Fiancé of Neda, Iran’s Slain ‘Angel of Freedom,’ Heading to Geneva Rights Summit.

THE UPDATE:   www.unwatch.org

02 March 2010

Fiancé of Neda, Iran’s Slain ‘Angel of Freedom,’ Heading to Geneva Rights Summit – Caspian Makan to protest Iranian government brutality.

GENEVA, March 2, 2010 – One day after Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki told the UN in Geneva that President Ahmadinejad’s June election was “an exemplary exhibition of democracy and freedom,” Caspian Makan, the fiancé of slain Iranian icon Neda Agha Soltan, announced today that he will join other world-famous dissidents as a speaker at next Monday’s Geneva Summit for Human Rights, Tolerance and Democracy, co-organized by UN Watch, Freedom House, Ibuka and more than 20 other human rights NGOs.

Images of Neda’s bloody killing in June at the hand of the Basij paramilitary force turned an international spotlight on the brutality of the Iranian government crackdown against peaceful protesters.

The Tehran regime banned prayers for Neda in the country’s mosques, arresting anyone who held a vigil for her. Mr. Makan was then arrested and detained at Evin Prison in Tehran. He was beaten and pressured to sign a false confession.

Since his release, Mr. Makan has been an outspoken dissident for freedom in Iran, spreading Neda’s story and message around the world.

The Geneva conference is organized by a global civil society coalition of 25 human rights groups, including Burmese, Tibetan and Zimbabwean organizations (see list below), with support from the Canton of Geneva.

The two-day schedule features more than 20 action-oriented presentations and skills-building workshops, with the objective of advancing internet freedom, the struggle of dissidents against state repression, and reform of the 47-nation UN Human Rights Council.

Speakers will include former political prisoners from around the world, including Rebiya Kadeer, champion of China’s Uighur minority and Nobel Peace Prize nominee; Nestor Rodriguez Lobaina, Cuban dissident; Bo Kyi, Burmese dissident, winner of the 2008 Human Rights Watch Award; Donghyuk Shin, survivor of North Korean prison camps; and Phuntsok Nyidron, the Buddhist nun from Tibet who served 15 years in jail for recording songs of freedom.

The Geneva Summit will also feature eminent governmental and intergovernmental advocates for human rights, including Massouda Jalal, the former Afghan Minister of Women Affairs and first female presidential candidate; MP Irwin Cotler, Canadian human rights hero and former counsel to Nelson Mandela; Italian MP Matteo Mecacci, OSCE Parliamentary Assembly Rapporteur for democracy and human rights; and Jan Pronk, former Special Representative in Sudan of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

Last year’s summit, covered by CNN, AP, Reuters, and the Wall Street Journal, brought together former political prisoners Saad Eddin Ibrahim of Egypt, Ahmad Batebi of Iran, José Gabriel Ramón Castillo of Cuba and Soe Aung of Burma, along with many other well-known rights activists and scholars. (See videos at http://genevasummit.org/videos.)

Admission to the March 8-9, 2010 conference is free, and the public and media are invited to attend. For accreditation, program and schedule information, please visit http://genevasummit.org/.

Visit the site during the conference to follow the live webcast, blog and Twitter feed.

Global Civil Society Coalition

Assistance Association for Political Prisoners in Burma

Centro para la Apertura y el Desarrollo de América Latina (CADAL)

Darfur Peace and Development Center

Directorio Democratico Cubano

Fondation Genereuse Development

Freedom House

Freedom Now

Genocide Watch

Global Zimbabwe Forum

Human Rights Activists in Iran

Human Rights Without Frontiers Int’l

IBUKA

Ingénieurs du monde

Inter-African Committee on Traditional Practices Affecting the Health of Women and Children

International Federation of Liberal Youth (IFLRY)

International Campaign to End Genocide

International Association of Genocide Scholars

Ligue Internationale Contre le Racisme

LiNK

Respekt Institut

Stop Child Executions

Tibetan Women’s Association

UN Watch

Zimbabwe Advocacy Office

###

“Giving Iran Seat on U.N. Rights Council Would Legitimize Its Brutality,” Says Boyfriend of Killed Protest Icon

Patrick Goodenough
March 10, 2010

An Iranian whose fiancée’s death by gunfire became a symbol of opposition to the regime during post-election protests last year made an impassioned appeal Tuesday for Tehran to be denied a seat on the U.N. Human Rights Council in elections this spring.

Caspian Makan addresses the Geneva Summit for Human Rights, Tolerance and Democracy, co-organized by UN Watch and 24 other human rights NGOs, Tuesday, March 9, 2010. Click here for full transcript of his remarks Click here to watch video

Addressing a gathering of dissidents and human rights advocates in Geneva, Caspian Makan, a photojournalist who fled Iran late last year after being detained for more than 60 days, said Iranian membership in the U.N.’s top human rights body would be a “slap in the face” of other members.

It would encourage other countries that have a tendency to flout human rights and undermine the credibility of the U.N. and the council, he said, according to a translation provided by event organizers.

“I feel furthermore that if the Iranian regime became a member, that would legitimize the inhuman and cruel acts the regime has perpetuated against its population,” Makan added. “Giving it legitimacy would encourage them to go further still.”

The U.N. has confirmed that Iran has submitted in writing its candidacy to become a member of the HRC.

On May 13, the General Assembly will vote by secret ballot to fill 14 of the Geneva-based council’s 47 seats. Iran and four other countries – Thailand, Qatar, Malaysia and the Maldives – will compete to fill four available seats set aside for the Asian regional group.

Makan was speaking Tuesday at the Geneva Summit for Human Rights, Tolerance and Democracy, a two-day event that brought together some 500 people from more than 60 countries, to discuss issues organizers say are mostly neglected by the HRC.

He told the gathering about Neda Agha Soltan, the 26-year old “deep thinker” and “artist at heart” with whom he had fallen in love after meeting her on a trip.

Makan, 38, said they had tended in the past not to vote in elections because they were seen as a charade, and taking part would be seen as “participating in the regime to some extent.”

But the 2009 election had seemed to offer in the shape of opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi a “lesser evil” for young Iranians who “above all else wanted to get rid of Mr. [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad.”

Once it became clear that the election was rigged in favor of the incumbent, he said, Soltan had joined the protests.

Makan said that while trying to do his job he was an eyewitness to the violent clampdown by “the mercenaries of the regime” and “saw firsthand that the army of the revolution was shooting and killing the demonstrators from a helicopter.”

Four days before she died, he had urged Soltan to keep away from the demonstrations. “She said, ‘You know Caspian, I love you, I love being with you, but what is most important to me is the freedom of our people.”

On June 20, Soltan was shot in the chest on a Tehran street, apparently by a Basij militia sniper. Amateur video footage capturing the moments after the shooting was posted online and seen around the world.

“We have seen many people who have been wounded and killed, but this struck the world particularly hard,” Makan said of his fiancee’s death.

“We were able to see in the footage how good and kind she was and admire her attitude when faced with death, to admire her courage as a symbol of liberty, as she died hoping for a better life for the millions of Iranians who remained behind.”

Human rights researchers say at least 40 Iranians died during June and that the number more than doubled in the months that followed. The official figure stands at 44.

Last month, Mahmoud Abbaszadeh Meshkini, director-general of Iran’s Interior Ministry – whose functions including policing and overseeing elections – told the HRC that the June 2009 presidential election had been “an exemplary exhibition of democracy and freedom.”

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Mother Jones <newsletters@motherjones.com>
Date: Tue, Feb 16, 2010
Subject: End Genocide Forever.

Dear friend, The world made a commitment to stop genocide after the Holocaust. Yet our actions haven’t been enough to stop the mass killings in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur. We must prevent genocide. Ask President Obama to prioritize genocide prevention today! It didn’t end with the Holocaust. Since World War II, the world has repeatedly failed to stop genocide. Just over 60 years ago, with the horrors of the Holocaust fresh in mind, the world adopted the U.N. Genocide Convention, and promised to prevent and punish the crime of genocide. Yet we haven’t followed through on that promise: think of Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and now Darfur. Last year, some of America’s best minds issued clear recommendations for doing better. Now it’s up to us to see the struggle through—and end genocide forever. Join us by asking President Obama to make genocide prevention a priority. Today, the crisis in Darfur continues, while the U.S. and the world have still failed to act on the policies recommended by the Genocide Prevention Task Force. We can’t stand by while the threat of genocide looms. We need strong government action for the people of Darfur today and for the victims of future genocides tomorrow. Ask President Obama to make ending genocide a priority today. Early in his presidency, President Obama told the world that we “find cause for hope in a movement to save Darfur that has…people of every age and faith and background and race united in common cause with suffering brothers and sisters halfway around the world.” Now we must make sure genocide prevention is one of President Obama’s priorities. Help us grow the movement to end genocide forever: Ask President Obama to live up to his words by making genocide prevention a priority today. Thank you, Mark Lotwis Save Darfur Coalition

The Save Darfur Coalition is an alliance of over 180 faith-based, advocacy and human rights organizations whose mission is to raise public awareness about the ongoing genocide in Darfur and to mobilize a unified response to the atrocities that threaten the lives of more than two million people in the Darfur region. To learn more, please visit http://www.SaveDarfur.org.

Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, the Turkish OIC Secretary General : The Donors Conference for the Development and Reconstruction of Darfur on 21 March.

But the OIC Calendar posted in the same posting says: “March 23: OIC Conference for the Development and Reconstruction of Darfur – Cairo, Egypt.” (??)

OIC Secretary General  Ihsanoglu also expressed his great satisfaction on the visit of H.E. Idriss Deby, the President of Chad, to Sudan and the agreement reached between the two countries to normalize their bilateral relations.

Also – OIC Secretary General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu expressed his deep disappointment over the announced decision of the appeals chamber of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to direct the pre-trial chamber to decide anew on the charge of genocide against the President of Sudan Omer Hassan Ahmed Al-Bashir.

All the above seems to show that the Islamic countries are ready to step into a problem solving mode in Sudan – but will the UN keep its Darfur and South Sudan watchdog positions? White washing Al-Bashir should not be allowed. What was done in Sudan was a series of Government sanctioned crimes. We also said that some of the motivation to those crimes had to do with impacts of climate change – will the oil rich Islamic countries – those countries that got financial advantage by selling the oil to the rest of the world, will they indeed pay their dues in the form of real help to the black people of Darfur – be they Islamic or not?

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The Secretary General of the OIC Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu discussed with the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Egypt Ahmad Aboul Gheit the current arrangements for the organization of the ‘International Donors Conference for the Development and Reconstruction of Darfur’, due to be held in the Egyptian Capital, Cairo, in March 21, 2010. The meeting was at Aboul Gheit’s office in Cairo on 6 February 2010. During the meeting, the two sides discussed the facets of joint cooperation between the OIC and Cairo, and their bilateral relations.

The meeting also addressed the ongoing arrangements for the next Islamic Summit Conference, which will be held in Egypt in March 2011, as well as various other issues of mutual interest.

The Secretary General had arrived in Cairo on 5 February. During his visit he also met with the Egyptian Minister of Islamic Affairs Mahmoud Himdi Zaqzouq and discussed the existing cooperation between the two parties in many fields.
In statements made to journalists, the Secretary General said that the Donors’ Conference for the Development and Reconstruction of Darfur will be held in Cairo on 21 March 2010, commending at the same time the concrete Egyptian role towards making the conference a success and its provision of all facilitations for organizing the conference. He also highlighted the significant support the OIC receives from both the leadership and the people of Egypt.

Ihsanoglu said that the Conference, which will be held at the ministerial level, will submit to the donors a number of vital projects in Darfur with the aim of completing the development process, which will strengthen stability in the province.

On another level, the Secretary General delivered on February 7, 2010 a lecture on ‘The Future of the Muslim World’ at the International Book Exhibition in Cairo.

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Turkish Minister of Trade and Industry visits the OIC General Secretariat in Jeddah.

A ninety-member Turkish delegation led by the Minister of Trade and Industry of Turkey Dr. Nihat Ergun visited the headquarters of the General Secretariat of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) in Jeddah on 8 February 2010. The Minister, whose delegation comprised industrialists and businessmen from the private and public sectors in Turkey, was received by the Assistant Secretary General for Economic Affairs Ambassador Hameed A. Opeloyeru, and the Director General of the Cabinet and Chief Advisor to the Secretary General Ambassador Sukru Tufan, on behalf of the OIC Secretary General Professor Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu. They exchanged views on how to expand cooperation between the OIC and Turkey in economic sector.

The Minister and his accompanying delegation attended a briefing session on expanding intra-OIC cooperation in the fields of trade and industry delivered by Ambassador Opeloyeru. The presentation covered a range of vital issues which included Intra-OIC Trade, Trade Preferential System of OIC, Cotton Rehabilitation Program, Agro-Food Development, Development of OIC Halal Food Standards, Cooperation in Tourism, Banking and Financial Sectors, Transportation and Private Sector initiatives.

Minister Ergun for his part stressed that his country will continue to take an active role in the OIC initiatives. He also noted that Turkey will soon finalize the ratification process of the Statute of the Standards and Meteorology Institute for Islamic Countries (SMIIC) which will function under the umbrella of the OIC.

