There is a related video linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/opini ... ?th&emc=th
January 31, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
Orphaned, Raped and Ignored
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
KALEHE, Congo
Sometimes I wish eastern Congo could suffer an earthquake or a tsunami, so that it might finally get the attention it needs. The barbaric civil war being waged here is the most lethal conflict since World War II and has claimed at least 30 times as many lives as the Haiti earthquake.
Yet no humanitarian crisis generates so little attention per million corpses, or such a pathetic international response.
That’s why I’m here in the lovely, lush and threatening hills west of Lake Kivu, where militias rape, mutilate and kill civilians with a savagery that is almost incomprehensible. I’m talking to a 9-year-old girl, Chance Tombola, an orphan whose eyes are luminous with fear.
For Chance, the war arrived one evening last May when armed soldiers from an extremist Hutu militia — remnants of those who committed the Rwandan genocide — burst into her home. They killed her parents in front of her. Chance ran away, but the soldiers seized her two sisters, ages 6 and 12, and carried them away into the forest, presumably to be turned into “wives” of soldiers. No one has seen Chance’s sisters since.
Chance moved in with her aunt and uncle and their two teenage daughters. Two months later, the same militia invaded the aunt’s house and held everyone at gunpoint. Chance says she recognized some of the soldiers as the same ones who had killed her parents.
This time, no one could escape. The soldiers first shot her uncle, and then, as the terrified family members sobbed, they pulled out a large knife.
“They sliced his belly so that the intestines fell out,” said his widow, Jeanne Birengenyi, 34, Chance’s aunt. “Then they cut his heart out and showed it to me.” The soldiers continued to mutilate the body, while others began to rape Jeanne.
“One takes a leg, one takes the other leg,” Jeanne said dully. “Others grab the arms while one just starts raping. They don’t care if children are watching.”
Chance added softly: “There were six who raped her. One raped me, too.”
The soldiers left Jeanne and Chance, tightly tied up, and marched off into the forest with Jeanne’s two daughters as prisoners. One daughter is 14, the other 16, and they have not been heard from since.
“They kill, they rape, burn houses and take people’s belongings,” Jeanne said. “When they come with their guns, it’s as if they have a project to eliminate the local population.”
A peer-reviewed study found that 5.4 million people had already died in this war as of April 2007, and hundreds of thousands more have died as the situation has deteriorated since then. A catastrophically planned military offensive last year, backed by the governments of Congo and Rwanda as well as the United Nations force here, made some headway against Hutu militias but also led to increased predation on civilians from all sides.
Human Rights Watch estimates that for every Hutu fighter sent back to Rwanda last year, at least seven women were raped and 900 people forced to flee for their lives. “From a human rights perspective, the operation has been catastrophic,” concluded Philip Alston, a senior United Nations investigator.
This is a pointless war — now a dozen years old — driven by warlords, greed for minerals, ethnic tensions and complete impunity. While there is plenty of fault to go around, Rwanda has long played a particularly troubling role in many ways, including support for one of the militias. Rwanda’s government is dazzlingly successful at home, but next door in Congo, it appears complicit in war crimes.
Jeanne and Chance contracted sexually transmitted diseases. Like other survivors in areas that are accessible, they receive help from the International Rescue Committee, but Chance still suffers pain when she urinates.
Counselors say that most raped women are rejected by their husbands, and raped girls like Chance have difficulty marrying. In an area west of Lake Kivu where attacks are continuing, I met Saleh Bulondo, a newly homeless young man who was educated and spoke a little English. I asked him if he would still marry his girlfriend if she were raped.
“Never,” he said. “I will abandon her.”
A girl here normally fetches a bride price (a reverse dowry, paid by the husband’s family) when she marries. A village chief told me that a typical price would be 20 goats — but if the girl has been raped, two goats. At most.
Thus it takes astonishing courage for Jeanne and Chance to tell their stories (including in a video posted with the on-line version of this column). I’ll be reporting more from eastern Congo in the coming days, hoping that the fortitude of survivors like them can inspire world leaders to step forward to stop this slaughter. It’s time to show the same compassion toward Congo that we have toward Haiti.
•
I invite you to visit my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.
MAN-MADE DISASTERS
MAN-MADE DISASTERS
Last edited by kmaherali on Sun Dec 09, 2018 5:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.
There is a related video linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/opini ... ?th&emc=th
February 7, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
The World Capital of Killing
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
BUKAVU, Congo
It’s easy to wonder how world leaders, journalists, religious figures and ordinary citizens looked the other way while six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. And it’s even easier to assume that we’d do better.
But so far the brutal war here in eastern Congo has not only lasted longer than the Holocaust but also appears to have claimed more lives. A peer- reviewed study put the Congo war’s death toll at 5.4 million as of April 2007 and rising at 45,000 a month. That would leave the total today, after a dozen years, at 6.9 million.
What those numbers don’t capture is the way Congo has become the world capital of rape, torture and mutilation, in ways that sear survivors like Jeanne Mukuninwa, a beautiful, cheerful young woman of 19 who somehow musters the courage to giggle. Her parents disappeared in the fighting when she had just turned 14 — perhaps they were massacred, but their bodies never turned up — so she moved in with her uncle.
A few months later, the extremist Hutu militia invaded the home. She remembers that it was the day of her very first menstrual period — the only one she has ever had.
“First, they tied up my uncle,” Jeanne said. “They cut off his hands, gouged out his eyes, cut off his feet, cut off his sex organs, and left him like that. He was still alive.
“His wife and his son were also there. Then they took all of us into the forest.” That militia is known for kidnapping people and enslaving them for months, even years. Men are turned into porters, and girls into sex slaves.
Jeanne and other girls were regularly tied spread-eagle and gang-raped, and she soon became pregnant. The rapes continued, sometimes with sticks that tore apart her insides and left her dribbling wastes constantly. Somehow the fetus survived, but her pelvis was too immature to deliver the baby.
One of the people the militia had kidnapped was a doctor who was forced to treat the soldiers. The doctor, seeing that Jeanne was close to dying in obstructed childbirth, cut her open with an old knife, without anesthetic, and removed the stillborn baby. Jeanne was delirious and almost dead, so the militia dumped her beside a road.
“She was completely destroyed inside,” said another doctor, Denis Mukwege, who saved her life after she was brought here to Bukavu. Dr. Mukwege, 54, presides over the 400-bed Panzi Hospital, supported by the European Union and private groups like the Fistula Foundation. He is sometimes mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize for his heroic efforts to fight the war and heal its victims.
Dr. Mukwege operated on Jeanne nine times over three years to repair the fistulas that were causing her to leak wastes. Finally he succeeded, and she returned to her village to live with her grandmother.
“He told me to stay away from men for three months,” Jeanne remembers, to give her body time to heal. But three days after she returned to the village, the militia came again and raped again. The fistula reopened.
Jeanne, kept naked in the forest and stinking because her internal injuries had reopened, finally managed to escape and eventually found her way back to Panzi Hospital. Dr. Mukwege has already started a second round of surgeries on her, but there is so little tissue left that it is not clear she can ever be continent again.
About 12 percent of the raped women he treats have contracted syphilis, and 6 percent have H.I.V. He does what he can to repair their injuries and help them heal — until the next time.
“Sometimes I don’t know what I am doing here,” Dr. Mukwege said despairingly. “There is no medical solution.” The paramount need, he says, is not for more humanitarian aid for Congo, but for a much more vigorous international effort to end the war itself.
That means putting pressure on neighboring Rwanda, a country so widely admired for its good governance at home that it tends to get a pass for its possible role in war crimes next door. We also need pressure on the Congolese president, Joseph Kabila, to arrest Gen. Jean Bosco Ntaganda, wanted by the International Criminal Court on war crimes charges. And, as recommended by an advocacy organization called the Enough Project, we need a U.S.-brokered effort to monitor the minerals trade from Congo so that warlords can no longer buy guns by exporting gold, tin or coltan.
Unless we see some leadership here, the fighting in Congo — fueled by profits from mineral exports — will continue indefinitely. So if we don’t act now, when will we? When the toll reaches 10 million deaths? When Jeanne is kidnapped and raped for a third time?
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.
******
February 7, 2010
Many in Ivory Coast May Be Left Out From Vote
By ADAM NOSSITER
ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast — The pictures plastered on school walls all over the country offered a stark reminder of the divisions in this identity-obsessed nation.
On one side were the faces of people the government has deemed true members of society, the ones eligible to vote in the first election here in a decade. On the other side were snapshots of the multitudes — about a million in all — whose identities have fallen under official suspicion.
Ten years of war and riots lie behind those fateful doubts, and soon after the pictures went up the astonishment at being excluded gave way to an urgent reality. To vote in the long-postponed election, many of these one million excluded residents had to troop to registration offices, clutching yellowing documents in a race to prove they belonged here. Sometimes even a birth certificate was not enough.
“I was surprised and shocked” to be barred from voting, said Serge Bayoro, 31. Waiting at a vote center to challenge his status, Mr. Bayoro said with quiet insistence, “I’m a pure-blood Ivorian.”
Those are loaded words in a country where the contrary has been fatal. After years of violence and delays, Ivory Coast, once West Africa’s economic star, is stumbling toward a presidential election. Peace is the hope, expressed over and over in markets and in offices: hold the election and the country can begin to recover. Officials insist that preparations are now ending and that the million residents in dispute, in a country of 18.5 million, will either be integrated into the voter rolls or not.
The question has fueled coups, riots, an armed uprising and thousands of deaths yet still has not been settled: who is and who is not Ivorian in a country that once attracted millions of African migrants because of its prosperity. When global prices for the country’s cocoa, coffee and cotton fell in the 1990s, the economy soured and so did Ivorians’ feelings about the foreigners’ place here.
That xenophobia has been exploited by the government for years. The term foreigner is often so loosely applied that political rivals, voters from the largely Muslim north and a broad array of others have been cast as outsiders simply to keep them out of the political process.
“He who lies about his origins is a danger to the people,” a headline in a pro-government newspaper, Notre Voie, blared recently, next to a photo of a leading opposition candidate, Alassane Dramane Ouattara, who for years has been labeled a closet foreigner by people in the non-Muslim south.
The country split in two in the fall of 2002, as soldiers and officers in the north rebelled against the government of President Laurent Gbagbo. The revolt was the culmination of years of tension between the regions, based on sharply felt feelings of persecution among many northerners.
The war was over in a matter of weeks, but years of instability and flare-ups followed, including the bombing of rebel targets in 2004, the killing of French soldiers by Mr. Gbagbo’s government, retaliation by France and violent anti-French riots.
The election will finally help resolve these issues, officials here say. “The war was actually a welcome thing,” said Alphonse Koffi of the electoral commission in a recent interview. “Now, we can figure out the true identity of people. It was a necessary evil.”
But from the streets to the seats of power, the old preoccupations with identity persist, and the election — whose date has been changing, with regularity, for years — seems to offer little chance of an easy resolution.
In late January, President Gbagbo accused the national electoral commission of trying to surreptitiously add hundreds of thousands of disputed names to the list. Now some 465,000 “contentious ones” — as those in dispute are officially known — who have been added to the electoral list will be rechecked.
“Candidates of the foreign power” would be “revealed” by the election, Mr. Gbagbo promised at his re-election announcement in October, a veiled reference to interference by France here in its former colony.
The anger over the vote has started to boil over. On Friday, 5,000 people rioted in a western town over fears of being removed from the voter list by pro-government judges, a spokesman for the local military commander said.
“The people are afraid that the government is biased against them,” said the spokesman, Lacine Mara. The authorities also reported clashes over the electoral list in a northern town.
Those who support the process offer no apologies for it. “We must know, in the population, who are the nationals, and who are the foreigners, who don’t vote,” said Henri Konan Bédié, a former president. Mr. Bédié has been blamed for — or credited with, depending on the perspective — inventing the explosive concept of Ivoirité, according to which the patriotism of those in the north is considered suspect. The ideology helped set off the crisis, but Mr. Bédié is running again, 10 years after his overthrow in a military coup.
At the elections offices, each voter’s national identity is minutely scrutinized, and if a person has not been found on previous lists — an old elections list, or a list of pensioners, for example — it may make voting difficult.
“I gave them everything, but they won’t let me vote,” said Lancina Soumahoro, a welder in Yopougon, a working-class district here. “If you come from the north, there are big problems.”
Though Ivory Coast still has the largest economy in the West African Economic and Monetary Union, poverty has increased to nearly 50 percent from 38 percent since the troubles began.
“Nothing has happened in over 10 years,” said Jean-Louis Eugène Billon, president of the Chamber of Commerce. “It’s a country living on past achievements.”
Mr. Gbagbo’s term officially ended in 2005. A vote has been postponed half a dozen times, by some counts, with nearly as many peace agreements.
The president, a former history professor once linked to death squads by the French secret services, has clung to power. He leads a rump country in the south, bolstered by armed militants, nationalist rhetoric and profits from the cocoa-bean sector, while rejecting international impatience over the election delays, analysts say.
The warlords who control the north, succored by illicit tax schemes, also seem to have little reason to hurry. The crossings into their domain resemble border points between nations; striding about market stalls are northern soldiers toting guns.
They carry them in and out of the elections offices in a rebel stronghold, Bouaké, 190 miles north of Abidjan, and not much suggests that they will lay the guns down and reunite with the south after the election.
The Abidjan government’s prefects have “no administrative power” in these areas, according to a recent report by experts for the United Nations. The report said that the north was rearming, noting also that Mr. Gbagbo’s government had “invested heavily in riot-control equipment.” Mr. Bédié’s party recently formed its own militia, “to counter those loyal to” Mr. Gbagbo’s party, according to the report.
Hostile sentiments are commonplace. “All Muslims are thugs!” a street orator, surrounded by rapt listeners, shouted at a trembling young man in a park.
Nonetheless, popular longing for a vote is strong. “We want the elections to be held now, so that this state of crisis can finally be over,” said Adou Kobenan, who runs a restaurant in Yopougon.
“For the sake of the Ivory Coast, we must proceed quickly to elections,” said the president of the elections commission, Robert Beugré Mambé, though he was unable to give a date.
“They’ve put it off so much, we’re skeptical,” said Hervé Gouamené, a lawyer who runs a local human rights group.
But “should we have the elections as long as there is no disarmament?” he added, referring to the plethora of armed militias in the country. “This is a worry.”
Loucoumane Coulibaly contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/world ... nted=print
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/opini ... ?th&emc=th
February 7, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
The World Capital of Killing
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
BUKAVU, Congo
It’s easy to wonder how world leaders, journalists, religious figures and ordinary citizens looked the other way while six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. And it’s even easier to assume that we’d do better.
But so far the brutal war here in eastern Congo has not only lasted longer than the Holocaust but also appears to have claimed more lives. A peer- reviewed study put the Congo war’s death toll at 5.4 million as of April 2007 and rising at 45,000 a month. That would leave the total today, after a dozen years, at 6.9 million.
What those numbers don’t capture is the way Congo has become the world capital of rape, torture and mutilation, in ways that sear survivors like Jeanne Mukuninwa, a beautiful, cheerful young woman of 19 who somehow musters the courage to giggle. Her parents disappeared in the fighting when she had just turned 14 — perhaps they were massacred, but their bodies never turned up — so she moved in with her uncle.
A few months later, the extremist Hutu militia invaded the home. She remembers that it was the day of her very first menstrual period — the only one she has ever had.
“First, they tied up my uncle,” Jeanne said. “They cut off his hands, gouged out his eyes, cut off his feet, cut off his sex organs, and left him like that. He was still alive.
“His wife and his son were also there. Then they took all of us into the forest.” That militia is known for kidnapping people and enslaving them for months, even years. Men are turned into porters, and girls into sex slaves.
Jeanne and other girls were regularly tied spread-eagle and gang-raped, and she soon became pregnant. The rapes continued, sometimes with sticks that tore apart her insides and left her dribbling wastes constantly. Somehow the fetus survived, but her pelvis was too immature to deliver the baby.
One of the people the militia had kidnapped was a doctor who was forced to treat the soldiers. The doctor, seeing that Jeanne was close to dying in obstructed childbirth, cut her open with an old knife, without anesthetic, and removed the stillborn baby. Jeanne was delirious and almost dead, so the militia dumped her beside a road.
“She was completely destroyed inside,” said another doctor, Denis Mukwege, who saved her life after she was brought here to Bukavu. Dr. Mukwege, 54, presides over the 400-bed Panzi Hospital, supported by the European Union and private groups like the Fistula Foundation. He is sometimes mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize for his heroic efforts to fight the war and heal its victims.
Dr. Mukwege operated on Jeanne nine times over three years to repair the fistulas that were causing her to leak wastes. Finally he succeeded, and she returned to her village to live with her grandmother.
“He told me to stay away from men for three months,” Jeanne remembers, to give her body time to heal. But three days after she returned to the village, the militia came again and raped again. The fistula reopened.
Jeanne, kept naked in the forest and stinking because her internal injuries had reopened, finally managed to escape and eventually found her way back to Panzi Hospital. Dr. Mukwege has already started a second round of surgeries on her, but there is so little tissue left that it is not clear she can ever be continent again.
About 12 percent of the raped women he treats have contracted syphilis, and 6 percent have H.I.V. He does what he can to repair their injuries and help them heal — until the next time.
“Sometimes I don’t know what I am doing here,” Dr. Mukwege said despairingly. “There is no medical solution.” The paramount need, he says, is not for more humanitarian aid for Congo, but for a much more vigorous international effort to end the war itself.
That means putting pressure on neighboring Rwanda, a country so widely admired for its good governance at home that it tends to get a pass for its possible role in war crimes next door. We also need pressure on the Congolese president, Joseph Kabila, to arrest Gen. Jean Bosco Ntaganda, wanted by the International Criminal Court on war crimes charges. And, as recommended by an advocacy organization called the Enough Project, we need a U.S.-brokered effort to monitor the minerals trade from Congo so that warlords can no longer buy guns by exporting gold, tin or coltan.
Unless we see some leadership here, the fighting in Congo — fueled by profits from mineral exports — will continue indefinitely. So if we don’t act now, when will we? When the toll reaches 10 million deaths? When Jeanne is kidnapped and raped for a third time?
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.
******
February 7, 2010
Many in Ivory Coast May Be Left Out From Vote
By ADAM NOSSITER
ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast — The pictures plastered on school walls all over the country offered a stark reminder of the divisions in this identity-obsessed nation.
On one side were the faces of people the government has deemed true members of society, the ones eligible to vote in the first election here in a decade. On the other side were snapshots of the multitudes — about a million in all — whose identities have fallen under official suspicion.
Ten years of war and riots lie behind those fateful doubts, and soon after the pictures went up the astonishment at being excluded gave way to an urgent reality. To vote in the long-postponed election, many of these one million excluded residents had to troop to registration offices, clutching yellowing documents in a race to prove they belonged here. Sometimes even a birth certificate was not enough.
“I was surprised and shocked” to be barred from voting, said Serge Bayoro, 31. Waiting at a vote center to challenge his status, Mr. Bayoro said with quiet insistence, “I’m a pure-blood Ivorian.”
Those are loaded words in a country where the contrary has been fatal. After years of violence and delays, Ivory Coast, once West Africa’s economic star, is stumbling toward a presidential election. Peace is the hope, expressed over and over in markets and in offices: hold the election and the country can begin to recover. Officials insist that preparations are now ending and that the million residents in dispute, in a country of 18.5 million, will either be integrated into the voter rolls or not.
The question has fueled coups, riots, an armed uprising and thousands of deaths yet still has not been settled: who is and who is not Ivorian in a country that once attracted millions of African migrants because of its prosperity. When global prices for the country’s cocoa, coffee and cotton fell in the 1990s, the economy soured and so did Ivorians’ feelings about the foreigners’ place here.
That xenophobia has been exploited by the government for years. The term foreigner is often so loosely applied that political rivals, voters from the largely Muslim north and a broad array of others have been cast as outsiders simply to keep them out of the political process.
“He who lies about his origins is a danger to the people,” a headline in a pro-government newspaper, Notre Voie, blared recently, next to a photo of a leading opposition candidate, Alassane Dramane Ouattara, who for years has been labeled a closet foreigner by people in the non-Muslim south.
The country split in two in the fall of 2002, as soldiers and officers in the north rebelled against the government of President Laurent Gbagbo. The revolt was the culmination of years of tension between the regions, based on sharply felt feelings of persecution among many northerners.
The war was over in a matter of weeks, but years of instability and flare-ups followed, including the bombing of rebel targets in 2004, the killing of French soldiers by Mr. Gbagbo’s government, retaliation by France and violent anti-French riots.
