Africa - INTER PRESS SERVICE

By Mahir Ali
Mar 19 2016 (Dawn, Pakistan)

It is wise of Angela Merkel not to have panicked in the wake of setbacks for her Christian Democrats (CDU) in Sunday`s three regional elections. The German chancellor acknowledged the blow, but discounted the likelihood of abrupt changes to her government`s policy on refugees.

That very policy has accounted for a surge in support for the anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a recently formed party with links to the far-right Pegida movement. But that is only part of the picture.

Whereas the AfD`s seats in regional assemblies are based to a large extent on the backing of Germans who previously did not bother to vote, a fairly substantial number of CDU appear to have drif ted to the Green party and the Social-Democrats, notably in situations where CDU candidates sought to distance themselves from Merkel`s generosity.

In Baden-Württemburg, for instance, 30pc of the voters who switched from the CDU to the Greens said their decision was based on the refugee issue. The state`s Green premier has been quoted as saying that he was `praying ever day` for Merkel`s well-being.

Germany`s divisions on this issue were inevitably exacerbated after the appalling sexual assaults and coercive thef ts in Cologne on New Year`s Eve, even though only a tiny proportion of the assailants turned out to be components of the latest wave of refugees that brought more than a million people to Germany last year.

Merkel`s open-borders policy has been held responsible for precipitating a Europewide crisis, with those who are able to make their way from Turkey to Greece and beyond opting for relatively welcoming countries such as Germany. The alternative, though, was to deny entry to Europe to the clearly desperate victims of the strife in Syria in particular.

In some ways, that scenario has lately come to pass, with Macedonia seeking to seal its border with Greece and all too many of its neighbours pursuing similar policies in blatant disregard of the international rules put in place in the wake of the Second World War. Back then, it was Jewish refugees from Germany and Nazi-occupied territories who suffered the consequences of reactionary bigotry.

Not many European countries other than Germany have flung open their doors to the wretched of the earth, with some letting in refugees from Syria and Iraq but refusing access to others from various African countries, Pakistan and Bangladesh. That may seem fair enough in some respects, given Europe cannot be expected to accommodate the all too many economic refugees that international capitalism has spawned.

Levels of desperation are hard to judge, though.Greece`s fear, meanwhile, of turning into what its prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, has poetically characterised as a `warehouse of souls` is perfectly legitimate. Hundreds of thousands of refugees from Turkey keep on turning up In Greece, with no intention of remaining there, but find their pathway to elsewhere in Europe blocked.

The European Union, meanwhile, has reached an agreement with Turkey whereby all refugees who make it to Greek shores will be returned to Turkish soil, but Europe will accommodate one Turkey-based Syrian for each one sent back. The United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, and various other human rights organisations have pointed out that such a policy would violate international law.

Whether the agreement will bear fruit remains to be seen. Europe`s handling of the unprecedented crisis thus far has provided plenty of cause for consternation. And former members of the Soviet bloc have been by far the least inclined to adopt a humanitarian approach.The Russian president, meanwhile, has been accused of actively striving to whip up tensions in Europe by funding the anti-immigrant backlash. It`s hard to tell, though, whether that is indeed the case, given thatthe charge has been made by a Latvian official associated with Nato who has an axe to grind vis-à-vis Russia.

That doesn`t necessarily mean he is lying,although Vladimir Putin`s announcement on Monday that most Russian forces will be pulled out of Syria militates against the notion that his intervention was intended primarily to exacerbate Europe`s refugee woes.

Not much hope was held out for the talks on Syria`s future taking place in Europe this week, but it would be folly to completely write off the prospect of some sort of agreement. After all, the ceasefire put in place three weeks or so ago has largely held, contrary to expectations.

It would be unduly optimistic, though, to read into that an indication that the awful conflict in Syria is approaching its conclusion. It would be amazing if that were indeed the case. In the interim, though, the `warehouse of souls` remains in place, and it could very well return to haunt Europe for decades hence unless Merkel`s plea for a Europe-wide humanitarian solution finds at least a few more takers.

m mahir.dawn@gmail.com

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 19 2016 (IPS)

When the only female candidate failed in her attempt to become UN Secretary-General back in late 2006, an Asian diplomat weighed in with an upgraded Biblical quote: “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle”, he said, “than for a woman to become the Secretary-General of the United Nations.”

But as an unrelated New Yorker cartoon jokingly pronounced: “We (may still) need either bigger needles or smaller camels.”

That female candidate, Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga, never made it to the 38th floor of the UN Secretariat, the office of the UN chief.

The other six candidates in that race were all men: UN Under-Secretary-General Shashi Tharoor of India; former Foreign Minister Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan; Jordanian Ambassador Prince Zeid Raad al-Hussein; Thai Deputy Prime Minister Surakiart Sathirathai; and UN Under-Secretary-General Jayantha Dhanapala of Sri Lanka.

The sixth male candidate, South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon, was eventually elected Secretary-General (SG), and took office in January 2007.

For most of the 70 years of its existence, the UN has remained mostly male dominated as part of an embedded political culture.

But that environment appears to change – although appearances are known to be deceptive, and politically so, in the world body.

However, if the current campaign for a woman Secretary-General picks up steam, there is still a chance the UN will get its historic first later this year—in a world where nearly half of the 7 billion people are women.

For the first time in the history of the UN, the President of the 193-member General Assembly (GA) Mogens Lykketoft of Denmark says he is committed to an “open and transparent process” for the selection and appointment of the next Secretary-General.

All member States have been invited to present candidates to the President of the General Assembly, as well as to the President of the Security Council. As of last week, there were seven officially declared candidates, four men and three women.

The list includes: Dr. Srgjan Kerim of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia; Ms Vesna Pusić of the Republic of Croatia; Dr. Igor Lukšić of Montenegro; Dr. Danilo Türk of Slovenia; Ms. Irina Bokova of Bulgaria; Ms. Natalia Gherman of Republic of Moldova and Antonio Guterres of Portugal.

Jessica Neuwirth, one of the founders and Honorary President of Equality Now, told lPS: “I think the time for a woman SG has finally come – SG Ban ki-moon has said he would like for a woman to succeed him, there are member states formally endorsing the idea that it is time for a woman SG, and while there have always been qualified women for the post, there are now a number of these women who are actually campaigning for it”.

“As for the regional rotation, I think more than any region’s turn, it is women’s turn to be represented and so there could and should be some flexibility to be sure that a woman can be chosen for the post,” said Neuwirth who is the founder/director of Donor Direct Action, an offshoot of Equality Now, founded to raise funds for frontline women’s groups.

She pointed out that Equality Now launched its first call for a woman SG soon after the adoption of the Beijing Platform for Action in 1995 at the UN Fourth World Conference on Women.

She said the Platform for Action called for the development of “mechanisms to nominate women candidates for appointment to senior posts in the United Nations” and set the target of “overall gender equality, particularly at the Professional level and above, by the year 2000.”

“We are still waiting for implementation of this commitment, 16 years after the target date of 2000. Maybe if we start from the top we can actually get there,” she declared.

Charlotte Bunch, Founding Director of the Center for Women’s Global Leadership and Distinguished Professor, Rutgers University, told IPS: “We are closer than ever before to the possibility of a woman being selected as the next SG.”

She said the more transparent process adopted by the GA this year and the growing recognition of the need for diversity in leadership, including gender as well as geography, all bode well for this to happen.

“There are a number of well qualified women from various regions whose names have been either formally nominated and/or publicly discussed, and we hope all will be given serious consideration.”

But it is critically important which woman is chosen, as a poor choice sets women up for failure. “Her gender should be a strong plus, but not her primary qualification,” said Bunch.

Her vision of the future of the United Nations in these troubled times and her ability to communicate and carry that out organizationally as well as her demonstrated commitment to the UN principles – of human rights, peace, development and gender equality – are also crucial, said Bunch who took a leading role in the campaign for the creation of UN Women.

As part of the transparency process, the President of the General Assembly will begin a series of informal dialogues with the candidates April 12 through April 14.

This meeting will provide candidates a platform to present their candidature and an opportunity for the 193 member states to ask questions and grill the candidates. The candidates will be offered a two-hour meeting for individual presentations.

Meanwhile, there is a global campaign by a collective group of NGOs called “1 for 7 Billion” demanding an open election process “which until now has been shrouded in secrecy.”

The group criticizes the “woefully inadequate way in which the Secretary-General has been elected to date by a handful of powerful countries (read: the five permanent members of the Security Council) behind closed doors.”
Last year The Colombian Ambassador Maria Emma Mejia circulated a letter seeking support for a female Secretary-General. Over 44 governments initially signed on to the initiative.

But not the five veto-wielding permanent members of the Security Council – the US, UK, France, China and Russia – who have always had the final say on the selection of the Secretary-General.

Russia has already made a statement that the job should go to the most competent person – irrespective of gender.

But it is rooting for an Eastern European on the basis of geographical rotation because the last eight UN chiefs have come from Western Europe (3), Asia (2), Africa (2) and Latin America (1).

A senior US woman journalist, who was at one-time based at the United Nations, told IPS: “My instinct is that the choice of a woman could be very narrow, since there are no obvious candidates — and I see that the US has been critical lately of the management of UNDP.”

“I don’t think Washington is focused very much on this with the pandemonium going on in the primary races. And the Russian nomination of a woman from Moldova looks more like mischief than anything else.”

Incidentally, she said, German Chancellor Angela Kane would like to be on that list but hasn’t got any backing from Germany.

