‘Psychic numbing‘ is a relatively new term, assigned to the phenomenon which shows people tend to feel less urgent compassion, and tend to give less, when the suffering in question is shown to be more systemic and more pervasive, or affecting larger numbers of people. Some psychologists believe it is linked to our intuitive sense that if one suffers alone, the suffering is worse, but if one is accompanied, there might be some security in numbers, not just emotionally, but practically.

The individual does not actually suffer less, but somehow, human beings —across cultures, ages groups and regions— appear to have an almost inborn tendency to convince themselves that the one who suffers with others is somehow safer. This is, of course, rarely true. While yes, a young boy might survive because his older sister goes without food, two young children in a population beset with pervasive, persistent scarcity or political disorder, may be at significantly heightened risk of violence, or even enslavement.

Others suggest the phenomenon of psychic numbing is more to do with some sort of instinctual calculation of the worth of one’s efforts. If one seeks to help one lone child, one’s actions seem able; if one seeks to send a small amount to help millions, one’s actions may seem less able, less capable of ‘making a difference’.

There is a theory that this might be related to a long “prehistoric” period —far longer than the period which we refer to as “recorded history”— in which smaller tribal bands were the organizing principle of human society. We can understand safety in numbers, but we can’t conceive of how sending a few dollars, or writing a letter, will in any way contribute to easing the suffering of millions of people. Biologically, this just doesn’t compute in a cerebral infrastructure organized around tribal society.

Yet there are alternatives: there is the theory of an informational tipping point. The lone photo, with no information and no statistics, will spark great compassion. Adding statistics or removing the photo, or naming numbers that run into the millions, will lessen the likelihood of compassion across a large population. But when enough information is given so that the reader/viewer can comprehend in intellectually resilient terms the scale of a tragic crisis, the real energy of compassion is again motivated, perhaps more effectively than by any other means.

Social networking has allowed people to share information and to make donations with an ease of effort and on a scale of cooperative endeavor never before possible. This may be helping to ease the transition away from generalized psychic numbing and toward generalized charitable predisposition, as social networking sites help to shrink the size of the planet to the biologically comprehensible “village” scale, familiarizing people with their counterparts across the world.

How much of a role is there for social networking in solving this problem? How much of the problem is about resistance to new information about crises of massive scale? How much is a crisis of imagination? And are there examples of how we can do or are doing better in any given case?

• Join the discussion at The Hot Spring Network’s Crisis Policy Forum

The issue of women’s equality is a question as old as human history. And even now, in the most modern of democracies, which guarantee more or less political and economic equality for women, there remain fundamental imbalances in rights, privileges and enforcement. Women are often guaranteed freedom from discrimination, but nevertheless suffer essential inequalities that do in fact alter the landscape of their choices and freedoms.

Economic rights in the developed world remain a serious issue where gender-based inequality must be addressed. In most developed democracies, women enjoy 100% equal rights in terms of property ownership, education, voting and political freedoms. But wages are still on average significantly lower for women, property tied up in marriages is often harder for women to hold onto, and in the worst cases, the modern slave traffic deals mostly in women and young girls, even in the most advanced democracies.

In the developing world, the situation is vastly more dire. Women in Africa suffer such a serious threat of death in childbirth that some fear if something is not done to provide adequate obstetric care to remote areas, population levels in poor African nations could fall dramatically, at a time when development requires an expanding workforce. The result of maternal mortality rates, barring women’s access to education, and rampant violence against women, is prolonged political instability.

In a nation like the Democratic Republic of Congo, where a multi-front civil war has plagued the nation since 1998, and as many as 14 neighboring countries were involved in combat or in supplying fighters with weapons and support, the extreme violence suffered by women is part of what keeps the war going. Rape has been used as a weapon of war, and impunity among both government and rebel forces in the eastern Kivu provinces means extreme violence begets more violence, with women constantly under threat from neighbors and invaders alike.

Maternal mortality rates in Africa are now a kind of epidemic, which actually spreads in a way similar to contagion, as resources are drained away from one village after another, and central governments dealing with unstable security situations abandon remote areas, let infrastructure collapse or even force out the charity groups that might be a region’s only means of reliable up-to-date medical care.

1,500 women are dying in childbirth every day across Africa, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). That’s roughly 1,000 women per 100,000 live births, meaning a woman has a one in 100 chance of dying in childbirth. The situation is severe enough that the US Congress has been working on legislation that could make protecting women and girls, including maternal health, a focus of all US foreign aid.

In a Guardian newspaper blog on Katine, Uganda, Sarah Bosely writes:

The other day I watched a woman die. A small crowd of nursing staff, orderlies and onlookers clustered round the bed in the treatment room where she had been taken after collapsing on the grass outside. It seemed like an intrusion to join them,but, in truth, one more made no difference. She was motionless, legs bent below her red dress and head to one side. With the horror of a westerner used to ambulance sirens, I counted the seconds ticking away while nothing was done. No drip, no oxygen mask, no injections, no resuscitation. They had seen it too often before. They knew there was nothing they could do.

As a Café Sentido colleague reported, in reference to Ms. Bosely’s testimony:

[The patient] had been perfectly healthy and active just the day before. But once she went into labor, her situation, geographically and socio-economically, left her in peril. There is no doctor in her town. There are no doctors for over 20 miles. The town of Soroti, where she might find a hospital and a doctor, also has the nearest obstetrician.

Violence against women in Darfur continues to rage out of control. As this publication reported in late July:

Attitudes about violence against women in Darfur vary widely and are a source of high controversy in Sudan. Last year, at the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women, at the UN Headquarters in New York, a panel of women from the Sudanese parliament, headed by a female Sudanese doctor linked to the Khartoum government, gave a report on the status of violence against women in the Darfur conflict zone, in which rape was virtually ignored.

Though the presentation focused on rape as a form of violence against women, the reports of “confirmed cases”, based only on the cases the authorities both accepted as legitimate complaints and had successfully prosecuted, put the annual number of rapes for each of the three designated zones in Darfur in the single digits, even as NGOs and UN agencies were estimating figures, compiled from sporadic reports of cases never prosecuted, in the tens of thousands, including documentation of a deliberate campaign involving some government-backed forces.

But the failure to prosecute rape, or even to adequately treat rape victims or investigate reports of rape in the first place, is only part of the extreme violence that puts women in danger and threatens to keep the benefits of a full life engaged with society from them.

Failure to act to prevent forcible or coercive female circumcision and a refusal to treat cases of fistula, which is easily cured if treated early, cause women to endure not only physical trauma and ongoing disability, but also to be relegated to a lower level of social relevance. Providing even one trained physician for a remote village or over-stressed refugee camp can do a lot to prevent these kind of problems from crippling women or keeping them away from the public sphere.

Justice for women victimized by corruption, war and impunity, is of primary urgency for societies whose women are so extremely disadvantaged. Whether it is the inability of women to sue to hold onto family-owned land, to fight against powerful local leaders who commit crimes against them, including rape, theft, abduction and forcible indenture, securing women’s right to access the justice system, be treated as equals and enforce their rights before the law, is essential to healing communities, speeding their economic development and stabilizing political systems.

Economic rights that cannot be overlooked, include the right to own and inherit property, the right to fair pay or equal pay for equal work, the right to hold personal bank accounts, start businesses in their own name, and to secure microfinancing for their personal or business ventures. Extending each of these economic rights to women has repeatedly been shown to have a stabilizing effect on volatile regions and nations and to aid in economic development.

Key political rights that must be addressed are both women’s suffrage —which means examining and securing the voting rights of all citizens within a given country, so that women can be adequately assured of having equal, and verifiably so, access to the voting process— and women’s right to participate in electoral politics as candidates.

In Afghanistan, the plight of Malalai Joya is instructive. As reported by Café Sentido this June:

Malalai Joya is a pioneer in Afghan politics, one of the female members of Parliament, as of 2005, and a voice for women’s and human rights generally in a nation increasingly beleaguered by corruption, mass violence and social disintegration. Joya was stripped of her seat in parliament in 2007, in extralegal proceedings, for criticizing the warlords among her colleagues.

She now lives a nightmare of constant persecution, in which she is forced to change location nearly every night to avoid falling into the hands of those who threaten to kill her for speaking out. Joya says that Afghan democracy and the “voiceless” people of her country are engaged in an invisible and desperate struggle with enemies of her nation and her people, enemies of peace, like the Taliban leaders and warlords who seek to subjugate the population.

Joya’s own story of heroic advocacy and tragic persecution mirrors the situation in which Afghans find themselves generally, struggling to emerge from a reign of terror, in which fundamentalist militia attack schoolgirls by throwing acid on them and women are stoned simply for walking alone, even if covered from head to toe, in public.

But women also need to be protected from the evils of culturally rationalized shame-based killings, in which male family members murder their own female relatives in order to defend their “honor”. There is also the problem of shame-based torture, as in the case of a Sudanese law that subjects a woman to 40 lashes —a bloody and agonizing experience— for the crime of “harassment to the public sentiments”, committed by wearing full-length pants.

Such laws demean women and foster the ancient superstition that women should be treated as “unclean” or “sinful” and thus excluded from public life. They allow thugs and murderers to justify violent assaults against defenseless women and even young girls. And even where violence is absent, such beliefs help to preclude women’s accessing educational institutions or even learning to read and write.

And yet, in one after another country, it has been demonstrated that empowering poor women, through education, political rights and economic equality before the law, fosters political stability and economic advancement for their communities and for the society at large.

Defending women and girls against the very real evils of the human trafficking —i.e. modern slavery— underworld, working to prevent and to punish violence against women, and guaranteeing girls’ access to a full education, are must-do priorities for any society where poverty, political violence and tribalism threaten stability.

• Some reporting contributed by J.E. Robertson

The UN General Assembly, which brings together every head of government in the world, to offer their country’s position on issues, their country’s demands regarding trade and conflict negotiations, their country’s hopes for a more harmonious world, this year truly grapples with issues of global consensus. Economic recovery, for many parts of the world, will require an unprecedented expansion of women’s rights and sustained attention to responsible environmental stewardship.

Climate change, or global climate destabilization, has come to the fore as the most severe and pervasive security threat of the 21st century. The G20 summit in Pittsburgh later this month will work in part as a prelude to the Copenhagen climate conference to be held in December. The goal is to achieve worldwide consensus on a comprehensive, binding strategy to reduce carbon emissions and to protect against the unwinding of climate patterns that have remained consistent throughout all of recorded human history.

Women’s rights is now being viewed by more nations and by more major international organizations as key to the economic and political stability of fragile nations. The Obama administration, under the leadership of Sec. of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, has made women’s rights a priority and has laid out goals for helping to promote women’s rights through economic development, modernization of educational systems, and democratization of the political processes in nations around the world.

A consistent theme of Sec. Clinton’s travels around Africa this summer was the need to end the out of control violence against women that plagues many African nations, and bring women into the fold of the political process and economic structures. She visited the eastern Kivu region of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where one of the world’s most desperate and protracted civil wars continues to put women in jeopardy of random attacks on a daily basis and where mass rape has been used as a weapon of war.

Her message was clear: the United States does not intend to continue directing aid to regimes that do not combat the extreme conditions of violence and repression in which millions of women find themselves, but aid will be directed toward those policies that are designed to empower and protect women. There will be efforts to persuade China, which strongly backs some of the worst offending nations, like Sudan, to demand better treatment for women.

Pres. Obama has called for a global initiative to move toward the eventual elimination of all nuclear weapons, which he admits may not occur during his lifetime. He and Russian president Dmitry Medvedev have already begun the process to establish a new comprehensive strategic arms reduction treaty (StART). Iran, under intense pressure from the international community to cease uranium enrichment, has also proposed a framework for eliminating all nuclear weapons worldwide.

The nuclear question looms large, and will consume a lot of words in open and back-room negotiations. The UN Security Council can be expected to receive new pressure from western powers to threaten sanctions against Iran if it does not halt uranium enrichment. And the recent announcement of the Obama administration’s plans to scrap Bush-era plans for stationing missiles in Poland is thought to be in part a call on Russia to support sanctions against Iran.

In a recent CNN interview, with Fareed Zakaria, Pres. Medvedev sounded tougher on the Iran question than at any time previous: he said Russia would only ever provide Iran with “defensive” weapons equipment and would neither help Iran develop long-range ICBM nor come to Iran’s defense if it were attacked. He called on the international community to come together to secure peace and prevent conflict in the middle east.

Medvedev also confirmed that he had met in secret with Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu. He said the meeting was kept secret at the Israelis request and that he had “honored the wishes of our partners”. He revealed that in that meeting Netanyahu, who has been under intense pressure from the west to tone down bellicose rhetoric, said Israel had no plans to attack Iran or destroy any of its research facilities, adding that he trusted Israel and hoped new partnerships could be created to prevent further conflict in the region.

Pres. Obama has invited PM Netanyahu and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas to meet with him to discuss the path to lasting peace, during the UN General Assembly in New York. The two have accepted, setting the stage for what might be breakthrough negotiations on concessions from both sides that could lead to a two-state solution.