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The Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) is the second largest inter-governmental organization after the United Nations which has membership of 57 states spread over four continents. The Organization is the collective voice of the Muslim world and ensuring to safeguard and protect the nterests of the Muslim world in the spirit of promoting international peace and harmony among various people of the world. The Organization was established upon a decision of the historical summit which took place in Rabat, Kingdom of Morocco on 12th Rajab 1389 Hijra (25 September 1969). The Headquarters of OIC are in Jeddah - http://www.oosterhuis.nl/quickstart/inde…

from: http://twitter.com/AfghanNews?utm_source…

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Militarism in Afghanistan is not enough: The U.S. Afghanistan policy needs a revision, given realities on the ground.
PUBLISHED: 01/31/2010 - http://bit.ly/99iGQm
BY UTTAM DAS

President Barack Obama’s announcement in December 2009 of the deployment of 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan has received mixed reactions at home and abroad.

Military compulsion on the ground and political expediency at home are apparently in collision; frustration and anger are growing. Allies in the Afghan war such as France, Germany and Australia have reportedly opposed Obama’s announcement. However, the United Kingdom, Poland and Italy promised to send a small number of additional troops.

By June 2010, the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan is expected to be 98,000. There were 29,950 U.S. troops in the International Security Assistance Force under NATO command, which has 64,500 troops, most supplied by the NATO member countries.

Though Obama had promised “change you can believe in” following his landslide victory in the 2008 presidential election, in the meantime he’s faced criticism for his decision to deploy additional troops to Afghanistan. The president announced that he will begin to withdraw troops in Afghanistan by July 2011 to bring an end to the decade-long war; however, the timeline has not convinced the American people, especially those on the left of the president’s own Democratic Party, who are increasingly demonstrating in front of the White House against the war.

Analysts and media in the region of South Asia are also critical of Obama’s new plan. The influential Indian daily The Hindu observes that sending additional troops to Afghanistan may provide “tactical relief to American commanders on the ground;” however, there is no guarantee that this new deployment would bring any “victory against terrorism and extremism.” For this, innovative strategies must be devised.

In a Dec. 3, 2009 editorial, The Hindu identified four deficits in America’s war against the Taliban and al-Qaida: the political consideration or attention, military doctrine, Afghan capability and a commitment from Pakistan where both the Taliban and al-Qaida allegedly have bases. Flurries of questions will continue to surround the comprehensiveness of U.S. policy and military actions in Afghanistan in the Asian media.

Given the reality on the ground, Pakistan is now in a crisis of sectarian conflict and a rising religious militancy. There is also reported presence of al-Qaida members in its territory; thus, Pakistan’s stability, politics, economy and military power are under great threat, as observes the Bangladeshi newspaper The Daily Ittefaq.

Analysts comment that it is likely impossible for the United States to win the war in Afghanistan by merely raising the number of troops. On the contrary, it may prolong the war with serious casualties on both sides.

Analysts recommend improving the conditions of the Afghan people by investing in poverty reduction, education and health. But the country has been further devastated by a war that has brought insufferable civilian casualties. Any investment in social sectors would facilitate to decrease the anger of the Afghan people toward the United States. Without this infrastructure, the poverty- and illiteracy-ridden country will not be able to get on its feet.

The U.S. policy should also engage resources to other countries in the region where al-Qaida is reportedly trying to spread its “ideology.” The presence of poverty, illiteracy, unemployment, natural challenges and displacements all contribute to the people’s vulnerability, which catalyses the spread of ideological organizations like al-Qaida. Reportedly, a swath of religious schools in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh — allegedly beyond the reach of government monitors — are working as bases for the spread of the militaristic, ideological challenge to the West, especially the United States. To offset this trend, governments need to engage civic institutions, but this deserves investment.

In the latest development, a London conference on Afghanistan has drafted a recommendation to initiate dialogues between the Afghan government and the Taliban, with an aim to dislodge al-Qaida from the country. The Taliban extremist Islamic group is essentially ideologically distinct from the terrorist al-Qaida and seized power in Afghanistan in 1996.

However, the international community must monitor such dialogues to ensure they are strategic and to guard against the Taliban using it as a legitimization and recruitment tool.

These dimensions in the Afghanistan conflict make a challenging situation all the more difficult, but for now, the deployment of more troops to the region seems only to increase our dependence on military strategy. What is needed most desperately in the region, however, is stability, investment and infrastructure.

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Robert NaimanPolicy Director of Just Foreign Policy
Posted: February 2, 2010 - http://bit.ly/apDj4q

Eat Your Spinach: Time for Peace Talks in Afghanistan – What’s Your Reaction:

In the last week the New York Times and Inter Press Service have reported that the Obama Administration is having an internal debate on whether to supports talks with senior Afghan Taliban leaders, including Mullah Muhammad Omar, as a means of ending the war in Afghanistan. Senior officials like Vice President Biden are said to be more open to reaching out because they believe it will help shorten the war.

Wouldn’t it be remarkable if this remained merely an “internal debate” within the Obama Administration? Wouldn’t you expect that the part of public opinion that wants the war to end would try to intervene in this debate on behalf of talks in order to end the war?

As an administration official told the New York Times,

“Today, people agree that part of the solution for Afghanistan is going to include an accommodation with the Taliban, even above low- and middle-level fighters.”
And in fact, US and British officials have been saying for months that the “endgame” in Afghanistan includes a negotiated political settlement with the Afghan Taliban.

Now, suppose you tell Mom that you want to have ice cream. And Mom says, you can have ice cream when you’ve eaten your spinach. Wouldn’t you eat your spinach? If you don’t eat your spinach now, you didn’t want ice cream very badly.

So if U.S. and British officials say the endgame includes a negotiated political settlement with the Afghan Taliban, and you figure, extrapolating from the last five thousand years of human history, that a negotiated political settlement typically does not just drop down from the sky, but in fact is generally preceded by political negotiations, and you want to end the war as soon as possible, wouldn’t you be clamoring for political negotiations to start as soon as possible? Because the longer political negotiations are delayed, the longer the war will last. If you don’t support political negotiations now, you don’t want to end the war very badly.

If you consider peace negotiations with the Afghan Taliban “distasteful,” consider this: every month that the war continues, every month that U.S. troops remain in Afghanistan, is another month in which U.S. soldiers will die horrible deaths, be horribly maimed, and be horribly scarred psychologically, perhaps for life. It’s also another month in which the U.S. military is likely to “accidentally” kill Afghan government soldiers (such episodes “are not uncommon,” the New York Times notes) and kill Afghan civilians, as they have done at least twice in the last week, according to the reporting in the New York Times and the Washington Post.

I put the word “accidentally” in quotation marks, not of course because I believe that the U.S. military is killing Afghan soldiers and Afghan civilians “on purpose,” but because when you repeatedly take an action (continuing the war) that leads to a predictable result (killing Afghan government soldiers and civilians) you lose the exoneration otherwise conferred by the word “accidentally.”

Is this not also “distasteful”? Is killing innocent people not more “distasteful” than peace talks?

Gareth Porter, writing for Inter Press Service, reports that an official of the Western military coalition says there has been a debate among U.S. officials about “the terms on which the Taliban will become part of the political fabric.” The debate is not on whether the Taliban movement will be participating in the Afghan political system, Porter reports, but on whether or not the administration could accept the participation of Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar in the political future of Afghanistan.

The Afghan Taliban has insisted in published statements that it will not participate in peace talks that would not result in the withdrawal of foreign troops, Porter notes. That raises the question of whether the administration would be willing to discuss the complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan as part of a negotiated settlement to the conflict.

The Obama Administration has stated publicly that it has no long-term interest in maintaining U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Therefore, should not the U.S. be willing to agree to a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops as part of a negotiated settlement? We’re leaving anyway, according to U.S. officials – what’s holding us back from agreeing, as part of a negotiation, to do what we plan to do anyway?

U.S. officials have said that the war is all about the relationship between the Afghan Taliban and al Qaeda. When the Afghan Taliban breaks with al Qaeda the war is over, say these officials. Some say that Mullah Omar is ready to break with al Qaeda, including the Pakistani intelligence officer who trained him; while Osama bin Laden’s son Omar says Al Qaeda and the Taliban are only “allies of convenience.” Why wouldn’t we put these propositions to the test through negotiations?

If you think, for the sake of peace, the United States should be willing to agree to do on a timetable that which it claims it intends to do anyway, tell President Obama.

Follow Robert Naiman on Twitter: www.twitter.com

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Lesson from Somalia echoes in Afghanistan
By Adam Folken – Contributing Columnist - http://bit.ly/dv6IT3

|Published: Thursday, February 4, 2010

Last Thursday, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown hosted a conference in London regarding NATO’s plans in Afghanistan.  In attendance were U.S. General Stanley McChrystal, commander of NATO operations in Afghanistan, and Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s special emissary to Afghanistan and Pakistan.  According to CTV News, both officials expressed plans to advocate peace and negotiations with Taliban forces.  Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s plan of “reconciliation and reintegration” of potential Taliban defectors complements McChrystal and Holbrooke’s strategies.  These plans represent a growing trend in emphasizing political action over the use of force to suppress the militant insurgency plaguing Afghanistan.  This switch comes nearly nine years after the beginning of the United States’ Operation Enduring Freedom, though it is  better late than never.

The Taliban was the power in Afghanistan prior to 2001, and their ranks draw from various Pashtun clans.  The Pashtun people represent the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan and have dominated Afghan politics for centuries.  It is therefore the appropriate move to include Taliban members in negotiations and going the step further in allowing their involvement in the new Afghan government. This was one of many lessons taken from U.S. involvement in the United Nations’ intervention in Somalia.

The fall of Said Barre’s regime in 1991 created a power vacuum in Somalia that resulted in vicious inter-clan fighting.  The collateral damage was devastating to the Somali people, who suffered the conflict and widespread famine.

For the U.N., what began as an international effort to deliver humanitarian aid evolved into a struggle to stabilize and democratize Somalia.  General Mohamed Farrah Aidid, with the support of members of his clan – the Habr Gidr – and other militant factions, repeatedly assaulted U.S. and U.N. forces to drive them out of Somalia.  Many U.S. and U.N. officials wanted Aidid and his supporters marginalized in the new government.  Rather than work with the local power, the U.S. wished to create a more ‘ideal’ system that had little focus on clannism.  The attempts to remove Aidid’s influence served to unite Somalis against the U.S., culminating in a humiliating retreat from Somalia.

The parallels with the situation in Afghanistan are clear.  Local power structures, such as clannism in Somalia and Afghanistan, must be considered when creating a functional government.  If powerful players are not given incentive to play the game, they won’t have to.

Further Recommended Articles:

Canada and Germany’s mission in Afghanistan (The Concordian)
Fein: ‘Graveyard of empires’ challenge for Obama (The Daily Northwestern)

BAN KI-MOON
U.N. Looks for Diplomatic Breakthroughs: U.N. looks for diplomatic breakthroughs in 2010.
Posted By Colum Lynch   Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Ban Ki-moon and his diplomatic envoys have been scouring the globe this week in search of a promising peace settlement for 2010, pursuing talks with Kim Jong Il’s government in North Korea, Afghanistan’s Taliban, and Turkish and Greek Cypriot leaders.

These latest diplomatic initiatives follow a year that brought few breakthroughs on the mediation front as the U.N. strained to advance democracy in Burma, head off mass rights abuses in Sri Lanka, and manage a crisis that threatens to trigger a resumption of civil war in Sudan.

U.N. officials say the proliferation of new initiatives is largely coincidental, the product of months, if not years, of preparation, but that it provides the U.N. with an opportunity to show that it can achieve some diplomatic wins. “There’s no grand strategy here,” said one official. Here’s a survey of key U.N. diplomatic initiatives for 2010 and their prospects for success {cynics at the UN say that this is propelled by the wish to secure a reappointment for a seconf term at the UN - www.SustainabiliTank.info editor}:

1. Cyprus. Ban traveled to Cyprus this weekend to nudge Demetris Christofias and Mehmet Ali Talat, the parties representing the ethnic Greek and Turkish sides of the island, into a breakthrough in a conflict that has lasted more than 35 years despite repeated efforts at mediation. Ban said that he is confident that a political settlement “is within reach.” But the two Cypriot leaders appeared more downbeat about the prospects for a deal. Cyprus has been split since 1974. Talks between the two sides during the past 17 months have produced some results, including an agreement to open a pedestrian crossing in Nicosia, the divided capital. But there is concern that April elections in the Turkish section may bring a hard-liner to power. “Time is not on the side of settlement,” the two leaders acknowledged in a joint statement Monday.

2. North Korea. Ban, a former South Korean diplomat, has been seeking a role in the North Korea crisis since he first took office in January 2007. A confidential U.N. policy paper, produced on April 25, 2007, called for “intensifying and expanding engagement” with Pyongyang, and possibly for the appointment a special North Korea coordinator. But initial attempts to start talks faltered after North Korea launched its missile test and detonated its second nuclear explosive last April and May. On Sunday, Ban announced that he would send his top political advisor, B. Lynn Pascoe, a former U.S. diplomat, to Pyongyang to restart high level U.N. talks later this month. He will be joined by Ban’s top Korean aide, Kim Won-soo. Can Ban be far behind?