The current Secretary-General’s all-male predecessors were: Kofi Annan (Ghana), Boutros Boutros-Ghali (Egypt), Javier Pèrez de Cuèllar (Peru), Kurt Waldheim (Austria), U.Thant (Burma, now Myanmar), Dag Hammarskjöld (Sweden) and Trygve Lie (Norway).

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

Añelo, a Patagonian town in southwest Argentina that experienced explosive growth because it is next to the country’s biggest shale oil and gas field, is now starting to feel the impact on the development of these resources due to the plunge in international oil prices. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
AÑELO, Argentina, Mar 19 2016 (IPS)

The dizzying growth of Añelo, a town in southwest Argentina, driven by the production of shale oil and gas in the Vaca Muerta geological reserve, has slowed down due to the plunge in global oil prices, which has put a curb on local development and is threatening investment and employment.

Vaca Muerta, a 30,000-sq-km geological reserve rich in unconventional fossil fuels in the province of Neuquén, began to be exploited in mid-2013 by the state-run oil company Yacimientos Petroliferos Fiscales (YPF) in a joint venture with U.S. oil giant Chevron.

“We had an interesting growth boom thanks to the strategic development plan that we were promoting, to get all of the oil services companies to set up shop in Añelo. That really boosted our growth, and helped our town to develop,” Añelo Mayor Darío Díaz told IPS.

The population of this town located 100 km from the provincial capital, Neuquén, in Argentina’s southern Patagonian region, rose twofold from 3,000 to 6,000.

And that is not counting the large number of machinists, technicians, engineers and executives of the oil companies who rotate in and out of the area, along with the truckers who haul supplies to the Loma Campana oilfield eight km from Añelo.

“There were around 10 services companies operating in Añelo; now we have about 50, and some 160 agreements signed for other companies to come here,” the mayor said.

The shale gas and oil in Vaca Muerta has made this country the second in the world after the United States in production of unconventional fossil fuels.

Loma Campana, where there are 300 active wells producing unconventional gas and oil after a total investment of three billion dollars, currently produces 50 billion barrels per day of oil, according to YPF figures.

The shale oil and gas industry has fuelled heavy public investment in Añelo and nearby towns. The population of this town is expected to reach 25,000 in the next 15 years.

“We’re building two schools and a hospital,” Díaz told IPS. “The primary and secondary schools have been expanded. We are making town squares and a new energy substation. We built a water treatment plant and have improved the sewage service. In terms of public works we have really done a great deal, keeping our eyes on our goal: growth.”

But the expansion of the town has also brought problems.

The mayor pointed out, for example, that rent for a two-bedroom housing unit has climbed from 33 dollars to 100 dollars a month, and that a plot of land that previously was worth 1,700 dollars cannot be purchased now for less than 130,000 dollars.

“Those are abrupt changes brought by the oil industry,” Díaz said. “What us old-time residents of Añelo have suffered the most is the social impact of all of this movement, of so much vehicle traffic, so many people, which brings insecurity and other things that are typical of development in general.”

New complications

People in Añelo are now worried that despite the costs they are paying for the development boom, the promised progress will not arrive.

On Mar. 4, the outgoing president of YPF, Miguel Galuccio, announced in a conference with international investors that the cutbacks in the industry in 2016 would be reflected in slower progress in Vaca Muerta.

Workers in Loma Campana, a field with 300 shale oil wells in Vaca Muerta. The decision to slow down the development of unconventional fossil fuels in Argentina has led to lay-offs in the area. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

In 2015, the company’s revenues shrank 49 percent, while investment grew less than four percent, below previous levels.

The costs of producing shale gas and oil, which requires an expensive technique known as hydraulic fracturing or “fracking”, are not competitive in a context where international oil prices are hovering between 30 and 40 dollars a barrel.

In Argentina, the cost of extraction in conventional wells stands at 25 to 30 dollars a barrel, and in unconventional wells at around 70 dollars a barrel, oil industry experts report.

But the internal price of a barrel in Vaca Muerta is regulated at 67.5 dollars and in the rest of the country’s oilfields at 54.9 percent – an artificial price established to shore up the oil industry’s expansion plans, especially in this part of the country, although at a slower pace now.

YPF announced that in Vaca Muerta, it would cut oil production costs by 15 percent, which has led to lay-offs.

“The situation is very complicated,” said Díaz, who estimated that there will be 1,000 more unemployed people in the province, added to those who have already lost their jobs. “A reduction in activity,” has already been seen, he said, and “people are working fewer hours” and wages have fallen, which has a social impact, he added.

Oil worker unions in Vaca Muerta say 1,000 people have been laid off so far in the industry, as well as 1,000 in other areas.

Eduardo Toledo, an agricultural technician who decided to move from Buenos Aires to Añelo and invest his savings in a restaurant, is worried about the slowdown in oil industry activity in Vaca Muerta.

“When we started, we had just one stove with three burners and an oven,” said Toledo, whose customers are truck drivers, factory workers and other oil industry employees who have been drawn to this area by the relatively high wages paid by the industry.

Like Toledo, many people invested in hotels, rental housing, shops and small-scale service businesses. “Everyone wanted to come to what was going to be the shale gas and oil capital,” he said.

But now his restaurant is working at a “mid to low level of activity.”

“If people know they’re going to lose their jobs, they don’t want to spend money,” he said.

Toledo is still confident that interest in shale gas and oil will keep things moving, despite the plummeting prices.

In Vaca Muerta, 77 percent of the proven shale reserves are gas.

Besides, “there are major gas resources that have not yet become reserves,” Ignacio Sabbatella, who holds a PhD in social sciences from the University of Buenos Aires and is the co-author of the book “History of a privatization; How and why the YPF was lost”, told IPS. (YPF was renationalised in 2012.)

But experts and local residents are taking a long-term view.

Sabbatella stressed that it is important to keep in mind that beyond the current international oil price swings, the investments in Vaca Muerta “will yield fruit in the long term” – in five to 10 years.

He pointed out that shale oil and gas production only got underway in the area in 2011, “and especially after the recovery of state control of YPF, in a joint venture with transnational corporations like Chevron.”

YPF, Argentina’s biggest company, was in private hands from 1992 to 2012, when the government of Cristina Fernández (2007-2015) decided to renationalise it.

Sabbatella said the announced cutbacks in YPF have coincided with an overall “shift in policy” since the arrival to the presidency on Dec. 10 of the centre-right Mauricio Macri, who ended a period of centre-left governments under Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007) and later his wife and successor, Fernández.

“The previous government did everything possible to sustain the levels of investment, exploration and production, even in an unfavourable international context, and what we are seeing is that this government is only halfway maintaining that policy and is even pushing YPF to cut its investments,” said Sabbatella.

“The current administration believes that the best thing is to adjust domestic oil industry policy to external conditions. In a context of low prices, they believe the best idea is to not sustain domestic investment, and they have even shown some illustrations of this, by importing cheaper crude and fuel from abroad, for example,” he said.

But Toledo prefers to be optimistic, because otherwise, he said, “I have to close my restaurant.”

“I can’t afford to go somewhere else and I’m not interested anyway because it’s hard to set down roots again in a place like this.”

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Related Articles

• Añelo, from Forgotten Town to Capital of Argentina’s Shale Fuel Boom
• Vaca Muerta, Argentina’s New Development Frontier

Devastation from the Mar. 1, 2011 tsunami that swept through Yotukura fishing village. Credit: Suvendrini Kakuchi/IPS

By Armen Chilingaryan
YEREVAN, ARMENIA, Mar 18 2016 (IPS)

Armenia is prone to natural disasters. Eight out of every 10 citizens are likely to experience a natural disaster at some point during their lifetimes – an earthquake, landslide, hailstorm or flooding. Each year, the country incurs $33 million in damage from such disasters.

As a Member State of the United Nations, Armenia joined the Hyogo Framework for Action in 2005, which brought a common understanding, at the global level, of what is needed to minimize the destruction caused by natural disasters.

Immediately after joining this global call, Armenia began to shift its approach from providing humanitarian relief to reducing risk. More than ten years down the line, the country has made every effort to become a safer place to live.

Here’s how. After independence in the early 1990s, many communities in Armenia didn’t have working drainage systems, mudflow channels and soil dams. They now do, thanks to the leadership of the Ministry of Emergency Situations, which pushed for stronger and more conscious urban planning.

In addition, unlike many countries at the time, there was no system in place – neither at national nor at community level – to monitor incoming disasters or coordinate the response once they occurred.

This changed when, in 2010, Armenia set up a national platform and in 2012 a strategy for disaster risk reduction. The region’s first, it extended the responsibility for mitigating risk to many institutions and people concerned, not just the Ministry of Emergency Situations.

Next, disaster risk management has been mainstreamed into the Government’s development plans and is much more proactive, relying on data, research studies, satellite pictures, meteorological sensors and other sources.

These measures would not be effective without proper decentralisation of decision-making. In a country where over 30 percent of the population works in rural agriculture, even one severe hailstorm can have devastating consequences on crop production and national poverty rates.

By decentralising the management of disaster risk to nine regional crisis management centers, preventative actions were vastly augmented, targeting those most at risk.

As a result, hundreds of hectares of land and households have been protected thanks to mudflow channels, dams and cleaning drainage systems. When UNDP installed hail nets in three communities, 95 percent of the yield survived after a subsequent wave of hail storms.

The demand for the nets increased sharply in other areas of Armenia, and a range of NGOs, including CARD, World Vision Armenia and Oxfam started replicating that practice across the country.

One of the big takeaways from the Summit in Sendai, Japan was that reducing the risk of disaster must be a collaborative effort. While governments will lead the fight, a range of other stakeholders must be involved.