As the Wall Street Journal reports:

In a break from the Bush administration, Mr. Obama pressed early in his administration for new, U.S.-brokered talks between the two sides. In another departure, Mr. Obama has ratcheted up pressure on Israel, publicly calling for a total freeze in Jewish settlement construction in the West Bank.

That issue has blocked progress in restarting talks so far. Palestinian negotiators have demanded a total freeze before agreeing to any substantive negotiations. Mr. Netanyahu has refused.

The US and NATO nations may refrain from openly pressing Russia on its interventions in the volatile Caucasus region, but the problem of Georgia and the former Soviet Republics along its borders must be dealt with. Abkhazia has declared independence with Russian diplomatic backing, and Georgia has sought to blockade Abkhazia as a protest against that declaration of independence. There are fears the blockade could lead to another bloody Russian intervention against a state that seeks to join NATO.

There is, however, an opportunity for a new era of cooperation between the Russian Federation and NATO. European leaders have proposed that with the US putting aside missile defense basing plans for Poland, the opportunity may exist to come together and create a unified missile defense system covering all of NATO and the Russian Federation.

But economic empowerment and global financial regulation may turn out to be dominant themes of the General Assembly meetings. The 2008-2009 global economic crisis has shown the vulnerability of poor nations to the unraveling of sometimes delicate international trade pacts and resource flows. The threat from intercontinental climate destabilization could result in the collapse of food supplies to half the world’s population and the migration of hundreds of millions of people, if one year’s monsoon doesn’t materialize.

The empowerment of poorer nations to be capable of competing for internationally trade resources, including food and water, is vital to preventing mass climate migration and the resulting destabilization of nation states in coming years and decades. The beginnings of these negotiations, to prevent protectionist measures and expand the internationally accessible resource base, will be taking place as world leaders meet in New York.

Rights and democracy as such will also be highlighted. The election of 12 June 2009 in Iran has stirred a global firestorm of opinion over what measures might be taken to guarantee transparency and prevent massive fraud engineered by leaders of government. More than 100 nations whose leaders will be in attendance have significant voting rights issues that must be addressed in order to legitimate their electoral processes and improve transparency.

The US will seek to lead on this question, even as dozens of its own states struggle to clarify election process and balloting laws, to ensure manipulation is not possible and guarantee the transparency of upcoming elections. New Jersey might be held up by some foreign states as an example of a state that still won’t guarantee its voters paper proof of their votes, while Venezuela may claim legitimacy on this point, a contrast that is sure to make for contentious negotiations on standards for international voting rights and ballot-counting transparency.

Human Rights Activist Estemirova Murdered in Chechnya :: Natalya Estemirova, from the Russian human rights organization, the Memorial Human Rights Center, was kidnapped today while leaving her home in Grozny, the Chechen capital, and later found dead. She reportedly shouted to bystanders “This is a kidnapping!” No one was able to intervene, as four armed men grabbed her and put her into a white automobile. [Complete text...]

Natalya Estemirova is only the most recent victim of an apparently politically motivated assassination, carried out against a journalist or human rights worker investigating atrocities committed against civilians in furtherance of corrupt uses of state power. In an article on “Journalists Around the World at Risk of Violence or Imprisonment“, we explored this May the problem facing journalists across the globe, who still face mounting and extreme dangers just by virtue of doing their jobs.

Conflict zones are especially dangerous places, and even nations with a long and successful history of defending and promoting freedom of the press, like the United States, have warned crusading journalists that stepping outside strict protocols could put them in harm’s way with no guarantee of protection (Iraq war, 2003).

The north Caucasus region, Sudan’s Darfur, eastern DR Congo, Sri Lanka, Iraq and North Korea, are just an example of the range of physical risks journalists are facing. How can governments and news agencies work together to ensure greater freedom and better guarantees of protection for journalists doing the most necessary and most perilous work?

• Join the discussion on The Hot Spring Network

The government of Sudan has abducted a United Nations media worker and is preparing to issue a verdict that might have her flogged 40 times for the “crime” of wearing pants. According to Sudan’s extreme interpretation of Islamic law, the aid worker’s two-legged pants are considered to cause “harassment to the public sentiments”. She will be brutally whipped 40 times as punishment for risking the emotional discomfort of Sudanese citizens, by wearing pants that for most people conceal a woman’s body from view.

Lubna al Hussein, a journalist and UN aid worker, has chosen to resign from her UN post, shedding her immunity from prosecution, in order to highlight the manner in which this brutal treatment is meted out to women in Sudan. The totalitarian regime of Omar al-Bashir, reinforced by a campaign of terror and mass killing in various parts of the country, uses fundamentalist Islamic dictates to subject women to a position of permanent degradation and limited rights. Hussein’s case is just one of many.

She was detained at a cafe in Khartoum, along with 12 other women, 10 of whom were flogged for indecency, inside a police station, just two days later. Hussein’s position at the UN meant subjecting her to such punishment was more complicated. She might actually require a trial, if she gave up immunity. She clearly recognized the opportunity to educate the outside world about the depths of cruelty authorities would resort to in furtherance of their arbitrary use of power.

In a show of support for her cause, female friends appeared in court wearing pants, putting themselves at risk as well. The judge adjourned her hearing until 4 August, to allow Hussein time to leave her UN post and face prosecution legally. After the hearing, Ms. Hussein said “This is a case about annulling the article that addresses women’s dress code, under the title of indecent acts. This is my battle. This article is against the constitution and even against Islamic law itself”.

According to the AP:

Women in the mostly Arabized and Muslim northern Sudan, particularly in the capital Khartoum, dress in traditional outfits that include a shawl over their head and shoulder. Western dress is uncommon.

Still, the raid on a Khartoum cafe popular with journalists and foreigners was unusual.

There are suspicions the raid itself may be part of an ongoing campaign to intimidate and scare off foreign aid workers, human rights workers and reporters, who might be trying to bring to light crimes committed against the people of Darfur, or against women broadly. Sudan is one of the most brutal nations in terms of its treatment of women, imposing a violent brand of shari’a law, even against the non-Muslim population.

SIGI, the OECD’s Social Institutions and Gender Index, reports:

Women in Sudan have a very low level of legal protection in relation to family matters. At time of publication, no information was available regarding laws that define a legal minimum age of marriage. According to available statistics, early marriage appears to be widespread. A 2004 United Nations report estimated that 21 per cent of girls between 15 and 19 years of age were married, divorced or widowed. …

Women in Sudan have a very low level of protection for their physical integrity. To date, there are no specific laws prohibiting violence against women, including domestic violence, which is common. Women who file claims are subject to accusations of lying, and the police normally do not intervene.

Women also have virtually no property rights of any kind, and divorce proceedings always assign custody of children to the father. Some observers blame ancient superstitions that treat women as “unclean” or as vehicles for temptation and possession. Others believe Sudan’s authoritarian social structures are mirrored in its political structures, and that (as in many countries where crushing poverty and violent human rights abuses are commonplace) women are seen as a potential voice for the popular conscience, and must be kept from giving testimony in the public sphere or taking roles of responsibility.

Ms. Hussein’s lawyer, Nabil Adib, says the law “is quite unnecessary and degrading. It is harassment.” Ban Ki-moon, secretary general of the UN, has said the sentence of flogging would be “against the international human rights standards”. Indeed, the level of suffering inflicted, in comparison with the alleged offense, rises to the level of crime against humanity. According to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court Explanatory Memorandum, crimes against humanity:

are particularly odious offences in that they constitute a serious attack on human dignity or grave humiliation or a degradation of one or more human beings. They are not isolated or sporadic events, but are part either of a government policy (although the perpetrators need not identify themselves with this policy) or of a wide practice of atrocities tolerated or condoned by a government or a de facto authority. Murder; extermination; torture; rape and political, racial, or religious persecution and other inhumane acts reach the threshold of crimes against humanity only if they are part of a widespread or systematic practice. Isolated inhumane acts of this nature may constitute grave infringements of human rights, or depending on the circumstances, war crimes, but may fall short of falling into the category of crimes under discussion.”

The flogging of Lubna al-Hussein is not genocide, but it is torture, and it is not an isolated incident. It is part of a routine and brutal campaign of oppression against a subgroup of the population, all women, through the imposition of laws that justify and promote torture and other cruel treatment. Ms. Hussein is using this trial to demonstrate that the flogging of the women detained with her, and of herself, “are not isolated or sporadic events, but are part either of a government policy (although the perpetrators need not identify themselves with this policy) or of a wide practice of atrocities tolerated or condoned by a government”.

In 2004, Amnesty International reported on plans by the Sudan government to flog Intisar Bakri Abulgader, a 16-year old girl, 100 times for the “crime” of adultery:

Cruel punishments are an everyday part of Sudan’s legal system, despite being in clear violation of Sudan’s obligations under international human rights law. Now is the time for the international community to support human rights campaigners in Sudan and turn up the pressure on the government of Sudan to stop these cruel punishments.

This illegal torture is not in fact isolated or sporadic, but is “an everyday part of Sudan’s legal system”, meaning that under international law, the regime of Omar al-Bashir is using torture and other atrocities to maintain its grip on power. Such facts of life in Sudanese society are part of the cause for the International Criminal Court’s indictment of Bashir for crimes against humanity, its first ever such indictment of a sitting head of state.

Ms. Abulgader’s crime was becoming pregnant. She became pregnant out of wedlock, a crime for which a woman can be subjected to 100 lashes. The alleged father of the child was not accused and was not prosecuted. If her lover had been married, she could have been sentenced to death by stoning. Both the punishments themselves and the way they are adjudicated are fundamental violations of international law.

In its 2004 report on the case, Amnesty noted “Scores of people were sentenced to amputation or flogging in Sudan last year. Flogging is frequently carried out immediately after sentencing leaving no chance for appeal, even when there are concerns about whether a fair trial has been held.” Sudan’s judicial proceedings fly in the face of international standards for due process and basic human rights, and rights groups persistently allege women are often “convicted” on nothing more than hearsay, while violent rapists are often not prosecuted, because the state demands physical “proof” from a woman before even opening an investigation.

Life for women in Darfuri refugee camps in Sudan and neighboring Chad is extremely hard. Many have no access to any public authority that will investigate violence against women, and medical facilities are scarce to non-existent. While rape is rampant, and has allegedly been used as a “weapon of war” by the Khartoum backed militia engaged in a campaign of ethnic cleansing in Darfur, women are seldom able to find safety in seeking help from local authorities.

Uprooted from their homes, often relegated to ad-hoc communities where male elders are dispersed or involved in conflict, women victimized by corrupt camp guards or Sudanese police or militia risk serious physical attack or punishment for reporting rape. The Darfur refugee crisis has exacerbated the crisis levels of violence against women, and ongoing conflict and an apparent government cover-up campaign help to conceal the crimes.

The Nobel-prize-winning human rights and medical aid group Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) has been investigating the proliferation of accounts of brutal treatment of women in the camps. One woman told the group “I was raped in the camp in 2007 by a man with a knife at night. I am very sad. I told this to the sheikha, but they didn’t find the man who did it. My new husband doesn’t know that this happened to me.” She also said Chadian soldiers now raid camps at night, but she was lucky to have evaded being raped, so far.

Another woman told PHR:

There is no food. I am suffering. They only give us a little bit of sorghum. How can I be happy?  I think a lot about my country. I don’t think I’m sick, but I think a lot about what happened. The sadness has entered into my heart.

Sometimes, I go to look for wood. But if I see anyone on the way, I go back to the camp. They yell at me, “Leave the wood.” There’s only me on my ration card, so I don’t get enough wood.

I live here with my husband and grandchildren and daughter-in-law, the wife of my son who was killed.

Despite living with other relatives, she is less able to provide for them, because the violent marginalization of women puts her at a disadvantage in finding food and fuel to sustain a home-life for her relatives. Such tensions over scarce supplies inflame tensions and can be linked to some cases of violence against women, where competition for resources is seen as justifiably favoring men, in the tribal, traditional, and conflict-induced setting.

PHR has conducted a study, one of the most in-depth to date, into the persistent problem of violence against women, including sexual violence and rape. According to the group:

In November, 2008, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) sent a team of four experts to gather an in-depth picture of the lives and concerns of Darfuri women now living in the Farchana Refugee Camp in eastern Chad. Eighty-eight women sat with PHR’s team of three physicians and a human rights researcher and spoke candidly and openly about their lives in Darfur, the horrific attacks that drove them from their villages, their harrowing flight to Chad, and the struggles of their daily lives in the camp.

The team found that many of these women had been sexually violated in Darfur, and many have been raped since arriving at the camp in Chad. They risk sexual assault on an everyday basis when they leave the camp to collect firewood. Shame and fear of further violence or rejection by their families lead most of these women to suffer these indignities in silence.

Attitudes about violence against women in Darfur vary widely and are a source of high controversy in Sudan. Last year, at the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women, at the UN Headquarters in New York, a panel of women from the Sudanese parliament, headed by a female Sudanese doctor linked to the Khartoum government, gave a report on the status of violence against women in the Darfur conflict zone, in which rape was virtually ignored.

