6.5% of the population of Latin America and the Caribbean suffers from hunger, or 43.2 million people. Credit: FAO
Opinion by Mario Lubetkin (santiago)
Inter Press Service
SANTIAGO, Nov 10 (IPS) – Mario Lubetkin is FAO Assistant Director-General and FAO Regional Representative for Latin America and the CaribbeanThe figures published by the latest Regional Overview of Food Security and Nutrition 2023 are cause for great concern. The document is clear: hunger continues to significantly affect Latin America and the Caribbean.
The reasons are varied; consequences of the pandemic, armed conflicts, climate crisis, economic slowdown, rising food inflation, and income inequality have all generated a difficult scenario that requires immediate action.
Our region has an opportunity that we must not miss. Only with stability and peace will it be possible to achieve development and resolve food insecurity.
According to the Regional Overview 2023, although Latin America and the Caribbean registers a slight drop of 0.5% in hunger levels when compared to the previous measurement, it is essential to remember that, despite this progress, we are still 0.9 percentage points above the hunger levels of 2019, prior to the outbreak of COVID-19.
But hunger does not affect the region uniformly. In South America, there was a reduction of 3.5 million hungry people between 2021 and 2022, but there are still 6 million additional undernourished people compared to the pre-COVID-19 period. In Mesoamerica, the prevalence of hunger has barely changed, affecting 9.1 million people in 2022, representing 5.1%.
The situation is worrisome in the Caribbean, where 7.2 million people experienced hunger in 2022, with an alarming prevalence of 16.3% of the population. Between 2021 and 2022, hunger increased by 700,000 people, and compared to 2019, the increase was 1 million people, with Haiti being one of the most affected countries.
While hunger figures continue to concern us, overweight in children under five years of age continues to rise, exceeding the global estimate, and a quarter of the adult population lives with obesity.
FAO recognizes the urgency of addressing this issue and is committed to updating the CELAC FNS Plan for food and nutritional security. The recent Buenos Aires Declaration of the VII CELAC Summit reaffirmed the commitment of the 33 member states to food security, agriculture, and sustainable development.
This declaration emphasized the importance of updating the plan in accordance with the new international context and the challenges facing the region, with the technical assistance of global organizations like FAO and regional organizations such as ECLAC, IICA, and ALADI, to achieve a comprehensive solution.
The update of the food plan takes into account national commitments related to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, evidence-based policies and good practices in the region, providing a mechanism that contributes to the eradication of poverty, hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition.
Eradicating hunger is a shared responsibility, and together we must redouble our efforts to ensure that no citizen of Latin America and the Caribbean goes hungry. Food security is essential for the well-being of our communities and the sustainable development of the region, and we must continue to work together, leaving no one behind. FAO is fully committed to this challenge.
Kenya’s extensive coastline has been fronted as a hub for carbon trading due to its lush mangrove forests. But now experts caution that carbon markets are exploitative greenwashing systems. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS
by Joyce Chimbi (nairobi)
Inter Press Service
NAIROBI, Nov 10 (IPS) – Somalia, Syria, DRC Congo, Afghanistan, Yemen, Chad, South Sudan, Central African Republic, Nigeria, and Ethiopia are the 10 countries at greatest risk of climate disaster globally despite collectively contributing just 0.28 percent of global CO2 emissions. A climate-induced humanitarian crisis continues to unfold across these countries and many others in the global South, including Kenya, which declared drought a national disaster in September 2021.
Flash floods, failed rainy seasons, severe food insecurity, and climate-induced health disasters such as cholera are becoming frequent, and their debilitating effects are increasingly difficult to mitigate. In late 2022, for instance, floods caused extensive damage to farmlands in Nigeria, and projections show 25 million Nigerians could face high levels of food insecurity by the end of 2023.
Against this backdrop, there is growing concern that the carbon market has failed Africa and other developing countries in the global South. Governments and companies created carbon market systems to address their greenhouse emissions – a trading system in which carbon credits are sold and bought. One tradable carbon credit is equivalent to one tonne of carbon dioxide, or the amount of different greenhouse gases reduced, sequestered, or avoided.
Fadhel Kaboub, a Tunisian economist based in Nairobi, a senior advisor with Power Shift Africa and the President of the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity, tells IPS, “Carbon credits are pollution permits that allow global North polluters to continue polluting while offering financial crumbs to the global South. They displace vulnerable communities from their ancestral territory and pastoral land. They enrich middlemen and speculators.”
Kaboub, who is also an Associate Professor of Economics at Denison University, says, “Through the dominant market power of the corporations that buy these pollution permits, they pass the cost of the carbon credits on to their customers, many of whom are actually in the Global South, so we end up paying for it indirectly.”
There are experts, however, such as those powering the Africa Carbon Markets Initiative (ACMI), who are proactively promoting the carbon market systems as a powerful tool to deliver carbon justice. And for developing countries to accelerate socio-economic development by leveraging on selling carbon while transitioning to a low-carbon economy.
ACMI seeks to capture more of Africa’s potential in carbon markets by addressing the challenges to voluntary carbon market growth and building the foundations for a thriving voluntary carbon market ecosystem in Africa by 2030. Its priority areas are “not only on driving decarbonisation activities but also on driving economic development by supporting energy access, scaling the clean energy transition, protecting forests, improving agriculture, and creating new income sources.”
However, a recent report found that “ACMI’s growth target would allow big private companies to emit an additional 1.5-2.5 Gigatonnes CO2e per year by 2050, more than the total emissions from fossil fuels from all of Africa in 2021 and double the entire annual CO2 emissions from all of sub-Saharan Africa.”
IPS reached out to ACMI for comment, but it had not come back to us at the time of publication.
But carbon trading is not universally seen as a panacea to addressing global warming.
South African-based Dr Shehnaaz Moosa, the director and head of finance hub at SouthSouthNorth, which is a climate change non-profit organisation, tells IPS that carbon markets have the potential to either reinforce or mitigate historic structural inequalities between the global North and South.
“But given the dismal failure of the Clean Development Mechanism and the greenwashing of the voluntary carbon market, I am in the camp that believes it will reinforce these deep inequalities. The carbon market allows big polluters to keep doing so with no overall reduction in their emissions. Local projects in the global South that reduce carbon are exploited with no real benefit accruing to the communities.”