Armenia’s policy of decentralisation has also seen the active participation of an uncharacteristically large array of stakeholders including local actors, research centers, NGOs, educational institutions, persons with disabilities, women’s networks and organizations, and vulnerable groups.

Finally, the country has taken advantage of overlapping global initiatives. In 2010, 21 cities in Armenia officially joined the “Making Cities Resilient: My City is Getting Ready” campaign under which cities make a commitment to undertake 10 steps to become safer.

One of them, Stepanavan, situated in the north of the country, was selected as a role model during the Sendai conference. The city administration was the first to place resilience at the core of its urban planning and land-use management efforts.

A year ago today, the Armenian delegation, led by the Ministry of Emergency Situations, showcased these successes to the world. Other countries are beginning to take note; providing all levels of society with the means to identify potential disasters, reduce their risk, and coordinate responses.

Guaranteeing people’s safety at a time of grave environmental risk depends on making that change.

(End)

“They have reduced the quantity of food they used to give us and we still do not know why. But we are managing. We are refugees and we have no choice. All they give us is rice and some soya beans” John Guige, a Nigerian resident and primary school teacher in the Minawao refugee camp […]

By Marc-André Franche
Mar 17 2016 (Dawn, Pakistan)

The year 2015 will be remembered for two landmark global agreements. In September, UN member states endorsed the 2030 Development Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals. Later, 196 parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change adopted the Paris Agreement at the conclusion of UN Climate Change Conference (COP21) in France.

The year will also be remembered as the warmest on record with temperature rises breaking the one degree Celsius milestone above pre-industrial era average. A heatwave swept the globe including Sindh where 2,000 perished reminding us of the increased intensity and frequency of climatic events and its growing impact on development, particularly the poor and vulnerable.

It has been established that climate change is the consequence of Greenhouse Gas Emission (GHG) and is caused by human activities.

T he Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Synthesis Report of 2014 pointed to an increase in global temperature of 4°C contrary to the initial estimates of about 3.5°C till 2100.

Developing countries are more vulnerable because of their dependence on agriculture and socioeconomic dynamics including their weak capacities to cope with climate change.

In 2008, more than 100 million people fell below the poverty line largely due to food price hikes and low agriculture yields.

At the COP21 participating countries adopted the first-ever universal, legally binding climate deal that promises a global action plan to save the world from the effects of climate change by limiting global warming to 1.5 °C.

The COP21 agreement is indeed a diplomatic success. However, the intentions in the Paris Agreement and actual commitments in the form of Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) by governments don`t connect. Estimates suggest that the combined impact of all INDCs, if fully implemented, will account for 86pc of the GHG emissions and will still result in global average temperature hikes above the 2°C threshold. Similarly, the intention of developed countries to mobilise $100 billion per year until 2025 is not only insufficient but also uncertain to be realised.

Pakistan is the eighth most vulnerable country to climate change though it produces less than 0.5pc of global emissions. Events like the 2010 floods which resulted in 2,000 human lives and economic losses equivalent to 7pc of GDP reconfirm that climate change is the most immediate development threat faced by this country. There is a clear and visible shift in summer monsoons trend from northeast to northwest by a range of 80-100 kilometres, threatening the agriculture sector. Frequency of other extreme weather events like cyclones, droughts and glacial lake outburst floods showthat Pakistan is becoming increasingly vulnerable to climate change.

Pakistan is conscious to the threats. The National Climate Change Policy (NCCP) of 2012 outlines mitigation and adaptation actions. Pakistan is one of the few countries to have undertaken a Climate Public Expenditure and Institutional Review (CPEIR) and has established public expenditure and institutional benchmarks. Post 18th Amendment, climate change has largely become a provincial subject and provinces must now take the lead. It is encouraging to note that some of the provinces have already started initiatives such as the `Billion Tree Plantation` initiative.

The deficit of vision and action remains widespread however. The INDCs put forward by Pakistan for the COP21 were considered limited and devoid of quantitative commitments and investment requirements for adaptation and mitigation. Using the CPEIR, Pakistan could have spelled out in detail its vulnerability to climate change. This would have afforded an opportunity to plead climate change-related needs in front of lobbyists,donors and negotiators across the globe. Pakistan can still revise its INDCs.

It needs strong institutions to implement its NCCP. A `whole of government` approach including parliament, finance, planning and sectoral departments is needed.The medium-term budgetary frameworks of ministries should talce into account climate change`s effects. The finance and planning institutions at the federal and provincial level should track related expenditure and progress. Provinces must integrate climate change issues in their growth strategies given its impact on poverty and social development.

Pakistan incurred $6bn climate changerelated losses in 2012. It needs to invest 5.5pc of GDP annually for mitigation and 1.5-3pc for adaptation to address its effects. For a 15pc reduction in GHG, an annual investment of around $8bn is needed. Given the global shortfall in financing, Pakistan requires an overarching climate change financing framework which can help streamline budget allocations and ensure holistic response to the challenge.

So far the evidence affirms that no one will remain untouched by the consequences of climate change. Developing countries will be most affected. It is time to act together. As UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said, `there is no plan B, because there is no planet B`.

The writer is country director of UNDP in Pakistan

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

By Tharanga Yakupitiyage
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 17 2016 (IPS)

“When it comes to peace talks, women have a special stake,” said Gloria Steinem while discussing current peace talks in the Middle East.

Steinem, a prominent activist, joined the 60th annual session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) as part of Donor Direct Action, an NGO connecting women’s rights activists to donors.

Partnering with Karama, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) focused on violence against women in the Arab region, the two organisations highlighted the need to include women not only in politics, but also in peace processes in conflict nations.

“Women should not be in the corridor, but actually at the table,” Karama founder Hibaaq Osman told delegates.

According to the International Peace Institute (IPI), between 1992 and 2011, just 2 percent of chief mediators and 9 percent of negotiators in peace processes were women.

However, in conflict, women continue to bear the brunt of causalities, gender-based violence and livelihood insecurity.

Despite the unanimous UN adoption of Resolution 1325 calling for the increase in women’s representation in conflict management and resolution, little has been done to enforce and implement it.

No woman has ever been the chief or lead mediator in an UN-led peace negotiation.

In an effort to include more women, UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura established a Women’s Advisory Board, the first of its kind.

Though it is a monumental step towards women’s participation in peace talks, Mouna Ghanem, the founder of the Syrian Women’s Forum and member of the Women’s Advisory Board, stated that this is only the first step.

“This is not what we are aspiring for. What we are aspiring for is not only participation,” Ghanem told reporters.

“We are aspiring to be the decision makers, and we have a long way to go,” she continued.

The ongoing Syrian negotiations, which are on their fifth day in Geneva, have invited two parties to the table: Assad’s government and the main opposition bloc High Negotiations Committee (HNC). Though the Women’s Advisory Board will express their concerns and provide recommendations to the delegations, it is unclear how much influence they will have.

While criticising the lack of female decision-makers, Ghanem asked: “Why are [men] making the future of Syria? Why aren’t women also making the future of Syria? Are we going to let those who destroyed Syria and committed huge human rights violations to women and children…are we going to let them decide the future of Syria?

She added that the two-party negotiating system will not bring the best interests of Syrians, especially women.

Sahar Ghanem, the head of Civil Society Organisations Affairs Unit in the Yemeni Prime Minister’s Office, painted an almost identical picture, noting that the Yemeni peace talks also did not include women. She disclosed that women were “sacrificed” from the talks in order to bring the two reluctant parties together to negotiate.

Instead, in October 2015, a coalition of Yemeni women met with the UN Special Envoy for Yemen Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed to consult on the political situation.

Director of the Libyan Women’s Platform for Peace Zahra’ Langhi noted that mediation must go beyond just the representation of women, adding that the UN-led mission failed to do this.

“They can bring some women in a segregated track and tick the box and say ‘we have women’, but women were not respectively engaged in the process,” she told IPS.

“The peace [the UN peace envoy] aim to achieve is fragile peace…it is a peace that does not engage local communities that women are the heart of,” she continued.

Langhi also asserted that in order to have sustainable peace, a ceasefire is insufficient, and they must tackle with the root causes of the conflict.

Among the causes are militarisation and the arms trade which, in Libya, has contributed to the systematic violence against civil society representatives, especially women.

Since the country’s revolution in 2011, there has been a wave of seemingly politically-motivated assassinations. In June 2014, prominent human rights lawyer and politician Salwa Bugaighis was shot to death in her home.

A month later, Fariha al-Barkawy was gunned down in broad daylight. In February 2015, civil society activist Intisar al-Hassairy was found dead in the trunk of her car.

“Because of the militarization and the assassination of these women, other women…decided not to be part of civil society anymore,” Langhi told IPS.

Echoing similar sentiments was Syrian Women’s Advisory Board representative Ghanem who said that the international community is simply giving Syrian refugees a “painkiller” without addressing why they are refugees in the first place.

“We should ask what the disease is and the disease is distributing arms to all these groups who are fighting in Syria,” she stated.

The three women highlighted though it is important to have a 30 percent quota for women in politics, the inclusion of more women in peace talks must involve investing in local communities. This will lead to long-lasting “sustainable” peace, they remarked.

Research from the Philippines and Colombia has shown that including women and men in peace processes significantly increases the likelihood of reaching and sustaining an agreement.

Citing the case of Liberia, where a group of women began a nonviolent campaign for peace which effectively ended the Second Liberian Civil War in 2003, Steinem pointed to the power of women in matters of peace and security, stating: “Now if they could make such a difference outside the room and away from the peace table, imagine what women could do in the room and at the table if we were half of every group.”

