Category: Article

Europeans just cannot seem to get Islam, or more properly, Islamism, out of their heads. This seems to be particularly true of Europeans who have not spent much time in the Islamic world, and whose idea of immersion journalism is to spend an afternoon wandering round an immigrant neighbourhood in the European capital city of their choice with a view to chatting up a few swarthy-looking men over a cup of mint tea.

And even some more serious writers have ended up falling into the same trap over the last few weeks. Take Timothy Garton Ash, for instance, whose reporting of the decline of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe in the 1980s was exemplary in its combination of in-depth research and first-hand experience. In a series of articles in The Guardian, Garton Ash has been greeting the wave of insurrections sweeping across the Arab world with a wall of worry. In his latest piece, published last week, a visit to the Calle de Tribulete in Madrid plunged him into new depths of anxiety. Despite garnering some half-hearted expressions of ill-defined hope, it was not long before he and his interlocutors were overtaken by the memories of terrorism past. He even managed to run into a young man at a bus stop spouting Wahhabi-inspired anti-semitic conspiracy theories to casual passers-by. Needless to say, the overall effect was far from encouraging.

“Only a fool would fail to recognise that this is a moment of danger, as well as opportunity,” he concludes. “The path forward for Tunisia and Egypt is far less clear than it was for east European countries – and there is no warm, safe house of EU membership beckoning at the end of the road.”

The leitmotiv of Garton Ash’s fears is that the threat of Islamic fundamentalism is real, however it may have been instrumentalised by western democrats and their client dictators, and that the task now falls to Europe to do something to prevent this menace from bring translated into reality. Without our help and guidance, the current upheaval in our Arab neighbours is likely to install regimes more oppressive for their citizens, and more dangerous for us than those which they have replaced.

The problem with this scenario is not just that it depends on a faulty reading of history, one which minimises or ignores the role of the western powers in supporting the rise of Islamism in the first place, and in particular in installing a theocratic regime in Iran in order to ensure ‘stability’ and preempt a genuinely progressive revolution[1]. Even if history did agree with Garton Ash, his argument would still be undermined by the present. For it is entirely contradicted by everything we know about what is happening today in Egypt, the only one of these revolutions so far to have reached a point where, at least provisionally, the balance of power seems to have given the revolutionaries some measure of control.

All the reports we have concur that once this particular Arab street had liberated itself, its first instinct was not to revert to some authoritarian moralistic Golden Age, the mediaeval theme park of Orientalist imagination, but rather to create an entirely new kind of society symbolised by and embodied in the occupation of Tahrir Square. The result, as Yasmine El-Rashidi has described it, was something like a cross between a vernacular religious festival (the kind of joyfully chaotic carnival which textbook Islamists generally cannot stand), and an anarchist commune. A space that was self-organising, self-securing, self-policing, self-recycling, and in which people were constantly devolving power back to one another – devout Muslims to Christians and to ‘godless’ youth[2], has-been and potential leaders to the mass of the people, and soldiers (up to fairly senior officer rank) to civilians.

In other words, absent outside intervention, whether positive or negative, the most likely course of the Arab revolutions now in progress would be to produce creative forms of political organisation and social conviviality which, while rooted in the long histories of their indigenous cultures, and in the more recent civilisational traditions that overlay them, are as unprecedented in the experience of those now living through them as they are unpredictable for external observers.

The problem, then, is not what Europe can do to help them, but how we Europeans can keep our governments safely out of their way, and ensure that our political and financial elites do not try to subvert these movements for their own purposes. (This is a practical problem, and it requires practical solutions – that is, things we can do, not just things we can demand that others do.) The greatest problem facing Egypt today is not the Muslim Brotherhood, or high levels of poverty and illiteracy, but the vicious co-dependency that exists between the upper echelons of the Egyptian army, the Israeli military-political complex and the bi-partisan US establishment, and of which the most obscene symbol is the US armament casings that littered the streets of Cairo after the insurrection’s blackest days[3]

“Friends of the family”

Led by the Egyptians and the Tunisians, the Arab world stands on the brink of inventing forms of democracy and participation that should not only destroy the dominant Orientalist image of the region once and for all, but from which the people of the US and Europe have much to learn, too. What is not clear is whether the leaders of the west, and their paranoid courtiers in the media, are ready to let us benefit from this inspiration.

The good news, however, is that it is probably already too late for them to stop us. The people of the west have already had ample opportunity to see both what real democracy in action looks like over the last month – what it is like, that is, when people take their rights for themselves, rather than voluntarily down-converting them into “privileges” to be granted by a higher authority – and how our so-called democratic leaders react when confronted with this kind of behaviour. From Tony Blair’s description of Mubarak as “a force for good”, to Hillary Clinton’s admission that she and her husband counted the dictator of Egypt and his wife as “friends of the family”, or the revelations that half the French cabinet seems to have been relying on North African tyrants for cut-rate holidays and last-minute travel plans, we have been reminded of something that should have been obvious from the beginning. The attitude of our elected leaders towards the bullies, torturers and thieves who still continue to run a large part of the tragically misnamed “developing world” is not just one of uncomfortable tolerance. These are their friends, their allies, their co-conspirators. Though the ways in which they have risen to power may differ, the culture which that power confers upon them is essentially the same.

The problem with Blair and Clinton is not that they are prepared to compromise their Enlightenment values for the sake of political expediency – in order to protect Israel, to ensure access to cheap energy resources, or to take advantage of a police force that is happy to torture their prisoners for them while they keep their own hands clean. The real problem with ‘our’ leaders is that they have more in common with ‘their’ leaders than they do with the vast majority of the people whom they are widely, if implausibly, supposed to ‘represent’. And that, in the end, is why we need laws: not to govern us, but to restrain them.

Of course, the web of ties which binds together the internally violent and corrupt police states that still run most of the extractive zones of the world economy, and the externally violent and corrupt oligarchies-by-consent which are the ornament (and, increasingly, not much else) of those zones where consumption is the dominant form of oppression, is structural in nature, as well as personal. This is not just about Tony and Hillary sipping drinks by the pool with Hosni and Suzanne. Our governments and corporations sell their armies and police forces “non-lethal” weapons, and then train them in how to use them to create maximum terror among their populations. And we do this, not out of the kindness of our hearts, but precisely so that they can sell us in return their countries’ natural resources at a discount to the rate that would have to be applied if it was recognised that these resources belonged to all the people of that country, collectively and indivisibly, and not just to some tiny tyrannical minority that has managed to grab hold of the levers of former colonial power, and re-purpose them for the post-colonial era.

In this context, David Cameron’s decision to surf the wave of people power by stopping over in Egypt on Monday looks particularly opportunistic, on the part of a man whose government has managed in the space of a few months to authorize sales of tear gas to Bahrain, crowd-control ammunition to Libya, combat helicopters to Algeria and armoured personnel carriers to Saudi Arabia. Wherever we shouldn’t have been selling weapons this winter, we have been doing it. And our role in equipping dictators and their goons seems set to continue this week at the International Defence Exhibition and Conference (IDEX), the largest arms trade exhibition in the Middle East, which opened in Abu Dhabi Sunday. The Middle East remains a ‘priority market’ for the UK industry, supported by UKTI, and one in ten of the exhibitors at IDEX are UK-based companies[4].

Bringing Tahrir to Kensington

One of Garton Ash’s more implausible claims is that Europe has a duty to help the Arab nations determine their path going forwards, because we have a particularly rich experience of achieving successful transitions from dictatorship to democracy. It could equally well be said, however, that our power elites have a particularly rich experience of ensuring that the transition from colonial dependency to independent state in Africa, the Middle East, Latin American and large parts of Asia, turned out entirely compatible with the continuation and intensification of the old colonial circuits of exploitation and oppression.

Indeed, even within Europe itself, our leaders have always tried to ensure that any transition from authoritarianism to democracy, while openly welcomed, was effectively emptied of any real substance. In the process, ‘democracy’ was transformed from the real lived participation of all in the government of everyday life, into a pure spectacle – a system of propaganda that exists principally to make injustice and inequality far more ‘bearable’ than could any explicitly authoritarian regime (as Saroj Giri recently suggested, in the course of comparing the events in Egypt to the situation in India). Seen in this way, the advice of our governments on how to manage the ‘transition’ to democracy is probably something the Arab world will want to do without.

But that does not mean that Europe and the Arab world have nothing to learn from each other. On the contrary. If the revolutions now underway across the region are indeed able to deliver on their promise of reempowering their people, without being subverted by the combined economic and military power of the USA, the EU, Israel and Saudi Arabia, then it may be that the new Arab nations which emerge from this process will need and want to share their experience with us. Indeed, they may see it as vital to their own interests to help us, the people of Europe, retake control over our own economies and our own societies, not simply in order to export their revolution, but as the minimum condition for transforming us into a good neighbour for the rest of the region, rather than the source of chronic instability and insecurity we have been over the past several centuries.