Though the presentation focused on rape as a form of violence against women, the reports of “confirmed cases”, based only on the cases the authorities both accepted as legitimate complaints and had successfully prosecuted, put the annual number of rapes for each of the three designated zones in Darfur in the single digits, even as NGOs and UN agencies were estimating figures, compiled from sporadic reports of cases never prosecuted, in the tens of thousands, including documentation of a deliberate campaign involving some government-backed forces.

The presentation was a glossing over of the entire problem of violence against women, designed primarily to defend or extoll the government’s official response to international accusations of war crimes including systematic rape. The official response purports to have set up “clinics” in every refugee camp and every village, though by the end of the presentation —which was cut short amid difficult questioning— the panel admitted that no such clinics yet existed and there was no proof that women had any recourse real post-rape support.

As we reported in March:

[The National Plan of Action (NPOA)] itself is tainted by the open direction that it be used “to respond to international claims and accusations”. Though there are provisions for “raising awareness” about violence against women, via the Ministry of Information, a process to be organized by a dedicated special committee, the mission of countering international perceptions about extreme violence and mass rape means there is pressure to file reports of reduced or scarce violence against women (”Four years of success in combating violence against women”), incentive to not report, not address, to cover up, what violence there is.

Numerous observers at the UN conference, some of them university researchers, some having worked in the field in Darfur, said the panel was also compromised by the views of some privileged Sudanese women that Darfuri women should not automatically be believed when they complain of such extreme violence. One woman told me she believed the Sudanese parliament ministers might not have any real freedom to address the problem of violence against women and might fear for their lives should they give actual figures.

The PHR report found:

Women who report being raped are stigmatized, and remain trapped in places of perpetual insecurity. There’s no one to stop the rapes, no one to turn to for justice for past or ongoing crimes, and little psycho-social support to address their prolonged and unimaginable traumas.

In fact, indifference, tolerance of violence against women and systematic efforts to obscure the atrocities, combine to put women in Darfur’s refugee camps in a chronic condition of extreme vulnerability. Women already victimized by brutal attacks on their bodies or their families may be subjected to even more brutal treatment when they come forward, as some authorities see them as 1) highly defenseless and 2) targets for allegations of sexual deviance, a common attack on women who are able to demonstrate that violence occurred.

In 2004, the women’s rights group NOW reported “Tens of thousands of women [in Darfur] have been displaced, raped and killed since the violence began, and an end to these horrors is not in sight.” Indeed, the projection was right. Many aid groups speak of workers observing continued brutality against women and an atmosphere of near total impunity for government-backed militia and police involved in any such crimes.

Anecdotal reports of aid workers, many of them Sudan-born, forced to leave the country due to having expressed concerns about violence against women or the ongoing genocide, are numerous. One anonymous source, who had to flee into exile to avoid attacks against herself and her family, says government threats to aid workers have become an integral part of the campaign of violence against the people of Darfur.

Access to the internet must be a basic human right, across the globe, for a number of reasons. First of all, legitimate, transparent democratic processes of government require in today’s world that information flow freely and that citizens be empowered to share information and to find information, according to their choices and their needs.

Socio-economic barriers to such free flow of information are just another kind of information control that establishes dangerous demographic stratification into privileged and marginalized groups. Governments across the world are using web filtering technologies to censor the information available to their citizens and crack down on dissent.

In China, in Iran, in Cuba, aggressive web filtering measures and electronic spying technology have been used to prevent the spread of information unfavorable to the government leadership, to obscure corruption, and to hunt and persecute members of a would-be democratic opposition. In China, web filtering censorship has perhaps reached its zenith, with major multinationals collaborating in the “Great Firewall of China”.

Web searches routinely rule out links that contain information banned by the government, and the government has explored barring any website not entirely in Mandarin from being viewed inside China. Talk of the parallel Chinese internet has given way to concerns the government has opted for a technologically more realistic total filtering program.

“Cyber dissidents” are now an entirely new area of press targeted by government censors and security forces. In China and Iran, cyber dissidents are jailed simply for linking to materials that the government has sought to keep away from the public eye. Iran’s government has repeatedly shut down opposition websites in order to prevent democratic assembly, to cover up violence against civilians or to obscure challenges to official diktat.

China recently delayed plans to implement a draconian filtering system based on a new “green dam” software platform. The government is believed to have been taken aback by the broad-based and persistent expressions of anger over the plans, as the nation’s population continues to move into contact with the online medium and is demanding more transparency.

But Pres. Hu Jintao came to office promising a “smokeless war” against the press and cyber dissidents, and China has been criticized across the world for efforts to manipulate the information made available to its citizens, including distortions of the unrest a year ago in Tibet and Sichuan and now in Xinjiang, which many say could foment violence against people of Tibetan or Uighur ethnicity, depending on the case.

Efforts to use internet filtering to cover up the massacre of unarmed civilians at Tiananmen Square on 4 June 1989 are part of that ongoing war against the free press. The Beijing government fears acknowledging what took place there could delegitimize the current regime and sow political unrest. Pro-democracy advocates say that like any government in a free democracy, China’s government could acknowledge its mistakes, promote electoral reform, and liberalize its political process, without destabilizing the country.

In remote regions like Darfur in western Sudan or North Kivu in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, conditions of extreme danger for aid workers and violence against journalists means information filters very slowly through the population, worsening already catastrophic situations of persistent conflict and human suffering.

Violence against women in Darfur is persistent in part owing to the fact that Darfuri women have virtually no access to information distribution systems. They are almost never able to report crimes against them to any public authority or international group. And medical service workers are often unable to locate people in need of help, as the remote region is plagued by lack of communicative media.

There is also concern about the effects of internet usage on the development of human cognitive abilities. Social cognitive structures are thought to be directly affected by use of communicative media, and the internet as achieved fundamental alterations in the communicative structure of society; facing that reality, it must be a universal right of all people to participate in the direction and development of that medium in reference to their own daily lives.

In May, I reported on this for The Hot Spring Network:

“Cognitive science has revealed a human brain notable for its plasticity. It is not unreasonable to speculate that the Internet not only shapes itself to the mind but shapes the mind to itself”, writes Ana Menéndez in this month’s Poets & Writers magazine.

What can we do to impede the erosion of some of our most prized social-intellectual habits of mind, rooted in organic brain structure and in social networking (from campfire to empire, parliament to newsprint, to Twitter and The Hot Spring Network), while taking advantage of the power of the web?

The internet and attendant communications technologies have a visible decentralizing effect that enhances the democratic influence average people can exert in the public sphere. In the US election of 2008, that was evident in online information sharing and organizing. In the Spanish election of 2004, it was evident in the popular outcry that was so ably communicated by sms, that helped uncover a government disinformation campaign.

Clay Sharky, of the TED initiative, explains in a video address how social networking services and a new generation of web applications and smart phones, are coming together to empower individuals across the world and bring about the end of “top-down” controls in the political sphere. This effect is operating even in authoritarian societies, where in some cases the best information available comes from individuals posting anecdotal reports online.

Perhaps the world’s most developed and advanced campaign for net neutrality, or legal constraints on internet service providers’ (ISP) ability to plan or carry out systematic filtering of content, has taken root in the US. Motivated by a fierce defense of First Amendment rights and an understanding of the democratizing effects of open flows of information, the net neutrality movement has won important victories both in Congress and among federal regulators.

In March 2008, I reported for Cafe Sentido that “We are on the verge of a major communications and global economic revolution, in which major media, technological advances, cloud computing and dispersed optimization, adapt to and take over new models for living and producing in human society.” But that moment is being met with stepped up efforts by governments and businesses to control the freedom of ordinary people to access and control information.

Such efforts are a direct assault on democratic freedoms, and measurably impede the ability of people to gather information related to risks to their health or safety or to orchestrate the dissemination of information that may favor their social, economic or ideological interests. As the US Bill of Rights‘ commitment to a first-order freedom of the press shows, all other democratic rights are built on the foundation of a free and independent media culture. So access to the web must begin to be treated as a basic measure of human rights everywhere.

Follow these links for more information on:

• Press Freedom & Persecution of Journalists
• Net Neutrality & Internet Freedoms
• Human Rights & Democratic Freedoms

The Khmer Rouge sought to establish a red Khmer empire in Cambodia, with some ambitions of expansion beyond the nation’s borders, by stamping out any human life or mind that varied from the project, as narrowly conceived by Pol Pot and his murderous regime. The “killing fields” that ensued, with the mass slaughter of an estimated 1.5 million people, were an attempt to establish a new break in time, the time before and the time after the purification —as the regime proposed— of all Cambodia.

Beyond Utopia, it was a lust to fashion a paradise built on millions of purgatories. It was the paradox of a violent Heaven, a wisdom of intolerance, a corrupt purity, an abstraction drowned in the blood of innocents. In order to establish absolute power, either for themselves or their ideology, a purge was undertaken that would attempt to eliminate nearly all people of learning, leaving by one count only 4 highly trained Cambodian legal minds remaining.

The totalitarian nature of the purge was, like all political purges and all totalitarianism, based on the lie, the false promise of finality: The Khmer Rouge bet the lives of millions and the fate of their nation on the idea that once they had killed enough people, the perfect society would emerge and the ills that threatened their plans would be cured, purged successfully, overcome without risk of return.

If the political logic of the deranged practitioners of the Cambodian genocide are to be believed, they believed they could make a just and ordered world by attacking with thunder and steel everything vulnerable in the human beings they judged as outside their reach, and erasing human virtues like compassion, justice, tolerance, from the communities they favored, by shaping their society through a system of torture and murder.

The evils of the Khmer Rouge terror were nothing less than the wholesale abdication of humanity, in service of a power structure that elevated thugs and psychopaths, testing their merit by urging them to exhibit incomprehensible degrees of cruelty.

This is so much the case that in the ongoing trial of Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch (pronounced ‘Doik’) —a prison director accused of a vast array of war crimes, committed in furtherance of the Khmer Rouge purge—, the defendant has alternately broken down in hysterical demonstrations of guilt and regret and attempted to delegitimize testimony questioning the identity of witnesses by saying he had long ago had that person killed.

The metaphysical arrangement of such a regime of bloodlust could be classed as habitual psychotics —more than as physics or metaphysics—‚ behavior so far outside what even the perpetrator’s heart and mind can countenance, that it amounts to a deliberate casting off of any intellectual or moral coherence, a descent into something antithetical to the involvement of anything we might call human qualities.

By casting off the restraint that stems from having human qualities like conscience, moral compass, tolerance and civil social structures, in exchange for an experiment with habitual psychotics, the genocidal regime is able to spread the logic of its brutality, by disqualifying virtually anyone from the broad category of humanity, both the victims and its allies in perpetrating the killing.

This accounts for the mysterious inability of any moral considerations to explain or account for the logic of genocide. It is not logical; it is not intellectually or morally coherent; it is not actually in service of any reasonable or worthy political aim. It is the sowing of injury and contempt in a way that will take root, leaving a landscape of devastation and tragedy in its wake, the fundamental crippling of a nation for generations to come.

Now, long after the killing ended, Cambodia has finally been able to put together a legal process for prosecuting and punishing the crimes of that era (1975-1979), but only with the help of international jurists assisting in an ad-hoc “hybrid” tribunal system meant to enforce and expand the scope of Cambodia’s own evolving humanitarian law.

The trials are a criminal prosecution that stands in for what has been tried in other places, the “truth and reconciliation” process aimed at fixing crimes and grudges firmly in the past, in order to clear the terrain of the society’s future for something better and more humane. Each society that faces the horrors of such a history has unique circumstances, unique crimes to address, and unique demographic makeup that may favor one solution over another.

Paul Kagame, president of Rwanda, conceived a complex but broadly applicable process of community hearings, in which the perpetrators of the horrific Rwandan genocide openly confessed in front of their neighbors their involvement in the crimes of those 100 days in 1994 — when over 800,000 men, women and children were murdered by machete, dagger, fire and beating, by people who had always been part of their communities.

Kagame told Fareed Zakaria on Sunday’s edition of GPS —the “Global Public Square”— that “We had to bring the victims and perpetrators back together”, because those on either side of the genocide live in mixed communities everywhere across Rwanda. Zakaria praised Rwanda for finding a nuanced and well-thought solution to the problem of continued cohabitation of both communities, even as the nation seeks to recognize the genocide and prevent another round of the same, perhaps in retaliation or frustration for hard living conditions.

In fact, “spillover from the 1994 Rwandan genocide” is now sowing unrest in North Kivu, in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Cattle rustling used to finance militia activity is fomenting inter-ethnic conflict among Hutus and Tutsis, some of whom are émigrés from Rwanda, having fled in the time of the genocide. As the Christian Science Monitor is reporting:

While the trade in blood cows finances rebel activity here, but it’s also a form of psychological warfare. Another major rebel group in the region, the National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP), is a predominantly Tutsi movement which sees itself as protecting its people. It also defends their traditional livelihood; For centuries, the pastoral Tutsi have measured a man’s wealth by counting his cattle.