The election will finally help resolve these issues, officials here say. “The war was actually a welcome thing,” said Alphonse Koffi of the electoral commission in a recent interview. “Now, we can figure out the true identity of people. It was a necessary evil.”
But from the streets to the seats of power, the old preoccupations with identity persist, and the election — whose date has been changing, with regularity, for years — seems to offer little chance of an easy resolution.
In late January, President Gbagbo accused the national electoral commission of trying to surreptitiously add hundreds of thousands of disputed names to the list. Now some 465,000 “contentious ones” — as those in dispute are officially known — who have been added to the electoral list will be rechecked.
“Candidates of the foreign power” would be “revealed” by the election, Mr. Gbagbo promised at his re-election announcement in October, a veiled reference to interference by France here in its former colony.
The anger over the vote has started to boil over. On Friday, 5,000 people rioted in a western town over fears of being removed from the voter list by pro-government judges, a spokesman for the local military commander said.
“The people are afraid that the government is biased against them,” said the spokesman, Lacine Mara. The authorities also reported clashes over the electoral list in a northern town.
Those who support the process offer no apologies for it. “We must know, in the population, who are the nationals, and who are the foreigners, who don’t vote,” said Henri Konan Bédié, a former president. Mr. Bédié has been blamed for — or credited with, depending on the perspective — inventing the explosive concept of Ivoirité, according to which the patriotism of those in the north is considered suspect. The ideology helped set off the crisis, but Mr. Bédié is running again, 10 years after his overthrow in a military coup.
At the elections offices, each voter’s national identity is minutely scrutinized, and if a person has not been found on previous lists — an old elections list, or a list of pensioners, for example — it may make voting difficult.
“I gave them everything, but they won’t let me vote,” said Lancina Soumahoro, a welder in Yopougon, a working-class district here. “If you come from the north, there are big problems.”
Though Ivory Coast still has the largest economy in the West African Economic and Monetary Union, poverty has increased to nearly 50 percent from 38 percent since the troubles began.
“Nothing has happened in over 10 years,” said Jean-Louis Eugène Billon, president of the Chamber of Commerce. “It’s a country living on past achievements.”
Mr. Gbagbo’s term officially ended in 2005. A vote has been postponed half a dozen times, by some counts, with nearly as many peace agreements.
The president, a former history professor once linked to death squads by the French secret services, has clung to power. He leads a rump country in the south, bolstered by armed militants, nationalist rhetoric and profits from the cocoa-bean sector, while rejecting international impatience over the election delays, analysts say.
The warlords who control the north, succored by illicit tax schemes, also seem to have little reason to hurry. The crossings into their domain resemble border points between nations; striding about market stalls are northern soldiers toting guns.
They carry them in and out of the elections offices in a rebel stronghold, Bouaké, 190 miles north of Abidjan, and not much suggests that they will lay the guns down and reunite with the south after the election.
The Abidjan government’s prefects have “no administrative power” in these areas, according to a recent report by experts for the United Nations. The report said that the north was rearming, noting also that Mr. Gbagbo’s government had “invested heavily in riot-control equipment.” Mr. Bédié’s party recently formed its own militia, “to counter those loyal to” Mr. Gbagbo’s party, according to the report.
Hostile sentiments are commonplace. “All Muslims are thugs!” a street orator, surrounded by rapt listeners, shouted at a trembling young man in a park.
Nonetheless, popular longing for a vote is strong. “We want the elections to be held now, so that this state of crisis can finally be over,” said Adou Kobenan, who runs a restaurant in Yopougon.
“For the sake of the Ivory Coast, we must proceed quickly to elections,” said the president of the elections commission, Robert Beugré Mambé, though he was unable to give a date.
“They’ve put it off so much, we’re skeptical,” said Hervé Gouamené, a lawyer who runs a local human rights group.
But “should we have the elections as long as there is no disarmament?” he added, referring to the plethora of armed militias in the country. “This is a worry.”
Loucoumane Coulibaly contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/world ... nted=print
The URLs can break and be inactive. These are not artciles that have been picked up randomly. They are carefully chosen to reflect the respective threads.I believe there is a great deal of interest in them as shown by the numbers.Strade wrote:Could you please refrain from posting ridiculously large articles EVERYWHERE that are not of your own typing, and instead, offer your own insight into what the topic is about...and oh, I dunno, link it as an URL?
There is a related slideshow at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/08/world ... ?th&emc=th
February 8, 2010
Sarobi Journal
On Afghan Road, Scenes of Beauty and Death
By DEXTER FILKINS
SAROBI, Afghanistan — Even in a nation beset by war and suicide bombings, you would be hard-pressed to find anything as reliably terrifying as the national highway through the Kabul Gorge.
The 40-mile stretch, a breathtaking chasm of mountains and cliffs between Kabul and Jalalabad, claims so many lives so regularly that most people stopped counting long ago. Cars flip and flatten. Trucks soar to the valley floor. Buses play chicken; buses collide.
The mayhem unfolds on one of the most bewitching stretches of scenery on all the earth. The gorge, in some places no more than a few hundred yards wide, is framed by vertical rock cliffs that soar more than 2,000 feet above the Kabul River below. Most people die, and most cars crash, while zooming around one of the impossible turns that offer impossible views of the crevasses and buttes.
Indeed, driving on the Kabul Gorge seems a uniquely Afghan experience, a complicated dance of beauty and death.
“I sit right here and watch people crash all day long,” said Mohammed Nabi, who fries fresh fish in an open-air stall along the road. “The course of history has proved that the Afghan people are bullies. This is why we cannot drive safely.”
One day last week, 13 accidents unfolded on the road in a mere two hours, all of them catastrophic, nearly all of them fatal. The daylong drizzle made the day slightly more calamitous than most. At one scene, a bloodied family grieved for their kin trapped in a flattened car. At another, a minibus lay crushed beneath the hulk of a jackknifed truck. At still another, the bottom of a ravine was filled with a car’s twisted remains.
And yet even as those accidents spread themselves across the roadway, the cars sailed heedlessly past. Taxis and buses weaved and passed one another at bone-chilling speeds, with only millimeters separating them from bloody catastrophe.
“The fighting with the Taliban lasts only for a day or two, but the crashes are every day,” said Juma Gul, who owns a fabric shop in Sarobi that looks directly out onto the highway. “It’s a kind of theater. Sometimes, a car will fly by in the air.”
The lethality of the roadway stems from the unique mix of geography, the road itself, and the drivers’ disregard for the laws of physics.
The two-lane highway is barely wide enough for two cars to pass. On the inside lane, less than a yard outside your window, stands a wall of treeless rock that climbs upward in a nearly perpendicular line. A foot-high ledge guards the outside lane, behind which lies a valley floor as far as 1,000 feet down.
For the drivers, of course, that means there is virtually no margin for error: they go into the wall, or over the edge, or into each other.
The only note of caution is provided by children, who live in the impoverished villages nearby. Often as young as 4 or 5, they stand bedraggled at the bends, using flattened green Sprite bottles as flags, waving the drivers through when the way is clear.
Under the circumstances, you might imagine that drivers in the Kabul Gorge would proceed slowly, crawling and craning their necks to guard against oncoming traffic whipping round the next curve. In fact, for most of history, they did.
Over the centuries, countless invading forces passed through or near the gorge on their way to the Khyber Pass. Among them were a group of 17,000 British troops and civilians, who were massacred as they beat a retreat from Kabul at the end of the first Anglo-Afghan War in 1842. Dr. William Brydon, who rode into Jalalabad on a horse, was the only European to survive.
The Kabul-to-Jalalabad road was paved for the first time by the West German government in 1960. In the 1980s, it was almost entirely obliterated during the insurrection against the Soviet invasion. In the decade that followed, when the Taliban and other armed groups fought to control the country, the road was a blasted moonscape. The craters were so large that taxis would disappear for minutes at a time, only to reappear as they struggled to climb out.
It was a tough road, and it had its own dangers — stretches of roadway often collapsed or washed away — but speed was not among them. That changed in 2006, when a European Union-backed project finally smoothed the road all the way through. Now Afghans could finally drive as fast as they wanted.
And they do! The cars zoom at astonishing speeds, far faster than would ever be allowed on a similar road in the West, if there was one. Like Formula One drivers, the Afghans dart out along the sharpest of turns, slamming their cars back into their lanes at the first flash of oncoming disaster. Most of the time they make it.
The danger is heightened by other things. On paper, the government of Afghanistan requires that drivers pass a test to get a license, but few people here seem to have one.
Then there are the cars themselves, battered Toyota taxis and even Ladas from bygone Soviet days. A typical Afghan car has bald tires and squeaky brakes—not exactly ideal for zigging and zagging through the mountains.
But perhaps the gravest threat, apart from speed of the cars, is the slowness of the trucks. The massive tractor-trailers that move cargo in and out of Pakistan are often overloaded by thousands of pounds. They cannot move fast; if they are climbing one of the gorge’s thousand-foot hills, they cannot move at all. They get stuck. They fall back. They fall over.
So the cars and their drivers stack up behind them, angry and impatient, and rush and maneuver and pass them at the first chance.
And so the cars crash, one after the other.
Each day, the broken and bloody arrive at the Sarobi Hospital, a small clinic in the town at the head of the gorge.
“Most of our patients were injured in accidents,” said Ros Mohammed Jabbar Khel, the chief surgeon.
Dr. Jabbar Khel has a plan to buy a fleet of ambulances and stage them at various points along the gorge. That way, he figures, he could save a lot of lives. He said he was waiting for the money to come from the government in Kabul.
Dr. Jabbar Khel himself drives the gorge several times a week. And each time, he said, he is filled with fear — not for his own abilities, but for those of the others.
“I have a license!” the doctor said. “I took lessons!”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/08/world ... nted=print
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/08/world ... ?th&emc=th
February 8, 2010
Sarobi Journal
On Afghan Road, Scenes of Beauty and Death
By DEXTER FILKINS
SAROBI, Afghanistan — Even in a nation beset by war and suicide bombings, you would be hard-pressed to find anything as reliably terrifying as the national highway through the Kabul Gorge.
The 40-mile stretch, a breathtaking chasm of mountains and cliffs between Kabul and Jalalabad, claims so many lives so regularly that most people stopped counting long ago. Cars flip and flatten. Trucks soar to the valley floor. Buses play chicken; buses collide.
The mayhem unfolds on one of the most bewitching stretches of scenery on all the earth. The gorge, in some places no more than a few hundred yards wide, is framed by vertical rock cliffs that soar more than 2,000 feet above the Kabul River below. Most people die, and most cars crash, while zooming around one of the impossible turns that offer impossible views of the crevasses and buttes.
Indeed, driving on the Kabul Gorge seems a uniquely Afghan experience, a complicated dance of beauty and death.
“I sit right here and watch people crash all day long,” said Mohammed Nabi, who fries fresh fish in an open-air stall along the road. “The course of history has proved that the Afghan people are bullies. This is why we cannot drive safely.”
One day last week, 13 accidents unfolded on the road in a mere two hours, all of them catastrophic, nearly all of them fatal. The daylong drizzle made the day slightly more calamitous than most. At one scene, a bloodied family grieved for their kin trapped in a flattened car. At another, a minibus lay crushed beneath the hulk of a jackknifed truck. At still another, the bottom of a ravine was filled with a car’s twisted remains.
And yet even as those accidents spread themselves across the roadway, the cars sailed heedlessly past. Taxis and buses weaved and passed one another at bone-chilling speeds, with only millimeters separating them from bloody catastrophe.
“The fighting with the Taliban lasts only for a day or two, but the crashes are every day,” said Juma Gul, who owns a fabric shop in Sarobi that looks directly out onto the highway. “It’s a kind of theater. Sometimes, a car will fly by in the air.”
The lethality of the roadway stems from the unique mix of geography, the road itself, and the drivers’ disregard for the laws of physics.
The two-lane highway is barely wide enough for two cars to pass. On the inside lane, less than a yard outside your window, stands a wall of treeless rock that climbs upward in a nearly perpendicular line. A foot-high ledge guards the outside lane, behind which lies a valley floor as far as 1,000 feet down.
For the drivers, of course, that means there is virtually no margin for error: they go into the wall, or over the edge, or into each other.
The only note of caution is provided by children, who live in the impoverished villages nearby. Often as young as 4 or 5, they stand bedraggled at the bends, using flattened green Sprite bottles as flags, waving the drivers through when the way is clear.
Under the circumstances, you might imagine that drivers in the Kabul Gorge would proceed slowly, crawling and craning their necks to guard against oncoming traffic whipping round the next curve. In fact, for most of history, they did.
Over the centuries, countless invading forces passed through or near the gorge on their way to the Khyber Pass. Among them were a group of 17,000 British troops and civilians, who were massacred as they beat a retreat from Kabul at the end of the first Anglo-Afghan War in 1842. Dr. William Brydon, who rode into Jalalabad on a horse, was the only European to survive.
The Kabul-to-Jalalabad road was paved for the first time by the West German government in 1960. In the 1980s, it was almost entirely obliterated during the insurrection against the Soviet invasion. In the decade that followed, when the Taliban and other armed groups fought to control the country, the road was a blasted moonscape. The craters were so large that taxis would disappear for minutes at a time, only to reappear as they struggled to climb out.
It was a tough road, and it had its own dangers — stretches of roadway often collapsed or washed away — but speed was not among them. That changed in 2006, when a European Union-backed project finally smoothed the road all the way through. Now Afghans could finally drive as fast as they wanted.
And they do! The cars zoom at astonishing speeds, far faster than would ever be allowed on a similar road in the West, if there was one. Like Formula One drivers, the Afghans dart out along the sharpest of turns, slamming their cars back into their lanes at the first flash of oncoming disaster. Most of the time they make it.
The danger is heightened by other things. On paper, the government of Afghanistan requires that drivers pass a test to get a license, but few people here seem to have one.
Then there are the cars themselves, battered Toyota taxis and even Ladas from bygone Soviet days. A typical Afghan car has bald tires and squeaky brakes—not exactly ideal for zigging and zagging through the mountains.
But perhaps the gravest threat, apart from speed of the cars, is the slowness of the trucks. The massive tractor-trailers that move cargo in and out of Pakistan are often overloaded by thousands of pounds. They cannot move fast; if they are climbing one of the gorge’s thousand-foot hills, they cannot move at all. They get stuck. They fall back. They fall over.
So the cars and their drivers stack up behind them, angry and impatient, and rush and maneuver and pass them at the first chance.
And so the cars crash, one after the other.
Each day, the broken and bloody arrive at the Sarobi Hospital, a small clinic in the town at the head of the gorge.
“Most of our patients were injured in accidents,” said Ros Mohammed Jabbar Khel, the chief surgeon.
Dr. Jabbar Khel has a plan to buy a fleet of ambulances and stage them at various points along the gorge. That way, he figures, he could save a lot of lives. He said he was waiting for the money to come from the government in Kabul.
Dr. Jabbar Khel himself drives the gorge several times a week. And each time, he said, he is filled with fear — not for his own abilities, but for those of the others.
“I have a license!” the doctor said. “I took lessons!”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/08/world ... nted=print
There is a related video linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/11/opini ... ?th&emc=th
February 11, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
The Grotesque Vocabulary in Congo
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
BUKAVU, Congo
I’ve learned some new words.
One is “autocannibalism,” coined in French but equally appropriate in English. It describes what happens when a militia here in eastern Congo’s endless war cuts flesh from living victims and forces them to eat it.
Another is “re-rape.” The need for that term arose because doctors were seeing women and girls raped, re-raped and re-raped again, here in the world capital of murder, rape, mutilation.
This grotesque vocabulary helps answer a question that I’ve had from readers: Why Congo? After a previous visit to eastern Congo, a reader named Jim D. objected. “Yes there are horrible things happening in Africa,” he wrote on my blog. “None are anything we can do anything about by ourselves.”
“My question is why do you not concentrate on this nation’s poor,” he asked. “Yes, Africa suffers, but you need to look in your own house first.”
Jim D. has a legitimate complaint, echoed by other readers: We have enormous needs at home, and we shouldn’t let foreign crises distract us from them.
But do we really need to say that we can’t address suffering in Congo or Haiti, or anywhere else, because we have our own needs? Particularly when the Congo war has claimed so many lives (perhaps more than six million), isn’t it time for the U.S. to lead a major, global diplomatic push for peace?
Sometimes it’s said that women and children bear the brunt of the brutality in Congo. That’s not quite right; a United Nations official estimates that the population here in South Kivu Province is 55 percent female because so many men have been executed. Women are less likely to be killed but more likely to be tortured.
So can anything be done about this abattoir, or is Jim D. right that it is just one more tragedy to which we must wearily resign ourselves?
One answer is simple: Some people are already showing that it is possible to make a difference here. International Rescue Committee is helping rape survivors recover. The World Food Program averts starvation with its food distributions. And Eve Ensler, author of “The Vagina Monologues,” is working with Unicef to build a City of Joy here to train women — some of them shattered by war — to transform their communities. City of Joy will teach legal rights, self-defense and skills for economic empowerment, and a team of female construction workers is helping build it right now.
“The intention is to transform pain into power,” explained Christine Schuler Deschryver, who manages the project in Congo.
As for whether it is possible to end the war itself, it helps to understand why Congolese civilians are subjected to autocannibalism and re-rape. It’s not just mindless savagery. Rather, after talking to survivors and perpetrators alike over the years, I’ve come to believe that the atrocities are calculated and strategic, serving two main purposes.
First, they terrorize populations and shatter traditional structures of authority.
Second, they create cohesiveness among the misfit, often youthful soldiers typically employed by warlords. If commanders can get their troops to commit unspeakable atrocities, those soldiers are less likely ever to return to society.
So don’t think of wartime atrocities as some ineluctable Lord of the Flies reversion to life in a natural state but as a calculated military strategy. We can change those calculations by holding commanders accountable.
A four-step approach would be:
• Pressure on Rwanda to stop funding its pet Tutsi militia in Congo. Rwanda also should publish a list of those facing criminal charges for its 1994 genocide so that more Hutu militiamen not on the list might go back. A Rwandan war shouldn’t be fought in Congo.
• An international regime to monitor mineral exports from Congo so that warlords do not monetize their militias by exporting minerals through Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi. Legislation to do this, backed by an advocacy group called the Enough Project, is pending in Congress.
• A major push to demobilize Rwandan Hutu fighters and return as many as possible to civilian life in Rwanda or settlements in Congo or Burundi. That should be coupled with a crackdown on leaders in Congo and those who direct action from Europe and the United States.
• A drive to professionalize the Congolese Army and end the impunity for murder, torture and rape, starting with the arrest of Jean Bosco Ntaganda on his warrant for war crimes.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s visit to eastern Congo last year was a landmark, but it needs more follow-up from the Obama administration. What is required isn’t some new formula but much greater political will. Otherwise, the fighting will go on for years to come — and this lovely, lush land will spawn even more horrific vocabulary.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/11/opini ... ?th&emc=th
February 11, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
The Grotesque Vocabulary in Congo
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
BUKAVU, Congo
I’ve learned some new words.
One is “autocannibalism,” coined in French but equally appropriate in English. It describes what happens when a militia here in eastern Congo’s endless war cuts flesh from living victims and forces them to eat it.
Another is “re-rape.” The need for that term arose because doctors were seeing women and girls raped, re-raped and re-raped again, here in the world capital of murder, rape, mutilation.
This grotesque vocabulary helps answer a question that I’ve had from readers: Why Congo? After a previous visit to eastern Congo, a reader named Jim D. objected. “Yes there are horrible things happening in Africa,” he wrote on my blog. “None are anything we can do anything about by ourselves.”
“My question is why do you not concentrate on this nation’s poor,” he asked. “Yes, Africa suffers, but you need to look in your own house first.”
Jim D. has a legitimate complaint, echoed by other readers: We have enormous needs at home, and we shouldn’t let foreign crises distract us from them.
But do we really need to say that we can’t address suffering in Congo or Haiti, or anywhere else, because we have our own needs? Particularly when the Congo war has claimed so many lives (perhaps more than six million), isn’t it time for the U.S. to lead a major, global diplomatic push for peace?
Sometimes it’s said that women and children bear the brunt of the brutality in Congo. That’s not quite right; a United Nations official estimates that the population here in South Kivu Province is 55 percent female because so many men have been executed. Women are less likely to be killed but more likely to be tortured.
So can anything be done about this abattoir, or is Jim D. right that it is just one more tragedy to which we must wearily resign ourselves?
