http://afpak.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/09/08/dispatch_from_sindh_children_at_risk_from_disease

http://www.rte.ie/news/2010/0905/worldreport.html

In the ad-hoc child malnutrition facility at the Railway Hospital in Sukkur, mothers cradle and nurse their toddlers, all emaciated and weakened. A row of beds runs either side of the ward in the brown and gray-painted Raj-era hospital.

Three year-old Zamina was malnourished before the floods hit, but the flight from the family farm in Thulla to this heaving city in northern Sindh worsened the tiny girl’s condition considerably, says Dr Sakina Jafri, pausing to speak as she moved from bed to bed.

“With the threat of disease all around, young children are most prone,” she said. “And when they are so young and are malnourished, it only adds to that level of vulnerability.”

Mother Zeina feeds Zamina. (Photo: Simon Roughneen)

UNICEF Director Anthony Lake says that almost 9 million children are at risk of disease, an alarm call rung out in tandem with World Food Program head Josette Sheeran’s warning of a second wave of disaster looming even as flood waters slowly recede.

Authorities have also struggled to cope with a growing number of cases of severe diarrhea and malaria caused by dirty water that offers a perfect breeding ground for insects and disease. More than 500,000 cases of acute diarrhea and nearly 95,000 cases of suspected malaria have been treated since the floods first hit, the U.N.’s World Health Organization said last week.

The big fear is a cholera outbreak, given that little or no capacity is in place to deal with what could be a devastating epidemic. Cases have been reported in Sindh province on recent days, but the Pakistani Government has not yet officially announced anything. Cholera can kill within 48 hours if not treated, and is highly-contagious. Once identified it can be treated quickly, usually with basic rehydration solutions.

These children receive a few hours education in the morning at their camp, run by the Institute for Business Administration in Sukkur. (Photo: Simon Roughneen)

Over 6 million people have been displaced by the floods, with over 3.5 million of these in Sindh alone. 1.2 million homes have been damaged or destroyed – five times as many as the Haiti earthquake. While some of the homeless are in camps set up by the military and NGOs, the majority are pitching down wherever possible, constructing ad-hoc shelters and often sheltering under beds or blankets in the baking heat.

The Sindh Provincial Disaster Management Authority (PDMA) said that there were almost 900,000 people in camps and spontaneous settlements in the province as of 28 August, figures that may not be inclusive of more recent displacement. In any case, sanitation facilities and clean water are absent from most camps, compounding an already parlous public health environment and laying the ground for the spread of disease. Even as the waters in Punjab and the north of Pakistan, towns and cities in Sindh remain at risk, with evacuation orders issued for 400,000 people in Mehar and surrounding areas.

Hunger is a problem now and emergency rations are needed for adults and children, as well as therapeutic feeding needed for severely affected young children such as Zamina.

It is a problem for the Government as well, with implications for the country’s economy. After briefing the country’s cabinet, Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani last week worried aloud about food insecurity due to the damage to agriculture, and follow-on impact on social welfare.

“The floods have inflicted damage to the economy which may, by some estimates, reach $43 billion (£27.9 billion), while affecting 30 percent of all agricultural land,” he said. Agriculture is the mainstay of the economy, with cotton the main cash crop. Textiles, which are cotton-dependent, are the country’s biggest export. The next wheat harvest is at risk after the floods destroyed more than 500,000 tons of seed stocks in Asia’s third-largest wheat producer.

Village under water in rural Sindh. (Photo: Simon Roughneen)

Hunger and malnutrition are hitting hard right now, but food shortages will be a problem in the near-to-immediate future as well. With millions of acres of cultivable land under water, nobody knows how the land can be readied for the next planting season, which should start in October, or if people will be able to return home in time for that. With so many draught animals lost in the waters, it will be difficult for farmers to prepare the ground, which will be covered in heavy silt.

Zamina’s mother Zeina knows this, her head bowed and her words translated through Dr Sakina. She nurses her youngest, an eight-month old boy, while a nurse feeds Zamina.

Life will be immensely-difficult for her and millions more families in the same position from now on. “I have nine children”, she says. “My husband and the other children are in a camp. What will we do now? We just don’t know,” she laments.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/07/09/seven_questions_jose_ramos_horta?a

East Timor’s Nobel Prize-winning president asks, just who is the failed state here?