“Nothing riles the CNDP and the Tutsi more than having their cattle stolen,” says Anneke Van Woudenberg, senior Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch. When they turn to battle, she says, the CNDP can be brutal: In a bid to regain villages controlled by Hutu militias, in April the CNDP killed over 100 civilians, some of them the elderly and children.

However galling or economically traumatic, the theft of cattle is substantially less significant than the mass slaughter of innocents, but the Kivu experience demonstrates how the unresolved fallout from the 1994 genocide is again stoking the fires of ethnic hatred. Can Paul Kagame do enough in his second term as president of Rwanda to establish a reliable civil society to effect a lasting truth and reconciliation process in which the crimes and animus of the genocide are relegated to the past?

The effects of the slaughter will be part of Rwandan life, part of the immediate life experience and family structures across the nation, for generations to come, as is the case in Cambodia, as among Europeans both Jewish and non-Jewish who lived through the Holocaust, as is the case for residents of the former Yugoslavia or of today’s Darfur. The false promise of the final solution will, in every case, become ingrained in the evolution of a people, and may impede any real ascent to ideal structures favoring harmony among rival groups.

We need to establish international structures with reach and authority that can detect and prevent such campaigns of slaughter. The prime minister of Turkey, Tayyip Erdogan, decries China’s treatment of Uighur muslims in Xinjiang province as “genocide”, though many believe the programmatic “ethnic reordering” in which Beijing has engaged is not as dangerous as more aggressive “ethnic cleansing”. But some say such situations as those in Xinjiang, or the North Caucasus, need to be viewed as early warnings and halted without further loss of life.

Framing a social plan of any kind in the logic of ethnic cleansing or political re-engineering implies the desire to use force to command the restructuring of communities. Doing so in a way that takes lives or forces entire ethnicities or groups of political dissidents out verges on what could be called a purge campaign. Such ideas of a final solution are tempting to the subset of political actors who disqualify their rivals from humanity and seek to sweep them from existence, and are the root structure of a burgeoning genocide.

International structures that can provide for monitoring such policies that put a society at risk of ethnic cleansing need to be established, tested and strengthened. Observation of crimes like those ongoing in Darfur, and possibly ready to flare up again in North Kivu or the North Caucasus, is not enough: observation with vocal protest which amounts to no intervention empowers the perpetrators and condones their worst actions.

Building consensus among the “great powers”, namely the 5 permanent members of the UN Security Council, each of whom wields a veto power over any action taken by the Council, is the first step. Genuine issues of sovereignty can be addressed, but Moscow and Beijing could be persuaded to see that reducing inter-ethnic conflict wherever it exists, especially within their borders and in neighboring countries, is in the interests of their existing systems of government and influence abroad.

Cambodia is now facing its savage and inexplicable past, and doing the truly hard work of trying to adjudicate who pays the price for the crimes of a regime whose legal framework for ruling could not be justified as “legal” under any recognized notion of legitimate government. Evidence presented in court may show that some of those responsible for the crimes were following orders; the orders, and the legal authority behind them, must be shown to be beyond the scope of any allowable legal structure.

What faces Cambodia, however, is more than just judging the guilty; it’s accounting for all that was lost, all the cultural potential of the lives cut short, all the vision and humanity that will never be recovered. That ache is memorial and immemorial, tightly woven into the fabric of Cambodian politics, and transcendent; it must permeate what takes place in the future, but also be put aside so that the future can be free of it.

The status of women is not actually “equal” to that of men in any society in the world, despite decades of major advances in many countries both rich and poor. The UN’s annual Commission on the Status of Women seeks to examine in-depth those programs underway, especially in the developing world, to speed the shift toward greater gender equality, setting out a series of global standards in the form of “agreed conclusions”.

The 2005 meetings of the Commission on the Status of Women addressed the problem of a lack of equal participation of women and men in decision-making processes at all levels. The hearings were aimed at uncovering the areas of politics, education, professional life and community values, where women were being kept from reaching equal standing in the ability to improve their standing and make decisions about the direction of family, personal life or society at large.

The 2005 CSW report included the following agreed conclusions, among others:

2. … that despite general acceptance of the need for gender balance in decision-making bodies at all levels, a gap between de jure and de facto equality had persisted, and that women continued to be underrepresented at the legislative, ministerial and sub-ministerial levels, as well as at the highest levels of the corporate sector and other economic and social institutions…

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The focus was also placed on raising awareness of those obstacles that stand in the way of women gaining more access to decision-making processes. Traditional community values that assign to women the role of full-time caregiver, or limit their ability to freely pursue opportunities outside the home, end up limiting the representation of women in decision-making positions in society and in government.

The government of Sudan, based in Khartoum, and under the rule of Pres. Omar Hassan al-Bashir, has expelled more than a dozen international aid organizations from the country, charging that their activities in Darfur helped agents for the International Criminal Court (ICC) develop their war crimes case against Bashir. Bashir has been indicted on charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes, and a fierce crack-down on dissent, press and international visitors, has been underway since.

One source, who wished to remain anonymous for reasons of personal safety, said there is increasing volume of calls and messages coming from aid workers in Darfur, saying they are afraid and the situation is deteriorating rapidly. While the government has pledged that local aid workers and UN agencies will fill the gap left by the departing NGOs, those expelled represent as much as half the aid, in the world’s largest humanitarian aid project.

The New York Times reports:

The expulsion of organizations that provided clean water, medical treatment, food and shelter for millions of Sudanese in the war-racked region of Darfur has thrown the world’s largest aid operation into disarray, putting the lives of millions of displaced people at risk.

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Already there are reports of deaths linked to contaminated water and preventable diseases that are going untreated. With millions of Darfuris living in refugee camps, with little to no infrastructure, extremely poor sanitation and in need of food aid and medical aid to survive, the expulsion of these groups could turn what the UN already qualifies as the worst humanitarian crisis in the world into a mass catastrophe.

If the government of Sudan does not find a way to deliver, with immediate, aggressive efforts, substantial deliveries of food aid and medical supplies, personnel and services, as well as sanitation operations, to the camps, millions of lives will be put in jeopardy by the corresponding spread of contaminated water, disease outbreak and chronic hunger. The record of the Khartoum government has been to show little interest at all in providing aid to displaced Darfuris, since the apparent goal of their operations in Darfur appears to have been to displace or kill the civilian population.

The international community is now, of course, under increasing pressure to act to protect the people of Darfur. As those aid groups pull out, their efforts must be replaced by similar efforts on a similar scale. Some, like Doctors without Borders (MSF) are among the most daring, pro-active and effective, of non-governmental aid organizations, and replacing their volunteers will be difficult.

The ICC indictment has put the Darfur crisis on a permanent state of high alert, because under international law, Sudan itself is required to arrest Pres. Bashir and send him to the Hague for prosecution. Bashir has been marshaling all the powers at his disposal to protect his regime against collapse or against internal threats opened up by the ICC indictment. This new, more defensive stance means the people of Darfur are now, more than ever, hostages to the violence of his regime, unless the international community dramatically increases its protection and aid efforts.

The Sudanese government attempted an artful campaign of misinformation by way of its presentation at the 53rd Commission on the Status of Women last week in New York. The event, hosted by the Sudanese Women Parliamentary Caucus (SWPC), focused on a government-backed study that was designed to show Khartoum to be concerned about violence against women, willing to take great pains to combat it, yet unable to find evidence of many cases in war-torn Darfur.

Despite hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, and reports of rapes per year exceeding 10,000, eve of the government supporting the use of rape as a “tool of war”, the study counted only those cases where the government’s narrow legal definition of rape (“proven” and documented prior to any investigation) permitted actual charges and an eventual conviction. Despite the session’s being advertised as focusing on “women in conflict”, not one aspect of conflict, in the abstract or the particular, was mentioned, save the sparing now-and-then references to “the camps”.

The study lays out what its authors call “Four years of success in combating violence against women in Darfur 2004-2008″. It announces “a task force to study the role of Government and Women Organization in Women Protection Darfur Experience” and openly says the project was “a response to the false accusations stating that Sudan Government has done nothing to protect Women in Darfur”.

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The study also explains actions taken by government ministries to speed women’s access to medical treatment immediately after any violent assault (“Circular No. 2″, 23 October 2004), but the provisions form a system of bureaucratic processes that are likely to impede women’s access to legal advice, medical treatment and justice. The report also included mention of a National Plan of Action (NPOA) to investigate violence against women and treat victims, as well as directives to local “police and medical workers” in the “application” of Circular No. 2.

But the NPOA itself is tainted by the open direction that it be used “to respond to international claims and accusations”. Though there are provisions for “raising awareness” about violence against women, via the Ministry of Information, a process to be organized by a dedicated special committee, the mission of countering international perceptions about extreme violence and mass rape means there is pressure to file reports of reduced or scarce violence against women (“Four years of success in combating violence against women”), incentive to not report, not address, to cover up, what violence there is.

While certain promising language was used, such as an Advisory Council on Human Rights hosting workshops in Nyala and Al Fasher discussing “Rights of victims / Violence against women in international, regional and domestic law / Legal aid and victims”, the process as described does not facilitate women coming forward for treatment or to demand justice.

Workshops and protocols feature in the report’s claims about Sudan’s efforts to curb violence against women in Darfur. Observance of the dictates of UN agencies also features prominently, though specific evidence of effective observance of the UN’s human rights standards or of any actual acts to bring the treatment of women in line with international law is totally lacking. The report and the hearing both are devoid of any reference to a large-scale investigation into allegations of mass rape or of the military carrying out acts of violence against women.

A key specific point of contention is women’s access to medical treatment and to pressing criminal charges, in the wake of an assault. According to the report, a 2006 protocol, developed in coordination with UNFPA, directed clinical treatment for rape, including a requirement “to ensure documentation of medical history” and recognize women’s right to that documentation.

But all of this glosses over an underlying stain on the report and the process of organizing these new plans of action to protect women: the number of cases actually prosecuted is so low as to leave the reader in shock. (Several people stood up and walked out of the presentation at UNHQ last Thursday, as the report’s figures came to light.)

In fact, during the SWPC presentation, we were informed that women require the medical documentation in order to file charges or prompt an actual investigation. They cannot even seek justice without the medical documentation the government says women are entitled to have. Afterward, this reporter was told specifically that they cannot imagine any other way in which rape could be investigated, except in light of an immediate medical examination.

In Darfur, where all manifestations of officialdom provoke fear and suspicion among the ethnic African population, where doctors are exceedingly scarce, where confidentiality is not standard and where police may be military personnel, enemies of those seeking justice, and possibly even involved in the crimes reported, most victims of rape are, by virtue of this highly bureaucratic system, effectively barred from seeking justice at all.

The number of cases of rape officially recognized by the government report for all of Darfur in 2004 were just 19. In 2005, the total was 32. And in 2006, the figure dropped to just 10 overall. The Human Rights Watch (HRW) global report for 2007, covering the events of 2006, cites “serious abuses of civilians, including forced displacement, rape, killings, and increasing attacks on humanitarian aid workers.”

It is improbable that with the mass violence in Darfur in 2006, with specific documented cases of conflict-related rape, that the figure could be as low as just 10. It would make Darfur, in the midst of a chaotic, genocidal conflict, the safest place in the world for women, in terms of risk of suffering rape. The HRW report even specifies the following:

The establishment in 2005 of a national tribunal to respond to the crimes in Darfur had no effect on the continuing impunity of militia leaders and government officials responsible for crimes against humanity.

The report delivered at the UNHQ by the panel from Sudan gave no information whatsoever regarding the involvement of officials and government-backed militia in crimes against civilians, much less of any effort to combat that problem. We also received no detailed information about the actual ongoing activities of the national tribunal, the women’s security unit or the clinics we were told were planned for community-level assistance to victims of sexual assault.

Obviously, the entire report is a logical nonsequitur in that such low levels of sexual assault would imply little need for a National Plan of Action to combat it, much less the construction of dedicated confidential clinics at the community level. But while the Sudanese government’s study, with its stated mission of refuting “false” accusations from abroad, claims to demonstrate a low incidence of rape in Darfur, HRW reported in 2007 that as of 2006:

Rape and sexual violence continue to be pervasive throughout Darfur, with attacks on women and girls taking palce both in the context of hostilities between the warring parties as well as when internally displaced women and girls travel outside camp settings to collect firewood and other items. In just one example in August [2006], aid workers reported that more than 200 women and girls were sexually assaulted over a five week period in Kalma, the largest diplaced persons camp in south Darfur.

The HRW report is also explicit in charging that the ruling party “made no substantive effort to investigate or prosecute those individuals reponsible for the most serious crimes in Darfur”. The SWPC report focused on laws, plans, protocols and an “initiative” designed to start raising awareness about violence against women. Again, we saw little evidence that any substantive actions have yet been taken, and not one community center was cited as evidence of the government’s plan actually working for victims.