Ongoing protests and actions in places from Madison, Wisconsin, to Central London have already appealed to the Egyptian experience, both explicitly, and symbolically. American public service workers last week brandished Egyptian flags to express their rejection of the state’s attempts to deprive them of their union rights, while British activists have called for a day of action in March to “bring Tahrir Square to Hyde Park”. While the nature of every act of human revolt is specific and, at some level, untranslatable, the energy of empowerment which it releases is by its nature infectious, and transgressive. How long before here, in the West, our own governments’ politically-motivated “austerity” programmes create the conditions in which a thousand Tahrirs can bloom? Looking back to recent events in France and Greece, we may feel that day is perhaps not so far away.

Noam Chomsky recently claimed that what western leaders are really afraid of is not an Islamist takeover in the Arab region, but the emergence of genuinely independent and democratic Arab states which will no longer kow-tow to Washington and do its bidding. That is surely part of the story. But I believe that what they are most afraid of is not just the emergence of democracy in the Arab world. However uncomfortable and embarrassing that may be, they know they can live with it. What they are most afraid of is that, having slept through the last 60 years of democracy, their own citizens/subjects may be about to wake up again to their own power: that, having seen what it is like when a people dictate to their government what it should do for them, rather than the reverse, we might start to take our own rights back, wholesale, rather than waiting for our rulers to grant us them in homeopathic doses – or fob us off with a placebo.

The victory of the revolutionaries of Tahrir Square, however partial and provisional, reminds us that we once started our own revolution, and that we failed to finish it. Maybe this is our time that has come again, too.

[1] See Serge Bricianer, Une étincelle dans la nuit – Sur la révolution iranienne 1978-1979, Ab Irato, Paris, 2002, for an account of how Iranian workers’ movements were sidelined and ultimately defeated in 1979.

[2] See Omar Kamel, “Regarding the Brotherhood…”, for a particularly moving illustration of this phenomenon.

[3] See Pratap Chaterjee, “Egypt’s military-industrial complex”, The Guardian, 4 February 2011.

[4] See “CAAT condemns empty words from Government as arms sale drive continues” and “UK arms sales to Middle East include tear gas and crowd control ammunition to Bahrain and Libya” for more details.

Frederick Bowie is an independent journalist. He has spent many years living and working in the Middle East, and was a regular contributor to Al-Ahram Weekly (Cairo). The original version of this article appeared on openDemocracy. 

In the first study of its kind, researchers have linked a natural global climate cycle to periodic increases in warfare. The arrival of El Niño, which every three to seven years boosts temperatures and cuts rainfall, doubles the risk of civil wars across 90 affected tropical countries, and may help account for a fifth of worldwide conflicts during the past half-century, say the authors.

The paper, written by an interdisciplinary team at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, appears in the current issue of the leading scientific journal Nature.

In recent years, historians and climatologists have built evidence that past societies suffered and fell due in connection with heat or droughts that damaged agriculture and shook governments. This is the first study to make the case for such destabilization in the present day, using statistics to link global weather observations and well-documented outbreaks of violence. The study does not blame specific wars on El Niño, nor does it directly address the issue of long-term climate change. However, it raises potent questions, as many scientists think natural weather cycles will become more extreme with warming climate, and some suggest ongoing chaos in places like Somalia are already being stoked by warming climate.

“The most important thing is that this looks at modern times, and it’s done on a global scale,” said Solomon M. Hsiang, the study’s lead author, a graduate of the Earth Institute’s Ph.D. in sustainable development. “We can speculate that a long-ago Egyptian dynasty was overthrown during a drought. That’s a specific time and place, that may be very different from today, so people might say, ‘OK, we’re immune to that now.’  This study shows a systematic pattern of global climate affecting conflict, and shows it right now.”

The cycle known as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO, is a periodic warming and cooling of the tropical Pacific Ocean. This affects weather patterns across much of Africa, the Mideast, India, southeast Asia, Australia, and the Americas, where half the world’s people live. During the cool, or La Niña, phase, rain may be relatively plentiful in tropical areas; during the warmer El Niño, land temperatures rise, and rainfall declines in most affected places. Interacting with other factors including wind and temperature cycles over the other oceans, El Niño can vary dramatically in power and length. At its most intense, it brings scorching heat and multi-year droughts. (In higher latitudes, effects weaken, disappear or reverse; La Niña conditions earlier this year helped dry the U.S. Southwest and parts of east Africa.)

The scientists tracked ENSO from 1950 to 2004 and correlated it with onsets of civil conflicts that killed more than 25 people in a given year. The data included 175 countries and 234 conflicts, over half of which each caused more than 1,000 battle-related deaths. For nations whose weather is controlled by ENSO, they found that during La Niña, the chance of civil war breaking out was about 3 percent; during El Niño, the chance doubled, to 6 percent. Countries not affected by the cycle remained at 2 percent no matter what. Overall, the team calculated that El Niño may have played a role in 21 percent of civil wars worldwide—and nearly 30 percent in those countries affected by El Niño.

Coauthor Mark Cane, a climate scientist at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said that the study does not show that weather alone starts wars. “No one should take this to say that climate is our fate. Rather, this is compelling evidence that it has a measurable influence on how much people fight overall,” he said. “It is not the only factor–you have to consider politics, economics, all kinds of other things.” Cane, a climate modeler, was among the first to elucidate the mechanisms of El Niño, showing in the 1980s that its larger swings can be predicted—knowledge now used by organizations around the world to plan agriculture and relief services.

The authors say they do not know exactly why climate feeds conflict. “But if you have social inequality, people are poor, and there are underlying tensions, it seems possible that climate can deliver the knockout punch,” said Hsiang. When crops fail, people may take up a gun simply to make a living, he said. Kyle C. Meng, a sustainable-development Ph.D. candidate and the study’s other author, pointed out that social scientists have shown that individuals often become more aggressive when temperatures rise, but he said that whether that applies to whole societies is only speculative.

Bad weather does appear to tip poorer countries into chaos more easily; rich Australia, for instance, is controlled by ENSO, but has never seen a civil war. On the other side, Hsiang said at least two countries “jump out of the data.” In 1982, a powerful El Niño struck impoverished highland Peru, destroying crops; that year, simmering guerrilla attacks by the revolutionary Shining Path movement turned into a full-scale 20-year civil war that still sputters today. Separately, forces in southern Sudan were already facing off with the domineering north, when intense warfare broke out in the El Niño year of 1963. The insurrection abated, but flared again in 1976, another El Niño year. Then, 1983 saw a major El Niño–and the apocalyptic outbreak of more than 20 years of fighting that killed 2 million people, arguably the world’s bloodiest conflict since World War II. It culminated only this summer, when South Sudan became a separate nation; fighting continues in border areas. Hsiang said some other countries where festering conflicts have tended to blow up during El Niños include El Salvador, the Philippines and Uganda (1972); Angola, Haiti and Myanmar (1991); and Congo, Eritrea, Indonesia and Rwanda (1997).

The idea that environment fuels violence has gained currency in the past decade, with popular books by authors like Jared Diamond, Brian Fagan and Mike Davis. Academic studies have drawn links between droughts and social collapses, including the end of the Persian Gulf’s Akkadian empire (the world’s first superpower), 6,000 years ago; the AD 800-900 fall of Mexico’s Maya civilization; centuries-long cycles of warfare within Chinese dynasties; and recent insurgencies in sub-Saharan Africa. Last year, tree-ring specialists at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory published a 1,000-year atlas of El Niño-related droughts; data from this pinpoints droughts coinciding with the downfall of the Angkor civilization of Cambodia around AD 1400, and the later dissolution of kingdoms in China, Vietnam, Myanmar and Thailand.

Some scientists and historians remain unconvinced of connections between climate and violence. “The study fails to improve on our understanding of the causes of armed conflicts, as it makes no attempt to explain the reported association between ENSO cycles and conflict risk,” said Halvard Buhaug, a political scientist with the Peace Research Institute Oslo in Norway who studies the issue. “Correlation without explanation can only lead to speculation.”  Another expert, economist Marshall Burke of the University of California, Berkeley, said the authors gave “very convincing evidence” of a connection. But, he said, the question of how overall climate change might play out remains. “People may respond differently to short-run shocks than they do to longer-run changes in average temperature and precipitation,” he said. He called the study “a useful and illuminating basis for future work.”

The Earth Institute’s Ph.D. in sustainable development program is run jointly with Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, and the university’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Image source: The U.S. National Archives

Article source: The Earth Institute

This article by Foreign Policy in Focus co-director John Feffer powerfully explores three recent and geographically diverse killings in the context of marginalisation. Feffer links the fatal beating of an Iraqi-born American woman in California, the shooting of Trayvon Martin in Florida, and Mohamed Merah’s killing spree in Toulouse to the notion of trespass: “The message behind all three is this: you should not be here, you are not one of us, and your death shall serve as a warning.”

Merah himself was a member of a minority in France that is still yet to fully realise its place in French society, but that is only part of the context in which he operated: his own sense of trespass came from an intolerant ideology shared with a borderless fringe, dictating that Muslims who join the western ‘enemy’ armed forces (or who simply become too western) put themselves beyond the pale in doing so. As such, the concept of trespass is not merely a question of geography but also incorporates trespass of the mind, which is equally deserving of punishment. Feffer notes that the vast majority of Al-Qaeda’s victims are Muslims, a clear example of self-appointed leaders punishing disloyal or failed members of their own group. Other examples of this conception of trespass include honour killings and the 2011 terrorist attack by Anders Behring Breivik, who believed that Norway had betrayed its Christian European roots and so was motivated to punish the young liberal inheritors of that transgressive philosophy.

