knew what was going to happen but chose to ignore it, but rather that he was simply dismissive of what Hamas is capable of and believed that he had a good handle on what was happening in Gaza. He was preoccupied with passing legislation that would subordinate the Supreme Court and the appointment of judges to elected politicians, which would have destroyed Israel’s democracy and allowed him to assume authoritarian powers, to which he badly aspired.

Although the Palestinians on the whole, be they in the West Bank or Gaza, are innocent civilians, the extremists among them have committed many egregious acts of violence against Israel. The Palestinian leaders missed many opportunities to make peace, and made countless mistakes that aggravated their own situation.

Moreover, by threatening Israel’s very existence, extremist groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad allowed successive Israeli governments to make a strong case against the Palestinians by portraying them as an irredeemable mortal enemy that poses the greatest danger to Israel’s national security and hence, the Palestinians cannot be a party to peace.

With these perspectives established by the Israeli government, maintaining the occupation became the state policy, however unsustainable it has been deemed by any keen and informed observer.

What’s next

That said, once the war is over and the dust settles, a growing majority on both sides will come to recognize one irreversible fact. Co-existence is not one of many options, it is the only option, be that under conditions of peace or perpetual violent enmity. The two-state solution has come back to the table, as it has always been the only viable option. Both sides must now face this bittersweet reality.

The question is what will happen now that Israel and Hamas are engaged in fierce fighting on the ground that will surely exact an immense toll on both sides. I maintain that whether Israel limits its ground invasion of Gaza to its northern part, or continues its targeted bombing of Hamas’s encampments while seeking to decapitate as many of its leaders as possible, or simply stops the fighting, which is unlikely, and focuses on releasing the over 240 hostages, nothing will change in any substantial way the irreversible new paradigm that has bitterly awakened both sides to their miserable, unsustainable status quo.

To be sure, what option the Israeli government will choose to bring an end to the conflict will only define the length of time that that might take, the extent of difficulties in the negotiation, the modalities of the negotiating process, the level of public and international pressure to find a solution, and the likely intermittent violence. But none of these issues will change the fundamental point of departure that point to the endgame of a two-state solution, regardless of how many more hurdles might be encountered.

Dr. Alon Ben-Meir is a professor of international relations at the Center for Global Affairs at New York University (NYU). He teaches courses on international negotiation and Middle Eastern studies.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Women were reduced to cheerleaders in Zimbabwe's recent 2023 general elections. Credit: Farai Shawn Matiashe/IPS

By Farai Shawn Matiashe
BULAWAYO, Nov 6 2023 (IPS)

Zimbabwe’s recent election has exposed weak gender policies both at the political party and governmental levels as women were sidelined despite the fact that they make up more than half of the 6.5 million electorate.

Zimbabwe held its presidential, parliamentary and local municipality elections on August 23 and 24.

Only 22 women were elected for the 210 National Assembly seats out of the 70 women contested against 637 male candidates, according to the Election Resource Centre.

The number of women who contested the National Assembly seats shows a decline compared to the previous election in 2018, where the number of women who competed against men was 14 percent.

In the 2023 election, the total number of women was 11 percent.

The 22 women who were successfully duly elected as Members of Parliament represent a meagre 10 percent of women in the National Assembly, meaning only 30 percent of the women who contested won, according to the Women’s Academy for Leadership and Political Excellence (WALPE).

This figure has fallen from the 25 women, 11.9 percent, who won seats in the 2018 elections.

“There is a lack of political will on the part of our political leaders to promote gender equality,” says WALPE executive director Sitabile Dewa.

“The political environment in Zimbabwe is characterised by violence, patriarchy, fear, harassment and marginalisation of women in electoral processes. These challenges are some of the major impediments to women’s ascendancy to leadership positions at all levels of government within the country.”

Dewa tells IPS that for Zimbabwe to close the gender gap, political party leaders must walk the talk on equality through genuinely and sincerely levelled the electoral field to allow women, young women and women with disabilities to freely, actively and fully participate as both candidates and voters.

A video went viral recently after a Zanu PF campaigner used derogatory names to refer to Judith Tobaiwa, a female candidate for Kwekwe Central, a constituency located 215 kilometres from Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital.

Expensive nomination fees were also a barrier to many aspiring female candidates.

In the 2023 general polls, the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission raised the nomination fees beyond the reach of many women who are already disadvantaged economically as compared to their male counterparts in the country.

Presidential candidates paid USD 20,000 while parliamentary candidates parted away with $1000 and $100 for council candidates.

In contrast, in 2018, presidential candidates paid USD 1,000, while legislators paid USD 50.

Linda Masarira of the opposition party Labour, Economists and African Democrats (LEAD) is one of the aspiring presidential candidates who struggled to raise the USD 20,000 nomination fees needed by ZEC this year.

While seats for the National Assembly were shared between CCC and Zanu PF, those from the smaller parties and female candidates who ran as independents failed to win any seats from the plebiscite, showing difficulties outside the main political parties.

All these figures fall short of the 30 percent minimum threshold set out in the 1997 Southern African Development Community (SADC) Declaration on Gender and Development, Zimbabwe’s Constitution, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 5, which seeks to promote gender equality and empower all women and girls, according to WAPLE.

In June, the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) announced 11 presidential candidates, and there were no women.

Two female presidential candidates, Elisabeth Valerio of United Zimbabwe Alliance (UZA) and Masarira, were blocked by ZEC on petty issues of late payment of nomination fees.

Both female presidential candidates took their matters to court.

Valerio won her case, and ZEC was forced to accept her nomination papers.

But Masarira lost the case.

Incumbent Emmerson Mnangagwa of Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (Zanu PF) was controversially declared the winner of the hotly disputed contested election with 52.6 percent against his biggest rival Nelson Chamisa of Citizens Coalition for Change (CCC) with 44 percent of the vote.

The opposition has since rejected the election as the polls were marred by voter intimidation, ballot paper delays in opposition strongholds like Harare, Bulawayo and some parts of Manicaland Province and rigging by the electoral body in favour of the ruling Zanu PF.

Multiple observer reports, including SADC, declared the elections not credible, not free, and not fair.

The recently reelected leader has appointed just six women out of 26 cabinet positions.

The gender gap is manifesting in Mnangagwa’s appointment of cabinet ministers.

When Mnangagwa announced his cabinet ministers in September, only six were women out of 26 positions, representing 23 percent.

“It is going to be a mammoth task for Zimbabwe to achieve 50/50 gender balance as enshrined in the Constitution,” says Masarira.

She says this is because the country does not have a “Gender Equality Act to operationalise” some sections of the Constitution.

“Secondly, there is selective application of the Constitution by political parties and the government itself, especially when it comes to issues to do with gender balance, gender equality and non-discrimination,” Masarira says.

Kembo Mohadi, the vice president who was forced to resign in 2021 amid a sex scandal, bounced back as Mnangagwa’s deputy.

Alleged recorded calls of Mohadi soliciting sex from married women who are his subordinates were leaked to the local media. Mohadi has not been charged with any sexual offence and has refuted the audio saying he was a victim of a political plot and voice cloning.

“Mr Mnangagwa is obviously not bothered by Mohadi’s sex scandals or anyone for that matter,” says Gladys Hlatywayo, a CCC senior official.

“In fact, we have always known that the sex scandals were never the reason why he was forced to resign and were a mere cover-up to a political motive. The message that Mr Mnangagwa is sending by reappointing Mohadi is that he does not care at all about women’s rights issues,” she tells IPS.

Dewa says Mahadi’s reappointment as Zimbabwe’s Vice President shows that President Mnangagwa is not willing to consider the welfare and well-being of women.

“Mr Mohadi’s re-appointment stinks in the face of justice for all survivors of sexual abuse by men. It is an indictment on the highest office of the land that women’s rights are of no importance,” she says.

“The office of the Vice President demands the highest levels of integrity and moral probity by its occupants.”

The 2013 Zimbabwean Constitution introduced a women’s quota system, setting aside 60 out of 270 parliamentary seats for women.

This proportional representation provision, which was set to expire in 2023, was extended for two additional electoral cycles by an amendment made to the Constitution by Mnangagwa’s regime last year.

Some women prefer these proportional representation seats as compared to the contested ones.

Dewa says there is a need for a complete overhaul of the current electoral system to promote gender equality in politics.

“The electoral voting system must be changed from the first past the post to proportional representation, with a list in zebra format, as this guarantees gender equality. Citizens must vote for political parties, not individuals, as this also insulates women from political violence and vote buying,” she says.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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Several women dance and burn their veils during a nighttime demonstration in Bandar Abbas, southwestern Iran. The protest is in response to the tragic deaths of Jina Amini, who was beaten for not wearing the veil properly, and Armita Geravand on October 28 for similar reasons. Credit: Social networks

By Karlos Zurutuza
ROME, Nov 3 2023 (IPS)

On October 28, Armita Geravand, a 16-year-old Iranian teenager, passed away a month after she had been beaten by the police in the Tehran subway for not wearing the Islamic veil correctly.

Geravand’s death took place 13 months after Jina Amini´s, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman also beaten to death after being arrested in Tehran. She was also wearing her veil in the wrong way.

Farsi is the only official language in a country where any expression of identities other than Persian is banned and even punished. But it turns out that minorities are the majority: more than 60% of the almost 90 million Iranians are not Persians

Amini’s murder, however, was the trigger for one of the largest protests that have shaken the Islamic Republic of Iran since its foundation in 1979. Hundreds of thousands of young women and men took to the streets chanting “Women, life, freedom” all across the country.

The Government responded with a wave of repression that resulted in hundreds of deaths and thousands of arrests between 2022 and 2023.

Removing the Islamic veil in public, or even burning it, has been a recurring gesture nationally to denounce the constant violation of women’s rights in Iran.

Such a powerful image became the key symbol in protests which also included demands from the country’s minorities.

Both the previous monarchical regime (1925-1979) and the current one have focused on building a national identity as a homogeneous Persian society, ignoring the rest of the nations of Iran.

Thus, Farsi is the only official language in a country where any expression of identities other than Persian is banned and even punished. But it turns out that minorities are the majority: more than 60% of the almost 90 million Iranians are not Persians.

This is the case of the Baloch, a people numbering about four million in the extreme southeast of Iran, bordering Pakistan and Afghanistan.

 

An aerial view of Zahedan, the capital of Balochistan under Persian control. To this day it is the only city in Iran where protests continue to take place every Friday. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

 

A former political prisoner, Shahzavar Karimzadi is today the vice president of the Free Balochistan Movement, a political party banned in Iran that brings together Baloch people from three territories: Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

“We have been fighting for our most basic national rights for many years. We advocate for a secular, decentralized and democratic State, but that does not mean that we rule out our right to self-determination,” Karimzadi told IPS over the phone from London.

Apparently, Balochistan under Iranian control is the only corner of the country where the protest has not yet faded away. Karimzadi stressed that his people continue to demonstrate every Friday in Zahedan – the provincial capital, 1,100 kilometres southeast of Tehran – “despite the violence with which the regime responds.”

It’s true. An Amnesty International report published on October 26 denounced cases of torture of detainees in mass arrests in Balochistan that included children. The NGO urged the Iranian authorities to allow access to a UN mission to investigate human rights violations related to the protest.

The statistics speak volumes. Although the Baloch in Iran make up 4% of the country’s total population, a study by the Iranian NGO Iran Human Rights found that 30% of those executed by the State in 2022 belonged to this ethnic group.

 

Downtown Iranshar, in Balochistan under Iranian control. It is the poorest and most underdeveloped region of the country and one of the most severely punished by the repression of the clerical regime. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

 

From the mountains to the sea

Like the Baloch, the Kurds are also predominantly Sunni Muslims, an added stigma to their distinct ethnicity from the Persians under the ruling Shiite theocracy..

With a population estimated between ten and fifteen million, they live mainly in the northwest of the country, on the borders of Turkey and Iraq.

In an interview with IPS in the mountains between Iraq and Iran, Zilan Vejin, co-president of the Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan (PJAK), recalled that the slogan, “Woman, life and freedom” was coined by the Kurdish movement during a 2013 meeting.

“The protest started in Kurdistan led by women. From there, it spread throughout the country because it brings together people of all nationalities within Iran,” explained Vejin.

According to the guerrilla leader, calls against the mandatory use of the Islamic veil are “nothing more than the excuse for a revolt that calls for freedom and democracy.”

Vejin outlined his political project not only for Iran but for the region as a whole. It is a decentralized model, “a democracy built from the bottom up that advocates secularism, gender equality and the right of all peoples to develop their culture and language.”

It could be a solution that the Ahwazis of Iran could also accept.

They number about twelve million and concentrate on the shores of the Persian Gulf, right on the border with Iraq. They have paid for their Arab language and culture with decades of repression — from both the previous and current Iranian regimes.

Faisal al Ahwazi is the spokesperson for the Ahwazi Democratic Popular Front, one of the minority’s main political organizations. In a conversation with IPS by telephone from London, Al Ahwazi explained why his people had distanced themselves from the latest wave of protests.

“The repression we suffered in November 2019 is still too present. Back then, more than 200 Ahwazi protesters were murdered by the regime. That protest had no replicas in the rest of the country and we did not feel solidarity towards us,” lamented Al Ahwazi.

He highlighted the “lack of coordination” in the most recent protests and warned of dangers that may arise from a falsely executed regime change. “If the Persians want to remain in power, there will be a civil war,” said Al Ahwazi.

 

The moment in which Zilan Vejin was re-elected as co-president of the PJAK. The Kurdish liberation movement advocates a decentralization of the entire Middle East region. Courtesy PJAK

 

“Separatists”

One of the features of the last wave of protests in Iran has been the high level of participation by young people and their commitment to a “horizontal” movement. Although the absence of leadership has often been taken as a virtue, many analysts identify it as one of the reasons behind its failure.

Mehrab Sarjov, a political analyst and observer of the Iranian issue, also points out the lack of common goals and plans. “We don’t even know what kind of a country they vow for when the clerics are no longer there,” Sarjov explained to IPS from London over the phone.

The expert also recalled that Azeris make the country’s main minority and he highlighted their ties with both Turkey and Azerbaijan.

“Even if it´s Azeri, Kurdish, Arab or Baloch autonomists asking for decentralization and democratization of the country, they´re always labelled as ‘separatists’ by the Persians and automatically discarded,” explained Sarjov.

“It is the rhetoric of the ‘developed centre’ versus a ‘periphery’ whose economic and social backwardness is a consequence, they say, of its distance from that very centre,” he added.

In the absence of an inclusive project from the Persian core of the country, Sarjov points to the country’s minorities as “the main opposition force to the Government.”

But further steps need to be taken.

“Even the most secular and progressive Persians still do not recognize the rest of the peoples of Iran. It will still take time until they understand that they have to sit down and talk to them in order to articulate a movement with a chance of success,” concluded the expert.

 

Credit: Tomás Cuesta/Getty Images

By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Nov 3 2023 (IPS)

For many of Argentina’s voters the choice in the 19 November presidential runoff is between the lesser of two evils: Sergio Massa, economy minister of a government that’s presiding over a once-in-a-generation economic meltdown with a whopping 140-per cent inflation rate, or Javier Milei, a far-right libertarian who admires Donald Trump, wants to shut down the Central Bank and wields a chainsaw in public as a symbol of his willingness to slash the state. Many will rue that it ever came to this.

A peculiar outsider

A post-modern media celebrity, Milei’s performance style is a perfect fit for social media. He’s easily angered, reacts violently and insults copiously. He’s unapologetically sexist and mocks identity politics.

Milei bangs the drum for ‘anarcho-capitalism’, an ultra-individualistic ideology in which the market has absolute pre-eminence: earlier this year, he described the sale of human organs as ‘just another market’.

To expand his appeal beyond this extreme economic niche he forged an alliance with the culturally conservative right. His running mate, Victoria Villarruel, represents the backlash against abortion – legalised after decades of civil society campaigning in 2020 – and sexual diversity and gender equality policies, along with reappraisal of the murderous military dictatorship that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983.

In the run-up to primary elections in August, the two mainstream coalitions – the centre-left incumbent Union for the Homeland (UP) and the centre-right opposition Together for Change (JxC) – displayed a notable lack of leadership and indulged in internal squabbles that showed very little empathy for people’s daily struggles. All they had to offer in the face of widespread concerns about inflation and insecurity were the candidacies of the current minister of the economy and a former minister of security. They made it easy for Milei to hold them responsible for decades of corruption, ineffectiveness and failure.