During the Q&A session after the presentation of the SWPC report, several questioners raised issues about the veracity or credibility of the figures reported. The extremely low rape statistics were of particular concern, and reports by Amnesty International and the BBC, both supported by documentary evidence, were decried by the presenter as distortions and lies.

When pressed on the existence of “centers” where confidential medical treatment, advanced counseling services, and female-only police, would be made available to women, the presenter clarified that she had not intended to give the impression such centers (plural) existed, but that there was “one center”, whose location, functions and achievements, she did not name.

It is clear the event was staged as part of an information campaign, designed to beat back attacks on the government of Omar al-Bashir, indicted just a week before by the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. It is also clear that the report given demonstrates a clear awareness of the need to conceal the facts on the ground, which were never mentioned during the nearly two hour presentation.

The issue of protecting women during conflict, the stated purpose of the meeting, was never directly addressed, as the conflict itself was not raised. Again, the only reference to the conflict in Darfur was the use of the word “camps” at intervals. Ultimately, it appears women in Darfur are less well served than they are hampered by the process laid out by the government for prosecuting rape allegations, and other forms of violence were left completely unaddressed by the panel.

Kenyan PM Raila Odinga denounces murder of two leading human rights activists, saying his nation is “hurtling toward failure”. The two activists had given evidence to a UN probe into police corruption and extrajudicial killings. They had accused police of ties to a criminal gang that the BBC says uses “extreme violence” to intimidate population.

Sudan’s ambassador to the UN says the aid groups his government expelled were “messing up everything,” decrying them for “spoiling” the situation and “destabilizing” the country. The aid groups were preventing mass death from famine, disease and massacre, and the remarks seem to be an admission from the Sudanese government that it viewed the aid organizations as an obstacle to its program of ethnic cleansing in Darfur, still ongoing.

Republican party blocks omnibus spending bill needed to keep government running past midnight tonight, complaining about over 8,000 earmarks. In fact, GOP has placed more than 4,000 earmarks in this spending bill, a higher proportion than their representation in Congress. Republicans had also sought to derail the ARRA (stimulus), which contained zero earmarks, on grounds it was full of earmarks.

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Republican leaders also began pushing for an across-the-board “spending freeze” for all of 2009. The idea, which was tried by Pres. Herbert Hoover and resulted in accelerating the arrival of the Great Depression, would necessitate the abandoning of economic stimulus, aid to financial institutions, money for the war in Afghanistan, infrastructure reinvestment and for Pres. Obama’s plans for a bipartisan healthcare reform program.

Pres. Barack Obama will on Monday reverse a Bush executive order banning government funding of research involving embryonic stem cells. The research was eligible for funding before Pres. Bush’s unilateral ban, and could help produce therapies or cures for severe neurological diseases, spinal cord injuries and paralysis.

Italy to build one of the world’s longest bridges, linking Sicily to mainland Italy. The 3 km bridge would be the longest dual-arch suspension bridge in the world, and would account for up to one-third of Italy’s planned economic stimulus spending. The project is a favorite of controversial PM Silvio Berlusconi, and some critics say the structure would not be safe.

Radio host Rush Limbaugh longs for Kennedy demise: remarks gleefully that Sen. Ted Kennedy’s involvement in healthcare reform might soon make for a “Ted Kennedy memorial health care bill”, apparently anticipating the senator will not long survive in his struggle against brain cancer. Limbaugh also stated his unequivocal opposition to any government actions that involve “caring”.

The indictment of Sudanese president Omar Hassan al-Bashir by the International Criminal Court means the nation of Sudan itself is, under international treaties to which it is party, obliged to arrest and extradite its own president. But the regime of the authoritarian ruler has, unsurprisingly, rejected that obligation and says the indictment is a conspiracy against Sudan by western powers.

‘Voices from Darfur’ (documentary from 2007)

There are now fears that Bashir’s government may do as other embattled authoritarians with illegal military campaigns have done, and try to speed the process of ethnic cleansing it has engineered and still supports in the western region of Darfur. Government-backed militia, reportedly with Khartoum-linked air support, have been purging the region of black African tribes, murdering hundreds of thousands and forcing millions to flee their homes.

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The fallout from the bloodshed in Darfur has so affected neighboring Chad, which has taken in hundreds of thousands in refugee camps, that Chad accuses the Bashir government of using Darfur as a staging ground for a paramilitary border war against the Chadian government. Fears of a larger regional war have been growing for some time.

The joint African Union / UN force operating in Darfur is not large enough to stage a full ground and air campaign to keep Bashir’s forces out of the region altogether, and diplomats have expressed concern that the situation may now escalate as Bashir seeks to consolidate his hold on power and rule out the possibility that rebel groups from Darfur may gain political legitimacy, enter Sudanese government or secure autonomy for the region.

The indictment also places added pressure on Bashir to destroy evidence, including witnesses who could testify about the Darfur mass killing and the links between “janjaweed” militia and regular Sudanese military forces. Aid workers and journalists have long been in danger when operating in Darfur, and fighting has repeated forced the delay or suspension of aid to the region.

It is expected a motion may be put forth at the UN to give the peacekeeping forces there jurisdiction to arrest Bashir or officials operating under him, in order to carry out the ICC warrant. The ICC has no police force of its own, and is powerless to act on its arrest warrants without the aid of national governments. UN powers are now looking to secure cooperation from all members, to isolate Bashir and prevent his traveling without risk of arrest.

But the immediate concern needs to be the civilians “on the ground” in and around Darfur, and possibly in other regions of Sudan that were engaged in drawn-out civil war with Khartoum. There is growing consensus that the AU/UN force must be charged with acting to prevent any incidence of violence against civilians, in order to prevent Bashir from using the warrant as an excuse to wage all-out war on the civilian population of Darfur.

Already, Bashir has expelled 13 aid organizations from the region, a move UN sec. general Ban Ki-moon said will cause “irrevocable damage” to humanitarian aid operations in the region. An estimated 4.7 million people receive humanitarian aid in the devastated Darfur region; the expulsions could lead to the rapid spread of disease, hunger and preventable death among the hardest hit populations.

The International Criminal Court has issued a warrant for the arrest of Sudanese president Omar Hassan al-Bashir, on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Bashir is charged with waging a deliberate, sustained campaign of violence and terror against civilians.

Omar al-Bashir is the first sitting head of state to be formally charged by the ICC, making this warrant a major precedent in the establishing of a global justice system. Diplomats had asked the Court to delay issuing the warrant, in hopes more time might lead to a more viable peace agreement.

There had been arrest warrants issued for Slobodan Milosevic (of Serbia) and Charles Taylor (of Liberia) while they were sitting heads of state, but those warrants were not issued by the ICC, a permanent, established court for prosecuting war crimes.

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According to The New York Times:

The judges charged Mr. Bashir with five counts of crimes against humanity, including murder, extermination, forcible transfer, torture and rape. The two counts of war crimes were for attacks against a civilian population and for pillaging.

In their statement, they said the court did not recognize immunity for a head of state and called on all countries, including those who were members of the court and of the United Nations to cooperate with the court.

In recent weeks, progress had been made in negotiating a truce between the government in Khartoum and the various rebel forces operating in Darfur, but the government had continued its “counterinsurgency” efforts against the people of Darfur, blaming rebels for the violence. The rebel groups had essentially emerged from the relentless assault on Darfuris by government-linked militia.

Some now fear a violent backlash could ensue, with rebels seeking to move toward the capital and the government lashing out from a position of weakness. All governments are requested, by the ICC, to cooperate in the arrest of Pres. Bashir, a legal complication which could either isolate the Khartoum government or force strong allies like China to come to its defense.

Thousands reportedly rallied to Bashir’s defense in central Khartoum, while the government said it would ignore the “neo-colonialist” court ruling. It accused western countries of using the ICC as a means of revoking the independence of states like Sudan.

The judges had found, by a margin of two to one, that genocide had not been proven by the prosecutors. Under international law, as interpreted by the International Criminal Court, proving genocide requires evidence of a “specific intent” to “destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such”.

The crisis in Darfur continues to worsen, as the Khartoum government continues to support groups attacking civilians indiscriminately under the guise of counter-insurgency. Various rebel groups in Darfur have sprung up as the crisis has worsened, making a political solution increasingly difficult, as Darfuris refuse to accept the rule of the Bashir government in Khartoum. Meanwhile, the killing goes on.

A new round of peace talks is now underway in Qatar, with the UN and the AU expressing confidence about the chances of reaching a ceasefire deal. But the lead rebel faction, the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) says recent Sudanese troop movements are “yet more proof of the government’s lack of seriousness and the fact that it does not feel engaged by the peace process”.

This comes as numerous reports suggest the ethnic cleansing campaign is ongoing, and a new film details former Sudanese officials’ direct involvement in planning and implementing atrocities carried out against the people of Darfur. The International Herald Tribune reports:

The documentary released Wednesday was produced by the London-based human rights group, Aegis Trust. It features interviews with four men the group says were former Sudanese army and militia members.

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The men, whose names are not given and faces are blurred, recount their roles in what they said was government-ordered attacks on Darfurians in a campaign to cleanse the area of non-Arab Africans.

At least 300,000 people have been killed since the Darfur crisis began, and many decry the international response as shamefully slow and passive, allowing genocide to go on while diplomatic negotiations center on whether or not the government in Khartoum will recognize the need for foreign troops to protect civilians against its forces.

The global aid group, Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF / Doctors Without Borders) has released its 11th annual report on the ten most severe humanitarian crises around the world. This years list cites mass poverty, resource scarcity and ungovernability in Somalia, Ethiopia and DR Congo, severe health risks to the populations of Zimbabwe, Burma (Myanmar) and DR Congo, and the constant danger of violence against civilians in Iraq, DR Congo, and Sudan’s Darfur region, along the Chad border.

MSF also focuses on the need to do better in fighting two major unnecessary killers: hunger and preventable disease. Specifically, the report says that “While combating hunger depends on having access to food in sufficient quantity, conquering malnutrition also means assuring foods of adequate nutritional quality”. Statistical reports bring into stark relief the desperation of whole regions whose most vulnerable face serious peril of “life-threatening malnutrition”:

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates there are 178 million children suffering from undernutrition across the globe. All told, malnutrition contributes to 3.5 to 5 million deaths in children under five each year. According to UNICEF, the situation is actually getting worse in 16 high-burden countries. In the world’s “malnutrition hotspots,” the Horn of Africa, the Sahel and South Asia, many families simply cannot afford to provide nutritious food—particularly animal source foods such as milk, meat, and eggs—that young children need to grow and thrive.

The ten worst crises list can be summarized as follows: Somalia unraveling (total crisis, with attendant anarchy, warlordism, famine, disease, mass displacement); Burma (Myanmar) sees serious public health neglect; violence, economic chaos, lethal health risks in Zimbabwe; DR Congo’s Kivu conflict killing civilians; 178 million malnourished children worldwide; Ethiopia’s dire aid shortage in Somali region; civilians killed or displaced by fighting in NW Pakistan; ethnic cleansing, civil war ongoing in Sudan; civilians suffering violence, services-vacuum in wartorn Iraq; infection overlap between tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS.

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The report is designed to focus world attention on often neglected crisis zones, where a lack of aid group involvement can be deadly to millions:

The international medical aid group said its list underscored the difficulties in bringing assistance to people affected by violence, especially highly politicized conflicts such as those in Pakistan, Iraq, Sudan and Somalia.

The eighth country on the list was Ethiopia, where Doctors Without Borders, known by its French acronym MSF, said violence and harsh climactic conditions made living a struggle for people in the Somali region of the country.

Iraq, according to the MSF report, is a case-study for the ways in which conflict reduces the reach of humanitarian assistance, putting the most at risk in even more serious danger of getting lost in the chaos:

Various military and political actors have sought to use and abuse humanitarian action for political purposes and in doing so have made humanitarian organizations a target for violent attacks. This has undermined the ability of MSF, and other neutral humanitarian organizations to address critical needs of the civilian population.

MSF was forced to leave the violence-affected regions of Iraq in 2004 when attacks on humanitarian aid workers placed its teams at too great a risk. The recent moderation of violence levels in Iraq has presented MSF with new opportunities to re-engage inside Iraq with direct medical care. In 2008, MSF has cautiously started several new projects inside Iraq.

DR Congo, Somalia and Darfur are also regions where conflict has made it far more difficult for meaningful humanitarian assistance to reach those in need. With attacks on civilians, on infrastructure, and on high-profile civilian administrators, like aid workers, journalists, diplomats and political office-holders, used as tactical lynchpins, conflict-zones can be made more dangerous for all involved, when those best-equipped to provide life-saving assistance or training are forced out due to security concerns.

This problem has severely set back the calendar for reconstruction in Iraq and has led to spiralling chronic poverty and social unrest in many post-war developing nations. Few African nations have had the luxury of two consecutive peaceful transfers of power, by democratic means, in recent decades, in part due to the chronic problem of underdevelopment, resource seizure or black-marketeering with aid deliveries, and attacks on civilians and aid workers by militant factions, warlords or political paramilitaries.