 

Three Killings

The note left next to the bloodied body of Shaima Alawadi read “go back to your country, you terrorist.” Alawadi, who died on March 24 after being taken off life support, was an Iraqi-born mother of five living outside of San Diego. Someone had delivered a similar note to the family earlier in the month. It was likely the same person who returned with a tire iron and struck her repeatedly on the head. Alawadi had lived in the United States for 17 years. Several family members reportedly provided cultural training to U.S. soldiers deployed to the Middle East. In a very sad coda, Alawadi is indeed going back to her country – to be buried.

There were no notes that accompanied Trayvon Martin’s death at the end of February. But he was also killed for a perceived trespassing. An African-American teenager, Martin was guilty of “walking while black” as he carried iced tea and Skittles through the Florida community of Sanford. The self-appointed head of the community’s neighborhood watch, George Zimmerman, identified Martin as a threat. Zimmerman didn’t wait for the police to arrive. He chased after the young man and, in circumstances still very murky, shot him dead. Because of the “stand your ground” law that permits shooting in self-defense, the police did not arrest Zimmerman.

In the middle of March, Mohamed Merah went on a killing spree in Toulouse, France that left seven people dead. The victims were a rabbi, three Jewish children, and three French soldiers. Two of the soldiers were Muslim. Merah, who identified with Islamic extremism, specifically targeted Muslim soldiers for being “traitors.” The French-born Merah better fit the profile of a serial killer than a political extremist. But his Muslim victims are an important reminder that ordinary, everyday Muslims, even more so than Jews or Americans, figure as the most potent threats to the worldview promoted by al-Qaeda and its ilk. The overwhelming majority of al-Qaeda and Taliban victims are Muslims.

These murders are, on the face of it, quite different: a hate crime, a serial killing, and an act of vigilantism. But underlying these three tragedies is a notion of violated borders, of trespass. The message behind all three is this: you should not be here, you are not one of us, and your death shall serve as a warning.

Trespass is originally an economic term intimately connected to evolving concepts of public and private space. In the late medieval period in England, wealthy landholders began to fence off common lands to increase the pasturage for their flocks of sheep. This enclosure movement, privatization avant la lettre, created a new class of dispossessed, of those who did not belong. The word “trespass” – to enter private property without permission – comes from this period of late Middle Ages. Fences marked off the newly enclosed property. You could not enter without the permission of the owner or his agents. And scaffolds appeared throughout England to punish those thrown off the land who were forced to steal because they had no other means of subsistence.

In his captivating book The Swerve, Stephen Greenblatt describes how the violence and oppression of this system drove theologian Thomas More to create his famous “utopia” of commonly held property.

“Utopia begins with a searing indictment of England as a land where noblemen, living idly off the labor of others, bleed their tenants white by constantly raising their rents,” Greenblatt writes, “where land enclosures for sheep-raising throw untold thousands of poor people into an existence of starvation or crime, and where the cities are ringed by gibbets on which thieves are hanged by the score without the slightest indication that the draconian punishment deters anyone from committing the same crimes.” Greenblatt cites the statistic of 72,000 thieves hanged during the reign of Henry the VIII, when More was composing his tract.

We too are living at a time of gibbets and enclosures, of death penalties and gated communities, of state violence and privatization. The United States has become a country of wealthy enclaves, neighborhood watches, and charter schools. Widening inequality has directly contributed to the deterioration of any sense of the public good. The drive for minimal government has reduced the capacity of public servants to ensure basic services and security. The erosion of the middle class has not only reduced the tax base, it has weakened political support for programs that aspire to universality. “Ill fares the land,” wrote Oliver Goldsmith in his 1770 poem “The Deserted Village,” “to hast’ning ill a prey/Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.”

Colorado Springs, a sort of anti-Utopia, is a case in point. There, the city council responded to state and federal budget cuts by radically reducing public services. In its place, the city set up an extortion racket. If you want the electricity restored to all the streetlamps in your neighborhood or the Parks Department to take care of your local park, you have to pony up the dollars yourself. Most disturbingly, as a recent This American Life episode on Colorado Springs detailed, residents are willing to pay more money to maintain services in their own little patch of earth than they would have paid in additional taxes to keep the services running for everybody in the city.

Trayvon Martin was killed in a modest gated community in Sanford, Florida, a suburb of Orlando hard hit by the recession. The name of the community, tellingly, is The Retreat. As in Colorado Springs, the residents of Sanford must band together to compensate for what a diminished public sector fails to provide. The Retreaters, who live in townhouses priced around $100,000, have recently been concerned about a rash of burglaries. According to one resident, there had been eight cases in 15 months, and the culprits were mostly African-American males (or so he said). There are no signs at The Retreat that read: No Poor People or No African-Americans or No People Wearing Hoodies. The rules regarding trespass are unstated, shaped by fear and subject to the worst kind of stereotyping. Trayvon Martin was a victim of profiling but also of the insecurity that accompanies the decline of the middle class, an insecurity that especially plagues those of modest means, for they cannot afford all the perquisites of the wealthy. Vigilantism is the byproduct of a failed state. And the austerity measures promoted during our current mean season result in such a failed state.

Shaima Alawadi and her family recently moved from Detroit to the San Diego suburb of El Cajon, home to the second-largest Iraqi community in the country. Alawadi, like so many Iraqis living in El Cajon, took refuge in America from the human rights violations and the subsequent sectarian violence of Iraq. But they also found themselves in a city close to the Mexican border and therefore on the frontlines of the immigration debate in the United States. The economic crisis has produced a spike in anti-immigrant sentiment: “they” are taking “our” jobs; “they” are a burden on “our” city services; “they” are not assimilating into “our” culture. Hate crimes against immigrants have been on the rise. Alawadi was not only an immigrant. She wore a headscarf and so was identifiably Muslim. As such, she was a target for all those who conflate Islam with terrorism. Religious freedom and respect for ethnic diversity are still core American values. But a certain tribalism has crept into American discourse. A tribe of xenophobic Christians is fearful that demographic shifts and economic malaise will undermine their precarious cultural status. A small but growing minority within this tribe will resort to violence to maintain this status.

The politics of immigration, multiculturalism, and Islamophobia take on a very different character in France. In this election year, President Nicolas Sarkozy has tried to steal the fire from an unabashedly xenophobic right wing. He has stated that there are “too many foreigners” in the country. He has strenuously backed the French ban on the hijab. He has gone after halal meat (which has also raised concerns in France’s Jewish community that Kosher food will likewise be stigmatized). What had once been on the margins of French debate is now in the very mainstream. Muslims are somehow under suspicion for challenging a mythical unitary French identity through what they eat, what they wear, and how they pray. Mohamed Merah, meanwhile, believed that some Muslims had become too French and should be punished for their transgression. French Muslims find themselves in an increasingly difficult position. They trespass on French culture if they attempt to retain their identity. Or they trespass in the imaginations of religious extremists if they identify too closely as French — by, for instance, joining the army. If France and the European Union were enjoying an economic uptick, these culture wars would retreat into the background. As it is, Muslims have become a convenient scapegoat.

The European Union was supposed to be a borderless space. But the old dream of an ever more prosperous and economically equitable regional arrangement has come up hard against economic downturn and polarization. The United States was supposed to be a country without the class barriers of feudal Europe. But the old dream of a growing middle class and the relatively stable politics that accompany it cannot survive in the austerity liberalism and anti-government conservatism of the 21st century. When our notion of the common good, of commonwealth, begins to disintegrate, all that is left are tribes defending their turf, standing their ground, enclosing their land.

We are living now in a new world of enclosures. We are building our fences ever higher. We are patrolling our borders with ever more sophisticated weaponry. And we are punishing any and all who trespass. The victims of these recent killings are the collateral damage of these border wars.

 

To read the original article, click here

Image Source: Lightgraph

In a report published in December 2011, Minority Rights Group International highlights the problems facing minority groups, specifically in an area covering Kenya, Uganda and Jonglei State in South Sudan. Competition over resources has increased the potential for confrontation not only with local dominant ethnic groups, but also with the state and international corporations, thereby increasing the liklihood of different forms of conflict on different levels. Progressive legal protections are often not enforced because of a disconnect at state-level between legislation and law-enforcement, which only exacerbates existing problems caused by long-standing discrimination. Moreover, conflict involving already marginalised people adversely affects the women and children in these groups in particular, which in turn re-impacts on the community because of the traditional roles that women play in family cohesion and as food producers.

Many problems arise not simply because people belonging to minority groups are themselves marginalised, but also their community and governance structures which previously had been successful in mediating conflict such as (in an East African context) cattle raiding. Marginalisation not only discriminates against individuals because of their backgrounds or beliefs but also rides roughshod over communal organisation and mediation, leaving groups unable to adapt to change or protect their interests when threatened by more powerful entities.

 

Executive Summary, by Laura A. Young and Korir Sing’Oei

In resource-scarce East Africa, minority groups face major challenges over the control of and access to land and other natural resources. Despite national policy regimes that are developing in a positive direction, the reality for minority groups and their neighbouring ethnic groups is that land and natural resources continue to be a major trigger of violence. Minorities find themselves competing with other communities, with the state, and with corporate interests for control of resources upon which they depend for their livelihood, cultural integrity and future development.