One answer is simple: Some people are already showing that it is possible to make a difference here. International Rescue Committee is helping rape survivors recover. The World Food Program averts starvation with its food distributions. And Eve Ensler, author of “The Vagina Monologues,” is working with Unicef to build a City of Joy here to train women — some of them shattered by war — to transform their communities. City of Joy will teach legal rights, self-defense and skills for economic empowerment, and a team of female construction workers is helping build it right now.
“The intention is to transform pain into power,” explained Christine Schuler Deschryver, who manages the project in Congo.
As for whether it is possible to end the war itself, it helps to understand why Congolese civilians are subjected to autocannibalism and re-rape. It’s not just mindless savagery. Rather, after talking to survivors and perpetrators alike over the years, I’ve come to believe that the atrocities are calculated and strategic, serving two main purposes.
First, they terrorize populations and shatter traditional structures of authority.
Second, they create cohesiveness among the misfit, often youthful soldiers typically employed by warlords. If commanders can get their troops to commit unspeakable atrocities, those soldiers are less likely ever to return to society.
So don’t think of wartime atrocities as some ineluctable Lord of the Flies reversion to life in a natural state but as a calculated military strategy. We can change those calculations by holding commanders accountable.
A four-step approach would be:
• Pressure on Rwanda to stop funding its pet Tutsi militia in Congo. Rwanda also should publish a list of those facing criminal charges for its 1994 genocide so that more Hutu militiamen not on the list might go back. A Rwandan war shouldn’t be fought in Congo.
• An international regime to monitor mineral exports from Congo so that warlords do not monetize their militias by exporting minerals through Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi. Legislation to do this, backed by an advocacy group called the Enough Project, is pending in Congress.
• A major push to demobilize Rwandan Hutu fighters and return as many as possible to civilian life in Rwanda or settlements in Congo or Burundi. That should be coupled with a crackdown on leaders in Congo and those who direct action from Europe and the United States.
• A drive to professionalize the Congolese Army and end the impunity for murder, torture and rape, starting with the arrest of Jean Bosco Ntaganda on his warrant for war crimes.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s visit to eastern Congo last year was a landmark, but it needs more follow-up from the Obama administration. What is required isn’t some new formula but much greater political will. Otherwise, the fighting will go on for years to come — and this lovely, lush land will spawn even more horrific vocabulary.
Thousands of honour killings each year: UN
Agence France-Presse
March 5, 2010
Some 5,000 women are murdered in honour killings every year, the UN's top human rights official said Thursday, calling it an "extreme symptom of discrimination."
"It has been estimated that as many as one in three women across the world has been beaten, raped or otherwise abused during the course of her lifetime," said Navi Pillay in a statement. "Amongst the most extreme forms of abuse is what is known as 'honour killing'," added the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 4&sponsor=
Agence France-Presse
March 5, 2010
Some 5,000 women are murdered in honour killings every year, the UN's top human rights official said Thursday, calling it an "extreme symptom of discrimination."
"It has been estimated that as many as one in three women across the world has been beaten, raped or otherwise abused during the course of her lifetime," said Navi Pillay in a statement. "Amongst the most extreme forms of abuse is what is known as 'honour killing'," added the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 4&sponsor=
March 10, 2010
Nigerians Recount Night of Their Bloody Revenge
By ADAM NOSSITER
JOS, Nigeria — Dispassionately, the baby-faced young man recounted his killings: two women and one man, first beaten senseless with a stick, then stabbed to death with a short knife.
The man, Dahiru Adamu, 25, was crouching on the floor in the sprawling police headquarters here, summoned to give an accounting of the terrible night of March 7, when, he said, he and dozens of other herdsmen descended on a slumbering village just south of here and slaughtered hundreds with machetes, knives and cutlasses in a brutal act of sectarian retribution.
On Monday and Tuesday, 332 bodies were buried in a mass grave in the village of Dogo Na Hawa, the Nigerian Red Cross said Wednesday. Human rights groups and the state government say that as many as 500 people may have been killed in the early hours of Sunday morning, in three different villages.
Sunday’s killings were an especially vicious expression of long-running hostilities between Christians and Muslims in this divided nation. Jos and the region around it are on the fault line where the volatile and poor Muslim north and the Christian south meet. In the past decade, some 3,000 people have been killed in interethnic, interreligious violence in this fraught zone. The pattern is familiar and was seen as recently as January: uneasy coexistence suddenly explodes into killing, amplified for days by retaliation.
Mr. Adamu, a Muslim herder, said he went to Dogo Na Hawa, a village of Christians living in mud-brick houses on dirt streets, to avenge the killings of Muslims and their cattle in January.
The operation had been planned at least several days before by a local group called Thank Allah, said one of Mr. Adamu’s fellow detainees, Ibrahim Harouna, who was shackled on the floor next to him. The men spoke in Hausa through an interpreter.
“They killed a lot of our Fulanis in January,” Mr. Adamu said, referring to his ethnic group. “So I knew that this time, we would take revenge.”
His victims were sleeping when he arrived, he said, and he set their house on fire. Sure enough, they ran out.
“I killed three people,” Mr. Adamu said calmly.
He and the other detainees showed no sign that they had been maltreated; some confessed to killings, and others denied them, speaking in front of the police.
The police quickly arrested about 200 people in connection with the killings, and many of them were crouching anxiously in rows on a bare concrete floor, outside the police headquarters on Wednesday morning. The police have confiscated 14 machetes, 26 bows, arrows, 3 axes, 4 spears and 44 guns. Victims, many of them women and children, were cut down with knives, short and long; few survived.
Usually in such attacks, there are twice as many injuries as deaths, said Ben Whitfield of the Doctors Without Borders team in Jos. “It’s unreal,” he said. “These people were definitely caught in the middle of the night and meant to be killed.” Like others in Jos, police officials say they are hoping for peace after years of sectarian killings in the region.
But they are not sure they will get it. The streets in this metropolis of several million were largely deserted Wednesday. Residents spoke of fear and anger, and about 4,300 have fled.
Christians, in interviews, voiced suspicion of the intentions of Muslims and associated them with the taint of terrorism. The state attorney general, Edward Pwajok, a Christian, said that on Wednesday morning he had prosecuted a Nigerian Muslim man living in a Jos suburb who had “acknowledged” being “a member of Al Qaeda.”
Mr. Pwajok said there was no indication that the man, Samsudeen Sahsu, was connected to the killings; he said DVDs of Al Qaeda’s activities had been discovered in the man’s home. The group is not previously known to have penetrated Nigeria, though Mr. Sahsu, in a written confession provided by the attorney general, named other members of the “AlKaida Islamic Association.”
He said the headquarters were in Maiduguri, where last summer a radical Islamic sect, Boko Haram, was bloodily suppressed by Nigerian security forces.
“Suspicion is still rife,” the state police commissioner, Ikechukwu Aduba, said in an interview in his office in Jos. “We are appealing to the youth to sheath their swords and give peace a chance.”
Mr. Aduba sharply disputed the elevated death toll reported by others, saying that the police could confirm only 109 deaths.
But a Nigerian Red Cross official in Jos, Adeyemo Adebayo, deputy head of disaster management, said that the number of dead was “possibly” even greater than the 332 buried in the mass grave, since many fled into the bush and could have been cut down there by their attackers. A respected Nigerian human rights group, the Civil Rights Congress, said Monday that its members had counted 492 bodies.
Their attackers had come on foot from nearby villages and had made no preparations for a getaway, said Adebola Hamzat, chief superintendent of the Jos police. “Many of them were still running around,” he said, when they were picked up by the security forces. And many were carrying “cutlasses” — long lethal-looking knives that the police produced for visitors on Wednesday — still stained with blood, he said.
“The person was coming toward me; I killed him with a cutlass,” said the young man next to Mr. Adamu, Zakaria Yakubu, 20, insisting that he was defending a fellow Fulani who had been shot. His victim “did not die right away,” Mr. Yakubu said. “When we got to Dogo Na Hawa, we were just looking for our cattle.” He was clutching some bread distributed by the Red Cross.
Next to him, Ibrahim Harouna, also 20, would say only that he had “killed some of the people’s pigs,” though the police said he was also suspected of having taken part in the killings.
On Wednesday, the mood in Jos was tense among Muslim traders, who complained of a sharp drop in business, and it was anything but forgiving among Christians. They complained that Muslims wanted to supplant “indigenes” — Christians long native to the region.
“Some people want to be rulers everywhere,” said Yohanna Yatou, a businessman. “It’s the Muslims. They said they are born to rule.” Williams Danladi said that Muslims “believe that if they die during this war, they will go to heaven.”
“We Christians, we don’t believe this,” he said.
Others expressed puzzlement and exasperation with the never-ending conflict. “This is a Christian, an indigene,” said Moussa Ismail, pointing to his friend sitting next to him on a downtown stoop, Jacob Ayuba. “We have done business for more than 20 years. How would I attack him?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/11/world ... ?th&emc=th
Nigerians Recount Night of Their Bloody Revenge
By ADAM NOSSITER
JOS, Nigeria — Dispassionately, the baby-faced young man recounted his killings: two women and one man, first beaten senseless with a stick, then stabbed to death with a short knife.
The man, Dahiru Adamu, 25, was crouching on the floor in the sprawling police headquarters here, summoned to give an accounting of the terrible night of March 7, when, he said, he and dozens of other herdsmen descended on a slumbering village just south of here and slaughtered hundreds with machetes, knives and cutlasses in a brutal act of sectarian retribution.
On Monday and Tuesday, 332 bodies were buried in a mass grave in the village of Dogo Na Hawa, the Nigerian Red Cross said Wednesday. Human rights groups and the state government say that as many as 500 people may have been killed in the early hours of Sunday morning, in three different villages.
Sunday’s killings were an especially vicious expression of long-running hostilities between Christians and Muslims in this divided nation. Jos and the region around it are on the fault line where the volatile and poor Muslim north and the Christian south meet. In the past decade, some 3,000 people have been killed in interethnic, interreligious violence in this fraught zone. The pattern is familiar and was seen as recently as January: uneasy coexistence suddenly explodes into killing, amplified for days by retaliation.
Mr. Adamu, a Muslim herder, said he went to Dogo Na Hawa, a village of Christians living in mud-brick houses on dirt streets, to avenge the killings of Muslims and their cattle in January.
The operation had been planned at least several days before by a local group called Thank Allah, said one of Mr. Adamu’s fellow detainees, Ibrahim Harouna, who was shackled on the floor next to him. The men spoke in Hausa through an interpreter.
“They killed a lot of our Fulanis in January,” Mr. Adamu said, referring to his ethnic group. “So I knew that this time, we would take revenge.”
His victims were sleeping when he arrived, he said, and he set their house on fire. Sure enough, they ran out.
“I killed three people,” Mr. Adamu said calmly.
He and the other detainees showed no sign that they had been maltreated; some confessed to killings, and others denied them, speaking in front of the police.
The police quickly arrested about 200 people in connection with the killings, and many of them were crouching anxiously in rows on a bare concrete floor, outside the police headquarters on Wednesday morning. The police have confiscated 14 machetes, 26 bows, arrows, 3 axes, 4 spears and 44 guns. Victims, many of them women and children, were cut down with knives, short and long; few survived.
Usually in such attacks, there are twice as many injuries as deaths, said Ben Whitfield of the Doctors Without Borders team in Jos. “It’s unreal,” he said. “These people were definitely caught in the middle of the night and meant to be killed.” Like others in Jos, police officials say they are hoping for peace after years of sectarian killings in the region.
But they are not sure they will get it. The streets in this metropolis of several million were largely deserted Wednesday. Residents spoke of fear and anger, and about 4,300 have fled.
Christians, in interviews, voiced suspicion of the intentions of Muslims and associated them with the taint of terrorism. The state attorney general, Edward Pwajok, a Christian, said that on Wednesday morning he had prosecuted a Nigerian Muslim man living in a Jos suburb who had “acknowledged” being “a member of Al Qaeda.”
Mr. Pwajok said there was no indication that the man, Samsudeen Sahsu, was connected to the killings; he said DVDs of Al Qaeda’s activities had been discovered in the man’s home. The group is not previously known to have penetrated Nigeria, though Mr. Sahsu, in a written confession provided by the attorney general, named other members of the “AlKaida Islamic Association.”
He said the headquarters were in Maiduguri, where last summer a radical Islamic sect, Boko Haram, was bloodily suppressed by Nigerian security forces.
“Suspicion is still rife,” the state police commissioner, Ikechukwu Aduba, said in an interview in his office in Jos. “We are appealing to the youth to sheath their swords and give peace a chance.”
Mr. Aduba sharply disputed the elevated death toll reported by others, saying that the police could confirm only 109 deaths.
But a Nigerian Red Cross official in Jos, Adeyemo Adebayo, deputy head of disaster management, said that the number of dead was “possibly” even greater than the 332 buried in the mass grave, since many fled into the bush and could have been cut down there by their attackers. A respected Nigerian human rights group, the Civil Rights Congress, said Monday that its members had counted 492 bodies.
Their attackers had come on foot from nearby villages and had made no preparations for a getaway, said Adebola Hamzat, chief superintendent of the Jos police. “Many of them were still running around,” he said, when they were picked up by the security forces. And many were carrying “cutlasses” — long lethal-looking knives that the police produced for visitors on Wednesday — still stained with blood, he said.
“The person was coming toward me; I killed him with a cutlass,” said the young man next to Mr. Adamu, Zakaria Yakubu, 20, insisting that he was defending a fellow Fulani who had been shot. His victim “did not die right away,” Mr. Yakubu said. “When we got to Dogo Na Hawa, we were just looking for our cattle.” He was clutching some bread distributed by the Red Cross.
Next to him, Ibrahim Harouna, also 20, would say only that he had “killed some of the people’s pigs,” though the police said he was also suspected of having taken part in the killings.
On Wednesday, the mood in Jos was tense among Muslim traders, who complained of a sharp drop in business, and it was anything but forgiving among Christians. They complained that Muslims wanted to supplant “indigenes” — Christians long native to the region.
“Some people want to be rulers everywhere,” said Yohanna Yatou, a businessman. “It’s the Muslims. They said they are born to rule.” Williams Danladi said that Muslims “believe that if they die during this war, they will go to heaven.”
“We Christians, we don’t believe this,” he said.
Others expressed puzzlement and exasperation with the never-ending conflict. “This is a Christian, an indigene,” said Moussa Ismail, pointing to his friend sitting next to him on a downtown stoop, Jacob Ayuba. “We have done business for more than 20 years. How would I attack him?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/11/world ... ?th&emc=th
DR Congo rebel massacre uncovered
By Martin Plaut
Africa editor, BBC World Service
Evidence of the massacre of at least 321 people in Democratic Republic of Congo has been uncovered by the BBC.
The killings took place last December but have not previously been reported.
Fighters from the notorious Lord's Resistance Army raided several villages in a remote part of north-eastern DR Congo, killing and abducting children.
Human Rights Watch says this is one of the worst massacres carried out by the LRA, whose fighters roam across several countries after spreading from Uganda.
The rebel leaders initially claimed to be fighting to install a theocracy in Uganda based on the Biblical Ten Commandments, but they now sow terror in Sudan and Central African Republic, as well as DR Congo.
Narrow escape
In the latest attack, the rebels hacked to death villagers and made others carry looted goods.
“ He warned me because he is an Azande, like me ”
Jean-Claude Singbatile
One abductee, 17-year-old Jean-Claude Singbatile, was captured with a group of friends and spent days carrying bags of salt.
"As we marched, the LRA killed people - two at one village, three at the next and then four at the next," he told the BBC.
"They wanted to kill me, but the leader said I should be kept alive, as they needed strong soldiers."
Eventually, one of the rebels warned him that he would also be killed and should take his chance and run for it.
"He warned me because he is an Azande, like me," said Jean-Claude, referring to his ethnic group.
Posing as soldiers
The United Nations had heard rumours that an attack was to be launched around Christmas, and reinforced their troops in the area.
“ The son of our chief was among them, so we felt we had to give them a burial ”
Jacques Akoba Red Cross volunteer
But they were deployed to towns like Dungu and Niangara rather than the remote villages where the killings finally took place.
On 13 December, a contingent of LRA rebels crossed the Uele river, before arriving at a market in the village of Mabanga Ya Talo.
Dressed in military uniforms, they pretended to be Congolese soldiers who had spent months in the forests and asked local people for food and other goods.
They then asked people to carry the goods back to where they had crossed the river, and when the villagers refused, the rebels turned on them.
Adults were attacked, captured, imprisoned in huts, then taken out and made to act as porters.
Anyone who was unable to keep up with the pace of the forced march was "left behind" - a euphemism for being tied up and battered to death with wooden stakes or killed with machetes and axes.
Those who refused or tried to escape were also brutally killed.
It was a pattern repeated in villages all the way to Tapili, some 45km (30 miles) away.
Shallow grave
Lt Jeanvier Bahati, a Congolese army commander in the Tapili area, was one of the first to arrive at the massacre site and helped to bury the dead.
"I saw with my own eyes 268 dead bodies, because we buried them - there was no-one else to do it," he said.
LRA MASSACRES
May 2002 Eastern Equatoria, Sudan 450 killed, activists say some villagers forced to walk off a cliff
January 1997 Lamwo, northern Uganda More than 400 die, roughly 100,000 displaced
December 2009 Makombo, DR Congo Estimated 312 killed in village raids
December 2008 Doruma area, DR Congo About 300 die in worst incident of campaign of violence known as "Christmas massacres"
Jacques Akoba, a Red Cross volunteer, said he buried seven bodies in a shallow grave 2km south of Mangada, along with nine skulls he found by the side of the road.
"We were scared as we were burying them, but the son of our chief was among them, so we felt we had to give them a burial," he said.
Human Rights Watch, working with local groups, has verified 321 deaths - but other activists have given far higher estimates.
Witnesses say the stench of death hung over the area for weeks.
Children were a particular target of the LRA.
At least 80 were taken by force - boys to become fighters, girls to be used as sex slaves by LRA combatants.
Quite why they killed so many of their victims is a mystery.
Fear remains
"We don't understand what their strategy really is, but they clearly like killing, like destroying things," said Father Joseph Nzala, the Catholic priest at Tapili.
Many villagers are still too frightened to go home, and they continue to live in a makeshift camp on the edge of Niangara.
Local people question why the UN, Congolese and Ugandan forces do not co-operate more closely to halt the LRA, who have now returned to their camps north of the Uele river.
Ugandan army commanders claimed they had all but eradicated the LRA after launching a joint operation with South Sudanese and Congolese troops in December 2008.
With logistical and intelligence support from the US, the operation was meant to kill LRA commanders, including its leader, Joseph Kony.
But the attack failed to achieve its aims and the LRA dispersed, attacking churches and villages during Christmas 2008.
Uganda continues to maintain substantial forces on Congolese territory, sometimes conducting joint patrols with the army.
The Congolese soldiers receive support from UN troops who have a number of small peacekeeping bases in the area.
But Anneke van Woudenberg of Human Rights Watch said the massacre provided "clear evidence" of the LRA's ongoing capabilities.
"Rather than ignoring the facts, the governments of the region and UN peacekeepers should co-ordinate their efforts to protect civilians and develop a comprehensive strategy to resolve the LRA problem once and for all," she said.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/a ... 587305.stm
Published: 2010/03/27 19:40:40 GMT
© BBC MMX
Print Sponsor
By Martin Plaut
Africa editor, BBC World Service
Evidence of the massacre of at least 321 people in Democratic Republic of Congo has been uncovered by the BBC.
The killings took place last December but have not previously been reported.
Fighters from the notorious Lord's Resistance Army raided several villages in a remote part of north-eastern DR Congo, killing and abducting children.
Human Rights Watch says this is one of the worst massacres carried out by the LRA, whose fighters roam across several countries after spreading from Uganda.
The rebel leaders initially claimed to be fighting to install a theocracy in Uganda based on the Biblical Ten Commandments, but they now sow terror in Sudan and Central African Republic, as well as DR Congo.
Narrow escape
In the latest attack, the rebels hacked to death villagers and made others carry looted goods.
“ He warned me because he is an Azande, like me ”
Jean-Claude Singbatile
One abductee, 17-year-old Jean-Claude Singbatile, was captured with a group of friends and spent days carrying bags of salt.
"As we marched, the LRA killed people - two at one village, three at the next and then four at the next," he told the BBC.
"They wanted to kill me, but the leader said I should be kept alive, as they needed strong soldiers."