Hunger and resource-scarcity in population-dense nations, like Nigeria, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia and the Philippines, means that even in more developed nations, mass poverty can stall the rise in living standards and lead to the spontaneous proliferation of tin shanties lining the highways and beltways of major cities, like Metro-Manila, New Delhi and Lagos. The lack of infrastructure or civil services to work with these populations means even where food aid is available, there is little benefit to the invisible-impoverished, who often need pro-active aid agents to get out into the community and spread information and resources person-to-person.

There are few things more damaging to the right of witnesses and bystanders to contribute to the resolution of a given problem than harboring the assumption that no one involved has anything to contribute. For western and Asian lookers on, viewing the problems of the African continent as outsiders, there is absolutely nothing to be gained by surrendering to the ugly bias of the belief that Africans cannot contribute to the change and development they both need and deserve.

First of all, it is foolish to adopt a position so far removed from the reality of the situation. Is Nelson Mandela not an African man? Was his movement not an African movement? Is his African National Congress party not still effecting change by taking up the lessons of the outside world and the real situation and requirements of the African residents of the nation they govern? This is but one example.

If we look to Mozambique, we also see that it was artists coming together in the capital Maputo who dreamed up and initiated the ‘tree of life’ project, taking used weapons and molding them into new aesthetic entities, in order to create an expressive world of sculpture, illustrating the possibility of creating something human and hopeful by turning the tools of war into a symbol of peace and reconciliation. This is another way forward that symbolizes the kind of mission to be undertaken in any post-war condition, where a society needs to be reborn, inspired with a new breath of life.

In some of the worst wars in recent memories, like the civil war whose aftershocks still threaten the Democratic Republic of Congo, in which over 4 million people lost their lives, much of the conflict and chaos was brought on by the interests and the interference of African neighbors (some estimate 14 different nations in the region backed one or more factions in the seemingly limitless bloodshed), and those same nations can achieve solutions that save DR Congo from the devastation they helped it to reach.

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In Darfur, we have an ongoing and gathering wave of international pressure to end the genocide, but the conflict is motivated by interests that include political frictions with Chad, oil profits and the government’s own policies on royalties, Khartoum’s wish to end all the civil wars without ceding power or seeing the country fragmented, and by deep-seated tribal conflicts, with ethnic, religious and territorial roots.

There, it has been the effectiveness of the African Union as a negotiating body and as an international security conduit that has permitted the eventual installation of United Nations peacekeepers, albeit in modest numbers, so that even where foreign troops are brought to the continent for the sake of peace and security, it may be that African institutions are the best venue.

If we look at the intervention of the International Criminal Court (ICC) at the Hague in the Darfur conflict, with its historic move to indict a sitting head of state, Pres. Omar al-Bashir, of Sudan, for genocide and war crimes, we still see that this process cannot exist without the collaboration of African dissidents and activists seeking to protect the rights and lives of those forced to flee the campaign of ethnic cleansing waged against millions of Darfuri villagers by both military and paramilitary organizations.

Ultimately, it is for Sudanese citizens, leaders and factionalist adherents to decide what is rebellion, what is counter-insurgency and how to achieve an end to armed conflict within Sudan’s borders. And it may be that getting a grip on ethnic difference and coming to see a common fate, inherent in achieving peace or promoting conflict, will be the key moment, the fulcrum at which hope or desperation takes over for the long term.

Agricultural policy has a role to play in many African conflicts, where food or water are scarce, where several nations actively seek to divert the largest possible quantity of water away from the Nile River, for example, risking shortages for those downstream, where nations like Zimbabwe wind up with untenable systems of productive cultivation, ending up with economic chaos or mass famine. The right solutions may come from a wealth of knowledge shared globally, but the implementation of the right policies must be local, executed by the stakeholders, and kept up by a commitment to the policies that fit the place and the population’s needs.

We have to consider that the entire meaning of democracy and of international laws that support and uphold democratic principles, is that people are able to choose for themselves and decide their own fate. What kind of Africa, indeed what kind of world, can we be attempting to deliver to see come into being if we fully intend for Africa to find solutions only by way of foreign intervention or the dictates of non-African bodies?

The Hague human rights court’s prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo, investigating allegations of war crimes and genocide in the western Sudanese region of Darfur, has recommended to the International Criminal Court it indict Sudan’s president Omar al-Bashir on charges of war crimes and genocide. Bashir would be the first serving head of state to be indicted by the court.

The charges were motivated in part, it seems, by impatience about the failure of UN forces and international pressure to stabilize the Darfur region or obstruct the ongoing campaign of ethnic cleansing, carried out by militia known as the janjaweed —soldiers on horseback— allegedly linked to the Khartoum government of Mr. Bashir. Foreign observers in the region have long said they have witnessed assaults by government troops on civilians, using the pretext of counter-insurgency.

Some reports have suggested that the militia appeared to have coordinated their assaults with Sudanese airstrikes or air cover The Financial Times reported on the day that:

Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the ICC’s prosecutor, said he could no longer “stay silent” over the campaign of murder, rape and displacement in Darfur, where 300,000 people have been killed and 2.5m forced from their homes since 2003, according to United Nations estimates.

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Bashir’s government reacted swiftly and angrily, suggesting the people of Darfur would suffer and the crisis there would intensify if he were indicted. It was not clear from initial statements if the government’s comments were intended to be interpreted as a threat. Rebel groups in Darfur have reacted with optimism, saying the charges against Bashir represent “a great moment for the people of Darfur”.

The United Nations has said it will remove 200 “non-essential” staff from the region, in order to prevent their becoming increased security risks. 7 peacekeepers of the joint UN-African-Union force for Darfur (UNAMID) were killed last week in an ambush attack in Darfur, which the UN and major powers have condemned. The peacekeepers do not have a mandate for aggressive action, and have had to retrench, making it more difficult to focus on their security mission.

Agence France Presse reports that the UK is formally seeking a UN Security Council condemnation of the ambush as an “unacceptable act”. The terminology could be aimed at moving the Council toward expanding the joint UN-AU force, and escalating its mission to counter militants linked to the government, though no official statement has suggested this is the case.

The UK’s Independent newspaper reports:

The prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, must produce evidence proving not only that Bashir was responsible for the actions of his forces in Darfur but that his intent was to “destroy, in whole or in part” the Fur, Masalit and Zarghawa peoples. Ocampo compares Bashir’s regime to the Nazis. Like Hitler, he argues, Bashir had a plan of extermination.

But while prosecutors at the Nuremberg trials could rely on volumes of documents detailing the “final solution”, there is no such paper trail in Darfur. Three judges will spend the next two or three months considering whether Ocampo’s charges are admissible, and while they do that, Bashir will plot his next move.

There are fears Bashir could continue his past strategy, of using counter-insurgency against Darfur rebel groups as a pretext to punish the civilian population of Darfur for the situation he finds himself in. Ocampo and other players in the international community’s response to the ethnic cleansing in Darfur argue the charges are the best way to prevent Bashir from continuing or escalating the campaign against the Darfuri population with impunity.

Still, the Bashir government has waged a near two-decades-long civil war against various regions of the country, most notably the southern rebels. At one point, the Khartoum government was effectively fighting three separate civil wars within the nation’s vast territory, and allegations of human rights abuses have been a constant.

The UN’s secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, has demanded that the government of Mr. Bashir cooperate fully with the UNAMID mission in Darfur, and ensure that all those associated with the peacekeeping mission be able to carry out their duties in safety and security. Ban also urged Bashir to ensure the safety of the more than 16,000 humanitarian workers delivering aid and vital services to refugees in and around the Darfur region.

China, Sudan’s staunchest ally on the Security Council, has voiced its opposition to the indictment, but western powers have suggested China may be ill-served by showing support for the regime if evidence comes to light showing a clear connection between Omar al-Bashir and a deliberate plot to exterminate Darfuri civilians. China’s ties to the Bashir regime have intensified as it has sought to become the driving force in developing Sudan’s vast oil riches.

There is concern the backing of a veto-wielding state may embolden Bashir in his efforts to impose reprisals on the population of Darfur. At least one Darfur rebel group has announced it is planning a new wave of attacks on the capital Khartoum, with the aim of taking the fight to Bashir’s doorstep, alleging his government has sought to undermine the real prospects of a lasting peace that benefits the population of Darfur.

Bashir has sought to make this a regional issue, asking Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, to help him prosecution at the Hague. Museveni is engaged in his own counter-insurgency against the Lord’s Resistance Army, and Sudan’s southern rebels had often sought shelter across the border in northern Uganda, before the power-sharing deal between Khartoum and the southern rebel movements.

Hassan Gadkarim, Sudanese ambassador to Kampala. Ambassador Gadkarim said, in a request to Museveni for diplomatic backing, that the Hague indictment “upsets and subverts peace and stability in the whole region, in particular Sudanese peace initiatives with neighbouring countries, e.g. Juba Peace Talks.” Uganda and Sudan are not well-established allies, and the appeal seems to be more aimed at tapping fears Museveni’s efforts at counter-insurgency could be hampered by a war-crimes prosecution against Bashir.

The most serious question raised by the Hague indictment would be jurisdiction and enforcement. How would prosecutors arrest a serving head of state? Military force and/or the deposing of the president might come to be necessary before any prosecution could go forward. But Sudan is a vast nation, with over 40 million citizens and a surface area of 2,505,810 square kilometers, a little more than one-quarter the size of the United States, with landscapes and factionalism that would make invasion nearly unthinkable.

By comparison, Iraq covers just 437,072 square kilometers, a little more than twice the size of the northwestern US state of Idaho, and has a population of around 28 million. The tactical difficulties in launching a war of criminal prosecution against the sitting head of state for such a nation are daunting, and at present, there is no published UN strategy involving invasion to unseat the Khartoum government.

Lester R. Brown, EPI :: A fast-unfolding food shortage is engulfing the entire world, driving food prices to record highs. Over the past half-century grain prices have spiked from time to time because of weather-related events, such as the 1972 Soviet crop failure that led to a doubling of world wheat, rice, and corn prices. The situation today is entirely different, however. The current doubling of grain prices is trend-driven, the cumulative effect of some trends that are accelerating growth in demand and other trends that are slowing the growth in supply.

The world has not experienced anything quite like this before. In the face of rising food prices and spreading hunger, the social order is beginning to break down in some countries. In several provinces in Thailand, for instance, rustlers steal rice by harvesting fields during the night. In response, Thai villagers with distant fields have taken to guarding ripe rice fields at night with loaded shotguns.

In Sudan, the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP), which is responsible for supplying grain to 2 million people in Darfur refugee camps, is facing a difficult mission to say the least. During the first three months of this year, 56 grain-laden trucks were hijacked. Thus far, only 20 of the trucks have been recovered and some 24 drivers are still unaccounted for. This threat to U.N.-supplied food to the Darfur camps has reduced the flow of food into the region by half, raising the specter of starvation if supply lines cannot be secured.

In Pakistan, where flour prices have doubled, food insecurity is a national concern. Thousands of armed Pakistani troops have been assigned to guard grain elevators and to accompany the trucks that transport grain.

Food riots are now becoming commonplace. In Egypt, the bread lines at bakeries that distribute state-subsidized bread are often the scene of fights. In Morocco, 34 food rioters were jailed. In Yemen, food riots turned deadly, taking at least a dozen lives. In Cameroon, dozens of people have died in food riots and hundreds have been arrested. Other countries with food riots include Ethiopia, Haiti, Indonesia, Mexico, the Philippines, and Senegal. (See additional examples of food price unrest.)

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The doubling of world wheat, rice, and corn prices has sharply reduced the availability of food aid, putting the 37 countries that depend on the WFP’s emergency food assistance at risk. In March, the WFP issued an urgent appeal for $500 million of additional funds.

Around the world, a politics of food scarcity is emerging. Most fundamentally, it involves the restriction of grain exports by countries that want to check the rise in their domestic food prices. Russia, the Ukraine, and Argentina are among the governments that are currently restricting wheat exports. Countries restricting rice exports include Viet Nam, Cambodia, and Egypt. These export restrictions simply drive prices higher in the world market.

The chronically tight food supply the world is now facing is driven by the cumulative effect of several well established trends that are affecting both global demand and supply. On the demand side, the trends include the continuing addition of 70 million people per year to the earth’s population, the desire of some 4 billion people to move up the food chain and consume more grain-intensive livestock products, and the recent sharp acceleration in the U.S. use of grain to produce ethanol for cars. Since 2005, this last source of demand has raised the annual growth in world grain consumption from roughly 20 million tons to 50 million tons.

Meanwhile, on the supply side, there is little new land to be brought under the plow unless it comes from clearing tropical rainforests in the Amazon and Congo basins and in Indonesia, or from clearing land in the Brazilian cerrado, a savannah-like region south of the Amazon rainforest. Unfortunately, this has heavy environmental costs: the release of sequestered carbon, the loss of plant and animal species, and increased rainfall runoff and soil erosion. And in scores of countries prime cropland is being lost to both industrial and residential construction and to the paving of land for roads, highways, and parking lots for fast-growing automobile fleets.