President Ramos-Horta gives press conference at Dili Airport, July 09 (Simon Roughneen)

A year after surviving an assassination attempt, President José Ramos-Horta is feeling good about his country. Peace seems to have taken hold in East Timor, where U.N. peacekeepers have been based almost continuously since 1999. The economy is bucking trends in the region with a 12 percent growth rate last year. And Aug. 30 marks the 10-year anniversary of the vote for independence from Indonesia. For Ramos-Horta, who shared a Nobel Peace Prize in 1996 for his nonviolent work toward independence and was elected president in 2007, things could hardly look better.

Proud of recent success and touting plans for more, Ramos-Horta spoke to Foreign Policy from his new Chinese-built presidential compound in Dili, East Timor’s capital. He criticizes the West’s misunderstandings about his country and discusses the progress it has made in recent years. Despite challenges ahead — from security reform to corruption to widespread poverty — Ramos-Horta says that the United States is closer to being a “failing state” than the country he leads. Excerpts:

Foreign Policy: The United Nations decided in February to extend the mandate of its peacekeeping force for another year. How is security-sector reform in East Timor progressing? Are the East Timorese police ready to resume full responsibilities from the United Nations?

José Ramos-Horta: I am confident that the PNTL [National Police of East Timor] can assume full responsibilities. I prefer that the handover be at a prudent pace alongside continued training and institutional reform. I would like the U.N. police to give backup until 2012, and I know there is political will among contributing countries for this.

I see a two-to-three-year horizon before we have progressed enough in redeveloping our defense forces. The Army has recruited new soldiers to fill projected numbers. In the next two years we face a generation[al] change, as resistance veterans retire after serving this country for 30 years.

FP: Many of the personnel involved in the 2006 East Timor crisis have retained senior positions in the security forces. Are elites exempt from justice? How will this affect people’s confidence in the country’s institutions?

JRH: Some American and European “geniuses,” who write in newspapers and so-called academic journals, have labeled ours as a failed state. Well, I can only cite another American institution, the International Republican Institute, which did a two-month survey in late 2008 and reached the following conclusions: Confidence in the president is 83 percent, confidence in the police is 82 percent, confidence in the prime minister, I think, is 79 percent, and more than 60 percent had confidence in how the country is being run.

Some of these pseudo intellectuals in the United States seem to forget that Timor-Leste [East Timor], along with China, is the one financing U.S. debt. So who is the failing state — the United States or Timor-Leste?

FP: Generating employment is vital, given East Timor’s youthful demographics and the links between unemployment and gang and/or political violence. What needs to be done to address this?

JRH: For a few years now, the government has to be the agent that takes the lead in economic development in this country. We need massive investments in roads and roads and roads. If we are serious about developing our agriculture and ensuring food security, if we want to promote tourism, if we want to provide our people access to services such as education and health, we need roads. This will create thousands of jobs for many years to come, and this [project] will last 10 years. We will build 4,000 kilometers of roads, a new airport, and a port. Foreign investment will come from tourism as we develop this infrastructure.

We are negotiating with Digicel to become the second mobile carrier here, to complement Timor Telecom, which is majority-owned by Portugal Telecom [PT]. We have started dialogue with PT for them to agree to our preference, which is [market] liberalization. PT should abide by European standards — so no monopolies here, as in Europe. As prices are reduced, you will see a huge expansion of mobile-phone users. Timor could have 500,000, maybe even 800,000 users, rather than the current 150,000 out of a population of 1.1 million.

FP: East Timor will soon celebrate its 10-year anniversary of the end of Indonesian occupation. How do you plan to mark this date?

JRH: We will celebrate August 30 in a booming economy. Dili and the rest of country are at peace; the police and Army are reconciled; and we are celebrating at a time when cooperation between Timor-Leste and Indonesia is at its best — no two countries on the planet have a better bilateral relationship.

FP: What plans are in place for post-conflict justice for the crimes committed during the Indonesian occupation and around the 1999 referendum?

JRH: My personal preference is to adopt a law that simply puts an end to the tragic chapters of the past. Let bygones be bygones. Let us not forget the victims and heroes, but let us forgive those who did harm, because God gave us a greater gift: our independence.

Let’s forget about an international tribunal — it will never happen.

Indonesia has been remarkable. It left humiliated, after investing in Timor-Leste in a way that the Portuguese never did. Indonesia is today the most vibrant democracy in Southeast Asia. It has made remarkable progress, and I leave it to them on their own watch to deal with the perpetrators of violence in Indonesia and Timor-Leste.