Moosa, who also lectures in Chemical Engineering at the University of Cape Town, says carbon trading must be seen for what it is, “a lot of hot air to legitimise the continued production of greenhouse emissions. We keep hearing the rhetoric that depending on how the market is structured, it will be of benefit, which is a Northern narrative, and there is no way to structure exploitation that will make it equitable because it is exactly what carbon trading is: exploitation.”
Kaboub affirms, citing a recent investigation that found that the majority of carbon offset projects essentially amount to greenwashing fraud – making false or misleading statements about the environmental benefits of a product or practice – that does nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Stressing that this is one of the most disturbing climate finance false solutions and dangerous distractions.
Moosa and Kaboub emphasise that the cause of disagreement is that carbon markets are attractive to high polluters as they enable wealthy industrialised nations and corporations to maintain carbon-intensive and climate-warming practices while transferring their emission reduction duties to Africa. Stressing that it is time to explore other climate financing mechanisms and bring into full effect the Polluter Pays Principle – one of the key principles underlying the European Union’s environmental policy.
The principle demands that polluters bear the costs of their pollution, including the cost of measures taken to prevent, control and remedy pollution and the costs it imposes on society. As such, polluters are incentivised to avoid environmental damage and are held responsible for the pollution that they cause. It is also the polluter, and not the taxpayer, who covers the cost of remediation.
Moosa is particularly focused on Loss and Damage, “while the Loss and Damage funding arrangements are being designed, we do not need to be distracted by a concept that only works for the big polluters. The developing countries’ energies should be directed to Loss and Damage and Adaptation finance because there cannot be climate justice until climate injustice is addressed. The global North has a long way to go to address these injustices, and carbon markets are not a way to do it.”
Kaboub agrees, calling for a need to steer clear of the carbon market as African countries that have not contributed to climate change and who are, in fact, the victims of climate-induced shocks are now being forced to give up territorial sovereignty over large swaths of land to foreign corporations to issue pollution permits – adding that this is a new form of colonialism.
NEW DELHI, India, Nov 10 (IPS) – For a long time, the agriculture sector has been heralded as a success story for India. Spurred by the Green Revolution, it provided a path-breaking solution to feed the country’s burgeoning population starting in the 1960s.
However, in recent decades, intensive land use and inequitable water resource management, compounded by a swelling population, prevailing poverty, depletion of natural resources, and a rapidly changing climate have put tremendous pressure on the country’s agricultural output.
The 2023 Global Hunger Index ranked India 111th out of 125 countries, indicating a serious level of hunger, with concerns growing about the possibility of long-term food scarcity. And earlier this year, The Women and Child Development Ministry found that nearly 8% of the country’s children were malnourished.
A similar situation pervades in various parts of the world:?139 million people?plunged into acute food insecurity in 2021, and in 2022, an estimated?2.4 billion people worldwide did not have regular access to safe, nutritious, and sufficient food.
The Famine Early Warning Systems Network has projected approximately 100 million people worldwide will need food assistance through early 2024, in large part because of the El Niño.
Credit: UNICEF/Safidy Andriananten
The food crisis continued to worsen last year, as the tremors of the Russo-Ukrainian War and its trade policies and the economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic were felt across the globe. As of October 30, 2023, 19 countries have implemented 27 food export bans, and seven have implemented 15 export-limiting measures.
At the upcoming COP28 (30 November- 12 December in Dubai), governments must commit to taking serious action to curb the impacts of our food and land use systems on our climate. This includes: (1) urging nations to include emissions from food systems in their climate commitments; (2) addressing poor water management; and (3) adopting climate-resilient agriculture practices.
Agriculture and GHG emissions
A lack of sustainable agriculture production has made the food and land use sector a major contributor to total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Global food systems account for?31% of global emissions?and could become a major factor in exceeding 1.5°C of warming between 2051 and 2063.?
Moreover, agricultural?land today takes up 38 percent of the global land surface. Nearly one-third of this is used as cropland, while the remaining two-thirds consist of meadows and pastures for grazing livestock. This comes at the cost of extensive deforestation and biodiversity loss. ?Agriculture accounts on average for? 70%?of all freshwater withdrawals globally.
The challenge is even more acute for India, which accounts for about 17% of the world’s population but only 4% of the world’s freshwater resources. In fact, nearly 55% of Indians are dependent on agriculture. With the Indian population estimated to reach 1.67 billion by 2050, the demand on water, food and energy is only expected to increase.
Addressing Poor Water Management
Climate change has substantially impacted agricultural productivity, making better water management a necessity. India’s chief crop produce—rice, wheat, and sugarcane—consume the most water. Indian agriculture accounts for 90% water use due to fast-track groundwater depletion and poor irrigation systems. Due to an inept water resource management system and persistent climate change, the country faces regular water shortages.
Distorted water pricing has compounded the issue and is chiefly responsible for the over-extraction of India’s groundwater. Furthermore, subsidized electricity to farmers for pumping water for agricultural activities has led to instances of increased groundwater extraction, and shifting cropping pattern towards more water-intensive crops, like the rice paddy.
Efficient irrigation systems should be developed and implemented to economize water and reduce crop vulnerabilities. The use of water-saving technologies and conservation agriculture technologies, such as drip sprinkler irrigation and sub-soil irrigation, have proven extremely effective in both water conservation and increasing crop yields.
Alternate wetting and drying (AWD) and Direct Seeded Rice have also demonstrated success as water management techniques for rice plantations, whereas efforts to expand the use of millets, a highly nutritious crop that can grow on arid lands and is resilient to climate changes, in emerging economies should also be accelerated.
Climate Resilient Agriculture
It is well established that climate change is a threat to agriculture, and resilient agriculture practices forged through efficient technologies, innovations, and circular economy practices must be incentivized and scaled.
Despite being the world’s leading producer in jute, milk, wheat sugarcane, vegetable, and rice, India continues to face post-harvest losses. A 2022 study revealed that between harvesting and consumption, the country lost 5-13% of its fruits and vegetables and around 3-7% of crops that included oil, seeds, and spices.
In particular, the significant use of chemical fertilizers by Indian farmers due to huge subsidies given by the government is a major contributor not only to emissions and environmental pollution, but to the degradation of soil.
Sustainable alternatives, such as nanofertilizers and bioinoculants like mycorrhizaes should be explored to both reduce burdens on the government as well as curb the environmental impacts of traditional fertilizers. Combined agro-waste (crop-residue and livestock manure) management and increasing the use of biogas plants can also help to reduce carbon emissions and produce more resilient crops.