In Milei’s discourse, the hardworking, productive majority is being bled dry by taxation to maintain the privileges of a parasitic and corrupt political ‘caste’. His proposal is deceptively simple: shrink the state to a minimum to destroy the caste that lives off it, clearing their way for individual progress.

Milei gained traction among young voters, particularly young men, via TikTok. He found fertile ground among a generation that no longer expect to be better off than their parents. While many of his followers concede that his ideas may be a little crazy, they appear to be willing to take the risk of embracing the unknown on the basis that the really crazy plan would be to allow those long in control to retain their power and expect things to turn out differently. Milei has capitalised on the despair, hopelessness and accumulated anger so many rightfully feel.

Surprise after surprise

The first surprise came on 13 August, when Milei won the most votes of any candidate in the primaries.

Milei only entered politics in 2021, when the 17 per cent vote he amassed in the capital, Buenos Aires, sent him and two other libertarians to the National Congress. In the 2023 primaries he went much further, winning 30 per cent of the vote. He placed ahead of JxC, whose two candidates received a joint 28 per cent, and UP, the current incarnation of the Peronist Party, which took 27 per cent. The bulk of the UP vote, 21 per cent, went to Massa. That Peronism, once the dominant force, came third was a historic first.

The second surprise came on 22 October. Following the primaries, all talk was of Milei winning the presidency. He trumpeted his intent to win the first round outright. Measured against these expectations, his second place looks like an underperformance. But the fact that a candidate who wasn’t on the radar before the primaries has made the runoff shows how quickly the political landscape can shift.

In the October vote Milei took almost the exact share he’d received in the primaries. Massa finished above him with almost 37 per cent, displacing JxC, which lost four points on its second-place performance in the primaries.

The fact that the economy minister was able to distance himself from the government he’s part of – one often described as the worst in 40 years – to come first was viewed as a notable victory, even though his share was just about the lowest Peronism has ever received.

One explanation for Massa’s improved performance was turnout, which increased by eight points to almost 78 per cent – still low for a country with compulsory voting, but enough to make a difference. Much of the increase could be credited to the political machinery that mobilised voters on election day, aided by the minister-candidate pulling as many levers as he could to improve his chances. This included putting lots of instant cash into voters’ pockets, including through tax breaks benefiting targeted groups of workers and consumers.

An unpalatable decision

There’s still much uncertainty ahead. Economic failure is Milei’s best propaganda, so much will depend on how the economy behaves over the next couple of weeks. Milei and the destruction he represents can’t be written off.

Neither those currently in power nor those in the mainstream opposition recognise the obvious: Milei is their fault. They’ve held power for the best part of the past 40 years without effectively tackling any of the issues that concern people the most.

Many voters now feel they face an unpalatable choice between a corrupt and failing government and a dangerous disruptor. They fear that if they choose to keep Milei out, their votes may be misinterpreted as a show of active support for a continuity they also reject. What’s at stake here is more than one election. If Milei is kept at bay, the political dynamics leading to the current economic dysfunction will still need to be addressed – or the far-right threat to democracy won’t end with Milei.

Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Senior Research Specialist, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

 

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Keithlin Caroo speaks to young Saint Lucian on International Rural Women’s Day. Education is an important part of advocacy on behalf of women and girls. Credit: Alison Kentish/IPS

By Alison Kentish
SAINT LUCIA, Nov 3 2023 (IPS)

On August 22, 2023, Women’s Affairs Ministers from the Commonwealth huddled in a room at the Atlantis Resort in the Bahamas. For the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic, they were meeting in person.

The 13th Commonwealth Women’s Affairs Ministers Meeting was being held under the theme, Equality Towards a Common Future. It was taking place amid the acknowledgement by policymakers that issues like accelerating climate change, economic turmoil, political upheaval in some parts of the world, and the COVID-19 pandemic have taken a debilitating toll on progress toward the empowerment of women and girls.

Bahamian Prime Minister Philip Davis vowed that the gathering would be solutions-oriented.

“The time is now for our Commonwealth community to be unabashedly ambitious in our goals and plans. We need more than slogans – we need commitments,” he said.

As Dr Anne Gallagher, Director General of the Commonwealth Foundation, addressed the high-level forum, images of a recent online civil society gathering organized by the Foundation flashed on screens across the room. The key outcome of that event was a list of ten recommendations that civil society groups from across the Commonwealth want women’s affairs ministers to consider.

Recommendation number seven, “Measure better to target better,” appeared on the screen. It was one of the recommendations that drew animated discussion among delegates. It came from a young woman dedicated to helping women farmers in her part of the world.

The journey of a recommendation from an online forum to the Commonwealth’s highest decision-making body for women’s affairs is serving as an example of the importance of not just giving a voice to those who are on the ground, working with women and girls but ensuring that their concerns are heard by those charged with gender equality policy action.

A Virtual Roundtable

Keithlin Caroo was a panellist on the Commonwealth Foundation’s Critical Conversations series, a virtual discussion that seeks to find sustainable solutions to the most pressing issues for the 2.5 billion citizens of the Commonwealth.

For years, Caroo has been on a mission to help rural women in her home country, Saint Lucia, and has extended that support to the neighboring islands of St. Vincent and the Grenadines and St. Kitts and Nevis. She is the founder and executive director of Helen’s Daughters, a non-profit organization that she refers to as a ‘community,’ which has been changing the narrative on women in agriculture. Helen’s Daughters is built on the premise that while in small states, everyone is connected to agriculture, women are not sufficiently supported despite their pivotal role in the sector.

The organization helps rural women with market access and forges linkages for farmers with supermarkets, restaurants, hotels, and the public through a FarmHers Market. It runs a free Rural Women’s ‘Ag-cademy’ on the islands of Saint Lucia, St. Kitts and Nevis and St. Vincent and the Grenadines, which focuses on sustainable agriculture and entrepreneurship. It is the first all-women agri-apprenticeship programme in the Caribbean. The organization operates a structured care system that focuses on the holistic development of women, hosting training on trauma-informed care to peer-to-peer support and wellness retreats.

Before the virtual event, the Commonwealth Foundation had made it clear – recommendations from the forum would be put before decision-makers. When Caroo spoke, she did so on behalf of the women farmers who toil daily in a sector fraught with gender biases.

“This engagement was important because it shows that the voices of grassroots organizations are important to Commonwealth’s policymaking; however, what’s important for me is seeing to it that the recommendations translate from policy to actions on the ground,” she said in an interview with IPS.

“We recognized the lack of sex-disaggregated early on, and aside from our interventions, data collection, monitoring, and evaluation are key to our work. Lack of data places further burden on us because aside from crafting interventions relevant to our beneficiaries, we are also responsible for primary data collection, which takes more time and resources; however, we must craft interventions according to the current state of play rather than what is imagined. As I said during the roundtable- “We can only target better if we measure better.”

Voices like Caroo’s played an important role in ensuring a commonwealth-wide response to gender inequality.

The Process

With its theme Gender, climate change and health: how can we do better for women and girls? the virtual roundtable stoked discussion on cross-cutting issues such as violence against women, investing in women and access to education.

“The event was deliberately outcome-oriented: it included not just a debate and discussion but also a highly focused working session where all participants were charged with coming up with specific recommendations to present to this body. Not a shopping list of blue-sky ideas but practical steps that they felt reflect what Commonwealth civil society – what the 2.5 billion citizens of the Commonwealth, want their countries to do for women and girls when it comes to health and climate change,” said Gallagher.

She reminded the gathering that the Foundation is a link between Commonwealth Member States and the people they all serve. She urged the ministers to reflect on the ‘clear and urgent’ recommendations from civil society.

“For me, the clarity and simplicity of the ten recommendations signals an important truth: we all understand the challenges we are up against in relation to women’s rights and well-being, and also in relation to climate change. We all appreciate what must be done. But shifting the current trajectory in ways that make a real difference will require much more. It will require courage, commitment, and true solidarity within and between countries of the Commonwealth,” she said.

The Recommendations

Recommendation seven, “Measure better to target better,” might have struck a chord with attendees, but the other nine recommendations were also well received.

They are:

• Acknowledge that the impacts of the climate crisis are not gender-neutral,
• Empower women through gender-responsive climate policies and actions,
• Improve access to education and training for women and girls,
• Improve climate finance and bring women forward as leaders and decision-makers,
• Value and promote women and girls as adaptation educators and agents of change,
• Promote gender equality in access to healthcare
• Act to reduce gender-based violence
• Enhance women’s economic empowerment.

The meeting’s official outcome statement notes that the recommendations were welcomed and endorsed.

Their journey is not over – they are now part of the women’s affairs ministerial meeting recommendations that will be brought before Commonwealth Heads of Government at their 2024 meeting in Samoa.

“I thought this engagement was of particular importance because I had never been to a panel at this level that spoke on the intersection of gender, climate change and health or intersectionality in general. Far too often, we focus on these themes in silos,” Caroo said.

“We do not consider Helen’s Daughters an agricultural organization because we deal with gender, climate change, gender-based violence, health, economic empowerment, climate and environmental justice, several areas that contribute to the overall development of our FarmHers. I thought the roundtable was timely because our policymaking needs to take an intersectional approach.”

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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Excerpt:

Amid fears that global shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic have eroded progress toward gender equality, the Commonwealth Foundation has created an online platform that takes civil society’s recommendations for the empowerment of women and girls directly to policymakers.

Missile strikes continue through the night in Gaza. Credit: UNICEF/Eyad El Baba
 
“How much past tomorrow holds.”
Mahmoud Darwish (A rhyme for the odes Mu’allaquat)

By Tisaranee Gunasekara
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka, Nov 3 2023 (IPS)

During her 2013 visit to Sri Lanka, then UN Human Rights Commissioner Navi Pillay wanted to lay a wreath to commemorate the war-dead. “When I go to a country, I like to honour the victims, all victims, victims of LTTE, soldiers, families,” she explained.

The Rajapaksa regime refused permission and launched a campaign of lies against her. “Informed sources said that Pillay had initially informed of her desire to offer a floral tribute to the late LTTE terrorist leader Vellupillai Prabhakaran,” The Daily News wrote.

The Rajapaksas dubbed the final Eelam War a humanitarian offensive with zero-civilian casualties. Acknowledging civilian Tamil deaths was equated with playing the Tiger game. Mourning was a crime, criticising Lankan forces treachery, and referring to the root causes of the conflict justifying Tiger-atrocities. In this us-vs.-them universe, Ms. Pillay’s condemnation of the LTTE as a ‘murderous organisation’ counted for nothing.

Ms. Pillay, like UN agencies and humanitarian organisations, based her stance on International Humanitarian Law (IHL). IHL is premised on the concept of jus in bello, just conduct of war, which includes principles such as non-combatant immunity and proportionality. The Rajapaksas practiced the antithesis of IHL.

As Prof. Rajan Hoole wrote, “From 2006, the government began to do what would have been unthinkable after 1987. Intense shelling and deliberate displacement of Tamil populations became integral to its military strategy… (Himal – February 2009). Before launching the final offensive, the Rajapaksas ordered all UN agencies, INGOs, and media to leave the war-zone.

During the 2014 Gaza War, a pro-Netanyahu columnist in The Jerusalem Post urged the Israeli PM to learn from Lanka’s example of ‘resolute use of military force’ and give Hamas ‘the thrashing it deserves’ https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Fundamentally-Freund-Defeating-terrorists-From-Sri-Lanka-to-Gaza-371428).

Today Israel is waging a total war in Gaza, a war that has killed more than 3000 children so far (one child killed every 15 minutes). According to Save the Children, more children have been killed in Gaza in three weeks than in global conflicts annually in the last 4 years (2985 children 2022, 2515 in 2021, and 2674 in 2020). Oxfam has accused Israel of using starvation as a weapon of war. The UN is warning of hunger and desperation in Gaza leading to societal collapse.

How many Palestinian children must die for Israel to feel safe, or the West to say enough?

The targeting of Israeli civilians by Hamas was an act of barbarism. Israel’s retaliatory war against the entire population of Gaza is no less barbaric. As Karim Khan, a prosecutor at the International Criminal Court said, “Whether a child is born Jewish in Israel or is a Christian or Muslim in Gaza – they’re children and we should have that sense of humanity – that legal, ethical, and moral responsibility to do right by them.”

For Hamas and their supporters, Israeli children are not children. For Israel and its Western backers, Palestinian children are not children. Hamas committed war crimes. Israel is committing war crimes. And the West, the self-appointed guardians of International Humanitarian Law, is enabling Israel to go on committing war crimes. US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has descended so low as to ask Qatar to ‘moderate Al Jazeera’s coverage’ of Israel’s air strikes against Gaza, according to a Guardian report.

The repercussions of this abandonment of jus in bello are likely to be both global and long-lasting. The world could regress to a time when anything was permissible in and during war. The UN and international humanitarian organisations could become totally irrelevant. The credibility of a legal system depends on its fair application. When laws are applied selectively, they lose legitimacy. One law for friends and another for foes results in jungle for all.

By permitting, indeed helping, Israel to violate IHL, the US and the West are opening the door to a world of complete lawlessness and injustice. They are not ending terrorism but birthing it, in ever more gruesome forms.

Allied powers did nothing to impede the Holocaust. Dresden which had no military value, was fire-bombed while railway lines to Auschwitz were not. From that civilisational failure was born the cry, Never Again. But as a Jewish protestor at the anti-war demonstration near the Capitol building said, “Never again means never again for anyone.”

The world needs impartial application of IHL to Israel and Hamas, to Russia and Ukraine. The failure to do so will push humanity back to an age when life for most humans was solitary, nasty, and brutish.

Marriages made in Hell

Conception was the name given to Benjamin Netanyahu’s decades-old policy of using Hamas to divide and weaken Palestinians. Addressing Likud party Knesset members in March 2019, he explained his rationale for favouring Hamas and permitting Qatar to fund it. “Whoever opposes a Palestinian state must approve the delivery of funds to Gaza because maintaining the difference between the PA in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza will prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.”

Hamas, an acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya (Islamic Resistance Movement) does not accept Israel’s right to existence and wants to install an Islamic Caliphate in all Palestinian lands. Such an organisation would be the best excuse for Israel right’s own plans for a theocratic and non-pluralist Greater Israel.

As retired general Yair Golan pointed out, Netanyahu “created a situation in which, so long as the Palestinian Authority was weak, he could create the overall perception that the best thing to do was to annex West Bank. We weakened the very institution that we could have worked with, and strengthened Hamas” (The New Yorker – 28.10.2023). In pursuant of this, weapons were reportedly taken away from the Gaza border and given to settlers in West Bank.

Mr. Netanyahu’s Conception indirectly enabled Hamas’ October 7th attack just as his war will turn the Arab world into a breeding ground for Hamas. As Palestinian philosopher Sari Nusseibeh said, “It is a mistake to think that Hamas is an alien being – it is part of the national tapestry. It grows bigger or smaller depending on other factors. You can eliminate the guys running Hamas now, but you cannot eliminate it entirely. It will stay as a way of thinking, as an idea so long as there is a Palestinian-Israeli conflict” (ibid).

Had the Oslo Accords worked, had there been an independent democratic Palestinian state, Hamas could have been marginalised. The Accord’s monumental failure, and the resultant disillusionment in peaceful solutions (not to mention Fatah’s incompetent and corrupt practices in West Bank) helped Hamas thrive. As Hamas founder Sheik Ahmad Yassen once said, “When oppression increases people start looking for God.”

The plan to ethnic-cleanse West Bank piecemeal, using low intensity violence by Israeli settlers and the Israeli army, continues, empowered by Western indifference. As human rights lawyer Raja Shehadeh wrote, even such a quotidian activity like olive picking has been politicised by expansionist settlers who attack Palestinian olive-pickers, preventing them from reaching their lands and sometimes stealing the harvest.

In the West Bank village of Deir Istiya, those returning home from harvesting olives found notices under car windshield-wipers telling them to wait for the Great Nakba – to leave or be forcefully evicted, Israeli columnist Hagar Shezaf wrote in Haaretz on October 27th.

