Africa

This article is part of a series on the state of civil society organisations (CSOs), which is the focus of International Civil Society Week (ICSW), sponsored by CIVICUS, and currently taking place in Belgrade, April 8-12.
 
Josef Benedict is a civic space researcher with global civil society alliance, CIVICUS.

By Josef Benedict
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Apr 9 2019 (IPS)

Around the globe, cyberspace has become the new battleground in the fight for the heart and soul of democracy. And Southeast Asia is fast becoming one of the global hotspots where the screws are being tightened on freedom of expression online.

Governments across the region have been passing legislation ostensibly aimed at regulating online space, often in the name of national security or to preserve public morality. But the laws mask a more insidious intention: the stifling of dissent and the silencing of views that deviate from the state-ordained line.

The trend of online restrictions is a continuation of the long-running campaign of free speech and media freedom restrictions that many states have been exercising offline. The effect of the legislation is to create a climate of intimidation and self-censorship in a space – social media – that has proven an effective tool in awareness-raising and mobilisation around rights.

It comes as no surprise that such tools of repression are on the rise in authoritarian-leaning countries such as Vietnam and Thailand – the former a one-party state, the latter ruled for the last five years by a military junta – in a bid to try and influence and control the popular narrative.

In Thailand, for example, a controversial cyberlaw was passed in February allowing the state to access anyone’s personal or business information, and to seize and hold any computers or electronic devices suspected of being used to commit cybercrimes.

No provision has been made for citizens to appeal such seizures. The purported justification is to prevent government websites and databases from being hacked, but the reality is that this law infringes on people’s right to privacy.

What makes it even worse is that this cyberlaw has not come out of nowhere – it builds on the existing Computer Crimes Act in Thailand, a draconian piece of legislation under which hundreds of activists have been prosecuted since the 2014 military coup for exercising their right to free speech online.

It is one thing to outlaw hate speech, expressed online or offline, that could potentially incite violence or discord. It is quite another when all elements of daily life and business are being policed and censored by an omnipotent Big Brother-like system, serving to chill free expression through a climate of fear.

But in Southeast Asia, such repressive laws are proliferating. Last year, Vietnamese legislators approved a cybersecurity law that tightens control of the internet.

Having come into effect in January amid widespread protests that saw demonstrators being beaten and arrested last year, it gives the government sweeping powers to censor social media posts and the authority to force global technology companies operating in the country to hand over users’ data, which they have to store locally.

Many of these laws are vaguely worded, are overbroad in their scope and are widely open to interpretation – and abuse.

Vietnam’s new law, by way of example, stipulates that it is a crime to post material online that “offends the nation, the national flag, the national emblem, the national anthem, great people, leaders, notable people and national heroes”.

Elsewhere, in states such as Malaysia and Indonesia with multiparty democratic systems of government, the iron fist regulating online activity is often more subtle but no less alarming.

In both countries, laws governing the digital space seem intent on silencing criticism and dissent. In Malaysia, lawyer and activist Fadiah Nadwa Fikri was investigated under the the Communications and Multimedia Act for an article she wrote online that some perceived as being disrespectful to the country’s monarchy.

In Indonesia, activist and human rights defender Robertus Robet was detained for violating the Law on Electronic Information and Transactions after a video of him criticising the military was posted on social media platforms.

Further complicating matters in the region is when a government institutes laws that forbid what it construes as blasphemy or religious defamation. This turns the state into the self-styled arbiter of public morality and raises the spectre of modern-day witch hunts.

It’s becoming increasingly common for people who are peacefully exercising their freedom of speech on social media platforms across the region to be arrested, prosecuted and punished for criticising religion or “state ideology” – or even, in some cases, for promoting minority or LGBTIQ+ rights.

Amid the physical assaults, intimidation and threats of punitive action for not toeing the official line, there is a faint glimmer of hope: citizens and civil society in the region are railing against the curtailing of their online freedoms, and have made some significant gains.

The Thai Netizen Network managed to force some important amendments to the new cyberlaw before it was passed, in Indonesia a Constitutional Court legal challenge also led to progressive revisions to the restrictive legislation, and in Malaysia, civil society is lobbying the new government for similar amendments.

While Southeast Asia is certainly not alone when it comes to statutory moves to silence critics and quash online dissent in the name of national stability and security – similar censorship is being mulled or rolled out in China, Russia, in some European and African countries, and even the United States – the training and installing of actual “cyberpolice” in places such as Vietnam cannot be allowed to go unchallenged.

Media and citizens are being effectively gagged from having legitimate conversations through this social policing, potentially leading to increasing self-censorship, a stunting of vigorous intellectual debate and weakening of state accountability.