Eventually, one of the rebels warned him that he would also be killed and should take his chance and run for it.
"He warned me because he is an Azande, like me," said Jean-Claude, referring to his ethnic group.
Posing as soldiers
The United Nations had heard rumours that an attack was to be launched around Christmas, and reinforced their troops in the area.
“ The son of our chief was among them, so we felt we had to give them a burial ”
Jacques Akoba Red Cross volunteer
But they were deployed to towns like Dungu and Niangara rather than the remote villages where the killings finally took place.
On 13 December, a contingent of LRA rebels crossed the Uele river, before arriving at a market in the village of Mabanga Ya Talo.
Dressed in military uniforms, they pretended to be Congolese soldiers who had spent months in the forests and asked local people for food and other goods.
They then asked people to carry the goods back to where they had crossed the river, and when the villagers refused, the rebels turned on them.
Adults were attacked, captured, imprisoned in huts, then taken out and made to act as porters.
Anyone who was unable to keep up with the pace of the forced march was "left behind" - a euphemism for being tied up and battered to death with wooden stakes or killed with machetes and axes.
Those who refused or tried to escape were also brutally killed.
It was a pattern repeated in villages all the way to Tapili, some 45km (30 miles) away.
Shallow grave
Lt Jeanvier Bahati, a Congolese army commander in the Tapili area, was one of the first to arrive at the massacre site and helped to bury the dead.
"I saw with my own eyes 268 dead bodies, because we buried them - there was no-one else to do it," he said.
LRA MASSACRES
May 2002 Eastern Equatoria, Sudan 450 killed, activists say some villagers forced to walk off a cliff
January 1997 Lamwo, northern Uganda More than 400 die, roughly 100,000 displaced
December 2009 Makombo, DR Congo Estimated 312 killed in village raids
December 2008 Doruma area, DR Congo About 300 die in worst incident of campaign of violence known as "Christmas massacres"
Jacques Akoba, a Red Cross volunteer, said he buried seven bodies in a shallow grave 2km south of Mangada, along with nine skulls he found by the side of the road.
"We were scared as we were burying them, but the son of our chief was among them, so we felt we had to give them a burial," he said.
Human Rights Watch, working with local groups, has verified 321 deaths - but other activists have given far higher estimates.
Witnesses say the stench of death hung over the area for weeks.
Children were a particular target of the LRA.
At least 80 were taken by force - boys to become fighters, girls to be used as sex slaves by LRA combatants.
Quite why they killed so many of their victims is a mystery.
Fear remains
"We don't understand what their strategy really is, but they clearly like killing, like destroying things," said Father Joseph Nzala, the Catholic priest at Tapili.
Many villagers are still too frightened to go home, and they continue to live in a makeshift camp on the edge of Niangara.
Local people question why the UN, Congolese and Ugandan forces do not co-operate more closely to halt the LRA, who have now returned to their camps north of the Uele river.
Ugandan army commanders claimed they had all but eradicated the LRA after launching a joint operation with South Sudanese and Congolese troops in December 2008.
With logistical and intelligence support from the US, the operation was meant to kill LRA commanders, including its leader, Joseph Kony.
But the attack failed to achieve its aims and the LRA dispersed, attacking churches and villages during Christmas 2008.
Uganda continues to maintain substantial forces on Congolese territory, sometimes conducting joint patrols with the army.
The Congolese soldiers receive support from UN troops who have a number of small peacekeeping bases in the area.
But Anneke van Woudenberg of Human Rights Watch said the massacre provided "clear evidence" of the LRA's ongoing capabilities.
"Rather than ignoring the facts, the governments of the region and UN peacekeepers should co-ordinate their efforts to protect civilians and develop a comprehensive strategy to resolve the LRA problem once and for all," she said.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/a ... 587305.stm
Published: 2010/03/27 19:40:40 GMT
© BBC MMX
Print Sponsor
There is a related multimedia at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/opini ... istof.html
April 11, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
Young Superheroes in a Hut
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
VICTORIA FALLS, Zimbabwe
Why is Africa poor?
Is it a legacy of colonial exploitation? Tropical diseases and parasites? Or is it that local mammals, like the zebra and the African elephant, were difficult to domesticate and harness in agriculture?
There’s truth in each of these explanations. But a visit to Zimbabwe highlights perhaps the main reason: bad governance. The tyrannical, incompetent and corrupt rule of Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, has turned one of Africa’s most advanced countries into a shambles.
In a village less than a day’s drive from Victoria Falls, I stumbled across a hut that to me captured the country’s heartbreak — and also its resilience and hope. The only people living in the hut are five children, orphans from two families. The kids, ages 8 to 17, moved in together after their four parents died of AIDS and other causes.
The head of the household is the oldest boy, Abel, a gangly 10th grader with a perpetual grin. He has been in charge since he was 15.
At one time, the two families reflected Zimbabwe’s relative prosperity. One mother was a businesswoman who traveled abroad regularly. A solar panel that she brought back from Zambia lies in the courtyard.
One of the fathers was a soccer coach who named his son Diego Maradona. Diego may have inherited some of his father’s talent, but he has no soccer ball and no soccer shoes — indeed, no shoes at all. And here, as in much of Zimbabwe, a once-impressive system of schools and clinics has pretty much collapsed, along with tourism, agricultural production and the economy itself.
The household stirs to life each morning when Abel rises at 4 and sets off barefoot on a nine-mile hike to the nearest high school. He has no watch or clock, so he judges the time from the sun, knowing that it will take three hours to get to school.
Abel and the other children have no money to pay school fees or buy notebooks. But the teachers allow them to attend class anyway, because they are brilliant students who earn top grades. They’re a reminder that talent is universal, although opportunity is not.
After Abel leaves for school, responsibility shifts to Diego Maradona, who is 11. He wakes the three younger children, feeds them cold cornmeal mush left over from the previous night’s dinner, and walks with them to the elementary school they all attend a few miles away.
When Diego and the younger children return in the afternoon, they gather firewood, fetch water, tend the chickens and sometimes search for edible wild plants. Abel returns by about 7 p.m. and cooks more cornmeal mush for dinner. He dispenses orders and affection, nurses the younger ones when they are sick, comforts them when they miss their parents, spanks them when they are naughty, coaches them with their schoolwork, begs food from neighbors, fixes the thatch roof when it leaks, and rules the household with tenderness and efficiency.
Abel’s goal is to graduate from high school and become a policeman, because the job will provide a steady salary to support his siblings. He does not know how he will come up with the modest fees to take graduation exams.
I asked Abel what he dreams of. “A bicycle,” he said. Then he would be able to get home from school more quickly and manage the household better.
“Life was a lot better when I was younger,” he said, a bit wistfully. “From what my parents used to tell me, life was a lot better under white rule. There was a lot more food and clothes, and you could afford to buy things.” But Abel insisted that he was optimistic that life would eventually get better again.
Westerners sometimes think that Africa’s problem is a lack of initiative or hard work. Nobody could think that after talking to Abel and Diego Maradona — or so many other Zimbabweans who display a resilience and courage that left me inspired.
I found Zimbabwean superheroes like Abel often in my week of surreptitious reporting in Zimbabwe. (Mr. Mugabe subjects journalists to imprisonment, so it seemed best not to advertise my presence.) Parents sacrifice meals to keep their children in wretched schools (one teacher showed me his two textbooks for a class of 50). And a growing number of Zimbabweans risk crocodiles, drowning and violence to sneak into South Africa in search of work.
So Zimbabwe’s tragedy isn’t its people, but its leader. Likewise, Africa’s failure has been, above all, one of leadership. It is telling that Africa’s greatest success story, Botswana, is adjacent to one of its greatest failures, Zimbabwe. The difference is that for decades Botswana has been exceptionally well and honestly managed, and Zimbabwe pillaged.
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/opini ... istof.html
April 11, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
Young Superheroes in a Hut
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
VICTORIA FALLS, Zimbabwe
Why is Africa poor?
Is it a legacy of colonial exploitation? Tropical diseases and parasites? Or is it that local mammals, like the zebra and the African elephant, were difficult to domesticate and harness in agriculture?
There’s truth in each of these explanations. But a visit to Zimbabwe highlights perhaps the main reason: bad governance. The tyrannical, incompetent and corrupt rule of Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, has turned one of Africa’s most advanced countries into a shambles.
In a village less than a day’s drive from Victoria Falls, I stumbled across a hut that to me captured the country’s heartbreak — and also its resilience and hope. The only people living in the hut are five children, orphans from two families. The kids, ages 8 to 17, moved in together after their four parents died of AIDS and other causes.
The head of the household is the oldest boy, Abel, a gangly 10th grader with a perpetual grin. He has been in charge since he was 15.
At one time, the two families reflected Zimbabwe’s relative prosperity. One mother was a businesswoman who traveled abroad regularly. A solar panel that she brought back from Zambia lies in the courtyard.
One of the fathers was a soccer coach who named his son Diego Maradona. Diego may have inherited some of his father’s talent, but he has no soccer ball and no soccer shoes — indeed, no shoes at all. And here, as in much of Zimbabwe, a once-impressive system of schools and clinics has pretty much collapsed, along with tourism, agricultural production and the economy itself.
The household stirs to life each morning when Abel rises at 4 and sets off barefoot on a nine-mile hike to the nearest high school. He has no watch or clock, so he judges the time from the sun, knowing that it will take three hours to get to school.
Abel and the other children have no money to pay school fees or buy notebooks. But the teachers allow them to attend class anyway, because they are brilliant students who earn top grades. They’re a reminder that talent is universal, although opportunity is not.
After Abel leaves for school, responsibility shifts to Diego Maradona, who is 11. He wakes the three younger children, feeds them cold cornmeal mush left over from the previous night’s dinner, and walks with them to the elementary school they all attend a few miles away.
When Diego and the younger children return in the afternoon, they gather firewood, fetch water, tend the chickens and sometimes search for edible wild plants. Abel returns by about 7 p.m. and cooks more cornmeal mush for dinner. He dispenses orders and affection, nurses the younger ones when they are sick, comforts them when they miss their parents, spanks them when they are naughty, coaches them with their schoolwork, begs food from neighbors, fixes the thatch roof when it leaks, and rules the household with tenderness and efficiency.
Abel’s goal is to graduate from high school and become a policeman, because the job will provide a steady salary to support his siblings. He does not know how he will come up with the modest fees to take graduation exams.
I asked Abel what he dreams of. “A bicycle,” he said. Then he would be able to get home from school more quickly and manage the household better.
“Life was a lot better when I was younger,” he said, a bit wistfully. “From what my parents used to tell me, life was a lot better under white rule. There was a lot more food and clothes, and you could afford to buy things.” But Abel insisted that he was optimistic that life would eventually get better again.
Westerners sometimes think that Africa’s problem is a lack of initiative or hard work. Nobody could think that after talking to Abel and Diego Maradona — or so many other Zimbabweans who display a resilience and courage that left me inspired.
I found Zimbabwean superheroes like Abel often in my week of surreptitious reporting in Zimbabwe. (Mr. Mugabe subjects journalists to imprisonment, so it seemed best not to advertise my presence.) Parents sacrifice meals to keep their children in wretched schools (one teacher showed me his two textbooks for a class of 50). And a growing number of Zimbabweans risk crocodiles, drowning and violence to sneak into South Africa in search of work.
So Zimbabwe’s tragedy isn’t its people, but its leader. Likewise, Africa’s failure has been, above all, one of leadership. It is telling that Africa’s greatest success story, Botswana, is adjacent to one of its greatest failures, Zimbabwe. The difference is that for decades Botswana has been exceptionally well and honestly managed, and Zimbabwe pillaged.
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.
This artcile is about risk assessment in complex technological systems...
May 27, 2010
Drilling for Certainty
By DAVID BROOKS
In the weeks since the Deepwater Horizon explosion, the political debate has fallen into predictably partisan and often puerile categories. Conservatives say this is Obama’s Katrina. Liberals say the spill is proof the government should have more control over industry.
But the real issue has to do with risk assessment. It has to do with the bloody crossroads where complex technical systems meet human psychology.
Over the past decades, we’ve come to depend on an ever-expanding array of intricate high-tech systems. These hardware and software systems are the guts of financial markets, energy exploration, space exploration, air travel, defense programs and modern production plants.
These systems, which allow us to live as well as we do, are too complex for any single person to understand. Yet every day, individuals are asked to monitor the health of these networks, weigh the risks of a system failure and take appropriate measures to reduce those risks.
If there is one thing we’ve learned, it is that humans are not great at measuring and responding to risk when placed in situations too complicated to understand.
In the first place, people have trouble imagining how small failings can combine to lead to catastrophic disasters. At the Three Mile Island nuclear facility, a series of small systems happened to fail at the same time. It was the interplay between these seemingly minor events that led to an unanticipated systemic crash.
Second, people have a tendency to get acclimated to risk. As the physicist Richard Feynman wrote in a report on the Challenger disaster, as years went by, NASA officials got used to living with small failures. If faulty O rings didn’t produce a catastrophe last time, they probably won’t this time, they figured.
Feynman compared this to playing Russian roulette. Success in the last round is not a good predictor of success this time. Nonetheless, as things seemed to be going well, people unconsciously adjust their definition of acceptable risk.
Third, people have a tendency to place elaborate faith in backup systems and safety devices. More pedestrians die in crosswalks than when jay-walking. That’s because they have a false sense of security in crosswalks and are less likely to look both ways.
On the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, a Transocean official apparently tried to close off a safety debate by reminding everybody the blowout preventer would save them if something went wrong. The illusion of the safety system encouraged the crew to behave in more reckless ways. As Malcolm Gladwell put it in a 1996 New Yorker essay, “Human beings have a seemingly fundamental tendency to compensate for lower risks in one area by taking greater risks in another.”
Fourth, people have a tendency to match complicated technical systems with complicated governing structures. The command structure on the Deepwater Horizon seems to have been completely muddled, with officials from BP, Transocean and Halliburton hopelessly tangled in confusing lines of authority and blurred definitions of who was ultimately responsible for what.
Fifth, people tend to spread good news and hide bad news. Everybody wants to be part of a project that comes in under budget and nobody wants to be responsible for the reverse. For decades, a steady stream of oil leaked out of a drill off the Guadalupe Dunes in California. A culture of silence settled upon all concerned, from front-line workers who didn’t want to lose their jobs to executives who didn’t want to hurt profits.
Finally, people in the same field begin to think alike, whether they are in oversight roles or not. The oil industry’s capture of the Minerals Management Service is actually misleading because the agency was so appalling and corrupt. Cognitive capture is more common and harder to detect.
In the weeks and hours leading up to the Deepwater Horizon disaster, engineers were compelled to make a series of decisions: what sort of well-casing to use; how long to circulate and when to remove the heavy drilling fluid or “mud” from the hole; how to interpret various tests. They were forced to make these decisions without any clear sense of the risks and in an environment that seems to have encouraged overconfidence.
Over the past years, we have seen smart people at Fannie Mae, Lehman Brothers, NASA and the C.I.A. make similarly catastrophic risk assessments. As Gladwell wrote in that 1996 essay, “We have constructed a world in which the potential for high-tech catastrophe is embedded in the fabric of day-to-day life.”
So it seems important, in the months ahead, to not only focus on mechanical ways to make drilling safer, but also more broadly on helping people deal with potentially catastrophic complexity. There must be ways to improve the choice architecture — to help people guard against risk creep, false security, groupthink, the good-news bias and all the rest.
This isn’t just about oil. It’s a challenge for people living in an imponderably complex technical society.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/28/opini ... ?th&emc=th
May 27, 2010
Drilling for Certainty
By DAVID BROOKS
In the weeks since the Deepwater Horizon explosion, the political debate has fallen into predictably partisan and often puerile categories. Conservatives say this is Obama’s Katrina. Liberals say the spill is proof the government should have more control over industry.
But the real issue has to do with risk assessment. It has to do with the bloody crossroads where complex technical systems meet human psychology.
Over the past decades, we’ve come to depend on an ever-expanding array of intricate high-tech systems. These hardware and software systems are the guts of financial markets, energy exploration, space exploration, air travel, defense programs and modern production plants.
These systems, which allow us to live as well as we do, are too complex for any single person to understand. Yet every day, individuals are asked to monitor the health of these networks, weigh the risks of a system failure and take appropriate measures to reduce those risks.
If there is one thing we’ve learned, it is that humans are not great at measuring and responding to risk when placed in situations too complicated to understand.
In the first place, people have trouble imagining how small failings can combine to lead to catastrophic disasters. At the Three Mile Island nuclear facility, a series of small systems happened to fail at the same time. It was the interplay between these seemingly minor events that led to an unanticipated systemic crash.
Second, people have a tendency to get acclimated to risk. As the physicist Richard Feynman wrote in a report on the Challenger disaster, as years went by, NASA officials got used to living with small failures. If faulty O rings didn’t produce a catastrophe last time, they probably won’t this time, they figured.
Feynman compared this to playing Russian roulette. Success in the last round is not a good predictor of success this time. Nonetheless, as things seemed to be going well, people unconsciously adjust their definition of acceptable risk.
Third, people have a tendency to place elaborate faith in backup systems and safety devices. More pedestrians die in crosswalks than when jay-walking. That’s because they have a false sense of security in crosswalks and are less likely to look both ways.
On the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, a Transocean official apparently tried to close off a safety debate by reminding everybody the blowout preventer would save them if something went wrong. The illusion of the safety system encouraged the crew to behave in more reckless ways. As Malcolm Gladwell put it in a 1996 New Yorker essay, “Human beings have a seemingly fundamental tendency to compensate for lower risks in one area by taking greater risks in another.”
Fourth, people have a tendency to match complicated technical systems with complicated governing structures. The command structure on the Deepwater Horizon seems to have been completely muddled, with officials from BP, Transocean and Halliburton hopelessly tangled in confusing lines of authority and blurred definitions of who was ultimately responsible for what.
Fifth, people tend to spread good news and hide bad news. Everybody wants to be part of a project that comes in under budget and nobody wants to be responsible for the reverse. For decades, a steady stream of oil leaked out of a drill off the Guadalupe Dunes in California. A culture of silence settled upon all concerned, from front-line workers who didn’t want to lose their jobs to executives who didn’t want to hurt profits.
Finally, people in the same field begin to think alike, whether they are in oversight roles or not. The oil industry’s capture of the Minerals Management Service is actually misleading because the agency was so appalling and corrupt. Cognitive capture is more common and harder to detect.
In the weeks and hours leading up to the Deepwater Horizon disaster, engineers were compelled to make a series of decisions: what sort of well-casing to use; how long to circulate and when to remove the heavy drilling fluid or “mud” from the hole; how to interpret various tests. They were forced to make these decisions without any clear sense of the risks and in an environment that seems to have encouraged overconfidence.
Over the past years, we have seen smart people at Fannie Mae, Lehman Brothers, NASA and the C.I.A. make similarly catastrophic risk assessments. As Gladwell wrote in that 1996 essay, “We have constructed a world in which the potential for high-tech catastrophe is embedded in the fabric of day-to-day life.”
So it seems important, in the months ahead, to not only focus on mechanical ways to make drilling safer, but also more broadly on helping people deal with potentially catastrophic complexity. There must be ways to improve the choice architecture — to help people guard against risk creep, false security, groupthink, the good-news bias and all the rest.
This isn’t just about oil. It’s a challenge for people living in an imponderably complex technical society.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/28/opini ... ?th&emc=th
June 4, 2010
Disaster in the Amazon
By BOB HERBERT
BP’s calamitous behavior in the Gulf of Mexico is the big oil story of the moment. But for many years, indigenous people from a formerly pristine region of the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador have been trying to get relief from an American company, Texaco (which later merged with Chevron), for what has been described as the largest oil-related environmental catastrophe ever.
“As horrible as the gulf spill has been, what happened in the Amazon was worse,” said Jonathan Abady, a New York lawyer who is part of the legal team that is suing Chevron on behalf of the rainforest inhabitants.
It has been a long and ugly legal fight and the outcome is uncertain. But what has happened in the rainforest is heartbreaking, although it has not gotten nearly the coverage that the BP spill has.
What’s not in dispute is that Texaco operated more than 300 oil wells for the better part of three decades in a vast swath of Ecuador’s northern Amazon region, just south of the border with Colombia. Much of that area has been horribly polluted. The lives and culture of the local inhabitants, who fished in the intricate waterways and cultivated the land as their ancestors had done for generations, have been upended in ways that have led to widespread misery.