The pursuit of Greater Israel is a threat to Palestinian Christians as well. Settler expansionists want a Jewish state in which Christians will have little or no space. In 2012, extremist settlers attacked the Trappist Monastery in Latroun, setting its door on fire and writing anti-Christian graffiti such as Jesus is a monkey on its walls. Jerusalem’s Monastery of the Cross too has been attacked.

Again in 2012, Israel politician Michael Ben Ari tore a copy of the New Testament in the Knesset and threw it into a rubbish bin after denouncing it as an abhorrent book. A second legislator wanted bible to be burnt. Neither was officially sanctioned.

As Father Pierbatista Pizzaballa, Custodian of the Holy Land, pointed out, “Israel has failed to address the practice of some ultra-Orthodox Jewish schools that it is a doctrinal obligation to abuse anyone in Holy Orders they encounter in public” (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/9529123/Vatican-official-says-Israel-fostering-intolerance-of-Christianity.html).

In Sri Lanka too, political monks, extremist politicians, and retired military officers have stepped up their campaign to incite ethnic/religious tensions. Now that Kurundi has been neutralised by the government, these motley combos have shifted focus to Batticaloa. They are abusing even Buddha statues, using them as weapons of war and markers of territorial possession. Omalpe Sobitha thero, a bit-actor in the drama, asked, “If you can’t keep a Buddhist statue in places like Batticaloa, has a separate country come into being?”

The main actor in the unfolding Diwulpathana teledrama, the infamous Ampitiye Sumanarathana thero, set out a clear warning. “The country is angry and awake… They are ready to reply the President, Rasamannikam, Senthil Thondaman. The entire Sinhala nation is ready to reply to all of them anytime… I don’t know who sired Ranil Wickremesinghe. I don’t know if Tamil people have traditional properties in this Sri Lanka… There is a history going back beyond 2500 years for these properties… These are traditional properties of Sinhalese…

When Mahinda Rajapaksa became the president and the war ended, these people got back their rights… They lost their rights when Maithripala became the president, and regained them again when Gotabaya became the president and lost them again when Gotabaya was driven out. It’s after Ranil Wickremesinghe came to power that politicians like Shanakyam shout like this…” The monks and lay cohorts are acting with total impunity while the government looks away and the Opposition evades the issue. The moderate centre is unoccupied territory while the two antipodes are teeming with actual and would be owners.

Rational Resistance

When a policeman shot dead unarmed teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, USA, in 2014, mass protests erupted. Confronted by policemen armed as if for war, some demonstrators drew comparisons between themselves and the Gazans. Many Palestinians responded by tweeting practical advice (for instance, Mariam Barghouti from West Bank tweeted, “Always make sure to run against the wind/to keep calm when you are tear gassed, the pain will pass, don’t rub your eyes.”) When an American social-media user objected to the Ferguson-Gaza comparison, another responded, “I don’t think anyone is trying to compare Ferguson to Gaza; the point is solidarity and justice.”

Now also, the point is solidarity and justice, with Gazans and all Palestinians, with hostages, and the Israelis who lost their loved ones, with Palestinian journalist Wael Al-Dahdouh whose wife, daughter, and son were killed in Israeli bombings, and with the mother of Shani Louk, the German-Israeli tattoo artist murdered by Hamas. For solidarity with Palestinians to grown into a moral and political force, resistance needs to move out of the violent theocratic paradigm represented by Hamas. The locus should be not Islamic or Arab but global.

What is at issue is not the right to violent resistance but the efficacy of that path. Arab and Islamic leaders might breathe fire, but they are not even going to suspend diplomatic relations with Israel, let alone wage war against Israel, not even if every inch of Gaza is flattened and every Gazan perish under the rubble. The only way out is to do what national liberation movements did in the old days, from Vietnam to South Africa: gain and occupy the moral highground.

The repugnancy of Israel’s policies and actions cannot be showcased, if resistance to Israel is dominated by Hamas and its equally repugnant brand of violence. Just as it is possible to support Israel’s right to existence without supporting the Greater Israel project, it is possible to resist Israel occupation and expansion without descending to the depth of barbarism. To find that radically moderate path all Palestine has to do is to reach back to its own history.

As Palestinian cleric Munib Younan, Bishop emeritus of the Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land pointed out last month, “We have lived with the Jews all the time. Jews were persecuted in Europe. Never in Palestine. Anti-Semitism is a European construct.” Tolerating anti-Semitism, even in the face of the murderous attacks by Israel, is morally wrong and strategically counter-productive. Had Tamil struggle not succumbed to extremism, had the LTTE not targeted Sinhala and Muslim civilians and Tamil critics, it wouldn’t have gone down to utter defeat.

While October 7th attack was happening, Hamas exhorted Palestinians in the West Bank to rise against Israeli settlers, violently. West Bank Palestinians refused to heed that deadly call. Outside Israel, and even within, some Jews have endorsed the growing global call for a ceasefire in Gaza.

Last week, hundreds of mostly Jewish demonstrators, members of Jewish Voice for Peace NY, took over the main hall of the Grand Central Station, protesting against the bombing of Gaza, shouting that Palestinians will be free. The sentiment of one of the young demonstrators provides a glimpse of a path out of the looming jungle of violent lawlessness: Mourn the dead. Fight like hell for the living.

Tisaranee Gunasekara is a Sri Lankan political commentator based in Colombo.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary – a conservation center dedicated to rescuing, rehabilitating, and protecting Sierra Leone’s national chimpanzee. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Stella Paul
FREETOWN, Nov 3 2023 (IPS)

Thirty-three years ago, Bala Amerasekaran – a Sri Lankan by birth – visited Freetown, Sierra Leone. Since then, the West African nation has been his home, where Amerasekaran has dedicated his life to conserving the chimpanzee – Sierra Leone’s national animal.

In 1995, with support from the national government, he founded Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary – the country’s first conservation center that rescues, rehabilitates, and protects chimpanzees, often hunted, traded, and killed for their meat. Currently home to 100 chimpanzees, the conservation works of the sanctuary also help prevent the spread of any possible diseases transmitted from primates to humans.

However, 20 years later, Amerasekaran’s enthusiasm is declining as he has witnessed massive encroachment within the sanctuary, destroying its forest cover and threatening the sustainability of the conservation program itself.

“I am beginning to feel that I have wasted my life for 28 years because there is no safety for this place,” says a visibly upset Amerasekaran.

Wildlife Connection to Africa’s Zoonotic Disease Trail

“At least 75 percent of emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases of humans—including Ebola, Marburg, Henipavirus, and zoonotic avian flu—have an animal origin, according to Hellen Amuguni – Associate Professor in the Department of Infectious Disease and Global Health at the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University. “Chances are that when the next illness like COVID-19 emerges to threaten global health, it will originate in animals before it passes to humans, a process known as spillover,” Amuguni says.

West Africa has a long history of recurring zoonotic disease spillovers, the biggest of which occurred in 2014 when the region witnessed a devastating Ebola virus outbreak. The outbreak spread quickly across the entire region, including Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, where about 11,000 people died.

A 2018 study led by Caroline Huber of Precision Health Economics estimated that the disease outbreak also caused an economic and social burden worth over USD50 billion. Researchers later traced the origin to a spillover event: a two-year-old boy in Guinea likely infected while playing near a tree where bats roosted.

Since then, the conservation of biodiversity, especially the natural habitats of wildlife, has gained attention in the region to prevent any quick transmission of a zoonotic pathogen from animals to humans. But almost all the major forests and key wildlife habitats also face increasing stress from loggers, hunters, traders, and illegal builders.

An example is the Upper Guinean Forest, which covers the lowland forests of West Africa from Guinea to Togo. This forest is a global biodiversity hotspot and contains the world’s second-largest rainforest, the Congo Basin. However, studies have found that the forest has lost 84 percent of its original area, mostly due to agricultural expansion, commercial logging, charcoal burning, and human settlement.

Within the borders of Guinea – where the 2014 Ebola outbreak occurred first – 17.1-kilo hectares of humid primary forest disappeared between 2002 -2022, according to Global Forest Watch (GFW). To put it in perspective, this is the loss of a forest area as big as the city of Washington, DC.

GFW has also tracked large-scale deforestation in Equatorial Guinea –the country that reported the first cases of Marburg – a deadly viral zoonotic disease in May this year that claimed 12 lives. According to GFW’s estimates, in 2010, Equatorial Guinea had 2.63 mega hectares (Mha) of tree cover, extending over 98 percent of its land area, but by 2022, it lost 7.76 thousand hectares (kha) of tree cover, which is roughly the size of Paris.

Sierra Leone’s Vulnerable Forests

In Sierra Leone, several dense forests are habitats of many endangered wildlife species, including 6000 chimpanzees. These include Kangari Hills and Nimini Hills forests, Outamba-Kilimi National Park, and the Gola Rainforest – one of the largest remaining West African tracts extending to neighboring Liberia.

While deforestation has occurred in all these forests owing to illegal logging, unsustainable land use, infrastructural development, and charcoal production, it is particularly high in Gola Forest. According to a 2017 Purdue University research, the Gola forest has been losing its green cover at an annual rate of 4.18 percent. These losses are largely due to the expansion of rice farms within the forest area, says John Christian Abu-Kpawoh, who conducted the research.

In comparison, Tacugama Sanctuary is a tiny patch of forest of only about 40 hectares. Yet its proximity to the national capital, Freetown, a 40-minute drive away, makes it a prime target for encroachers. About 30 percent of the sanctuary has been encroached upon by builders, many of whom are powerful and well-connected.

“Last year, the Ministry of Lands deployed soldiers here (to protect the chimpanzee sanctuary). Yet every name that is coming up in the recent encroachments is of a soldier,” Amerasekaran reveals, indicating deep-rooted corruption in the government.

Worrying News for One Health

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the One Health Approach to prevent a future zoonotic disease spillover has gained traction. The One Health approach recognizes the interconnection between human, animal, and environmental health and emphasizes an integrated approach to prevent any health crisis, especially related to infections transmitted from animals to humans.

Across West Africa, several large projects are already being implemented where multidisciplinary experts, including veterinarians, zoologists, epidemiologists, social behavior scientists, and risk communicators, are working together to prevent a new spillover.

The USAID-funded STOP Spillover, PREDICT and RESPOND, the Eco Health Alliance projects, and the West African One Health actions for understanding, preventing, and mitigating outbreaks are some examples.

These projects, among others, are engaged in studying and monitoring animal-human interaction, assessing risks of a possible disease breakout, putting surveillance measures in place to detect the early warning of spillover, and raising awareness among locals about the importance of conserving forest and wildlife to prevent a disease outbreak.

Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary is also working with local communities to address some of the threats being faced by the rainforest-dwelling species. For example, the sanctuary is helping to establish livestock rearing projects, setting up swamp rice plantations, improving fuel efficiency of cooking, setting up tree nurseries for sustainable harvesting of wood and food products, and running education programs for school children.

But the uncontrolled development and encroachment on the forest land pose serious threats to the success of these activities, the biggest of them being the shrinking of space between humans and animals.

Although the 2014 Ebola virus outbreak and spillover were attributed to bats, chimpanzees can also be responsible for a new Ebola outbreak as they can contract and succumb to the virus. Ebola has been a major reason for the declining chimpanzee population across Africa. Once humans come in contact with an infected chimpanzee or its body fluids, the deadly disease can be transmitted to humans – leading to a viral spillover.

This means every unmonitored handling of a chimpanzee, including its capture, to sell it as a pet or kill for meat poses a risk of a disease breakout simply because the hunter or the capturer cannot know whether the animal has contracted Ebola virus. On the other hand, protecting a chimpanzee’s natural habitat and ensuring it stays within that habitat not only leads to its conservation but also prevents it from passing on any deadly pathogen, such as Ebola, to humans.

‘Learn from East Africa’

Considering the spillover risks, conserving the habitats of key wildlife species, especially those known to transmit viral zoonotic diseases to humans, is vital. Many feel West Africa can learn from its East African neighbors who have set examples of protecting their wildlife reserves by creating a safe distance between the wildlife and humans.

“Look at countries like Rwanda or Kenya, then you will see that where there is a wild reserve, they create a buffer zone of 2-3 kilometers,’’ says the founder of Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary.

The failure to maintain this distance can pose serious risks to the region’s One Health goal, says Frederick Jobo Moseray, Assistant Conservation Manager at the sanctuary.

“When the forest goes, the animals become homeless. They then come to human colonies. Here, we are talking about chimpanzees. They are hunted, killed, and also kept as pets. All of this is dangerous. We are talking about preventing a zoonotic disease spillover, but first, we must stop the shrinking of safe space between humans and chimpanzees,” Moseray concludes.

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Kashmir's apple industry has been devasted by unusual weather patterns that are blamed on climate change. Credit: Umer Asif/IPS

By Umar Manzoor Shah
SHOPIAN, INDIA, Nov 2 2023 (IPS)

Of Kashmir’s seven million inhabitants, a staggering one million rely directly on apple farming. The region is pivotal in India’s apple and horticulture production, contributing to over 70 percent of the country’s apple supply. This not only provides income to farmers but also sustains a vast network of laborers, traders, and transporters within the fruit economy.

However, this year paints a grim picture for the apple industry. Drastic fluctuations in weather patterns, including unseasonal rainfall and unexpected temperature surges, have left apple farmers in a state of deep concern and distress.

In the southern region of Shopian, renowned for its high-quality apple exports, farmers lament the sharp decline in production, considering this trend as a severe threat to their livelihoods.

Perturbed Orchardists

Abdul Karim Mir is one such farmer from the area. His apple orchard is spread over three acres. This year, his produce dipped drastically due to the late arrival of summer and a sudden increase in temperatures when autumn was nearing. “There are scores of apple growers like me who used to be excited about the harvest as it would provide us with immense profits and wider appreciation. The Kashmiri apples are world-famous. There are few pesticides and chemical sprays used for their growth. They are extremely delicious and nutritious. But now, the tale seems different,” Mir told IPS.

He says last year, his orchard produced more than 500 boxes of apples. However, this year, says Mir, the count is not more than 300.

“This is because the bloom at the onset of spring didn’t happen on time. The temperatures were not more than 10 degrees when they should have been more than 20. And at the end of the summer, which is the month of August and September, the temperatures surged suddenly. This had a direct impact on the crop. The productivity plummeted, and so did our hopes of a profitable harvest,” Mir said.

Ghulam Rasool Bhat, another apple farmer from central Kashmir’s Ganderbal, says the situation for the apple growers due to climate change in Kashmir is becoming dismal.

“I estimate around 50 percent of loss this year. Even when we are plucking the fruit from the trees, the loss is of such a magnitude. Now imagine, when we load them in trucks for export, how much more produce will be lost during the transition period,” Bhat said.

He adds that though the government has launched a few schemes for apple growers that include subsidized fertilizers and facilitation of storage, climate change is leaving production in tatters.

Bhat says the cold wave grips Kashmir valley in the months of May and June; otherwise, the summer months when fruits normally grow in the region are fine. “Then, in the first week of September, Kashmir recorded the hottest day of summer. The temperatures were recorded at 34.2°C. Such scorching heat was last recorded 53 years ago. This is unprecedented. It damaged the apple crop beyond repair,” he added.

Horticulture is considered the backbone of Kashmir’s economy, and there are an estimated 144,825 hectares of land dedicated to apple-growing in the region. The industry annually produces 1.7 million tons of apples, and their exports have been valued at INR 6000 crore (USD 826,860,000).

Heat Wave Wreaks Havoc

Apart from India, the relentless grip of global heat waves has unleashed a series of environmental crises across the globe. Canada and Hawaii have experienced intensified wildfires, while South America, Japan, Europe, and the United States have been subjected to extreme heat waves.

According to the American space agency NASA, our planet has witnessed the hottest June to August period on record this year. It marked the hottest summer ever recorded in the Northern Hemisphere, contrasting with the warmest winter in the Southern Hemisphere.

NASA’s data reveals that the months of June, July, and August were a staggering 0.23 degrees Celsius warmer than any previous summer in their records and a scorching 1.2 degrees Celsius warmer than the average summer temperatures observed between 1951 and 1980.