In the region and beyond, the crisis is of serious concern to human rights defenders and organisations, who see the grave implications for democracies. The issue is a key focus for more than 800 civil society leaders and activists seeking sustainable solutions at International Civil Society Week (ICSW), the largest global civil society gathering currently underway in Belgrade, Serbia.

It’s encouraging that David Kaye, the United Nations special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, has spoken out strongly against such cyberlaws and called on states to repeal any legislation that criminalises or unduly restricts expression online.

But it is also incumbent on all of us as civil society to deepen our national and international advocacy efforts in this area.

Civil society activists and rights defenders cannot afford to ease up on the pressure, as the quality of democracy is taking a serious hit due, ironically, to the sustained squeezing of the very space that holds such rich potential to deepen democracy – the digital realm.

The post Rise in Cyberlaws Across Southeast Asia Spell Bad News for Human Rights & Democracy appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

This article is part of a series on the state of civil society organisations (CSOs), which is the focus of International Civil Society Week (ICSW), sponsored by CIVICUS, and currently taking place in Belgrade, April 8-12.

 
Josef Benedict is a civic space researcher with global civil society alliance, CIVICUS.

The post Rise in Cyberlaws Across Southeast Asia Spell Bad News for Human Rights & Democracy appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Sudanese protesters tell the BBC some members of the army are protecting them from government militias.

The Ghana Prison Services sets up a committee to investigate the assault of a female referee during a match on Sunday.

Central Texas Food Bank distributing food. Photo courtesy Central Texas Food Bank.

By James Jeffrey
AUSTIN, United States, Apr 9 2019 (IPS)

There’s much to think about regarding food this month. April is Reducing Food Waste Month in the United States, as efforts mount here to reduce food loss and waste, while globally Sunday Apr. 7 was World Heath Day.

In dustbins across America, food is the single largest type of daily waste. More than one-third of all available food in the U.S. goes uneaten through loss or waste, a proportion replicated globally.

Increasingly there is an acceptance that when food is tossed aside, so, too, are opportunities for economic growth, healthier communities and environmental prosperity. The hope is that this can change through partnership, leadership and action, underpinned by education and outreach.

“There is increasing recognition of the need to sensitive and educate consumers, particularly in urban centres, to value food and reduce food waste,” Florian Doerr from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations tells IPS. “Recognising that children and young people are the consumers that will shape the food waste scenario of the future, investing in their education to reduce food waste will help in creating a culture of change toward sustainably stemming the problem.”

Hence the work being done by the likes of the Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition Foundation (BCFN), a non-profit research centre studying the causes and effects on food created by economic, scientific, societal and environmental factors.

It has produced for the U.S.—as well as for another 66 countries—a food sustainability index profile that dives into all the relevant sectors, ranging from the likes of management of water resources, the impact on land of animal feed and biofuels, agricultural subsidies and diversification of agricultural system, to nutritional challenges, physical activity, diet composition and healthy life expectancy indicators.

“We want to provide tools for all the stakeholders involved, ranging from those deciding policy to students becoming better informed,” BCFN’s Katarzyna Dembska tells IPS. “The goal is to enable people to make more informed choices, both nutritionally and in terms of the impact on the environment.”

The stakes are high. Food production is the largest contributor to climate change (31 percent), exceeding the heating of buildings (23.6 percent) and transportation (18.5 percent), according to global estimates.

The consequences of climate change on agriculture and human health are one of the most significant problems we will face in the coming years, says the World Health Organization (WHO), due to the increase in temperatures and atmospheric pollutants. According to recent estimates, air pollution in Italy causes the death of over 90,000 people a year, a record in the European Union (EU).

“People are starting to realise that the food system is built into so many other sectors,” Brian Lipinski from the World Resources Institute tells IPS. “Agriculture has implications for land use, what we eat, and so many other aspects of our lives.”

The double food and environmental pyramid model developed by the BCFN Foundation emerged from research and an evolution of the food pyramid, which forms the basis of the Mediterranean diet. Photo courtesy BCFN.

Given the differences in food and agriculture systems and various inputs across different countries, Dembska notes that it is important users of the food index try to dig deeper and explore the underlying thematic pillars and indicators to learn more about how each income group performs within individual areas of food sustainability.

“When people are inserted into an overall food system that is not sustainable, it makes making sustainable choices harder,” Dembska tells IPS. “We want to draw attention to issues that may be well known to those in areas such as public health but might not be as appreciated by policy makers, but who are connected to the relevant sectors—then there can be more of an integrated approach.”

While much of the discussion about food wastage focuses on developed countries, the situation is more complicated.

“In poorer countries there is not so much food waste at the consumption end, rather it’s more a case of food loss at the farming and storage stages, as they don’t have the required infrastructure yet,” Lipinski says. “Rather than singling out countries for blame, it’s more helpful to look at and think about the trend of how as incomes increase as countries develop, the wastage shifts downstream to the consumer end.”