Texaco came barreling into this delicate ancient landscape in the early 1960s with all the subtlety and grace of an invading army. And when it left in 1992, it left behind, according to the lawsuit, widespread toxic contamination that devastated the livelihoods and traditions of the local people, and took a severe toll on their physical well-being.
A brief filed by the plaintiffs said: “It deliberately dumped many billions of gallons of waste byproduct from oil drilling directly into the rivers and streams of the rainforest covering an area the size of Rhode Island. It gouged more than 900 unlined waste pits out of the jungle floor — pits which to this day leach toxic waste into soils and groundwater. It burned hundreds of millions of cubic feet of gas and waste oil into the atmosphere, poisoning the air and creating ‘black rain’ which inundated the area during tropical thunderstorms.”
The quest for oil is, by its nature, colossally destructive. And the giant oil companies, when left to their own devices, will treat even the most magnificent of nature’s wonders like a sewer. But the riches to be made are so vastly corrupting that governments refuse to impose the kinds of rigid oversight and safeguards that would mitigate the damage to the environment and its human and animal inhabitants.
Pick your venue. The families whose lives and culture are dependent upon the intricate web of waterways along the Gulf Coast of the United States are in a fix similar to that of the indigenous people zapped by nonstop oil spills and the oil-related pollution in the Ecuadorian rainforest. Each group is fearful about its future. Both have been treated contemptuously.
The oil companies don’t care. Shell can’t wait to begin drilling in the Arctic Ocean off the northern coast of Alaska, an area that would pose monumental problems for anyone trying to deal with a catastrophic spill. The companies pretend that the spills won’t happen. They always say that their drilling operations are safe. They said that before drilling off Santa Barbara, and in the rainforest in Ecuador, and in the Gulf of Mexico, and everywhere else they drill.
Their assurances mean nothing.
President Obama has suspended Shell’s Arctic drilling permits and has temporarily halted the so-called Arctic oil rush. What we’ve learned from the BP debacle in the gulf, and from the rainforest, and so many other places, is just how reckless and inept the oil companies can be when it comes to safeguarding life, limb and the environment.
They’re dangerous. They need the most stringent kind of oversight, and swift and severe sanctions for serious wrongdoing. At the same time, we need to be searching with a much, much greater sense of urgency for viable energy alternatives. Treating the Amazon and the gulf and the Arctic as if they were nothing more than toxic waste sites is an affront to the planet and all life-forms that inhabit it.
Chevron doesn’t believe it should be called to account for any of the sins Texaco may have committed in the Amazon. A spokesman told me that the allegations of environmental damage were wildly overstated and that even if Texaco had caused some pollution, it had cleaned it up and reached an agreement with the Ecuadorian government that precluded further liability.
The indigenous residents may be suffering (they’re in much worse shape than the people on the gulf coast) but the Chevron-Texaco crowd feels real good about itself. The big money was made, and the trash was left behind.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/05/opini ... OeBN0CaFbw
Disaster in the Amazon
By BOB HERBERT
BP’s calamitous behavior in the Gulf of Mexico is the big oil story of the moment. But for many years, indigenous people from a formerly pristine region of the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador have been trying to get relief from an American company, Texaco (which later merged with Chevron), for what has been described as the largest oil-related environmental catastrophe ever.
“As horrible as the gulf spill has been, what happened in the Amazon was worse,” said Jonathan Abady, a New York lawyer who is part of the legal team that is suing Chevron on behalf of the rainforest inhabitants.
It has been a long and ugly legal fight and the outcome is uncertain. But what has happened in the rainforest is heartbreaking, although it has not gotten nearly the coverage that the BP spill has.
What’s not in dispute is that Texaco operated more than 300 oil wells for the better part of three decades in a vast swath of Ecuador’s northern Amazon region, just south of the border with Colombia. Much of that area has been horribly polluted. The lives and culture of the local inhabitants, who fished in the intricate waterways and cultivated the land as their ancestors had done for generations, have been upended in ways that have led to widespread misery.
Texaco came barreling into this delicate ancient landscape in the early 1960s with all the subtlety and grace of an invading army. And when it left in 1992, it left behind, according to the lawsuit, widespread toxic contamination that devastated the livelihoods and traditions of the local people, and took a severe toll on their physical well-being.
A brief filed by the plaintiffs said: “It deliberately dumped many billions of gallons of waste byproduct from oil drilling directly into the rivers and streams of the rainforest covering an area the size of Rhode Island. It gouged more than 900 unlined waste pits out of the jungle floor — pits which to this day leach toxic waste into soils and groundwater. It burned hundreds of millions of cubic feet of gas and waste oil into the atmosphere, poisoning the air and creating ‘black rain’ which inundated the area during tropical thunderstorms.”
The quest for oil is, by its nature, colossally destructive. And the giant oil companies, when left to their own devices, will treat even the most magnificent of nature’s wonders like a sewer. But the riches to be made are so vastly corrupting that governments refuse to impose the kinds of rigid oversight and safeguards that would mitigate the damage to the environment and its human and animal inhabitants.
Pick your venue. The families whose lives and culture are dependent upon the intricate web of waterways along the Gulf Coast of the United States are in a fix similar to that of the indigenous people zapped by nonstop oil spills and the oil-related pollution in the Ecuadorian rainforest. Each group is fearful about its future. Both have been treated contemptuously.
The oil companies don’t care. Shell can’t wait to begin drilling in the Arctic Ocean off the northern coast of Alaska, an area that would pose monumental problems for anyone trying to deal with a catastrophic spill. The companies pretend that the spills won’t happen. They always say that their drilling operations are safe. They said that before drilling off Santa Barbara, and in the rainforest in Ecuador, and in the Gulf of Mexico, and everywhere else they drill.
Their assurances mean nothing.
President Obama has suspended Shell’s Arctic drilling permits and has temporarily halted the so-called Arctic oil rush. What we’ve learned from the BP debacle in the gulf, and from the rainforest, and so many other places, is just how reckless and inept the oil companies can be when it comes to safeguarding life, limb and the environment.
They’re dangerous. They need the most stringent kind of oversight, and swift and severe sanctions for serious wrongdoing. At the same time, we need to be searching with a much, much greater sense of urgency for viable energy alternatives. Treating the Amazon and the gulf and the Arctic as if they were nothing more than toxic waste sites is an affront to the planet and all life-forms that inhabit it.
Chevron doesn’t believe it should be called to account for any of the sins Texaco may have committed in the Amazon. A spokesman told me that the allegations of environmental damage were wildly overstated and that even if Texaco had caused some pollution, it had cleaned it up and reached an agreement with the Ecuadorian government that precluded further liability.
The indigenous residents may be suffering (they’re in much worse shape than the people on the gulf coast) but the Chevron-Texaco crowd feels real good about itself. The big money was made, and the trash was left behind.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/05/opini ... OeBN0CaFbw
Hahahaha...this time, North Americans and the West Europeans are f***d big time, not just the middle easterners…remember the early days of bush thugministration…within two weeks in the office, the greatest tragedy was hatched behind the closed doors by that motherf***g Dick Cheney and the rest of the Big Oil cronies…in the name of Energy Task Force.
Remember that son of a b*tch Rumsfeld, who said France and Germany is “Old Europe”…
---------------------------------------------------------------
EDITED BY ADMIN
NEXT TIME I SEE THIS KIND OF VOCABULARY IN YOUR POSTS YOUR ACCOUNT WILL BE DELETED.
Remember that son of a b*tch Rumsfeld, who said France and Germany is “Old Europe”…
---------------------------------------------------------------
EDITED BY ADMIN
NEXT TIME I SEE THIS KIND OF VOCABULARY IN YOUR POSTS YOUR ACCOUNT WILL BE DELETED.
There is a related video linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/world ... gewanted=2
June 7, 2010
India Steadily Increases Its Lead in Road Fatalities
By HEATHER TIMMONS and HARI KUMAR
NEW DELHI — India lives in its villages, Gandhi said. But increasingly, the people of India are dying on its roads.
India overtook China to top the world in road fatalities in 2006 and has continued to pull steadily ahead, despite a heavily agrarian population, fewer people than China and far fewer cars than many Western countries.
While road deaths in many other big emerging markets have declined or stabilized in recent years, even as vehicle sales jumped, in India, fatalities are skyrocketing — up 40 percent in five years to more than 118,000 in 2008, the last figure available.
A lethal brew of poor road planning, inadequate law enforcement, a surge in trucks and cars, and a flood of untrained drivers have made India the world’s road death capital. As the country’s fast-growing economy and huge population raise its importance on the world stage, the rising toll is a reminder that the government still struggles to keep its more than a billion people safe.
In China, by contrast, which has undergone an auto boom of its own, official figures for road deaths have been falling for much of the past decade, to 73,500 in 2008, as new highways segregate cars from pedestrians, tractors and other slow-moving traffic, and the government cracks down on drunken driving and other violations.
Evidence of road accidents seems to be everywhere in urban India.
Highways and city intersections often glitter with smears of broken windshield and are scattered with unmatched shoes, shorn-off bicycle seats and bits of motorcycle helmet. Tales of rolled-over trucks and speeding buses are a newspaper staple, and it is rare to meet someone in urban India who has not lost a family member, friend or colleague on the road.
The dangerous state of the roads represents a “total failure on the part of the government of India,” said Rakesh Singh, whose 16-year-old son, Akshay, was killed last year by an out-of-control truck in Bijnor, in the state of Uttar Pradesh, as he walked along a highway to a wedding.
The truck crushed Akshay so completely that his father could identify his son only by his shirt. The truck also ran over a second man and drove away.
Reckless driving and the juxtaposition of pedestrians and fast-moving heavy vehicles is common. The expressway that runs southeast from Delhi to Greater Noida, a fast-growing satellite city, cuts through farmland interspersed with new industrial parks and shopping malls. Small settlements of huts piled with cow-dung patties fringe the road.
During a 40-minute ride on that highway, a tractor hauling gravel was seen driving the wrong way, a milk truck stopped in the road so its driver could urinate and motorists swerved to avoid a bicycle cart full of wooden tables in the fast lane. Drivers chatted on mobile phones as they steered stick-shift cars and wove across lanes. Side mirrors were often turned in or were nonexistent.
A cluster of women in saris holding small children waited anxiously for a gap in traffic so they could race across the highway. Opposite them, a group of young men in office attire waited to cross in the other direction.
The breakdown in road safety has many causes, experts say. Often, the police are too stretched to enforce existing traffic laws or take bribes to ignore them; heavy vehicles, pedestrians, bullock carts and bicycles share roadways; punishment for violators is lenient, delayed or nonexistent; and driver’s licenses are easy to get with a bribe.
Kamal Nath, India’s minister of road transport and highways, said in an interview that highway safety was a “priority” for the national government. “Road safety is one of the major issues” the ministry is addressing, he said. The ministry is reviewing the Motor Vehicles Act and, three years after a government-backed committee recommended that a national road safety board be established, it has introduced legislation to that effect in Parliament.
International safety experts say the Indian government has been slow to act. Bringing down road deaths “requires political commitment at the highest level,” said Dr. Etienne Krug, director of the department of violence and injury prevention at the World Health Organization. India’s government is “just waking up to the issue,” he said.
Mr. Nath, who was India’s commerce minister before moving to the Highway Ministry last year, has increased highway expansion plans and is raising $45 billion from private investors to extend India’s 3.3-million-kilometer, or 2-million-mile, road network. The expansion is an integral part of keeping the economy, now at about 9 percent growth a year, humming, Mr. Nath says.
Government planners warn that fatalities are unlikely to decline soon.
When highways are built, “there are always more accidents,” said Atul Kumar, chief general manager of road safety with the National Highways Authority of India, part of Mr. Nath’s ministry.
Mr. Kumar said that his agency had spoken with local residents before building and expanding roads near towns and villages but that it could not always satisfy them. “If we accept all their demands, we’d have an underpass every kilometer,” he said. The expansion has to be “viable for bidders,” he said, and “underpasses and flyovers are expensive.”
In the rest of the world, a rise in high-speed roads does not always have to mean a rise in deaths. In Brazil, for example, new, privatized highways have much lower rates of fatal accidents than other roads.
Private companies building and running new highways in India say that their hands are sometimes tied. From his office overlooking a 32-lane set of tollbooths, Manoj Aggarwal, chief executive of the road-building company Delhi-Gurgaon Super Connectivity, says he witnesses hundreds of traffic violations every day that he cannot stop.
“Look at this man in the middle of the road,” he said during an interview, pointing to a pedestrian slowly weaving his way through the traffic. “I can’t fine him. I can’t punish him.”
Only the police can ticket or fine speeders, or people who are on the roads but should not be. But, over-burdened and understaffed, the police are rarely available, Mr. Aggarwal said, even though he has offered to pay them extra to work on off-duty hours.
In 2008, 73 people were killed on just this 27-kilometer stretch of highway, earning it the nickname “Expressway to Death.” The death toll dropped as Mr. Aggarwal added safety features outside the government contract.
Shivani, a 15-year-old student, recently landed in St. Stephen’s Hospital in Old Delhi with a fractured right leg after just such a highway dash.
“I don’t know what happened,” she said. “I was trying to cross the road.” Her forehead and knuckles were blackened and scraped, and her eyes were glazed after a four-day coma.
She has to cross a busy highway during her one-kilometer walk to school. There are no crosswalks, no underpasses and no stoplights.
As cars increase, those who cannot afford them and continue to travel on foot, bicycle or rickshaw are more vulnerable, safety experts say. Dr. Mathew Varghese, the head of St. Stephen’s orthopedics department, said he saw hundreds of patients a year like Shivani. The government is building “economic growth on the dead bodies of the poor on these highways,” he said.
Frustrated Indians often take matters into their own hands, forming impromptu mobs to beat up offending drivers. “Road rage” incidents, where drivers step out of their cars and get into physical altercations, have become common. Some people have begun campaigns to curb unsafe driving.
“People don’t understand the value of life here,” said Manoj Gupta, a consultant from Chandigarh, whose wife was riding a motor scooter when she was crushed by a speeding bus two years ago. Helmet laws apply only to men, and she was not wearing one. The bus driver was out on bail in four or five days, Mr. Gupta said. Now Mr. Gupta stops reckless drivers to tell them about his wife and to ask them to drive more carefully.
Safety “needs to be an important part of the driving culture, and that is still lacking,” said Harman S. Sidhu, president of ArriveSafe, a road safety awareness group in Chandigarh. He started it after he was left paralyzed by a car accident in the Himalayas.
Last year during Raksha Bandhan, a festival celebrating the bond between brothers and sisters, ArriveSafe enlisted thousands of sisters to beg their brothers to drive carefully.
Mr. Singh, the father of Akshay, the boy killed by a truck in Bijnor, said he had spent days searching for the driver who ran over his son after the local police refused to help, finally taking the police in his own car to make the arrest. Megh Singh, the investigating police officer for the case, said in an interview that the police were eager to investigate but hampered because the station has only one jeep for its 18 to 20 inspectors.
The truck driver, now awaiting trial on charges of negligent death in Akshay’s case and murder in a second man’s case, has been released on bail. The truck, which appeared to be carrying an illegally heavy load, was returned to its owner without incurring any fees or fines.
Dozens of letters Mr. Singh wrote to local and national politicians asking them to investigate overloaded trucks in the area have not been answered.
“No one wants to be responsible,” he said. “They are all passing the buck.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/world ... gewanted=2
June 7, 2010
India Steadily Increases Its Lead in Road Fatalities
By HEATHER TIMMONS and HARI KUMAR
NEW DELHI — India lives in its villages, Gandhi said. But increasingly, the people of India are dying on its roads.
India overtook China to top the world in road fatalities in 2006 and has continued to pull steadily ahead, despite a heavily agrarian population, fewer people than China and far fewer cars than many Western countries.
While road deaths in many other big emerging markets have declined or stabilized in recent years, even as vehicle sales jumped, in India, fatalities are skyrocketing — up 40 percent in five years to more than 118,000 in 2008, the last figure available.
A lethal brew of poor road planning, inadequate law enforcement, a surge in trucks and cars, and a flood of untrained drivers have made India the world’s road death capital. As the country’s fast-growing economy and huge population raise its importance on the world stage, the rising toll is a reminder that the government still struggles to keep its more than a billion people safe.
In China, by contrast, which has undergone an auto boom of its own, official figures for road deaths have been falling for much of the past decade, to 73,500 in 2008, as new highways segregate cars from pedestrians, tractors and other slow-moving traffic, and the government cracks down on drunken driving and other violations.
Evidence of road accidents seems to be everywhere in urban India.
Highways and city intersections often glitter with smears of broken windshield and are scattered with unmatched shoes, shorn-off bicycle seats and bits of motorcycle helmet. Tales of rolled-over trucks and speeding buses are a newspaper staple, and it is rare to meet someone in urban India who has not lost a family member, friend or colleague on the road.
The dangerous state of the roads represents a “total failure on the part of the government of India,” said Rakesh Singh, whose 16-year-old son, Akshay, was killed last year by an out-of-control truck in Bijnor, in the state of Uttar Pradesh, as he walked along a highway to a wedding.
The truck crushed Akshay so completely that his father could identify his son only by his shirt. The truck also ran over a second man and drove away.
Reckless driving and the juxtaposition of pedestrians and fast-moving heavy vehicles is common. The expressway that runs southeast from Delhi to Greater Noida, a fast-growing satellite city, cuts through farmland interspersed with new industrial parks and shopping malls. Small settlements of huts piled with cow-dung patties fringe the road.
During a 40-minute ride on that highway, a tractor hauling gravel was seen driving the wrong way, a milk truck stopped in the road so its driver could urinate and motorists swerved to avoid a bicycle cart full of wooden tables in the fast lane. Drivers chatted on mobile phones as they steered stick-shift cars and wove across lanes. Side mirrors were often turned in or were nonexistent.
A cluster of women in saris holding small children waited anxiously for a gap in traffic so they could race across the highway. Opposite them, a group of young men in office attire waited to cross in the other direction.
The breakdown in road safety has many causes, experts say. Often, the police are too stretched to enforce existing traffic laws or take bribes to ignore them; heavy vehicles, pedestrians, bullock carts and bicycles share roadways; punishment for violators is lenient, delayed or nonexistent; and driver’s licenses are easy to get with a bribe.
Kamal Nath, India’s minister of road transport and highways, said in an interview that highway safety was a “priority” for the national government. “Road safety is one of the major issues” the ministry is addressing, he said. The ministry is reviewing the Motor Vehicles Act and, three years after a government-backed committee recommended that a national road safety board be established, it has introduced legislation to that effect in Parliament.
International safety experts say the Indian government has been slow to act. Bringing down road deaths “requires political commitment at the highest level,” said Dr. Etienne Krug, director of the department of violence and injury prevention at the World Health Organization. India’s government is “just waking up to the issue,” he said.
Mr. Nath, who was India’s commerce minister before moving to the Highway Ministry last year, has increased highway expansion plans and is raising $45 billion from private investors to extend India’s 3.3-million-kilometer, or 2-million-mile, road network. The expansion is an integral part of keeping the economy, now at about 9 percent growth a year, humming, Mr. Nath says.
Government planners warn that fatalities are unlikely to decline soon.
When highways are built, “there are always more accidents,” said Atul Kumar, chief general manager of road safety with the National Highways Authority of India, part of Mr. Nath’s ministry.
Mr. Kumar said that his agency had spoken with local residents before building and expanding roads near towns and villages but that it could not always satisfy them. “If we accept all their demands, we’d have an underpass every kilometer,” he said. The expansion has to be “viable for bidders,” he said, and “underpasses and flyovers are expensive.”
In the rest of the world, a rise in high-speed roads does not always have to mean a rise in deaths. In Brazil, for example, new, privatized highways have much lower rates of fatal accidents than other roads.
Private companies building and running new highways in India say that their hands are sometimes tied. From his office overlooking a 32-lane set of tollbooths, Manoj Aggarwal, chief executive of the road-building company Delhi-Gurgaon Super Connectivity, says he witnesses hundreds of traffic violations every day that he cannot stop.
“Look at this man in the middle of the road,” he said during an interview, pointing to a pedestrian slowly weaving his way through the traffic. “I can’t fine him. I can’t punish him.”
Only the police can ticket or fine speeders, or people who are on the roads but should not be. But, over-burdened and understaffed, the police are rarely available, Mr. Aggarwal said, even though he has offered to pay them extra to work on off-duty hours.
In 2008, 73 people were killed on just this 27-kilometer stretch of highway, earning it the nickname “Expressway to Death.” The death toll dropped as Mr. Aggarwal added safety features outside the government contract.