The world is ready to make a transition towards sustainable food and land use practices, and national leaders should seize this opportunity to intensify their fight against climate change. COP28 offers an important platform to accelerate the transformation of our food and land-use systems towards a better, progressive future.
Vibha Dhawan is Chair of SDSN South Asia and Director General of The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI)
More than 800 people have been reportedly killed by armed groups in Ardamata, West Darfur, an area which has so far been less affected by the conflict that erupted in April.
Ardamata also housed a camp for internally displaced people, Close to 100 shelters have been razed to the ground, while extensive looting – including of UNHCR relief items – has also taken place.
Two decades ago, thousands were killed across Darfur and millions displaced in fighting between Sudanese Government forces backed by allied militia known as the Janjaweed on one side, and rebel groups resisting the autocratic rule of President Omar al-Bashir, who was ousted in 2019.
UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, Alice Wairimu Nderitu, warned in June that if fighting in West Darfur continued, including attacks based on ethnicity, this could amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Violations, extortion and killings
The UN refugee agency expressed alarm over reports of continued sexual violence, torture, arbitrary killings, extortion of civilians and targeting of specific ethnic groups.
“Twenty years ago, the world was shocked by the terrible atrocities and human rights violations in Darfur. We fear a similar dynamic might be developing,” said UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi.
“An immediate end to the fighting and unconditional respect for the civilian population by all parties are crucial to avoid another catastrophe,” he added.
Millions displaced
More than 4.8 million people have been displaced inside Sudan since fighting broke out in mid-April between the army and a paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). A further 1.2 million have sought refuge in neighbouring countries.
UNHCR reported that more than 8,000 people fled to Chad in the last week alone, though this is likely to be an underestimate due to challenges registering new arrivals.
The agency and partners are working with the government to prepare for more refugees entering the country.
Earthquake-affected families in Chamakhet village, Jajarkot, are staying in temporary shelters. Credit: Barsha Shah/IPS
by Tanka Dhakal (kathmandu)
Inter Press Service
KATHMANDU, Nov 10 (IPS) – Emergency health services are grappling with the enormous challenge of providing essential care to individuals affected by a deadly earthquake that claimed the lives of at least 153 and around 400 people wounded in western Nepal.
At midnight of Friday, November 3, a powerful 6.4 magnitude earthquake struck the remote district of Jajarkot in western Nepal, and rural communities are dealing with physical destruction, loss of life, and a lack of basic healthcare services, which pose a significant threat to public health in the aftermath of the earthquake.
“Affected families are living under the open sky in this cold winter, and we are struggling to manage basic services, including food, clean water, and healthcare facilities,” explained Bir Bahadur Giri, President of Barekot Rural Municipality, which was the epicenter of the earthquake.
“Emergency responses are still ongoing, and we are witnessing incidents of cholera infections. We need dedicated support from all stakeholders to address this threat before it worsens.”
Families, having lost their homes that were either completely destroyed or damaged, are struggling. There is a shortage of clean drinking water, food, and warm shelter.
Giri, who is also a local resident, stressed the need for a robust focus not only on emergency support but also on immediate responses to public health concerns, including psychological counseling for affected families. The earthquake and subsequent aftershocks have affected the historically vulnerable Karnali region, making it more prone to public health outbreaks. The risk has increased significantly due to the latest disaster.
The earthquake destroyed houses and killed more than 150 people. Credit: Barsha Shah/IPS
‘We Are Ready to Respond’
In the face of the crisis, the government is trying to console and keep the affected community hopeful about the assistance they will receive from the agencies. The Ministry of Health and Population claims that it is in continuous contact with the emergency medical team (EMT) and stakeholders to understand the situations on the ground. The Ministry stated, “There is a possibility of a public health-related impact after this hazard, and we are preparing for an effective response.”
As the central agency, the Karnali Province Government said it is monitoring the situation in real-time and ensuring that the response reaches the community on time. According to the Health Service Directorate of the provincial government, their current focus is on monitoring and preparing for potential health risks.
Dr Rabin Khadka, Office Chief at the Directorate, further explained, “Yes, we are facing shortages of resources and manpower, but we are trying to be ready for possible health risks. We are aware that there is a high possibility of an outbreak, and we are preparing for it, but we need help from all.”
Karnali Province, including severely affected districts like Jajarkot and West Rukum, is prone to diarrhea, cholera, and other water-borne diseases. According to the Directorate, around 500 people have died due to these diseases in the past ten years in the province.
The fear of water-borne and cold-related health risks is concerning for locals, especially when affected families are struggling to access clean water despite government agencies claiming they are prepared.
Concerning Reality
Sagar Budhathoki, a Kathmandu-based journalist who covers healthcare and is currently reporting from the earthquake-affected area, explained that the ground reality for affected families is heart-wrenching.
“Getting primary healthcare and accessing very basic needs is itself a huge battle for the locals here,” Budhathoki shared his observations. “The majority of healthcare centers are also destroyed, and now these families are fully dependent. We don’t see any effective preparedness to tackle a possible public health crisis.”
At least 14 health posts or healthcare centers have been either destroyed or damaged by the earthquake. Dr Pratikshya Bharati is leading health services at the Jajarkot district hospital, and her major concern is how remote villages will function during this challenging and demanding time when they are also hit by the earthquake.
“Healthcare facilities in the villages are struggling to maintain normal day-to-day health services,” Dr. Bharati said, “For the first few days, our focus was on rescue and emergency treatment, but now there is a fear of potential public health concerns, and we are not fully equipped.”
According to her, even the district hospital is only able to provide primary care and refer patients to hospitals in nearby cities, including Surkhet and Nepalgunj, which take at least 3 to 5 hours to reach. “If we were able to provide more services, we may be able to save a few lives,” Bhattrai shares her disappointment.
In addition to that, regular immunizations and breathing facilities are also affected. “Home delivery rates will rise because birthing centers are also destroyed,” she explained, “Institutional delivery is only at 52 percent here, and now there is a fear that risky home deliveries will increase, which is another area we need to be careful about.”
SAN FRANCISCO, USA, Nov 09 (IPS) – The governments of Israel and the United States are now in disagreement over how many Palestinian civilians it’s okay to kill. Last week — as the death toll from massive Israeli bombardment of Gaza neared 10,000 people, including several thousand children — top U.S. officials began to worry about the rising horrified outcry at home and abroad. So, they went public with muted misgivings and calls for a “humanitarian pause.” But Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made clear that he would have none of it.