In addition to the educative likes of BCFN’s food sustainability index to shed light on these sorts of trends, other practical measures are gaining traction. Increasingly shops are opening up to selling lower-quality foods, such as fruits and vegetables—sometimes called “ugly” because they do not meet high quality standards such as size, colour and shape but are safe to eat—at reduced prices.

Other initiatives—including social media and other public awareness campaigns—are focusing on providing more information about safe food handling, proper food storage in households and better understanding about “best before” dates in order to prevent and reduce food waste.

“There’s three parts to why food sustainability is important,” Lipinski tells IPS. “It’s good for you, it’s good for others, and it’s good for the world—it’s good for you because you save money; it’s good for others if you redistribute food that otherwise would have been wasted; and it’s good environmentally because then all the resources that went into getting the food to you aren’t being thrown away either.”

Around the world, one in 10 people is estimated to have to choose between spending money on food or healthcare, a conundrum that many Americans face due to mounting living costs.

“In a city like Austin, there is increasing prosperity, but at the same time there are people being left behind,” Angela Henry, from the Central Texas Food Bank, part of Feeding America, a nationwide network of 200 food banks providing hunger relief across the U.S., tells IPS. “There’s a viscous cycle of food insecurity and health disorders—lack of nutritious food leads to stress and makes it difficult to cope and manage your illness, which leads to more complications personally and professionally.”

At the same time, America and many other countries are facing increasing levels of obesity, a major cause of non-communicable diseases such as heart disease, diabetes and respiratory illnesses, which are estimated to cost the world economy two trillion dollars per year (2.8 percent of global GDP).

Despite the overall scale of the challenge, those such as Dembska note that it doesn’t necessarily take drastic actions to achieve eating in a more sustainable way, as all the guidelines are out there already, as illustrated by the “food and environmental pyramid” model.

This highlights the extremely close links between two aspects of every food: its nutritional value and the environmental impact it has through the stages of its production and consumption. Healthier foods that people often don’t eat enough of, such as fruit and vegetables, tend to have lower environmental impact, while foods with a high environmental impact, such a red meat, should be consumed in moderation because of the effects they can have on our health.

“In almost every country of the world, the multiple burdens of malnutrition include caloric deficiencies, micronutrient deficiencies—hidden hunger—overweightness and obesity are putting ever-growing costs on health care systems,” Doerr says. “The majority of wasted foods are perishable, nutrient dense foods like fruits, vegetables, dairy products and fish, which can help tackle all these forms of malnutrition.”

At the same time, another important aspect is to start to look at things differently, says Lipinski. He notes how when people throw away food that has become squishy or mouldy they don’t necessarily look on it as wasting food.

“But you did something, whether it was buying too much food which meant you didn’t eat it in time, or that you forgot about at the back of the fridge,” Lipinski says. “So there are many different points where change can occur.”

As the numbers show, food and the health of ourselves and the planet are deeply connected and impact the financial costs we pay for medical care, as well as potentially deeper costs in terms of a viable future for humanity.

“The main message is that if you want to be sustainable then choose a healthy diet,” Dembska says.

Related Articles

• Safeguarding The Health of People and Planet Through Food
• Canada Implements New Food Guidelines, But What About the Food Waste?
• Italy Has the ‘Greenest Agriculture’ in Europe, But it’s Not Sustainable

The post Finding a Way to Food Sustainability appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Food waste and loss is of increasing concern due to the wide implications ranging from health care to the environment. Finding a solution requires everyone to look at how they eat.

The post Finding a Way to Food Sustainability appeared first on Inter Press Service.

The human rights commissioner says all parties must make every effort to protect civilians.

By Jomo Kwame Sundaram and Anis Chowdhury
KUALA LUMPUR and SYDNEY, Apr 9 2019 (IPS)

The World Bank has successfully built a coalition to effectively advance its ‘Maximizing Finance for Development’ (MFD) agenda. The October 2018 G20 Eminent Persons Group’s (EPG) report includes proposals to better coordinate various international financial institutions (IFIs) in promoting financialization.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

MDB midwives of financialization
The MFD approach wants multilateral development banks (MDBs) to actively re-shape developing countries’ financial systems to better ‘complement’ global finance. MDBs have already urged developing countries to encourage local institutional investors by redesigning pension systems along lines inspired by US private pensions. Thus, MDBs have been:

• influencing what projects are deemed ‘bankable’, probably prioritizing large infrastructure over smaller projects.
• enabling securitization to transform bankable projects into tradable securities, generating more revenues and strengthening global finance.
• persuading developing country governments to finance subsidies and other ‘de-risking’ measures designed by MDBs to guarantee private financial profits.
• determining how developing countries supply securities preferred by transnational banks and institutional investors.