3. Afghanistan. The U.N.’s outgoing special representative, Kai Eide, held secret talks with members of the Taliban sometime last year. Eide has been pursuing such contacts with the Taliban since he first started his job. U.N. sources described those talks as highly preliminary, and said that they do not have the approval of the Taliban leadership, which claims that its movement is not negotiating with the U.N. But an official close to the talks confirmed that they had in fact taken place and that Eide’s successor, Staffan di Mistura, would likely continue pursuing those contacts. While these discussions offer little hope of providing a breakthrough, they could provide a useful back channel over the long haul.

4. Sudan. The U.N. faces perhaps its greatest diplomatic challenge in Sudan, which is preparing for presidential elections this year and a referendum in 2011 that will determine whether the country remains unified or whether Sudan’s southerners decide to vote for independence. Ban has said Sudan will be one of his top priorities in 2010, and he has just assigned his two top Africa specialists, Ibrahim Gambari and Haile Menkerios, to manage U.N. operations on the ground. Success in Sudan will largely be measured by the U.N.’s ability to stop the referendum from triggering a renewed civil war. “Partitioning the country without violence: that will be a miracle,” said one Security Council diplomat. “I don’t know how they are going to do it.”

5. Burma. U.N. diplomatic efforts in Burma have pretty much run aground. Ban has reassigned his top Burma envoy, Gambari, to Sudan, and made his chief of staff, Vijay Nambiar of India, his temporary point man on Burma. The Burmese military junta recently rebuffed a U.N. request to invite Gambari back to the country for a final visit. U.N. diplomats say that Burma has little interest in meeting with the U.N.’s diplomatic placeholders, particularly now that the Americans are looking to engage the regime directly.

Foreign Drillers Rush at Uganda’s Promising Oil Reserves.

By GUY CHAZAN in London And NICHOLAS BARIYO in Kampala, Uganda
 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424…

A skirmish over an oil field on the shores of Africa’s Lake Albert highlights Big Oil’s intense interest in Uganda—a rising star of African energy. Tullow Oil is competing with Eni, Total and Cnooc to secure an oilfield stake owned by partner Heritage.

The battle centers on the Ugandan assets of Heritage Oil PLC, a small U.K.-based explorer, which is selling its stakes in the much-coveted Lake Albert Rift Basin. The area has yielded some of sub-Saharan Africa’s largest onshore oil discoveries of recent years.

Big energy companies like Italy’s Eni SpA, France’s Total SA and China National Offshore Oil Co. all are vying for access to Uganda’s oil wealth. Uganda’s onshore oil is particularly appealing because it is relatively inexpensive to produce. That sets it apart from other frontier provinces, like the deep waters off Brazil’s coast and the Arctic Ocean, where the majors require an oil price of around $60 a barrel just to break even.

Initially, Eni looked to be the likely winner, announcing in November that it was buying Heritage’s stakes for $1.5 billion in cash and assets. But Tullow Oil PLC, Heritage’s partner in the oil field, exercised its contractual right to block the sale and acquire the stakes itself at the same price. Tullow’s purchase, however, is subject to approval by the Ugandan government. The initial reaction was negative, with the country’s energy minister saying the government didn’t want one company to end up with control of the whole oil field and would prevent the sale if necessary. Heritage and Tullow share ownership of two blocks in the oil field, while Tullow owns all of a third. Acquiring Heritage’s stakes would give Tullow full ownership of all three blocks, covering 10,000 square kilometers—about one-third the size of Belgium.

The government’s position appeared to soften after Tullow Chief Executive Aidan Heavey met with Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni in Kampala recently. Tullow said that once in full possession of the oil field it would sell half to either Cnooc or Total to help finance the construction of a refinery and a 1,300-kilometer pipeline that would carry Uganda’s oil to world markets.

Such an arrangement would allow Tullow to control who it works with as well as concentrate on its core activities—exploring for and pumping oil, rather than refining and transporting it to market.

Tullow also announced plans last Wednesday to raise around $1.6 billion in a rights issue to help it develop Uganda’s oil.

Tullow now is the favorite to take the Heritage stakes, with Cnooc edging out Total as Tullow’s most-likely partner, a person familiar with the matter said. Mr. Museveni met with Cnooc executives in Kampala last week and is expected to meet them again this week to finalize details, the person said. Cnooc and Total declined to comment.

Eni hasn’t given up, however, and last week sweetened its package. The company’s CEO, Paolo Scaroni, said in a newspaper interview that Eni would not only develop the Lake Albert field and build a refinery and pipeline to the Indian Ocean, but also would construct an electricity plant in Uganda and upgrade a railway line from Kampala to the Kenyan port of Mombasa. He said Eni would invest $13 billion in the “integrated development plan.” Eni declined to comment for this article.

Tullow declined to comment on Eni’s new offer.

What has attracted companies like Eni to Uganda is the one billion barrels of crude already discovered in the Lake Albert Rift Basin, a vast, oil-rich area close to Uganda’s border with Congo to the west, and the huge untapped potential of the region. Tullow estimates that about 1.5 billion barrels, roughly the same amount as Yemen’s oil reserves, remain to be discovered in the basin.

Uganda also is seen as more stable politically than many of its neighbors, though the north of the country is wracked by armed conflict between the army and a rebel group, the Lord’s Resistance Army, that has displaced hundreds of thousands of people.

Some of the most promising prospects are in Lake Albert itself, however, and will require offshore drilling using floating platforms. Industry experts have said there could be large amounts of oil on the Congo side of the lake, which remains largely unexplored.

Uganda plans to produce around 150,000 barrels of oil a day in four to six years, most of which will be exported. For comparison, that is slightly less than the output of Brunei. The steady revenue stream from oil could radically change the fortunes of the east African country, one of the world’s poorest.

“It doesn’t move the needle in terms of global oil supply, but it’s one of the few countries that will see growth in the coming years in a world of shrinking opportunity,” said Bob McKnight, an oil expert at consulting firm PFC Energy.

Tullow and Heritage have had an almost unbroken run of successes since they started drilling for oil in the Lake Albert area five years ago, with most of their wells encountering crude. Tullow’s share price nearly doubled last year on the back of the discoveries.

Write to Guy Chazan at  guy.chazan at wsj.com and Nicholas Bariyoat  nicholas.bariyo at dowjones.com

UN Says Darfur Refugees Desperately Need Water.

Date: 29-Jan-10
Andrew Heavensfrom Khartoum, Reuters -  Refugees in parts of Sudan’s strife-torn Darfur region are desperately short of food and water due to a lack of rain, and problems have been exacerbated in at least one area by Khartoum’s expulsion of aid groups, officials said on Thursday.

U.N. officers told Reuters the remote western region only received “a fraction” of the rainfall of previous years and aid groups were planning to step up efforts to reach millions of people displaced by seven years of conflict.

“Due to low levels of rainfall last year, state authorities and the humanitarian community expect significant food shortages in IDP (internally displaced persons) camps in 2010, increasing the possibility of further conflict,” read a statement from Darfur’s joint U.N./African Union UNAMID peacekeepers.

An estimated 4.7 million people rely on humanitarian aid in Darfur where mostly non-Arab rebels took up arms against the Khartoum government in 2003, accusing it of neglect.

UNAMID said a joint assessment mission with UN agencies had found worrying signs of shortages around the North Darfur settlements of Dar El Salaam and Shangil Tobay and their surrounding displacement camps.

“IDPs in both regions were found to be in desperate need of food and water,” it said.

The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) told Reuters thousands of members of the Birgit tribe fleeing fighting moved into the area around Shangil Tobay late last year, sparking tensions with locals.

“We have people on the ground at the moment assessing the situation and supporting mediation efforts,” said OCHA spokesman Samuel Hendricks.

“One of the root causes of the tension is the shortage of water and the resulting competition for resources.”

Unknown gunmen shot dead two UNAMID peacekeepers while they were distributing near Shangil Tobay, about 65 km (40 miles) south of the capital of north Darfur El Fasher, in December.

Another U.N. official, who asked not to be named, said the aid group Oxfam had provided water services in Shangil Tobay before it was expelled last year. “That gap has not been properly filled,” said the official.

President Omar Hassan al-Bashir ordered 13 foreign aid agencies to leave north Sudan in March, and closed three local groups, after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for him to face charges of war crimes in Darfur.

Bashir accused the groups of passing information to the Hague-based court, an accusation they denied.

No one was immediately available for comment from Sudan’s Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs. In the past it has said the work of expelled groups has been taken up by local organisations and new international groups.

Khartoum mobilised mostly Arab militias to crush the Darfur revolt, unleashing a wave of violence that Washington and some activists call genocide.

Sudan’s government dismisses the accusation and says the Western media have exaggerated the conflict. Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the conflict range from 10,000, according to Khartoum, to around 300,000, according to U.N. humanitarian chief John Holmes.

Ranjit Devraj writes for IPS Terra Viva at the UN that the BASIC Group meeting concluded with an amazing – ‘Copenhagen Accord Not Legal, Kyoto Protocol Is.’ Nevertheless Brazil, South Africa, India and China – will submit their plans for voluntary mitigation actions by the Jan. 31, 2010 deadline stipulated by the Copenhagen Accord. That amounts to positive participation and denying it also.
 http://ipsterraviva.net/UN/currentNew.as…

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 27, 2010

‘Copenhagen Accord Not Legal, Kyoto Protocol Is’
Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Jan 26 (IPS) – While the BASIC bloc countries – Brazil, South Africa, India and China – will submit their plans for voluntary mitigation actions by the Jan. 31 deadline stipulated by the Copenhagen Accord, they have taken care to emphasise that the agreement, reached at the end of the December climate change summit in the Danish capital, has no legal basis.

Addressing a joint press conference after a meeting of concerned BASIC ministers on Sunday, India’s environment minister Jairam Ramesh said: “We support the Copenhagen Accord. But all of us were unanimously of the view that its value lies not as a standalone document but as an input into the two- track negotiation process under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).”

Ramesh explained that the Accord was not a legal document and that the “understanding reached at Copenhagen was that the accord will facilitate the two-track negotiating process which is the only legitimate process to reach a legally binding treaty in Mexico.” The two-track negotiation process was agreed upon at the December 2007 Bali conference, pertaining to Long-Term Cooperative Action under the UNFCCC and the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.

The BASIC meeting and the press conference were attended by Carlos Minc, the Brazilian environment minister, his counterpart from South Africa, Buyelwa Sonjica, and the vice-chairman of China’s National Development and Reform Commission, Xie Zhenhua.

At the press conference, Xie said that the BASIC group’s objectives were consistent with the interests of the developing countries. “BASIC will take the lead in large-scale emission reduction and also stick to the policy of common but differentiated principle.” Sonjica said BASIC would not make any decision outside the Group of 77 (G-77) countries. “We see ourselves as adding value to the proposals of G-77,” she said.

Siddharth Pathak, a member of the international environmental group Greenpeace’s policy division, told IPS that the willingness of the BASIC group to support vulnerable countries by ensuring their participation in open and transparent negotiations and plans to provide technological and financial support was commendable. “We hope that this support will become tangible by the group’s next meeting in April.”

Pathak said that while BASIC appeared keen to consolidate itself as a group and also take along the G-77 countries, it needed to “demonstrate leadership, both in furthering negotiations on a fair, ambitious and legally binding agreement, and in terms of pushing industrialised counties to urgently reduce GhG (greenhouse gas) emissions and make their own appropriate contributions.”

Other analysts said the BASIC meeting had the potential of cementing differences both within and outside the bloc.

“What is crucial now is to see whether China and India will stick to carbon intensity figures in their action plans, as they announced before the Copenhagen meet,” said Siddharth Mishra, director at CUTS International, a leading economic policy and advocacy group. Carbon intensity is a measure of carbon dioxide emissions per unit of production.

“This will suit China well because it is already on a trajectory of lowering its energy intensity and it has voluntarily announced cuts of 40-45 percent before Copenhagen,” said Mitra. “India, too, can reduce the trend of the growth of its emissions and specify domestic regulations to ensure reductions in emissions from its dirty industries,” Mitra told IPS.

Mitra added: “We don’t know what the back-of-the-envelope calculations are, but both China and India may benefit from the pledge of 100 billion U.S. dollars by the end of the decade for developing countries to adapt to climate change and limit the global rise in temperatures, since industrialisation began, from exceeding two degrees Celsius.”

Denmark, as president of the Conference of Parties (CoP), has been asked by the BASIC ministers to convene immediately meetings of the two negotiation groups for the Kyoto Protocol and the Long-Term Cooperative Action in March and ensure that they meet on at least five more occasions before the 16th CoP in December.

After the BASIC countries joined hands with the United States in negotiating the Copenhagen Accord, at the end of the summit in the Danish capital, several developing countries expressed fears that the document would become legal and dilute the Bali two-track process.

BASIC ministers have also asked the rich nations to speedily distribute the 10 billion dollars they had pledged to the least developed countries and the islands to address climate change this year.

