BUCKNACKT'S SORDID TAWDRY BLOG
We should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive & well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate, bier or wein in hand, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming "WHOO-HOO, WHAT A RIDE!!!!!!"
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Showing posts with label Democratic Republic of the Congo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Democratic Republic of the Congo. Show all posts
BAHRAIN, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, The Democratic Rep of Congo, Uganda, The Central African Republic, Mali, Chad, Colombia, Mexico...just some of the countries being devastated by the world's rampant arms trade supplying every weapon imaginable to tyrants, despots, drug cartels and terrorist. The UN is meeting next week on this issue and Amnesty International has an ongoing campaign calling on the international community to take action to regulate and enforce restrictions on the arms trade. They face formidable opposition, here in the U.S. war is big business and the military-industrial complex often dictates our foreign and military policies, Check out the information below and sign Amnesty's petition to Pres Obama to be part of the solution, not part of the problem...
We need millions to sign the petition for a strong Arms Trade Treaty
World leaders are meeting in July to draw up the first ever
international Arms Trade Treaty. This treaty could save countless lives
and help prevent human rights abuses around the world – but we have just
one shot to get it right. Sign the petition to demand a bulletproof Arms Trade Treaty!
Most governments continue to permit irresponsible trade of
weapons. Treaties regulate the global trade of many goods – even bananas
and dinosaur bones – but not guns and bullets.
EVERY loan I have made through KIVA has been paid back or is being paid back on time. Every single one, even those made to people living in countries torn by war and political instability. Every loan paid back. Here are my 23 & 24th loans, check them out and if you have $25 to spare maybe you can make a loan too. Peace....
Andon spent most of his adolescence moving to and from different countries, including Chile, Mexico, India, and multiple states in the US. He says that along the way his family was a part of every socioeconomic class, from “third world rich” to “first world poor”. His father built oyster and shrimp hatcheries all over and taught Andon about the customs of Latin America. In 2008, Andon took a journey from Appalachia to Yucatan to learn about how he can contribute to forest restoration- this is how Andon’s non-profit, New Forest Earth, came to be.
New Forest Earth works with community cooperatives in Mexico and Ecuador to bring handcrafted, sustainable goods to customers in the United States. These goods vary from recycled paper journals, jewelry made from plants in the Amazon rainforest, and USDA organic, Rainforest Alliance certified chocolate. The goal of the business is to fund reforestation and indigenous cultural development projects. The organization has a large support group, including interns from universities and even children as young as 12, all trying to raise awareness amongst their peers.
Andon hopes to expand his business across the United States, and with this loan from Accion USA, he will purchase inventory from co-ops, which will allow him to sell more products and in turn contribute to the mission of reforestation.
Kiva realizes that access to credit is a challenge for entrepreneurs everywhere. Kiva started out as a website focused on developing-world entrepreneurs. In June 2009, Kiva began experimenting with allowing entrepreneurs in the United States to raise money on its website. If this is something you support, please feel free to fund this loan. If you have questions, including how an entrepreneur in your neighborhood might get a loan, please visit our Help Center and click on "Loans in the United States."
In this Group: Horace Omba, Jeanne Bafeti, Bernice Kavundji, Bernadette Belende, Nadine Etota, Hortance Mukoko, Pilchérie Mayitidi, Marie Kena, Marc Toko, Vicky Tshiela, Bibiche Muyenga, Wekola Becha, Jacky Kongodima, Willy Mayamba, Elia Blondel, Stéphanie Limaya, Sylvie Mbala, Esther Mansanga, Jason Mavidi, Hélène Mobeli, Claudine Lokaso, Lucie Assani
A portion of Efficacité Plus Group's $3,500 loan helps the borrower described to purchase dozens of prepaid cards to resell in order to increase his working capital.
Horace is the leader of a Community bank named “Efficacité Plus”, which is composed of 22 micro-entrepreneurs united in solidarity to receive loans from Kiva through IMF HOPE RDC, with the goal of developing their businesses.
Horace, 35 and married, sells prepaid cards. He has been in business since 1997. With hard work and good management, he has been able to stabilize his business by delivering prepaid cards in order to increase his working capital. He makes a profit of about $20 daily. Horace’s ambition is to become a prepaid cards provider in his area. As he wants to develop his business, he has decided to join one of Hope’s groups. He is planning with the next loan to purchase dozens of prepaid cards and resell them at a profit. Horace has five children whose ages vary between 9 months and 9 years old. Two of them attend school.
Additional information about this loan
This is a Group Loan
In a group loan, each member of the group receives an individual loan, but is part of a group of individuals. The group is there to provide support to the members and provides a system of peer pressure in repayments of loans. However, groups may or may not be formally bound by a group guarantee. In cases where there is a group guarantee, the members of the group are responsible for paying back the loans of their fellow group member if someone is delinquent or defaults. Learn More
AN update on one of the groups I helped finance through KIVA, check them out by clicking the header.... M.A.J GO/01512 credit Zamiri group
This is an update on your loan to Zamiri Group in The Democratic Republic of the Congo.