G20 financialization proposals
The main G20 EPG proposals for collaboration to promote financialization include:

• IFIs working together to increase the supply of bankable projects and to share data and information to support infrastructure data platforms needed to securitize MDB loans.
• IFIs should provide risk insurance to increase the number of bankable projects stuck due to high political risk. This requires government guarantees against ‘political risks’ to be more attractive to re-insurers.

As securitization of MDB loans involves tradable assets with different credit ratings for investors with diverse ‘risk appetites’, MDBs are being urged to securitize both private and sovereign loans, and to retain stakes in junior tranches to induce private investments.

Anis Chowdhury

MDBs no longer development banks?
While MDBs should follow recent advice for issuers to remain stakeholders by retaining shares of securitized tranches on their balance sheets, the implications are quite different when MDBs, and not private banks, securitize loans.

As originators, MDBs may politically pressure low- and middle-income country governments to provide de-risking instruments, including guaranteed income from securitized public-private partnership (PPP) infrastructure projects.

World Bank Guidance on PPP Contractual Provisions can burden states and citizens more than any trade or investment agreement or international law. States take on inordinate risk while its right to regulate in the public interest is fettered.

New Washington Consensus?
The Washington-based Center for Global Development (CGD) has similarly discouraged borrowing in its paper for the G20 EPG, ‘More mobilizing, less lending’. Instead, it proposes augmenting MDB private sector windows with special purpose vehicles (SPVs).

The CDG also calls on MDBs to use sovereign lending to promote reforms to make projects financially viable and to help finance the public share of PPPs. Hence, MDBs are pressuring governments to support the MFD with their own fiscal resources.

The recommendations will also make it more difficult to manage systemic vulnerabilities arising from the envisaged securities, repo and derivative markets to be officially promoted.

Various options promoted by the CDG thus involve high risk, high leverage, financialized investors as partners in international development, exposing the MDBs themselves to the vulnerabilities of the MFD approach.

Checks and balances?
The tendency towards concentration in asset management (with economies of scale and scope) is likely to result in US-based asset managers allocating finance globally using considerable institutional investments from developing countries.

The G20 EPG is not unaware that its proposal — to transform developing country financial systems to contribute to the global supply of securities — involves significant systemic risks. Nevertheless, it claims to be seeking to secure the benefits of open financial markets while mitigating systemic vulnerabilities.

Thus, it has called on the IMF to: develop and manage a framework for managing volatile capital flows; create a resilient global ‘safety net’ that can effectively mobilize resources to address financial fragilities; and integrate financial surveillance with an effective early warning system.

However, the EPG paper does not make the shift to securitization conditional on mitigating systemic risks. As its proposed safeguards are largely unrealizable or ineffective, its financial instability concerns do not mean much.

Although recognizing the dangers and vulnerabilities involved at both national and international levels, including the loss of effective sovereign control over financing conditions, the IMF supports the EPG proposals.

Despite the experience of recent financial crises, the IMF continues to preach that freely floating exchange rates can effectively buffer capital flow volatility, while capital controls should only be used after exhausting all monetary and fiscal policy instruments.

The post World Bank Financialization Strategy Serves Big Finance appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Taina Bien-Aimé
NEW YORK, Apr 9 2019 (IPS)

Prostitution policies are bubbling up again in legislative circles across the United States, but few representatives seem to have much clarity on the issue. 2020 presidential candidate Senator Kamala Harris has given mixed messages on her thinking, while Bernie Sanders has said he simply has “no answer.”

At the state level, New York is moving even more quickly – and in the wrong direction. Recently elected Senators Julia Salazar and Jessica Ramos are proposing to fully decriminalize the sex trade, including pimping and sex buying.

They refer to it as “sex work,” a now ubiquitous term coined by sex trade proponents to normalize prostitution and masks its harms.

The sex trade is a multi-billion dollar global industry fueled by almost entirely male sex buyers who pay for sexual access to the most vulnerable people among us, almost always women and girls of color. It preys on individuals with histories of childhood trauma, ranging from sexual abuse to homelessness.

While criminalization of those bought and sold is extremely harmful, full decriminalization – or its close neighbor, legalization – of prostitution has also been a complete failure in the handful of places where it has been enacted.

A growing number of countries including Sweden, Iceland, Northern Ireland, Canada, Ireland, France, Norway and Israel have gone down a different path. Recognizing prostitution as a form of violence and inequality, they have removed penalties – and in most cases mandated services and exiting options – to those prostituted, while maintaining penalties on pimps, brothel-owners and sex buyers.

Taina Bien-Aimé

Known as the Swedish, Nordic or Equality Model, this progressive framework is founded on the principle of gender equality. It has gained traction from policymakers, sex trade survivors and feminist groups, proving to be the best policy approach for those caught up in this exploitative industry.