As globalization, population explosion, and climate change converge to increase the demand for land, water, forest products and mineral resources within territories inhabited by minorities in East Africa, these groups are forced to find new ways to cope with different types of conflict at once.

This report describes the situation of selected minorities and their neighbouring groups in Kenya, Uganda and South Sudan’s Jonglei State. Each group has unique characteristics, including extreme livelihood challenges, vulnerability to conflict, and ongoing discrimination, which are common across communities and countries. Decades of discrimination against minority groups, often as a result of state policy starting in the colonial era, has rendered minorities in East Africa poorer and with more precarious access to land and natural resources than other communities.

Minorities face such serious challenges for numerous reasons: legal regimes remain unimplemented or result in further discrimination against minority groups; there are existing conflicts between formal and customary laws; population pressures and climate change; lack of coordination in conflict resolution programming and donor support, and non-recognition of indigenous livelihoods by states.

Resource conflicts and discrimination lead to negative consequences for women from these communities in particular, as they face double discrimination because of deeply entrenched patriarchy. Conflicts between formal and customary laws often leave women with limited options to protect their access to land and natural resources. Given the place of women in the social system of most minority groups, in which they are responsible for production of food, denial of access has negative effects on the community overall and specifically on women and children. Women also often bear the brunt of conflicts over natural resources. Security operations to quell violence or evict communities expose women to multiple violations of their rights. Moreover, violence between communities leads to attacks on women and children and directly impacts women’s particular property rights within traditional community structures.

The research for this report reveals that communities often struggle with multiple types of conflict at once: interethnic competition; conflict with the state; and conflict with corporate actors. Each of these types of conflict requires a different method of resolution. The report highlights that communities themselves are initiating the most effective conflict resolution methods when it comes to inter-ethnic violence, most often associated with cattle raiding in pastoralist communities. Effective conflictresolution strategies often draw on customary practices, integrated with modern technological advances. The report highlights that national law and policies often contradict and undermine customary practices. Moreover, current conditions of land scarcity, state intervention and resource extraction are straining or obliterating customary management in many communities.

State-led policy initiatives to resolve conflict between communities and state or corporate actors have not proven successful because of lack of implementation and failure to effectively consult minority communities’ traditional governance structures. Accordingly, many communities, such as the Endorois, have been forced to become legal adversaries of the state, addressing conflict through litigation at the national and regional level.

This report recommends that governments in the regions discussed take urgent action to adopt and implement their national policy directives on land and natural resources. These policies are generally progressive with respect to minority rights and provide a strong basis for supporting the other recommended actions in the report.

Among other key recommendations, this report urges national governments to develop guidelines on what constitutes participatory and effective community consultation around land and natural resource extraction, based on free, prior and informed consent; and recognize the value of indigenous peoples’ knowledge of resource management and of customary practise, especially related to women’s rights to hold and use land.

To read the full report and press release, click here

Image Source: Leonie_x

This Project Briefing from the Overseas Development Institute reports on the findings of a study examining the experience of Nepalese and Bangladeshi migrants in India. This vulnerable group of people face marginalisation on many different levels, having been compelled to emigrate in the first place because of economic hardship; and facing job-, wage-, and housing-insecurity on arrival because of their ambiguous legal status. Fear of disclosure or of being identified by their accents prevents migrants not only from taking a stand against exploitation, but also from forming networks within the host communities, thereby compounding the other forms of insecurity. In addition, migrants are often marginalised on their return home: “There is a common belief that women who Migrate to india engage voluntarily in commercial sex work once there,” while husbands left behind suffer from the stigma surrounding their wives’ supposed profession. The briefing concludes with recommendations for mitigating insecurity experienced by this group, who would otherwise be at permanent risk of violence and exploitation.

Introduction, Fiona Samuels et. al.

There has been a steady flow of people from Nepal and Bangladesh to India in recent decades in search of better work and livelihood opportunities. As they move to and fro, many face harassment, discrimination and violence. Many face these challenges during their journeys – particularly when they cross borders – at their destinations, and when they go home. Their experiences are affected by gender, country of origin and the process of recruitment to migration.

This Project Briefing explores the experiences of these people as they migrate, drawing on findings from a baseline study on their vulnerabilities, particularly to HIV and AIDS, as they move between their communities of origin in Nepal and Bangladesh to India. Although the baseline used quantitative and qualitative approaches, stories of harassment and violence emerge mostly from the qualitative elements. Respondents rarely speak about their own experiences of violence or discrimination, but talk about the experiences and behaviour of others. The term ‘violence’ is used in its broadest sense, ranging from harassment, bribery, threats and name-calling, to discrimination, stigma, exclusion and exploitation, to physical violence including beating, torture and murder, to sexual and gender based violence including sexual exploitation, coercion and rape. After exploring experiences of violence, this briefing concludes with recommendations, many of them already being operationalised in the three countries as a result of findings from this study.

 

To read the full briefing, click here

Image Source: FriskoDude

What is the real mission in Libya? Not the no-fly zone– that’s a method. So what is the mission? How do we end this thing?

The president said in Santiago yesterday that the military mission isn’t aimed at getting rid of Gaddafi. He said we have other means to do that-sanctions and money freezes and that stuff.

Well, excuse me for being skeptical, Mr. President, but we’ve done all that before and regimes have survived it for years-many years. I remember how many years we had white-ruled Rhodesia under sanctions. When I was over there in the Peace Corps, I went to that country, it meant watching old movies instead of ones currently available in other countries. No, it really didn’t really work all that fast.

Americans don’t like long wars. Are we going to be backing this military campaign in Libya for months or even years-with the French and the Brits and a token Arab force flying overhead while Gaddafi kills his people in alleys and basements below? Are we going to wait for –excuse me — sanctions to work their will?

It doesn’t ring true. We went in there to stop a killer from massacring his people. If he’s set on doing it, he’s got plenty of time now to find ways of doing it — if all we’re doing is running sanctions against him.

So, we need to know more. Perhaps there’s a secret plan out there to overthrow Gaddafi. Are we offering him safe-conduct to Venezuela? Are we giving him a means to end this standoff?

Because if we’re not doing any of this, it promises to be a long war, a standoff, where Gaddafi sacrifices more and more of his people to prolong his own rule, which he needs to prolong if he’s going to prolong his own life.

I hope we have a plan here we’re not talking about, because what we’re seeing makes no sense. We say we want to overthrow Gaddafi again but give him no place to escape. If that’s the nature of this contest, he will fight to the death — as most people would — and that will mean the deaths of countless people who would survive if we had a quicker, smarter plan that promised a quicker, smarter ending to this thing.

I don’t like the looks of this campaign for the simple reason it looks like so many others. In an effort to reduce our footprint, we’re making it a far longer, more bloody journey to where we’re headed in the end.

 

Chris Mathews is a TV News anchor in the United States.

This article originally appeared on the Huffington Post. 

 

In today’s era of globalization, the line between critic and hypocrite is increasingly becoming blurred. Single out a problem in a region or country other than one’s own, and risk triggering an immediate, yet understandable, response: Why criticize the problem here, when you face the same one back home?

Such a response is particularly justified in the context of water insecurity, a dilemma that afflicts scores of countries, including the author’s United States. In the parched American West, New Mexico has only ten years worth of drinking water remaining, while Arizona already imports every drop. Less arid areas of the country are increasingly water-stressed as well. Rivers in South Carolina and Massachusetts, lakes in Florida and Georgia, and even the mighty Lake Superior (the world’s largest fresh-water lake) are all running dry. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, if American water consumption habits continue unchecked, as many as 36 states will face water shortages within the next few years. Also notable is the fact that America’s waterways are choked with pollution, and that nearly twenty million Americans may fall ill each year from contaminated water. Not to mention that more than thirty U.S. states are fighting with their neighbours over water.

Such a narrative is a familiar one, because it also applies to South Asia. However, in South Asia, the narrative is considerably more urgent. The region houses a quarter of the world’s population, yet contains less than 5% of its annual renewable water resources. With the exception of Bhutan and Nepal, South Asia’s per capita water availability falls below the world average. Annual water availability has plummeted by nearly 70% since 1950, and from around 21,000 cubic metres in the 1960s to approximately 8,000 in 2005. If such patterns continue, the region could face ‘widespread water scarcity’ (that is, per capita water availability under 1,000 cubic metres) by 2025. Furthermore, the United Nations, based on a variety of measures – including ecological insecurity, water management problems and resource stress – characterizes two key water basins of South Asia (the Helmand and Indus) as ‘highly vulnerable’.

These findings are not surprising, given that the region suffers from many drivers of water insecurity: high population growth, vulnerability to climate change, arid weather, agriculture dependent economies and political tensions. This is not to say that South Asia is devoid of water security stabilizers; indeed, its various trans-national arrangements, to differing degrees, help the region manage its water constraints and tensions. This paper argues that such arrangements are vital, yet also incapable of safeguarding regional water security on their own. It asserts that more attention to demand-side water management within individual countries is as crucial for South Asian water security as are trans-national water mechanisms.