These alarming trends have been attributed to the emission of greenhouse gases, which stand as a significant driver behind climate change and the global warming phenomenon responsible for the extreme conditions we witnessed during this sweltering summer.

In the year 2016, India’s northern state of Rajasthan experienced an unprecedented heatwave, with temperatures soaring to a staggering 51 degrees Celsius in the scorching month of May, breaking all previous records. Tragically, this extreme heatwave claimed the lives of an estimated 1,000 people in the state due to dehydration and hyperthermia. In the same year, the southern states of India also withstood the worst of the relentless heatwave, resulting in the tragic loss of 800 lives.

At the UN Climate Change Conference (COP24) in December 2015, a report from the World Health Organization (WHO) emphasized the urgent need for India to address climate change. The report highlighted that both India and China stand to gain substantial health benefits from tackling climate change, with potential gains estimated at a remarkable USD3.28-8.4 trillion for India alone.

Furthermore, the report revealed that the value of health improvements resulting from climate action would be twice the cost of global mitigation policies. This benefit-to-cost ratio is even more favorable for countries like China and India.

Government data indicates that the persistent drought and rising temperatures have adversely affected more than 330 million people in India. Research conducted by the Joint Global Change Research Institute and Battelle Memorial Institute, Pacific Northwest Division, underscores that climate change will disproportionately impact the country’s marginalized communities. These communities, often lacking financial resources and adequate education, rely on agriculture for their sustenance and livelihood. Under the looming threat of climate change, their options are severely limited, leading to increased vulnerability.

The research also warns that in a country prone to natural disasters, the well-being of those affected, particularly those with limited means to recover, will become a significant factor under climate change. This could potentially lead to political instability, strain public budgets, and foster social unrest.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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By Rosi Orozco
ACAPULCO, Mexico, Nov 2 2023 (IPS)

Acapulco is a paradise. A port of golden sunsets, toasted sand, and deep blue sea. Its dream beaches captivated the hearts of Elvis Presley and Elizabeth Taylor. US President John F. Kennedy chose its shores to spend his honeymoon with Jackie Kennedy. Its luxury hotels and the untamed sea made it the most famous tourist destination in Mexico.

Rosi Orozco

Today, Acapulco is devastated. A Category 5 hurricane—the deadliest possible rating—called “Otis” hit the beach on October 25 with incomparable force. No one anticipated it. Hours before it made landfall, it was just an inconvenient storm. Suddenly it became a deadly cyclone. Most of the hotels are destroyed, the sea swallowed people, houses were blown away, and dozens of people are dead.

In the last century, its beauty attracted the world’s most influential celebrities. Its tranquil mornings and lively nightlife attracted actresses, singers, politicians, aristocratic musicians, and families who wanted to spend their summers by the sea. I myself spent my youth at the family timeshare apartment in Acapulco, and it was there that I met my husband Alejandro, with whom I’ve been married for 40 years. My life is permanently connected to Acapulco.

Luxury businessmen, millionaire athletes, and Michelin-starred chefs arrived. Also drug dealers, money launderers, and men looking for girls and boys to rape in exchange for food or a few dollars for their parents who lived in the city’s poor areas.

Because there are two Acapulcos. They both share an airport and roads, so all roads lead to that pair of versions of the same city. There is a “diamond Acapulco” where the rich vacation with all the amenities at their disposal. And there is a “traditional Acapulco,” where the poor live who work for wealthy tourists.

The people who inhabit “diamond Acapulco” and “traditional Acapulco” do not usually cross paths. They live in the same city, but they are separated by golf courses and exclusive shopping malls. Only rich foreigners and wealthy nationals cross to the poor side when they feel a repugnant urge: to make their plans for child sex tourism a reality with girls and boys as young as 3 years old.

Acapulco is one of the most unequal tourist destinations in the world. In Mexico, it is the most unequal municipality of all: more than 60% of its 900,000 inhabitants live in extreme poverty, which means they do not know what they will eat today or tomorrow. They are the workers who serve plates of fresh seafood, who sweep marble floors, who fill the wine glasses of tourists.

For years, journalists and human rights organizations have told horrific stories that combine poverty, inequality, and sex tourism: a 6-year-old boy rented out to be photographed naked in exchange for milk and eggs; a 9-year-old girl sold to a Canadian tourist to be his wife for a month; homeless teenagers invited to sex parties on lavish yachts in exchange for food; parents and mothers waiting outside hotels for their children to be raped for a price paid in dollars per hour.

Those pedophiles and child molesters turned Acapulco into the country’s primary destination for child sexual tourism. They also led Mexico to the disgraceful second position in the production of child pornography, only surpassed by Thailand, according to data from the Mexican Chamber of Deputies and the United Nations Children’s Fund.

Today, Acapulco is a different place. Little remains of the port that enchanted singers Agustín Lara and Luis Miguel. There are thousands of poor families without homes, hundreds of workers who lost their jobs, and dozens of fishermen without boats to go out to sea to find sustenance. The destruction is so extensive that complete economic recovery is estimated to take decades, not years.

Under these conditions, childhood is at very high risk. Many families have lost so much that their bodies are the only currency they have left. And in the dirty business of forced prostitution, child bodies are the most sought after.

Amid this unprecedented crisis in Mexico, the Chamber of Deputies approved amendments to the general law against human trafficking. These changes aim to broaden the scope of the law enacted in 2012 and update it to address new technologies that traffickers and organized crime engaged in sexual exploitation can use. The wording has some issues that we are still analyzing, but it also includes positive aspects.

For example, it introduces new protections for individuals with injuries, intellectual disabilities, and Afro-Mexican towns and communities. The latter represent 6.5% of the total population in Guerrero and 4% of the residents in Acapulco, according to the National Population Council.

Civil society organizations are monitoring these changes and hope that the deputies will honor their commitment to protecting the victims.

Meanwhile, it is the responsibility of all, not just in Mexico, to help Acapulco back on its feet, a place that has given so much to both nationals and foreigners. It won’t be easy or quick, but every day we delay puts the vulnerable children at risk due to the magnitude of sexual tourism in that beautiful port.

After Hurricane Otis, Acapulco will be different. Its reconstruction is an opportunity to build a new city on the ruins of depravity, one with values and respect for human dignity. I long for the day to see it standing and for its coastline, beach, and air to remain a paradise, especially for children like me who grew up happily by the sea.

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Unted Nations Secretary-General António Guterres wearing a traditional Nepali topi, in Kathmandu. Credit: Rupa Joshi

By Kanak Mani Dixit
KATHMANDU, Nepal, Nov 2 2023 (IPS)

Many observers found it intriguing that UN Secretary-General António Guterres would want to spend three full days in Nepal even as Israel was carpet-bombing Gaza.

He did speak out from the Security Council floor, for which he was rewarded with a demand for resignation by the Israeli ambassador, but there was obviously much more to be done against the ongoing mass-murder of Palestinians.

A Nepali commentator asked on Twitter, “Is this the time for UN Sec Gen to be anywhere other than the Middle East?”

Perhaps it was the prospect of visiting Lumbini, birthplace of Sakyamuni Siddhartha Gautam – the Buddha, Asia’s ‘prince of peace’ – that brought Mr. Guterres to Nepal. He did use his time at the nativity site, which has been visited by all five Secretaries-General since Dag Hammarskjold in 1959, to highlight urgency of world peace.

The Secretary-General might also have wanted to laud Nepal’s role as the second-largest contributor to UN peacekeeping operations, a position it holds despite being kept off the command responsibilities it deserves.

UN Resident Coordinator Hanaa Singer-Hamdy presenting a file of communications from Nepali victims of conflict on the transitional justice process. Credit: UN, Nepal

But there were two issues besides world peace that Mr. Guterres clearly wanted to highlight: the transforming world climate and Nepal as a path-breaker in arena of transitional justice.

In separate helicopter trips to the base of Mount Everest and to the Annapurna Sanctuary, the Secretary-General relied on the experience of the mountain people to sound the alarm on climate crisis, three weeks before COP-28 is to start in Dubai. The highly populated ‘third pole’ of the planet indeed serves as a barometer of global warming, and the receding glaciers of an inhabited Himalaya are a more potent bellwether of climate catastrophe than the Arctic or Antarctica.

Joint Session of Parliament

For Nepal, the most significant aspect of the Secretary-General’s visit was the suspended transitional justice (TJ) process, which began with the end of the decade-long Maoist insurgency in 2006.

The matter languishes even though the Maoists rebels have long since joined mainstream politics and commandant of the Maoist force is presently the prime minister. He is in that position despite holding no more than 11 percent of seats in Parliament, but that is another story.

Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal (nom de guerre: ‘Prachanda’) had hoped to use the Secretary-General’s trip to show off his international standing to the Nepali populace, and to get a green signal from the Secretary-General for his tendentious plans to push a perpetrator-friendly TJ draft law through Parliament.

Despite an overwhelming show of obsequiousness from Mr. Dahal who followed him at practically every step around the country, the Secretary-General did not oblige his host. Instead, Mr. Guterres used every pulpit during his trip to insist that Nepal’s TJ process be concluded within three parameters: a) concurrence of the victims of conflict; b) concordance with relevant international law and principles; and, c) follow the precedence-setting judgements on transitional justice by the Supreme Court of Nepal.

While the victims of Nepal’s conflict did not get to meet the Secretary-General, as requested, their various submissions were put together in a file and presented to Mr. Guterres as he departed for the airport on the morning of 11 October by Hanaa Singer-Hamdy, the UN Resident Coordinator to Nepal. She said in her comment on X (Twitter): “The needs and priorities of the conflict victims are at the heart of Transitional Justice-related discussion in Nepal.”

Making of An Exemplary Process

The Secretary-General clearly understands that, worldwide, the fraught arena of transitional justice has had too few successes, whereas it provides the pathway for post-conflict societies to heal and recover – through reparation, memorialisation, truth and reconciliation, not to forget accountability for extreme cases of human rights abuse.

Herein lies the importance of Nepal, where the Nepali-led transitional justice process is presently stuck, but the victims and rights defenders have not let go. The international community, and especially the United Nations, can help by ensuring that there is principled monitoring.

That the Nepalis players are capable of moving the boat to the other shore was what Mr. Guterres emphasised in his address on 10 October to a joint session of Parliament.

Nepal’s transitional justice process could become an example for post-conflict societies the way Colombia, South Africa and Sierra Leone are today held out for their relative success. Within South Asia, a region awash in long-term conflict from Kashmir to Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Balochistan to the Arakan, transitional justice is not ‘deployed’ anywhere else other than in Nepal.

All the more reason for the Nepali process to succeed in order to provide a model for the rest of the region to consider, and for Mr. Guterres to dwell on the matter during his visit.

Ironically, the main roadblock to a proper conclusion of the peace process was the Secretary-General’s host, the prime minister. While the Mr. Dahal used the conflict and the ensuing peace process to build his personal political career, he understands that a genuine transitional justice exercise would jeapordise his trajectory and pre-eminent position in Nepali politics.

The entire superstructure of his Maoist party would collapse were he to submit his colleagues to an accountability process, even if only ‘emblematic cases’ were to be investigated. Hence, the formula used on the TJ over a decade and more has been prevarication and duplicity.

The government security personnel who would have been involved in atrocities during the conflict of 1995-2006 are all retired by now, whereas the Maoist leadership is today part of Nepal’s political establishment, ruling the roost.

They are loathe to be held accountable, which is why their supremo Mr. Dahal cannot countenance an honest exercise, and which is why he was hoping to bamboozle Mr. Guterres with pomp and flattery.

Victims and Spoilers

While there has historically been ferocious bloodletting in the Kathmandu Court among clans and factions vying for power, the villages of Nepal have been largely free of internecine violence until the decade of insurgency and state response.

The villagers of Nepal were caught in a pincer between the Maoist rebels who specialised in hit-and-run raids and the security forces that meted out harsh treatment to local level political leaders, teachers and development workers.

The role of Mr. Dahal himself may be held up for scrutiny in a genuine Truth and Reconciliation process, for he headed the chain of command of the Maoist insurgents. His attitude to atrocities including murder, torture, rape and abduction conducted by his cadre has always been ambiguous, and there has been no expression of remorse throughout his years in open politics.

If anything, there has been gleeful celebration of extra-judicial killing and physical violence generally, and he has even expressed satisfaction on how he personally fooled the United Nations Mission in Nepal (UNMIN) into tripling the number of Maoist combatants in a verification exercise.

In 2007, upon coming above ground, Mr. Dahal told a BBC interlocutor that in a personal circular during the conflict, he had instructed that “you may eliminate individual if required, but without torture”. Over the years, Mr. Dahal has been the key leader who ensured that successive Truth and Reconciliation Commissions were designed for failure, with their membership padded with Maoists.

Most recently, Mr. Dahal’s attempt has been to push through legislation that would make it easy for the next Truth and Reconciliation to let perpetrators (of both sides, rebels and state security) off the hook by, among other things, creating two categories of murder: ‘normal murder’ and ‘extreme murder’.

What makes the Secretary-General’s interest on Nepal’s transitional justice efforts vitally important is that the Western governments and INGOs who introduced the concept and funded the Nepal’s engagement with TJ are now losing interest. This seems to have to do with ‘TJ fatigue’, a paucity of funding, as well as certain geopolitical considerations.

Some Western policy-makers see Mr. Dahal as a pliable head-of-government of a strategically important Asian country who they must have ‘on their side’ as China proceeds with a more aggressive continental policy of its own.

Nepal’s victims of conflict, in coordination with human rights defenders, have been fighting a lonely battle against a political class and polity that has been in thrall of the Maoists’ momentum and their attempt to create a ‘new normal’ in the polity, with a forced attempt to ensure past atrocities are forgotten.

Whereas, the victims of conflict are united in not letting the perpetrators get the better of memory. The UN Secretary-General has come up with a powerful position of support for a transitional justice process that is just and humane, and the victim representatives and rights defenders of Kathmandu are heartened. Their worst fears that bubbled to the surface when the Secretary-General’s visit was hurriedly announced were not borne out.

What is required now is to keep watch for ‘spoilers’ of the peace process, and they include many influential Nepalis who have over the past decade developed political and inter-personal relationships with the perpetrators of the conflict years.

Likewise, there is a Western diplomat (or two) who seem to have a low opinion of the Nepali yearnings for a just peace, rather than the peace of the cemetery.

A group of civil society actors cautioned the Secretary-General in a letter delivered as he departed Kathmandu: “There are national and international ‘spoilers’ wanting to foist a perpetrator-friendly ending to the peace process in the name of elapsed time and geopolitical expediency.”

Kathmandu-based writer and journalist Kanak Mani Dixit is founder-editor of the magazine Himal Southasian, and was a UN Secretariat staffer from 1982-1990.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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A pregnant teenage girl sits in a Caracas plaza. Teenage pregnancy often leads to dropping out of school or turning women into heads of single-parent households at a very early age, curtailing their possibilities for personal growth and fomenting multigenerational poverty. CREDIT: Avesa

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Nov 2 2023 (IPS)

Hemmed in by poverty, with barely two days of school a week, and often at risk of unwanted pregnancy or the uncertain prospect of emigration, young women and adolescents are among the main victims of the ongoing crisis in Venezuela.

“Yes, my boyfriend and I have sex less often or for example he pulls out so as not to risk pregnancy, because buying contraceptives is expensive and we can’t always afford it,” Anita, a 22-year-old computer science student, told IPS from the west-central city of Barquisimeto."Instead of education being the gateway to the labor market (for women), dropping out of school at a young age means a very high risk of teenage pregnancy." -- Luis Pedro España

A pack of three condoms costs at least four dollars, a month of birth control pills more than 10 dollars, an intrauterine device about 40 dollars (plus the medical cost of its implantation), and in the country the minimum wage is four dollars a month and the average monthly salary barely exceeds 130 dollars.

A survey by the Women’s Peacebuilding Network found in September that 42 percent of Venezuelan women between the ages of 18 and 24 do not use birth control, and one of the reasons is the high cost in relation to their meager incomes.

The Venezuelan Association for Alternative Sex Education reported in a study in April that only three out of 10 women of reproductive age use contraceptive methods in this country.

“The lack of contraceptives and access to sexual and reproductive health is of great concern in the case of impoverished adolescent girls, who most need to avoid early pregnancy that could keep them out of the classroom,” said María Laura Chang, editor of the report by the Women’s Peacebuilding Network.