16-year-old Desiree Robinson was one of those girls. Soon after she ran away from home in 2016, Joseph Hazley invited her to live with him on Chicago’s South Side. A week later, he sold her online. That Christmas Eve, a sex buyer purchased her on the classified-ads site Backpage.com. He brutally beat her and slit her throat.

In April 2018, the FBI finally shut down Backpage.com after years of complaints and lawsuits, mostly by adolescent girls across the United States, who sued the website for facilitating their sex trafficking online. Its owners were found guilty of sex trafficking, money laundering and pimping, ironically thanks in part to the then California Attorney General Kamala Harris.

A number of similar websites immediately shut down on their own volition. The intensely profitable virtual sex market, which had facilitated Desiree’s murder, shrunk overnight.

Around the same time last year the Allow States and Victims to Stop Sex Trafficking Act, also known as FOSTA-SESTA, was enacted to help protect and support girls like Desiree. Its goal is to target websites that knowingly facilitate sex trafficking and pimping.

This removed a loophole under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which had given the owners of some websites immunity for criminal activity that they facilitated online.

Before 2018, if a trafficker specified his young victim’s age in an ad, Backpage coached him to use instead terms like “Lolita,” “New in town” or “Amber Alert.” Sex buyers, the website operators said, would understand she was a child. Section 230 said it was someone else’s content – and therefore their responsibility.

Instead of recognition as a tool to protect girls like Desiree, FOSTA-SESTA became a deafening rallying cry for supporters of the sex trade, whose primary goals encompass persuading the public that prostitution is a job like any other, and calling for its full decriminalization.

A key reason for this backlash is that the sex trade is massively profitable. 99% of Backpage’s global revenues – $500 million – came from the online ads for “adult services”, meaning prostitution and sex trafficking.

Craigslist’s “erotic services” classifieds brought in $122 million. Britain’s National Crime Agency accused Facebook and Google of making millions from advertising the exploitation of vulnerable women in brothels – and the technology industry poured millions of lobbying dollars to stop FOSTA-SESTA from passing.

Just as there is a gun or tobacco lobby, so exists the sex trade lobby, fighting hard to safeguard its financial interests.

False claims about what this vital law does are widespread. It does not jeopardize the lives of those who promote their own sexual services. In fact it does not apply to individuals at all, unless they operate websites that knowingly promote pimping. The report that people in prostitution can no longer exchange information about health is also false.

The idea that sex buyers cannot be screened under the new law is farcical. They never could be. Claims that potentially violent men are detectable online are laughable to any sex trade survivor with the scars and near-death experiences to prove it.

George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, a decades-long global funder of the movement to decriminalize the sex trade, including pimping, brothel-owning and sex buying, is now offering grants to anyone who will challenge FOSTA-SESTA based on these egregiously false claims.

And myriad media outlets inexplicably continue to irresponsibly copy and paste the same inaccurate information.

We have seen time and time again that those who hold the purse strings are experts in drowning out the voices of thousands trapped in the unfathomable pain and suffering the sex trade inflicts.

If New York – or any other jurisdiction – shows such a dire lack of compassion and decriminalizes pimping and sex buying, the ruthless market of flesh will explode overnight. Instead, state Senators should examine whose interests they are really representing.

The post Why New York Should Not Decriminalize Sex Trade appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Taina Bien-Aimé is the Executive Director of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW).

The post Why New York Should Not Decriminalize Sex Trade appeared first on Inter Press Service.

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Marcus Samo, Assistant Secretary in the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) Department of Health Services, is concerned that the country has been unable to reduce the prevalence of Hansen’s disease. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Stella Paul
POHNPEI , Apr 8 2019 (IPS)

During his 22-year career in the health sector, Marcus Samo has seen the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) suffer from an increased burden of disease while at the same time the resources to address them have either remained the same or decreased.
Samo is the Assistant Secretary in the country’s Department of Health Services, a post he has held for a decade. He has seen the rapid growth of both noncommunicable diseases (diabetes and heart ailments) and communicable diseases (tuberculosis and leprosy).

Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Kiribati have among the highest rates of leprosy, also known as Hansen’s disease, in the world. But according to the World Health Organisation (WHO), Micronesia has the highest prevalence of Hansen’s disease in the Pacific.

And Samo considers the disease his country’s biggest health concern.
“We don’t seem to be reducing leprosy the way we should, so it is a big concern for us. We appreciate the way we are getting support, such as drugs,” Samo tells IPS.
Novartis, through the WHO, currently provides multidrug therapy or MDT free across the globe.
And this March, Samo met with a team from the Sasakawa Health Foundation/Nippon Foundation, led by the foundation’s CEO Takahiro Nanri. The team was in Pohnpei, the Micronesian capital, to understand the reasons for the high prevalence of Hansen’s disease in the country and to assess the national leprosy programme. The foundation’s team included Dr. Arturo Cunanan, a world expert on leprosy, who currently heads up the Culion Sanitarium and General Hospital in the Philippines.