La cliente Ebulu Achumire remercie l'IMF Hekima, pour le crédit qu'elle a reçu dernièrement d'un montant de 400$. Ce crédit lui a servi de renforcer son chiffre d'affaire et payer les frais scolaires de ses enfants sans difficultés et améliorer la maison. Il sied de signaler que ce crédit fut destiné dans le business de vente des poissons. Ce crédit a été plus rentable et profitable pour son entreprise et pour sa famille. Que Dieu bénisse Hekima et ses partenaires. Translated using google translator TheclientEbuluAchumireHekimathankthe MFIforthecreditithasrecently receiveda$ 400.Thiscredithasservedto strengthenits salesandpayschool feesforher childrenwithoutdifficultiesandimprovethe house.It shouldbe notedthatthiscreditwasintendedin the businessofsellingfish.Thiscreditwasmore cost effective andprofitablefor his companyand hisfamily.May GodblessHekimaand its partners.
I encourage everyone to watch the video 'Pray The Devil Back To Hell', the moving and inspiring story of the women of Liberia, wealthy, middle class and poor, Christian and Muslim, who put their lives on the line in their campaign to bring peace to their country. Their story is amazing, and it should be required viewing for all members of the U.N. Security Council on a quarterly basis, to remind them of the horrors of war, especially for children and women, and to move them to include women in all conflict resolution negotiations. If you have never seen this video do yourself a favor and watch it soon, you will be amazed. As far as Afghanistan is concerned, we might as well leave now as there is no difference between the Taliban coming back to power and the present government, both are corrupt, hypocritical, and not worth one more drop of American and NATO blood. Moderate free thinking men along with the majority of Afghan women are going to have to accept the responsibility for the real liberation of and bringing peace to Afghanistan. This from AlterNet....
Looking for a way out of Afghanistan? Maybe it’s time to try something entirely new and totally different: Get women to the negotiation table.
Looking for a way out of Afghanistan? Maybe it’s time to try something entirely new and totally different. So how about putting into action, for the first time in recorded history, the most enlightened edict ever passed by the United Nations Security Council: Resolution 1325?
Passed on October 31, 2000, more than a decade ago, that “landmark” resolution was hailed worldwide as a great “victory” for women and international peace and security. In a nutshell, SCR 1325 calls for women to participate equally and fully at decision-making levels in all processes of conflict resolution, peacemaking, and reconstruction. Without the active participation of women in peacemaking every step of the way, the Security Council concluded, no just and durable peace could be achieved anywhere.
“Durable” was the key word. Keep it in mind.
Most hot wars of recent memory, little and big, have been resolved or nudged into remission through what is called a power-sharing agreement. The big men from most or all of the warring parties -- and war is basically a guy thing, in case you hadn’t noticed -- shoulder in to the negotiating table and carve up a country’s or region’s military, political, and financial pie. Then they proclaim the resulting deal “peace.”
But as I learned firsthand as an aid worker in one so-called post-conflict country after another, when the men in power stop shooting at each other, they often escalate the war against civilians -- especially women and girls. It seems to be hard for men to switch off violence, once they’ve gotten the hang of it. From Liberia to Myanmar, rape, torture, mutilation, and murder continue unabated or even increase in frequency. In other words, from the standpoint of civilians, war is often not over when it’s “over,” and the “peace” is no real peace at all. Think of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the notorious “rape capital of the world,” where thousands upon thousands of women are gang-raped again and again although the country has officially been at “peace” since 2003.
In addition, power-sharing agreements among combatants tend to fray, and half of them unravel into open warfare again within a few years. Consider Liberia throughout the 1990s, Angola in 1992 and 1998, Cambodia in 1997, and Iraq in 2006-2007. At this moment, we are witnessing the breakdown of one power-sharing agreement in the Ivory Coast, and certainly the femicidal consequences of another, made in 2001, in Afghanistan.
It is this repeated recourse to war and the unrelenting abuse and neglect of civilians during fleeting episodes of “peace” that prompted the Security Council to seek the key to more durable solutions. They recognized that men at the negotiating table still jockey for power and wealth -- notably control of a country’s natural resources -- while women included at any level of negotiations commonly advocate for interests that coincide perfectly with those of civil society. Women are concerned about their children and consequently about shelter, clean water, sanitation, jobs, health care, education, and the like -- all those things that make life livable for peaceable men, women, and children anywhere.
The conclusion is self-evident. Bring women to the table in decision-making roles in equal numbers with male participants and the nature of peace negotiations changes altogether. And so does the result. Or at least that’s what the Security Council expects. We can’t be sure because in more than a decade since SCR 1325 was enacted, it has never been put to the test.