Such minor tactical discord does little to chip away at the solid bedrock alliance between the two countries, which are most of the way through a 10-year deal that guarantees $38 billion in U.S. military aid to Israel. And now, as the carnage in Gaza continues, Washington is rushing to provide extra military assistance worth $14 billion.
Days ago, In These Times reported that the Biden administration is seeking congressional permission “to unilaterally blanket-approve the future sale of military equipment and weapons — like ballistic missiles and artillery ammunition — to Israel without notifying Congress.” And so, “the Israeli government would be able to purchase up to $3.5 billion in military articles and services in complete secrecy.”
While Israeli forces were using weapons provided by the United States to slaughter Palestinian civilians, resupply flights were landing in Israel courtesy of U.S. taxpayers. Air & Space Forces Magazine published a photo showing “U.S. Air Force Airmen and Israeli military members unload cargo from a U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster III on a ramp at Nevatim Base, Israel.”
Pictures taken on Oct. 24 show that the military cargo went from Travis Air Force Base in California to Ramstein Air Base in Germany to Israel. Overall, the magazine reported, “the Air Force’s airlift fleet has been steadily working to deliver essential munitions, armored vehicles, and aid to Israel.” And so, the apartheid country is receiving a huge boost to assist with the killing.
The horrific atrocities committed by Hamas on Oct. 7 have opened the door to protracted horrific atrocities by Israel with key assistance from the United States.
Oxfam America has issued a briefing paper decrying the Pentagon’s plans to ship tens of thousands of 155mm artillery shells to the Israeli military. The organization noted that “Israel’s use of this munition in past conflicts demonstrates that its use would be virtually assured to be indiscriminate, unlawful, and devastating to civilians in Gaza.”
Oxfam added: “There are no known scenarios in which 155mm artillery shells could be used in Israel’s ground operation in Gaza in compliance with international humanitarian law.”
During the last several weeks, “international humanitarian law” has been a common phrase coming from President Biden while expressing support for Israel’s military actions. It’s an Orwellian absurdity, as if saying the words is sufficient while constantly helping Israel to violate international humanitarian law in numerous ways.
“Israeli forces have used white phosphorus, a chemical that ignites when in contact with oxygen, causing horrific and severe burns, on densely populated neighborhoods,” Human Rights Watch senior legal adviser Clive Baldwin wrote in late October. “White phosphorus can burn down to the bone, and burns to 10 percent of the human body are often fatal.”
Baldwin added: “Israel has also engaged in the collective punishment of Gaza’s population through cutting off food, water, electricity, and fuel. This is a war crime, as is willfully blocking humanitarian relief from reaching civilians in need.”
At the end of last week, the Win Without War organization noted that “senior administration officials are increasingly alarmed by how the Israeli government is conducting its military operations in Gaza, as well as the reputational repercussions of the Biden administration’s support for a collective punishment strategy that clearly violates international law. Many worry that the U.S. will be blamed for the Israeli military’s indiscriminate attacks on civilians, particularly women and children.”
News reporting now tells us that Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken want a bit of a course correction. For them, the steady large-scale killing of Palestinian civilians became concerning when it became a PR problem.
Dressed up in an inexhaustible supply of euphemistic rhetoric and double-talk, such immoral policies are stunning to see in real time. And, for many people in Gaza, literally breathtaking.
Now, guided by political calculus, the White House is trying to persuade Israel’s prime minister to titrate the lethal doses of bombing Gaza. But as Netanyahu has made clear in recent days, Israel is going to do whatever it wants, despite pleas from its patron.
While, in effect, it largely functions in the Middle East as part of the U.S. war machine, Israel has its own agenda. Yet the two governments are locked into shared, long-term, overarching strategic interests in the Middle East that have absolutely no use for human rights except as rhetorical window-dressing.
Biden made that clear last year when he fist-bumped the de facto ruler of oil-rich Saudi Arabia, a dictatorship that — with major U.S. assistance — has led an eight-year war on Yemen costing nearly 400,000 lives.
The war machine needs constant oiling from news media. That requires ongoing maintenance of the doublethink assumption that when Israel terrorizes and kills people from the air, the Israeli Defense Force is fighting “terrorism” without engaging in it.
Another helpful notion in recent weeks has been the presumption that — while Hamas puts out “propaganda” — Israel does not. And so, on Nov. 2, the PBS NewsHour’s foreign affairs correspondent Nick Schifrin reported on what he called “Hamas propaganda videos.”
Fair enough. Except that it would be virtually impossible for mainstream U.S. news media to also matter-of-factly refer to public output from the Israeli government as “propaganda.” (I asked Schifrin for comment, but my several emails and texts went unanswered.)
Whatever differences might surface from time to time, the United States and Israel remain enmeshed. To the power elite in Washington, the bilateral alliance is vastly more important than the lives of Palestinian people. And it’s unlikely that the U.S. government will really confront Israel over its open-ended killing spree in Gaza.
Consider this: Just weeks before beginning her second stint as House speaker in January 2019, Rep. Nancy Pelosi was recorded on video at a forum sponsored by the Israeli American Council as she declared: “I have said to people when they ask me — if this Capitol crumbled to the ground, the one thing that would remain is our commitment to our aid, I don’t even call it aid — our cooperation — with Israel. That’s fundamental to who we are.”
Even making allowances for bizarre hyperbole, Pelosi’s statement is revealing of the kind of mentality that continues to hold sway in official Washington. It won’t change without a huge grassroots movement that refuses to go away.
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.
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 09 (IPS) – The killings of thousands of civilians in the ongoing Middle East conflict are largely the result of an uneven battle—a nuclear-armed Israel, equipped with some of the most sophisticated American weapons systems, fighting a rag-tag militant group, Hamas.
Against this backdrop, a leading human rights organization, is appealing to Israel’s key allies—including the US, UK, Canada and Germany—to suspend military assistance and arms sales to Israel “so long as its forces commit widespread, serious abuses amounting to war crimes against Palestinian civilians with impunity”.
Iran and other governments, says Human Rights Watch (HRW), should also cease providing arms to Palestinian armed groups, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad, so long as they systematically commit attacks amounting to war crimes against Israeli civilians.
But the killings by the Israelis far outnumber the killings by Hamas, according to conservative estimates. Since October 7, about 1,400 Israelis and other nationals have been killed, and more than 10,000 Palestinians,40 percent of them children.