In addition to philanthropic assistance, Micronesia, like the Marshall Islands, is dependent on financial assistance from the United States. This is provided under the Compact of Free Association Agreement, which, according to the U.S. Department of the Interior means “the U.S. provides financial assistance, defends the FSM’s territorial integrity, and provides uninhibited travel for FSM citizens to the U.S.” For the 2019 financial year, 65 million dollars in Compact Funding was allocated to the atoll nation.

Samo admits that ensuring healthcare to the approximate 105,000 people, who are scattered on 65 of the nation’s 607 islands, is a balancing act. Oftentimes his staff use the tuberculosis (TB) budget to provide care for Hansen’s disease patients. Also, with just one newspaper and one radio station in the country, his department has few tools of mass communication and depends heavily on social media to raise public awareness about leprosy.

The offices of the Department of Health Services in Pohnpei, Micronesia’s capital. Ensuring healthcare to the approximate 105,000 people, who are scattered on 65 of the nation’s 607 islands is an ongoing challenge. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

Excerpts of the interview follow:
Inter Press Service (IPS): Other than the supply of drugs, in what other areas does FSM need the support of the international community?

Marcus Samo (MS): Beside drugs, one area where we need support is definitely transportation. To get to the islands, to give drugs to the patients is very difficult for us. So, transportation is one [need] and training is another.

IPS: What kind of training do you need?

MS: Training for physicians and clinicians on how to administer the drugs, how to deal with the complications of leprosy and extreme cases. Recently, one of our staff [received] some training in India and that is very useful.

IPS: Have you ever thought of building a treatment facility for those who might have serious cases of advanced leprosy?

MS: We haven’t really thought of it, but I think that is certainly something we will consider down the line. I am not sure if we have such extreme cases here, but only time will tell if we must do some serious thinking about it.

IPS: Is leprosy is a priority? Do you allocate enough fund for fighting the disease?

MS: As you know, Micronesia gets most of its resources from the US government through the Compact Fund. Most of our budget allocations come from there. But, just recently, our department has also started receiving some additional money which is raised by our own national government locally through revenue collections and some other smaller funds that we get from other governments. We call it the Legal Fund. We are distributing some of this money to our state health departments to provide care for all the diseases which are endemic here such as diabetes, TB and leprosy. That’s why I say leprosy is a priority for us.

IPS: So, for the annual budget of your department, the national government gives you money both from the Compact Fund and from various other funds?

MS: Yes

IPS: But your National Leprosy Programme (NLP) still doesn’t have any fund of its own and depends on TB programme’s budget. Is it correct?

MS: We are aware of it. But TB and Leprosy are now combined as a single, integrated service. Sometimes they do internal adjustments. But, as I said, we are looking forward to more external financial support. If we can get it, we can provide funding separately to the NLP.

IPS: What is the amount you allocate to states? Is this enough?

MS: I can’t give you a number yet, but it is not adequate. But, compared to what we had five years ago, it has increased a little and we just need to maintain it. Of course we are also working with our funders like [United States] on this.

IPS: How important is the role of media in eliminating leprosy and how do you collaborate with the media?

MS: The role of the media is very important especially in removing the stigma that is attached to leprosy. We don’t have a television channel here. We have a radio station and a newspaper who decide on their own content. We may consider [teaming] up with them to produce some content focused on leprosy like a panel discussion or a special interview with a visiting expert. But currently we are using media that we produce such as posters, brochures and leaflets.

IPS: Have you ever met a leprosy patient yourself?

MS: Only when I was a kid. Since then, I have not.

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• Greater Skills Equals Greater Ability to Combat Leprosy
• Missing Data & Inefficient Drug Distribution Tops List of Micronesia’s Leprosy Challenges

The post Q&A: 607 Island Atolls Means it Hard to Distribute Leprosy Healthcare to All Micronesians appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

IPS Correspondent Stella Paul interviews MARCUS SAMO Assistant Secretary in Micronesia's Department of Health Services

The post Q&A: 607 Island Atolls Means it Hard to Distribute Leprosy Healthcare to All Micronesians appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Other civilians are cut off from vital services since an attack began on the capital Tripoli.

Ambassador Anwarul K. Chowdhury in his address during the launch of the initiative on “Mobilizing Men as Partners for Women , Peace and Security.”
 