I lost two brothers and a sister [in the violence]. We were able to exhume the body of my sister in 2003, but we have never been able to trace [my brothers,] Nuno or Gil [Guilherme]. My mother disagrees with me, and many mothers do not share my accommodating stance with Indonesia. I say the greater justice is that we are free.

FP: How would you assess the role of the United Nations and the international community since they first intervened in 1999?

JRH: I am eternally grateful to the international community, which has invested so much in this country. With mixed results, for sure — the U.N. is not a perfect organization. But we have to accept our share of responsibility for developments so far. It was not the U.N. that decided the police and Army should fight in 2006. It was not the U.N. that told [former president and now prime minister] Kay Rala Xanana Gusmão and [former Prime Minister] Mari Alkatiri to quarrel. There are many more-important issues facing the U.N. and the international community than Timor-Leste.

FP: Prime Minister Gusmão has recently been accused of approving a large contract with a company of which his daughter was a major shareholder. What is your response to these corruption allegations?

JRH: I remain 100 percent confident in Xanana Gusmão. He was right in assigning contracts to 15 Timorese companies, and his daughter happened to be a minor member of one company. Should he have said that this company cannot take part just because of that? I don’t know the details of how this was done. But I can guarantee that Xanana Gusmão is the most decent, most caring person you will find in this country.

http://experts.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/03/12/ireland_goes_back_in_time

Continuity IRA Slogan

It’s looking dangerously similar to the 1980s in Northern Ireland, but a lot has changed since the worst days of “the troubles.”

Last weekend shattered the illusion that the gun had been permanently removed from Irish politics. Two Irish Republican Army (IRA) splinter groups carried out what seemed to be well-planned hits, first against two Afghanistan-bound British soldiers, and later, against a Catholic policeman responding to what turned out to be a terrorist trap. Tragedy that it was, the violence was just the first of two related messes now threatening peace and prosperity in Ireland. The financial crisis has also sent a wave of panic across the now-dead ‘Celtic Tiger’ — whose economy is now set to shrink by at least 6 percent in 2009 after a decade and a half of record growth.

Is history repeating itself? To many in Ireland, it’s like a return to the 1980s — shootings in the north and a basket-case economy in the Republic. No one, barring the hard-line pro-independence minority, is nostalgic for the bad old days. But some fear they might get a return to the 80s nevertheless.

From the politics, at least, the crisis looks familiar enough to warrant concern. The two splinter groups, which call themselves the Real IRA and the Continuity IRA, continue to push for Irish unification by gunfire; they have resisted the political approach adopted by mainstream IRA leaders. Although this is the first fatal attack since 1998, there have been ample warnings recently that IRA splinter groups were sizing up potential targets. Northern Ireland has seen more than 20 gun and bomb attacks in the past 18 months, wounding seven police officers. One month ago, police found a 300-pound car bomb outside a British army barracks, a hint that some of the old IRA bomb-making and training networks might have been revived and co-opted by the dissident groups.

To be sure, these latest murders were intended to spark either a heavy-handed British response, or a reaction from terrorist counterparts on the other side of the sectarian divide. Indeed, the perpetrators might have sought both in a bid to reinvigorate the tit-for-tat vortex of violence that took so long to seal off. The governments in London and in Dublin were quick to condemn the attacks. Yet London will not want to redeploy additional soldiers back in Northern Ireland, for fear that this will play into terrorist hands.

It was significant that Martin McGuinness, Northern Ireland’s deputy prime minister, pointedly and evocatively described the killers as “traitors.” As an IRA leader during the 30 plus years of attritional terror endured by Northern Ireland, McGuinness (who helped dole out a good proportion of the misery) today views the “dissident” IRA groups as a challenge to his authority and that of Gerry Adams, President of Sinn Féin, the political party linked to the ‘mainstream’ IRA. Today, the pair lead Irish Republicanism through political channels — resisting the tradition of using political violence to agitate for an all-Ireland independent republic. McGuinness called the perpetrators traitors to preempt what hard-liners consider his and Adams’s own treachery — taking formal political office as part of a British-ruled Northern Ireland under the 1998 Good Friday peace deal.

What now? During the troubles, as the 1969-1998 conflict is now referred to, Dublin was ambivalent about hunting down the IRA in the Republic, partly given the heavy-handed British response in Northern Ireland and the threat of protestant terror groups mounting attacks in the Republic.