“Civilians are being punished and killed at a scale unprecedented in recent history in Israel and Palestine,” said Bruno Stagno, chief advocacy officer at Human Rights Watch. “The United States, Iran and other governments risk being complicit in grave abuses if they continue to provide military assistance to known violators.”
Kenneth Roth, the former executive director of HRW, was quoted as saying Israel dropping several large bombs in the middle of a densely populated refugee camp was completely and predictably going to lead to a significant and disproportionate loss of civilian lives and therefore a war crime.
Describing Israel’s military “as part of the US war machine”, Norman Solomon, national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, told IPS the solid bedrock alliance between Israel and the US has ensured the continuation of a 10-year deal that guarantees $38 billion in U.S. military aid to Israel.
And now, as the carnage in Gaza continues, he pointed out, Washington is rushing to provide extra military assistance worth $14 billion.
During the last several weeks, he said, “international humanitarian law” has been a common phrase coming from President Biden while expressing support for Israel’s military actions.
It’s an Orwellian absurdity, as if saying the words is sufficient, while constantly helping Israel to violate international humanitarian law in numerous ways, declared Solomon.
HRW said future military transfers to Israel in the face of ongoing serious violations of the laws of war risk making the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Germany complicit in these abuses if they knowingly and significantly contribute to them. Providing weapons to Palestinian armed groups, given their continuing unlawful attacks, risks making Iran complicit in those violations.
US President Joseph R. Biden has requested US$14.3 billion for further arms to Israel in addition to the $3.8 billion in US military aid Israel receives annually.
On November 2, the US House of Representatives passed a bill that would provide that military aid to Israel. Since October 7, the United States has either transferred or announced it is planning to transfer Small Diameter Bombs, Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) guidance kits, 155mm artillery shells, and a million rounds of ammunition, among other weapons.
The United Kingdom has licensed the sale of GBP£442 million worth of arms ($539 million) to Israeli forces since 2015, including aircraft, bombs, and ammunition. Canada exported CDN$47 million ($33 million) in 2021 and 2022. Germany issued licenses for €862 million ($916 million) in arms sales to Israel between 2015 and 2019, according to HRW.
Hamas leadership publicly said in January 2022 that it received at least US$70 million in military assistance from Iran, but did not specify during what period of time this support was provided.
“How many more civilian lives must be lost, how much more must civilians suffer as a result of war crimes before countries supplying weapons to Israel and Palestinian armed groups pull the plug and avoid complicity in these atrocities?” Stagno said.
The United Nations, once described the deaths and destruction in the eight-year-old civil war in Yemen as “the world’s worst humanitarian disaster”.
The killings of mostly civilians have been estimated at over 100,000, with accusations of war crimes against a coalition led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), whose primary arms supplier is the US.
And now, the killings of Palestinians in Gaza have come back to haunt the Americans in a new war zone. But still, the US is unlikely to be hauled before the International Criminal Court (ICC)., nor was it charged for human rights abuses, torture, and war crimes committed in Afghanistan and Iraq in a bygone era.
“If U.S. officials don’t care about Palestinian civilians facing atrocities using U.S. weapons, perhaps they will care a bit more about their own individual criminal liability for aiding Israel in carrying out these atrocities,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), an American non-profit organization that advocates democracy and human rights in the Middle East.
“The American people never signed up to help Israel commit war crimes against defenseless civilians with taxpayer funded bombs and artillery,” she noted.
Last month, Josh Paul, a longstanding official at the State Department’s political-military bureau resigned because of what he said was immoral US support and lethal aid for Israel’s bombings in Gaza.
According to the State Department, Israel has been designated as a Major Non-NATO Ally under U.S. law. This status provides foreign partners with certain benefits in the areas of defense trade and security cooperation and is a powerful symbol of their close relationship with the United States.
Consistent with statutory requirements, it is the policy of the United States to help Israel preserve its Qualitative Military Edge (QME), or its ability to counter and defeat any credible conventional military threat from any individual state or possible coalition of states or from non-state actors, while sustaining minimal damages and casualties.
This requires a quadrennial report to Congress, for arms transfers that are required to be Congressionally notified, and a determination that individual arms transfers to the region will not adversely affect Israel’s QME.
Strengthening their military relationship further, the United States and Israel have signed multiple bilateral defense cooperation agreements, including: a Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement (1952); a General Security of Information Agreement (1982); a Mutual Logistics Support Agreement (1991); and a Status of Forces Agreement (1994).
Armenians from Nagorno Karabakh on September 25, departing from the besieged enclave. Virtually the entire population has fled for fear of violence by Azerbaijani forces. Credit: Gaiane Yenokian/IPS
by Gaiane Yenokian (tegh, armenia)
Inter Press Service
TEGH, Armenia, Nov 08 (IPS) – From the balcony of the house she’s lived in for the past weeks, 32-year-old Margarita Ghushunts says she often looks in the direction of her home, in Nagorno Karabakh.
“Every time I look that way, I remember the hellish journey we took to escape from home. It feels like losing it over and over again,” she tells IPS.
Also called “Artsakh” by its Armenian former residents, Nagorno-Karabakh was a self-proclaimed republic within Soviet Azerbaijan which had sought international recognition and independence since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The First Nagorno-Karabakh War (1988-1994) ended with an Armenian victory. Azerbaijan would unleash its armed forces in 2020 and take back many of the areas lost years before.
But grievances were still not settled.
On September 19, Azerbaijan launched a massive attack against Nagorno Karabakh. All the population —more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians— fled the region for Armenia within a few days.
Panicked by the Azerbaijani attack, the civilian population rushed to evacuate. The sole road connecting Nagorno Karabakh to Armenia —closed by a 9-month blockade imposed by Azerbaijan— had just been reopened, but it could be closed again at any moment.
After a 28-hour, exhausting ride to the Armenian border from Nagorno Karabakh´s capital city Stepanakert, Margarita, her husband Harutyun and their three minor children arrived at her father’s house in Tegh village, in southern Armenia.
The village is located right on the Azerbaijani border. Margarita can even see the Azerbaijani military positions and their flags waving from the neighbouring mountain peaks.
“We can also hear the periodic gunshots so my children cannot sleep peacefully. Even when they hear the sound of thunder, they come to me and ask: “Mama, are they shooting at us again?”
Refugees in Kornidzor, the first town on the Armenian side of the border, on September 25. Many arrived empty-handed after fleeing on foot through the forest and under shelling. Credit: Gaiane Yenokian/IPS
Killed and tortured
On September 28, the last leader of Nagorno Karabakh, Samvel Shajramanian, issued a decree dissolving the self-proclaimed Nagorno Karabakh Republic as of January 1, 2024.