At the time, at the exhilarating dawn of a new millennium, the whole world applauded SCR 1325 as a great achievement of the United Nations, pointing the pathway to world peace. Later, when men in war-torn countries negotiated peace, often with the guidance of the U.N., they forgot all about it. Their excuse was that they had to act fast, speed being more important than justice or durability or women. At critical times like that, don’t you know, women just get in the way. Peace? Not a Chance
My special concern is Afghanistan, and I’m impatient. I’d like a speedy conclusion, too. It’s been nine years since I started doing aid work there, and in that time several of the young Afghan women who were my colleagues and became my friends have died of illnesses they would have survived in better times under the auspices of a government that cared about the welfare of its citizens. Even its women citizens.
Yet now, whenever I present my modest proposal for the implementation of SCR 1325 to American big men -- thinkers, movers, and shakers -- who lay claim to expertise on Afghanistan, most of them strongly object. They know the theory, they say, but practice is something else again, and they are precluded from throwing their weight behind SCR 1325 by delicate considerations of “cultural relativism.” Afghanistan, they remind me, is a “traditional” culture that regards women as less than human. As Westerners, they say, we must be particularly careful to respect that view.
Yet the eagerness of Western men to defer to this “tradition” seems excessive, and their tenderness for the sentiments of bearded men who couldn’t clear airport security in Iowa City strikes me as deliberately obtuse, especially since very few of the Afghan men who actually governed Afghanistan between 1919 and 1989 would have shared their sentiments. Afghan culture is -- and is not -- traditional. Modern ideas, including the idea of equality between the sexes, have been at the heart of internal Afghan cultural struggles for at least a century. In the 1920s, King Amanullah founded the first high school for girls and the first family court to adjudicate women’s complaints about their husbands; he proclaimed the equality of men and women, banned polygamy, cast away the burqa, and banished ultra-conservative Islamist mullahs as “bad and evil persons” who spread propaganda foreign to the moderate Sufi ideals of Afghanistan. His modern ideas cost him his crown, but Afghans still remember Amanullah and his modern, unveiled Queen Suraya for their brave endeavor to drag the country into the modern world.
Thousands of Afghan citizens have shared King Amanullah’s modern views, expressed later by successive leaders, kings and communists alike. But at least since 1979, when the United States and Saudi Arabia joined Pakistan in promoting the ideology and military skill of Islamist extremists who sought to return the country to the seventh-century world of the prophet, Afghanistan’s liberal modernists have taken flight for North America, Europe, and Australia.
Last summer in Afghanistan I talked with many progressive men and women who were running for parliament, hoping to push back against the inordinate power of the Afghan executive in the person of President Hamid Karzai. To them, he seems increasingly eager to do deals with the most extreme Islamists in opposition to all their progressive dreams for their country.
Yet in August, when President Karzai flagrantly stole the presidential election, President Obama telephoned to congratulate him and the U.S. officially pronounced the fraudulent election results “good enough.” We might ask: In this contest between entrenched Islamist extremists and progressives who favor equality and democracy, why is the United States on the wrong side? Why are we on the side of a mistaken notion of Afghan “tradition”? Our Big Man in Kabul
In 2001, the U.S. and by extension the entire international community cast their lot with Hamid Karzai. We put him in power after one of those power-sharing conferences in Bonn, Germany, to which, by the way, only two Afghan women were invited. We paid hundreds of millions of dollars to stage two presidential elections, in 2004 and 2009, and looked the other way while Karzai’s men stuffed the ballot boxes. Now, it seems, we’re stuck with him and his misogynist “traditions,” even though a growing number of Afghanistan watchers identify the Karzai government as the single greatest problem the U.S. faces in its never-ending war.
We could have seen this coming if we had kept an eye on how President Karzai treats women. George W. Bush famously claimed to have “liberated” the women of Afghanistan, but he missed one: Hamid Karzai’s wife. Although she is a gynecologist with desperately needed skills, she is kept shut up at home. To this day, the president’s wife remains the most prominent woman in Afghanistan still living under house rules established by the Taliban. That little detail, by the way, should remind you of why you ought to care what happens to women: they are the canaries in the Afghan political coal mine.
And what has President Karzai done for the rest of the women of Afghanistan? Not a thing.
That’s the conclusion of a recent report issued by the Human Rights Research and Advocacy Consortium (HRRAC), an association of prominent aid and independent research groups in Afghanistan, including such highly respected non-governmental organizations as Oxfam, CARE, and Save the Children. The Afghan researchers who did the study conducted extensive interviews with prominent male religious scholars, male political leaders, and female leaders locally, provincially, and nationally.