To understand the importance of trans-boundary water arrangements in South Asia, one must first bear in mind a paradox: the region is poorly integrated, yet linked together by water co-dependencies.

Consider, first, that the World Bank has declared South Asia the world’s least integrated region. According to the Bank, South Asia has the world’s worst railways and road density, while only sub-Saharan Africa has worse electricity and sanitation systems. Predictably, intra-regional trade accounts for just 5% of the region’s total international trade, and less than 2% of gross domestic product. Not surprisingly, South Asia’s regional organization, SAARC, is not nearly as dynamic as regional groupings like the European Union or the Association of South East Asian Nations.

Second, that many of the region’s countries depend on the same rivers – and, by extension, neighbouring upper riparians – for their water supply. India, Bangladesh and Nepal look to the Brahmaputra, while both Pakistan and India are beholden to the rivers of the Indus basin. Bangladesh and Pakistan, both lower riparians, must obtain great majorities of their water resources (91% and 75%, respectively) from beyond their borders.

Conversely, China, while not a geographic entity of South Asia, is an upper riparian for many of the key rivers flowing into South Asia. India is both a lower (in the case of the Brahmaputra) and upper (in the case of the Indus) riparian. This means, hypothetically, that any flow-diverting Chinese activities on the Brahmaputra could alarm India, Nepal and Bangladesh, and in turn trigger Indian flow manipulations on the Indus, with implications downstream for Pakistan. Such a dynamic creates a hydro domino effect: one nation’s water policies can spark a chain reaction throughout the region.

Another notable factor about South Asia’s interconnected water geography is that many major rivers originate in or pass through politically contested or tense areas. The Tibetan plateau – where the mighty flows of the Salween, Brahmaputra, Indus, Sutlej, and other rivers all spring to life, providing water to 1.5 billion people downstream – is controlled by China, and abuts India’s water-rich Arunachal Pradesh state, which China covets and has sparked Sino-Indian tensions. The rivers of the Indus basin, of course, flow through the Kashmir region – an unending source of Pakistan-India tensions. No wonder that many of South Asia’s riparian pairings (India-Pakistan for the Indus, and India-Bangladesh for the Brahmaputra and the Ganges) reflect the region’s most troubled bilateral relationships.

In effect, South Asia’s water relations play out amid a volatile backdrop of shortage, dependency and geopolitical tension.

A nation’s upper riparian status by no means guarantees water security. China, an uber-upper riparian, suffers from a full-blown water crisis. The North China plain – one of the country’s ‘economic and social cores’ generating more than 20% of its grain supply, according to China scholar David Pietz – is frighteningly water-scarce, with a per capita availability of 225 cubic metres per year. India, meanwhile, contains about 20% of the world’s population, but only about 4% of its water. A 2010 Asian Development Bank report projects that the country could suffer from water shortages of as much as 50% by 2030.

Faced with current shortages, policymakers in upper riparian states frequently opt for supply-side solutions. Water generation measures may ease water stress internally, yet they often exacerbate regional tensions. India and China, to generate desperately needed water resources for both agriculture and energy, often resort to dam construction and other large engineering projects. Many of these are run-of-the-river and hence do not prevent flows from continuing downstream. Still, dams are a delicate matter. China’s insistence that its South to North Water Diversion Project will not divert flows from the Brahmaputra is met with skepticism in India. Additionally, even run-of-the-river dams and other hydro projects threaten lower riparians’ water and food security. For example, if India builds all its envisioned hydro projects on the western rivers of the Indus basin, Pakistan’s agriculture could be deprived of up to a month’s worth of river flows – enough to ruin an entire planting season.

Lower riparians also opt for large, supply generating projects. Pakistan’s water resources policy has been dominated by dam building for decades, and the country’s Water and Power Development Authority (WAPDA) plans to construct five dams, three large canals, and five hydropower facilities by 2025. As a lower riparian, these national engineering projects will not impede river flows into downstream countries. However, they upset riparian communities, who risk being displaced. Supply-side efforts also aggravate regional and provincial tensions, which are high in many South Asian countries. The furious debate surrounding Pakistan’s Kalabagh dam, for example, has pitted supporters in Punjab against opponents everywhere else in the country. This internal discontent feeds into the domestic instability that so concerns Pakistan’s neighbours.

In Pakistan, water insecurity also spawns different manifestations of militancy. In recent years, the Pakistani Taliban, aware of Pakistan’s precarious water situation, has attacked the country’s largest earth-filled dam, the fabled Tarbela. More recently, extremists in Punjab have issued violent threats, angrily blaming India for ‘stealing’ Pakistan’s water and vowing aggression against India unless it ceases such ‘theft’. It is perhaps not coincidental that while Pakistan based extremists have been largely absent from the latest uprising in Jammu and Kashmir, they have been increasingly vocal in their accusations of India’s alleged water theft. These extremists regard their India blame game as an expression of nationalism – an attempt to draw attention away from divisive debates within Pakistan about dam construction and toward a unified front on confronting India. Water may well be supplanting Kashmir as the militants’ chief rallying cry.

Another response – more potential than actual, at least at this point – is for desperate citizens to flee to more water-secure nations. According to a Strategic Foresight Group estimate, water scarcity will contribute to the displacement and migration of 50 to 70 million people in India, Bangladesh, Nepal and China by 2050. To be sure, water strain takes a devastating toll on human security inside upper and lower riparian nations alike – as evidenced by the livelihood-shattered Pakistani fishermen along the disappearing Indus plain and the water starved, suicidal Indian farmers in parts of India.

However, migration is a particularly worrisome threat for lower riparians, with the potential not just to uproot millions of people, but also to imperil regional stability. Bangladesh offers a vivid example. As an impoverished, highly populous, lower riparian that depends on other countries for nearly all its water needs, it is deeply vulnerable to Indian or Chinese activity on rivers upstream and to glacial melting in the Himalayas. And as a low-lying nation, it is susceptible to rising sea levels and monsoon flooding. This array of water problems, according to some observers, could hasten mass Bangladeshi migrations into India’s volatile East, with politically explosive implications.

The combustible mix of water vulnerability, geopolitical tensions, and supply-side responses with ripple effects across borders constitutes a recipe for disaster – and figures to become even more explosive in the coming decades as the region’s population growth soars and Himalayan glacial melt accelerates. Several nightmare water-driven scenarios come to mind:

* Indus Basin War. Militants in eastern Pakistan, vowing to avenge India’s ‘theft’ of Pakistan’s water from the Indus basin’s western rivers, launch terror attacks in India. New Delhi dispatches troops to its western flank, and threatens to shut-off western river flows into Pakistan.

* Sino-Indian Water Showdown. China, in response to Indian defen-sive upgrades in and near Arunachal Pradesh, the water-rich northeastern Indian state that Beijing has long claimed, seeks to reclaim a strategic advantage by slowing the flow of the Brahmaputra into India’s Assam state – an impoverished bastion of separatist militancy that is also an important area of agricultural production.

* Environmental Refugee Crisis. As glacial melt in the Himalayas runs its course, river flows slow to a trickle, and lower riparian Bangladesh experiences rampant water scarcity, Bangladeshis migrate en masse to more water secure but politically volatile eastern India – deepening instability in the latter as violent factions target these new arrivals, and long entrenched separatist militants exploit the unrest by launching their own attacks.

These hypothetical scenarios, and the bubbling cauldron of water insecurity and political tensions that makes them impossible to dismiss, crystallize the importance of trans-boundary water arrangements with the ability to manage, if not reduce, the region’s water based tensions.

Numerous trans-boundary rivers in South Asia are governed by treaties. These include the Mahakali (to which India and Nepal are party), the Ganges (involving India and Bangladesh), and the Indus (comprising India and Pakistan). The Mahakali accord is meant to promote the river’s integrated development, though various disagreements have prevented the treaty from being properly implemented. The Ganges agreement is also constrained by several disagreements, particularly over the Farakka Barrage, which Bangladesh believes has reduced downstream flows of the Ganges.

Nonetheless, none of these countries has ever gone to war over water, and the treaties are surely a major reason why.

The Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) allocates the Indus basin’s western rivers to Pakistan, and the eastern rivers to India (India is authorized to draw on the western rivers for agricultural purposes, so long as this use does not involve storage). It deserves particular attention, given that it is repeatedly lauded as a magnificent example of international cooperation and conflict management. Such rhetoric is warranted. The two parties, despite their rocky relations, truly make a commitment to uphold the treaty’s provisions. The IWT emphasizes transparency, particularly in terms of data exchange and notification of plans to undertake hydro projects. Sure enough, in 2010, India allowed Pakistan to inspect several under- construction Indian hydropower projects on the western rivers. The two nations have also agreed to set up a telemetry system to measure river flows.

Additionally, only once in the treaty’s 50 year history have the accord’s mechanisms for dispute resolution been put to the test. This was a period between 2005 and 2007, when a neutral expert (appointed by the World Bank, as per the IWT’s stipulations) weighed in on the concerns of Pakistan about the Baglihar dam, a project being constructed by India on one of the Indus basin’s western rivers. The expert ruled against Pakistan on several technical points – particularly when he stated that a gated spillway was necessary – yet agreed with it on others (such as on the issue of power intake levels). While many on both sides undoubtedly found ways to oppose the outcome, it is undeniable that the dispute was settled peacefully. In June 2010, both governments concurred that the Baglihar dispute had been definitively resolved.