Students at the Central University of Venezuela in Caracas take part in a protest against sexual abuse and aggression. Sexist violence stands out in the national context of poverty and scarce access to resources and education on sexual and reproductive health. CREDIT: Mairet Chourio / Efecto Cocuyo

 

Omnipresent poverty

As a result, “the feminization of poverty has been prolonged, as young women gain more dependents and less time to devote to their economic well-being, education and self-improvement,” Chang added in an interview with IPS.

“All age groups are affected by poverty, lack of income and opportunities. Because of the education crisis, the women most at risk are adolescents,” sociologist Luis Pedro España, head of poverty studies at the private Andrés Bello Catholic University (Ucab) in Caracas, told IPS.

Every year Ucab conducts a Survey of Living Conditions of Venezuelans (Encovi), which found that in 2022 income poverty affected 81.5 percent of the country’s 28.3 million inhabitants, extreme poverty affected 53.3 percent, and multidimensional poverty (employment, services, health, education and income) 50.5 percent.

España highlighted the impact of the educational crisis that the country is going through “because schools only receive students twice a week, which makes adolescent girls more likely to drop out.”

The reduction from five to only two days of classes per week in many public schools and institutes is mainly due to the lack of teachers, who have left the classrooms – in the three year period of 2019-2021 alone a quarter of them left – due to low salaries, lack of transportation, deterioration of infrastructure and other resources, as well as high student dropout rates.

 

Women are a majority during an enrollment day at the private Andrés Bello Catholic University in Caracas. University studies are an avenue for personal growth, but graduates, both men and women, suffer from the lack of opportunities due to poorly paid jobs in the midst of Venezuela’s economic crisis. CREDIT: M. Sardá / El Ucabista

 

According to official figures, there are 29,400 schools in the country, of which 24,400 are public, serving 6.4 million students, and 5,000 are private, serving 1.2 million students. Figures from universities and civil society organizations estimate the number of students dropping out of school at around 1.5 million in the last five years.

In the survey carried out by the Women’s Peacebuilding Network, 58 percent of the women respondents stated that the main reason for missing classes was because of their school’s suspension of activities.

For women, “instead of education being the gateway to the labor market, dropping out of school at a young age means a very high risk of teenage pregnancy,” España stressed.

The expert said that “an additional element that correlates with poverty is that of single-parent households that result from early pregnancy and are headed by a young woman who is not sufficiently trained for work, so that poverty is likely to continue to be the plight of her descendants.”

 

Young women run a street vendor’s stall in Caracas. Girls who drop out of school also expand the ranks of the informal economy. It is part of the landscape of poverty in which the majority of Venezuela’s population is embedded, following a decade marked by economic collapse, with a combination of recession and hyperinflation. CREDIT: U. Montenegro / Venezuela Red.us

 

Disappointment and violence

Another consequence is the disappointment in the lack of opportunities even for young women who complete their higher studies, due to the prolonged economic crisis, during which, for example, the number of factories shrank from 13,000 in 1999 to 2,600 in 2020, according to the Venezuelan Confederation of Industrialists (Conindustria).

In seven of the last 10 years a recession has reduced the country’s GDP by four-fifths, and during at least three years of hyperinflation the value of the local currency and the value of salaries and pensions were decimated.

“I have studied for more than 18 years to end up applying for jobs where they want to pay me 150 or at most 200 dollars a month. With that I can’t even pay for my passport (which costs 216 dollars),” Mariela, a recent graduate in administration from a private university, told IPS.

Sitting on a sofa in the middle-class apartment where she lives with her parents, Mariela rattles off a list of grievances to IPS: she is tired of getting up so early to go to school because of the precarious public transportation; there are no good jobs in the country; going abroad is risky or unaffordable; electricity, water and internet fail in her house for several hours almost every day.

To top it off, “I am one of the few who registered in the Electoral Registry. Many of my fellow students did not. They are not interested in participating in politics at all,” said Mariela who, like other young women who spoke to IPS, asked not to disclose her last name.

In its September survey, the Women’s Peacebuilding Network found that only half of those over 18 (the minimum voting age) and under 25 were registered on the electoral roll, and even fewer were determined to vote in the presidential election scheduled for 2024.

Of this age group, 19 percent engaged in some community activity and 81 percent in none. Of the latter, 60 percent mentioned the lack of economic stimulus as an obstacle, and 55 percent mentioned the difficulty of transportation to get around.

Another issue faced by young and adolescent girls is gender-based violence.

Of 237 femicides or gender-based murders documented in 2022 by the Digital Observatory of Femicides, of the NGO Centre for Justice and Peace, 69 involved women between 16 and 27 years old.

In the Network’s survey, 38 percent of the women interviewed said they had been victims of sexist violence, mainly psychological but also physical. Of the respondents, 24 percent said they were victims of economic violence, both those over and under the age of 24.

In addition, 12 percent of the total number of women surveyed reported having suffered sexual violence, but in the 18 to 24 year-old segment the percentage doubled to 24 percent, reflecting the greater vulnerability of young women to this kind of violence.

 

Young Venezuelan women rest after the perilous journey across the Darien jungle between Colombia and Panama. Migration has marked the lives of Venezuelan families in the last decade, during which millions of people have left the country. CREDIT: Gema Cortés / IOM

 

Time to emigrate

Almost eight million people have left the country, especially since 2015, according to United Nations agencies. In 2018, Encovi reported, 57 percent of those migrating were between 15 and 29 years old, a percentage that decreased to 42 percent in 2022. For every 100 female migrants there are 116 males.

Migrants and asylum seekers are highly vulnerable to trafficking and sexual exploitation, and most of the victims of these practices detected in countries in the region, such as Colombia, Peru, Trinidad and Tobago and the neighboring Dutch Caribbean islands, are Venezuelan.

Last year, civil society organizations reported the rescue of 1,390 Venezuelan victims of this type of crime abroad. Young women are a particularly fragile segment of the population and are sought by traffickers – often with deceitful offers of employment – to subject them to sexual and labor exploitation.

In the Network’s survey, 54 percent of young women between the ages of 18 and 25 said that a member of their family had migrated: 23 percent said it was their mother, father or both, and most reported that they have brothers or sisters who have left the country.

The report that accompanied the survey highlights that for young women and adolescents the separation from their loved ones has had a significant emotional impact, and has made them face new responsibilities, such as caring for younger siblings or attending to new domestic chores, with an impact on their personal development.

The Network’s study proposes the design of government programs and policies aimed at overcoming the shortcomings faced by youth and adolescents, support services for victims of gender violence, and an appeal to international cooperation to curb gangs dedicated to human trafficking.

España said that “it is essential to strengthen schools, so that women in their teenage and young adult years do not have children prematurely and can empower themselves, enter the labor market and become independent, without depending on support from their parents or partners.”

“Unfortunately, policies and measures are not being developed to mitigate the immense damage being done by reducing the number of school days,” he argued.

IFAW recently translocated elephants into Kasungu National Park, which is on the Malawi-Zambia border. IFAW is implementing the Room to Roam initiative so that these elephants can have safe passage in the corridor. Credit: Charles Mpaka/IPS

By Charles Mpaka
CHIPATA, ZAMBIA, Nov 1 2023 (IPS)

As we approach the forest in the village to appreciate Andrew Mbewe’s beekeeping enterprise, a bee from a hive close to the edge of the natural woodland stings him on the cheek.

He steps back quickly, waving everyone away from danger, as he grimaces and grumbles in pain while trying to take out the stinger to prevent his face from swelling.

“That’s one of the duties they are performing,” he says through his gritted teeth about his 18 beehives in this forest.

He examines the tips of his index and thumb fingernails to see if he has taken out the bee’s poison-injecting barb.

“These bees are guardians of this forest,” he says. “They protect it from invaders. That’s one of the reasons this forest is still standing today.”

Across the villages along the Chipata-Lundazi road, which cuts through a landscape that stretches between Kasungu National Park in Malawi and Lukusuzi and Luambe National Parks in Zambia’s Eastern Province, one feature is likely to catch the eye: impressive stands of natural forests among villages and smallholder farms.

Andrew Mbewe has 18 beehives in this forest. He quit poaching. Now he leads a community conservation group that fights poaching and implements alternative livelihood activities such as beekeeping. Credit: Charles Mpaka/IPS

In Mbewe’s village in Chikomeni chiefdom in Lundazi district, these indigenous forests are home to over 700 beehives belonging to more than 140 families.

The forest protection duty that the bees are providing is an unintended consequence of the beekeeping enterprise. Fundamentally, the communities are sucking money out of the honeycombs in these beehives through sales of both raw and processed honey, some of which find space on the shelves of Zambia’s supermarkets.

It is one of the livelihood activities which Community Markets for Conservation (Comaco), in partnership with the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), are implementing within the broader wildlife conservation strategy in the Malawi-Zambia landscape.

Comaco’s driving force is that conservation can work when rural communities overcome the challenges of hunger and poverty.

It says these problems are often related to farming practices that degrade soils and drive deforestation and biodiversity loss.

Therefore, Comaco works with small-scale farmers to adopt climate-smart agriculture approaches such as making and using organic fertilisers and agroecology to revitalise soils so farmers achieve maximum crop productivity.

It also supports small farmers to add value to their produce and attractively brand the products so they are competitive in the market.

With burgeoning carbon trading as another revenue stream, this wildlife economy is raking in promising sums for both individual members and their groups, communities say.

The cooperative to which Mbewe belongs has used part of its revenue to purchase two vehicles – 5-tonne and 3-tonne trucks – which the group hires out for income. The money is invested in community projects such as building teachers’ houses and hospital shelters.

Luke Japhet Lungu, assistant project manager for the IFAW-Comaco Partnership Project, tells IPS that these activities are making people less and less reliant on exploiting natural resources for a living.

“You will not find a bag of charcoal here,” Lungu challenges.

“Because of the farming practices we adopted, people are realising that if they destroy the forest, they also destroy the productivity of their land and their income will suffer,” he says.

Along the way, people are also learning to live with the animals.

“Animals are able to move from one forest to another without disturbance. For the bigger ones, such as elephants, which would cause damage to our crops, we have a rapid communication system through our community scouts who work with government rangers.

“We have occasions of elephant invasions from the three parks. However, we have learnt to handle them better to minimise conflict. It’s a process,” Lungu says.

One man who has learnt to manage the animals he once hunted is Mbewe himself.

A battle-scared poacher for nearly a decade from the 1980s, he terrorised the 5,000-square-kilometre conservation area on poaching missions.

For his operations, he used rifles he rented from some officials within the government of Zambia, he claims.

“They were also my major market for ivory and other wildlife products,” he says.

Apparently, without knowing it, Mbewe was actually supplying a far bigger transnational market.

For over 30 years, from the late 1970s, the Malawi-Zambia conservation area was a major source and transit route for ivory to markets in China and Southeast Asia.

Elephant poaching rocked the landscape resulting in the decline of the species. In Kasungu National Park, for example, according to data from the Department of National Parks and Wildlife in Malawi, elephant numbers dwindled from 1,200 in the 1970s to just 50 in 2015.

In 2017, IFAW launched a five-year Combating Wildlife Crime project whose aim was to see elephant populations stabilise and increase in the landscape through reduced poaching.

The project supported park management operations and constructed or rehabilitated requisite structures such as vehicle workshops and offices.

It trained game rangers and judiciary officers in wildlife crime investigation and prosecution.

It provided game rangers with uniforms, decent housing, field allowances, patrol vehicles and equipment.

It supported community livelihood activities such as beekeeping and climate-friendly farming.

It also thrust communities to the centre of planning wildlife conservation measures.

Erastus Kancheya is the Area Warden for the Department of National Parks and Wildlife for the East Luangwa Area Management unit where Lukusuzi and Luambe National Parks lie.

He says he sees these measures as enabling degraded protected areas like Lukusuzi National Park to “rise from the long-forgotten dust [and] awakening on the long road of meaningful conservation”.

Kancheya says engaging communities in co-management of the protected areas is also proving to be effective in the landscape.

Now, IFAW is leveraging this community partnership to sustain the achievements of the Combating Wildlife Crime project through its flagship Room to Roam initiative.

Patricio Ndadzela, Director for IFAW in Malawi and Zambia, describes Room to Roam as a broad, people-centred conservation strategy.

“This is an initiative that cuts across land use and planning, promotes climate-smart approaches to farming and ensures people and animals co-exist,” he says.

The approach aims to deliver benefits for climate, nature and people through biodiversity protection and restoration.

Room to Roam intends to build landscapes in which both animals and people can thrive.

In the process, some people are being transformed. Mbewe is one such person. From being a notorious poacher, he is now a ploughshare of conservation as chairperson of the Community Forest Management Group in his area. The cooperative enforces wildlife conservation and sustainable land management practices.

It is not easy work, he admits.

“There are hardened attitudes to change, and patience is required to teach. Sometimes, the earnings from the livelihood activities are insufficient or irregular. For instance, you don’t harvest honey every day or every month,” he says.

Yet, he says, the prospects are good and the challenges he faces now rank nowhere near what he encountered when he was a poacher.

One incident still makes him shudder: Stalking a herd of elephants at their drinking spot in Kasungu National Park one day, he came under unexpected gunfire from rangers.

“I was an experienced poacher. I knew at what time of the day to find the elephants and at what location. But the rangers saw me first. I was dead. I don’t understand how I escaped,” he says.

Today, on reflection, he regrets having ever lived the life of a poacher.

“I went into poaching for selfish reasons,” Mbewe says thoughtfully.

“Poaching was benefiting me only; the conservation work I am doing now is benefiting the entire community and future generations,” he tells IPS while rubbing the spot of the bee sting and looking relieved.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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A five-year-old boy holds up his cat amidst the wreckage of his home in Gaza. Credit: UNICEF/Mohammad Ajjour

By Lana Nusseibeh
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 1 2023 (IPS)

Thank you for your presence here with us in New York, and for the special dedication that Brazil has given to peace in our region.

I also pay special tribute to our briefers, and to their teams’ dedicated work in the most unimaginable circumstances on the ground in the Gaza Strip.

Commissioner-General Lazzarini, I was very shaken by your recent words to your staff over the weekend, in which you said, “I am constantly hoping that this hell on earth will soon come to an end.” I want to extend the UAE’s deep condolences for the 64 UNRWA workers killed in this war.

They paid the ultimate sacrifice for the lifesaving work the United Nations does every day around the world, and we have failed to protect them.

Last Friday, 121 countries – representing an overwhelming majority of the world – issued an unambiguous call for an immediate, durable, and sustained humanitarian truce in Gaza.

They stood up for the humanitarian imperative, for human rights, for international law, and most importantly, for the self-evident truth that Palestinian life is precious, equal, and deserving of the full protection of the law.

We have heard many say that the 2.2 million Palestinians in Gaza are not Hamas, that this is not a war against them. And while these are welcome words, it is time that action reflected them.

The more than 8,000 people that have been killed in Gaza, and as we heard today, 70 percent of whom were women and children, were surely not all Hamas.

Nearly 1,000 children are missing and may be trapped or dead under the rubble. They are not Hamas. Will we help them?

The number of Palestinian children killed in just three weeks of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza exceeds the total number of children killed in conflicts worldwide in each of the last four years.

As Ms. Russell has so eloquently said, that should stain our moral conscience, if nothing else does. Children do deserve our special protection, and are entitled to it today. If we lean on the General Assembly’s moral authority in other settings, we must also respect it in this one.

Indeed, members of this Council have repeatedly expressed their concerns about the fraying of the international order. This Council ignoring the expressed will of the majority of the world may be what breaks it.

Colleagues, we need a ceasefire now. As Foreign Minister Vieira said, we need to ensure that safe, sustained, and at scale humanitarian aid reaches Gaza, now. And that access to electricity, clean water, and fuel is restored now.

The shutdown of cellular and internet services over the weekend as part of the offensive meant that wounded civilians were searching for help in the dark. As we have heard today, there have been 76 attacks on healthcare, including 20 hospitals and clinics damaged or destroyed. More than 650,000 people are sheltering in UNRWA facilities.

Let me be absolutely clear on this point: these sites are protected by international humanitarian law. Announcements that they are targets or warnings for them to evacuate do not, I repeat, do not alter their protected status. We need to see the rescission of dangerous unrealistic evacuation orders.