The report notes that President Karzai has supported increasingly repressive laws against women, most notoriously the “Taliban-style” Shia Personal Status Law, enacted in 2009, which not only legitimizes marital rape but “prevents women from stepping out of their homes” without their husband’s consent, in effect depriving them of the right to make any decisions about their own lives. The report points out that this law denies women even the basic freedoms guaranteed to all citizens in the Afghan Constitution, which was passed in 2004 as part of a flurry of democratic reforms marking the start of Karzai’s first term as elected president. The democratizing spasm passed and President Karzai, sworn to defend that Constitution, failed to do the job.
In fact, Karzai’s record on human rights, as the HRRAC report documents, is chiefly remarkable for what he has not done. He holds extraordinary power to make political appointments -- another indicator of the peculiar nature of this Afghan “democracy” our troops are fighting for -- and he has now had almost 10 years in office, ample time to lead even the most reluctant traditional society toward more equitable social arrangements. Yet today, but one cabinet ministry is held by a woman, the Ministry for Women’s Affairs, which incidentally is the sole government ministry that possesses only advisory powers. Karzai has appointed just one female provincial governor, and 33 men. (Is it by chance that Bamyan -- the province run by that woman -- is generally viewed as the most peaceful in the country?) To head city governments nationwide, he has named only one female mayor. And to the Supreme Court High Council he has appointed no woman at all.
Karzai’s claim that he can’t find qualified women is a flimsy -- and traditional -- excuse. Many of his highest-ranking appointees to government offices are notorious war criminals, men considered by the great majority of Afghan citizens to have disqualified themselves from public office. The failure of many of his male appointees to govern honestly and justly, or even to show up for work at all, is a rising complaint of NATO commanders who find upon delivery of “government in a box” that the box is pretty much empty.
If fully qualified women are in short supply, having been confined and deprived for years thanks to armed combat and the Taliban government, isn’t that all the more reason for a president sworn to uphold equality to act quickly to insure broad opportunities for education, training, jobs, and the like? The HRRAC report sensibly recommends “broad sociopolitical reform” to provide “education and economic opportunities for real women’s leadership.” Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai, former minister of finance, former president of Kabul University, and presidential contender, spoke in favor of such a “sensible and regular process.” As he noted, however, “Our government is not a sensible government.”
Flimsy, too, is the argument that Afghanistan’s cultural traditions eliminate women from public service. Uzra Jafari, the mayor of Daikundi, reports that the city’s inhabitants did not believe a woman could be a mayor, but they soon “accepted that a woman can serve them better than a man.” “Social obstacles can be overcome,” she says, “but the main problem is the political obstacles. We have problems at the highest levels.” The problem, in other words, is President Karzai, the only person in Afghanistan who has the power to install women in political offices and yet refuses to do so. In short, the president is far more “traditional” than most of the people.
Without the support of male leadership, women leaders (and their families) become easy targets for harassment, threats, intimidation, and assassination. When such threats come from the ultra-Islamist men who dominate the Afghan parliament, they prevent women parliamentarians from uniting in support of women and, in most cases, from speaking out as individuals for women’s rights. Death threats have a remarkable silencing effect, disrupting the processes of governance, yet President Karzai has not once taken a stand against the terrorist tactics of his cronies. The Brotherhood of Men
Let’s acknowledge that there are limits to what the West can and cannot do in the very different and more traditional culture of Afghanistan. Judging by what we have already done, it seems to be perfectly all right for the West -- aka the U.S. -- to rain bombs upon this agrarian country, with its long tradition of moderate Sufism, and impose an ultraconservative Islamist government and free market capitalism (even at the expense of indigenous agricultural markets) through the ministrations of thousands of highly paid private American “technical assistants.” But it is apparently not okay for any of those multitudinous, extravagantly paid American political and economic consultants to tweak the silken sleeve of President Karzai’s chapan and say, “Hamid, my man, you’ve gotta get some more women in here.” That would be disrespectful of Afghan traditions.
I don’t buy it. What we’re up against is not just the intractable misogyny of President Karzai and other powerful mullahs and mujahideen, but the misogyny of power brokers in Washington as well.
Take, for example, the second most popular objection I hear from American male experts on Afghanistan when I raise my modest proposal. They call this one “pragmatic” or “realistic.” Women can’t come to the negotiating table, they say, because the Taliban would never sit down with them. In fact, Taliban, “ex-Taliban,” and Taliban sympathizers sit down with women every day in the Afghan Parliament, as they have in occasional loya jirgas (deliberating assemblies) since 2001. Clearly, any Taliban who refuse altogether to talk with women disqualify themselves as peace negotiators and should have no place at the table. But what’s stunning about the view of the American male experts is that it comes down on the other side, ceding to the most extreme Taliban misogynists the right to exclude from peace deliberations half the population of the country. (Tell that to our women soldiers putting their lives on the line.)
Yet these days every so-called Afghanistan expert in Washington has a plan for the future of the country. Some seem relatively reasonable while others are certifiably delusional, but what almost all of these documents have in common is the absence of the word “women.” (There are a few tiny but notable exceptions.)