Shivani, a 15-year-old student, recently landed in St. Stephen’s Hospital in Old Delhi with a fractured right leg after just such a highway dash.
“I don’t know what happened,” she said. “I was trying to cross the road.” Her forehead and knuckles were blackened and scraped, and her eyes were glazed after a four-day coma.
She has to cross a busy highway during her one-kilometer walk to school. There are no crosswalks, no underpasses and no stoplights.
As cars increase, those who cannot afford them and continue to travel on foot, bicycle or rickshaw are more vulnerable, safety experts say. Dr. Mathew Varghese, the head of St. Stephen’s orthopedics department, said he saw hundreds of patients a year like Shivani. The government is building “economic growth on the dead bodies of the poor on these highways,” he said.
Frustrated Indians often take matters into their own hands, forming impromptu mobs to beat up offending drivers. “Road rage” incidents, where drivers step out of their cars and get into physical altercations, have become common. Some people have begun campaigns to curb unsafe driving.
“People don’t understand the value of life here,” said Manoj Gupta, a consultant from Chandigarh, whose wife was riding a motor scooter when she was crushed by a speeding bus two years ago. Helmet laws apply only to men, and she was not wearing one. The bus driver was out on bail in four or five days, Mr. Gupta said. Now Mr. Gupta stops reckless drivers to tell them about his wife and to ask them to drive more carefully.
Safety “needs to be an important part of the driving culture, and that is still lacking,” said Harman S. Sidhu, president of ArriveSafe, a road safety awareness group in Chandigarh. He started it after he was left paralyzed by a car accident in the Himalayas.
Last year during Raksha Bandhan, a festival celebrating the bond between brothers and sisters, ArriveSafe enlisted thousands of sisters to beg their brothers to drive carefully.
Mr. Singh, the father of Akshay, the boy killed by a truck in Bijnor, said he had spent days searching for the driver who ran over his son after the local police refused to help, finally taking the police in his own car to make the arrest. Megh Singh, the investigating police officer for the case, said in an interview that the police were eager to investigate but hampered because the station has only one jeep for its 18 to 20 inspectors.
The truck driver, now awaiting trial on charges of negligent death in Akshay’s case and murder in a second man’s case, has been released on bail. The truck, which appeared to be carrying an illegally heavy load, was returned to its owner without incurring any fees or fines.
Dozens of letters Mr. Singh wrote to local and national politicians asking them to investigate overloaded trucks in the area have not been answered.
“No one wants to be responsible,” he said. “They are all passing the buck.”
June 26, 2010
Death by Gadget
By Nicholas d. kristof
“Blood diamonds” have faded away, but we may now be carrying “blood phones.”
An ugly paradox of the 21st century is that some of our elegant symbols of modernity — smartphones, laptops and digital cameras — are built from minerals that seem to be fueling mass slaughter and rape in Congo. With throngs waiting in lines in the last few days to buy the latest iPhone, I’m thinking: What if we could harness that desperation for new technologies to the desperate need to curb the killing in central Africa?
I’ve never reported on a war more barbaric than Congo’s, and it haunts me. In Congo, I’ve seen women who have been mutilated, children who have been forced to eat their parents’ flesh, girls who have been subjected to rapes that destroyed their insides. Warlords finance their predations in part through the sale of mineral ore containing tantalum, tungsten, tin and gold. For example, tantalum from Congo is used to make electrical capacitors that go into phones, computers and gaming devices.
Electronics manufacturers have tried to hush all this up. They want you to look at a gadget and think “sleek,” not “blood.”
Yet now there’s a grass-roots movement pressuring companies to keep these “conflict minerals” out of high-tech supply chains. Using Facebook and YouTube, activists are harassing companies like Apple, Intel and Research in Motion (which makes the BlackBerry) to get them to lean on their suppliers and ensure the use of, say, Australian tantalum rather than tantalum peddled by a Congolese militia.
A humorous new video taunting Apple and PC computers alike goes online this weekend on YouTube, with hopes that it will go viral. Put together by a group of Hollywood actors, it’s a spoof on the famous “I’m a Mac”/”I’m a PC” ad and suggests that both are sometimes built from conflict minerals.
“Guess we have some things in common after all,” Mac admits.
Protesters demonstrated outside the grand opening of Apple’s new store in Washington, demanding that the company commit to using only clean minerals. Last month, activists blanketed Intel’s Facebook page with calls to support tough legislation to curb trade in conflict minerals. For a time, Intel disabled comments — creating a stink that called more attention to blood minerals than human rights campaigners ever could.
Partly as a result, requirements that companies report on their use of conflict minerals were accepted as an amendment to financial reform legislation.
A word of background: Eastern Congo is the site of the most lethal conflict since World War II, and is widely described as the rape capital of the world. The war had claimed 5.4 million deaths as of April 2007, with the toll mounting by 45,000 a month, according to a study by the International Rescue Committee.
It’s not that American tech companies are responsible for the slaughter, or that eliminating conflict minerals from Americans’ phones will immediately end the war. Even the Enough Project, an anti-genocide organization that has been a leading force in the current campaign, estimates that only one-fifth of the world’s tantalum comes from Congo.
“There’s no magic-bullet solution to peace in Congo,” notes David Sullivan of the Enough Project, “but this is one of the drivers of the conflict.” The economics of the war should be addressed to resolve it.
The Obama administration also should put more pressure on Rwanda to play a constructive role next door in Congo (it has, inexcusably, backed one militia and bolstered others by dealing extensively in the conflict minerals trade). Impeding trade in conflict minerals is also a piece of the Congo puzzle, and because of public pressure, a group of companies led by Intel and Motorola is now developing a process to audit origins of tantalum in supply chains.
Manufacturers previously settled for statements from suppliers that they do not source in eastern Congo, with no verification. Auditing the supply chains at smelters to determine whether minerals are clean or bloody would add about a penny to the price of a cellphone, according to the Enough Project, which says the figure originated with the industry.
“Apple is claiming that their products don’t contain conflict minerals because their suppliers say so,” said Jonathan Hutson, of the Enough Project. “People are saying that answer is not good enough. That’s why there’s this grass-roots movement, so that we as consumers can choose to buy conflict free.” Some ideas about what consumers can do are at raisehopeforCongo.org — starting with spreading the word.
We may be able to undercut some of the world’s most brutal militias simply by making it clear to electronics manufacturers that we don’t want our beloved gadgets to enrich sadistic gunmen. No phone or tablet computer can be considered “cool” if it may be helping perpetuate one of the most brutal wars on the planet.
•
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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/opini ... ?th&emc=th
Death by Gadget
By Nicholas d. kristof
“Blood diamonds” have faded away, but we may now be carrying “blood phones.”
An ugly paradox of the 21st century is that some of our elegant symbols of modernity — smartphones, laptops and digital cameras — are built from minerals that seem to be fueling mass slaughter and rape in Congo. With throngs waiting in lines in the last few days to buy the latest iPhone, I’m thinking: What if we could harness that desperation for new technologies to the desperate need to curb the killing in central Africa?
I’ve never reported on a war more barbaric than Congo’s, and it haunts me. In Congo, I’ve seen women who have been mutilated, children who have been forced to eat their parents’ flesh, girls who have been subjected to rapes that destroyed their insides. Warlords finance their predations in part through the sale of mineral ore containing tantalum, tungsten, tin and gold. For example, tantalum from Congo is used to make electrical capacitors that go into phones, computers and gaming devices.
Electronics manufacturers have tried to hush all this up. They want you to look at a gadget and think “sleek,” not “blood.”
Yet now there’s a grass-roots movement pressuring companies to keep these “conflict minerals” out of high-tech supply chains. Using Facebook and YouTube, activists are harassing companies like Apple, Intel and Research in Motion (which makes the BlackBerry) to get them to lean on their suppliers and ensure the use of, say, Australian tantalum rather than tantalum peddled by a Congolese militia.
A humorous new video taunting Apple and PC computers alike goes online this weekend on YouTube, with hopes that it will go viral. Put together by a group of Hollywood actors, it’s a spoof on the famous “I’m a Mac”/”I’m a PC” ad and suggests that both are sometimes built from conflict minerals.
“Guess we have some things in common after all,” Mac admits.
Protesters demonstrated outside the grand opening of Apple’s new store in Washington, demanding that the company commit to using only clean minerals. Last month, activists blanketed Intel’s Facebook page with calls to support tough legislation to curb trade in conflict minerals. For a time, Intel disabled comments — creating a stink that called more attention to blood minerals than human rights campaigners ever could.
Partly as a result, requirements that companies report on their use of conflict minerals were accepted as an amendment to financial reform legislation.
A word of background: Eastern Congo is the site of the most lethal conflict since World War II, and is widely described as the rape capital of the world. The war had claimed 5.4 million deaths as of April 2007, with the toll mounting by 45,000 a month, according to a study by the International Rescue Committee.
It’s not that American tech companies are responsible for the slaughter, or that eliminating conflict minerals from Americans’ phones will immediately end the war. Even the Enough Project, an anti-genocide organization that has been a leading force in the current campaign, estimates that only one-fifth of the world’s tantalum comes from Congo.
“There’s no magic-bullet solution to peace in Congo,” notes David Sullivan of the Enough Project, “but this is one of the drivers of the conflict.” The economics of the war should be addressed to resolve it.
The Obama administration also should put more pressure on Rwanda to play a constructive role next door in Congo (it has, inexcusably, backed one militia and bolstered others by dealing extensively in the conflict minerals trade). Impeding trade in conflict minerals is also a piece of the Congo puzzle, and because of public pressure, a group of companies led by Intel and Motorola is now developing a process to audit origins of tantalum in supply chains.
Manufacturers previously settled for statements from suppliers that they do not source in eastern Congo, with no verification. Auditing the supply chains at smelters to determine whether minerals are clean or bloody would add about a penny to the price of a cellphone, according to the Enough Project, which says the figure originated with the industry.
“Apple is claiming that their products don’t contain conflict minerals because their suppliers say so,” said Jonathan Hutson, of the Enough Project. “People are saying that answer is not good enough. That’s why there’s this grass-roots movement, so that we as consumers can choose to buy conflict free.” Some ideas about what consumers can do are at raisehopeforCongo.org — starting with spreading the word.
We may be able to undercut some of the world’s most brutal militias simply by making it clear to electronics manufacturers that we don’t want our beloved gadgets to enrich sadistic gunmen. No phone or tablet computer can be considered “cool” if it may be helping perpetuate one of the most brutal wars on the planet.
•
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/opini ... ?th&emc=th
July 12, 2010
No Honor, Only Horror
There is much to admire in India today, including its vibrant democracy and economy and its rich traditions. It should also lead the way in protecting and empowering women by ending so-called honor killings.
Jim Yardley recently reported in The Times on the case of Nirupama Pathak, a 22-year-old journalism graduate student from northern India who was found dead in her bedroom in April. Police arrested her mother on suspicion of murder; the family insisted Ms. Pathak had killed herself after confessing that she was pregnant.
The legal process must move forward, but what is clear is that Ms. Pathak’s family — members of the Brahmin caste, the highest Hindu caste — fiercely disapproved of her engagement to a young man she had met at school who was from a middle-upper caste. When she told her family of her plans to marry, The Times reported, she was accused of defiling her Hindu religion.
Her family gave police conflicting stories about how Ms. Pathak died. First, it was said that she had died from electrocution. Then the claim was that she had hanged herself. The autopsy showed that she had suffocated.
Responding to an apparent resurgence in “honor killings,” Prime Minister Manmohan Singh ordered a cabinet-level commission this month to consider tougher penalties in such cases. In June, India’s Supreme Court asked seven states and the national government to report on what is being done to address the problem. Mr. Singh and the court need to follow through.
Honor killings are widely reported in the Middle East and South Asia, but in recent years they also have taken place in Italy, Sweden, Brazil and Britain. According to Navi Pillay, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, there are 5,000 instances annually when women and girls are shot, stoned, burned, buried alive, strangled, smothered and knifed to death by fathers, brothers, sons, uncles, even mothers in the name of preserving family “honor.” Ms. Pillay has rejected arguments that such family violence is outside the conceptual framework of international human rights.
There is a reason these religious and cultural beliefs are allowed to persist. Politicians don’t have the courage to call it what it is: murder.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/opini ... nted=print
No Honor, Only Horror
There is much to admire in India today, including its vibrant democracy and economy and its rich traditions. It should also lead the way in protecting and empowering women by ending so-called honor killings.
Jim Yardley recently reported in The Times on the case of Nirupama Pathak, a 22-year-old journalism graduate student from northern India who was found dead in her bedroom in April. Police arrested her mother on suspicion of murder; the family insisted Ms. Pathak had killed herself after confessing that she was pregnant.
The legal process must move forward, but what is clear is that Ms. Pathak’s family — members of the Brahmin caste, the highest Hindu caste — fiercely disapproved of her engagement to a young man she had met at school who was from a middle-upper caste. When she told her family of her plans to marry, The Times reported, she was accused of defiling her Hindu religion.
Her family gave police conflicting stories about how Ms. Pathak died. First, it was said that she had died from electrocution. Then the claim was that she had hanged herself. The autopsy showed that she had suffocated.
Responding to an apparent resurgence in “honor killings,” Prime Minister Manmohan Singh ordered a cabinet-level commission this month to consider tougher penalties in such cases. In June, India’s Supreme Court asked seven states and the national government to report on what is being done to address the problem. Mr. Singh and the court need to follow through.
Honor killings are widely reported in the Middle East and South Asia, but in recent years they also have taken place in Italy, Sweden, Brazil and Britain. According to Navi Pillay, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, there are 5,000 instances annually when women and girls are shot, stoned, burned, buried alive, strangled, smothered and knifed to death by fathers, brothers, sons, uncles, even mothers in the name of preserving family “honor.” Ms. Pillay has rejected arguments that such family violence is outside the conceptual framework of international human rights.
There is a reason these religious and cultural beliefs are allowed to persist. Politicians don’t have the courage to call it what it is: murder.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/opini ... nted=print
August 2, 2010
Gulf Spill Is the Largest of Its Kind, Scientists Say
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON and CLIFFORD KRAUSS
NEW ORLEANS — The BP spill is by far the world’s largest accidental release of oil into marine waters, according to the most precise estimates yet of the well’s flow rate, announced by federal scientists on Monday.
Nearly five million barrels of oil have gushed from BP’s well — and about 800,000 have been captured by containment efforts —since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on April 20, according to the latest data. That amount outstrips the estimated 3.3 million barrels spilled into the Bay of Campeche by the Mexican rig Ixtoc I in 1979, previously believed to be the world’s largest accidental release.
The BP spill was already thought to be the largest spill in American waters, but it was unclear whether it had eclipsed Ixtoc.
“We’ve never had a spill of this magnitude in the deep ocean,” said Ian R. MacDonald, a professor of oceanography at Florida State University.
“These things reverberate through the ecosystem,” he said. “It is an ecological echo chamber, and I think we’ll be hearing the echoes of this, ecologically, for the rest of my life.”
Federal science and engineering teams, citing data that are “the most accurate to date,” estimated that 53,000 barrels of oil a day were pouring from the well just before BP was able to cap it on July 15. They also estimated that the daily flow rate had diminished over time, starting at about 62,000 barrels a day and decreasing as the reservoir of hydrocarbons feeding the gusher was gradually depleted. Before Monday’s announcement, federal scientific teams had estimated the spill in a range from 35,000 to 60,000 barrels a day.
The teams believe that the current estimates are accurate to within 10 percent.
As the estimates of the number of barrels spilled increases, so, too, do the penalties under the Clean Water Act, which calls for fines of $1,100 per barrel, or $4,300 per barrel if the government finds that gross negligence led to the spill.
At 4.9 million barrels, that means that the total fine could be $5.4 billion — and, if gross negligence led to the spill, $21 billion. If BP successfully argues that the 800,000 barrels it has recovered should mitigate the penalty, then the figure drops to $4.5 billion and $17.6 billion, respectively.
The amount of oil estimated to be pouring from the well has been a matter of dispute from the earliest days of the spill. Federal and BP officials initially announced that no oil appeared to be leaking, then 1,000 barrels a day, then 5,000 a day, frequently repeating that spill estimates are rough at best and that the main goal was to stop the well. But criticism mounted that no effort was being made to measure the leak with more certainty.
The Obama administration announced the creation of a scientific group dedicated to analyzing the flow rate, which came up with a new estimate of 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day in late May, a figure that was met with skepticism. That, too, was later revised upward several times before Monday’s announcement. Previous estimates came from analysis of videos from remote-controlled vehicles at the wellhead, modeling of the reservoir and measurements of the oil that was collected by surface ships in the response effort.
After BP capped the well, these measurements could be reinforced by pressure readings within the well. Those pressure readings were compared with pressure estimates when the well was first drilled to determine whether the rate had changed over time, which it apparently had.
The government is continuing to study the data and may refine the estimate.
Meanwhile, BP continued efforts Monday to permanently seal the well. It said it was preparing to conduct final testing on Tuesday to determine whether to go ahead with a plan to pump heavy drilling mud into the runaway Macondo well, in hopes of permanently sealing it by the end of the week.
During the tests, a surface ship will slowly inject small amounts of mud into the well to make sure the mud will reach the oil reservoir from the column of pipes and valves that sit atop it. If that is accomplished, BP will pump higher volumes of mud, and possibly cement, into the well, in an operation known as a static kill or bullheading.
BP executives said Monday that they expected positive results from the tests, which will also check the pressure of the well to ensure that it is safe to pump the mud.
The efforts come 18 days after BP placed a tight-fitting cap on the well that put a temporary end to months of leaking. Engineers had planned to begin the tests on Monday but had to delay when they found a small hydraulic leak in the capping control system above the well.
Kent Wells, senior vice president for exploration and production at BP, said on Monday that a day or two after the pumping of mud began, engineers would consider pumping cement into the well, which could permanently plug it. Engineers might also decide to wait for a relief well to be completed before pumping cement in. There is also a chance that they will pump cement during the static kill and later through the relief well, to make sure the runaway well is sealed.
“We want to end up with cement in the bottom of the hole, completely filling the entire Macondo well,” Mr. Wells said Monday. “Whether that comes from the top or whether it comes from the relief well, those will be decisions made along the way.”
An estimated 2,000 pounds of mud is to be flooded into the well this week.
Thad W. Allen, the retired Coast Guard admiral who is leading the federal response to the spill, cautioned against rushing to declare the static kill a final victory over the well. “I don’t think we can see this as the end-all, be-all, until we actually get the relief wells done,” he said.
Mr. Wells said the last 100 feet of the first of two relief wells should be completed by Aug. 15. A final killing of the well by pouring mud and cement just above the reservoir could take a few days or as much as a few weeks. If the first relief well somehow misses its target, a second one is being drilled for insurance.
Campbell Robertson reported from New Orleans, and Clifford Krauss from Houston. Catrin Einhorn and John Schwartz contributed reporting from New York.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/03/us/03 ... ?th&emc=th
Gulf Spill Is the Largest of Its Kind, Scientists Say
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON and CLIFFORD KRAUSS
NEW ORLEANS — The BP spill is by far the world’s largest accidental release of oil into marine waters, according to the most precise estimates yet of the well’s flow rate, announced by federal scientists on Monday.
Nearly five million barrels of oil have gushed from BP’s well — and about 800,000 have been captured by containment efforts —since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on April 20, according to the latest data. That amount outstrips the estimated 3.3 million barrels spilled into the Bay of Campeche by the Mexican rig Ixtoc I in 1979, previously believed to be the world’s largest accidental release.
The BP spill was already thought to be the largest spill in American waters, but it was unclear whether it had eclipsed Ixtoc.
“We’ve never had a spill of this magnitude in the deep ocean,” said Ian R. MacDonald, a professor of oceanography at Florida State University.
“These things reverberate through the ecosystem,” he said. “It is an ecological echo chamber, and I think we’ll be hearing the echoes of this, ecologically, for the rest of my life.”
Federal science and engineering teams, citing data that are “the most accurate to date,” estimated that 53,000 barrels of oil a day were pouring from the well just before BP was able to cap it on July 15. They also estimated that the daily flow rate had diminished over time, starting at about 62,000 barrels a day and decreasing as the reservoir of hydrocarbons feeding the gusher was gradually depleted. Before Monday’s announcement, federal scientific teams had estimated the spill in a range from 35,000 to 60,000 barrels a day.
The teams believe that the current estimates are accurate to within 10 percent.
As the estimates of the number of barrels spilled increases, so, too, do the penalties under the Clean Water Act, which calls for fines of $1,100 per barrel, or $4,300 per barrel if the government finds that gross negligence led to the spill.