New sources of irrigation water are even more scarce than new land to plow. During the last half of the twentieth century, world irrigated area nearly tripled, expanding from 94 million hectares in 1950 to 276 million hectares in 2000. In the years since then there has been little, if any, growth. As a result, irrigated area per person is shrinking by 1 percent a year.

Meanwhile, the backlog of agricultural technology that can be used to raise cropland productivity is dwindling. Between 1950 and 1990 the world’s farmers raised grainland productivity by 2.1 percent a year, but from 1990 until 2007 this growth rate slowed to 1.2 percent a year. And the rising price of oil is boosting the costs of both food production and transport while at the same time making it more profitable to convert grain into fuel for cars.

Beyond this, climate change presents new risks. Crop-withering heat waves, more-destructive storms, and the melting of the Asian mountain glaciers that sustain the dry-season flow of that region’s major rivers, are combining to make harvest expansion more difficult. In the past the negative effect of unusual weather events was always temporary; within a year or two things would return to normal. But with climate in flux, there is no norm to return to.

The collective effect of these trends makes it more and more difficult for farmers to keep pace with the growth in demand. During seven of the last eight years, grain consumption exceeded production. After seven years of drawing down stocks, world grain carryover stocks in 2008 have fallen to 55 days of world consumption, the lowest on record. The result is a new era of tightening food supplies, rising food prices, and political instability. With grain stocks at an all-time low, the world is only one poor harvest away from total chaos in world grain markets.

Business-as-usual is no longer a viable option. Food security will deteriorate further unless leading countries can collectively mobilize to stabilize population, restrict the use of grain to produce automotive fuel, stabilize climate, stabilize water tables and aquifers, protect cropland, and conserve soils. Stabilizing population is not simply a matter of providing reproductive health care and family planning services. It requires a worldwide effort to eradicate poverty. Eliminating water shortages depends on a global attempt to raise water productivity similar to the effort launched a half-century ago to raise land productivity, an initiative that has nearly tripled the world grain yield per hectare. None of these goals can be achieved quickly, but progress toward all is essential to restoring a semblance of food security.

This troubling situation is unlike any the world has faced before. The challenge is not simply to deal with a temporary rise in grain prices, as in the past, but rather to quickly alter those trends whose cumulative effects collectively threaten the food security that is a hallmark of civilization. If food security cannot be restored quickly, social unrest and political instability will spread and the number of failing states will likely increase dramatically, threatening the very stability of civilization itself.

Originally published online: 16 April 2008
(http://www.earthpolicy.org/Updates/2008/Update72.htm)
Republished here by permission of Earth Policy Institute
Copyright © 2008 Earth Policy Institute

A revolutionary web-based social networking project, Witness.org has created a platform for delivering evidentiary video documenting human rights abuses for the collective conscience of the online world. ‘The Hub’, as the video sharing platform is called, is designed to ensure that individuals who have documented potential human rights abuses, or who are able to give their testimony via video, can put their message before the eyes of the world.

Begun in 1992, after a number of prominent occasions made it clear that video evidence made it far more difficult to obscure brutal acts of state violence (namely Tiananmen Square, and in an American media phenomenon, the Rodney King tape), Witness was started as an organization whose mission was to find documentary evidence and make it available, in the interests of promoting human rights and righting injustices.

The Hub is now providing select human rights activists with pocket-sized digital video cameras, in hopes they can gather interviews from witnesses to human rights abuses around the world, and begin creating a video archive of testimony from those who know and those who can help to motivate change and spur public opinion abroad to take an interst in specific crises, like those in Darfur, Burma or the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Witness has helped to bring abourt awareness of abuses in Darfur, Chechnya, Burma, and many other places, as well as focusing on the plight of the most ignored victims of mass tragedy: internally displaced people (IDP), refugees who remain within the borders of a war-torn country with a totalitarian or ethnically repressive regime, or which is subject to a state of continual anarchy and bloodshed.

5 February :: Quiet in Chad capital N’Djamena, after France announces it will intervene to protect Déby gov’t, rebels pull back; at least one Darfur rebel group also said it would fight to protect Déby’s gov’t, as it considers Déby an ally in its fight against the Sudan regime of Omar al-Bashir… CIA Director Michael Hayden told Congress today that his agency had used “waterboarding” in interrogations with 3 different suspects, but that the technique had not been used for 5 years; the simulated drowning technique is illegal according to several US military codes, and Congress is working to pass an outright ban; Reuters reports “Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat and judiciary committee member, demanded that Attorney General Michael Mukasey investigate the CIA waterboarding and vowed to delay the nomination for Mukasey’s deputy until the attorney general responds to that and other issues”; Justice is already investigating the destruction of evidence related to these interrogations, and investigators have authority to look into related criminal activity… 24 states to hold primaries, caucuses, in the largest single day of presidential primary voting in US history; Democrats expected to draw comparable numbers of convention delegates, while GOP looks to have clear frontrunner after Super Tuesday voting… US Congress to question Defense Dept. officials on war costs, demand more thorough, precise cost projections, as Democrat-controlled Congress organizes attack on Bush’s $3.1 trillion spending plan; Defense Secretary Gates says the $515 billion Pentagon request is well thought out, what is needed to keep America safe, while many in both parties in Congress remain skeptical that money is being well spent in Iraq conflict… US Navy lawyer defending Canadian accused of aiding al-Qaeda says then 15-year old client was “a victim of al Qaeda, not a member of al Qaeda”, that international law treats all child soldiers as involuntary victims of war, while prosecution argued that the legislation governing the Guantánamo special tribunals does not distinguish between adult and child soldiers, that Congress would have made the distinction, because it knew Khadr could face charges; there is no ruling as yet on the request… Mother of pop star Britney Spears has filed injunction against her daughter’s manager, saying he drugged her daughter in effort to take control of her life, assets; Lynne Spears said in sworn statement that Lutfi stole her daughter’s phone chargers, slipped drugs into her food, yelled and dominated her, and tried to cut contact from outside influences, and described the following scene: “She cleaned the house. She changed her clothes many times. She also changed her dogs’ clothes many times. Britney spoke to me in a tone and with the level of understanding of a very young girl”…

4 February :: US pres. George W. Bush has presented the nation’s first federal budget exceeding $3 billion in spending; while giving generous expansions to defense spending, the budget seeks to cut $196 billion from healthcare spending, and projects near record budget deficits for at least two years; Bush claims that part of the 6% increase in spending is tied to the planned $145 billion economic stimulus package he’s working with Congress to implement… Fmr. colonial power, ally France stands aside as rebels attack Chad gov’t, though officially it says it supports the elected gov’t, UNSC approves unilateral action by France to protect Déby gov’t, condemns rebels; Sarkozy gov’t says it plans to ensure joint EU “humantarian protection force” for Darfur refugees in eastern Chad (EU’s largest ever common defense deployment) be implemented to protect aid routes… French pres. Sarkozy has lost support rapidly among electorate, his approval dropping 13 points in January alone, to 41%, as economic woes seem by many to go unattended; his wedding Saturday to singer Carla Bruni was unannounced, and did not even include the official presidential photographer… London establishes 610 sq mile low-emissions zone, within which violators who do not meet EU emissions standards for transport vehicles will be charged £200 per day to operate; Mayor Ken Livingstone is quoted as saying “In a modern world city, people should have the opportunity to live and work without fear of being poisoned by the air they breathe”, though the plan is projected only to eliminate 16% of air pollution by 2012… Millions assemble in cities around world in “global rally” against FARC rebels in Colombia, demanding peace, end to bloodshed; Bloomberg reports “Millions of Colombians dressed in white marched throughout the country and in major cities worldwide today to express outrage at 40 years of violence and kidnapping by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia”; over 100,000 people were reported to have registered their participation in the rally on the social networking site Facebook…

3 February :: Surge in violence in Chad appears to be coup attempt against Déby gov’t in N’Djamena; France has begun evacuating foreigners from Chad, in face of what could be severe violence between rebels, gov’t; rebel offensive comes just days before EU “humanitarian protection force” set to arrive in Chad… CSM reports “If President Idriss Déby’s government falls by military coup, humanitarian aid operations feeding nearly 400,000 Sudanese refugees and displaced Chadians will be thrown into disarray, and half a dozen Darfur rebel movements taking refuge in Chad may be forced to move their bases back into the troubled Sudanese region”… New poll in CA shows Obama, McCain dramatically increasing support in recent weeks; Obama now runs even with Clinton, whom he trailed by 12 percentage points just two weeks ago, while McCain surging to an 8 percentage point lead over closest rival Romney; Obama also has edge over Clinton against McCain in general election, according to poll, with respondents saying they would vote Obama over McCain 47% to 40%, or Clinton over McCain 45% to 43%…

1 January 2008 :: Le Monde has acquired a document that outlines irregularities recorded by observers of the Kenyan presidential poll, appearing to demonstrate fraud amounting to the altering of millions of votes: according to Le Monde, the report shows that opposition leader Raila Odinga led by as much as one million votes, a lead which disappeared in mysterious circumstances in late counting; the document was reportedly presented to the government in advance of the announcement that incumbent president Mwai Kibaki was the official winner… Fighting across the country is reported to be intensifying, with nearly 300 people killed in clashes with police; in one western city, where Odinga’s support is particularly strong, reports suggest police fired “indiscriminately” into crowds of civilian demonstrators, killing 40, including women and children; fighting has revealed ethnic rifts in Kenyan society and Maina Kiai, chairman of the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights has lamented “We are going back to the days of dictatorship”… Reports from Pakistan show gov’t has reversed its position on cause of Bhutto death, now offering reward for two suspects seen in video of shooting; CNN is also reporting that a lawyer for Rawalpindi General Hospital, where Bhutto was treated, says gov’t officials threatened doctors who intended to perform an autopsy of Bhutto’s body to determine cause of death; in his open letter, he wrote “There is a state within the state, and that state within the state does not want itself to be held accountable”, an apparent reference to an alleged cadre of corrupt security officials accused of not wanting a return to democratic rule… An American diplomat was shot and killed in the center of Khartoum, Sudan; US officials are not speaking about the details of the killing, saying the shooting is still under investigation; IHT reports “On Monday, President George W. Bush, who has called the conflict in Darfur a genocide, signed a bill that makes it easier for mutual funds and other investment managers to sell stakes in companies that do business in Sudan”…

The top ten most underreported humanitarian crises worldwide are, according to Doctors without Borders (MSF), “Displaced Fleeing War in Somalia Face Humanitarian Crisis; Political and Economic Turmoil Sparks Health-Care Crisis in Zimbabwe; Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis Spreads As New Drugs Go Untested; Expanded Use of Nutrient Dense Ready-to-Use Foods Crucial for Reducing Childhood Malnutrition; Civilians Increasingly Under Fire in Sri Lankan Conflict; Conditions Worsen in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo; Living Precariously in Colombia’s Conflict Zones; Humanitarian Aid Restricted in Myanmar; Civilians Caught Between Armed Groups in Central African Republic; As Chechen Conflict Ebbs, Critical Humanitarian Needs Still Remain”.

The official press release goes on to explain that “The DRC and Colombia, both wracked by ongoing civil conflict and massive internal displacement of civilians, have dominated the list over the past decade, each appearing a total of nine times. The humanitarian consequence of war in Chechnya has appeared eight times. Somalia has appeared seven times, most recently because renewed fighting centered in Mogadishu in 2007 has killed thousands of people and forced hundreds of thousands to flee their homes, only to endure disease and extremely precarious living conditions.

According to Andrew Tyndall, publisher of the online media-tracking journal, “The Tyndall Report,” the countries and contexts highlighted by MSF on this year’s list accounted for just 18 minutes of coverage on the three major U.S. television networks’ nightly newscasts from January through November 2007. This figure does not include coverage of Myanmar or tuberculosis; both generated significant media attention, but very little of it focused on the medical humanitarian aspects of either context. Chechnya, Sri Lanka, and CAR—where many villages were burned to the ground in fighting between government forces and rebels and tens of thousands of people fled into inhospitable forests seeking safety—were never mentioned.”

TheHotSpring.com :: Due to the science we already have, the laws we have to govern our own activity and to force government to act for the public health, we face the real possibility of being forced, in American courts, in the future, to pay for damage done to the most affected populations in other parts of the world, as a result of inaction by our government. And if not in court, then as a matter of the de facto urgencies of international political stability.

If we do not find a way to work to mitigate global climate change, future generations will look back and will see clearly that a zeitgeist of selfish convenience and primitive disregard for the wellbeing of our fellow human beings led to a reckless attitude with regard to this snowballing crisis. The public voice, and those campaigning for the level of public respect needed for election to office, should bring this issue to the fore, push for real initiatives to tackle the problem boldly, in a collaborative way, now.