Brazil’s Minc said at the press conference that BASIC had decided to create its own fund to help small island states and the least developed countries. “The actual contributions will be decided at the next meeting of the BASIC in South Africa,” he said.

A day before the BASIC meet, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh let it be known that he had reservations over pressure from Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen and United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon for follow-up action on the Copenhagen Accord and get results by the Jan. 31 deadline.

While the Accord had called for “economy-wide emission targets” by 2020 by the Annex-1 (rich countries) and the other countries to submit “mitigation actions,” Rasmussen and Ban had written separately to all heads of state and governments on Dec. 30, urging them to submit their commitments by Jan. 31.

Their joint letter was silent on the Kyoto Protocol, raising suspicions. Mitra said that such suspicions first surfaced after the UNFCCC executive secretary, Yvo de Boer, failed to mention the Kyoto Protocol at a press conference held soon after the Copenhagen Accord. “The impression that there is a plan afoot to bury Kyoto is not helped by the fact that the European Union is pushing it as a first step to new negotiations.”

The Kyoto Protocol, the world’s only legally binding agreement, required 37 wealthy nations to cut GhG emissions by 2012, but asked for no commitments from developing countries. In contrast, the Copenhagen Accord does not talk of mitigation goals for the developed countries and is seen to be acting to lower the bar in climate negotiations when scientists warn that the climate is changing more rapidly than estimated earlier.

The Accord was opposed by Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua and Sudan on both substantive and procedural grounds. For that reason, it could not be accepted or endorsed by the CoP, which only “took note” of it, denying the document status at the U.N.

In an editorial on Tuesday, the respected ‘The Hindu’ newspaper commented that the response of BASIC “underscores the view of the developing world that the Copenhagen Accord chose to give insufficient importance to the central tenet of “common but differentiated responsibilities” outlined in the UNFCCC.

The Hindu editorial said one positive outcome of the “common strategy” adopted by BASIC countries was the fostering of “active South-South cooperation” to advance science. “Given that intellectual property rights on technology remain a major barrier to achieving higher energy efficiencies, such joint efforts involving India and China hold great promise.”

From the latest news coming from Washington – “Under the new airport
rules, all citizens of Afghanistan, Algeria, Lebanon, Libya, Iraq,
Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Yemen must receive a pat
down and an extra check of their carry-on bags before boarding a plane
bound for the United States, officials said. Citizens of Cuba, Iran,
Sudan and Syria — nations considered ’state sponsors of terrorism’ —
face the same requirement.”

That means Cuba and thirteen Muslim states: Afghanistan, Algeria,
Lebanon, Libya, Iraq, Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia,
Sudan, Syria, and Yemen.

These news caused a lot of comments, but we think the wrong comments.

We assume obviously that Washington is ready finally to address the
terrorism issue. Airplane terrorism, as we learned on 9/11, is not
about transport of weapons but about terrorists – to be specific since
9/11 – we speak here about Islamic terrorists. If you want to catch
terrorists you must look for terrorists. Looking for baby formula is
not the answer – but looking for those passengers whose profiles are
suspicious might be a better bet. Sure, obviously, not all Muslims are
terrorists, and profiling is terrible – even illegal, but if you want
to catch terrorists you start with the profile that most fits Islamic
terrorists, and you bet – they are Muslims of any color. Even though
they may be traveling with documents issued by non-Islamic States,
i.e. the UK, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, France, Switzerland, or even the
US.

So, it is not easy to define exactly what papers are carried by the
terrorists, but you can have some guidelines to increase your chance
of catching them. looking for a profile of an Asian or African Muslim.
Then, learn from the Israelis how to talk to them – you may even find
out that they are so convinced that their cause is the right one, that
they will lower their guard and just plainly disclose that what you
see is all they got.

There may be a Jamaican convert to Islam who preached terrorism in the UK
and resides now in Kenya – a case in point. Kenya does want him either and
he will be sent back to Jamaica a second time. yes, this is a problem if you
are American and Jamaica does not cooperate – but he is a Muslim and no
Anti-Defamation league is enrtitled to tell you Mr. President that he should
not be stripped and searched if he wants to travel via the US to Jamaica.
This is simple.

But what about Cuba? Fidel Castro is more atheist then Catholic, surely
no Muslim. Whatever went on in the past is history to me and I do not believe
prologue to Mr. Castro. So why mix him and his country up with 13 Islamic
States involved in Islamic Terrorism? That is unless someone in the US longs
to see him give cover to such terrorists in the future so they get new reasons
to be after him? If the Jamaica case has anything to teach us – it is that the
US is better off reinsuring its rear parts from anger caused by mistreatment
and friendship is not achieved by mulling over past grief. Specially, as several
hundred former sugar baron families living in Florida should not be allowed to
hold hostage the US when it comes to real US interests.

Mr. President, I watched Bolivia and Venezuela leaders speak in Copenhagen,
they fumed and brimmed with words – no stones or missiles. Their ALBA is,
I think, the natural ally of a US that manages to disengage from the Islamic
world of oil. So, it is the US self interest that calls for you, Mr. President, to
invite Fidel Castro to Washington for a tete-a-tete and start on a way that
eventually will give the US the wall of safety it needs when addressing the 21st
Century centers of terror – the Islamists’ terror cancer that will continue to ooze
as long as we use oil.

Please start by taking him of that list!

The thirteen on that list include the obvious Iran – Syria – Lebanon
trio of the Shii’a Islam, it includes the Afghanistan/Pakistan US
theater of operations and Iraq, as well as the other US theater Saudi
Arabia, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan that misses Egypt and the Gaza strip. A
fourth historic region includes Libya and Algeria, then with Nigeria,
these are newer sources of oil for the US, and as such clear potential
sources of unhappy Islamists who complain about the changes in their
countries as fueled by oil money. In very few countries terrorism
against the US was actually started by rulers decree. Libya, Iran,
Syria, Sudan, Somalia may be the exceptions, but Saudi Arabia and
Yemen may have seen rulers who deflected anger against themselves into
anger against foreigners. In the majority of cases the terrorist is a
person of convictions and the situation could have been avoided had
the US and the rest of the Western World, tried to be less squanderous
with the oil we got addicted to.

Having said the above – let us get now to the point – MR PRESIDENT -
PLEASE – TAKE CUBA OFF THAT LIST BECAUSE THEY DO NOT BELONG ON THAT
LIST IN 2010.

* * * *

Please look – I am posting here four reference – links to news
articles of today’s New York Times.
 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/05/us/05t…

New Air Security Checks From 14 Nations to U.S. Draw Criticism
 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/05/world/…

In Yemen, U.S. Faces Leader Who Puts Family First
 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/05/world/…

Behind Afghan Bombing, an Agent With Many Loyalties
 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/05/world/…

Kenya Seeks to Deport Muslim Cleric to Jamaica

————————

THE UPDATE:

We have received a comment on this post and it presents a very valid point supposedly made at the UN General Assembly by the Foreign Minister of Cuba: “I mean if they were going to include us, then they should have at least thrown in North Korea.”

Even if the e-mail we received from ajay -   akazif at gmail.com  as presented by www. eggplantpost.com in http://eggplantpost.com/2010/01/05/cuba-… were a made up story, the argument holds water nevertheless. DID THE US INCLUDE CUBA ON THAT LIST BECAUSE IT WANTED TO AVOID BEING SEEN AS GOING AFTER A RAG-TAG OF ISLANIC COUNTRIES? Now, we believe that US security should be spoken here – not again US appeasement-for-oil please!

Climate Change and International Security
15th December 1.30-3pm at DR-Byen’s Concert House, Studie 2
Open to the general public

The Danish Minister for Foreign Affairs Per Stig Møller has invited a panel of world leaders for a debate on the impact of climate change on international security. The panel will include:

·        African Union Commission Chairperson Dr. Jean Ping
·        EU Presidency, Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairs Carl Bildt
·        NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen

The moderator will be Steffen Kretz, Senior International Editor and anchor with the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR).

You are invited to take part. Participation is free of charge. Seats will be allocated on a first come, first served basis due to the limited number of seats. A binding registration is therefore necessary. Deadline is the 10th of December 2009. Register by sending your name and contact details to  MEK at UM.DK. You will receive a personal confirmation of registration, which you must bring with you in order to access the event.

Venue: DR-Byen’s Concert House, Studie 2, Emil Holms Kanal 20, 0999 Copenhagen C.
Nearest metro: DR-Byen (two stops from the Bella Center).
Doors open at 12.30 and close at 1.15pm, to ensure a prompt start to the debate.

For further information contact Catherine Lorenzen:  catlor at um.dk / +45 3392 1855

Finally a second shoe comes of at the UN Department of Public Information that services the Ban Ki-moon UN Administration. After the replacement of the officer in charge of Media Accreditation, now also a new Spokesperson.

November 30, 2009 UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is getting a new Spokesperson – a real professional – Martin Nesirky – that will hail from Vienna where he was not just spokesman for over three years at the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) but was also Head of Press and Public Information.

Nesirky will replace Michele Montas of Haiti who served since the beginning of the term of Mr. Ban Ki-moon, January 1, 2007, till now, November 30, 2009, thus leaving one month ahead of the end of a three years contract. Ms. Montas is retiring from the UN.

Mr. Nesirky came to OSCE from Reuters where he served over two decades as an international correspondent and editor. He covered issues the like of  the fall of the  Berlin Wall, events in the Balkans, and nuclear non-proliferation issues. Further, he had a stint as the Moscow Bureau Chief of Reuters with responsibility for coverage of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and as senior editor in London handling political stories, including the Middle East and Africa. He has been posted in Berlin, The Hague, and Seoul, though it is not known if he also speaks Korean, the language of the current UN Secretary- General – the subject of a question from one of the correspondents that remained unanswered.

More recently Mr. Nesirky in his Spokesman capacity at OSCE was instrumental in navigating the Russia backed OSCE Chairmanship for Kazakhstan for 2010. At the UN he may find his personal talents helpful in creating a new persona for the UN Secretary-General whose popularity with parts of the UN have hit a low, at a time that his reelection for a second term will be put on the table.

Ms. Montas whom he replaces had none of such credentials. Prior to her appointment, Montas headed the French unit of UN Radio. From 2003 to 2004, she served as the Spokesperson for UN General Assembly President Julian Robert Hunte, of Saint Lucia, soon after she fled to New York from Haiti. In Haiti, she and her husband were also radio journalists and activists. Her husband was killed in Haiti, and she escaped to New York. We can vouch that in her first several months in the job Mr. Ban Ki-moon set her up, she had no understanding or patience for subjects of climate change – not even when the subject was raised in connection to killings going on in Africa, or the dangers to Small Island Member States of the UN. Not even in matters of the Middle East – she seemed as a fish out of water and effectively harming  positions that the SG might have been more forthcoming. In press conferences of the SG she allowed only questions that she thought he would be interested in while guarding him from such questions as climate change.

The real question is now if Mr. Martin Nesirky will find it acceptable to fit in her shoes and submit to further layers of UN functionaries in a UN Department of Public Information where the Director of News and Media Division is Mr. Ahmad Fawzi who acts as a factotum on Press Accreditation and also whenever there is the need to talk to the press upon fighting in the Middle East. We feel that Mr. Nesirky may be inclined to become his own man in those areas while serving the needs of the Secretary-General.

The announcement about the new Spokesperson was made by Mr. Farhan Haq, of Pakistan, an Associated Spokesperson, third in the ranking below Mr. Nesirky (The second ranking Spokesperson is the Deputy Spokesperson Marie Okabe of Japan). Farhan started the announcement by saying: “And finally, a message that you’ve been waiting for some time. The Secretary-General today has named Martin Nesirky of the United Kingdom as the new Spokesperson for the Secretary-General,” but when asked by a correspondent if there will be in parallel an appointment for a position called Strategic Communications, he also gave no answer and showed impatience by mentioning that “our guests are here.”

Another correspondent asked nevertheless about the Small Pacific Developing Island States that called upon the Security Council to take up the issue of climate change “as a matter of security, because they say that their islands, their countries, could potentially disappear together for the first time in history, and they’re looking for the Council to develop enforceable emission targets. What does the SG think of this call to the SC to take up the Climate Change issue?”

The anemic answer was: “As you know, the SG has been encouraging all of the relevant bodies to deal with climate change and its effects across a variety of fields.At this stage, however, what the SG is concerned with is making sure that Member states and leaders at the highest level will come to Copenhagen to deal precisely with all of the challenges of climate change and seal a deal that can help resolve all the various problems that member States face.” That was quite a lame answer from the source of “Hopenhagen” and a clear show why finally the UN deserves a professional Spokesperson it was denied during the first three years of the Ban Ki-moon Administration of the UN.

The Correspondent continued with his insistence for an answer:
“There is nothing about the council taking up this matter?”

Final answer from the Associate Spokesperson: “It’s always up to the Security Council which matters it chooses to take up under rubric of peace and security issues.”

From our point of view, will Mr. Martin Nersirky accompany Mr. Ban Ki-moon to Copenhagen, or will it be Marie Okabe?