Though a new administration has been established after more than a year of UN peace talks, violence persists in the country and the peace deal remains weak.

Similarly, the peace deal between the Yemeni government and Houthi rebels is on the verge of collapse as negotiations continue to stall.

Syrian peace talks also teeter following disputes with the HNC and the Kurdish party who plan to announce a federal system in the Northern Kurd-dominated region of the country.

End

Roberto Savio, founder and president emeritus of the Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency and publisher of Other News.

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Mar 17 2016 (IPS)

The recent German elections went as predicted.. A new right wing, xenophobe party, Alternative for Germany, AFD, has emerged with force, and will bein national Parliament in 2017.This development is unprecedented in German politics since the end of the second world war, and it is widely viewedas part of a general trend – the rise of populist and xenophobe forces all over Europe.

Roberto Savio

The European elections of 2004 rang thefirst warning bell. The euro crisis and social instability saw the beginning of a surge to the right. Since then, every national election has seen a shift in the internal balance. Historical examples of civics and tolerance in the Nordic countries, such as Sweden, Norway and Denmark, has changed direction. Tthe Swedish Democrats, a party rooted in the neo Nazi movement, has forced the country to change its famous policy of open door to refugees. The Danish Popular Party last summer emerged as the second choice. In Finland, the True Finns becaoe the third force in 2015, and are now in the governmental coalition. In 2011, the massacre of 78 Norwegians by the neo Nazi Breivik heralded the end of the Nordic political identity.

Since 2004, the right wing parties just grew. Now they are in power in Hungary and Poland, and few days ago the pro Nazi “People Party for our Slovaquia” (LSNS), is firmly in parliament as the fourth force. And if elections are held today, the Freedom Party of the islamophobe GertWilders, would get the first place in the Netherlands. In France in 2015, the parties had to join forces to block Marine Le Pen from winning the French regional elections.

The weight of The UK Independence Party UKIP has obliged Cameron to call for a referendum on Europe. In Austria the right Freedom Party won 20.5% of the votes and, more recently, it came ahead either of the socialists or the Christian democrats in some state elections, entered in a Socialist-led government in Burgenland and gained more than 30% of the votes in Vienna. In Italy, the votes of the 5 Stars Movement added with those of the League of Matteo Salvini, it is almost 40% of anti Europe vote. Obviously the arrival of more than a million refugees, has given a boost to all xenophobe parties, and the Alternative for Germany’s fast rise has been explained as a punishment to Merkel, who opened the door to refugees, without any consultation, not even with France,

But beside this obvious explanation, it would be time to consider why since the crisis of the 2009, in such a short time, a campaign against Europe, and for a nationalist platform, seems to beso successful. Even without the refugees, the right wing tide has been a clear and evident fact. Refugees have become just an accelerator to what was happening everywhere. And why those right wing parties attract a very variegated electorate, from workers to housewives, from pensioners to young students? And why, suddenly, the dream of a European integration has lost popular support?

Obviously, this would entail a complex and long analysis, that we cannot afford here. But I would like to add an uncomfortable angle of reflection, probably not politically correct. The strict intransigence of the German government (embodied by the Nein fur Allen, no to everything, i.e. the minister of finance Wolfgang Schauble), has contributed to the decline of the European dream. Until the crisis of 2009, there were no serious financial and social problems. Then the crisis came, and Europe is now barely back to the pre crisis level (Italy not yet). This means that during the seven years of austerity imposed byGermany, with an epic fight on Cyprus and then Greece, and splitting Europe with a North-South divide was the only way forward. It would be of course irresponsible to suggest that the South of Europe could have ignored rules and budgets. But to make of the European Union a warden visibly indifferent to the savage cuts in public expenses, from welfare to hospitals, to the emerging dramatic youth unemployment everywhere, was not certainly the best recipe to give an attractive image of the European institutions.

Germany did look a superpower, passionate of its wealth, insensitive to other’s problems, which went by its own way, with no interest in consultation and socialization. It was easy during the seven years of crisis to attract a large number of people who felt left out, ignored by the traditional political parties, who did remember or imagine the good times of national sovereignty. They saw in foreign banks and corporations their enemy, in foreigners those who were robbing their jobs (remember the British campaign against the Polish plumber?) and saw Brussels as a bunch of unelected bureaucrats who did want to intrude in their lives, and decide on the shape of the tomatoes. Berlin did not do anything to correct that trend. It made a moral issue of the deficit of the debtors’ countries, and blocked any attempt to socialize the excedent of its economy with others.

It is may be time to consider that the German intransigence has a responsibility in the surge of the rightwing and nationalist tide, with the message that they did not care about others, intent only to keep their privileged situation; European solidarity is over. One by one its allies went into budget deficits , like Austria, Finland, the Netherlands, without Berlin even noticing. Austerity was a taboo which could not be discussed, like one cannot or must not discuss moral or religious dogmas.

It can be easily said that this is lamentation is from the side of the debtors, and that is usually what they do. Pass on the responsibility to the creditors, instead of making a real and sincere mea culpa. But then, what happens when Brussels, the warden of Europe, calls on Germany for a European responsibility ? Total indifference.

On the March 13, the European Commission did publish a report on the economic situation, and indicated that Spain, Italy and Portugal were the most fragile countries, in the terrible lack of growth in the Eurozone. The report specifically singles out Germany, echoing what already the IMF, the OECD, and the G20 have been stating: Berlin has completely ignored their call for increasing expenditure in infrastructures, as a way of a stimulus, using its huge superavit.

Germany has taken tiny steps in the last decade on all of the EU recommendations. It did not increase its budget in education, in research and development, nor did it improve the fiscal system. Brussels have been asking to increase the retirement age, at no avail. It has recommended to revise the fiscal treatments of the so called minijobs, and to eliminate barriers in the service sector, without any reaction. It asked to increase salaries, to redistribute the state superavit, in a total indifference. The Commission now says clearly that the large commercial superavit makes of Germany a risk for the euro. Brussels considers that Germany is not doing anything in matter of reforms, that must increase its public investment, and concludes that its enormous budgetary asynchrony with the rest of Europe “has adverse implications for the Eurozone”.

Let us not forget that Alternative for Germany was created by a group of academics who were against the euro. They were misplaced by the present leadership, who wants to get rid of the Brussels inference in the life of Germans, and go back to the times of the strong Germany of the past. Is the path of Merkel’s splendid solitude helping or weakening the European dream? No doubt she is a brilliant national leader. But a European one? .

(END)

By Zahed Khan
Mar 17 2016 (The Daily Star, Bangladesh)

In any country, one has to be an adult to qualify as a driver. But in Bangladesh, one does not have to obey that law to become a driver – and that literally means it is “allowed”.

Monir is 16. He has been driving a human haulier for six months. Underage, he naturally does not have a license. But who cares? You can spot him in the Mohammadpur and Mirpur route. Monir says many of his buddies are also in this same profession.

The Daily Star have also spotted even younger drivers driving minibuses — even on the VIP road right under the nose of the law enforcers.

In most cases, underage drivers are seen driving human hauliers. Drivers say this is because qualified drivers with genuine licenses are not interested to drive these smaller vehicles for prestige issues.

Also, vehicle owners can exploit young and eager-to-please drivers better when it comes to payment.

The most common defence of people who deploy these kids for such risky jobs is that they were very poor and these jobs were providing them with a livelihood.

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

Jan Oberg is TFF Director & Co-founder, peace studies professor. PhD in sociology, peace and future researcher. Associate professor (Docent) at Lund University, thereafter visiting or guest professor at various universities. Former director of the Lund University Peace Research Institute (LUPRI); former secretary-general of the Danish Peace Foundation; former member of the Danish government’s Committee on security and disarmament.

By Jan Oberg
Lund, Sweden, Mar 17 2016 (IPS)

The EUropean Union – a criminal?

The EU that has peace as its top goal and received Nobel’s Peace Prize?

The EU with Schengen and Dublin?

Jan Oberg

The EU with “European” values, humanism and mission civilisatrice that tells others how to live in accordance with international law and in respect for human rights?

We live in times where little shall surprise us anymore. The answer to the question – will EU become a criminal in international law terms? – will be answered on March 17 and 18 when the EU Council meets to decide whether or not to carry through the agreement with Turkey about how to handle refugees.

Amnesty International knows what it is all about. AI uses words such as “alarmingly shortsighted”, “inhumane”, “dehumanising”, “moral and legally flawed” and “EU and Turkish leaders have today sunk to a new low, effectively horse trading away the rights and dignity of some of the world’s most vulnerable people.”

And “By no stretch of imagination can Turkey be considered a ‘safe third country’ that the EU can cosily outsource its obligations to,” says Iverna McGowan, Head of Amnesty International’s European Institutions Office.

When Amnesty International expresses itself this way, we should listen very very carefully. I do and I’ve signed Amnesty’s Open Letter to Swedish prime minister Löfvén protesting that Sweden too may join this inhuman and law-violating agreement with Turkey.

Hurry up, it is tomorrow!

Behind every refugee stands an arms trade, stands militarism.

A huge majority of the refugees have fled the wars conducted by irresponsible and narrow-minded EU leaders who, thereby, have already violated international law.

They continue to do so – Denmark being the latest to join the tragedy.

EU countries combined make up the largest economy in the world.

How bizarre that the EU has the resources to fight one war after the other, has huge military budgets and nuclear weapons and puts unlimited resources into wars against terror (that is, to a large extent, a response to U.S./NATO/EU foreign policies) but cowardly believes it can’t find the resources to care for 1,2 million seeking refuge among its 500 million, i.e. 0,24%!