In 2010, Pakistan decided to bring some technical concerns about the Kishanganga dam (a hydro project being constructed by India in Jammu and Kashmir) to an international court of arbitration. While the outcome of this latest case is far from clear, the Baglihar precedent suggests the arbitration process for Kishanganga should be similarly smooth.

Despite its successes, many observers fear the IWT’s increasing vulnerability. This derives in part from the long-standing grievances harboured by both countries about the treaty. Indians believe it curtails the storage rights of Jammu and Kashmir, and hampers the development of hydro projects on the western rivers. Indeed, India’s participation in the treaty is both economically and politically risky – given that the energy-starved nation must forego opportunities to harvest hydroelectric resources, and given the resentment these cautious hydro development policies breed among Kashmiris.

Pakistan, meanwhile, resents its inherent vulnerability as the lower riparian (even though the IWT allots it 80% of the total Indus basin river flow). For many in Pakistan, the country with the lowest per capita water availability in Asia, entrusting its water security to its deeply mistrusted neighbour is profoundly unsettling.

Furthermore, worries about population growth and climate change effects (particularly the melting of Himalayan glaciers) are fuelling calls for a revised treaty that takes such trends into account. There are also recommendations that the treaty be expanded, so that it includes the other two Indus basin riparians, China and Afghanistan. Those advocating this latter view argue that a four-party treaty would reduce the possibilities of region-wide conflict, and promote basin-wide ecological sustainability.

Some experts contend that the ‘dividing the resources’ mentality of the IWT is no longer tenable, and that Pakistan and India should move toward a more cooperative ‘share the resources’ paradigm. Ahmad Rafay Alam, one of the most eloquent articulator of this view from the Pakistan side, argues that the two nations should determine ‘whether it is in the economic, social or political interest of both riparians to cooperate on water, rather than be antagonistic over it.’ For example, instead of railing against Indian run-of-the-river dam projects on the western rivers, power-starved Pakistan should consider buying the electricity they generate – a more affordable investment than buying power from pricier indigenous gas-powered rental power projects.

This paradigm can be applied to a broader geographic area as well. Bhutan and Nepal are blessed with ample hydroelectric potential; India could therefore invest in energy resources in these countries just as Pakistan could in India.

Some experts make more modest suggestions about improving trans-national water arrangements. They believe that regional water security is best attained not by changing the architecture or philosophy of regional water agreements, but instead by strengthening mechanisms for cooperation and transparency within existing arrangements. In other words, instead of crafting a new IWT, the parties should make even greater commitments to respect the treaty’s current provisions on transparency.

A core component of this viewpoint is the need for more data sharing on river flows, hydro project plans, and glacial melting. This emphasis on transparency is a chief feature of U.S. government policy on trans-national water arrangements. Policymakers in Washington, when describing South Asian water arrangements, repeatedly underscore the same terms: good communication, data sharing and joint management.

Some modest steps have already been taken along these lines. As mentioned above, India and Pakistan recently agreed to several information sharing measures. Additionally, China and India have agreed to share data on glacial melt. Still, much more can be done, and it is here that the international community can play a key role. International academic conferences and other forums facilitating the exchange of information about water constitute one way to boost water transparency. Technology sharing is another avenue.

The United States, for example, can share its new METRIC system – a new water measurement tool developed by academic researchers that has already helped resolve a fight over water in the Arkansas river, and could similarly be deployed in the Indus basin. Similarly, America could provide satellite data that document water availability. It is sometimes observed that there are no international water treaties or other global mechanisms to promote water cooperation. The international community’s participation in water data sharing exercises, in South Asia and elsewhere, can serve as a modest corrective.

Champions of trans-boundary water transparency argue that by fostering greater data sharing, riparians’ mutual suspicions can be reduced, paving the way for greater water cooperation. It is important to note, however, that greater water transparency can easily backfire, and even undermine riparian relations. As one study concludes, revelations of ‘inequitable Indian water stewardship on Indus tributaries’ could exacerbate the volatility of India-Pakistan relations. One might then argue that nations with delicate relations may in certain cases be better served by not revealing inflammatory water data, and should instead maintain opacity.

This raises a critical point: Advocating for more trans-boundary water openness, pushing for ‘resource sharing’ paradigms, and proposing more inclusive treaties all presuppose a level of political cooperation that may not exist in South Asia. After all, it is easy to propose the formation of a new Himalayan Rivers Commission to govern water management in this sub-region, as was done in 2010. However, it would be much more difficult to implement such an arrangement, which would necessitate the close cooperation of nations harbouring major trust deficits toward each other.

So the question invariably arises: How can South Asia’s trans-national water arrangements be enhanced in such a troubled political environment? One answer is to look within, and to muster better efforts to improve internal water governance. This is because sounder water management inside countries can create a more favourable political climate for the pursuit and achievement of lasting external water cooperation. Better internal water management can serve as a catalyst for effective regional water governance.

It is common to attribute water problems exclusively to politics. It is often said that India-Pakistan water tensions are just one facet of a long troubled bilateral relationship. Similarly, one frequently hears that India-China disagreements over water are rooted in the larger competition between the two rising powers for influence over South Asian territory and resources. And India’s water disagreements with Bangladesh and Nepal too are said to be part of a long history of poor political relations.

Such views are accurate, yet incomplete. After all, across the United States and Australia, regions and states bicker over river water allocations – yet these tensions have little to do with politics. Neither Colorado and Kansas in the United States, nor Victoria and Queensland in Australia, are at risk of going to war; they simply disagree about how to properly divide up river flows. As such, their squabbles demonstrate an inability to efficiently manage existing water resources. In South Asia, where the availability of water resources is more precarious, this poor water governance is a chief cause of water insecurity.

In South Asia, water insecurity is not solely a function of resource shortages. To be sure, much of it is running low on water. However, excluding some arid portions of the region, very little of South Asia is actually water-scarce. The resource is precious, yet present. South Asia’s water problems are very much rooted in the wasteful and inefficient management of the region’s available water supplies.

Pakistan is arguably the worst culprit. Water infrastructure and transmission systems – the canals and pipes that have helped make the Indus river system the world’s largest contiguous irrigated area – are literally falling apart because they have not been properly maintained. As a result, millions of gallons of water are lost to leakage every day. In urban areas, wastewater treatment facilities are nearly non-existent – hence the country’s great cities are notorious for fetid surface water resources that sicken and kill hundreds of thousands every year.

Meanwhile, Islamabad offers few incentives to the population to use water saving technology. The lack of subsidies for drip irrigation, for example, compels farmers to use traditional, water wasting flood irrigation. Furthermore, the government has made little effort to diversify crop production. This is unfortunate, given that Pakistan’s most intensively produced crops – and those that fetch the greatest profits for small farmers – are also the most water guzzling.

Then there are the structural factors that exacerbate Pakistan’s water mismanagement. Thanks to the nation’s feudal land setup, a small landed elite owns most rural land, while the majority of the rural population is landless. In a country with few water laws or rights, land ownership determines water access. As a result, most of Pakistan’s rural population struggles to obtain water. In theory, mechanisms such as warabandi – the colonial-era water distribution system meant to ensure farmers equal access to irrigation water – and provincial level water arbiters such as the Indus River System Authority (IRSA) are meant to compensate for such inequalities. In reality, they fail miserably. Warabandi is exploited by politically connected large farmers, while IRSA is rarely taken seriously, and its edicts about provincial river flow allocations are routinely ignored.

Given this gloomy domestic water situation in Pakistan, it is clear why not only militants, but also the country’s government, have chosen to externalize blame over the border. After all, bringing attention to its dysfunctional domestic water management would essentially be an acknowledgment that Islamabad is to blame for its water crisis. While Islamabad is much less prone to blame India than it was several years ago (in fact, in 2010, Pakistan’s minister for water and power acknowledged that India rarely prevents river water from flowing into Pakistan), it rarely admits that the country’s water problems are largely internally rooted.

Pakistan is not the only poor water manager in South Asia; India’s water governance is similarly troubled. India is home to ‘dilapidated’ pipes and pumping stations that cause more than one-third of New Delhi’s fresh water (and at least 40% of most Indian cities’ total water resources) to be lost to leakage. The Yamuna river is choked with ‘faecal bacteria’, and this sewage has increased ‘thousands of times’ over the last decade. Water intensive rice and wheat crops are championed by the government through price guarantees to farmers. And per capita storage availability – the sine qua non for dam efficiency – has plummeted in recent years to levels found in Africa’s poorest nations.

Poor internal water management has grave implications for public health, food security and the environment. Sometimes the effects can be catastrophic. Consider this summer’s flooding in Pakistan. If the country’s water infrastructure had been sturdier and better maintained, raging rivers would have been better contained and the damage wrought by the deluge may not have been as extensive.

Perhaps the most disturbing implication is the strain on groundwater resources. With poor internal water management regimes causing surface water to be wasted, lost or contaminated across the region, South Asians are increasingly digging deeper – literally – to alleviate their water insecurity.