Today, the population of the evacuated enclave is spread throughout the regions of Armenia. Some of them are in the accommodations provided by the government, while others rent houses or live in free accommodations offered by caring individuals.
In several public speeches and international meetings, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has repeatedly emphasized that the rights of Armenians living in Nagorno Karabakh would be safeguarded “with Azerbaijan’s national legislation and international commitments”.
But there’s little trust among the Armenians. Less than 40 remain in the besieged enclave. They are now provided with humanitarian aid by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
On October 19, the Armenian Human Rights Defender, Anahit Manasyan, reported that the bodies of the victims in Nagorno-Karabakh during the Azeri attack from September 19-21 showed signs of torture and mutilation.
It matches data issued by Armenia’s Investigative Committee on the 31st of October which points to 14 people being tortured by the Azerbaijani military and 64 people dying on the road from Nagorno Karabakh to Armenia.
In an interview with IPS in Yerevan, southern Armenia, International law and human rights expert Siranush Sahakyan notes that previously recorded cases of brutal murders among the civilian population of Nagorno-Karabakh demonstrate the futility of Aliyev´s words.
“After the 2020 war, up to 70 civilians decided to remain in their settlements of Hadrut, Shushi and other regions which came under Azerbaijani control. All these civilians were either captured, taken to Baku, tortured and killed or murdered in their own houses. Their bodies were desecrated,” recalls Siranush Sahakyan.
UN also called on Azerbaijan that “Rights and security of Karabakh Armenians must be guaranteed”. Other than just making calls, says Siranush Sahakyan, the UN should also create the conditions for it.
“The first condition is to eliminate hatred against Armenians. Also, an international fully mandated mechanism needs to be deployed in Azerbaijan to protect Armenians in case they face security issues. Without a substantial change in the situation, no one will return,” stresses the lawyer.
Romela Avanesyan prepares a traditional dish from Nagorno-Karabakh. As winter approaches, these displaced people depend on both government and international aid. Credit: Gaiane Yenokian/IPS
Fear of new attacks
Margarita Ghushunts’s little daughter, Rozi, was born under the blockade of Nagorno Karabakh during which they were deprived of gas, electricity, food, medicine, and fuel, and the healthcare system was almost non-functional.
But it was not the harsh living conditions that forced Margarita to leave Stepanakert
“We could bear all the cruelty of the blockade to protect our right of self-determination, but as Artsakh’s government was forced to surrender arms to save the civil population, we could not stay there anymore,” explains the displaced woman.
Life in Artsakh without its defence army, she claims, “simply equates to death for the population.”
Today, Ghushunts her neighbours often ask if they will stay in the village. Her answer, however, is unsettling for everyone. The displaced woman fears Azerbaijani troops “may launch an attack on Armenia at any moment.”
It can happen. According to the Armenian MFA, after the 2020 war Azerbaijan has occupied 150 square kilometres of the internationally recognized territories of the Republic of Armenia.
Displaced children from Nagorno Karabakh play in the only park in the town of Kalavan. According to the Armenian government, around 30,000 of the more than 100,000 refugees are minors. Credit: Gaiane Yenokian/IPS
On November 1st, The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention issued a “Red Flag Alert” for the Republic of Azerbaijan in the Republic of Armenia, due to the alarming potential for an invasion of Armenia by Azerbaijan in the coming days and weeks.
Siranush Sahakyan, the International law expert interviewed by IPS, claims that the ratification of the Rome Statute on the International Criminal Court (ICC) by Armenia’s parliament on the 3rd of October could open the door to an international investigation of Azerbaijan’s crimes against Armenia.
“Non-ratification of the Rome Statute by Azerbaijan creates obstacles to investigate their crimes in Artsakh, but it will fall under jurisdiction for the crimes committed on the internationally recognised territory of Armenia starting from May 2021. This could be one of the ways to protect Armenia from future international crimes,” Sahakyan states.
The Avanesyans also left Nagorno Karabakh to settle in Vazashen, another border village in Armenia´s south. But they soon decided to move again.
“Our neighbour pointed out the Azerbaijani positions right in front of the village. He mentioned that they could not graze the cattle because the Azerbaijanis were stealing it. The children got scared, so we had to seek another shelter,” Lusine Avanesyan, a 35-year-old mother of five children told IPS from Kalavan village.
That´s where they moved again after the local guesthouse offered its rooms for the family allowing them to stay as long as they wished.
Romela Avanesyan, Lusine Avanesyan’s mother-in-law, began exploring the resources available in Kalavan to start a farm as soon as they arrived.
The displaced 61-year-old remembers the pomegranate garden she planted many years ago but was forced to leave behind. While they were rushing to evacuate Karabakh, she held onto what was most precious to her: the seeds of plants and vegetables from her garden.
“I was urging my grandchildren to pick only the cracked pomegranates and leave the beautiful ones to ripen,” Avansesyan tells IPS. Today, she adds, “those pomegranates are lost, and so is our entire homeland.”
Pedestrian crossing at an intersection in Tokyo. Credit: Unsplash/Ryoji Iwata
Opinion by Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana, Natalia Kanem 2 (bangkok, thailand)
Inter Press Service
BANGKOK, Thailand, Nov 08 (IPS) – Asia and the Pacific is an economic powerhouse, fuelled by its vibrant and diverse population. Comprising 60 per cent of the world’s population, this region is bursting with both a wealth of experience and untapped potential.
Exciting advancements have been made here, in education; health care, including sexual and reproductive health; jobs, and sustainable development. Yet there is a catch: this progress has not been evenly distributed. In fact, inequity pervades the region, especially within individual countries.
Women still lose their lives during childbirth at alarming rates, and in many countries we have seen limited progress in reducing maternal mortality in the past decade. In several countries, less than 30 per cent of women of reproductive age use contraception. Unemployment rates among young women remain high, reaching up to 25 per cent in some places.
Women are still struggling for a seat at the political table, with less than a quarter of national parliamentary seats being occupied by women in 35 countries across the region. Progress towards gender equality and women’s empowerment has been sluggish, creating a roadblock to sustainable development.
The region is particularly susceptible to the effects of climate change and environmental degradation, with disasters claiming 2 million lives since 1970. Financial losses from these calamities add up to $924 billion every year, eating up nearly 3 per cent of the region’s GDP. Humanity’s environmental footprint has expanded dramatically. The region’s greenhouse gas emissions have risen by 54 per cent since 1990, largely due to the energy and agricultural sectors.