In the Loony Tunes category is former diplomat and National Security Council Deputy Robert D. Blackwill’s “Plan B in Afghanistan” appearing in Foreign Affairs, which calls for the U.S. military to flee the south, thus creating a “de facto partition” of Afghanistan and incidentally abandoning -- you guessed it -- “the women of those areas,” as well as anyone else in the south who wants “to resist the Taliban.” This scenario may call to mind images of helicopters departing the American embassy in Saigon in 1975, but Blackwill clings to his “strategy,” calling the grim fate of those left behind “a tragic consequence of local realities that are impossible for outsiders to change.”
In the relatively reasonable category is the plan of the Afghanistan Study Group: “A New Way Forward: Rethinking U.S. Strategy in Afghanistan.” Its first recommendation says, “The U.S. should fast-track a peace process designed to decentralize power within Afghanistan and encourage a power-sharing balance among the principal parties.” Whoops! No mention of women there. And power sharing? We know where that’s headed. Afghanistan, the undisputed small arms capital of the world, might easily spontaneously combust into civil war.
But what becomes of women? Even Matthew Hoh, who resigned his position in 2009 as a political officer in the foreign service to protest U.S. policy in Afghanistan, and now heads the Afghanistan Study Group, can’t seem to imagine bringing women to the negotiating table. (He says he’s “working on it.”) Instead, the Study Group decides for women that “this strategy will best serve [their] interests.” It declares that “the worst thing for women is for Afghanistan to remain paralyzed in a civil war in which there evolves no organically rooted support for their social advancement.” Well, no. Actually, the worst thing for women is to have a bunch of men -- and not even Afghan men at that -- decide one more time what’s best for women.
I wonder if it’s significant that the Afghan Study Group, much like the Bonn Conference that established the Karzai government in the first place, is essentially a guy club. I count three women among 49 men and the odd “center” or “council” (also undoubtedly consisting mostly of men). When I asked Matthew Hoh why there are so few women in the Study Group, he couldn’t help laughing. He said, “This is Washington. You go to any important meeting in Washington, it’s men.”
Maybe the heady atmosphere engendered by all those gatherings of suits in close quarters was what inspired Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to abandon all discretion recently and declare that the promise of equal protection in the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution does not extend to protecting women against sex discrimination. If states enact laws discriminating against women, he opined, such laws would not be unconstitutional. (You can be sure some legislators have gotten right to work on it.)
That opinion puts Justice Scalia cozily in bed with former Chief Justice Shinwari, President Karzai’s first appointee to head the Supreme Court of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, who interpreted Article 22 of the Afghan Constitution, which calls for men and women to have equal rights and responsibilities before the law, to mean that men have rights and women have responsibilities to their husbands. (Could this mean that the United States is a traditional culture, too?)
Women leaders in Afghanistan complain that their government does not see them as “human,” but merely uses them as tokens or symbols, presumably to appease those international donors who still rattle on about human rights. George W. Bush used Afghan women that way. Obama doesn’t mention them. Here in the U.S. you take your choice between cynical exploitation, utter neglect, and outright discrimination.
In Afghanistan, Karzai names a High Peace Council to negotiate with the Taliban. Sixty men. The usual suspects: warlords, Wahhabis, mujahideen, long-bearded and long in the tooth, but fighting for power to the bitter end. Thomas Ruttig of the Afghan Analysts Network reports that among them are 53 men linked to armed factions in the civil wars of the 1980s and 1990s including 13 linked to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e Islami, currently allied with the Taliban. An additional 12 members of the High Peace Council held positions in the Taliban’s Emirate government between 1996 and 2001.
Under some international pressure, Karzai belatedly added 10 women, the only members of the High Peace Council with no ties to armed militias past or present; they represent the interests of civil society, which is to say the people who might actually like to live in peace for a change and do their utmost to sustain it. The U.S. signed off on this lopsided Council. So did Hillary Clinton, a woman who, as Secretary of State, has solemnly promised again and again never to abandon the women of Afghanistan, though she never remembers to invite them to a conference where international and Afghan men decide the future of their country.
Okay, so my modest proposal doesn’t stand a chance. The deck is stacked against the participation of women, both there and here. Even I don’t expect men in power to take seriously the serious proposition that women must be equally and fully involved in peacemaking or you don’t get durable peace. Too many men, both Afghan and American, are doing very nicely thank you with the present traditional arrangements of our cultures. So, searching blindly for some eventual exit and burdened by their misbegotten notions of "peace," U.S. and NATO officials busy themselves repeatedly transporting to Kabul, at vast expense, a single high-ranking Taliban mullah to negotiate secret peace and power-sharing deals with President Karzai. American officials tout these man-to-man negotiations as evidence that U.S. strategy is finally working, until the “mullah” turns out to be an imposter playing a profitable little joke on the powers that be. Afghan women, who already suffer the effects of rising Taliban power, are not laughing.