In the context of agriculture – by far, the sector that consumes the most water across South Asia – the increasing inefficiency of highly subsidized, state-run irrigation systems have driven farmers to mine groundwater, which they have more control over and is more readily available. Even back in 2000, nearly 70% of Bangladesh’s irrigation, and more than 50% of India’s, was served by groundwater resources.

Yet groundwater depletion goes beyond the agricultural sector. According to the World Bank, India is the world’s most voracious consumer of groundwater. This heavy consumption is reflected in a 2009 study by several U.S. scientists, which found that groundwater levels fell by about four centimetres per year between 2002 and 2008 across three states in northwestern India – including the breadbasket of Punjab. These areas could conceivably exhaust their entire groundwater supply within the next few decades.

Pakistan, too, is increasingly groundwater-reliant. Lahore – the country’s second-largest city – is completely dependent on it for drinking water needs, and groundwater tables have fallen by as much as sixty-five feet in some areas of the metropolis. Worse, wastewater is now infiltrating the city’s groundwater, choking it with arsenic.

Groundwater – once a pristine, untapped resource – is now being extracted intensively throughout South Asia. In effect, with this onslaught on South Asia’s groundwater, the last bastion of regional water security has been breached. And as groundwater becomes increasingly short and scarce, South Asia may be compelled to return to rapidly dwindling surface water resources and to compete ferociously for the ultra-precious supply that remains – a terrifying prospect, and particularly for lower riparians.

Faced with domestic water problems, and mistaking mismanagement for shortages (or intentionally cloaking mismanagement in the guise of shortages), governments succumb to their supply-side fancies, and construct more dams and reservoirs. Such actions, as noted earlier, fan provincial tensions, and, in the case of upper riparians, anger downstream neighbours. Herein lies the troubling link between poor water management at home and trans-national water cooperation: the former prompts governments to take actions that threaten the latter.

Whether such actions outweigh the risks of imperilling trans-national water cooperation is debatable. This is because many supply-side coping strategies are neither efficient nor sustainable. One of Pakistan’s top water experts, Simi Kamal, has calculated that the quantity of water projected to be generated by the nation’s under-construction Diamer-Basha dam pales in comparison to the amount that would be freed up simply by repairing and maintaining Pakistan’s leaky canal system. Additionally, Pakistan’s dams, like India’s, are rapidly losing storage capacity.

Such considerations give way to another unsettling reality: So long as internal water management remains poor, the benefits accruing from deeper regional water cooperation will be strictly political; from a water resources standpoint, little will improve. Take the case of Pakistan. Assume, for a moment, that increased cooperation enables Pakistan to succeed in getting India to release more water downstream. What would be the result? Many Pakistanis would argue that their water problems would be solved: parched farmland saved, children’s thirst quenched, and lost water livelihoods restored.

In reality, however, none of this would happen. Instead, more water would mean more inefficiency: More water lost to leaky canals and pipes, wasted in irrigation, showered on water-guzzling crops, and contaminated by urban waste. Indeed, if nothing is done to improve internal water governance, allowing more water to gush into Pakistan would simply intensify the country’s water crisis.

South Asian nations need to focus more on demand-side solutions to domestic water problems. These include water conserving technologies, crop diversification, better investments in infrastructure maintenance and wastewater treatment, and a stronger embrace of rainwater harvesting (a conservation method that has already caught on quite strongly in parts of the region). Such policies are less expensive, and potentially more efficient, than traditional supply-side water engineering projects like large dams. Some encouraging signs are emerging from India, where there has been some debate about the merits of emphasizing sugar-bean cultivation over that of sugarcane, which is notoriously water wasting. There has also been discussion about embracing water saving mechanisms such as the direct seeding of rice.

If such demand-side management policies are implemented successfully, South Asian nations would become more judicious in their use of existing water resources, and therefore less threatened in the short-term by the spectre of scarcity. Upper riparians would, presumably, be less likely to initiate new hydro-generation projects that upset their downstream neighbours. Lower riparians, meanwhile, would have less incentive (and fewer grounds) to stoke tensions with their upstream neighbours by accusing them of water theft. As a result, trans-national water arrangements would be threatened less, and the calmer political climate would enable riparians to make more substantive progress on the data sharing and transparency essential for better South Asian water security. None of this, it should be noted, would necessitate drawing up new treaties or other water agreements.

To be sure, new demographic and environmental realities may well call into question the continued relevance of decades-old trans-national water arrangements. Still, these mechanisms need not stop functioning simply because of the presence of factors not at play fifty years ago. One study of the Baglihar dam case observes that the issue was ‘addressed bearing in mind the technical standards for hydropower plants as they have developed in the first decade of the 21st century, and not as perceived and thought of in the 1950s when the [IWT] was negotiated.’ A precedent has effectively been set for new conditions to be taken into account when interpreting the existing treaty, without needing to incorporate such conditions into an altogether new or revised treaty.

This is just one more reason for South Asian nations to redouble their efforts to ameliorate internal water management. Trans-national water arrangements can also stand to improve, yet they are not in desperate need of reform and revision. Rather, it is the water governance of the region’s individual countries that so urgently needs to be fixed. In effect, South Asian water policies must adopt a new approach – one that, in the words of noted water expert Ramaswamy R. Iyer, embraces the ‘responsible, harmonious, just, and wise use of water.’ With population growth and climate change continuing apace, the stakes have never been higher, and the costs of inaction never starker.

Article Source: Seminar

Image Source: hceebee

The eighth Review Conference of the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) will get under way at the United Nations in New York next week.  Scheduled to run for a month, the Conference brings together top diplomats from 189 countries and over 2000 representatives of civil society to debate a range of issues relating to nuclear disarmament, security and preventing the further spread of nuclear weapons and the fissile materials that make them.

When the Conference ends on 28th May, the outcome could be an agreed document containing substantive commitments to reduce reliance on nuclear weapons and move decisively towards their elimination, as was adopted in 2000.  Alternatively, the Conference might fail, as happened in 2005, or achieve something in between. The stakes are high, and despite some shared objectives the gulf between the objectives, intentions and expectations of the nuclear-weapon states and the majority of non-nuclear countries – especially the developing states – is still quite wide.  On past experience, how the Conference addresses the nuclear programmes in the Middle East – Israel’s as well as Iran’s – may play a critical role in whether or not the outcome is successful.  Israel, like India and Pakistan, stayed outside the NPT and developed its own nuclear arsenal, to the enduring anger of its neighbours.  In 1995, it was necessary for the NPT Conference to adopt a resolution calling for negotiations on a zone free of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East. Without such a resolution, the Arab States had made clear that they would not vote for the treaty – which at that time had a 25 year time limit – to be extended indefinitely.  In 2010, the League of Arab States, backed by over 110 Non-Aligned governments under Egypt’s leadership, have made clear that they want the Review Conference to take more action to implement the 1995 Resolution on the Middle East. Others, particularly the United States, are wary of putting too much pressure on Israel, which maintains the utmost secrecy about its nuclear weapons and policies.

President Obama’s initiatives have given renewed impetus to calls for deeper cuts in the existing nuclear arsenals and more comprehensive progress on nuclear disarmament. This year, for the first time, a majority of NPT parties will be calling for the objective of a nuclear weapons convention to be put on the negotiating agenda.  While recognising that such a comprehensive treaty to ban nuclear weapons will take time to achieve, there is renewed determination to make this possible, bringing nuclear weapons into line with biological  and chemical  weapons, both of which have been banned under comprehensive multilateral conventions.

Just before the Conference starts there is intense speculation about the role the United States intends to play, following President Obama’s initiatives of hosting a special session of the UN Security Council to discuss nuclear weapons issues last September, inviting the leaders of 46 countries to a Nuclear Summit in Washington this April, and his signing a new strategic arms reduction treaty with President Medvedev of Russia in April –  New-START. The US Nuclear Posture Review, which was finally published in April – six months after it was first expected – gave mixed messages about US intentions. On the one hand, the Obama administration made clear their desire to reduce the role of nuclear weapons, promising not to use US nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapon states that are NPT members and deemed to be fully complying with their obligations. However, the policy continued to assert the relevance of nuclear deterrence and left open a “narrow range of contingencies” – including attacks with conventional, biological or chemical weapons – in which the United States would be prepared to use nuclear weapons “in extreme circumstances”. Though the signing of the New-START agreement with Russia is very widely welcomed and there is considerable goodwill towards President Obama among NPT states, there are concerns that the US has still not ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), despite the indispensable link between this treaty and the support of many states for indefinite extension of the NPT in 1995.

The NPT was negotiated in the 1960s soon after the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis nearly turned the cold war into a nuclear war.  The shock of this propelled the key governments to the negotiating table. Though many countries wanted nuclear weapons to be abolished at that time, the political conditions made that impossible.  Instead, they agreed on a non-proliferation approach to halt the further spread of nuclear weapons.  This history is critical to understanding many of the treaty-related conflicts that are likely to unfold during the Review Conference.