Precisely because EU countries have caused a major part of the refugees to flee, we have a special moral obligation to a) receive them and b) learn to not start wars just like that on somebody else’s territory.

Where there is a will, there is a way. Will the EU anything good, the time is now.

There is no refugee crisis in the EU. There are several other crises:

1) A crisis caused by years of militarism;

2) A crisis of crisis management;

3) A crisis of leadership – or, with the exception of Chancellor Merkel – no leadership for common policies at all; and

4) A crisis of solidarity, humanity and ethics.

You may add a 5) the Euro-racism expressed as Islamophobia.

I am pretty sure that the EU would have acted differently if there had been a huge natural catastrophe or a nuclear power plant meltdown in Israel and 1,2 million Jews had come to Europe or if an EU country had experienced something like that in its own midst.

If on March 16-17, 2016, the EU decides to implement this immoral and law-violating agreement with increasingly authoritarian, war-fighting, terror-supporting and refugee-unsafe country Turkey, the moral decay of the Western world will be obvious.

If not to itself, then to the 92% of the world’s people living outside it.

And the EU will deserve nothing better than it own dissolution. Because it wasn’t for a better but for a worse world.

And technically – what is left when the asylum right, the Schengen and Dublin conventions etc. will be violated by the Council itself?

Either the EU is for a better world or it’s time for another Europe after it!

Jan Oberg’s article was published on 16 March 2016 in: TFF – Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research. Go to Original.

Dr Maung Zarni is a non-resident research scholar, Sleuth Rith Institute, (A permanent Documentation Centre of Cambodia) & former visiting lecturer, Harvard Medical School, USA

By Baher Kamal
MADRID, Mar 16 2016 (IPS)

Besieged by US, UK, French, Russian and Syrian war crafts and ground intelligence, both in Syria and Iraq, the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (Daesh from its original acronym in Arabic) has reportedly been searching for a new base in the North of Africa, specifically in Libya, in what has been called the “Colombian Triangle.”

A map of Libya with major cities and settlements. Credit: United Nations

Located in the South-Western region, the new base would be installed on the borders of Algeria, Niger and Libya itself.

The area is currently controlled by extremist groups, drug dealers and weapons traffickers. This kind of operations represents a strong source of funding for Daesh, but not the only one — oil would be another huge source.

According to Libyan sources, the “Colombian Triangle” was not, however, Daesh’ first choice. In fact, the story began last year, with Daesh expanding its influence in the Northern Libyan region of Sirte, which hosts the largest oil reserves in the country.

There, Daesh carried out several military attacks and even occupied and controlled refineries and huge oil deposits, there and in other producing areas.

Daesh had, nevertheless, to re-think its initial plans which aimed at installing its new base in the Northern oil rich regions in Libya, due to a series of rapid developments, such as the efforts carried out by the UN former Special Envoy, Bernardino Leon, and continued later on by the new one, Martin Kobler, to form a new, national unity government headed by Libyan businessman Fayyez al Sarraj.

This new unity government has been in fact formed as a result of a UN sponsored agreement in Skhirat (Morocco) on mid December 2015.

Daesh’s fears that the new national unity government would be strongly supported, intelligence and militarily wise, by foreign powers, mainly the US-led NATO, especially in Derna, Sirte, Tripoli and Sabratha areas, forced the terrorist group to change plans.

The skies in these regions have been monitored by drones. Local sources could not confirm whether these surveillance operations are controlled the Libyan Armed Forces led by General Khalifa Haftar, or by other states monitoring the activity of extremists in the country.

Some voices spoke also of subsidiary control operations by the United Nations.

Libyan oil fields, pipelines, refineries and storage. Credit: NordNordWest, Yug | Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Anyway, since the end of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, the successive new rulers failed to form a strong, stable central authority. Consequently the country was split between the army and several militias.

Sources of the first Libyan government installed in Tripoli after the 2011 military intervention led by NATO forces, estimated that there would be up to 25 million weapons out of state control in the country.

The increasing fragility of Libyan central authorities allowed extremist organizations, including Daesh, to seize control in several cities.

According to a Libyan retired military commander, the Southern town of Traghan already serves as the centre for the «Colombian Triangle”, being surrounded by mountains and sand dunes from almost all sides.

The area has been chosen by the smugglers because of the ease drug shipments across the border, according to this source, away from the eyes of neighbouring countries’ authorities, whether these are Algeria or Niger, with Mali as a first destination.

Mali itself became in recent years a safe haven for extremist groups, including the reportedly pro- Daesh Boko Haram in Nigeria. That area became an arsenal of military equipment, weapons and missiles that had been looted from Gaddafi’s regime military stores.

The retired military commander explained that this mountainous and rugged region, and is now the new headquarters for the pool of extremist groups from Libya and Africa.

Meanwhile, different well-informed sources have been speculating with the expected developments that should come from now on.

Some talk insistingly about an US-NATO-led military coalition’s intervention in Libya against Daesh. Others speak instead of “surgical” military operations against specific targets.

In the last days, a new version has circulated, citing “reports of Libyan intelligence services confirm the presence of intelligence officers from some countries supporting militias and liaising with terrorism in Libya.” In this sense, Dominique Sinclair on March 15, 2016 wrote http://dominiquesinclair.blog.lemonde.fr/on the French paper Le Monde, a post in which the author asks: “What hides the UN proposal for the establishment of safe corridors to Benghazi?”

According to Sinclair’s post, the UN envoy to Libya [Martin Kobler] had called several times to take into account the need to put an end to military operations in Benghazi with the aim to create safe corridors to allow the exit of the families [trapped] in the fighting zones.

The UN has also spoken in the same direction since combat zones and military operations have been abandoned by all their inhabitants and their families from the beginning of military operations in May 2014, Sinclair adds.

And asks why then Kobler and the Nations United were interested in this question recently by multiplying calls to open safe corridors for the departure of family [trapped] in conflict zones?

According to these versions, other objectives motivate such requirements “such as the existence of reports by Libyan intelligence indicating the presence of intelligence officers from some countries supporting the militias and are in liaison with terrorism in Libya. There would probably be other Western states involved in this case.”

Anyway, should Daesh manage to install its base in the “Colombian Triangle” in Libya, who could ever prevent it from further liaising with Boko Haram in Nigeria and other terrorist groups?

(End)

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By Bjørn Lomborg
Mar 16 2016 (The Daily Star, Bangladesh)

When it comes to cooking indoors over open fires, the harmful health effects can be equal to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. This indoor air pollution plagues nearly nine out of every 10 Bangladeshi households, which use wood and other biofuels to cook inside.

Over time, exposure to smoke from indoor cooking leads to deadly diseases such as lung cancer, stroke, and heart disease. This is why it’s the most deadly environmental problem in the world. In Bangladesh, such indoor air pollution is responsible for 10-15 percent of all deaths.

It may seem obvious to say that we need to focus on cutting household air pollution. But such policies compete with many other potentially beneficial proposals for how to use scarce resources from the national budget or international stakeholders.

So what are the very best policies? This is what the Bangladesh Priorities – a cooperation with BRAC and dozens of the world’s top economists – promises to help answer.

Our research suggests two principal ways to help decrease deadly air pollution inside the home: People could either burn the same biofuels that most Bangladeshi households currently use, but with smarter cook stoves that emit much less pollution, or they could change to liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), which burns much more cleanly.

The cheapest way to quality indoor air is to get widespread investment in an improved biomass cook stove. This is simply an enclosed stove, often with a chimney, that reduces heat loss, protects against the wind, and transfers heat to a cooking pot more efficiently than traditional stoves or open fires. It burns the fuel – often biomass – more effectively and hence with less pollution. In Bangladesh, the cost of such a stove with two burners and a chimney that will last three years is about Tk. 1,000 per year. This is both to cover the aggregate that needs replacement every third year, as well as some maintenance. And almost a third of the cost goes to promoting awareness of the opportunity in the first place.

But the benefits are many. If all 30 million households switched to improved cook stoves, it would save more than 33,000 lives each year. Each life will live on average another 28 years, which is worth about Tk. 79 billion or Tk. 2,600 per household each year. Moreover, each family will get slightly fewer sick days, worth another Tk. 260.

But the families would also save 15 minutes per day in cooking time, because the improved cook stoves are faster, and because less fuel is needed, it will reduce fuel collection time by half each day. In total, that benefit is worth another Tk. 2,000. For each Tk. 1,000 spent on a better cook stove, a family will get almost Tk. 5,000 in health and time savings benefits: every taka spent will do Tk. 5 of good.

This is an important step to improve household air quality. But it still leaves most of the problem in place – we will “only” save 33,000 of 150,000 deaths each year.

That is why we could consider a more thorough option. LPG burns very clean – almost like an electric stove. Adoption of these stoves would produce much higher benefits: it would save 91,000 lives, a total value of Tk. 218 billion, or Tk. 7,300 per household. It would also avoid some Tk. 700 of disease per household, speed up cooking by 40 minutes, and save all fuel collection time, at a net worth of Tk. 5,200.

But, the cost of LPG is also significantly higher. It would cost about Tk. 10,000 each year, plus Tk. 2,000 in cooking fuel costs. In total, you would pay about Tk. 12,000 for about Tk.13,200 in benefits. So spending on LPG stoves would not be a loss.

This shows that the most expensive option is not necessarily the best option. Cheaper options, despite helping less, can be a much better way to help everyone. In the long term, however, the more expensive options can be solutions. Many countries at similar income levels as Bangladesh have adopted modern cooking fuels such as LPG at substantially higher rates.