At 4.9 million barrels, that means that the total fine could be $5.4 billion — and, if gross negligence led to the spill, $21 billion. If BP successfully argues that the 800,000 barrels it has recovered should mitigate the penalty, then the figure drops to $4.5 billion and $17.6 billion, respectively.
The amount of oil estimated to be pouring from the well has been a matter of dispute from the earliest days of the spill. Federal and BP officials initially announced that no oil appeared to be leaking, then 1,000 barrels a day, then 5,000 a day, frequently repeating that spill estimates are rough at best and that the main goal was to stop the well. But criticism mounted that no effort was being made to measure the leak with more certainty.
The Obama administration announced the creation of a scientific group dedicated to analyzing the flow rate, which came up with a new estimate of 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day in late May, a figure that was met with skepticism. That, too, was later revised upward several times before Monday’s announcement. Previous estimates came from analysis of videos from remote-controlled vehicles at the wellhead, modeling of the reservoir and measurements of the oil that was collected by surface ships in the response effort.
After BP capped the well, these measurements could be reinforced by pressure readings within the well. Those pressure readings were compared with pressure estimates when the well was first drilled to determine whether the rate had changed over time, which it apparently had.
The government is continuing to study the data and may refine the estimate.
Meanwhile, BP continued efforts Monday to permanently seal the well. It said it was preparing to conduct final testing on Tuesday to determine whether to go ahead with a plan to pump heavy drilling mud into the runaway Macondo well, in hopes of permanently sealing it by the end of the week.
During the tests, a surface ship will slowly inject small amounts of mud into the well to make sure the mud will reach the oil reservoir from the column of pipes and valves that sit atop it. If that is accomplished, BP will pump higher volumes of mud, and possibly cement, into the well, in an operation known as a static kill or bullheading.
BP executives said Monday that they expected positive results from the tests, which will also check the pressure of the well to ensure that it is safe to pump the mud.
The efforts come 18 days after BP placed a tight-fitting cap on the well that put a temporary end to months of leaking. Engineers had planned to begin the tests on Monday but had to delay when they found a small hydraulic leak in the capping control system above the well.
Kent Wells, senior vice president for exploration and production at BP, said on Monday that a day or two after the pumping of mud began, engineers would consider pumping cement into the well, which could permanently plug it. Engineers might also decide to wait for a relief well to be completed before pumping cement in. There is also a chance that they will pump cement during the static kill and later through the relief well, to make sure the runaway well is sealed.
“We want to end up with cement in the bottom of the hole, completely filling the entire Macondo well,” Mr. Wells said Monday. “Whether that comes from the top or whether it comes from the relief well, those will be decisions made along the way.”
An estimated 2,000 pounds of mud is to be flooded into the well this week.
Thad W. Allen, the retired Coast Guard admiral who is leading the federal response to the spill, cautioned against rushing to declare the static kill a final victory over the well. “I don’t think we can see this as the end-all, be-all, until we actually get the relief wells done,” he said.
Mr. Wells said the last 100 feet of the first of two relief wells should be completed by Aug. 15. A final killing of the well by pouring mud and cement just above the reservoir could take a few days or as much as a few weeks. If the first relief well somehow misses its target, a second one is being drilled for insurance.
Campbell Robertson reported from New Orleans, and Clifford Krauss from Houston. Catrin Einhorn and John Schwartz contributed reporting from New York.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/03/us/03 ... ?th&emc=th
Accepting the Past, Facing the Future
What would we be willing to sacrifice to prevent the catastrophes humanity now faces? And why are so many of us not doing so?
How do we relate to our past, and what might this tell us about how to relate to our future? One of the most provocative approaches to this question comes from Friedrich Nietzsche, whose doctrine of the eternal return asks this: “What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more’”? To ask myself the question of the eternal return is to wonder about the worth of what I have done, to inquire whether it would stand the test of being done innumerable times again.
There is, however, a more disturbing worry underneath this one. For me to be able to ask the question of the eternal return already supposes that I have come into existence; and the question may arise of whether I should affirm the conditions that brought me into existence, not innumerable times but even once. To see the bite of this worry, let me share a bit of my own past. Had Hitler not come to power in Germany, the Holocaust and World War II would not have happened. Had World War II not have happened, my father would not have signed up for officer’s training school. Had he not signed up, he would not have gone to college, majored in economics, and then moved to New York for a job. And so he would not have met my mother. In short, without the Holocaust I would not be here.
Would I prefer that the Holocaust or slavery or the Crusades not have happened and that I not exist?
We need not look very deeply to see how many people’s existence requires the occurrence of the Holocaust. And as Peter Atterton has argued recently here, all of us can trace our existence back to some mass atrocity or another (if not the Holocaust, then perhaps to slavery or to the Crusades).
How, then, might we relate to the past, and specifically to the fact that we owe our existence to one or another historical atrocity (or, for that matter, to a host of other events: weather patterns, feelings of lust, etc.)? One suggestion, a pessimistic one, is offered by another philosopher, R. Jay Wallace, in his book “The View From Here.” Wallace argues that to affirm my existence, to say yes to it, requires that I affirm (among other unpalatable things) the past that led to it. To be sure, he does not claim that we must feel good about it. We might wish that our existence had come about another way. However, he argues that we cannot have what he calls “all-in regret” about it. It’s unfortunate that our existence had to arise this way, but since that’s the way it happened, affirming our existence requires affirming the past that led to it. It is no wonder that he calls his position one of “modest nihilism.”
But must we affirm the past that led to our existence? Must we be modest nihilists? For one thing, it is open to us to say that it would have been better for us not to have been born and for the Holocaust not to have happened. From a more cosmic perspective (assuming that recent history would not have offered us a comparable horror), we might say that it would have been better had the Holocaust not occurred and that the planet be filled with people different from us. When Atterton concludes his column by saying that we have no right to exist, I take it this is precisely what he is claiming. And, as far as it goes, I agree with him.
But that is not where the question should make us most uncomfortable, and not where Wallace stakes his ground. To affirm our existence is not a matter of what we think would be cosmically or impersonally better. It is to say what we prefer, what we would choose. Would I prefer that the Holocaust or slavery or the Crusades not have happened and that I not exist? If I were somehow allowed to rewind the tape of history and then let it go forward again in a way that prevented one of these atrocities, and thus my existence, would I do it? That is a more troubling question for those of us who are attached to our lives.
I would like to think that, at least in my better moments, I would, however reluctantly, acquiesce to that deal. At those times where I have a more vivid encounter with the Holocaust, for instance, when at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington I saw the shoes of many who had perished in the camps, I think I would, with difficulty, be willing to trade my existence for those of its victims. (It is another and even more vexing question of whether I would trade my childrens’ lives to spare theirs, recognizing that my childrens’ existence requires my own. But for reasons outside the scope of this essay, I believe that that is a question for my offspring to answer rather than me.) I don’t know for sure what I would do, but I hope I would be able to rise to the occasion.
If this is right, then perhaps the proper attitude to take toward the monstrosities that gave rise to us might be called one of acceptance rather than affirmation. We are the products of histories we cannot change, histories that contain atrocities we cannot undo. We know that it would have been better if those horrors had not happened and, consequently, we had not been born, and in nobler moments we might even prefer that it had been that way. Our lives are rooted in tragedies that have no reparation, and in that they are inescapably tainted. We must accept this, but we need not affirm it. The difference lies in what we would have been willing to do, given the opportunity.
At this point, however, someone might ask why it matters what I, or any one of us, would do in an imaginary scenario that cannot possibly happen. The Holocaust happened; it cannot be prevented retroactively. So why should we take up any attitude toward our existence in relation to it? There are two reasons for doing so, one more philosophically reflective and the other more practical. The philosophically reflective reason is this: We condemn the Holocaust. I believe most of us would say that it should not have occurred. But had it not occurred, many of us would not be here. So what is our attitude toward the Holocaust, really? Do we really condemn it, or do we not? Asking the questions I am posing here will reveal to us aspects of who we are in ways that we may or may not find comfortable.
The second reason is practical. If we would be willing to sacrifice our existence for the sake of preventing past horrors, what would we be willing to sacrifice of ourselves to prevent horrors now and in the future? And why are so many of us (and I include myself here) not doing so? I should note here that the situation of the past is not exactly symmetrical to that of the future. There is a complication. If I had not existed, I would not technically have lost anything, because there would have been no “I” to lose it in the first place. (Of course, it’s even more complicated than that. I have to exist to consider the possibility of my never having existed.) However, now that I do exist, in sacrificing myself I do stand to lose something — my future existence.
Nevertheless, with that caveat in mind, a willingness to sacrifice our existence in the past should be matched by a willingness to sacrifice at least something of value now or in the future to prevent or mitigate new atrocities. What would we be willing to sacrifice for the refugees from Syria or the potential victims of police violence, or the impoverished undocumented workers in our country — those whose troubles will help determine who our children and grandchildren are? What would we be willing to sacrifice to prevent the enormous consequences of climate change, which seem already to be multiplying their victims? And if we’re not prepared to make some sacrifice, what does this in turn say about our relation to the horrors that gave rise to us? Our relation to the past and our relation to the future are not entirely distinct from each other. In asking about one, we offer answers — and perhaps not answers we would prefer to acknowledge — to the other.
As a new year is upon us, then, we might do better to renew rather than to forget our old acquaintance with the past, and allow that to be a guide to our future.
Todd May is a professor of philosophy at Clemson University, and the author of, most recently, “A Significant Life.”
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20 ... ef=opinion
What would we be willing to sacrifice to prevent the catastrophes humanity now faces? And why are so many of us not doing so?
How do we relate to our past, and what might this tell us about how to relate to our future? One of the most provocative approaches to this question comes from Friedrich Nietzsche, whose doctrine of the eternal return asks this: “What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more’”? To ask myself the question of the eternal return is to wonder about the worth of what I have done, to inquire whether it would stand the test of being done innumerable times again.
There is, however, a more disturbing worry underneath this one. For me to be able to ask the question of the eternal return already supposes that I have come into existence; and the question may arise of whether I should affirm the conditions that brought me into existence, not innumerable times but even once. To see the bite of this worry, let me share a bit of my own past. Had Hitler not come to power in Germany, the Holocaust and World War II would not have happened. Had World War II not have happened, my father would not have signed up for officer’s training school. Had he not signed up, he would not have gone to college, majored in economics, and then moved to New York for a job. And so he would not have met my mother. In short, without the Holocaust I would not be here.
Would I prefer that the Holocaust or slavery or the Crusades not have happened and that I not exist?
We need not look very deeply to see how many people’s existence requires the occurrence of the Holocaust. And as Peter Atterton has argued recently here, all of us can trace our existence back to some mass atrocity or another (if not the Holocaust, then perhaps to slavery or to the Crusades).
How, then, might we relate to the past, and specifically to the fact that we owe our existence to one or another historical atrocity (or, for that matter, to a host of other events: weather patterns, feelings of lust, etc.)? One suggestion, a pessimistic one, is offered by another philosopher, R. Jay Wallace, in his book “The View From Here.” Wallace argues that to affirm my existence, to say yes to it, requires that I affirm (among other unpalatable things) the past that led to it. To be sure, he does not claim that we must feel good about it. We might wish that our existence had come about another way. However, he argues that we cannot have what he calls “all-in regret” about it. It’s unfortunate that our existence had to arise this way, but since that’s the way it happened, affirming our existence requires affirming the past that led to it. It is no wonder that he calls his position one of “modest nihilism.”
But must we affirm the past that led to our existence? Must we be modest nihilists? For one thing, it is open to us to say that it would have been better for us not to have been born and for the Holocaust not to have happened. From a more cosmic perspective (assuming that recent history would not have offered us a comparable horror), we might say that it would have been better had the Holocaust not occurred and that the planet be filled with people different from us. When Atterton concludes his column by saying that we have no right to exist, I take it this is precisely what he is claiming. And, as far as it goes, I agree with him.
But that is not where the question should make us most uncomfortable, and not where Wallace stakes his ground. To affirm our existence is not a matter of what we think would be cosmically or impersonally better. It is to say what we prefer, what we would choose. Would I prefer that the Holocaust or slavery or the Crusades not have happened and that I not exist? If I were somehow allowed to rewind the tape of history and then let it go forward again in a way that prevented one of these atrocities, and thus my existence, would I do it? That is a more troubling question for those of us who are attached to our lives.
I would like to think that, at least in my better moments, I would, however reluctantly, acquiesce to that deal. At those times where I have a more vivid encounter with the Holocaust, for instance, when at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington I saw the shoes of many who had perished in the camps, I think I would, with difficulty, be willing to trade my existence for those of its victims. (It is another and even more vexing question of whether I would trade my childrens’ lives to spare theirs, recognizing that my childrens’ existence requires my own. But for reasons outside the scope of this essay, I believe that that is a question for my offspring to answer rather than me.) I don’t know for sure what I would do, but I hope I would be able to rise to the occasion.
If this is right, then perhaps the proper attitude to take toward the monstrosities that gave rise to us might be called one of acceptance rather than affirmation. We are the products of histories we cannot change, histories that contain atrocities we cannot undo. We know that it would have been better if those horrors had not happened and, consequently, we had not been born, and in nobler moments we might even prefer that it had been that way. Our lives are rooted in tragedies that have no reparation, and in that they are inescapably tainted. We must accept this, but we need not affirm it. The difference lies in what we would have been willing to do, given the opportunity.
At this point, however, someone might ask why it matters what I, or any one of us, would do in an imaginary scenario that cannot possibly happen. The Holocaust happened; it cannot be prevented retroactively. So why should we take up any attitude toward our existence in relation to it? There are two reasons for doing so, one more philosophically reflective and the other more practical. The philosophically reflective reason is this: We condemn the Holocaust. I believe most of us would say that it should not have occurred. But had it not occurred, many of us would not be here. So what is our attitude toward the Holocaust, really? Do we really condemn it, or do we not? Asking the questions I am posing here will reveal to us aspects of who we are in ways that we may or may not find comfortable.
The second reason is practical. If we would be willing to sacrifice our existence for the sake of preventing past horrors, what would we be willing to sacrifice of ourselves to prevent horrors now and in the future? And why are so many of us (and I include myself here) not doing so? I should note here that the situation of the past is not exactly symmetrical to that of the future. There is a complication. If I had not existed, I would not technically have lost anything, because there would have been no “I” to lose it in the first place. (Of course, it’s even more complicated than that. I have to exist to consider the possibility of my never having existed.) However, now that I do exist, in sacrificing myself I do stand to lose something — my future existence.
Nevertheless, with that caveat in mind, a willingness to sacrifice our existence in the past should be matched by a willingness to sacrifice at least something of value now or in the future to prevent or mitigate new atrocities. What would we be willing to sacrifice for the refugees from Syria or the potential victims of police violence, or the impoverished undocumented workers in our country — those whose troubles will help determine who our children and grandchildren are? What would we be willing to sacrifice to prevent the enormous consequences of climate change, which seem already to be multiplying their victims? And if we’re not prepared to make some sacrifice, what does this in turn say about our relation to the horrors that gave rise to us? Our relation to the past and our relation to the future are not entirely distinct from each other. In asking about one, we offer answers — and perhaps not answers we would prefer to acknowledge — to the other.
As a new year is upon us, then, we might do better to renew rather than to forget our old acquaintance with the past, and allow that to be a guide to our future.
Todd May is a professor of philosophy at Clemson University, and the author of, most recently, “A Significant Life.”
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20 ... ef=opinion
How Scared Should You Be About Zika?
Every time there is a major infectious disease outbreak that scares us — Ebola in West Africa in 2014, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) on the Arabian Peninsula in 2012 and in South Korea in 2015, and now the Zika virus in South and Central America and the Caribbean — government leaders, the public and the news media demand explanations, guidance and predictions, and often express indignation that not enough was done to prevent it. Today everyone is asking about Zika: How did this crisis happen, and what do we need to do to make it go away? We immediately forget about the outbreak that came before it, and don’t plan for the ones we know are on the horizon. Almost no one wants to talk about Ebola or MERS now, or what we have or haven’t done to try to prevent an ugly recurrence.
When it comes to diseases, we have a very short attention span, and we tend to be reactive, rather than proactive. Instead of devoting ourselves to a comprehensive plan to combat microbial threats, we scramble to respond to the latest one in the headlines. There are lessons from previous infectious disease outbreaks that could and should have left us much better prepared than we are.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/opini ... ef=opinion
Every time there is a major infectious disease outbreak that scares us — Ebola in West Africa in 2014, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) on the Arabian Peninsula in 2012 and in South Korea in 2015, and now the Zika virus in South and Central America and the Caribbean — government leaders, the public and the news media demand explanations, guidance and predictions, and often express indignation that not enough was done to prevent it. Today everyone is asking about Zika: How did this crisis happen, and what do we need to do to make it go away? We immediately forget about the outbreak that came before it, and don’t plan for the ones we know are on the horizon. Almost no one wants to talk about Ebola or MERS now, or what we have or haven’t done to try to prevent an ugly recurrence.
When it comes to diseases, we have a very short attention span, and we tend to be reactive, rather than proactive. Instead of devoting ourselves to a comprehensive plan to combat microbial threats, we scramble to respond to the latest one in the headlines. There are lessons from previous infectious disease outbreaks that could and should have left us much better prepared than we are.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/opini ... ef=opinion
The issue is not whether the virus is natural or artificial. It is about how the outbreak of a disease it managed and what lessons are learnt so as to minimize the occurence in future. That is in control of man.nuseri wrote:To Kmaherali:Ya Ali madad.
Our IIS Alumni.
Is the emergence of Zika virus an act of human or an act of Nature ?
Let’s End the Peril of a Nuclear Winter
IN the early 1980s, American and Russian scientists working together outlined a stark vision of the Cold War future. In a battle between the two superpowers, smoke from fires ignited by nuclear explosions would be so dense that it would block out the sun, turning the earth cold, dark and dry, killing plants and preventing agriculture for at least a year.
This dystopia became known as nuclear winter.
We haven’t heard much about this apocalyptic future in recent years. But the research into the destructive potential of a war involving nuclear weapons has continued. Even with the reduced nuclear arsenals that the United States and Russia agreed to in 2010, we have the ability not only to set off instantaneous destruction, but also to push global temperatures below freezing, even in summer. Crops would die and starvation could kill most of humanity.
But it is not just the superpowers that threaten the planet.
A nuclear war between any two countries using 100 Hiroshima-size atom bombs, less than half of the combined arsenals of India and Pakistan, could produce climate change unseen in recorded human history.
This is why we should celebrate the recent agreement with Iran, which may stop it from producing a nuclear weapon. And it is also why we should look with deep alarm at North Korea’s recent launching of a rocket to put a satellite in orbit, in what is believed to be an effort to develop an intercontinental ballistic missile.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/11/opini ... d=45305309
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Don’t Forget Darfur
Northampton, Mass. — Darfur may have dropped out of international headlines, but that does not mean the region enjoys peace. Far from it. A renewed escalation of violence by the Sudanese government against non-Arab ethnic groups threatens to compound a humanitarian disaster that, according to United Nations estimates, over the past 13 years displaced more than 2.7 million people in Darfur and an additional 380,000 refugees to eastern Chad.
Darfur has become a focus again because the regime in Khartoum is desperate to end one of three active rebellions in the country, conflicts that have left its military badly overstretched while a failing economy is causing civil unrest.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/12/opini ... 05309&_r=0
IN the early 1980s, American and Russian scientists working together outlined a stark vision of the Cold War future. In a battle between the two superpowers, smoke from fires ignited by nuclear explosions would be so dense that it would block out the sun, turning the earth cold, dark and dry, killing plants and preventing agriculture for at least a year.
This dystopia became known as nuclear winter.
We haven’t heard much about this apocalyptic future in recent years. But the research into the destructive potential of a war involving nuclear weapons has continued. Even with the reduced nuclear arsenals that the United States and Russia agreed to in 2010, we have the ability not only to set off instantaneous destruction, but also to push global temperatures below freezing, even in summer. Crops would die and starvation could kill most of humanity.
But it is not just the superpowers that threaten the planet.
A nuclear war between any two countries using 100 Hiroshima-size atom bombs, less than half of the combined arsenals of India and Pakistan, could produce climate change unseen in recorded human history.