———————————–

N.B. - to be fair to Michele Montas -
Montas was one of the producers of Jonathan Demme’s documentary, The Agronomist, which depicted the life and death of her husband Jean Dominique and his career at Radio Haiti-Inter, the radio station that he founded. She was also involved with MINUTASH – the UN mission to Haiti. Montas worked  as a journalist at that Radio-station and has been  a human rights activist in Haiti and later a consistent international lecturer on Haiti – but the subject matter of the UN extends beyond Haiti and the Aristide government interests. We do not imply that Montas was a negative person as such, only that she was not the right person for her job which allowed Mr. Ahmad Fawzi of Egypt to take over some of the responsibilitires that were hers, and the Under Secretary-General for the UN DPI, Mr. Kyotaka Akasaka, another strange appointment in the Ban Ki-moon cabinet, could really not care less.

———————————-

P.S. – On November 23, 2009 Martin Nesirky met the media correspondents to the UN and said:

A couple of things I just wanted to mention.  First of all, I’m really looking forward to working with all of you; getting to know you.  This is a huge challenge, of course, and I’m very keen to try to get to know you so I can help you the best that I can.  That’s the first thing.

The second thing is that, needless to say, I do read what’s being written.  And I think there are a couple of things I’d like to make absolutely clear and very straight at the beginning.  My language skills: I speak German, I speak Russian, I speak English after a fashion, I speak a little bit of Korean and an even smaller amount of French.  I realize that it’s very, very important to be able to speak French. I’m going to be doing as the Secretary-General has done, which is to take extra French classes to improve on that. And that’s really all I wanted to say on that matter.

The other is that I really believe that coming from outside the UN has advantages and disadvantages.  You will have to bear with me as I get to know the system that you, many of you, know far better than I probably will ever do.  But I am very keen to work with you so that you can help me to help you to have the stories that you need to write.

Also, it seems that the UN expects Mr. Nesirky to start his work at the UN on only December 7th, which is coincidentally the day the Copenhagen Conference opens officially, does it mean that he will be there, or it means that Marie Okabe will be there and he will be in New York? We shall see!

The Barcelona, Catalunya, Spain, Climate Change Talks opened on Monday morning and the welcoming ceremony included José Montilla Aguilera, President of the Generalitat de Catalunya, who stressed that local and regional governments, not just states, desire to participate in, and contribute to, actions to address climate change. He said the Government of Catalunya has turned the fight against climate change into a main pillar of action, including through its renewable energy and sustainable transportation policies.

WELCOMING CEREMONY was opened by Yvo de Boer, the UNFCCC Executive Secretary.

Núria Marín Martinez, Mayor of L’Hospitalet, highlighted the role that local authorities can play in addressing climate change, drawing attention to commitments under the Covenant of Mayors against Climate Change.

Jordi Hereu, Mayor of Barcelona, stressed the need to connect local and regional policies and actions to effectively address climate change and called for inclusion of reference to local authorities in a climate change agreement.

Connie Hedegaard, Minister of Climate and Energy, Denmark, emphasized that the Barcelona session is paramount for success in Copenhagen where a coherent and ambitious solution is required to address the challenge of climate change. She highlighted “in-depth, frank and constructive discussions” during a recent meeting under the Greenland Dialogue on finance and mitigation, encouraging delegates to emulate this constructive spirit in Barcelona. She acknowledged the difficulty of getting binding agreement on all of the building blocks under the Bali Action Plan (BAP), pointing to further work required, and called on delegates to “walk the last mile to Copenhagen.”

María Teresa Fernández de la Vega, Vice-President of Spain, underscored the need to respond to climate change and highlighted the consequences of slowing down actions. Drawing attention to the window of opportunity to push forward a new green economy as a consequence of the global economic crisis, she said renewable energy would be one of the priorities of her country’s Presidency of the European Union (EU) in 2010. She also said €100 million of financing would be provided by Spain by 2012.

José Montilla Aguilera, President of the Generalitat de Catalunya, stressed that local and regional governments, not just states, desire to participate in, and contribute to, actions to address climate change. He said the Government of Catalunya has turned the fight against climate change into a main pillar of action, including through its renewable energy and sustainable transportation policies.

———–

As reported by the Earth Negotiations bulletin IN THE CORRIDORS http://mail.google.com/mail/#inbox/124b7… :

As delegates filled the vast halls of the Fira de Gran Via on Monday to begin the final week of negotiations before Copenhagen, many felt as if they had just left the previous round of discussions in Bangkok. As one delegate put it, the three-week intersessional period seemed like “a long working weekend.”

Expectations of progress in Barcelona, as well as in Copenhagen, varied. While many seemed resigned to the fact that a lot of work would have to be pushed beyond Copenhagen, others were angry at what they saw as attempts to lower expectations and the level of ambition.

Mixed feelings were also expressed on how the work should proceed in Barcelona. While many delegates expressed hope that meetings would go straight to informals to finally begin “real negotiations” and facilitate development of text and clear options for Copenhagen, some delegates continued to highlight the need for contact groups. One stressed that “a Copenhagen agreement needs to be developed in the light of day.” This sentiment was shared by some NGO representatives: “If they spend the meeting in informals from Tuesday onwards, I will have nothing to do for the rest of the week,” commented one.

In the afternoon, many delegates found their schedule to be much lighter than expected: suspension of the contact groups and informal consultations scheduled under the AWG-KP at the request of the African Group took many developed and developing countries by surprise.

Sudan, for the G-77/CHINA, expressed concern about calls by Annex I parties to end the Kyoto Protocol in favor of a single agreement in Copenhagen. He highlighted the need to make progress in defining Annex I parties’ individual and aggregate quantified emission limitation and reduction objectives (QELROs).

Sweden, for the EU, stressed that a new agreement should build on the Kyoto Protocol. He reiterated the EU’s willingness to reduce emissions by 30% from 1990 levels by 2020 as part of a global agreement, provided other countries take comparable commitments. He noted support expressed by the EU leaders for 80-95% emission reductions by 2050 from 1990 levels, and called on other developed countries to adopt the same goal.

The Gambia, for the AFRICAN GROUP,  said the Group would not accept scheduling of other contact group meetings until the work on “numbers” is completed.

Sudan, for the G-77/CHINA, expressed concern about calls by Annex I parties to end the Kyoto Protocol in favor of a single agreement in Copenhagen. He highlighted the need to make progress in defining Annex I parties’ individual and aggregate quantified emission limitation and reduction objectives (QELROs)

According to rumors circulating in the corridors, informal consultations held in the afternoon did not resolve the issue. Reactions to this development were mixed. According to a developing country delegate, the cancellation of informal groups should not have been necessary and was not a good start to the meeting.

Many developed country delegates in particular saw the move as a “poor tactic” and speculated on motivations behind it. Others, however, supported the position, calling it “necessary and quite timely,” and a developing country delegate said, “this demonstrates that if no agreement is reached in Copenhagen, it is because Annex I countries have refused to make necessary commitments.”

One veteran commented: “I thought I knew this process, but this just shows that unexpected things can happen – I hope this also applies to unexpectedly good progress in Copenhagen.”
and from Tiempo http://www.tiempocyberclimate.org/newswa… :

Meeting to discuss their position at the at the climate treaty negotiations in Copenhagen in December, African negotiators have declared that they will not accept a new agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol, nor will they accept the merging of the Protocol into a new pact. They are calling for the Kyoto Protocol to be extended to cover a second and further commitment periods.

The African negotiators want see a separate legal instrument stemming from the Bali Action Plan: “a fair, inclusive, effective and equitable new agreement… that will benefit the climate and vulnerable countries and that will be undertaken in the context of poverty eradication, sustainable development and the need for gender equity.” Compensation is sought from the industrialized nations, who are held responsible for the climate problem, in the form of new, sustained and scaled-up finance required for adaptation and risk management. Speaking recently at a Nigerian government inter-ministerial conference in Abuja, Peter Tarfa from the Federal Ministry of the Environment said that “developing countries are seeking between US$200 billion and US$400 billion [a year] as compensation.”

More information
allAfrica

This Day

http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/the-arab-future-conspiracy-vs-reality

Sudan by the US Senate: The culture of black Africans of Sudan can be displaced with impunity if the US is not ready to fight for Sudan’s oil – a blessing on the one hand but a curse on the poor people that will be allowed to suffer. Oh well! Let the UN and the other Africans take care of the problem even if we know they won’t. It is not American business – and this comes from high up in the US Administration.

While doing other work, I overheard on C-SPAN the Senate Foreign Relations Hearings on Sudan. The hearings were chaired by Senator Kerry and there were two panels.

The Second Panel consisted of Professor David Shinn of George Washington University of Washington DC, Ahmed Eisa who was a refugee from Darfur and who returned to work there, and Susan Peige of the National Democratic Institute.

The First Panel had two US Government officials.  These were Major General (USAF Retired) Scott Gration, who I realized was in his young years a refugee from Congo, and who is now President Obama’s State Department Special Envoy to Sudan, and Earl Gast from US AID in charge of Sudan.

The Second Panel was used basically to approve or disapprove what was said in the First Panel.

Professor Shinn agreed that technically what is going on today in Sudan IS NOT GENOCIDE according to definition – as this was also the opinion volunteered by the Major-General.

Eisa contended that  in Darfur it is still the oppression of an African culture. The government brought in other settlers and the refugees cannot go back and the government does not show the willingness to forgo the military option.

Peige said that the whole region has to be pulled in so that there will eventually be a peaceful coexistence or separation between South and North Sudan when the two referenda will be held eventually in 2011. Further, for having a peaceful settlement there will have to be first an understanding, how the pipeline revenue will be shared past 2011.

* * *

I preferred to start my reporting from the Second Panel as finally the topic of OIL became obvious – this was not the case for the spokespeople for the Government. There the big question was – as posed by Republican Senator Corker from Tennessee – if Sudan is a terrorism sponsoring State. The answer was a no -”there is no evidence and there was no evidence.” OK – so if the US is not after the Sudanese oil because it is spoken already – so there is no terrorism and there is no reason for the US to get involved. MIND YOU THIS IS FROM THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION SPECIAL ENVOY TO THE PROBLEM STATE. On the one hand we clearly wish that would have been the preferred position on Iraq after Saddam was successfully deposed.

At these hearings the Republican Senators were not happy with the Gration stand and wanted to know how he differs with Susan Rice, the US Ambassador to the UN who seems to be more pushy in having at least a UN involvement in Sudan. Republican Senator Isakson from Georgia wanted to know how you can be a cheer-leader for the UN when thinking about the UN failure in Rwanda? The Senators and the two witnesses of the First panel came back, and back again – “we are focusing on saving lives.”  Democratic Senator Menendez from New Jersey said that genocide has no offside – what do you need in order to be effective? and the Major-General said that we have to look at the sanctions – they may be counterproductive. When you bring in help it has to come through the ports of Sudan and most of the content is under sanction – so – release the sanctions. And here he made it clear that he disagrees with Susan Rice, and that this comes from someone whose family had also to leave everything behind and flee.

The US AID man said that in order to provide safety for the women that get raped when they go to search for fire-wood, better stoves should be given to them – AND YOU KNOW WHAT? USAID IS WORKING ON THE TECHNOLOGY.
My God – I heard that story back in 1977 when the issue was planting trees in Africa so there will be a better environment, and in order to keep those trees from  being cut – solar cookers or cheap higher efficiency stoves should be given to the people. There was a Swiss-Pakistani Foundation – THE BELLERIVE of Geneva headed by the Aga Khan of those days, that had a Polish scientist in Nairobi who knew the subject inside out – so 30 years hence the US is still trying to suggest that the day might come that they will fight rape by providing stoves – someday? Now, this is what convinced me that these Senate hearings must be written up. THEY WERE A DISGRACE.

Face the reality – if the US wanted to get its hand on Sudan oil – it would accuse Sudan of terrorism and move in – but as this will cause another US disaster – so better keep out and say there is no genocide and deal with the Sudanese government the way one deals with China. JUST DON’T ROCK THE BOAT AND DO NOT BE TOO NOSEY! There will always be at hand a professor that will back you up.

—————-
And TerraViva at the UN posted on the above, MONDAY, AUGUST 03, 2009, based on the following IPS reporting {but please note the missing reference to oil – we wonder why?}:

U.S. Officials Disagree Over Sudan Strategy.
by Danielle Kurtzleben

WASHINGTON, Aug 2 (IPS) – With the need for a comprehensive approach toward Sudan growing more urgent every day, U.S. policy remains a topic of disagreement amongst top Washington officials and even within the Barack Obama administration itself.

Testifying at a Thursday Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, U.S. Special Envoy to Sudan Michael Gration stated that the Obama administration will unveil a new comprehensive policy stance toward Sudan in the coming weeks.

“We anticipate that in the next three weeks, that we’ll be able to have a rollout of this strategy. I think you’ll see from this strategy that it is very comprehensive,” said Gration, adding that the strategy “includes incentives and pressures”.

Gration listed the U.S. goals in Sudan as including ending conflict between the north and south, ending human rights abuses, creating a functioning and stable Sudanese government, and seeking cooperation with the Sudanese government to counter terrorism.