But there are challenges to implementing smarter stoves. With some prior efforts, it has proven difficult to get households to adopt new stoves. And widespread adoption is crucial given the community-based nature of fighting air pollution. If not everyone in a community adopt improved cook stoves, there would be more local air pollution leading to fewer benefits.

Well-targeted information campaigns about the benefits of cleaner cook stoves could help spread the message about their benefits, and projects should also tailor stoves to customers’ preferences. And, ideally, households would be allowed to pay for stoves over the course of multiple installments, making them more affordable.

Last week you saw how poverty policies can help do Tk. 2 of good for each taka spent. Making cook stoves cleaner can help fight household air pollution with about Tk. 5 of good for every taka spent. Are these some of the best investments for Bangladesh? Let your voice be heard on https://copenhagen.fbapp.io/indoorairpriorities. Let’s start the conversation about where Bangladesh can do the most good.

The writer is president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, ranking the smartest solutions to the world’s biggest problems by cost-benefit. He was ranked one of the world’s 100 most influential people by Time magazine.

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

For two decades, Dickson Kamau only grew maize on his 0.5 hectare (ha) of land earning himself the nickname Kamau wa mbembe or Kamau who owns maize in his native Kikuyu language. “The maize business was always very good. Good production and the profit was enough to provide for my family and educate all my […]

UN Free and Equal postage stamps – promoting LGBT equality worldwide. Source: UNPA

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 15 2016 (IPS)

When the UN Postal Administration recently unveiled a set of six new commemorative stamps — as part of a global campaign promoting the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) communities — it did not expect a furious backlash as it did, mostly from the 54 members of the African Group and from Russia, a veto-wielding permanent member of the Security Council.

Speaking on behalf of the African Group at the UN, Justin Kisoka a Minister Counselor at the Tanzanian Mission to the United Nations, expressed his “very serious” concern at the Secretary-General’s “alarming” introduction, printing and circulation of stamps under the “Free and Equal” campaign.

The release of the new stamps, he said, “contravened the United Nations’ principles, as well as the culture, norms and beliefs of many Member States, casting a shadow on the adherence to rules and regulations governing use of the United Nations logo and resources.”

Addressing the UN’s Administrative and Budgetary Committee (also known as the Fifth Committee) last week, he went one step further “demanding the campaign’s immediate cessation” and also requested implementation of accountability measures, including recovery of the funds used to finance the stamp campaign.

He also demanded that Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon provide details on the funds used for the campaign, as well as on the related rules and regulations.

Asked for his comments, UN Deputy Spokesperson Farhan Haq told IPS: “You’re aware of the Secretary-General’s strong and consistent support for the Free and Equal campaign and his belief that the human rights of all people must be upheld.”

Beyond that, he said, “I’d have no further comment on the stamps issue.”

Backing the African Group, Sergey Khalizov of the Russian Federation said the Secretary-General’s activities “had caused serious issues for a range of delegations.”

He said consideration of the use of resources from the UN’s regular budget was a Fifth Committee prerogative.

He questioned the justification of mandates of leading UN bodies and said he was ready to engage in a discussion in the Committee on several issues raised by the African Group.

The campaign for LGBT rights is being led by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in Geneva.

Boris Dittrich, Advocacy Director, LGBT Rights Program at Human Rights Watch (HRW), told IPS the stamps were published within the framework of the Free and Equal Campaign of the United Nations.

“They reflect that fundamental rights like the freedom of expression, the right to privacy and non-discrimination, belong to each individual, no matter what their sexual orientation or gender identity is.”

He pointed out that the stamps reflect the spirit of two UN resolutions adopted in 2011 and 2015 by the UN Human Rights Council denouncing discrimination and violence against people on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity.

“Instead of attacking the UN for publishing a series of stamps, the African group and Russia should focus on eliminating discrimination and violence against LGBT people in their countries,” declared Dittrich.

Currently, there is a list of some 79 countries with anti-gay laws, 34 of them in Africa, including Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Angola, Botswana, and Tanzania.

In an interview, the artist who designed the stamps was quoted as saying he was heavily influenced by art from the first quarter of the 20th Century.

Sergio Baradat, who is of Cuban background, said his style stems from his appreciation for French Art Deco and growing up in Miami, Florida.

“One of the stamps represents someone who is transgender,” Baradat told UN Radio, referring to the stamp that depicts a person with butterfly wings, an image he says represents a person “becoming who they really are, blossoming.”

“We live in a world where even though [developed] nations have embraced marriage equality [and] LBGT equality, we still have a far, far, far way to go, but we are making some strides,” he added.

“There are some countries in the world right now where not only are we not celebrated or respected, but we are beaten and killed. And I thought that it would be a wonderful opportunity using art, to use postage stamps as a vehicle – using art to change hearts and minds.”

He also stressed that LGBT rights are human rights and that all individuals deserve to be treated equally and fairly under the law.

The series is co-sponsored by the permanent missions of Argentina, Australia, Chile, El Salvador, Germany, Israel, Netherlands, Norway, the UK, the United States, and Uruguay, the delegation of the European Union, in addition to OHCHR and the UN Postal Administration.

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

Xinia Solano and Luis Diego Murillo are one of the families working with the shade house programme in Los Reyes, in the southeastern Costa Rican municipality of Coto Brus. This model of agriculture is being promoted by the FAO, in conjunction with various government institutions. Credit: Diego Arguedas Ortiz/IPS

By Diego Arguedas Ortiz
LOS REYES, Costa Rica, Mar 15 2016 (IPS)

Before they got involved in farming, Luis Diego Murillo and Xinia Solano paid their bills and put food on their table with Luis’s salary as a foreman on construction sites, an unstable job that kept him on the move.

Now the 33-year-old Costa Rican walks along the rows where he and his wife grow bright green coriander and lettuce, and where stalks indicate a handful of radishes under the soil. They share the land with another family, but they are their own boss.

Over Murillo’s head is an enormous roof of black shade cloth which is crucial to his new life because it protects his crops in the community of Los Reyes, in the rural municipality of Coto Brus, Puntarenas province, in the foothills of Costa Rica’s Talamanca mountain range.

“We’re together now, I’m no longer away from my family,” he told IPS, explaining why they decided to dedicate themselves to farming full-time. “You don’t want to be working away from home, far away from your children and wife. You want to be with your family, no?”

Murillo and his wife, the 34-year-old Solano, are among the 74 families who have benefited from the Shade House programme that the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) is carrying out in southeast Costa Rica. “One of the big advantages is that they can produce year round. Before, in the dry season (November to May), the crops would be burnt by the sun. Besides, the popular idea that only a few things can be grown here has been laid to rest, and a greater diversity of crops is now produced.” -- Guillermo Murillo

In the protected shaded areas, 700 square metres in size, the farmers can manage the quantity and quality of sunlight, the percentage of shade and the impact on the crops of rainfall, which can be heavy in this area.

The families are thus able to grow fresh vegetables year-round, have boosted the quality and productivity of their crops and have even managed to grow vegetables that were unthinkable before, given the normal conditions in this area, such as broccoli and cabbage.

With this system, which began to be implemented in late 2013 on just six farms, the families produce food for their own consumption and earn an income selling the surplus.

“We’re very happy because thanks to the shade houses we don’t have to go out and buy food anymore. If you want coriander or a head of lettuce, you just come out and pick it,” said Solano, whose house is in a village next to Los Reyes, which is a six-hour drive from San José, although it is only 280 km away.

Another of the advantages of the programme is that it improves and helps diversify the diet of rural families in the socioeconomic region of Brunca, the area with the highest poverty level in this Central American nation of 4.8 million people.

FAO expert Guillermo Murillo (wearing a hat) talks to family farmers in the settlement of Los Reyes in southeast Costa Rica about techniques for improving production in their shade houses. Credit: Diego Arguedas Ortiz/IPS

Poverty affects 34.6 percent of households in this region of 300,000 people, compared to a national average of 20.6 percent, and only 51 percent of the economically population is employed, according to statistics that FAO provided to IPS.

This region only produces 15 to 20 percent of the fresh fruit and vegetables consumed here, and the rest is brought in from other parts of the country.

The families with shade houses are now eating better.

“We eat salad every day. We used to buy stuff for salad if we had the money, but now we don’t have to buy it,” said Solano.

The shade houses are also looking at larger-scale production and marketing of their crops, to boost family incomes.

The families participating in the programme already grow more than 25 different kinds of fresh vegetables.

“Some of the farmers have cars and lend them to others so they can sell their produce in nearby towns,” said Solano. “But we’re doing the paperwork to create a cooperative, to get a truck.”

Each shade house costs around 3,200 dollars, and the funds are provided by the Costa Rican government institutions working with FAO on the project, such as the Mixed Institute for Social Aid (IMAS) or the Rural Development Institute (INDER).

The programme, which also has the support of the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock, is focused on the entire family, and considers women’s contribution as key.

“The women here are very brave, most of them even pick up the shovel and plant. It was my wife who planted all of those plants (that provide shade for the coffee bushes),” Florentino Amador, a 54-year-old farmer, told IPS with pride in his voice.

Ligia Ruiz, 53, one of the most enthusiastic farmers in the four shade houses in Los Reyes, coordinates sales with her neighbours.

The shade house system makes it possible to diversify the production of fresh vegetables in the southern Costa Rican region of Brunca. Some fresh produce, like lettuce, was already grown in the region, but others, like broccoli and cabbage, are only now being produced, thanks to this farming technique promoted by the FAO. Credit: Diego Arguedas Ortiz/IPS

“On Wednesdays and Saturdays we harvest what we’re going to sell, just here in the community for now. I get the orders and we deliver the produce,” she told IPS.