This is why we should celebrate the recent agreement with Iran, which may stop it from producing a nuclear weapon. And it is also why we should look with deep alarm at North Korea’s recent launching of a rocket to put a satellite in orbit, in what is believed to be an effort to develop an intercontinental ballistic missile.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/11/opini ... d=45305309
*******
Don’t Forget Darfur
Northampton, Mass. — Darfur may have dropped out of international headlines, but that does not mean the region enjoys peace. Far from it. A renewed escalation of violence by the Sudanese government against non-Arab ethnic groups threatens to compound a humanitarian disaster that, according to United Nations estimates, over the past 13 years displaced more than 2.7 million people in Darfur and an additional 380,000 refugees to eastern Chad.
Darfur has become a focus again because the regime in Khartoum is desperate to end one of three active rebellions in the country, conflicts that have left its military badly overstretched while a failing economy is causing civil unrest.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/12/opini ... 05309&_r=0
Constant Tide of Migrants at Sea, and at Turkish Cemetery
IZMIR, Turkey — City workers shoveled dirt over the two coffins, one at a time, as an imam, in plaintive and meditative tones, sang prayers in Arabic.
“Our Lord, forgive us our sins and remit us from our evil deeds,” he said.
The solemnity of the occasion was made more so for what was absent — tears, loved ones or even the names of the dead, who are each identified only by a number.
Etched on one slab of wood: 42453.
Etched on the other: 42454.
For hundreds of thousands of refugees who fled wars in the Middle East for safety in Europe, this coastal city has been a place of departure. But for hundreds of others, it has become a final resting place.
“We are now faced with entire families drowning at sea, with no one left to claim them,” said Ahmet Altan, the imam at Dogancay Cemetery, which has put aside land to bury the unknown migrants who lose their lives at sea.
As NATO dispatches warships to the Aegean Sea in a new effort to contain the flow of refugees coming through Turkey and on to Europe, the deaths keep piling up: at least 400 so far this year, according to the International Organization for Migration. Already in 2016, more than 76,000 people — nearly 3,000 a day — have arrived in Greece from Turkey.
Photo
Bilal and Kholoud, who are Syrian refugees, with their children, from left, Rihab 10, Ibrahim, 6, and Domou, 8, in Izmir, Turkey. They survived when a boat they were on capsized in freezing water en route to Greece. Three young relatives of theirs died on the journey.Credit Bryan Denton for The New York Times
Increased patrols by the Turkish coast guard, plummeting temperatures and stormy seas — all factors that officials believed would lead to fewer crossings — have seemed to have little effect on the numbers.
If anything, there has been a surge in departures in recent weeks, as desperate refugees have taken advantage of the lower prices that smugglers typically charge during winter, when the journey is riskier than it is in summer. Those numbers could rise further, with a new wave of what Turkish officials say is now at least 100,000 refugees fleeing heavy Russian bombing raids and a Syrian government offensive near Aleppo this week.
“We have no choice but to leave now,” said Mahdi, 36, a Syrian refugee and former teacher who prepared to make the journey with his wife and two children, ages 11 months and 3. “It’s already hard to get to Europe, and it’s going to get harder because these countries prefer that we drown than live on their lands.”
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/14/world ... 87722&_r=0
******
VIDEO
Syria's horrifying statistics: 2 million children living under siege
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/video/news/syr ... lsignoutmd
IZMIR, Turkey — City workers shoveled dirt over the two coffins, one at a time, as an imam, in plaintive and meditative tones, sang prayers in Arabic.
“Our Lord, forgive us our sins and remit us from our evil deeds,” he said.
The solemnity of the occasion was made more so for what was absent — tears, loved ones or even the names of the dead, who are each identified only by a number.
Etched on one slab of wood: 42453.
Etched on the other: 42454.
For hundreds of thousands of refugees who fled wars in the Middle East for safety in Europe, this coastal city has been a place of departure. But for hundreds of others, it has become a final resting place.
“We are now faced with entire families drowning at sea, with no one left to claim them,” said Ahmet Altan, the imam at Dogancay Cemetery, which has put aside land to bury the unknown migrants who lose their lives at sea.
As NATO dispatches warships to the Aegean Sea in a new effort to contain the flow of refugees coming through Turkey and on to Europe, the deaths keep piling up: at least 400 so far this year, according to the International Organization for Migration. Already in 2016, more than 76,000 people — nearly 3,000 a day — have arrived in Greece from Turkey.
Photo
Bilal and Kholoud, who are Syrian refugees, with their children, from left, Rihab 10, Ibrahim, 6, and Domou, 8, in Izmir, Turkey. They survived when a boat they were on capsized in freezing water en route to Greece. Three young relatives of theirs died on the journey.Credit Bryan Denton for The New York Times
Increased patrols by the Turkish coast guard, plummeting temperatures and stormy seas — all factors that officials believed would lead to fewer crossings — have seemed to have little effect on the numbers.
If anything, there has been a surge in departures in recent weeks, as desperate refugees have taken advantage of the lower prices that smugglers typically charge during winter, when the journey is riskier than it is in summer. Those numbers could rise further, with a new wave of what Turkish officials say is now at least 100,000 refugees fleeing heavy Russian bombing raids and a Syrian government offensive near Aleppo this week.
“We have no choice but to leave now,” said Mahdi, 36, a Syrian refugee and former teacher who prepared to make the journey with his wife and two children, ages 11 months and 3. “It’s already hard to get to Europe, and it’s going to get harder because these countries prefer that we drown than live on their lands.”
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/14/world ... 87722&_r=0
******
VIDEO
Syria's horrifying statistics: 2 million children living under siege
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/video/news/syr ... lsignoutmd
Where the Soldiers Are Scarier Than the Crocodiles
UNITY STATE, South Sudan — THERE are cobras and vipers here, and hungry crocodiles and belligerent hippos. But thousands of South Sudanese are hiding in these swamps because they have even greater fear of their own government — which the United States helped install.
“When the soldiers come, we go into the water up to our necks and hide, with only our noses out of the water,” a displaced villager, Nyakier Gatluak, told me after I waded through swamps and rivers to reach the island where she shelters. She and other parents hold children and command them to be silent, hoping that they will be invisible in the water and reeds.
I asked about crocodiles, and Nyakier was fatalistic. “Even if you die in the water, it’s better to be killed by snakes or crocodiles than by soldiers,” she said.
A brutal civil war here in the world’s newest country has led government forces to burn villages, kill unarmed farmers, castrate boys, rape women and girls, and pillage hospitals. Rebels engage in similar behavior. Aid workers and journalists are under attack, with armed men breaking into a Catholic compound and raping a 67-year-old American nun.
More than two million South Sudanese have been forced to flee their homes, many into the perilous swamps, and United Nations officials estimate that at least 50,000 may have died in the last two years.
All the figures are dubious, but it may be that as many civilians are dying in South Sudan’s war as in Syria’s (I explore the numbers on my blog), and growing hunger may make the situation worse. Yet South Sudan hasn’t received the diplomatic or media attention the crisis merits. There was zero coverage of South Sudan’s civil war on American weekday evening network television news shows in 2015, according to the Tyndall Report, a news monitor.
More..
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/13/opini ... ef=opinion
UNITY STATE, South Sudan — THERE are cobras and vipers here, and hungry crocodiles and belligerent hippos. But thousands of South Sudanese are hiding in these swamps because they have even greater fear of their own government — which the United States helped install.
“When the soldiers come, we go into the water up to our necks and hide, with only our noses out of the water,” a displaced villager, Nyakier Gatluak, told me after I waded through swamps and rivers to reach the island where she shelters. She and other parents hold children and command them to be silent, hoping that they will be invisible in the water and reeds.
I asked about crocodiles, and Nyakier was fatalistic. “Even if you die in the water, it’s better to be killed by snakes or crocodiles than by soldiers,” she said.
A brutal civil war here in the world’s newest country has led government forces to burn villages, kill unarmed farmers, castrate boys, rape women and girls, and pillage hospitals. Rebels engage in similar behavior. Aid workers and journalists are under attack, with armed men breaking into a Catholic compound and raping a 67-year-old American nun.
More than two million South Sudanese have been forced to flee their homes, many into the perilous swamps, and United Nations officials estimate that at least 50,000 may have died in the last two years.
All the figures are dubious, but it may be that as many civilians are dying in South Sudan’s war as in Syria’s (I explore the numbers on my blog), and growing hunger may make the situation worse. Yet South Sudan hasn’t received the diplomatic or media attention the crisis merits. There was zero coverage of South Sudan’s civil war on American weekday evening network television news shows in 2015, according to the Tyndall Report, a news monitor.
More..
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/13/opini ... ef=opinion
Here’s Why There’s a Searing Ethiopian Drought Without an Epic Ethiopian Famine
I hope you’ll read “Is the Era of Great Famine Over,” an Op-Ed article by Alex de Waal, the executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University, which has a program tracking famine trends.
Filing from Ethiopia, which is in the midst of a potent drought but — for a change — not a calamitous famine, de Waal made these core points:
How did Ethiopia go from being the world’s symbol of mass famines to fending off starvation? Thanks partly to some good fortune, but mostly to peace, greater transparency and prudent planning. Ethiopia’s success in averting another disaster is confirmation that famine is elective because, at its core, it is an artifact and a tool of political repression.
It’s worth stressing that last line:
[F]amine is elective because, at its core, it is an artifact and a tool of political repression.
Please read the entire article and consider the trend against what has been learned by scholars like Joshua Goldstein and Steven Pinker about death rates from war and violence; declines in deep poverty as shown by Max Roser; and child mortality rates from the World Health Organization.
There’s a valuable deeper dive on global famine trends on the Tufts website.
Photo
The World Peace Foundation at Tufts University has found that governance and democracy are prime factors in cutting famine losses. A “great famine” is defined as one killing at least 100,000 people. Learn more at j.mp/faminetrends.Credit World Peace Foundation
Over all, human prospects continue to improve.
Setbacks are nearly always the result of ruptures in governance or unchecked extremism and violence. Click back to Nick Kristof’s searing commentary from South Sudan last year for another example. Here was his conclusion, even as he witnessed people collapsing on the street:
You might think that what’s needed to end a famine is food. Actually, what’s essential above all is an international push of intensive diplomacy and targeted sanctions to reach a compromise peace deal and end the civil war.
While the general picture is brightening, trend is not destiny, and, of course, the non-human world is not doing nearly as well.
But with sustained citizen engagement, increased monitoring and transparency, more “mundane science” (in the best sense, as conveyed by Dan Kammen and Michael Dove) and pressure on despots and other bad actors, chances of up-side surprises remain high.
Postscript | Don’t miss the slide show on the political roots of a host of great famines that accompanies the de Waal article.
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/ ... inion&_r=0
Please read all the links mentioned in the above link.
I hope you’ll read “Is the Era of Great Famine Over,” an Op-Ed article by Alex de Waal, the executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University, which has a program tracking famine trends.
Filing from Ethiopia, which is in the midst of a potent drought but — for a change — not a calamitous famine, de Waal made these core points:
How did Ethiopia go from being the world’s symbol of mass famines to fending off starvation? Thanks partly to some good fortune, but mostly to peace, greater transparency and prudent planning. Ethiopia’s success in averting another disaster is confirmation that famine is elective because, at its core, it is an artifact and a tool of political repression.
It’s worth stressing that last line:
[F]amine is elective because, at its core, it is an artifact and a tool of political repression.
Please read the entire article and consider the trend against what has been learned by scholars like Joshua Goldstein and Steven Pinker about death rates from war and violence; declines in deep poverty as shown by Max Roser; and child mortality rates from the World Health Organization.
There’s a valuable deeper dive on global famine trends on the Tufts website.
Photo
The World Peace Foundation at Tufts University has found that governance and democracy are prime factors in cutting famine losses. A “great famine” is defined as one killing at least 100,000 people. Learn more at j.mp/faminetrends.Credit World Peace Foundation
Over all, human prospects continue to improve.
Setbacks are nearly always the result of ruptures in governance or unchecked extremism and violence. Click back to Nick Kristof’s searing commentary from South Sudan last year for another example. Here was his conclusion, even as he witnessed people collapsing on the street:
You might think that what’s needed to end a famine is food. Actually, what’s essential above all is an international push of intensive diplomacy and targeted sanctions to reach a compromise peace deal and end the civil war.
While the general picture is brightening, trend is not destiny, and, of course, the non-human world is not doing nearly as well.
But with sustained citizen engagement, increased monitoring and transparency, more “mundane science” (in the best sense, as conveyed by Dan Kammen and Michael Dove) and pressure on despots and other bad actors, chances of up-side surprises remain high.
Postscript | Don’t miss the slide show on the political roots of a host of great famines that accompanies the de Waal article.
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/ ... inion&_r=0
Please read all the links mentioned in the above link.
We Have Tried Every Kind of Death Possible
ISTANBUL — I am from a small town in northwestern Syria called Jisr al-Shughour. Before the war I used to buy and sell electronics. In 2013, I joined a small group of fellow Syrians to form the Syrian Civil Defense, better known as the White Helmets, a group of volunteers who rush to the scene of recent bombings to try to save people trapped beneath the rubble. In 2014, my colleagues, now numbering 3,000 men and women, elected me to lead the organization.
Together we have saved more than 60,000 Syrians. Our work is guided by an Islamic principle, written in the Quran: “Whoever saves one life, it is as if he has saved all of humanity.” We take pride in this work, and every day we risk our lives to save others and serve our country.
I have been part of dozens of doomsday missions. I remember one of my first, three years ago: A car bomb detonated in a busy marketplace in the town of Darkoush, near the border with Turkey, burying many civilians beneath the rubble. Back then, we didn’t have the right equipment to remove the rubble fast enough to rescue them, and many people whom we could have saved perished. This year, an airstrike targeted the same market. Thanks to training and newer equipment like jackhammers and concrete-cutting saws, we were able to rescue many more. But there are also many we could not save, including 142 of our own civil defense volunteers who have been killed in the line of duty.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/21/opini ... &te=1&_r=0
ISTANBUL — I am from a small town in northwestern Syria called Jisr al-Shughour. Before the war I used to buy and sell electronics. In 2013, I joined a small group of fellow Syrians to form the Syrian Civil Defense, better known as the White Helmets, a group of volunteers who rush to the scene of recent bombings to try to save people trapped beneath the rubble. In 2014, my colleagues, now numbering 3,000 men and women, elected me to lead the organization.
Together we have saved more than 60,000 Syrians. Our work is guided by an Islamic principle, written in the Quran: “Whoever saves one life, it is as if he has saved all of humanity.” We take pride in this work, and every day we risk our lives to save others and serve our country.
I have been part of dozens of doomsday missions. I remember one of my first, three years ago: A car bomb detonated in a busy marketplace in the town of Darkoush, near the border with Turkey, burying many civilians beneath the rubble. Back then, we didn’t have the right equipment to remove the rubble fast enough to rescue them, and many people whom we could have saved perished. This year, an airstrike targeted the same market. Thanks to training and newer equipment like jackhammers and concrete-cutting saws, we were able to rescue many more. But there are also many we could not save, including 142 of our own civil defense volunteers who have been killed in the line of duty.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/21/opini ... &te=1&_r=0
Why 20 Million People Are on Brink of Famine in a ‘World of Plenty’
UNITED NATIONS — In a world filled with excess food, 20 million people are on the brink of famine, including 1.4 million children at imminent risk of death. In the face of such grim numbers, a stark question confronts the world’s most powerful: Why in 2017 can’t they avert such a seemingly archaic and preventable catastrophe?
Secretary General António Guterres of the United Nations raised the alarm Wednesday afternoon about the risk of famine in northern Nigeria, Somalia and Yemen. And this week, the United Nations declared famine in a patch of South Sudan.
“In our world of plenty there is no excuse for inaction or indifference,” Mr. Guterres said at a news conference, flanked by the heads of his aid agencies.
Each country facing famine is in war, or in the case of Somalia, recovering from decades of conflict.
What is famine?
Famine is a rare and specific state. It is declared after three specific criteria are met: when one in five households in a certain area face extreme food shortages; more than 30 percent of the population is acutely malnourished; and at least two people for every 10,000 die each day.
The chief economist for the World Food Program in Rome, Arif Husain, described it earlier this week this way: “When you declare a famine, bad things have already happened. People have already died.”
Famine was last declared in Somalia in July 2011, after an estimated 260,000 people had died, mostly in a two-month period.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/22/worl ... middleeast
UNITED NATIONS — In a world filled with excess food, 20 million people are on the brink of famine, including 1.4 million children at imminent risk of death. In the face of such grim numbers, a stark question confronts the world’s most powerful: Why in 2017 can’t they avert such a seemingly archaic and preventable catastrophe?
Secretary General António Guterres of the United Nations raised the alarm Wednesday afternoon about the risk of famine in northern Nigeria, Somalia and Yemen. And this week, the United Nations declared famine in a patch of South Sudan.
“In our world of plenty there is no excuse for inaction or indifference,” Mr. Guterres said at a news conference, flanked by the heads of his aid agencies.
Each country facing famine is in war, or in the case of Somalia, recovering from decades of conflict.
What is famine?
Famine is a rare and specific state. It is declared after three specific criteria are met: when one in five households in a certain area face extreme food shortages; more than 30 percent of the population is acutely malnourished; and at least two people for every 10,000 die each day.
The chief economist for the World Food Program in Rome, Arif Husain, described it earlier this week this way: “When you declare a famine, bad things have already happened. People have already died.”
Famine was last declared in Somalia in July 2011, after an estimated 260,000 people had died, mostly in a two-month period.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/22/worl ... middleeast
The flow of Rohingya refugees into Bangladesh shows no sign of abating
Nearly 600,000 have fled Myanmar in the past seven weeks
NOT since the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 have more people crossed an international border in a shorter span of time than currently from Myanmar to Bangladesh. Since August 25th, when attacks on police and army posts by Rohingya insurgents in Myanmar’s northern Rakhine triggered an army-led pogrom, nearly 600,000 Muslim Rohingyas have fled the Buddhist-majority state, which is also Myanmar’s poorest.
Bangladesh is said now to host at least 800,000 stateless Rohingyas on a 100km-long strip of land in the most underdeveloped part of the country (one UN estimate puts the figure at around 1m). Seven weeks into the exodus, the number of people crossing by land, or the river that divides Bangladesh and Myanmar, is still rising. There has in fact been a surge in new arrivals in recent days (see chart). The conditions in the rapidly growing camps are squalid; the humanitarian response is slow and inadequate. More than 200,000 refugees are children.
More...
https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphic ... lydispatch
Nearly 600,000 have fled Myanmar in the past seven weeks
NOT since the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 have more people crossed an international border in a shorter span of time than currently from Myanmar to Bangladesh. Since August 25th, when attacks on police and army posts by Rohingya insurgents in Myanmar’s northern Rakhine triggered an army-led pogrom, nearly 600,000 Muslim Rohingyas have fled the Buddhist-majority state, which is also Myanmar’s poorest.
Bangladesh is said now to host at least 800,000 stateless Rohingyas on a 100km-long strip of land in the most underdeveloped part of the country (one UN estimate puts the figure at around 1m). Seven weeks into the exodus, the number of people crossing by land, or the river that divides Bangladesh and Myanmar, is still rising. There has in fact been a surge in new arrivals in recent days (see chart). The conditions in the rapidly growing camps are squalid; the humanitarian response is slow and inadequate. More than 200,000 refugees are children.
More...
https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphic ... lydispatch
The aftershocks of North Korea's nuclear test
North Korea's nuclear test in September didn't just generate diplomatic shockwaves but also a 6.3 magnitude earthquake.
Aftershocks have continued ever since, and on Saturday the US Geological Survey said it had detected two more, sparking significant debate about what might be going on underground.
What happened during the nuclear test?
On 3 September, North Korea tested its most powerful nuclear bomb to date at its Punggye-ri test site in the mountains in its northwest.
Pyongyang claimed it was a hydrogen bomb, which would have made it a device many times more powerful than an atomic bomb.
Experts have expressed concerns the explosion might have been so powerful it could destabilise the surrounding mountains.
More..
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/th ... ailsignout
North Korea's nuclear test in September didn't just generate diplomatic shockwaves but also a 6.3 magnitude earthquake.
Aftershocks have continued ever since, and on Saturday the US Geological Survey said it had detected two more, sparking significant debate about what might be going on underground.
What happened during the nuclear test?
On 3 September, North Korea tested its most powerful nuclear bomb to date at its Punggye-ri test site in the mountains in its northwest.
Pyongyang claimed it was a hydrogen bomb, which would have made it a device many times more powerful than an atomic bomb.
Experts have expressed concerns the explosion might have been so powerful it could destabilise the surrounding mountains.
More..
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/th ... ailsignout