On Saturday, the Palestinian Red Crescent reported warnings from Israel to immediately evacuate al-Quds Hospital which hosts hundreds of patients, including new-born babies in incubators.

Around 12,000 civilians are also seeking refuge there right now as we sit here in this chamber in New York speaking to each other again and again, and debating the language of our humanitarian resolution and response.

An evacuation order in these conditions is cruel. It is reckless. And so is our delay as a Security Council. All of Gaza’s civilian population is at risk by the escalating hostilities, as are the Israeli and international hostages taken by Hamas. Wrongly taken by Hamas.

While our eyes have been trained on Gaza, the occupied West Bank has not been spared from violence either. Israeli settlers are escalating their attacks against Palestinian civilians, and forcing their displacement. These attacks must be prevented by the State of Israel.

Across the region, there have been several credible warnings of a wider escalation. The drums of war are beating.

Colleagues, taking these warnings seriously begins with stopping this war in Gaza. We do not serve Israel’s security by enabling it to go on. We cannot reverse the heinous October 7th attacks by condoning this war in which civilians are paying the price.

Ignoring what could happen day after day, will have devastating consequences, not only for Israelis and Palestinians, but for the prospects of peace and stability in our region.

As we work on responding to the General Assembly’s clear call on this body to live up to its responsibilities under the UN Charter, we should also keep in mind, always, the dying words of the dead so that their memories are a blessing to us.

I’d like to speak today of an Arab poet, Heba Abu Nada, a Palestinian woman killed in Khan Yunis several days ago.

“My friend circle diminishes, turning into little coffins scattered everywhere. As missiles launch, I can’t grasp the fleeting moments with my friends. These aren’t just names, they are reflections of us, each with a unique face and identity.”

Colleagues, we may have failed the dead, but we must channel our sorrow into saving the living. The time to reverse course is running out. What we, and 121 countries, are advocating for may be the harder road, but history warns us of the consequences of not taking it.

Lana Nusseibeh is Ambassador and Permanent Representative of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to the United Nations.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Excerpt:

In an address to the UN Security Council

By Jomo Kwame Sundaram
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Nov 1 2023 (IPS)

Governments the world over are worried about investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) rules. These allow foreign investors to sue them for billions over new laws or policies reducing their profits.

Typically favouring powerful transnational corporations (TNCs), ISDS blocks policy changes needed to address new challenges. Companies have successfully sued governments for policy changes which allegedly reduce their profits.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

The wicked of Oz
Tobacco giant Philip Morris tried to block the Australian government’s demand for ‘plain packaging’, with larger and more graphic health warnings on cigarette packs, by suing under ISDS and also in Australian courts. In the domestic case, Australia’s highest court ruled the legislation constitutional.

The company then transferred Philip Morris Australia to Philip Morris Asia in Hong Kong. Invoking ISDS in the bilateral investment treaty (BIT) between Australia and Hong Kong, it sued Australia. Luckily, the ISDS tribunal ruled it had no jurisdiction as considering the case would constitute an abuse of process.

More recently, Australian Clive Palmer has hired a former Attorney-General to demand nearly A$341 billion from state governments after moving his major mining companies to Singapore in 2019. His two ISDS claims invoke the Australia-New Zealand-ASEAN Free Trade Agreement (ANZAFTA).

The first seeks about A$300 billion in compensation and for ‘moral damages’ after Australia’s highest court ruled in favour of the Western Australian (WA) state government. Palmer is challenging the 2022 WA legislation to indemnify the state, ensuring he would get nothing.

He is also demanding A$41.3 billion in compensation for rejecting exploration permits for the Waratah coal mine in Queensland. The licence was refused on environmental grounds, including increasing carbon emissions.

Palmer is expected to take a third ISDS case against Australia’s Federal and Queensland government decisions to reject his coal mine licence application due to its likely adverse impacts on the local environment, including waterways, and the Great Barrier Reef.

Even if the governments win these cases, they would still incur millions in legal expenses. The Philip Morris cases against Australia took five years, and cost A$24 million in legal expenses, of which only half was recovered by the government.

Evading ISDS?
After such costly experiences, almost a decade ago, Australia successfully demanded a ‘tobacco carve-out’ to the Trans-Pacific Partnership’s (TPP) ISDS provisions.

Australia’s new Southeast Asia Economic Strategy to 2040, announced on 6 September 2023, promises to review existing free trade agreements (FTAs) with the region. This will include agreements containing ISDS clauses, including the ANZAFTA and other bilateral and plurilateral agreements.

Using side-letters, Australia has already opted out of the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) ISDS provisions with both the UK and New Zealand.

In an ISDS case, the World Bank Group’s International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes ruled Pakistan had to pay over US$5.8 billion to an aggrieved investor. This is equivalent to its entire US$6 billion new IMF loan, about an eighth of its annual budget.

Other ISDS second thoughts
The New Zealand government is now also against ISDS. While ISDS is part of several of its FTAs – e.g., the CPTPP and China-New Zealand FTA – its government has opposed ISDS provisions in FTA negotiations since 2018.

Hence, there is no ISDS in the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), the New Zealand-United Kingdom FTA, and the New Zealand-European Union FTA.

While it was considered too late to exclude ISDS entirely from the CPTPP at a late stage in negotiations, New Zealand has secured side letters with Australia, Brunei, Malaysia, Peru and Viet Nam. This means ISDS does not apply between New Zealand and these countries.

The current Chilean government is also concerned about ISDS. Hence, it has asked all other CPTPP governments for side-letters excluding ISDS between them, but only New Zealand has agreed so far!

Rich nations wary of ISDS
The US removed most ISDS provisions when the Trump administration replaced the old North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) in 2020.

ISDS was in the TPP because Obama administration negotiators wanted it. But most 2016 presidential aspirants to succeed him, including Democrats, rejected the TPP. Trump’s US Trade Representative (USTR) Lighthizer specifically cited ISDS as the reason for US withdrawal from the TPP.

Biden and his USTR have maintained Trump’s anti-ISDS stance instead of reverting to Obama’s position. ISDS is not in Biden Administration ‘economic cooperation’ agreements such as the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework.

Meanwhile, the EU is urging withdrawal from the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT) as its ISDS provisions will block needed European climate policies. Several EU and non-EU countries have already begun withdrawing from the ECT, arguing it constrains their ability to act against global warming.

Developing countries saying no
Many developing countries have already been withdrawing from their BITs while the RCEP does not include ISDS. So, the CPTPP, other BITs and FTAs’ ISDS provisions are out of date. Worse, they block addressing emergencies, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and global warming.

Countries should reject and even withdraw from BITs and FTAs with ISDS. After all, there is no evidence ISDS attracts foreign direct investment. More and more developing nations – including India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Ecuador, South Africa, etc. – have already withdrawn from such BITs.

Governments should urgently review and remove ISDS provisions in all existing BITs and FTAs, or withdraw from them, to avoid more costly ISDS cases. They must be more critical and careful in ensuring future economic cooperation agreements to ensure they really serve their current and future best interests.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Creativity pioneers in Milan, group Photo. Credit: Luca Dimoon/Moleskine Foundation

By Elena L. Pasquini
MILAN, Italy, Oct 31 2023 (IPS)

It all fits into an off-road vehicle that can reach even the most remote parts of Southern Africa to bring cinema where the essentials are lacking, where there’s no electricity to power a projector, and where perhaps no one has ever sat in front of a screen to watch a movie. With just the sun and a solar panel, a theater can be set up in areas where people struggle to access food and water and make a decent living. But what it truly requires is the courage to not view creativity as a luxury. Sydelle and Rowand, the founders of Sunshine Cinema, a network of mobile movie theaters, are not just entertaining people; they are crossing a bridge.

Crossing a bridge. That’s what creativity leaders do, according to Lwando Xaso. She is a lawyer, writer, and storyteller from South Africa, and in mid-October, she was in Milan moderating a panel that posed a challenging question: “Can creativity change the world?” She was present at “A Creativity Revival,” an “un-conference” whose participants shape the agenda and content. They are the “Creativity Pioneers,” women and men whose work is supported by a fund from the Moleskine Foundation and who had gathered in Italy from various corners of the world. Much like Rowand and Sydelle, they answered that challenging question with a resounding “yes.” “Creativity is not just something cute. It’s not just something nice. But creativity is something relevant. That is the key element nowadays to transform society for the better,” said Adama Sanneh, CEO of the Moleskine Foundation.

Adama Sanneh, CEO of Moleskine Foundation. Credit: Luca Dimoon/Moleskine Foundation

Crossing a bridge. That’s what South Africa is doing as well. “Our starting point is a place of violence. We come from a history of inequality, injustice, indignity, and oppression … We are moving across the bridge towards freedom, human dignity, equality, and justice. We’re moving away from trauma toward healing,” Xaso said. The tool her country is employing is its democratic Constitution, its “transformative constitutionalism.” But how does creativity relate to this transformation?

According to “Assessing the Impact of Culture and Creativity in Society,” a course and publication from the Impact Research Center of Erasmus University in Rotterdam, one of the most significant challenges in effecting social change is changing people’s behavior. Or, perhaps, their “hearts,” as Xaso emphasized. “A revolution can change regimes, but for transformation, we need to change hearts.” Xaso also explained: “Creativity and art were instruments of liberation. At the core of the anti-apartheid movement lay creativity. The majority of the country was never going to win the war against the apartheid government with arms alone … It was never going to happen. So, what are the other tools that can change the world? There was music. There was poetry. The ANC built a culture and a department for culture because they saw it as an instrument that can liberate the country …Art and justice reinforce each other.”

Rowand Roydon Pybus is also in Milan, sharing his experiences in crossing bridges. His tool is a network of solar-powered theaters that screen films made in Africa for those who lack access or cannot afford it. These films spark conversations on critical issues such as land rights and gender rights, thereby fostering change. They shed light on often-overlooked subjects. It’s not about just screening; Sunshine Cinema engages young people and train them as facilitators for these discussions. They use a vast collection of African movies to address vital questions in hyper-local environments, where the impact is most significant.

Moments of the conference “A creativity revival”. Credit: Luca Dimoon/Moleskine Foundation

However, assessing the scale of creativity’s social impact remains a challenge. As Eva Langerak writes in Erasmus University’s magazine, “The assumption that the cultural and creative sector adds substantial value to society is widely debated, and the discussion on how that value takes shape is quite controversial.” The social impact of arts, culture, and creativity can be defined as “those effects that go beyond the artifacts and the enactment of the event or performance itself and have a continuing influence on people’s lives.” This definition draws from the 1993 multi-authored work “The Social Impact of the Arts: A Discussion Document.” Measuring the social impact of creativity is not a straightforward task, but the significance of the cultural dimension has been recognized to the extent that participation in cultural life is considered a human right, as outlined in Article 27 of the Universal Declaration. This participation is crucial as it underpins ‘the ability to represent oneself and exercise other rights, including freedom of expression.’

Representing oneself is closely tied to identity, which is one of the questions that “creative pioneers” in Palestine are addressing through the “Wonder Cabinet,” a project in Bethlehem. Designed by architects Elias and Yousef Anastas, the Wonder Cabinet is a space for creative communities to come together and establish a safe place for Palestinian voices to express themselves, not only with regard to creative fields but also to share, learn, and gain exposure to different experiences. As Ilaria Speri, managing director, explained, “It brings together communities that have been physically separated over decades of occupation, with 65% of the West Bank under military rule, including checkpoints and segregated roads with different access permits.” This space offers the Palestinian community machinery, tools, knowledge, and an opportunity for reflection on identity and self-representation, thereby ensuring that the regional and local versions of their story are heard.

Art and creativity have a profound impact on society, encouraging critical thinking and prompting individuals to question their own experiences as well as those of others. This perspective is championed by authors such as François Matarasso, an artist, writer, and policy advisor, as well as Pascal Gielen. These insights hold particular significance in regions affected by conflict and warfare. In the words of Olena Rosstalna, the founder and manager of the Youth Drama Theater “Ama Tea” in Chernihiv, a city in northern Ukraine near the Russian border, the impact of art transcends the physical battlefronts. She observed, “It’s not just the war on the land; it’s also the war in the minds and for the minds, because the propaganda is very big. Brainwashing has persisted for decades.” Countering propaganda is among Ama Tea’s actions devoted to engaging the youth. Olena explained the genesis of their project: “We conceived this project in the early days of April or late March 2022, when the full-scale invasion by the Russian Federation happened. We were in a bomb shelter, thinking about what we could do to help in this dire situation.” Teaching critical thinking through a “fresh perspective” on art and literature has been a central focus for her team: “We manage to show the cases of propaganda not only in Ukrainian history, but in European history, in Polish, in Germany, [and] also taken in the context of World War Two,” she said. Olena’s work is geared primarily toward the youth. She stressed the importance of nurturing “the small seeds of creativity, conscientiousness, and responsibility” in the young generation, firmly believing that by doing so, they can secure a future for their country.

Olena describes herself as a “very small fish in a very big ocean,” yet she believes that everything starts from the ground up. “That’s why I’m deeply involved in grassroots initiatives in my work. Supporting local initiatives worldwide is crucial. It all begins with small steps and grassroots efforts. If we have a world of pioneers, one by one, all these initiatives will flourish into a beautiful garden,” she said. Communities often play a pivotal role in propelling social change. Community-led art projects, unite people to brainstorm solutions for local issues, according scholars. Solutions even where it seems impossible – that’s the essence of creativity, as Adama Sanneh eloquently wrote in Folios, the Moleskine Foundation’s periodical: “Revealing and exploring what is possible in seemingly impossible contexts. It’s about radical imagination and enlightenment during times of ignorance and resignation”.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Without land rights, women cannot make the necessary decisions to adapt to and mitigate the effects of climate change. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

By Joyce Chimbi
NAIROBI, Oct 31 2023 (IPS)

Although women account for more than three-quarters of the agricultural labour force and manage 40 percent of small-scale farms, historically, they neither owned nor controlled the land because land rights were passed down to male relatives. It is a historic gender injustice whereby women could only access land through close male relatives.

But as the vagaries of drought wreak havoc in the agricultural sector due to more failed rainfall seasons – with 2022 alone showing signs of a serious hydrological and ecological drought – gender and climate experts, such as Grace Gakii, tell IPS that women’s decision-making powers are much needed to ensure that extreme weather patterns do not paralyse the agricultural sector.

“The agriculture sector is the backbone of Kenya’s economy. It accounts for an estimated 33 percent of the country’s GDP and employs at least 40 percent of its population and 70 percent of the rural population. Without land rights, women cannot make the necessary decisions to either adapt or mitigate climate change,” she says.

“In mitigation, they cannot, for instance, decide if and when trees are planted. In adaptation, they have no say in, for instance, shifting to more climate-resilient crops. We have no shortage of indigenous seeds to help us navigate the rainfall deficit we are increasingly experiencing. But women have historically been denied the power to make these decisions even though it is women who provide the day-to-day farm labour.”

The revolutionary SACCO scheme is increasingly putting land rights in the hands of women and enabling them to access much-needed tools to build climate-resilient farming systems. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

The agriculture sector is the backbone of Kenya’s economy. It accounts for an estimated 33 percent of the country’s GDP. Women play a critical role in the sector. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

The agriculture sector employs at least 40 percent of the country’s population and 70 percent of the rural population. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

Serah Nyokabi says the revolutionary Savings and Credit Cooperative Society (SACCO) is increasingly putting land rights in the hands of women and facilitating access to the tools needed to build climate-resilient farming and food systems.

“I am a member of Afya SACCO. We save and take loans at a low interest. I use the loans to hire land in Central Kenya for farming and buy items such as seeds, fertilizer and even water. We rely on rainfall, and these days you cannot tell when it will rain, and even when it rains, it is often not enough. I also hire people to help me around the farm because I am a full-time teacher. SACCOs also buy large pieces of land, subdivide, and sell to members. I bought a piece of land this way, and they allow you to pay in small amounts over a six-month period,” she tells IPS.