Unlike previous kinds of treaties, which imposed restraints or prohibitions on all states equally, the NPT had to acknowledge that five countries had already become “nuclear-weapon states”. The core obligations therefore were that these five – Britain, China, France, the Soviet Union (now Russia) and the United States – were prohibited from transferring nuclear materials, control over nuclear weapons or know-how for nuclear weapons purposes and that they should “pursue negotiations in good faith” on nuclear disarmament. All other countries could only join the NPT as “non-nuclear weapon states”. They accepted obligations not to receive nuclear materials or know-how for nuclear weapons purposes and not to seek to develop any nuclear armaments. Along with this, the non-nuclear weapons countries agreed that the International Atomic Energy Agency would be able to inspect “safeguard” any of their civilian nuclear facilities to ensure that no materials were being diverted for weapons programmes. As an incentive to non-nuclear-weapon states to join the treaty, it was explicitly promised that they would not be prevented from developing civilian nuclear programmes; more than that, they were offered assistance to develop non-military nuclear reactors and programmes.  After the entry into force of the NPT there were further developments to strengthen the regime, including export controls imposed by suppliers of uranium and other nuclear products, nuclear-weapon-free zones – now covering the whole of Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, the South Pacific, South-East Asia and five countries in Central Asia.

I have covered every NPT meeting since 1994, and this one appears too close to call.  It would be a major problem for the credibility of the non-proliferation regime – and especially for the nuclear-weapon states – if the 2010 Conference were to collapse without agreement.  The fact that the 2005 Review Conference ended acrimoniously, having failed to agree on any substantive issue had less direct impact on the non-proliferation regime than some had anticipated, because it was predictable in view of the intransigent position of the Bush administration and refusal by a number of countries to adopt something much weaker than had already been agreed in 2000.  Iran and Egypt were also seen to have contributed to the 2005 deadlock, but they were clearly not the cause.

Expectations for the 2010 Review Conference are very different, not least because of the positive measures undertaken by President Obama. Yet these could still be swamped by the regional rivalries of the Middle East or if some of the other nuclear-weapon states refuse to reaffirm commitments made in 2000 that are still a long way from being fulfilled.  At the preparatory meeting held in 2009, France and Russia were digging their heels in over some of the disarmament proposals being put forward, while China was quietly anxious about what more transparency and accountability on disarmament matters might entail. If solid agreements on nuclear disarmament and the Middle East are on the table by the fourth week then that would be sufficient incentive for significant governments to exert pressure on potential spoilers. But that might not be the case if not enough is being offered in negotiations.

In this regard, a particularly wild card is whether the Security Council, currently chaired by Japan, will push ahead with a new sanctions resolution against Iran, as some politicians in the United States and elsewhere are demanding.  If so, then all bets for a positive NPT outcome will be off. Not only would such a sanctions resolution make Iran more likely to disrupt and block agreements in the NPT Conference, but it would also make it more difficult for other members of the Non-Aligned group of states to exert friendly persuasion on Iran to engage more constructively and not hold up agreements supported by the rest of the Non-Aligned countries.  The next four weeks will be critical for nuclear non-proliferation and security.

 

Source: OpenDemocracy

About the Author: Rebecca Johnson is Director of the Acronym Institute for Disarmament Diplomacy and a former senior advisor to the International WMD Blix Commission (2004-06)

Image source: ricardo.martins

 

The summer of 2010 saw the third-lowest amount and extent of Arctic sea ice ever recorded. For the third year in a row both the Northwest Passage between Greenland and Alaska and the Northern Sea Route between Norway and Kamchatka were ice-free – something that had not happened before 2008 in recorded history. As the physical state of the High North is changing, so too is the diplomatic environment.

 

The changing North

On 19 September 2010, sea ice covered 4.6 million km² of the 14.1m km² Arctic Ocean. This was 2.1m km², or 31%, below the average summer minimum during the last two decades of the twentieth century. It was the third-lowest extent, after 2007 and 2008, since consistent records began. Eight of the ten lowest minimums have been experienced in the last ten years. Change is also visible in winter ice cover: the maximum extent in March 2010 was 4% below the 1979–2000 average of 15.8m km², an area greater than the Arctic Ocean itself, since many areas outside the Arctic also freeze. The extent of ice cover is not the only story. The total volume of ice is also showing a downward trend, in both summer and winter. This is because the proportion of multi-year to newly formed ice is also declining. Since older ice tends to be thicker, this changing proportion means the total amount of summer ice in the Arctic is declining faster than the area it covers.

 

Some observers have taken comfort in the fact that ice extent increased year-on-year in both 2008 and 2009, with 2010 levels still above those of 2007 and 2008. But this was in part because the record low of 4.1m km² in 2007 was an anomaly, falling well below the long-term trend. Other observers worried that the 2007 melt was a harbinger of disaster – that a tipping point had been passed and that accelerating warming might lead to a seasonally ice-free Arctic in as little as ten years. But the figures for 2010 closely reflect the long-term trend. Both the optimists and the pessimists appear to have been wrong.

 

However, this long-term trend is worse – in the context of global climate change – than projected even five years ago. Only the most extreme of the projections included in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2007 Assessment Report showed an ice-free Arctic by the end of the twenty-first century. Yet the trend with regard to actual observations falls outside the range projected by the IPCC models (see chart). A simple linear extrapolation of the current trend would imply some seasonally ice-free years in the Arctic by the 2040s, while an accelerating trend that better fits the data suggests a date of 2030. Recent model-based projections that take into account the latest data give dates ranging from around 2040 to 2080, with most expert opinion inclining towards the earlier end of the range.

 

The full article can be found at IISS

 

Image source: IISS

 

 

“We, alongside this growing consensus of research institutes, analysts, and security agencies on both sides of the Atlantic, think of climate change as a risk multiplier; as something that will amplify existing social, political, and resource stressors,” said Janani Vivekananda of International Alert, speaking at the Wilson Center on May 10.

Vivekananda, a senior climate policy officer with International Alert’s Peacebuilding Program, was joined by co-presenter Jeffrey Stark, the director of research and studies at the Foundation for Environmental Security and Sustainability (FESS), and discussant Cynthia Brady, senior conflict advisor with USAID’s Office of Conflict Management and Mitigation, to discuss the complex connections between climate change, conflict, stability, and governance. 

A Multi-Layered Problem

Climate change and stability represent a “double-headed problem,” said Vivekananda. Climate change, while never the only cause of conflict, can increase its risk in certain contexts. At the same time, “states which are affected by conflict will already have weakened social, economic, and political resilience, which will mean that these states and their governments will find it difficult to address the impacts of climate change on the lives of these communities,” she said.

“In fragile states, the particular challenge is adapting the way we respond to climate change, bearing in mind the specific challenges of operating in a fragile context,” said Vivekananda. Ill-informed intervention programs run the risk of doing more harm than good, she said. 

For example, Vivekananda said an agrarian village she visited in Nepal was suffering from an acute water shortage and tried adapting by switching from rice to corn, which is a less water-intensive crop. However, this initiative failed because the villagers lacked the necessary technical knowledge and coordination to make their efforts successful in the long term, and in the short term this effort actually further reduced water supplies and exacerbated deforestation.

“Local responses will only be able to go so far without national-level coordination,” Vivekananda said. What is needed is a “harmony” between so-called “top-down” and “bottom-up” initiatives. “Adapting to these challenges means adapting development assistance,” she said. 

“What we’re finding is that the qualities that help a community, or a society, or in fact a government be resilient to climate change are in fact very similar qualities to that which makes a community able to deal with conflict issues without resorting to violence,” said Vivekananda.

No Simple, Surgical Solutions

“The impacts of environmental change and management of natural resources are always embedded in a powerful web of social, economic, political, cultural, and historical factors,” said Stark. “We shouldn’t expect simple, surgical solutions to climate change challenges,” he said.

Uganda and Ethiopia, for example, both have rich pastoralist traditions that are threatened by climate change. Increasing temperatures, drought, infrequent but intense rains, hail, and changes in seasonal patterns are threatening pasture lands and livelihoods.

At the same time, pastoralists are confronting the effects of a rapidly growing population, expanding cultivation, forced migration, shrinking traditional grazing lands, anti-pastoralist attitudes, and ethnic tensions. As a result, “any intervention in relation to climate adaptation – whether for water, or food, or alternative livelihoods – has to be fully understood and explicitly acknowledged as mutually beneficial by all sides,” Stark said. “If it is seen in any way to be favoring one group or another it will just cause conflict, so it is a very difficult and delicate situation.”

Yet, the challenges of climate change, said Stark, can be used “as a way to involve people who feel marginalized, empower their participation…and at the same time address some of the drivers of conflict that exist in the country.”

Case Studies: Addressing the “Missing Middle”

When doing climate change work in fragile states, “you have to think about your do-no-harm parameters,” said Brady. “Where are the opportunities to get additional sustainable development benefit and additional stabilization benefit out of reducing climate change vulnerability?”

More in-depth case studies, such as the work funded by USAID and conducted by FESS in Uganda and Ethiopia, are needed to help fill the “missing middle” between broad, international climate change efforts – like those at the United Nations – and the community level, Brady said. 

The information generated from these case studies is being eagerly awaited by USAID’s partners in the Departments of State, Defense, and Treasury, said Brady. “We are all hopeful that there will be some really significant common lessons learned, and that at a minimum, we may draw some common understanding about what climate-sensitive parameters in fragile states might mean.”

Image source: aheavens

Article source: The New Security Beat