Some senators expressed scepticism towards Gration’s continued espousal of the use of carrots in addition to sticks towards reaching these goals. Critics of incentives believe that the Sudanese government will not respond, having been uncooperative toward the U.S.

The debate over a U.S. strategy in Sudan takes place as two key dates approach, making U.S. policy all the more vital. The Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), signed in 2005, set 2011 as the date when south Sudan will be allowed to vote on secession from the north. Research performed by the National Democratic Institute indicates that southerners in Sudan will overwhelmingly vote to secede.

In addition, elections are currently scheduled for April 2010. Safe and fair elections would promote the goal of a democratic Sudan, but the government in Khartoum has been moving slowly towards preparing for these elections.

Voter registration only just began in late June, and during the rainy season, when millions of rural citizens are unable to access roads. Furthermore, a high illiteracy rate makes navigating a complex ballot difficult for many voters.

If elections or the referendum are unfair, or if the referendum is held before the CPA is fully implemented, it is feared that renewed violence will spread across the country, undoing what progress towards peace has been made.

The CPA was regarded at the time of its signing as a major step forward, ending a 22-year conflict between the Muslim Arab north and the Christian south. It is estimated that this conflict, Sudan’s second major civil war in its 53-year history, killed two million and drove four million people from their homes.

Yet several elements of the CPA have yet to be fully implemented. Most notably, the border between north and south Sudan has yet to be firmly demarcated, and a wealth-sharing agreement between the north and the south has yet to be reached.

Tensions also remain high in the oil-rich region of Abyei. Earlier this month, the borders of this region were redefined by an international tribunal at The Hague, and both the government in the north and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, the main political party in the south, agreed on the new borders.

However, the CPA ceasefire agreement has been breached on numerous occasions in this region, and fears remain that violence might again erupt.

Khartoum has a history of being uncooperative with the international community. In March, the Sudanese government expelled 10 foreign aid agencies in response to the ICC bringing charges against President Omar al-Bashir. General Gration has been successful in negotiating the return of several aid organisations, which are now operating in Sudan on limited capacity.

The emphasis on pressures over incentives towards the Sudanese government was especially strong from Senator Russ Feingold, head of the Africa Subcommittee of the Foreign Relations Committee.

Feingold asked Gration for reassurance that the Obama administration is considering “meaningful punitive actions… in the event that the government of Sudan continues its historic foot-dragging.” Gration agreed to brief the senators on potential punitive actions on a later date, in a closed setting.

After the hearings, several members of the NGO community expressed scepticism towards the use of incentives toward Sudan’s government, even as they expressed optimism for progress.

Jerry Fowler, president of the Save Darfur Coalition, issued a statement after the hearing that, while he was “encouraged” to hear that General Gration and the Obama administration are using both carrots and sticks in their efforts, his organisation is “seriously doubtful of Khartoum’s true intention and ability to make good on their promises.”

He added that he “urge[s] Senators to follow up swiftly with Gen. Gration on the classified details of this plan to ensure that it’s sufficiently robust to get the job done.”

John Prendergast, co-founder of the Enough Project, a Washington-based group that advocates against genocide, emphasised the historical usefulness of pressure against the Sudanese government: “We have 20 years of empirical evidence that when there are pressures, you get some kind of change of behaviour. When there has been pressure or credible threat of pressure, then you get change.”

Refugees International Advocate Melanie Teff likewise cautioned that “it is important to stay vigilant to ensure that all sides continue to abide by their agreements.”

Yet even as many argue against the use of carrots, Gration also argued that “sticks” have consequences of their own. Specifically, he criticised the U.S.’s economic sanctions, which are in place in part because Sudan is on a list of states sponsoring terrorism.

Sudan remains on the U.S.’s list of countries considered sponsors of terror because of Sudan’s support of Hamas. Gration said that the decision to continue regarding Sudan as a terror-sponsoring state is a “political decision”, and that the consequences of sanctions are both inhibiting development work and the making the South’s political development more difficult.

“We’re hurting the very development things we need to do to help the South become able, if they choose to secede, to become a viable economic state,” said Gration.

One of the most contentious points of the hearing involved whether the current situation in Darfur can be considered “genocide”. Though President Obama and U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice have referred to it as an “ongoing” genocide, Gration has continually refused to do so, a pattern he continued on Thursday.

When asked by Sen. Roger Wicker about Obama’s characterisation of the Darfur situation as “ongoing genocide”, a seemingly irritated Gration said, “You can read that how you need to read it. That’s his statement,” adding that Darfur experiences the “ongoing consequences of genocide”.

The one thing on which all seemed to agree is that forward movement on U.S. policy is necessary. As Senator John Kerry told those assembled on Thursday, “Maintenance of a miserable status quo is not a solution.”

============

AND:

MONDAY, AUGUST 03, 2009

U.S. Nervous About China’s Growing Footprint Across Africa.
by Antoaneta Bezlova

BEIJING, Aug 2 (IPS) – China’s “no strings attached” financial assistance to developing countries in Africa and Asia has come under scrutiny during the recent high-level talks between Chinese and US leaders. In this week’s Strategic and Economic Dialogue held in Washington, China has attempted to highlight its growing economic clout in a bid to push the United States on a range of thorny issues, such as the US budget deficit and trade barriers.

Few official media outlets reported that the United States delegates pressed Beijing on articulating clear guidelines for its growing aid to the developing world. China Business News only reported that the issue was raised between the two sides, but failed to furnish any other details. During the bilateral talks held between July 27 and July 29, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner both called upon China to increase cooperation with the US in assisting developing countries.

“It is a legitimate concern for the United States, and even more so for the European Union,” said Ding Xueliang, a social scientist at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. “The international community has paid a high price in the past for acting as financier to African countries where money was siphoned and crimes were committed so it wants to make sure that China does not go the same path.”

China’s increased lending to foreign governments since 2000 has come under the spotlight because of concerns about its impact on the environment and alleged human rights abuses committed by some recipient countries and some Chinese companies operating overseas.

China’s hunger for minerals has propelled it to offer a series of loans to heavily-indebted African countries, sparking off concerns among the World Bank and IMF that it may undermine the economic recovery of those countries. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, for instance, China sidelined all competitors in 2007 by granting a 5 billion USD loan to the government in exchange for copper, cobalt and timber.

Human rights activists accuse China of viewing developing countries, particularly in the continent of Africa, as proxy states, which can satiate its vast demands for natural resources and energy.

The official Xinhua press agency estimates there are at least 750,000 Chinese workers living and working in Africa. It reflects China’s burgeoning economic ties with Africa, which touched 107 billion USD in trade last year.

In 2006, China hosted a major summit with African leaders, which was attended by 48 heads of state. At the summit, China promised to double its assistance to the continent by 2009. Along with pledges of generous financial, commercial and military assistance to African countries, Beijing also wrote off about 1 billion USD in African debts.

More significantly, Chinese premier Wen Jiabao stressed that “Chinese assistance to Africa is sincere, unselfish and has no strings attached.”

The west has been caught off guard by the sheer scale and ease of Chinese loans flowing into the developing world.

“The issue figured on the agenda of U.S.-China talks for a reason,” said a Beijing-based western diplomat. “Just days before the talks opened Beijing announced that China-Africa Development Fund plans to raise 2 billion USD by November to expand business ties between Africa and China.”

The China-Africa Development, managed by one of China’s policy banks, China Development Bank, is the world’s largest equity fund aimed at Africa. In January 2008, it provided its first set of loans to Chinese companies working in Africa in the power and infrastructure sector.

China is building major new railroad lines in Nigeria and Angola, large dams in Sudan, and new roads and airports in several African countries. Chinese trade and investment has galvanised mineral production of manganese in South Africa, uranium in Niger and exploration of oil resources from Sudan to Angola.

Despite China’s heavy involvement as financier and builder in projects in developing countries, there exists no clear set of polices guiding Beijing’s lending practices. China Exim Bank and China Development Bank have environmental and social responsibility policies which highlight the importance of environmental evaluation of the projects seeking financing. Yet there is little in place for monitoring human rights issues and corruption.

To address these issues, Beijing has so far issued only ad-hoc rules concerning particular projects, says Ding Xueliang.

“The concept of being a ‘responsible big country’ is currently embraced by the policy think-tanks in China rather than administrators,” Ding said. “It will take a long, long time before China adopts lending rules similar to the developed world and its decisions would always be guided by the strategic importance of the countries seeking loans”.

The concluded U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue did not breach any new ground in nudging Beijing to observe international norms in its aid and change its “no strings” attached lending policies. Observers say the dialogue was an attempt to build mutual trust and open channels for information exchange.

“A dialogue is different from negotiations,” said Lu Ning, political observer based in Shanghai. “It is not so much about achieving a concrete agreement as it is about the opportunity to talk about each other’s misgivings and understands each other’s views.”

OSI-New York, 400 West 59 Street, New York City, is the main headquarters of the Open Society Institute founded by financier George Soros.  Along with OSI-Budapest, it provides administrative, financial, and technical support to the Soros foundations and also operates OSI initiatives, which address specific issues on a regional or network-wide basis, and other independent programs. OSI-New York is also the home of a series of initiatives that focus primarily on the United States.

OSI-New York is now considering the establishment of an initiative that deals with aspects of Global Climate Change. in this regard, July 22, 2009, it arranged for a panel and webcast to discuss – “The Adaptation Imperative—Food Security and Climate Change.” It was chaired by  Ross Gelbspan, a former editor and reporter at the Boston Globe and the Washington Post, author of two acclaimed books on climate change: “The Heat is On” (1997) and “Boiling Point” (2004) and is working now on his third book .  The participants were: Mark Hertsgaard a journalist covering the environment for the Nation and an Open Society fellow, and Sara Scherr who serves on the United Nations Millennium Project Task Force on Hunger and is founder of Ecoagriculture Partners.

It was announced that they will discuss the implications of – the somber reality that scientists calculate that temperatures will keep rising for the next 50 years, no matter how drastically we cut greenhouse gas emissions – for food production and global hunger – in a nutshell – “the implications of climate change for food production and global hunger” – this being clearly related to the main topics that OSI deals with – human rights and democracy – including the emerging and not-yet-emerging poor countries of the world.

The panelists were supposed to “assess the severity of the problem, which is worsened by widespread soil erosion and dwindling rainfall in crop-growing regions. But they will also identify cause for hope. New farming techniques can boost crop yields while enabling plants to store carbon.” I had the feeling that the above is just the needed dry test run for the preparation of fodder for the creation of the new OSI initiative.

As we would like to hope that a new George Soros Initiative that fords the political waters of climate change will be a big deal indeed – I will start here by going over material from the Soros Foundations Network Report 2008.

George Soros began supporting efforts to promote an open society back in 1978 and five years later established the foundation in Hungary which signaled the start of his network that operates now in all parts of the globe. Today, the President of his New York headquarters is famous human rights advocate Aryeh Neier.

The Foundations have offices in Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Nairobi for East Africa, Estonia, Georgia, Guatemala, Haiti, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovak Republic, South Africa, Johannesburg for Southern Africa, Tajikistan, Turkey, Ukraine, Dakar for Western Africa, then further US based offices that deal with Latin America and the Caribbean; Af-Pak, Turkmenistan, Middle East and North Africa; Albania, Bulgaria, Czech and Slovak Republics, Moldova and Rumania; the Caucasus, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan; The States that resulted from the former Yugoslavia, Hungary, the Baltics, Poland, Russia, and Ukraine; Turkey; Burma/South East Asia. The total expenditures of the network was in 2008 over $540 million.

With above scope before us – so what was discussed last night?

In his introduction, Ross Gelbspan made it clear that the Global Climate Change topic has not made it yet through the Global Press – and by saying so he clearly got my vote unconditionally.

He also said that the authoritarian governments that disregard human rights also do little on climate change. Their people suffer and there is no respite. A properly constructed program on this subject could help create important dynamics. Most important – RENEWABLE ENERGY COULD DRIVE GLOBAL ECONOMY.

The importance is global – just look at what Secretary of Energy Prof. Steven Chu has said – “while we talk about Africa we also talk about California.” We have already a major agricultural collapse in California.

Sara Scherr moved to food security in West Africa. Very large areas in Africa will get drier and much higher temperatures. Even in those countries that get cooler, or get more water – there will be problems. There will be floods and diseases that did not exist earlier. There will be a need for change so there will not be gains as some were saying earlier. In short – even when one sees weather improvements this will not translate as desirable. There will be environmental refugees.

GHG – over 30% come from the agricultural sector. Most of the forest emissions come from drivers in agriculture. There will be adaptation issues and there will be talk of irrigation issues.

Mark Hertsgaard added that so far we focused on energy and overlooked agriculture. WHERE DO YOU GET MEAT IS AS IMPORTANT AS THE CAR! he said. How do we eat? On the mitigation side – agriculture is an important tool.

One must get a way to pull the carbon out of the atmosphere he said. Changing the agricultural system we might start turning the clock back in so far as CO2 in the atmosphere. The pressure is to get agriculture high on the Copenhagen agenda he said.