Although each shade house was originally designed for one family, in Los Reyes the four shaded areas are worked by 10 families, who farm together in a very horizontal process; for example, the income from the sales goes into a joint fund, where they hope to save up for the cooperative.

“If there’s a lot to clean on one lot, one family helps the other, and then they in turn receive support,” said Ruíz with regard to the revival of the rural tradition of communal work.

The FAO’s aim is for the beneficiaries to be organised groups of farmers with access to a collective storage and trading centre, although the families are selected by the Costa Rican institutions involved in the project.

In Brazil and Mexico there are small-scale initiatives similar to the shade house project, said Guillermo Murillo, a FAO consultant who has worked in those countries and suggested the shade house model for Costa Rica.

“One of the big advantages is that they can produce year round,” Murillo told IPS. “Before, in the dry season (November to May), the crops would be burnt by the sun. Besides, the popular idea that only a few things can be grown here has been laid to rest, and a greater diversity of crops is now produced.”

Besides the support for setting up shade houses, the team of representatives of the FAO and the public institutions involved in the initiative give advice on farming techniques, tools, and marketing.

“The seeds that used to come here were the ones used in colder parts of Costa Rica, even though there were ‘tropicalised’ ones in the market,” said Murillo. “We looked for them, and the families started to use them.”

The programme is now being expanded to the northwest province of Guanacaste, where the installation of the first shade houses outside of the Brunca region has been approved.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

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Roberto Savio, founder and president emeritus of the Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency and publisher of Other News.

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Mar 15 2016 (IPS)

Larry Summers, Clinton’s minister of treasury, has made few friends in life. At that time, he was instrumental in eliminating the Glass Stegall Banking Law, which since 1933 separated the bank’s customer deposits from the financial activities of the Stock Exchange, releasing a flood of money which created the present monster financial system.

Roberto Savio

He was also Chief Economist of the World Bank, a position he left after polemics. He became the President of the prestigious Harvard Academy, but was obliged to leave on a gender issue. He was the Director of the National Economic Council under president Barack Obama, where is pro-business attitude led to new controversies.

Maybe, for all these reasons, very few paid attention to his predictions about “the new economy”. This is a term created after the crisis of 2009, to indicate that unemployment would be normal, and that the market would be the centre of economy and finance, and social and welfare measures were not any longer part of the economy’s concern.

Summers warns about “a secular stagnation”. In other words, anaemic growth will stay with us for a long time. His warnings were about the fact that there is no real political action to create stimulus, and that “in a world that is one major shock away from a global recession, little if anything directed on spurring demand was agreed. Central bankers communicated a sense that there was relatively little left that they could do to strengthen growth or even to raise inflation”.

Summers was commenting on the last G20 meeting of Ministers of Finance( Feb.26), where unable to agree on any action, concluded with a statement that “markets are worrying too much”. The magnitude of the recent market volatility has not reflected the underlying fundamentals of the global economy, declared Lou Jiwei, the Minister of Finance of China, who hosted the G20 in Shanghai.

The inflexible German Minister of Finance, Wolfgang Schauble, did block the plea for accompanying stimulus to reforms, championed by the American Jack Lew, insisting that now is the time only for structural reforms, and not for any fiscal and monetary policy of stimulus. The case of Greece was present in the minds of all. Later Schauble, commenting on the enormous load of refugees blocked in an already exhausted Greece, declared that while this human tragedy needs attention,” it should not distract Athens from implementing it’s program of structural reforms”.

A few days later, Mario Draghi, President of the European Central Bank (ECB), did present a very large program of fiscal stimulus, which is bringing the cost of money to zero, while increasing its monthly infusion of money from 60 t0 80 billions euro per month. The markets did react at first positively, then went down, and now are lookingup again.

But Draghi did warn (as he always did), that central banks cannot do the job of governments.

Inflation, which is part of growth as long as it does go beyond 2%, has been until now at 0,1%.

Growth in the Eurozone, is now at 1.4% in 2016, and hopefully at 1.7% in 2017. It is now five years that we are practically in a stagnation, and Europe has not recovered yet to reach the economic level prior to the crisis.

Of course, this has created a strong howling in Germany. Schauble, who has made economy a branch of moral science, declared that “Easy money brings to perdition”. The general lament is that the ECB is making a policy to bail out the indebted countries of the South of Europe, at the expenses of Germany and the other countries of the North of Europe who do not need a zero cost monetary policy. The President of the Federation of German Wholesale, Foreign Trade and Sevices (BGA) Anton Borner, has declared:”for the German population it is a catastrophe. Their savings have been expropriated. This is a giant expropriation from North to South”.

It is a fact the Germans are big savers. There accounts have over two trillion euro, one third of the total of Eurozone. With zero interest, Union Investment has calculated that they will lose 224 billion, compared with what they would have got with the average historical interest on deposits.

The DZ bank has published a study, which according to the Italian treasury will save 53 billion euro, against 9.5 for Germany. Spain would also save a similar amount: 42 billion euro. The director of the prestigious institute of research Leibniz Institute for Economic Research (IFO), stated” we are facing a policy of subsidies to zombie banks, and States on the verge of bankruptcy”.

All this is further proof of how any dream of a European project is fading away.

German complaints are logical, but only from a very short-sighted and egocentric angle of observation.

Germany cannot ignore that to remain an island of prosperity in a region which provides them with a steady superavit in its balance of trade, and a steady revenue in its inferior cost of borrowing money because of its positive differential with other European countries, is not a recipe for the future. If the Euro zone will keep an anaemic rate of growth, and a very low rate of inflation, stagnation will settle for a long time. It is easy to preach economic reforms, but according to the European Union, United States, China, the BRICS, and Germany should use its superavit atleast to invest in structural costs (like infrastructure), to spur growth.

Instead the German government keeps its earnings tight, and considers that its destiny has nothing to do with the others. It is ready to push the European Union to disburse six billion euro to Turkey to keep refugees from coming, and even to reopen the door to admission, something until now rejected by the German population. The North-South Europe’s divide is not only the result of the lack of discipline from the South, it is also the result of a major European country, who is increasingly acting only for its immediate interests.

Summers view looks increasingly realistic. Cost of petrol will increase, according to the International Energy Agency. The oil rig count in the US has dropped to its lowest level in more than six years, as the low price makes the high-cost rigs un-economical.

The number of oil and gas rigs has sunk to 1,761, the lowest number since 2002.

This is not going to help Africa as a whole, the Chinese crucial recovery, and a large number of Latin Americans and Asian countries, as well Europe.

Trade, a vital economic indicator, has been stagnant for the last five years, an unprecedented data. The debate about structural reforms versus economic and financial stimulus look like a stalemate, which is paralyzing the international community. What happens if “the major shock from a global recession” comes now from the European paralysis? We are entering into the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the one where robots will substitute workers. According to the latest book of Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum of Davos, in a decade robots will account for 52% of industrial production, up from its present 12%. This will increase concentration of wealth, and social inequality The debate about our future is nowhere in the political circles. We now discuss about saving accounts…

(End)

Sanjay Wijesekera is Chief of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene, UNICEF

By Sanjay Wijesekera
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 15 2016 (IPS)

Last year we watched with cautious optimism as UN chief Ban Ki-moon welcomed the new Sustainable Development Goals, and called upon the world to meet them.

Sanjay Wijesekera

Cautious, because we’d been here before. In 2000, the Millennium Development Goals were set – to try to lift people out of poverty, improve their health, protect the environment, and so on. They focused the attention of the world on clear, achievable targets.

In the area of water, sanitation and hygiene, however, the MDGs did not try to reach everyone. They aimed to halve the proportion of the global population that didn’t have adequate drinking water, and halve the proportion of the population that didn’t have or use toilets.

The water goal was met but left 663 million people without improved drinking water in 2015. The sanitation goal was missed and 2.4 billion people still have no access.

The SDGs set a high bar of universal and equitable access to safe water, and adequate sanitation and hygiene. That is the challenge facing representatives of some 50 countries, the UN, and numerous civil society partners gathered in Addis Ababa this week for the Sanitation and Water for All Ministerial Meeting.

The SDGs force us to move beyond looking at infrastructure, to addressing accessibility, availability and quality of services that were not envisaged under the MDGs. They call for “safely managed” water, sanitation and hygiene services.

They call for extending WASH services, not only to households, but to schools, workplaces, and other institutions. They call for an end to dumping and water pollution; an end to open defecation; addressing water scarcity. This means we have to radically change our way of working.

For UNICEF this is a crucial challenge, because water, sanitation and hygiene underpin so much of the rest of the goals. Those related to nutrition, health, education, poverty and economic growth, urban services, gender equality, resilience and climate change cannot be met without progress on water, sanitation and hygiene.

It is so evident when it comes to children. Some 800 children under 5 years old die every day from diarrhoeal diseases linked to inadequate water, sanitation and hygiene. Around the world 159 million children are stunted, a condition linked to open defecation.

What we have to do is:

1. Focus on those furthest behind. Progress during the MDG era almost as a rule left behind the poorest and most marginalized. Generally, the wealthier groups of the population are served long before the poorest. Those not reached include the rural poor; those who live in urban slums; ethnic minorities; the disabled; and many women and children. We must deliberately target those who have so far been excluded.