Ambassador Anwarul K. Chowdhury is former Under-Secretary-General and High Representative of the United Nations and Initiator of the conceptual breakthrough that led to adoption of UNSCR 1325, as Security Council President in March 2000

By Ambassador Anwarul K. Chowdhury
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 8 2019 (IPS)

In the first month of Bangladesh joining the Security Council in January 2000, President Nelson Mandela was in New York to report to the Council in his capacity as the UN-mandated facilitator of the Burundi Peace Process. In an informal setting, he shared with us that his efforts to include women in the peace table were not working as participating men stonewalled.

Ambassador Anwarul K. Chowdhury

Eager to hear what women want to share, he would invite them to have tea with him in the evenings after the formal meetings were over. At next morning’s formal meeting, Madiba would present some ideas for discussion and men around the table started praising him for those forward-looking ideas.

He alerted them by saying that those were not “my ideas”, rather those were from the women whom the men are not allowing to join at the peace table. The key message here is that women add value and bring in positive perspectives to building peace keeping in mind the best interests of their society.

Women -– equal half of humanity — bring a new breadth, quality and balance of vision to our common effort to move away from the cult of war towards the culture of peace. Women’s equality makes our planet safe and secure.

The reports presented to the 63rd session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) last month underlined that, unfortunately, overall progress towards gender equality had been unacceptably slow, with stagnation and even regression in some areas.

Women’s rights are under threat from a “backlash” of conservatism and fundamentalism around the world.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres lamented that everywhere, we still have a male-dominated culture.

My work has taken me to the farthest corners of the world and I have seen time and again the centrality of women’s equality in our lives.

This realization has now become more pertinent in the midst of the ever-increasing militarism and militarization that is destroying both our planet and our people.

The UN Charter has entrusted the Security Council with the responsibility of maintaining international peace and security. In that context, for 55 years of its existence, the Security Council found women as only helpless victims of wars and conflicts without recognizing their positive role and contribution in that process.

On 8 March 2000, as the President of the Security Council, I could mobilize it to recognize in a statement that “peace is inextricably linked with equality between women and men”, and affirmed the value of full and equal participation of women at all decision-making levels.

That is when the seed for Resolution 1325 was sown. The resolution was finally adopted unanimously on 31 October of the same year, after tough negotiations for eight months.

As you all know, the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011 was presented to three women peace builders from Liberia and Yemen. In its citation, the Nobel Committee referred to 1325 and asserted that “We cannot achieve democracy and lasting peace in the world unless women obtain the same opportunities as men to influence developments at all levels of society.”

It is a reality that politics, more so security, is a man’s world. Empowered women bring important and different skills and perspectives to the policy making table in comparison to their male counterparts.

The slogan of the Global Campaign on WPS which we launched in London in June 2014 reiterates “If we are serious about peace, we must take women seriously”.

Patriarchy and misogyny are the dual scourges pulling back the humanity away from our aspiration for a better world to live in freedom, equality and justice.

Men and policies and institutions controlled by them have been the main perpetrators of gender inequality which is a real threat to human progress. Feminism is about smart policy which is inclusive, uses all potentials and leaves no one behind.

I am proud to be a feminist. All of us need to be. That is how we make our planet a better place to live for all.

For the two-year initiative being launched today, all of us should take the vow to profess, advocate and work to ensure feminism as our creed and as our mission.

We should always remember that without peace, development is impossible, and without development, peace is not achievable, but without women, neither peace nor development is conceivable.

Footnote:

“The full and meaningful leadership, empowerment, and protection of women is essential to resolving deadly conflict and building stable, prosperous, and just post-conflict societies. We have created a group of leaders that identifies, encourages, and mobilizes the voices of prominent men and women in support of women’s engagement in global processes of peace, reconciliation, and post-conflict reconstruction.

“Mobilizing Men as Partners for Women, Peace and Security” is bringing global leaders—including prominent men from the defense, diplomacy, development, and business arenas—more fully into the campaign, along with the courageous women leaders who have long driven this advocacy, including grassroots advocates from war-affected countries.

We are partnering with key institutions, including UN agencies, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), advocacy groups, and academic institutions. Along with our partners, we ally with, listen to, and open doors for women’s groups and individuals calling for gender justice in conflict and post-conflict settings.

The initiative started by engaging global figures and their senior advisors from dozens of international institutions, NGOs, and governments at a convening in New York City on March 22, 2018, in the margins of the UN Commission on the Status of Women.

The participants agreed that while women-led efforts that created the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda have made considerable progress, men must be part of the solution.

Since our first convening, we have drafted a Charter, a statement of principles, and a call to action on engaging women as leaders, planners, and implementers of peace processes and post-conflict recovery efforts.

Once signed, the Charter will be publicized and shared with policymakers in governments and international organizations. Signatories will serve as Partners in this agenda, using their connections with other global leaders to make these points directly and to facilitate greater access for women advocates.