Now, however, co-operation between the police forces in both jurisdictions is good. The Republic has a highly-professional counter-terror police unit and an elite Army Ranger corps modeled on the British SAS (that latter of which is now contributing to an EU – UN joint peacekeeping mission in Chad). Both could be deployed against IRA factions hiding out in the Republic.

One can only hope that the dissident IRA factions have not got too much of a head-start on the security forces with the recent attacks. As the Irish economy capsizes, the Dublin government – and the Irish population — certainly have plenty of other things to worry about. Unemployment, for example, is expected to reach at least 10 percent before the year is out – leaving vast legions of jobless, much as in the 1980s. This time, there is no where to flee to, as the U.S. and European economies falter too.

Thankfully it’s not yet the troubles of the 1980s all over again. As Peter de Vries once said — “Nostalgia just isn’t want it used to be.”

http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2007/10/31/the_coming_war_in_sudan

Abandoned Sudanese tank outside Malakal, Upper Nile State. The area here was heavily contested during the 1983-2005 war (Photo: Simon Roughneen)

On Monday, United Nations (U.N.) and African Union (A.U.) mediators tried to put a positive spin on the failure of the latest Darfur peace talks in Sirte, Libya, after various splinter movements were the only groups to show up to negotiate with a Sudanese government that has collapsed. Crucially, Darfur’s major rebel groups, the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), were absent.

The meeting’s host, Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi, said that the world should cut Khartoum some slack over international peacekeepers since Darfur is nothing more than a tribal “fight over a camel.”

This suits the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir just fine, as it implies that the proposed 26,000 UN/AU force will achieve nothing.

Sudan’s government, meanwhile, is in limbo. On October 11, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/M), the southern-based former rebels headed by Sudan’s First Vice-President Salva Kiir, abruptly left the Sudanese government, accusing Bashir’s party of backsliding on the landmark 2005 power-sharing agreement that ended the 22-year civil war between the mostly Muslim North and the predominantly Christian South. Under the agreement, South Sudan will vote on secession in 2011. The SPLA/M’s withdrawal makes such an outcome more likely.

Before that happens, though, the North-South border must be delineated, a delicate task given that much of Sudan’s oil sits right in the middle in a disputed area called Abyei. Bashir recently rejected the official Abyei Boundary-Commission finding that placed much of Abyei’s oil in South Sudan. Abyei will itself vote on whether it wants to be part of the North or South in 2011. If it goes South and the South then secedes, the oil goes too. Complicating matters further, oil-rich areas along the proposed border stretch well into Darfur.

Yet oil is hardly the sole factor linking Darfur and the South; power politics are at play here, too. As part of the 2005 peace deal, Sudan is slated to hold national elections in 2009, two years before the South’s secession referendum. In a fair contest, Bashir and the NCP would surely lose power in Khartoum. Many northerners resent the South’s potential secession almost as much as they do the NCP’s long monopoly on power and patronage. In elections, the SPLA/M will likely win big in the South, making secession more likely. But elections will be difficult to run amid fighting in Darfur and along the North-South border, so the NCP is surely stalling peace now to forestall bigger losses later on.

But the NCP’s enemies are not standing idly by. As they did in 2003, Muslim rebels from Darfur are linking up with the largely Christian South Sudanese against the Islamist Arab generals dominant in Khartoum since 1989. Just last Tuesday, JEM militants kidnapped two foreign workers during an attack on a Chinese-run oil concession in Kordofan province—which borders Darfur and Abyei—in an effort to take the fight outside Darfur and into a zone where the NCP-led Army repeatedly clashed with the SPLA/M before the 2005 peace deal. It is significant that while peace talks were going nowhere in Sirte, JEM leaders met SPLA/M officials in Juba, South Sudan’s would-be capital, and issued a joint statement supporting the SPLA/M withdrawal from government.

NCP and SPLA/M troops are cheek-by-jowl in Abyei and other oil-laden border areas. With the NCP defiant over SPLA/M allegations that it is stalling implementation of the 2005 deal and no sign of progress on divisive issues, the bases seem loaded for a return to war across Sudan. Sadly, it may be just a question of time.

Simon Roughneen’s reports on Sudan and elsewhere been published by ISN Security Watch and in various Irish and British newspapers. He has also been to Sudan as Advocacy Officer with GOAL and will have two chapters on politics and security in Sudan published in Beyond Settlement (Associated University Press, 2007).