2. Ensure good governance and accountability. Good policies, strong institutions, robust financing, competent monitoring systems and comprehensive capacity development are among the fundamental “building blocks” that are needed to deliver results. In Addis, we will agree how to put these building blocks in place and mainstream them within country plans.

3. Address the impact of climate change: Nearly 160 million children live in severely drought-prone areas, mostly in Africa and Asia, where safe drinking water and sanitation are already in short supply. Droughts affect nutrition, but also education, since children and women are the main carriers of water when it is scarce, eating up hours needed for school and other activities. Nearly half a billion children live in flood zones, the vast majority of them in Asia. Apart from the drowning risks to children, floods compromise water supplies and damage sanitation facilities, increasing the risk of diarrhoea outbreaks. Other water-borne diseases which are predicted to increase with higher temperatures include malaria, dengue, zika, and cholera. We must prepare for the consequences of climate change, especially for those already most vulnerable.

4. Use innovation, testing and data. In 2016, we know better and cheaper ways of testing water than we did in 2000, and can ensure that those ‘improved sources’ are also safe sources. We have ways of collecting and disseminating data which can help governments pinpoint the populations left behind. And we can use new technology to bring better and cheaper toilets, and better and safer water to the millions who don’t have them now.

Addis must be our springboard to action, because millions of people should not have to wait for years to have safe water, proper toilets and better hygiene.

(End)

By Ziauddin Choudhury
Mar 15 2016 (The Daily Star, Bangladesh)

In a surreal digital theft that befits a high octane movie thriller, we were recently informed of the daring heist at Bangladesh Bank in which nearly a billion dollars were siphoned off last month. As if this was not enough, the theft took place over several days early February through a series of about three dozen electronic fund transfers from the Bank to New York Federal Reserve for a total amount anywhere between eight hundred fifty to eight hundred seventy million dollars. All of the looted amount made through dozens of transfers would have been cashed had it not been due to the now famous spelling error in a twenty million check made to a Sri Lankan NGO. The error prompted the routing bank, Deutsche Bank, to seek clarification from the Bangladesh central bank, which stopped the transaction. But the mystery hackers still managed to swipe $80 million, one of the largest recorded bank thefts in history.

The news struck the headlines in the foreign press, particularly in the UK and the US, but what was possibly more puzzling to everyone is how a spelling error stopped a bank heist than the actual massive pilferage of funds from a central bank. The news highlighted the ability of a spelling error to stop the attempted digital robbery. It is through further investigation that news agencies came to know of the successful transfer of at least $80 million to the Philippines. All major news agencies referred to this latest heist as another instance of CEO fraud, a growing threat to world financial institutions that had cost globally $2 billion in the last two years.

So what is actually a CEO fraud, and how does the attack work? The scam is referred to as a CEO fraud because the perpetrator or perpetrators pose electronically as the chief executive or senior financial official of an institution they are targeting. For an attacker to successfully pull it off, they need to know a lot of information about the company they’re targeting. Much of this information is about the hierarchical structure of the company or institution they’re targeting. They’ll need to know who they’ll be impersonating. Although this type of scam is known as “CEO fraud”, in reality it targets anyone with a senior role – anyone who would be able to initiate payments. They will need to know their names, and their email addresses. It would also help to know their schedule, and when they will be travelling, or will be on vacation. Experts say the criminals managed to breach Bangladesh Bank systems and stole the credentials of its senior officials for online payment transfers. (The Federal Reserve of New York stated that the transfers had valid digital credentials of Bangladesh Bank.)

Frauds and scams that target corporations and financial institutions have happened before, but probably it is the first time a central bank was successfully targeted. The most sobering aspect of the heist is the divine intervention in foiling of the robbery in its entirety in the form of a spelling error.
It saved the bank much of the heist amount, and it could possibly recover some of the eighty million dollars that got away. It is also possible that with the help of international cyber security experts, that the bank has engaged, the source of the breach can be identified as well as corrections made in the bank’s system to prevent future breaches.

But the most unsettling part is the apparent revelation to the government by the bank’s news of the breach and heist after a month of its occurrence. There may be defense of some kind or the other for this delay, but it will be ludicrous to assume that the bank authorities chose to go hush-hush, lest the news adversely affects the financial market. A serious crime of this magnitude is not a paltry incident of burglary in a government office that may not warrant waking up the minister at night and reporting it to him. It is a major incident of financial loss just not to the bank, but the country of which the bank is a financial guard. Keeping news hidden from the government is like a house guard concealing the news of theft in the house from his master.

The original hacking of Bangladesh Bank happened between February 4 and 5, 2016, when the bank’s offices were shut. Security experts said the perpetrators had deep knowledge of the Bangladeshi institution’s internal workings, likely gained by spying on bank workers. This is not to say that some bank employees could be complicit, because the CEO fraud, as said earlier, does not necessarily require direct assistance of employees of the institution. They only need to follow the workers closely.

Perhaps in time, we will come to the bottom of this heist and find ways to prevent such occurrences in the future. But these will concern computer systems and digital security apparatus. What these will not do is change the human guards who watch over the institutions and their behaviour and determine how to react responsibly in crisis situations and own up to mistakes. This requires training and change of management of a different kind; one of accountability and leadership and courage to take responsibility for mistakes.

The writer is a political analyst and commentator.

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

Berta Cáceres on the banks of the Gualcarque River, in the Rio Blanco region in western Honduras that she fought so hard to protect. Photo Credit: Goldman Environment Prize

By Amantha Perera
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka, Mar 15 2016 (IPS)

Berta Isabel Cáceres Flores, was in her early 20s when she co-founded the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organisations of Honduras (Cophin), a group that campaigned for the rights of indigenous communities in the Central American nation.

Influenced by a mother, who took in fleeing El Salvadorian refugees, Cáceres was fully committed to her cause. She told friends and colleagues that her struggle was against ‘deadly powers’ that put profit before the rights of her people. In the last two decades, she saw colleagues being threatened, attacked and killed, but her work only got bigger.

Twenty three years after she formed Cophin, Cáceres paid the ultimate prize. She was gunned down in her home after assassins had stormed it around 1 am on March 3.

Before her death, Cáceres had received dead threats and had in fact moved house for safety. Recently, she had been in the forefront of protests against one of the biggest hydropower projects in Central America. The envisioned four dam Agua Zarca project on the Gualcarque river was being built by a local Honduran firm DESA but initially had the backing of China’s Sinohydro and the World Bank’s private sector financier International Finance Cooperation (IFC).

Both pulled out following the protests and Cáceres and others had been publicly calling for other backers like the Dutch Development Bank, the Finnish Fund for Industrial Cooperation and Germany’s Siemens and Voith to follow Sinohydro and IFC.

Her work won worldwide recognition. “With her people she made the World Bank withdraw from Honduras. It is precisely because of this struggle of Cophin led by her and for more then 20 years of resistance to new colonial powers that she won the Emma Goldman Prize in 2015,” Tatiana Cordero, executive director, Latin America at Urgent Action Fund, an international organisation that works for women’s rights, told IPS.

Such global accolades only strengthened Cáceres’ resolve to campaign more vigorously against the dam project, but they obviously need to give her more protection. Less than two weeks before her assassination she led a massive march in Rio Blanco that ended in a confrontation with government security personnel and employees from DESA.

“She was a global voice for the rights of indigenous people to water, food, land and life. She bravely challenged those in positions of power to do what was right — instead of what would result in the most profit,” said Terry Odendahl, President and CEO, Global Greengrants that has funded over 3,000 grants in over 145 countries to the tune of over $45 million said.

The brazen murder of a high-profile activist sent shockwaves through the global environmental rights community. UN Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz said she was horrified at the murder. Tauli-Corpuz had met Cáceres during a visit in November 2015 and had been personally appraised on the threats.

Tauli-Corpuz said that the international community should work together to bring such wanton violence faced by indigenous activists to a stop: “It is time for the nations of the world to bring perpetrators to justice and to protect indigenous rights activists peacefully protesting the theft of their lands and resources.”

That grass roots environmental activists are under threat across the globe has been known for awhile now. Global Witness found that in 2014, 116 environmental activists were murdered, almost double the number of journalists killed in the same period. Over 40 per cent of the victims were from indigenous communities while three quarters of them were from Central or South America. Between 2002 and 2013, at least 903 citizens engaged in environmental protection work were killed world over.

“The case of Cáceres is emblematic of the systematic targeting of environmental defenders in Honduras. Since 2013, three of her colleagues have been killed for resisting the Agua Zarca hydro-dam on the Gualcarque River, which threatens to cut off a vital water source for hundreds of indigenous Lenca people,” Global Witness said soon after the murder. The organisation also found that such attacks do not get much attention in the international press.

Activists say that the international community needs to understand the real dangers faced by the likes of Cáceres and the impunity enjoyed by the perpetrators. “There is a difference between realising the danger and holding the people and systems accountable. This assassination took place because of the Honduran government’s inability to ensure indigenous people and women can carry out their legitimate work without fear.” Odendahl said.

Aleta Baun, an Indonesian activist from the western half of Timor, who has been campaigning on behalf of her Mollo people can relate easily to the Cáceres predicament. Baun, who also won the Goldman Environmental Award in 2013, has survived at least two assassination attempts.

“You feel completely alone when such attacks happen,” she said of an attack in when she was waylaid by 30 men. She said that there has been no serious pressure brought on by local governments and international players to curb such attacks.

Suryamani Bhagat an activist with Save the Forests of Jharkhand Movement in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand also shares these sentiments. “I work with a lot of women, so I feel safer,” she said.

But once they are alone, that protective shield shatters and leads to deadly consequences.

(End)