SACCOs are a cash pooling scheme by a group of people to save and borrow low-interest loans amongst themselves. Kenya’s SACCO sector is popular and on an upward trajectory. Recent reports show that accumulated total deposits of savings grew from USD 3.8 billion in 2021 to USD 4.2 billion in 2022 (Ksh 564.89 billion to Ksh 629.45 billion)– representing a 9.84 percent increase. In 2021, the total membership of regulated SACCOs was 5.99 million members compared to 6.42 million members in 2022, and this represented an increase of 7.02 percent.

Gakii says that regulated SACCOs represent about half of all SACCOs in Kenya, as many others are unregulated. She says there are at least 22,000 SACCOs and more than 14 million members overall in this East African nation, transacting billions every year amongst themselves. Some SACCOs, such as Afya SACCO, have thousands of members and others less than 100 members.

Others, such as the well-known Muungano (cooperative) Women’s Group, own prime land and a fully occupied commercial high-rise building in Ongata Rongai on the outskirts of Nairobi, have an all-female membership, and many others, such as Afya SACCO have both men and women as members. Muungano Women’s Group raises about USD 40,000 in rent per month from the Ongata Rongai commercial building, which is fully occupied, and members have also purchased prime land of their own.

“SACCOs are very important to women. They were shunned by banks because the profile of a Kenyan woman was too risky. The percentage of women in gainful employment was very low because many worked for their husbands or fathers in the informal settlements. Due to our customary laws that favour men over women, women did not own property or any assets and therefore lacked the collateral needed to take out bank loans. In fact, women could only open a bank account accompanied by a male relative, preferably her husband. SACCOs have helped women navigate these challenges as all they need is to save with a SACCO, produce three guarantors within the SACCO to take a loan or simply borrow against their own savings,” Gakii explains.

Although the percentage of women holding land title deeds is still very small, as only one percent of all land title deeds are in the hands of women alone and five percent held jointly with men, Gakii stresses that this is progress and is to be celebrated.

“We have another large category of women that hire land for commercial farming. This would not have been possible without the loans from schemes such as SACCOs,” she says.

Gakii says women need access and control over land to play a much-needed role in the five pillars of climate resilience, including threshold capacity, coping capacity, recovery capacity, adaptive capacity, and transformative capacity.

“I taught agriculture in secondary schools for many years, and during that time, I had access to the small farm at the school for practical sessions, but back home, I could only execute the instructions from my husband. He was an accountant, and I was essentially the farmer, but he made all the decisions. Women interact with the soil on a day-to-day basis, but they cannot make decisions about how to best address the climate crisis. The result is a serious food crisis. We have large tracks of fertile lands, but here we are with a begging bowl,” Nyokabi observes.

“We started by experiencing floods and droughts in close succession. In 2018, we had two extremes in one season, whereby March, April and May were very rainy, followed by a very dry season in October, November, and December. Last month we were repeatedly warned to prepare for El Niño in the October-November-December season, but now we have been told that there will be no El Niño. In fact, there is no rain at all, and yet we are in the short rain season where we plant in October and harvest in December-January. The person who is more likely to note these changes and see a pattern is the one who is doing the day-to-day farming activities, and so the role of women in building resilient farming systems cannot be ignored.”

With an estimated 98 percent of agriculture in Kenya being rainfed and as climate change becomes a most pressing issue as a result of cumulative rainfall deficits over many years, the role of women in building climate resilience cannot be overemphasized, as is the need for interventions that can facilitate women’s access to land rights and much-needed farm inputs.

Kenya: Agriculture by Numbers

Women in Agriculture

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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Excerpt:

Excluded by inheritance and ignored by big business, women farmers in Kenya are turning to innovative methods to become independent food producers and get the financial backing to ensure their success. Creating resilience is crucial to adapting to climate change and ensuring climate justice.
 

Aradhiya Khan, 25, a transwoman, got her vaccination in the middle of the night in July 2021, when the centre was less crowded, and stood in the women's line as there was none for her gender.

By Zofeen Ebrahim
KARACHI, Oct 31 2023 (IPS)

After months of warding off appeals from his employers to get vaccinated for the COVID-19 disease, Mohammad Yusuf, 24, working as a live-in domestic worker in Karachi’s Clifton area, finally relented and got his first shot.

“I believed that anyone who took the vaccine would die within two years,” he told IPS. He said he got this information from social media.

The people who finally convinced him were his parents living in the village of Rahil, in Sindh’s province of Umerkot district, where, according to Yusuf, “not a single case of COVID-19 has to date been found.” But because Karachi was rife with the virus then, his parents explained that he might catch the infection if he remained unvaccinated.

The other reason for his hesitancy was the fear that if he got COVID-19 and was hospitalized, he may die without saying goodbye to his family and be buried unceremoniously by strangers. “You either got well within ten days, or you’d die a very difficult and painful death with breathlessness, high fever, and then death,” is how he explained the disease and its symptoms.

Rakhi Matan, 40, a caretaker for the elderly, had heard, “If someone got COVID-19, the government would come and pick them up from their home and take them to a center, inject poison into you after which you died”. It was this fear that got her to vaccinate herself. But since the shot, she often falls sick and attributes it to the vaccine.

The country began its COVID-19 vaccination campaign first by inoculating health workers on February 2, 2021, a year after the first case was reported in February 2020. This was followed closely by senior citizens and gradually to everyone over 18 years of age.

According to data from the Ministry of National Health Services Regulations and Coordination (MoNHSR&C), by March 2022, of the total eligible population of a little over 143 million, more than 125 million had received their first jab.

Dr Rana Imran Sikander, executive director at the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences and who was then heading the COVID-19 ward there, was the first person in Pakistan to receive the shot from the batch of 500,000 Sinopharm vaccines received from China.

It was also the time when “myths and conspiracies abounded,” leading to hesitancy and fear of side effects. The more far-fetched conspiracy theories circulating in his hospital included ‘Bill Gates wants to reduce the world’s population,’ ‘the United States is injecting microchips into humans to make them their slaves,’ ‘Gates wants to alter their DNA.’

“Seeing me well and alive gave a huge boost to my co-workers,” said Sikander, who luckily has not caught COVID-19 even once. It could also be because he had also volunteered a dose six months prior to the official shot for the vaccine trial, he said.

Gallup Pakistan carried out 13 surveys (from March 2020 to January 2022) to understand people’s attitudes towards the pandemic. It also recorded the change in their perception towards the disease and the vaccine over a two-year period.

“The most alarming finding was that for close to 60 percent of health professionals, social media was a key source of information, and as high as one in five doctors were not willing to take the vaccine,” Bilal I. Gilani, executive director at Gallup Pakistan, told IPS. A consistent perception among Pakistanis in general, during all these months, he said, was “that COVID-19 was a foreign conspiracy.”

Like epidemiologists study viruses and find solutions on how to control the spread of diseases, anthropologist Dr Heidi Larson studies misinformation and tries to contain it before it spreads like wildfire. She is, therefore, not surprised as to why Sikander’s colleagues were “hesitant or losing confidence in vaccines.”

She has been studying the trend of how rumors start, flourish, and then taper, for 13 years under her Vaccine Confidence Project that she started in 2010.

At a recent Global Media Dialogue, held earlier this month, organized by the Internews, Larson spoke to a group of journalists about how important it was for health workers and policymakers to “listen” to what people are saying and why and “even listen to the rumors,” and they will “reveal that they [people] are not being heard”.

“That’s the cue to address the rumors,” she said. Already the findings say there is a drop in confidence around basic childhood vaccines, which she finds “pretty significant” and worrying as “we’ve never seen such a drop,” she said.

But how did the Pakistan government manage to get 130 million (above the age of 15) of the 250 million Pakistanis vaccinated for at least two doses in two years (by May 2022) after the pandemic? Given that the polio virus has continued to be found in Pakistan with communities refusing to get their children administered the oral vaccine, there was a fear among government officials it may face the same challenge with the COVID-19 vaccine.

Looking back to the two years of the pandemic, when he was the federal minister for planning and headed the National Command and Control Centre (NCOC) that had been set up to plan and contain the pandemic, Asad Umar said the two most important ingredients — “transparency and sharing of real-time data with the media when COVID-19 struck” was how they managed to dispel misinformation.

“By the time we were ready to vaccinate the people, the media had become our allies and played a huge role in supporting us in fighting misinformation and even disinformation.”

The other reason was that “for a change, all political parties were on board, and there was across-the-board consensus and confidence on the decisions made by the NCOC,” he said. The center disbanded as quickly as it was formed. “It’s a good model and needs to be institutionalized if we are to fight any future catastrophes, natural or health,” said Umar.

In July 2021, 76 percent of Pakistanis claimed that the government was controlling the COVID-19 situation well, according to a Gallup survey, although it diminished to just 41 percent by 2022.

It was “the oneness of message and consistency, coupled with an efficient vaccine delivery, which helped fight vaccine hesitancy,” said Dr Zaeem Ul Haq, a health and risk communication (real-time exchange of information, advice and opinions between experts and people who face a health hazard) expert who led communication and community engagement part of Pakistan’s response to the pandemic.

But to understand how the country succeeded in vaccinating millions of people, Haq said it was important to differentiate between vaccine-resistant (due to vested interests and political or religious beliefs difficult to convert) and vaccine-hesitant (if their questions around vaccines are appropriately answered can be converted) groups to be able to continue fighting misinformation. Unfortunately, in Pakistan, he said, these terms were used interchangeably and erroneously by the Pakistani media, which must be avoided, especially in the case of childhood immunization.

He shared that with simple and consistent messaging, combined with an age-appropriate, systematic administration of a vaccine, this reason-specific hesitancy declined in subsequent surveys.”

Dr Zafar Mirza, former special advisor to the prime minister for health, the government’s use of innovative approaches helped reach diverse and underserved populations.

“We put out pro-vaccination messages replacing the ringtones for nearly 150 million mobile phones, which made a huge impact,” he said. The Gallup survey found that by 2022, 84 percent of adult Pakistanis with mobile phone access had received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.

Another task carried out successfully was by the brigade of female community health workers and vaccinators, who convinced people to get vaccinated.

“Through the over 8,000 vaccinators and health workers and 300,000 community leaders, we managed to reach a population of 35 million in the remotest parts of Pakistan,” said Mirza.

A toll-free helpline, the Sehat Tahaffuz-1166, launched just before the pandemic in November 2019 to provide guidance for polio and its vaccine, was used to disseminate information about COVID-19.

“At one point, we had 500 call agents and 30 doctors daily assuaging the apprehensions and concerns about the infection and later the vaccine itself,” Mirza told IPS. From approximately 300 calls per day in 2019, it reached to 25,000, although the agents have attended as many as 70,000 calls in a day, too, he added.

For its part, UNICEF helped the government in battling vaccine hesitancy on social media platforms. “Through regular static posts and short videos, we communicated verified information about the vaccine’s efficacy. We posted messages from doctors, religious leaders, youth representatives, celebrities, community leaders, and even vaccinated individuals on our social media accounts,” UNICEF’s communications specialist, A. Sami Malik, told IPS. In addition, it regularly organized live interactive sessions on FB, Twitter Space, and Instagram, with experts providing responses to people’s questions and concerns.

This is not the last of the pandemics. Scientists are already warning of the possibility of a COVID-19-like pandemic at the scale of 2.5 percent to 3.3 percent yearly and 47 percent to 57 percent in the next 25 years. While vaccine hesitancy may have lowered, it has not ended after the pandemic. In fact, it gets fueled every time there is a reemergence of measles and polio in Pakistan. While vaccines must be delivered to the public in a coherent and effective manner to ensure public confidence in them, it will pay dividends if, as Dr Larson says, countries in general and Pakistan in particular, can recognize “the importance of emotions in people’s decision-making and in their willingness to cooperate.”

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Air strikes continue in Gaza. Credit: World Health Organization (WHO)

By Norman Solomon
SAN FRANCISCO, USA, Oct 31 2023 (IPS)

For three weeks, President Biden has played a key role in backing Israel’s war crimes while touting himself as a compassionate advocate of restraint. That pretense is lethal nonsense as Israel persists with mass killing of civilians in Gaza.

The same crucial standards that fully condemned Hamas’s murders of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7 should apply to Israel’s ongoing murders that have already taken the lives of at least several times as many Palestinian civilians. And Israel is just getting started.

“We need an immediate ceasefire,” Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib wrote in an email Saturday evening, “but the White House and Congress continue to unconditionally support the Israeli government’s genocidal actions.”

That unconditional support makes Biden and the vast majority of Congress directly complicit with mass murder and genocide, defined as “the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.” The definition clearly fits the words and deeds of Israel’s leaders.

“Israel has dropped approximately 12,000 tons of explosives on Gaza so far and has reportedly killed multiple senior Hamas commanders, but the majority of the casualties have been women and children,” Time magazine summed up at the end of last week.

Israel’s military has been shamelessly slaughtering civilians in homes, stores, markets, mosques, refugee camps and healthcare facilities. Imagine what can be expected now that communications between Gaza and the outside world are even less possible.

For reporters, being on the ground in Gaza is very dangerous; Israel’s assault has already killed at least 29 journalists. For the Israeli government, the fewer journalists alive in Gaza the better; media reliance on Israeli handouts, news conferences and interviews is ideal.

Pro-Israel frames of reference and word choices are routine in U.S. mainstream media. Yet some exceptional reporting has shed light on the merciless cruelty of Israel’s actions in Gaza, where 2.2 million people live.

For example, on Oct. 28, PBS News Weekend provided a human reality check as Israel began a ground assault while stepping up its bombing of Gaza. “As Israeli ground operations intensified there, suddenly the phone and internet signal went out,” correspondent Leila Molana-Allen reported.

“So, people in Gaza, voiceless through the night as they were under these intense bombardments. People were unable to call ambulances, and we’ve heard this morning that ambulance drivers were standing at high points throughout, trying to see where the explosions were, so they could just drive directly there. People unable to communicate with their families to see if they’re alright. People this morning saying ‘we’ve been digging children out of the rubble with our bare hands because we can’t call for help.’”

While people in Gaza “are under some of the most intense bombardment we’ve ever seen,” Molana-Allen added, they have no safe place to go: “Even though they’re still being told to move to the south, in fact most people can’t get to the south because they have no fuel for their cars, they can’t travel, and even in the south bombardment continues.”

Meanwhile, Biden has continued to publicly express his unequivocal support for what Israel is doing. After he spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week, the White House issued a statement without the slightest mention of concern about what Israel’s bombing was inflicting on civilians.

Instead, the statement said, “the President reiterated that Israel has every right and responsibility to defend its citizens from terrorism and to do so in a manner consistent with international humanitarian law.”

Biden’s support for continuing the carnage in Gaza is matched by Congress. As Israel began its fourth week of terrorizing and killing, only 18 members of the House were on the list of lawmakers cosponsoring H.Res. 786, “Calling for an immediate de-escalation and cease-fire in Israel and occupied Palestine.” All of those 18 cosponsors are people of color.

While Israel kills large numbers of Palestinian civilians each day — and clearly intends to kill many thousands more — we can see “progressive” masks falling away from numerous members of Congress who remain cravenly frozen in political conformity.

“In a dark time,” poet Theodore Roethke wrote, “the eye begins to see.”

Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of many books including War Made Easy. His latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, was published in summer 2023 by The New Press.

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By Jan Lundius
STOCKHOLM, Sweden, Oct 31 2023 (IPS)

In 1968, the tobacco company Philip Morris introduced a new cigarette brand called Virginia Slims. Under the slogan “You’ve come a long way, baby” it was exclusively marketed to women. The advertising campaign exploited the civil rights movements of the 1960s, indicating that those cigarettes were enjoyed by strong, independent, and liberated women. A blatant lie – why would “independent” women choose to poison themselves with a commodity which each year causes more than 480,000 deaths in the US alone – nearly one in five deaths? Another question arising from this deceitful ad is: “How far have women come on their way to independence and liberation?”

What is the global status of women today? Progress has been made, but this cannot fool us to believe that there is no difference to the plight of men and women. War is raging in Ukraine and Palestine, with all that this encompasses of human suffering and fake news. Israel and Hamas, Russia and Ukraine, are accusing each other of atrocities and for sure – abominable acts are committed by every warring faction. This is what happens in war – people are traumatized, mutilated, tortured, and killed. Nevertheless, the image of war we obtain from our daily news does in a way remind of tobacco ads. The crowning absurdity of war and cigarettes is ignored – they actually cause death and immense suffering. Crimes against humanity are presented as depending on which side perpetrators and victims find themselves, as well as their respective supporters, who generally are not suffering from the horrors of violence and displacement.