Mark traveled through India and saw that in the last 20-30 years there were large changes in agriculture – they got used to grow trees in the middle of the field. Here it becomes a topic of democracy and human rights as in authoritarian regimes the trees belong to the government – so why grow trees? It is only when the farmer gets acknowledged his property rights that there is interest in those trees. Interesting in this respect to look at the Niger?Nigeria border from the air. You see trees in Niger but not in Nigeria and this is plain demonstration of the larger acceptance of property rights in the more democratic Niger as compared to the authoritarian Nigeria.

At Q&A time questions came about US agriculture and the cap and trade program for dealing with climate change. Is there real advantage in the way how emission permits will be distributed – what about additionality in the agricultural sector, what about the fossil fuels used by agriculture …and we got away from the original issue of Africa. There was talk of monocultures but there was no talk of self sustaining agriculture and what foreign aid in kind does to destroy local potential in agriculture. Can the small local farmer break into the market if there is this unfair competition?

Indeed Ross spoke of the impact the press has by NOT bringing out the full facts of climate change, but then I felt that the speakers still thought that the UN is of help in these matters. I believe that it will take a George Soros push in order to level with a UN that for years did not allow the dissemination of the facts that the Darfur killings started because of the impact of climate change on the environment.

Human rights do not exist when the land cannot support all its children. Here we have security problems, and built in future genocides. These are the kind of issues that must be put on the table, as former UK government did when it brought up the issues to the forefront at the UN Security Council in 2007 and finally broke the UN leadership taboos in this respect. The UN Department of Public Information still had difficulty reporting on African leaders talking about climate change, and they were even slow in disseminating positions that were taken by some on the UN task forces. They were not alone in this. Some known accredited journalists still wanted just figures of how many corpses were found in the killings , but had no interest in why those things happen – do not waste our precious time they said – and it is amazing which self inflated correspondents said this.

NOW – HERE WE HAVE REAL MEAT FOR OSI – AND WE HOPE THAT THE BUDDING INITIATIVE WILL TRY TO PUSH GOVERNMENTS TO SUGGEST POSITIVE MOVES, FOR THEIR REAL ADVANTAGE, EVEN WHEN BUSINESS ATTITUDES MIGHT SUGGEST THAT THEIR INTEREST IS NOT TO ROCK THE BOAT. Could i.e. an OSI work with China to help Sudan avoid internal strife while still pandering for its oil?

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Regarding the planting of trees on farmlands – by coincidence we got now also the following:

UNEP NEWS

Trees on Farms Key to Climate and Food-Secure Future; Experts Call for Worldwide Adoption of Sustainable Farming Practices by 2030 ahead of Major International Agroforestry Congress, Nairobi, Kenya, 24 July 2009.

The World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) are calling for the widespread uptake of ‘green’ agricultural practices that will deliver multiple benefits to the world’s rapidly growing populations – from combating climate change and eradicating poverty to boosting food production and providing sustainable sources of timber.

The call was made at the launch of the 2nd World Congress of Agroforestry, which will be held in Nairobi from 23-28 August 2009.

Agriculture, deforestation and other forms of land use account for nearly one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions. With just a few months to go until the crucial UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, agricultural and environmental experts agree that all forms of land use should be included in a post-Kyoto climate regime.

According to a UNEP report, the agricultural sector could be largely carbon neutral by 2030 and produce enough food for a population estimated to grow to nine billion by 2050, if proven methods aimed at reducing emissions from agriculture were widely adopted today. Key among these methods are agroforestry, reduced cultivation of the soil, and the use of natural nutrients such as fertilizer trees.

A study by World Agroforestry Centre scientists, for example, on fertilizer trees that capture nitrogen from the air and transfer it to the soil indicates that their use can reduce the need for commercial nitrogen fertilizers by up to 75 per cent while doubling or tripling crop yields. “These results should make agroforestry appealing to farmers” noted Dennis Garrity, Director General of the World Agroforestry Centre and Co-Chair of the Congress Global Organizing Committee.

UN Under-Secretary-General and UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner said: “Addressing the range of current and future challenges – from the food, fuel and economic crises to the climate change and natural resource scarcity ones – requires an accelerated transition to a low carbon, resource efficient Green Economy for the 21st century. Farming will be either part of the problem or a big part of the solution. The choice is straight forward: continuing to mine and degrade productive land and the planet’s multi-trillion dollar ecosystems or widely adopting creative and climate-friendly management systems of which agroforestry is fast emerging as a key shining example.”

“If implemented over the next fifty years, agroforestry could result in 50 billion tons of carbon dioxide being removed from the atmosphere, about a third of the world’s total carbon reduction challenge,” Dr Garrity said.

Researchers suggest that integrating agroforestry in farming systems on a massive scale would create a vital carbon bank. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates no less than a billion hectares of developing country farmland is suitable for conversion to carbon agroforestry projects.

“Nations must seal the deal on a comprehensive and scientifically-credible new climate agreement in Copenhagen – there is a lot at stake, not least the future of agriculture and farmers’ livelihoods. One key step will be for nations to agree to a scheme for Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD) which will pave the way for preserving forests and other key ecosystems, as well as closing the gap in global demand for sustainable timber by shifting production from forest to farm,” Mr. Steiner stated.

According to a UNEP report released in June, the farm sector has the largest readily achievable gains in carbon storage, if best management practices were widely adopted. Up to 6 gigatonnes (Gt) of CO2 equivalent, or up to 2 Gt of carbon, could be sequestered each year by 2030, which is comparable to the current emissions from agriculture. Many of the agricultural practices that store more carbon can be implemented at little or no cost. The majority of this potential – 70 per cent – can be realized in developing countries.

While farmers in developing countries are one of the world’s largest, most efficient producers of sequestered carbon, to date it has not been possible to calculate or verify how much they are removing from the atmosphere. The World Agroforestry Centre and UNEP are partners in a project that promises to provide the basis for widespread adoption of agroforestry and other sustainable forms of agriculture.

The Carbon Benefits Project, launched in May 2009, is developing a standard and reliable method for accurately measuring, monitoring, reporting, and projecting how much carbon each kind of land use is storing. This global project makes use of the latest remote sensing technology and analysis, soil carbon modeling, ground-based measurements, and statistical analysis.

Garrity noted that if nations agree to a scheme for REDD in Copenhagen, the work of the Carbon Benefits Project will provide a more credible basis for smallholders to receive payments for conserving forests, practicing conservation agriculture and increasing tree cover on their farms that sequesters carbon.

“Saving carbon is not a priority for smallholder farmers. But, supporting them to expand their agroforestry systems provides income generation and service benefits to farmers that also have the co-benefit of sequestering carbon” Garrity said. “For example, by using fertilizer trees and other conservation agriculture techniques, farmers have increased their maize yields from an average of 1 tonne per hectare to 3 or even 4 tonnes per hectare while greatly improving exhausted soils. Food security is enhanced while farmers’ production systems become better adapted to climate change.”

Garrity also cited an agroforestry project underway in Malawi, where smallholder farmers are being supported with knowledge about how to plant trees for fertilizer, fruit and fuelwood benefits. The addition of fuelwood and fruit trees on these farms releases women from having to take timber from the forest, and their children are receiving more vitamins and minerals in their diet.

The theme of the Congress is Agroforestry – the future of global land use. It will assess opportunities to leverage scientific agroforestry in promoting sustainable land use worldwide. Over 1,000 researchers, practitioners, farmers, and policy makers from all corners of the globe are expected to attend, including Wangari Maathai, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and renowned environmental activist, and M. S. Swaminathan, World Food Prize laureate and “Father of the Green Revolution in India”.

Tree geneticists will explain successful processes for domesticating tree species such as rubber, coffee and indigenous fruits. Economists will present findings of studies on value-adding and improving access to markets. And soil scientists will debate the best tree-based systems for reversing land degradation.

2nd World Congress of Agroforestry website www.worldagroforestry.org

The World Agroforestry Centre, based in Nairobi, Kenya, is the world’s leading research institution on the diverse role trees play in agricultural landscapes and rural livelihoods. As part of its work to bring tree-based solutions to bear on poverty and environmental problems, centre researchers – working in close collaboration with national partners – have developed new technologies, tools and policy recommendations for increased food security and ecosystem health. www.worldagroforestry.org

For more information please contact:

For more information on the 2nd World Congress of Agrofrestry, see http://www.worldagroforestry.org/wca2009…
For more information on UNEP’s work in ecosystem management, see http://www.unep.org/ecosystemmanagement/

———————

and from NPR:

CLIMATE CONNECTIONS: SOLUTIONS
Niger’s Trees May Be Insurance Against Drought.

by Richard Harris

In response to droughts and threatening sand dunes, Niger villagers have grown trees with the help of international aid. Farmers are encouraged to scatter the trees throughout the land in order to grow crops on the same plot.  Although farmers normally prune the limbs only, some farmers clear the land for profit.

All Things Considered, NPR, July 2, 2007.

Scientists studying vegetation patterns in the broad, arid region just south of the Sahara desert have discovered that trees are growing like crazy there. And while it’s a big unknown whether global warming will bring further drought to this impoverished region, these trees will be one of the things that help people in countries like Niger cope.

A huge chunk of Niger is Sahara desert, and what’s not outright desert gets just a smattering of rain. You don’t expect to see a lot of trees in this land-locked, West African country.

But that’s exactly what ecologist Mahamane Larwanou and geographer Gray Tappan see when they roll out a satellite photo of central Niger. Both are passionate about understanding why trees are making a big comeback in many parts of Niger .

In Niger, trees aren’t just aesthetic. They are essential. Ninety percent of the nation’s energy comes in the form of firewood. Trees also feed animals, nourish the soil, provide wood for construction, and bear fruit and lucrative products, like gum Arabic. And unlike most crops, trees can survive the inevitable hard times when the climate suddenly turns even drier and more hostile.

So to get a closer look at the hopeful trend in tree growth, Larwanou and Tappan pack up a couple of four-wheel-drive trucks with gear, food and helpers and head east out of the capital city. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is funding a study to monitor tree growth in Niger, part of which involves a two-week road trip by Larwanou and Tappan.

As we wind through broad agricultural areas and across rocky plateaus, it’s the same thing everywhere: acacia trees, gum Arabic, ebony, tamarind. As we cross a plateau, Larwanou marvels that there’s actually greenery dotted around us.

“Before, this was an unproductive area,” he says. “There was not a single tree, only stones.”

We descend off the plateaus and make our way into the town of Adouna .

Larwanou and Tappan stop on the outskirts of town to measure the trees and figure out how much wood they’re producing.

“If we know the amount of wood that is being produced, we can figure out a sustainable rate of harvest of the wood for firewood,” Tappan says.

First they set up their study plot. Then, they measure the height and width of each tree and bush. Eventually, they will be able to extrapolate these readings to measure tree growth over an area of Niger the size of West Virginia. That’s a lot of wood.

Tappan works for SAIC, a contractor that helps the U.S. Geological Survey run a remote sensing center in South Dakota. He’s precise and a bit reserved, especially in contrast to Larwanou, who is everybody’s instant friend. Larwanou’s face is adorned with tribal markings that look like whiskers.

That gregarious quality serves Larwanou well, because the researchers don’t just want to measure tree growth. They want to understand what people are doing to encourage trees. And to do that, Larwanou talks to the locals.

We wander up a slope overlooking the study plot to talk to three women who have been looking down on us and laughing at the strange activity they see. The women are chopping up a branch that had been lopped off the tree. First, goats and sheep had a chance to eat the leaves. Now the women are taking the rest for firewood.

The first thing we learn is that these trees aren’t all that old. Oomah, the oldest woman, tell us that, long ago, this area was dotted with trees. But during the early 1970s, there was a horrible drought throughout this region of West Africa and people used the trees to survive.

“People suffered in a way that cannot be described. People were displaced by that crazy drought. Those who dared to stay, cut down the trees and took them to the markets to sell,” Oomah says. “That was their only way to get food.”

Even so, the drought killed hundreds of thousands of people throughout Niger and other parts of West Africa .

Gray Tappan picks up the story from there.

“When the people were hit by a second drought within their living memory,” he says, “they realized that they have to consider other options to survive the next drought. Everybody knows that drought is a natural part of this environment here. It is only a matter of time before we see another drought.”

Aid groups from Europe and the United States knew that trees could help people adapt during the bad years. So they planted trees extensively starting in the 1980s. This explains part of the story.

The government of Niger also changed its policies and let local people take ownership of the trees. And that has encouraged farmers to let the trees grow. These days, they prune them for wood rather than chopping them down altogether.

A European aid group volunteered to plant trees to stabilize the dunes — so long as the town’s people built fences to keep the trees safe from the camels, donkeys, sheep and goats. Today, the people in Adouna say those trees saved the village.

The stories vary from one village to the next, but Tappan says the result is the same: Large swaths of Niger are getting greener.

“As we go from village to village, what we are hearing from farmers is they consider themselves better off today than they were 20 years ago. We see less and less migration of youth to cities,” Tappan says. “Youth stay because they can actually make a living on the land today.”

Trees here are really another crop. Farmers generally encourage them to grow scattered throughout their land, so there’s still enough space and light to grow grains on the same plot. But Tappan and Larwanou have also noticed a few curious places in the aerial imagery where trees are growing back much more densely.