Population ageing is another mega-trend affecting this part of the world. More people are enjoying longer and healthier lives, and in this new reality we need policies that adapt to these shifts and invest in every stage of life. Rather than perceiving older persons as a drain on resources, we should recognize them as individuals with human rights who make important contributions to society in various ways all the time.
The same applies to persons with disabilities, migrants and other groups who have much to contribute, yet too often face stigma and discrimination. Let us build societies for people of all abilities and ages.
Over 60 per cent of the population in the Asia Pacific region has access to the internet, and this has turbocharged development across many sectors. Nevertheless, these technological advances bring new challenges, from the digital divide between the haves and the have-nots, to privacy violations and a disturbing rise in technology-facilitated gender-based violence.
While it is important that we celebrate the region’s many achievements, we must simultaneously confront its population and development challenges. We have a unique opportunity to do so as we mark 60 years since the first Asian and Pacific Population Conference and 30 years since the International Conference on Population and Development – two important milestones on the path towards sustainable progress.
At the midpoint of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, as countries seek to accelerate action towards our global goals, we urgently need comprehensive, forward-thinking, intergenerational approaches to harness the opportunities of population dynamics for sustainable development. To be effective, such approaches must be based on individual human rights and rooted in evidence and data.
Innovative solutions, financing and political commitment through inclusive partnerships are our path forward. Let us ensure young and older persons have a voice in decision-making and in designing solutions. Let us tap into the goldmine of shared knowledge and proven methods we have built over the past few decades.
Investing in people, through improved health, education and training, while providing social protection for all to retain development gains, lays the foundation for inclusive, just and sustainable societies. It is also our route to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.
The Seventh Asian and Pacific Population Conference taking place this week is the perfect launchpad for collective action. Governments, civil society, young people and others can come together and make a real difference, building on their collective investments and successes to date. Together, we can protect people and the planet and ensure prosperity for all, now and in the future.
Let us refocus our actions to ensure human rights and choices for everyone, driving us closer to peace and a sustainable future for this generation and those that follow.
Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana is UN Under-Secretary-General and Executive Secretary of the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP); Natalia Kanem is UN Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).
Community Efforts Boost Wastewater Treatment in El Salvador
by Edgardo Ayala (chirilagua, el salvador)
Inter Press Service
CHIRILAGUA, El Salvador, Nov 07 (IPS) – Neither the central government nor most of El Salvador’s 262 municipalities have had the capacity to install enough wastewater treatment plants to prevent it from being discharged directly into the environment.
As a result, most of the rivers are polluted to such a degree that only 12 percent of them have good quality water, and the pollution translates into gastrointestinal and other diseases among the 6.7 million inhabitants of this Central American country.
But there are some towns and cities that are making efforts to keep running the treatment plants they have managed to set up, with financial support from international institutions.
One of these municipalities is Chirilagua in eastern El Salvador, along the Pacific Ocean in the south, the only ocean that bathes the coast of this Central American isthmus country.
The municipality operates a wastewater treatment plant built in the surrounding area as part of a 40-unit housing project called La Española that houses 40 families affected by Hurricane Mitch, which caused death and destruction in Central America in October 1998.
The project was largely financed with funds from the government of the southern Spanish region of Andalucía.
“The benefit is to the environment and to the families living around here, because the less the environment is polluted the healthier the population is,” Eduardo Ortega, in charge of the plant’s maintenance, told IPS.
The treatment plant filters the sewage that arrives at the station, using various processes, including ponds filled with volcanic soil and gravel.
“The aim is to keep the treated water from polluting the San Roman River,” said Edwin Guzman, head of the Environmental Unit of the municipality of Chirilagua.
Close to the municipality is another rural settlement also built by Spanish aid funds for survivors of Hurricane Mitch, called Flores de Andalucía, which includes its own treatment plant.
With greater capacity, this station also receives sewage from El Cuco, a fishing village three kilometers to the south on a beach that due to population growth has become a town with modest stores, hostels and restaurants that receive tourists attracted by its gray sand beaches and gentle waves.
In El Salvador, only 8.52 percent of wastewater receives some type of treatment, and much of the waste is dumped into the different bodies of water, polluting ecosystems and harming people’s health. Now some communities and municipalities have managed to install treatment plants that are run by local residents and improve their lives.
Afghan women carry stories of sorrow and resilience. Credit: Learning Together
Inter Press Service
Nov 06 (IPS) – The author is an Afghanistan-based female journalist, trained with Finnish support before the Taliban take-over. Her identity is withheld for security reasons“When the sun rises in the morning, I see the light but I don’t feel like I’m having a bright day. I think about how different these days are from our past days”.
These are the words of Sharifa, 48, an Afghan mother of five as she recounts her life story wrought by the Taliban when they regained power two years ago. Tears streamed down her face as she narrated her story in the two-room house of her family in the Dasht e Barchi Qala area, far from the capital city Kabul.
Sharifa lost her job as a cleaner because Afghan women were no longer allowed to work under the Taliban. Her two young girls had to stop school for the same reason.
“Will we have a future?” she asked. “We live in a country where all women and girls are deprived of all their legal rights, and we don’t know what will happen tomorrow”, her final concern is, “we are worried about the future of our children”.
To Sharifa and millions of Afghan women, the return of the Taliban, the extremist Islamic group that took over power in August 2021 portended nothing but misery for them.
“I think about the future, on the outside I may seem alive, but inside I feel dead”, she says, with tears streaming down her face.
For the past five years, the family led a quite peaceful and happy life without worries in the Dasht e Barchi Qala area in Afghanistan. Sharifa describes her husband as a kind and compassionate person.
After she lost her job, her husband became the sole breadwinner for the family of seven. It became necessary therefore, for their eldest son who had dropped out of school due to lack of money to work and bring in supplementary income.
Sharifa’s own education was cut short at the tenth grade due to the demands of raising a family. Given that situation, she was determined to do all in her power to provide adequate education to her five children – two boys and three daughters.
“I was a mother who, with all the problems and challenges in life, wanted all my children to have a higher education so that they could serve their country and family in the future”.
But all her hopes came crushing when the Taliban took power. It became clear that female students above the sixth grade could no longer continue their education. Women were also asked to stay home and cease working. Only the university was not banned.