Our members will help to monitor and encourage full implementation of UN Security Council resolutions, National Action Plans (NAPs), and laws—including the US Women, Peace, and Security Act of 2017—and provide implementers at all levels access to information they need to do their jobs effectively.”

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Excerpt:

Ambassador Anwarul K. Chowdhury in his address during the launch of the initiative on “Mobilizing Men as Partners for Women , Peace and Security.”

 
Ambassador Anwarul K. Chowdhury is former Under-Secretary-General and High Representative of the United Nations and Initiator of the conceptual breakthrough that led to adoption of UNSCR 1325, as Security Council President in March 2000

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By Jan Lundius
STOCKHOLM / ROME, Apr 8 2019 (IPS)

Some memories stay with us forever. From my childhood I remember above all a few extraordinary moments – when I suddenly, after many failed attempts, found that I could swim and the same happened when I could ride a bicycle on my own. Since then, these skills have stayed with me throughout life, becoming part of my existence. However, towering above these instances of bliss is the moment when I realised that I had read an entire novel, one without pictures. One of those books that grown-ups were reading. From that moment the gates of paradise on earth were flung wide open. Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote that without music life would have been a mistake. He was probably right, but for my part I assume that without reading, my life would have been much more difficult, empty and boring. I cannot imagine a life without books. As a teacher my wish has always been to convey to my pupils the happiness and wealth books may bring to you.

While writing these lines I am surrounded by books. If I scan the book shelves, the titles printed on the spines are all familiar to me. There are many of them and each contains stories, lives, knowledge, experiences, adventures, meetings.

In the eleventh century CE, the poet Somadeva wrote in Kashmir a collection of stories he named Kathasaritsagara. I have only read a few of Kathasaritsagaras stories, though the title intrigues me. The Sanskrit word may apparently be translated as The Ocean Where Streams of Stories Unite. The world of books is truly a Kathasaritsagara. While reading, or just looking at the books surrounding me I feel like a fortunate sea creature allowed to wallow in a wonderful, immense world.

Every book tells a story. It contains a world of its own. Sometime during the third century CE the North African Terentianus Maurus wrote four books about “letters, syllables and metrics”. Most of the content of these books are forgotten by now, aside from the quote habent sua fata libelli, “books have their destiny”, suggesting that books obtain their meaning from their readers. Maybe Maurus also indicated that books have a life of their own. That it is not we who find the books, but it is they who find us. In his novel The Name of the Rose, the Italian author Umberto Eco mentioned Maurus´s quote and interpreted it as a way of stating that we share our destiny with the books we have read, that they have become part of our life.

Maybe it is true that a book is a unique entity, even quite different from its author. The Irish author James Joyce wrote that as soon as his famous novel Ulysses had been printed and published it began to live a life of its own. He read his own novel and could not understand how it had been written by him, it was as if it had been written by another person. I assume this is an experience he shares with several other writers.

During the 1920s and 1930s there appeared in Sweden a specific genre of autobiographies which was labelled as “proletarian tales about coming of age”. They were mainly written by young male and female authors who told about experiences gained from being born in poverty and how they had struggled through various kind of hardship, often related to hard manual labour, until they finally reached a stage where they had been able to master the language to such a degree that they could write their stories. These books are often deeply moving and surprisingly well-written, possibly due to the fact that these proletarian authors put such an effort into expressing themselves as clear and correct as possible. Their struggles combined with serious attempts to master the language had enabled them to respect it, even venerate it.

I have later come across tales by authors from quite different cultural spheres of the world, who in their autobiographies describe struggles similar to those of the Swedish proletarian authors. Common to most of them is the fact that sometime during their childhood or youth they learned to read and write and how some mentor, a kind and understanding teacher, or a neighbour or work mate, was able to open the gates to the Paradise of Literature. Thus these authors had finally been enabled to take a dip into the Ocean of Tales, Kathasaritsagara. From that moment on, their lives changed for the better. They did no longer feel alone and gained hopes for a better future.

Several of the Swedish proletarians wrote that it was “ambulatory libraries” administered by rural teachers, or members of so called CSOs, Civil Society Organisations, that made it possible for them to discover The World of Literature. When I occasionally have found myself abroad in poor, rural neighbourhoods and encountered bright youngsters, I have often thought how their lives could have changed for the better if they had had the same opportunities as the Swedish proletarian authors, who encountered an Ocean of Tales contained in the wooden crates with books that in the early decades of the twentieth century by idealists were brought to every corner of Sweden. You might say that this miracle could also be brought about through the access to the communication marvels provided by computers, though sitting here surrounded by my books I doubt it. I wonder if ours would be a better world if present leaders like Trump had regularly taken a dip into The Ocean of Tales, Kathasaritsagara.

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

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Algeria's Nabil Bentaleb will return to train with the Schalke first team after being punished by the German club.