War is not healthy and it is far from normal. It makes people abnormal, and its fatal effects linger. Furthermore, war is affecting men and women in different ways. It is driving up domestic violence, as stress levels raise when traumatized men return to their families after long spells on the front lines, finding their domestic situation changed.

War veterans returning from Germany after World War I committed more crimes against women than ever before. The same happened after World War II in the US and the Soviet Union, a country where as late as 1959 there were still 20 million more women than men due to male casualties from war and repression. This is just one indication that war is extremely gendered. Police reports of domestic violence spiked in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Many women and children fled the war and some of those who stayed behind bore the brunt of male frustration. Battered women confess: “With all due respect to our military, we may indeed find ourselves in a situation where a veteran returning from war will be respected and sympathized with to such an extent that such a minor offense as domestic violence may well be forgiven on all levels.” This occurs in Russia as well, and all over the world in countries suffering from armed conflicts. All levels of human interaction are affected by an unavoidable process of “militarization”, meaning that belligerent values become dominant, lingering long after armed aggression has ceased.

In modern warfare civilian casualties by far outnumber those of armed combatants. Defenceless civilians suffer human rights violations, while women are subjected to specific gender related abuses. Women and girls targeted by sexual violence often face insurmountable obstacles if they try to seek justice. Many suffer from social stigma, worsened by the fact that women and girls tend to have a disadvantaged social position . This despite the fact that women constitute the backbone of most communities. Their ideas, energy and involvement are crucial for maintaining resilience during conflicts, as well as they are important during the rebuilding of society in the aftermath of war. To ensure lasting peace, it is thus essential that women’s specific exposure to violence is recognized and that they are allowed to play an essential part at all stages of a peace process.

Combatting soldiers often find themselves surrounded by civilians who they consider to be their enemies, or even worse – inferior beings. It is quite common that soldiers are by their commanders’ eagerness to increase their fierceness are given licence to ignore normal boundaries of civil behaviour. Women might be perceived as upholding and embodying “enemy culture, and support”. Destroying the enemies’ domestic security and sense of cultural/ethnic belonging might become a military goal and violence against women thus becomes legitimized.

Attacks on women may sometimes focus on their role as mothers. During the Nazi regime’s ruthless extermination of Jews, Roma and Sinti, as well as several other ethnic groups, the elite troopers of SS considered their victims to be vermin “unworthy of life”. The leader of these ruthless exterminators, Heinrich Himmler, reminded them that not only grown-ups, but their children as well had to be killed: “Otherwise they will grow up and revenge themselves on their parents’ murderers”. Similar arguments have been used by other perpetrators of massacres on ethnic minority groups; killing children, destroying foetuses and mutilating women’s sexual organs to “eliminate guerrilla spawn”.

Young women and girls have been abducted and forced to become sex slaves, while children and youngsters have been forced to become “warriors”. Children are easier to influence and threaten than older people, who furthermore might be needed to supply troops and guerrillas through their agricultural work and other activities. China Keitetsi, a former child soldier from Uganda now living in Denmark, wrote in her book Child Soldier: “When I was nine years old, I came into the National Resistance Army. When I got there, there was not only me. There were many children. Some were only five years old. I thought at first it was exciting, it was like a game, they were marching left, right, and I wanted to be a part of it. The moment I became a part of it, that meant that all my rights were over, I had to think, to feel, according to my instructor.”

In more than 150 countries there are currently child soldiers within government and opposition armed forces and an estimated 30 percent are girls. China Keitetsi remembers :“We were bodyguards to our bosses, we cooked, and we looked after them, instead of them looking after us. We collected firewood, we carried weapons and for girls it was worse because we were girlfriends to many different officers. Today, I can’t think how many officers slept with me, and at the end it became like I don’t own my body, it’s their body. It was so hard to stay the 24 hours a day thinking which officer am I going to sleep with today.”

The widespread use of rape is common in any armed conflict. Rape is employed to intimidate, conquer and control women and all members of their communities. It is used as a form of torture to extract information, to punish and intimidate. Wartime rape is committed by a wide range of men. Even those mandated to protect civilians tend to sexually abuse women and girls under their care. Women may be targeted for rape not just because they are women, but also because of their social status, ethnic origin, religion or sexuality. In Rwanda, it is estimated that between a quarter and half a million rapes were committed during the 100 days of genocide between 7 April and 15 July 1994.

Rape is often accompanied by extreme brutality. Women and girls often die during the attack, or later of their wounds. This is particularly true of young girls. Other medical consequences include transmission of HIV and serious complications in reproductive health. Fear, nightmares and psychosomatic body pain are just some of the problems experienced by survivors. Sometimes women are raped in front of others, often family members, to deepen their sense of shame. Some rape survivors state they would rather die than let what has happened become public.

Widowhood and/or separation increase during armed conflicts and it is often women who have to flee and bring their children with them, since men and boys are targeted to be killed or forcefully recruited by warring factions. Homes are destroyed and entire families uprooted. The loss of the family home brings about specific problems for women, including rise in domestic violence, enormous practical and financial difficulties and a harmful dependency on strangers. Women and girls in flight may be forced to offer sex in return for safe passage, food, shelter and/or documentation. Government officials (such as immigration officials or border guards), smugglers, pirates, members of armed groups and male refugees have all been known to abuse refugee women in transit. Desperate women may be forced into illegal activities, putting them at risk for repercussions from authorities.

If homes have been destroyed and families evicted, women are particularly hard hit because of their responsibility for providing shelter and food for their families. Even in assumed “safe havens”, like refugee camps, women and girls are at risk of sexual exploitation by those who control access to food and supplies, and if they venture out of the camps to find water, food and fire wood, perpetrators may be lurking, ready to attack them.

A slogan like “You’ve come a long way, baby” is, to say the least, offensive to millions of women suffering hardship from war and displacement. The list of historical and current abuse and suffering of women in war is immense and constantly updated. Some examples:

During World War II women were by the Imperial Japanese Army forced into sexual slavery. Estimates vary with numbers ranging from as low as 20,000, to as high as 360,000 to 410,000 ( according to Chinese sources). In Europe, large numbers of women were during World War I “recruited” to “field brothels” by both warring factions and the practice was continued in the eastern territories occupied by the German army and its auxiliary forces. Even the horrific concentration camps were equipped with brothels.

During World War II, the eastern front was a veritable hell. German officers and soldiers were violating women and girls, while military commanders did not attempt to put an end to such atrocities. The Russian vengeance was horrible. The exact number of German women and girls raped by Soviet troops during war and occupation is uncertain, but historians estimate their numbers are likely in the hundreds of thousands, and possibly as many as two million. During the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, Pakistani military and so called Razakar paramilitary raped between 200,000 and 400,000 Bengali women and girls. There are no exact figures on how many women and children who were systematically raped by Serb forces in various concentration camps, estimates range from 20,000 to 50,000. In Eastern Congo, the prevalence and intensity of rape and other sexual violence is described as the worst in the world. A 2010 study found that 20 percent of men and 30 percent of women reported conflict-related sexual violence and the brutal bloodshed has not yet abated.

We may all agree that war is horrible and women and girls are suffering from its effects. However, we also have to admit that violence against women take such horrific proportions due to the fact that in most countries women are even in peacetime victims of misogyny, religious/traditional contempt and subjugation, unequal rights and a wide range of other types of discrimination. In war, injustices and mistreatment are multiplied many times over. One means to avoid the horrors of war would be to guarantee equal rights to women and men, ensuring that laws are enacted for that purpose, followed to the letter and that those who violate them are duly punished. Only then can women be said to have come a long way.

Main Sources: Keitetsi, China (2005) Child Soldier: Fighting for My Life. Johannesburg: Jacana Media. Lamb, Christina (2020) Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women. Glasgow: William Collins. Wiiliams, Jessie (2023) “’This War Made Him a Monster.’ Ukrainian Women Fear the Return of Their Partners”, Time, March 13.

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Brazilian women demonstrated in São Paulo on Sept. 28, International Safe Abortion Day, which began to be celebrated in Latin America. The activists are promoting the campaign "Neither imprisoned, nor dead" against the repression of women's right to abortion, which affects even young girls who are entitled to this right by law. CREDIT: Rovena Rosa / Agência Brasil

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 31 2023 (IPS)

A total of 17,456 babies were born to girls aged 10 to 14 in Brazil in 2021. The annual figures are falling, but still reflect the plight of ruined childhoods and the failures of judges and doctors when it comes to the issue of abortion rights.

Data from the Information System on Live Births (Sinasc) of the Ministry of Health put the number of births to girls in this age group at 252,786 in the decade 2010-2019, compiled by the Feminist Health Network. That is an annual average of 25,278."This country does not take care of women. While cardiology has advanced a lot in Brazil, medicine dedicated to women, such as obstetrics and gynecology, remains stuck in the last century and resists updating. An example is the persistence of curettage, a practice abolished by the World Health Organization (WHO) more than 20 years ago." -- Helena Paro

This phenomenon has ceased to be invisible since 2020, when a string of scandals erupted involving girls prevented from having abortions by judges, hospitals and even authorities such as the then Minister of Women, Family and Human Rights, Damares Alves, during the government of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022).

In Brazil, abortion is legal in cases of rape, risk of death of the pregnant woman and anencephalic fetuses. It is also an unquestionable right of girls up to 14 years of age, since all of them are legally victims of rape and their abusers face sentences of eight to 15 years in prison.

But there were judges, even in the appeals courts, who ruled against the termination of pregnancy in girls as young as 10 or 11 years old.

At the base of this iniquity is the social criminalization of abortion, to which many religious people who identify “abortion as murder, as a repulsive crime” contribute, lamented Clara Wardi, technical advisor of the Feminist Studies and Advisory Center (Cfemea), based in Brasilia.

Religious morality infiltrates the State

“The stigma is strong, in the culture, in the family, even in schools. That is why girls are reluctant to choose abortion, even if it is legal. And to do it clandestinely is expensive and risky,” she told IPS from Petrópolis, the city near Rio de Janeiro where she lives.

Many doctors argue that they are “conscientious objectors” and refuse to carry out abortions, which forces the girls to go on a “pilgrimage” in search of respect for their rights in other hospitals and even in the courts.

In spite of everything, a Cfemea survey conducted since 2018 found a growing public opinion against the criminalization of abortion. To the question “Are you for or against the imprisonment of women who terminate their pregnancy?”, 59.3 percent said “against” in 2023, up from 51.8 percent in 2018.

Those in favor of imprisonment also increased, but less, from 26.7 percent to 28.1 percent, reflecting the ideological polarization during Bolsonaro’s administration, which caused the proportion of “undecideds”, those who answered “it depends on the circumstances”, to fall from 16.1 percent to 7.6 percent.

There are “institutional barriers” to legal abortion, an issue in which the State ceases to be secular by subordinating its services to religious morality. The most emblematic case is that of an 11-year-old girl pregnant for the second time in the northeastern state of Piauí, who in late 2022 was denied an abortion by a public hospital and by the justice system.

Taken to a public shelter, she gave birth to her second child in March 2023. In other words, the State acted to remove her from her family, deny her the legal abortion she demanded and force her to give birth, Wardi said.

Damares Alves, a radical evangelical Christian who was Minister of Women, Family and Human Rights (2019-2022) during the far-right government of Jair Bolsonaro, mobilized her officials to pressure young pregnant girls to desist from getting an abortion, which was legal in their case because they are recognized as victims of rape. CREDIT: Fabio Rodrigues-Pozzebom / Agência Brasil

 

Ignorance

All this occurs in the midst of “collective failures” of society itself, such as insufficient information on reproductive rights and the possibility of choice for women, especially girls. There is no choice without access to health services, she argued.

“The criminalization of abortion invalidates the legality of the three situations. It is necessary to get out the information that abortion is legal in Brazil and to train qualified personnel to offer the service, without the need for legal action to obtain access,” said Denise Mascarenha, executive coordinator of the group Catholics for Choice in Brazil.

The basic flaw is in the training of health workers, whether doctors, nurses or psychologists, who “do not recognize the violence involved in a pregnancy in girls under 14 years of age,” which has been present in the Penal Code all the way back to 1940, said Helena Paro, professor of gynecology and obstetrics at the Faculty of Medicine of the Federal University of Uberlândia.

Universities, she said, do not train doctors to take care of rape victims, but good teaching would not be enough, anyway, she added. There is a lack of experience in practical assistance to patients, with a focus on women’s human rights, said the physician specialized in gynecology and obstetrics.

In Brazil there are just over 60 medical centers offering legal abortion services – virtually nothing for a population of 203 million inhabitants in which women constitute a majority of 51.7 percent, she told IPS from Uberlândia, a city in the southern state of Minas Gerais.

Only about 2,000 legal abortions are performed each year in Brazil, where it is estimated that more than 400,000 illegal abortions are performed annually, resulting in many deaths as well as complications that overload hospitals.

 

Judge Rosa Weber seen passing her vote in defense of the decriminalization of abortion up to 12 weeks of gestation, in her last sessions as president of the Supreme Federal Court, before retiring on Oct. 2. CREDIT: Antonio Cruz / Agência Brasil

 

Medical care that discriminates against women

“This country does not take care of women. While cardiology has advanced a lot in Brazil, medicine dedicated to women, such as obstetrics and gynecology, remains stuck in the last century and resists updating. An example is the persistence of curettage, a practice abolished by the World Health Organization (WHO) more than 20 years ago,” Paro commented.

She coordinates the Uberlândia Comprehensive Care Center for Victims of Sexual Assault (Nuavidas), opened in 2017 at her university hospital. Since 2021, the center has been offering abortion-related services via telemedicine, following an initial face-to-face consultation.

The COVID-19 pandemic prompted the online assistance, also facilitated by the efficacy of the abortion drug misoprostol, approved by the WHO and Brazilian health authorities.

Paro’s activities led to an attempt to disqualify her by the Regional Council of Medicine of Minas Gerais, which accuses her of using her knowledge “to commit crimes” and not for the well-being of patients.

“It’s all upside down,” the physician replied, arguing that she cares for the health of patients “based on scientific evidence” that the Council denies.

The councils, one national and 27 regional (in each of the states), regulate medical practice in the country and several of them acted unscientifically during the COVID-19 pandemic, by approving, for example, the use of ineffective drugs such as chloroquine.

A conservative offensive in Congress threatens to further restrict the right to abortion in Brazil, contrary to what is happening in Argentina, Colombia, Mexico and Uruguay, which have decriminalized abortion up to 12 weeks of pregnancy.

A 2007 bill, called the Statute of the Fetus, gained renewed momentum last year in the lower house of Congress, at the initiative of ultra-conservative lawmakers. Its approval would prohibit any abortion, guaranteeing the fetus all the rights of a human being, especially the right to life, from the moment of conception.

Other measures to criminalize abortions even in the restricted circumstances currently permitted are under parliamentary discussion.

To counteract this conservative offensive, Brazilian women’s rights movements launched the campaigns for decriminalization “Neither imprisoned nor dead” and “Girls, not mothers”, the latter of which is being carried out throughout Latin America.

Feminists are also celebrating the ruling of Judge Rosa Weber, who recorded her vote in favor of decriminalizing abortion up to the 12th week of pregnancy on Sept. 22, before leaving the presidency of the Supreme Federal Court and retiring 10 days later.

The highest court in the country, which has acted as a counterweight to the ultraconservative initiatives of the legislature and of the Bolsonaro administration, will ultimately decide whether to rule in favor of or against the legalization of abortion on any grounds up to 12 weeks.

Weber’s vote is in line with the demands of the feminist movement, especially with the strong, early contribution of black women, in advocating “reproductive justice as a tool for social transformations,” Wardi said.

“It is an important milestone in the fight for abortion rights in Brazil” and affirms “the legitimacy of the judiciary in ensuring women’s human rights,” Mascarenha said from São Paulo.

But the current circumstances are not very favorable to her argument, with a Congress dominated by conservative and ultra-conservative groups.

Also because the process within the Supreme Federal Court on the right to abortion is facing indefinite postponement since its new president, Luis Roberto Barroso, replaced Weber.