Consider this. We’re not just talking about women’s rights here. Women’s rights are human rights. Women exercising their human rights are simply women engaging in those things that men the world over take for granted: going to school, going to work, walking around. But in Afghanistan today -- here’s where tradition comes in again -- almost every woman and girl exercising her rights does so with the support of the man or men who let her out of the house: father, husband, brothers, uncles, sons. Exclude women from their rightful equal decision-making part in the peacemaking process and you also betray the men who stand behind them, men who are by self-definition committed to the dream of a more egalitarian and democratic future for their country.
The sad news from Afghanistan is that a great many progressives have already figured out their own exit strategy. Like generations of Afghans before them, they will become part of one of the world’s largest diasporas from a single country. Ironically, I’ll bet many of those progressive Afghan men will bring their families to the United States, where women appear to be free and it’s comforting to imagine that misogyny is dead.
[Note on further reading: The HRRAC report on “Women and Political Leadership” can be found online in .pdf format by clicking here.]
Ann Jones is the author most recently of War Is Not Over When It’s Over: Women Speak Out from the Ruins of War(Metropolitan 2010) on the way war affects women from Africa to the Middle East and Asia. She wrote about the struggles of Afghan women in Kabul in Winter (Metropolitan 2006). She is currently a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. To listen to Timothy MacBain's latest TomCast audio interview in which Jones discusses why wars never end for women and girls, click here or, to download it to your iPod, here.
TODAY IS INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS DAY and this post from HuffPost offers information on some of the worst violators. Click the header to go to the site to see the pictures, and look for links on this blog to check out AI / Amnesty International, HRF / Human Rights First, ACLU, and Doctors Without Borders, mabe join or send them a donation.
In lieu of the ongoing controversy surrounding jailed Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, China has the dubious distinction of joining the world's top 10 human rights offenders, according to a new report.
Released to coincide with International Human Rights Day on Dec. 10, the Human Rights Risk Atlas 2011 evaluated 196 countries on their performance across 30 different categories, which included human security, labor standards, as well as civil and political freedoms. Prepared by the British global advisory firm Maplecroft, the new report shows there are now 92 nations listed as being in the "extreme" and "high risk" categories, up from 83 countries last year.
The Democratic Republic of Congo was ranked as the world's riskiest nation, with China falling two spots from last year to come in at #10. On the opposite end of the scale, the U.S. was ranked as having a "medium risk" at #131, while both the United Kingom (#154) and Germany (#181) are considered to have "low risk."
Human rights deteriorating in fastest growing economies of Pakistan, China, Russia, Colombia, Bangladesh, Nigeria and India
10/12/2010
Maplecroft invites interested organisations to a WebEx presentation on Thursday 16 December 2010, 3pm GMT about the Human Rights Risk Atlas 2011 focusing on key findings and analysis. For WebEx details contact info@maplecroft.com
The human rights situation is worsening worldwide and especially in the important emerging economies of Pakistan, China, Russia, Colombia, Bangladesh, Nigeria, India, Philippines and Mexico. These are the findings of the Human Rights Risk Atlas 2011 that calculates and maps the risk of complicity in human rights abuses for companies operating worldwide.
According to Maplecroft, who publish the Atlas for the fifth successive year, there are now 92 countries in the ‘extreme’ and ‘high risk’ categories as opposed to 83 last year, a rise of nearly 10%. It is the emerging economies which cause most concern, as many multinational companies and investors now have considerable interests centred there and strong economic growth is not being translated into improving human rights, posing a range of legal, reputational, operational and strategic challenges for business.
The Human Rights Risk Atlas 2011, released for International Human Rights Day on 10 December, evaluates 196 countries on their performance across 30 human rights categories, which cover human security, labour standards and protections, civil and political rights and access to remedy.
Most significantly for business, given it plays a major role in supply chains, China has fallen two places in the ranking from last year to 10th. China joins DR Congo (1), Somalia (2), Pakistan (3), Sudan (4), Myanmar (5), Chad (6), Afghanistan (7), Zimbabwe (8), and North Korea (9) as the countries with the worst human rights records. Russia (14), Colombia (15), Bangladesh (16), Nigeria (17) India (21), Philippines (25) and Mexico (26) have also seen their scores worsen and are featured in the ‘extreme risk’ category.
China’s poor ranking in the overall Human Rights Risk Index (HRRI) reflects the dire situation found across several core human rights areas, where the country is ranked worst or joint bottom of the league. These include violation categories such as freedom of speech, the press and religion; minority rights; judicial independence; and arbitrary arrest and detention. The country also ranked bottom for trafficking and forced labour violations and scored 0.02 out of a possible 10 for child labour.
Labour rights violations, especially in the manufacturing and agricultural sectors, are commonplace in China due to weak and inconsistent enforcement of labour laws, although with the introduction of new Labour Contract Law in 2008, the situation is slowly set to change as Chinese work forces demand improved pay and conditions.