But the saddest part for Sharifa was the loss of her daughter, the eldest of her children. At 24, she had completed 12th grade, and despite of the prohibition placed on girls’ education, was still plowing ahead with great determination to go the university.
Little did she know that the enemies of girls’ education were lurking around the corner. A bomb blast hit the Kaj educational centre in Kabul at precisely the time she was busy writing the university entrance examination. The educational centre held 500 students, 320 of them girls.
The blast had devastating consequences. Fifty female students were killed and 130 injured. Among the dead was Sharifa’s daughter.
“When I heard that the educational center was attacked, I was shocked, and rushed to the scene bare-footed to look for my daughter”, she said.
Dozens of families lost their loved ones that day but to their consternation, when they arrived at the scene, the dead and the wounded had already been transferred to hospitals. The Taliban had barred people from entering the centre except for ambulances.
The ISIS took responsibility for the attack, which was condemned widely around the world. Taliban officials also strongly condemned the attack and promised that the perpetrators would be punished, but nothing has been done since.
Sharifa says that the day she received her daughter’s body for burial, was the bitterest and most painful day because all her wishes were also buried with her daughter.
“From that day until today, I only breath, but I don’t feel alive”, she says.
In the midst of the grief however, Sharifa continues to demand for women’s rights and calls for support from the international community and the UN, to stop the Taliban from oppressing Afghan women.
“The women of Afghanistan have the right to play an active role in their society, in all different sectors, social, cultural, economic, and political fields”, Sharifa demands.
NEW YORK, Nov 06 (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” . 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 … 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.
The powerful 6.4 magnitude earthquake struck the remote and rural districts of Rukum (West) and Jajarkot shortly before midnight on Friday (local time) as families slept in their mostly mud-brick homes, trapping many under the rubble. Several aftershocks have since been reported.
The shaking was also felt in the capital, Kathmandu, about 510 kilometres (about 315 miles) away. People ran out of their homes, with memories of the deadly April-May 2015 earthquakes still fresh in their minds.
The 2015 quakes claimed nearly 9,000 lives, destroyed or severely damaged over 500,000 homes, and reduced towns, schools, hospitals and centuries-old historic sites to rubble.
Children most at risk
Alice Akunga, UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Representative to Nepal, said that children and their families are most at risk, having lost their homes, schools and health centres.
Estimates indicate that thousands of school aged children live in the affected areas and will be impacted.
“The full extent of the damage will unfold in the coming days and sadly the numbers of those affected are likely to grow,” she said in a statement, adding that UNICEF teams are on the ground, assessing the impact and providing urgent assistance, including blankets and tarpaulins.
“We are gauging the support they require at this crucial juncture in the areas of health, nutrition, education, water, sanitation and hygiene, child protection and social protection,” Ms. Akunga said.
Other UN agencies have also stepped up their response. The World Health Organization (WHO) is mobilizing medical teams and the UN Satellite Centre (UNOSAT) has been activated to conduct remote damage assessment via satellite image analysis.
UNICEF staff load relief supplies onto a truck headed for Jajarkot district.
Access cut off
According to the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), access to Jajarkot is reportedly obstructed by landslides triggered by the earthquake. Efforts are ongoing to reopen the road.
Most of the damage so far has been reported in Jajarkot and Rukum (West). The Government has deployed army helicopters for search and rescue, and dispatched additional medical personnel to regional and field hospitals.
Immediate needs include medical support, trauma response, extracting people trapped beneath the rubble and the evacuation of affected people to safer locations. The imminent winter has underscored the critical need for warm clothes and shelter, healthcare and food.
Compounding vulnerabilities
This is the largest earthquake to impact Nepal since the 7.3 magnitude earthquake in 2015, and it is the latest in a series of earthquakes to hit western Nepal in the past year.
“The impact of this latest earthquake is thus compounding the difficulties and vulnerabilities of communities still recovering from previous shocks in areas where low socio-economic indicators and stretched coping mechanisms were already prevalent,” OCHA said.
“I am horrified by the reported attack in Gaza on an ambulance convoy outside Al Shifa hospital. The images of bodies strewn on the street outside the hospital are harrowing,” the UN chief said in a statement, issued late on Friday New York time.
He stated that he did not forget the terror attacks committed in Israel by Hamas and the killing, maiming and abductions, including of women and children. He stressed that all hostages held in Gaza must be released immediately and unconditionally.
Mr. Guterres added that for nearly one month, civilians in Gaza, including children and women, have been besieged, denied aid, killed, and bombed out of their homes.
“This must stop,” he stressed.
Nowhere is safe
Mr. Guterres further noted that the humanitarian situation in Gaza is “horrific”.
“Not nearly enough food, water and medicine are coming in to meet people’s needs. Fuel to power hospitals and water plants is running out,” he said, noting that shelters by the UN agency assisting Palestine refugees (UNRWA) were at nearly four times their full capacity “and are being hit in bombardments”.
“Morgues are overflowing. Shops are empty. The sanitation situation is abysmal. We are seeing an increase in diseases and respiratory illnesses, especially among children. An entire population is traumatized. Nowhere is safe.”
Respect humanitarian law
Renewing his appeals for a humanitarian ceasefire, the Secretary-General underscored that international humanitarian law must be respected.
“Civilians and civilian infrastructure, including humanitarian and medical workers and assets must be protected. Civilians must also not be used as human shields,” he said, urging also that essential supplies and services, and unimpeded humanitarian access must be safely allowed into and across Gaza “at a scale commensurate with this dramatic situation”.
The UN chief underscored, “all those with influence must exert it to ensure respect for the rules of war, end the suffering and avoid a spillover of the conflict that could engulf the whole region.”
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Nov 03 (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.
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)
Inter Press Service
ROME, Nov 03 (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.
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.
Missile strikes continue through the night in Gaza. Credit: UNICEF/Eyad El Baba
Opinion by Tisaranee Gunasekara (colombo, sri lanka)
Inter Press Service
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka, Nov 03 (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.
“How much past tomorrow holds.” – Mahmoud Darwish (A rhyme for the odes Mu’allaquat)
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.
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.
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)
Inter Press Service
FREETOWN, Nov 03 (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.
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.
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)
Inter Press Service
SHOPIAN, INDIA, Nov 02 (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.
Unted Nations Secretary-General António Guterres wearing a traditional Nepali topi, in Kathmandu. Credit: Rupa Joshi
Opinion by Kanak Mani Dixit (kathmandu, nepal)
Inter Press Service
KATHMANDU, Nepal, Nov 02 (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.