“This is literally a forest — there was nothing there in 1975,” Tappan says, looking at the photos. “It is the densest stand of vegetation we have anywhere near this village area.”

So we pile back into the trucks, pass some nomads who are riding camels, and head out — slowly — across deeply- rutted fields.

Across the river, the scene is not at all what Tappan and Larwanou expected. The farmer who owns this land has recently chopped down most of his trees.

“This was all forest a year and a half ago, and now look at all of the stumps. They cut everything,” Larwanou says. “They burned the soil to avoid sprouting. I am highly disappointed. I am an ecologist, and I would like to see everything green. But the farmer has to eat.”

He not only needs to eat, he needs to make his land produce more and more food every single year. That’s because the population here is growing at an astounding pace, doubling every 20 years.

These circumstances are difficult, but Larwanou sees an alternative to poverty’s destructive effects on Niger’s trees. In today’s global carbon marketplace, Niger could receive credit for trees that are soaking up the carbon dioxide produced by rich countries.

The World Bank is already funding a few tree plantations in Niger, so the country can earn cash for taking carbon out of the atmosphere. It is hard to see how individual subsistence farmers could benefit from this exchange. But if Larwanou can find a way for all to reap the benefits, that would be yet another reason for the people in Niger to let their trees grow tall.

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So, we learn that there is a multipurpose for planting tres on African farmland – perhaps not all of this is what we would like to hear. We assume that a Soros Foundation Initiative would look at how to help the locals feed themselves first – this before they fall into a new trap of what is good for the people from affar. We say this even though we are clearly in the corner of the climate change fighting world brigade, but doing another rffort on the back of Africas marginal people is not our thing.

From IISD a Special Report on UNCCD Land Day at the ongoing Bonn meetings on Climate Change.

On Saturday June 6, 2009, organized by the UNCCD Secretariat, the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) Secretariat hosted “Land Day” at the Gustav-Stresemann-Institut, Bonn, Germany.

The event, attended by 170 participants, aimed to help climate change negotiators and other stakeholders attending the concurrent Bonn climate change talks consider in detail the linkages between climate change and desertification, land degradation and drought (DLDD).

The event was opened by Luc Gnacadja, UNCCD Executive Secretary, Yvo de Boer, UNFCCC Executive Secretary, and Adolf Kloke-Lesch, Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) Director-General.

Jeffrey Sachs, Earth Institute Director, Columbia University, offered a pre-recorded keynote address.

Participants then attended three panels, entitled:

  – “How does sustainable land management support climate change adaptation?”;

 - “What options can soil carbon sequestration offer for mitigating and adapting to climate change?”; and

  – “Sustainable land management in climate change policy frameworks: what is the way forward?”

Luc Gnacadja, UNCCD Executive Secretary, stressed that land has an unparalleled capacity to sequester carbon, but its potential to mitigate climate change is presently untapped. Emphasizing that numerous opportunities exist to include land within a post-2012 climate regime, he said the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and carbon markets must be changed and made accessible to farmers and land managers.

Gnacadja argued that soil restoration and soil carbon sequestration offer “win-win-win” opportunities for climate change, biodiversity and desertification. Noting that “poor soils lead to poor people,” he further suggested that inclusion of desertification, land degradation and drought in a future climate regime has the potential to bring more equity and justice to developing countries.

Yvo de Boer, UNFCCC Executive Secretary, discussed the linkages between the agriculture and forest sectors and climate change mitigation and adaptation. He highlighted that 10-12% of total annual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions come from agricultural practices, and that deforestation accounted for 20% of GHG emissions in the 1990s.

Underscoring that some mitigation options can be realized at “low or even negative costs,” de Boer highlighted a number of possibilities in these sectors, including: reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation in developing countries (REDD); improved crop and grazing management; and restoration of organic soils. He added that mitigation options, such as agroforestry, support adaptation and promote biodiversity.

Adolf Kloke-Lesch, Director-General, German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), said climate change threatens to destroy the efforts and achievements of sustainable development. Noting that land degradation was previously considered a collection of local problems, he argued that today it is understood as a global problem that must be part of the global environmental agenda.

Kloke-Lesch stated that sustainable land management offers a cost-effective solution to mitigating climate change and that natural infrastructures, such as forests and soils, must be part of this solution. He stressed that sustainable land management must become an integral part of climate protection strategies in a new “Green Deal” forged at the 2009 climate change talks in Copenhagen.

In a pre-recorded message, Jeffrey Sachs, Earth Institute, Columbia University, underscored the importance of integrating the urgent agendas of drylands and global climate change. He said drylands are amongst the most vulnerable areas to climate change, and that impacts in dryland countries are compounded because these countries are also experiencing demographic pressures and have large populations living in poverty.

Sachs explained that the combination of these factors is “at the root” of some of the greatest security challenges on the planet, noting these issues must be addressed to lessen security risks not only for the people in these regions but for the entire world.

He called for several responses, including: better science on the effects of climate change in dryland regions; increased understanding of human systems, such as the impacts of climate change on herders’ livestock assets; and increased understanding of intervention measures that are needed for adaptation and climate change preparedness. Sachs emphasized the need for a holistic approach in addressing these issues, highlighting the potential for ecosystem-based adaption in this regard.

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(later addition) Professor Sachs – Highlighting the political conflicts in the 10,000 km stretch of drylands across the Sahel from Senegal to the Horn of Africa, across the Red Sea into Yemen, Pakistan and on to Afghanistan, Sachs said the lack of   “a coherent, consistent, persistent, scaled science-based response” to the harrowing effects of climate change associated with hunger, livestock survival and increasing stresses between sedentary populations and nomadic or semi-nomadic herders is the real challenge.

It is mind-boggling how above reality was suppressed by the UN for so many years – this as if the men in the UN glass building can speak only of unsolvable issues that provide for them a raison d’etre and their jobs, while trying to find the real reasons of those conflicts, the reasons before the fabricated reasons of “the other” would do harm to the bureacrats self   interest.

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www.sustainabilitank.info is still waiting to hear above ideas fully backed by the UN bureaucracy, but we are already gratified that many individuals, and enlightened governments, speak out forcefully. We were privvy, and victims, to a UN that was hiding above under the global rug because they felt it was just one more cause that can harm the sale of petroleum.

Please also read into the “at the root” comment by Dr. Sachs, locations like Darfur and the Middle East, and we would like to remark that we were hoping that President Obama would mention this in his Cairo speech to the Muslim World – but he did not. In our opinion, an opinion we fought for at the UN, a cooperative program on these “Land” issues between Israel, the Arab World, Iran, China, Africa, with international support, could go a long way in helping   address some of the problems with the Islamic governments – problems that were mentioned in the speech and the African problems that were not mentioned at all.

Water Wars

By Jeffrey Sachs

May 1, 2009

Many conflicts are caused or inflamed by water scarcity. The conflicts from Chad to Darfur, Sudan, to the Ogaden Desert in Ethiopia, to Somalia and its pirates, and across to Yemen, Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, lie in a great arc of arid lands where water scarcity is leading to failed crops, dying livestock, extreme poverty, and desperation.

Extremist groups like the Taliban find ample recruitment possibilities in such impoverished communities. Governments lose their legitimacy when they cannot guarantee their populations’ most basic needs: safe drinking water, staple food crops, and fodder and water for the animal herds on which communities depend for their meager livelihoods.

Politicians, diplomats, and generals in conflict-ridden countries typically treat these crises as they would any other political or military challenge. They mobilize armies, organize political factions, combat warlords, or try to grapple with religious extremism.

But these responses overlook the underlying challenge of helping communities meet their urgent needs for water, food, and livelihoods. As a result, the United States and Europe often spend tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars to send troops or bombers to quell uprisings or target “failed states,” but do not send one-tenth or even one-hundredth of that amount to address the underlying crises of water scarcity and under-development.

Water problems will not go away by themselves. On the contrary, they will worsen unless we, as a global community, respond. A series of recent studies shows how fragile the water balance is for many impoverished and unstable parts of the world. The United Nations agency UNESCO recently issued the UN World Water Development Report 2009; the World Bank issued powerful studies on India and Pakistan; and the Asia Society issued an overview of Asia’s water crises.

These reports tell a similar story. Water supplies are increasingly under stress in large parts of the world, especially in the world’s arid regions. Rapidly intensifying water scarcity reflects bulging populations, depletion of groundwater, waste and pollution, and the enormous and increasingly dire effects of manmade climate change.

The consequences are harrowing: drought and famine, loss of livelihood, the spread of water-borne diseases, forced migrations, and even open conflict. Practical solutions will include many components, including better water management, improved technologies to increase the efficiency of water use, and new investments undertaken jointly by governments, the business sector, and civic organizations.

I have seen such solutions in the Millennium Villages in rural Africa, a project in which my colleagues and I are working with poor communities, governments, and businesses to find practical solutions to the challenges of extreme rural poverty. In Senegal, for example, a world-leading pipe manufacturer, JM Eagle, donated more than 100 kilometers of piping to enable an impoverished community to join forces with the government water agency PEPAM to bring safe water to tens of thousands of people. The overall project is so cost effective, replicable, and sustainable that JM Eagle and other corporate partners will now undertake similar efforts elsewhere in Africa.

But future water stresses will be widespread, including both rich and poor countries. The United States, for example, encouraged a population boom in its arid southwestern states in recent decades, despite water scarcity that climate change is likely to intensify. Australia, too, is grappling with serious droughts in the agricultural heartland of the Murray-Darling River basin. The Mediterranean Basin, including Southern Europe and North Africa is also likely to experience serious drying as a result of climate change.

However, the precise nature of the water crisis will vary, with different pressure points in different regions. For example, Pakistan, an already arid country, will suffer under the pressures of a rapidly rising population, which has grown from 42 million in 1950 to 184 million in 2010, and may increase further to 335 million in 2050, according to the UN’s “medium” scenario. Even worse, farmers are now relying on groundwater that is being depleted by over-pumping. Moreover, the Himalayan glaciers that feed Pakistan’s rivers may melt by 2050, owing to global warming.

Solutions will have to be found at all “scales,” meaning that we will need water solutions within individual communities (as in the piped-water project in Senegal), along the length of a river (even as it crosses national boundaries), and globally, for example, to head off the worst effects of global climate change. Lasting solutions will require partnerships between government, business, and civil society, which can be hard to negotiate and manage, since these different sectors of society often have little or no experience in dealing with each other and may mistrust each other considerably.

Most governments are poorly equipped to deal with serious water challenges. Water ministries are typically staffed with engineers and generalist civil servants. Yet lasting solutions to water challenges require a broad range of expert knowledge about climate, ecology, farming, population, engineering, economics, community politics, and local cultures. Government officials also need the skill and flexibility to work with local communities, private businesses, international organizations, and potential donors.

A crucial next step is to bring together scientific, political, and business leaders from societies that share the problems of water scarcity—for example, Sudan, Pakistan, the United States, Australia, Spain, and Mexico—to brainstorm about creative approaches to overcoming them. Such a gathering would enable information-sharing, which could save lives and economies. It would also underscore a basic truth: The common challenge of sustainable development should unify a world divided by income, religion, and geography.

• Water: A Global Innovation Outlook Report (Policy Library)
• Managing Water Well (Briefings)
• Ethics Be Dammed? China’s Water Projects (Commentary)
• Beyond Scarcity: Power, poverty and the global water crisis (Policy Library)

From: <info@oiip.at>
Date: Tue, Apr 7, 2009

Panel Discussion The Impact of ICC-Resolution on Peace in Sudan on April 23, 2009.               On behalf of the Austrian Institute for International Affairs – oiip.

The Impact of the International Criminal Court (ICC)

Resolution on Peace in Sudan.

Welcome:
Sayed Galal ELAMIN, Ambassador of the Republic of Sudan
Otmar HÖLL, oiip

Participants:

Abdalah al ASHAAL, Professor, former Assistant to the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Egypt
Georg LENNKH, Advisor to the EU-Presidency for African Affairs, Austrian Foreign Ministry
Ferdinand TRAUTTMANSDORFF, Austrian Foreign Ministry
Representative of the Sudan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, tbc

Chair:
Werner FASSLABEND, Political Academy of the Austrian People s Party

Subsequent Buffet Dinner

Thursday, April 23, 2009

6:00 p.m.

Festsaal of the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna
Favoritenstraße 15a, 1040 Wien

Programme: http://www.oiip.at/magazin/00/artikel/64…

In cooperation with the Austrian Institute for European and Security Policy, the Austrian-Sudanese Society, the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna , the Embassy of the Republic of the Sudan and the Institute for Peace Support and Conflict Management.

Please register by e-mail  info at oiip.at or by phone: 01/581 11 06

————————-

Daniela Härtl

oiip – Austrian Institute for International Affairs

Operngasse 20B, A-1040 Vienna

Tel: +43 1 581 11 06/11, Fax: -10
e-mail:  haertl at oiip.at

OIIP proudly announces the 30 Year Jubilee with an International Symposium titled “European Security in a Changing World” on June 15/16, 2009.

Venue: Austrian Academy of Sciences, Dr. Ignaz Seipel-Platz 2, 1010 Vienna.

 info at oiip.at