The Chinese government reportedly monitors and harasses labour rights organisations and political opponents, lawyers are disbarred for taking on politically sensitive cases and victims of human rights abuses are obstructed in seeking redress. China’s performance is compounded by the actions of state security forces acting with impunity, which are reported to take part in extrajudicial killings, torture and arbitrary arrests.
“The worsening of the human rights landscape in fast growing emerging markets is a worry for business,” said Maplecroft CEO, Professor Alyson Warhurst, also a member of the UN Global Compact’s Human Rights Working Group. “The UN’s Special Representative has proposed that companies are responsible for respecting human rights that are impacted by their business activities. They will increasingly be required to exercise due diligence including undertaking human rights impact assessment and human rights monitoring. The Human Rights Risk Atlas supports such monitoring.”
India, which is important to the ICT, manufacturing and agriculture sectors, performs particularly badly in the area of labour rights protections. It is ranked joint first for child labour, forced labour and discrimination and 7th for trafficking, which includes the use of girls in bonded labour and sexual exploitation. Estimates of the number of child labourers varied widely. The government's 2004 national survey estimated the number of working children from aged 5-14 at 16.4 million. NGOs, however, claimed the number of child labourers was closer to 55 million.
Of the G7 nations, which are amongst the largest consumers of goods from the emerging economies, Italy (129), USA (131) and Japan (145) are rated medium risk, whilst France (152), United Kingdom (154), Canada (172) and Germany (181) rated low risk.
Japan scores high risk in minority rights, trafficking and arbitrary arrest and detention. For example, trafficking is a significant problem and during the 2009 period the Japanese government demonstrated diminished anti-trafficking law enforcement efforts.
The Human Rights Risk Atlas 2011 includes interactive maps and indices for 30 human rights categories and scorecards for 196 countries. It also features sub-national mapping of human rights violations and human security incidents down to site-specific levels worldwide. It is supported by sector specific country human rights risk reports.
Register for trial access to see examples of Maplecroft's indices, interactive maps, scorecards, briefings and in-depth reports.
This bloody slaughter continues, a barbaric act of bygone days that should be stopped but won't be as long as the residents of Taiji, Japan choose continue to live in ignorance. The Japanese nation should be ashamed.
Taiji Update: 100 Dolphins on Death Row
This morning, the Japanese dolphin serial killers drove about 100 dolphins into the Cove.
The gutting barge is in place, and they are getting ready to kill the entire pod.
We have fifteen Cove Guardians in place, but the Japanese Coast Guard has brought in a 95 foot armed patrol boat, and dozens of police are patrolling the area on shore.
We must continue to register our concerns with the Japanese consulates and embassies around the world. They must never think that we will forget the cruelty and the killings. Taiji must be seen as Japan’s most shameful town, a stain upon the honor of all that is Japanese. Please watch for more detailed updates on the Cove Guardians Daily Reports page
THE PRESIDENT should consider what life would be like for his daughters if they lived in any of these countries, as girls, as women, as child soldiers. Maybe if he would have put that kind of human face on this issue he would take a strong stand on the human rights aspect instead of standing up for the greed of the corporations with profit interest in these countries......Hey Michele Obama, as a mother, do you approve of child soldiers??????
Last week, Foreign Policy's Josh Rogin broke the story that the Obama White House had decided to quietly waive sanctions against four countries—Chad, Yemen, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)—that use child soldiers. Through the International Military Education and Training (IMET) fund, the United States supports a number of military training and counter terrorism programs in each of these countries. If the Obama adminstration had adhered to 2008's Child Soldiers Prevention Act—a law the president himself co-sponsored when he served in the Senate—that funding should have been yanked. Instead, the administration effectively gave the four offending countries a pass, with the State Department arguing that withdrawing the assistance would jeopardize America's ability to "positively influence the negative behavoir patterns currently exhibited."
Naturally, the decision to waive sanctions angered human rights activists and others who believed the adminstration was caving on a key issue. On Friday the White House hosted a conference call to smooth things over with Hill staffers and represenatives of NGOs, including Human Rights Watch, Oxfam, and World Vision. On the White House end of the line was Samantha Power, the National Security Council's senior director for multilateral affairs and human rights. "Given the way you all heard about the implementation of the statute," she said on the call, "I can understand why some of the reactions that you had were prevalent."
Power covered the wars in the Balkans in the mid-'90s before attending Harvard Law School. She's also a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and authored the Pulitzer-prize winning A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, a sweeping history of the persisting causes of genocide. In it, Power argues that countries like the United States must consider how their interests in other parts of the world profoundly shape those countries' human rights equations.