In November, UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon wrote a piece entitled “At the tipping point“, in which he explained some of the most dire aspects of the advancing effects of global climate change. Among the serious potential crises is the evidence that 20% of of Antarctica’s territory, in the form of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, may break up. “If it broke up, sea levels could rise by six meters”, he writes.

Added to that, such massive events may take some time to unfold, but once they reach their respective tipping point, the event itself could happen “quickly, almost overnight”. It’s worth considering what effect such a sudden sea-level rise would have on low-lying coastal cities, like New York, Mumbai or Shanghai, Dubai, Sydney or Hong Kong. The storm surge that breached New Orleans’ levees and plunged the city into chaos was roughly six meters.

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The IPCC is one of the most comprehensive and prestigious bodies of scientists ever gathered from around the world, and it has been unequivocal in its reports this year. Every major player in world politics, including Pres. Bush, has acknowledged that global climate change is happening, and is the result of human activities. 2007 will be remembered as the year the climate crisis went public and stayed on the global public interest radar, for good. The United States cannot afford to be lagging behind, not now, and not in the eyes of history.

Senator Barack Obama’s campaign website explains the problem as follows: “Global warming is real, is happening now and is the result of human activities. The number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes has almost doubled in the last 30 years. Glaciers are melting faster; the polar ice caps are shrinking; trees are blooming earlier; oceans are becoming more acidic, threatening marine life; people are dying in heat waves; species are migrating, and eventually many will become extinct.” In fact, large-scale mass extinction already appears to be underway, with the IPCC predicting 15% to 37% of all species may be wiped out by climate change alone.

The campaign issue write-up continues: “Scientists predict that absent major emission reductions, climate change will worsen famine and drought in some of the poorest places in the world and wreak havoc across the globe. In the U.S., sea-level rise threatens to cause massive economic and ecological damage to our populated coastal areas.” Many may disagree, but the science supports every word of the problem as stated. US presidential candidates are, for the first time, seriously contending for the climate-responsibility prize.

So, for those candidates serious enough to work across ideological rifts, a proposal for responsible legislation to deal with this crisis (to be pushed for and initiated in advance of the November 2008 US elections):

1. Push a 90% emissions reduction goal for 2050, and make it global. (There’s no reason this cannot be done. Wind-energy resources in Texas, Kansas and North Dakota alone could power the entire US economy and more, if properly funded and developed. Most nations have a surplus of wind resources; the secret is local development and responsible construction and implementation. Other new technologies and a rebuilding of transport infrastructure can help reach this goal, without undermining economic stability.)

2. Work to punish all forms of corruption associated with energy production, and implement stiff sanctions against any nation that does not severely punish such corruption (whether it’s bribery is Appalachian coal mining schemes, Saudi authoritarianism and arms trafficking, Uzbekistan’s megalomaniac leader, or China’s support for the Bashir government in Khartoum).

3. Ensure that the US economy is incentivized, from top to bottom, to adopt renewable resources and that we can fund through innovation, entrepreneurship, research and development grants, the green technology boom, which if properly carried out, will far surpass the 1990s economic expansion related to the building and popularization of the world wide web.

4. Institute in US law a “limited use” doctrine for nuclear plants, which means they will be employed in a period of transition (with no new construction) as a means of softening the price pinch that could come to sectors that lag in the renewables transition. This is not meant to allow new growth or prolonged use of fossil fuels, but rather to avoid punishing the underprivileged for their lack of access to easy capital. Eventually, a plan will need to be implemented that will transition away from these extremely costly plants with unequaled capacity for contamination (in case of accident).

5. Greening the military: begin immediately the funding and incentivization for defense contractors of a comprehensive transition to a military made more efficient, flexible and green in its global reach by way of the ecological (which in the very near future means economic) sustainability of its technologies and deployment systems. This will soon be a measure of rapid-deployment capacity, i.e. the ability to project power without bankrupting the state, so there is a direct security motivation involved in this. (The US military is a massive source of research and development, and cutting-edge technologies could emerge for civilian use, if the fossil fuel addiction is broken.)

6. Plan for “jump” generation innovations: energy resourcing is still in its infancy, comparatively (fossil fuels are square one; nuclear a bold but ill-advised ‘spur’; renewables are the first step toward rational sustainable energy policy; after renewables, or within the context of, there will come a more advanced mode of powering the global economy). Geothermal still relies on risky construction methods, wind requires massive construction and solar occupies space (ever less, but still a constraint), whereas new capabilities may be lying in wait beyond the scope of current scientific methods.

Let’s think ahead and privilege the “zero emissions” criterion. The more we can do to implement large-scale energy solutions that are in themselves zero-emissions processes, the larger the percentage of current emissions we can do without. It’s that simple.

We are on the cusp of an energy revolution, which is synonymous with acting to save the relative homeostasis of the global environment, to which our civilization is accustomed and which it requires for long-term stability. We can phase out fossil fuels, then nuclear, while building a global renewables grid, and (parallel to that) jumping ahead to what’s next. Integrated thinking will help us to serve the needs of a global systems ecology imperiled by our current practices.

Lastly, I propose that it is of the utmost urgency to examine security risks involved with climate change. We already have water wars in Africa. There are potential hydrological conflicts brewing in South America and south Asia. Australia faces the possibility of the Sydney region becoming near uninhabitable in a century’s time. And Bangladesh, with more than 150 million inhabitants, is caught between India’s overpumping of vital rivers and the constant threat of mass death and chaos from monsoon flooding.

We need to look at the potential for crop failure on massive regional scales, resulting economic or political collapse, or the unplanned migration of tens of millions of refugees, and what happens when local militia start responding (reference: Darfur, or Afghanistan, on a much larger scale).

We need to find a collaborative framework wherein:
1. democracy is not in any way curtailed nor are totalitarian measures elevated by the global protocols;
2. global treaties are bold, viable, respected and implemented;
3. the median wealth of the human population globally is increased (to de-incentivize violations).

This is the very least we can do to get started.

Sentido.tv :: Darfur, beset by years of bloody internecine violence, with the Khartoum-backed janjaweed militia killing civilians in numbers the US government has officially declared to be genocide, is still struggling to find a real beginning for peace. For years, human rights groups have pleaded with the international community to intervene, with or without the support of the Khartoum government. Finally, in August, the UN Security Council ordered the world’s largest peacekeeping mission to secure Darfur.

Estimates at the time suggested that at least 200,000 people have been killed in Darfur, with more than 2 million refugees unable to return home, some since 2003. UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon has noted the scale of the mission is “unprecedented” and told the Security Council “You are sending a clear and powerful signal of your commitment to improve the lives of the people of the region, and close this tragic chapter in Sudan’s history”.

After years of staunch opposition and threats, the government in Khartoum said it would “support” a UN force to police Darfur, but only after intense negotiations, the backing of China, a key Sudan ally, and the “toning down” of language attacking Khartoum for involvement in a deliberate campaign of genocide. China’s backing allowed for a unanimous vote in favor of the peacekeeping mission.

But cooperating has been spotty, and human rights groups are now calling for a comprehensive probe of the murder of 10 peacekeepers and police, allegedly by the same groups accused of carrying out the slaughter of Darfur civilians. It remains unclear whether the Khartoum government is committed to peace, and the rebel groups have not all signed up to the framework for peace.

The world community is facing in the case of Darfur a grave challenge to the rule of law and the right of people to live free of state-backed killing. Issues of national sovereignty, state policing powers, interventionist diplomacy and regional unity have made resolving the fractious crisis a political hot-button among security council powers, so for now, much depends on the success of the peacekeeping mission in overseeing tenuous peace.

MORE AT
Sentido.tv, Darfur Humanitarian Crisis Special Report

2 October :: HRW says killing of 10 African Union peacekeepers, civilian police in Darfur is war crime, calls on Khartoum, gov’t forces in region to aid investigation, punish those responsible… WSJ reports “Frustrated by the stalemate over Iraq, House Democrats spelled out a strategy that would stall action on President Bush’s 2008 war budget and rely on incremental funding to sustain troop operations in until next spring”… Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh has reported “intensification” of White House planning for war with Iran; according to Hersh “What had been presented primarily as a counter-proliferation mission has been reconceived as counterterrorism”, with focus now shifted toward attacks on Revolutionary Guard facilities, supplies and infrastructure… Cuban doctors have reportedly provided eye surgery to the man responsible for killing Ernesto “Che” Guevara, through a program by which Cuban physicians provide eye treatment across Latin America… ‘The Caucus’, a NY Times blog reports “Senator Barack Obama today will propose setting a goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons in the world, saying the United States should transform its nuclear posture and dramatically reduce nuclear stockpiles to reduce the threat of nuclear terrorism”… US pending home sales index fell to record low in August, amid spreading mortgage crisis, index now 21.5% lower than just 12 months ago, 16% lower than two months ago…

The Elders is a humanitarian initiative led by South African archibishop Desmond Tutu and former South African pres. Nelson Mandela, designed to bring the African “village elders” concept to the global village, in an effort to defuse flashpoint crisis situations and speed responsible policy-making. Its foundations are the basic principles of human rights and the experience and credibility of the group’s emissaries.

Apart from Mandela and Tutu, the group also includes Mandela’s wife Graça Machel, Kofi Annan, Lakhtar Brahimi, fmr. US pres. Jimmy Carter, Ela Bhatt, Gro Brundtland, Fernando Cardoso, Li Zhaoxing, Mary Robinson and Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Nobel laureate Grameen Bank for microcredit.

The stature of those included is part of what is expected to bring an international diplomatic prestige to its chosen approach to select humanitarian causes and conflict resolution. The Elders have said they reserve a place for detained Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. The idea was originally brought to Mandela seven years ago by British billionaire and philanthropist Richard Branson.

Nelson Mandela, in his inaugural address to announce the group’s founding, said:

“As institutions of government grapple, often unequally, with challenges they face, the efforts of a small, dedicated group of leaders, working objectively and without any vested interest in the outcome, can help resolve what often seem like intractable problems … Using their collective experience, their moral courage and their ability to rise above the parochial concerns of nation, race and creed, they can help to make our planet a more peaceful, healthy and equitable place to live.”

He added that the group will not become “arbitrary and arrogant” and will seek “long-term, sustainable approaches”, based on the advice of local interests, scientific experts, political advisors and “anyone who is motivated to help resolve a problem”.

The group’s first mission will be to Sudan, in an effort to lay the groundwork for a lasting political solution to end the killing in Darfur and help Darfurians return to their homes, re-establish civil society, obtain an appropriate level of self-rule and get the food and medical aid needed to help achieve these goals.

The peace negotiated in Darfur is tenuous at best, as one of the major rebel factions has refused to sign on so long as the Khartoum government remains in political and military control of the region.

Mandela also declared that “It is kindness and generous accomodation that are the catalysts for real change”, citing the African proverbial idea that “we are human only through the humanity of other human beings” and foresaw the group bringing “new energy to areas where others have become weary, because of endless conflict.”

30 September :: US pres. George W. Bush has approved $25 million in fuel aid for North Korea, as part of a February deal to shut down nuclear facilities, dismantle weapons and allow IAEA inspections; the Yongbyon reactor was shut down in July… Six-party talks to negotiate North Korean denuclearization have been suspended for two days, to allow six nations’ negotiators to contemplate discussions to date… Tutu, Mandela’s ‘The Elders’ initiative gathers established elder humanitarians to “speak freely, be fiercely independent and respond fast and flexibly in conflict situations”, will make first formal visit to Sudan, in effort to end Darfur killing; group has said chair is left open for detained Burmese opposition leader Suu Kyi… Burmese junta has reportedly allowed UN negotiator Ibrahim Gambari to meet with Aung San Suu Kyi, opposition leader under indefinite house arrest; security forces have reportedly detained more religious and lay ‘activists’; EU foreign minister Solana has said the Union is examining all possible measures that could be taken if military does not cease attacking demonstrators; military reported to be assaulting anyone with camera in streets of Rangoon… Sufi muslims celebrate 800 years since birth of mystic poet Rumi, Turkey will hold great ‘dance of the whirling dervishes’ to observe history of the pacifist Sufi order; the poet was “born in 1207 in Balkh in Central Asia, now part of Afghanistan”, reports BBC; in Afghanistan, the Taliban attempted to eliminate Sufism by banning music, imposing fundamentalist dogma… As Afghan conflict now longer than WWI, Pres. Hamid Karzai has said he wants negotiations with the Taliban, would “go to them”, may offer them position in gov’t… Intense flooding over western and central Africa has hit 20 nations; Togo has made an urgent appeal for food and medical aid; the EU has promised some 2 million € to help Togo, Burkina Faso and Ghana collectively… Hundreds have gathered to protest state violence in Islamabad, used to suppress bloody riots spurred by ruling allowing Musharraf to run for president while holding control of military… UK PM Brown rumored to be considering an early election to capitalize on high poll numbers just weeks after taking power from Blair; Conservative party calls national conference to prepare for possible vote… Ecuador voting today to choose delegates to new Constituent Assembly, aimed at replacing Congress, traditional power structures…