Power's book doesn’t let anyone off the hook, so it's more than a little jarring to hear that Power was forced to defend the White House's non-announcement of the controversial waiver. Participants on the call argued that the four countries have had plenty of time to adapt to the Child Soldier Prevention Act's rules on child soldiers, and that military aid hasn't had any palpable impact on reforming their practices so far. Even worse, the United States loses leverage over those four countries by forgoing sanctions. Power said that the Obama administration still plans to fight the use of child soldiers, and warn Chad, Yemen, Sudan, and the DRC that they wont get off so easy next time.
From Rogin:
Power repeatedly attempted to argue that the attention over the president's decision to waive sanctions was exactly the kind of public pressure needed to spur violator governments to change. However, her argument was complicated by the fact that the administration failed to tell anyone about the decision and announced it with no rollout or explanation whatsoever.
Power's knack for spin isn't why she was brought onto the Obama campaign as an advisor back in 2008 and later given a job on the NSC. Presumably it was her staunch commitment to human rights, which was in line with Obama's own campaign pledges on the subject. Working as a top aide to the president, though, she's required to sell his policies. But you have to wonder if she's actually on board with this one.
MY latest Kiva loan.....I do not post these here to make myself look good, but in the hope others will be interested and join Kiva...... and prayer of the day from SOJO
We struggle this day to understand how in a world of plenty there are some who have so much why others have so little. Help us, O God, to ensure that everyone in our world has enough. Help us to learn ways to lift others up, to provide dignity and respect to those for whom that is in short supply. Forgive those to whom much has been given, and yet far too little is shared. Help us, O God, to live as you have called us to live. Amen. Kiva - Zamiri Group from The Democratic Republic of the Congo has a loan fundraising on Kiva
Mauwa Mushengezi is the president of the Zamiri Group. She is 38 years old, has eight children, and her husband is a security guard. Her eldest son is 17 years old, the youngest is three, and all but the youngest are in school. She has been running her business for 17 years. She began with about $100 that she received from her husband. She sells sugar, Omo soap, rice, etc. She displays her merchandise in the central market of Virunga. This loan will allow her to increase her turnover by purchasing ten bags of rice, five bags of Omo soap, etc. The biggest challenge is that she sells in the national currency (Congolese francs). Because this Congolese currency is not stable, she is subjected to more and more inflation, which leads to a loss in exchange with foreign currency (dollars). She is like many Congolese who fear the Congolese franc and instead keep their savings in dollars. She would like to buy a small plot of land on which to build for her children. As a client, Mauwa Mushengezi thanks Hekima for its actions to help the poor citizens who are excluded from traditional banks. One should note that the Zamiri Group has 15 members.
About Group Loans
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Translated from French by Carolyn McMahon, Kiva Volunteer
Mauwa Mushengezi est présidente groupe Zamiri, âgée de 38 ans, mariée, mère de 8 enfants, son mari est gardien. Son fils ainé a 17 ans et le cadet a 3 ans et tous étudient, sauf le cadet. Il y a 17 ans qu’elle exerce le petit commerce général. Elle a commence avec ses fonds propre reçu de son mari environ 100$. Elle vend de sucre, Omo, riz, etc. Elle expose ses marchandises dans le marché central de Virunga. Ce crédit va lui permettre d’augmenter son chiffre d’affaire en achetant 10 sacs de Riz, 5 sacs d’Omo, etc. Le grand obstacle est qu’elle vend en monnaie nationale (franc congolais). Cependant cette monnaie congolaise n’est pas stable, elle subit de plus à plus l’inflation, ce qui entraine de perte de change avec la devise (les dollars), comme tous les congolais craignent le franc congolais, pour garder leurs économies en dollars. Elle souhaite acheter une parcelle pour ses enfants et y construire. La cliente Mauwa Mushengezi remercie Hekima pour ses actions en faveur de pauvres citoyens exclus de banque classique. Il sied de signaler que ce groupe Zamiri est composé de 15 membres.
Afghan culture is -- and is not -- traditional. Modern ideas, including the idea of equality between the sexes, have been at the heart of internal Afghan cultural struggles for at least a century. In the 1920s, King Amanullah founded the first high school for girls and the first family court to adjudicate women’s complaints about their husbands; he proclaimed the equality of men and women, banned polygamy, cast away the burqa, and banished ultra-conservative Islamist mullahs as “bad and evil persons” who spread propaganda foreign to the moderate Sufi ideals of Afghanistan. His modern ideas cost him his crown, but Afghans still remember Amanullah and his modern, unveiled Queen Suraya for their brave endeavor to drag the country into the modern world.
Maplecroft invites interested organisations to a WebEx presentation on Thursday 16 December 2010, 3pm GMT about the Human Rights Risk Atlas 2011 focusing on key findings and analysis. For WebEx details contact info@maplecroft.comThe human rights situation is worsening worldwide and especially in the important emerging economies of Pakistan, China, Russia, Colombia, Bangladesh, Nigeria, India, Philippines and Mexico. These are the findings of the Human Rights Risk Atlas 2011 that calculates and maps the risk of complicity in human rights abuses for companies operating worldwide.
