Why has the flow of aid money and humanitarian relief been so slow to Pakistan to help its flood victims, versus the huge amounts of aid that went to Haiti after its earthquake? A number of news outlets have looked at that question, including the Christian Science Monitor, PRI’s The World, and NPR.

It’s a phenomenon that’s disturbing to see: Armed groups targeting aid workers. It’s not a new phenomena, though its increasing frequency suggests that such attacks are becoming an accepted tactic by some, much as suicide bombing has been embraced by some armed groups as a legitimate tactic.

It’s not.

Suicide bombing and targeting aid workers purposely shred the principle that war is between armed combatants. Rules of war or fighting aren’t an intellectual exercise. Protecting civilians is a vital principle if there is to be a nod to humanity and human rights in a battle zone. Bystanders to war should not become legitimate targets of war. Yet, it is happening more and more as these two stories from Devex indicate. And another looking at why aid work is risky.

What may be most scary about these attacks is that it’s hard to see how to restore the notion of civilians’ right to protection and need to be differentiated from combatants. Former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan’s attempt to spread a Responsibility to Protect Civilians always will be limited because it is aimed at heads of state and governments, not at rebels and militias who also commit these atrocities. The easy accessibility of weapons gives the smallest band of thugs the ability to inflict damage that make foes and a larger public take notice. Thugs like the attention, like the destruction — that is victory enough for them. Any ideas on how to stem attacks on civilians?

The news that Swiss authorities are freeing film producer and child molester Roman Polanski is simply sickening. The LA Times looked at the important question as to how Polanski’s original sentence for having sex with a 13-year-old girl compared against the sentences of others who committed the same crime and had the same plea deal, in which a person admits to unlawful sex with a minor in exchange for dropping a rape charge. Polanski faced a 90-day jail sentence when he fled the country in 1978. The Times’ finding: Statutory rape convictions similar to Roman Polanski’s typically result in sentences at least four times longer today than the 90-day punishment a judge favored before the director fled the United States in 1978, a Times analysis of Los Angeles County court records shows.

It’s a shame that a legal technicality and Polanski’s stardom have shielded him from getting an appropriate sentence that would reinforce the societal and legal prohibition against an adult having sex with a minor. There’s a good reason for prohibitions in both of those realms: Children shouldn’t even be put in a situation in which they have to fend off an adult who is making sexual advances or worse. Nor, even if they are curious, are most kids — and I do mean most — emotionally mature enough to make a decision about whether to have sex, which can have serious consequences.

Over the years, the entire notion of childhood ash been eroded by such moves as states lowering ages at which a child can be tried as an adult, and by parents who fail to provide the kind of supervision and teaching a youngster needs from the most important adults in their lives. In Polansky’s case, responsibility for this latest episode rests with US authorities who did not provide information the Swiss requested and with the Swiss for essentially shrugging at the severity of a man who ADMITTED having sex with a child. Adults — and governments — are supposed to protect children. The opposite happened on many levels in this sordid story.

Nate Henn

Nate Henn, 25, was one of the victims in yesterday’s bombing in Kigali, Rwanda of a rugby field where the World Cup final was being televised on a giant screen. Nate listed himself as a 2007 graduate of the University of Delaware. When I was on the Inquirer’s editorial board writing about Northern Uganda from about 2005 through 2007, a group of students from UD was extremely passionate about and active in efforts to raise US awareness about the war in northern Uganda in which children were targeted and terrorized. A number of them walked in Philadelphia’s portion of the first, national Gulu Walk, in an effort to teach people around the world about that conflict. I suspect Nate was one of those participants, since he was in Uganda working with the NGO, Invisible Children, which seeks to help the kids of northern Uganda who still feel the aftereffects of a war in which they were kidnapped and forced to become soldiers and sex slaves.

A surge of activism beginning around 2005, helped propel the end of that war in northern Uganda, though the Lord’s Resistance Army, led by international war-crimes suspect Joseph Kony, continues to wreak bloody havoc on children and other bystanders throughout that region of Africa.  While the LRA’s continued existence is troubing, today let us simply herald the role individual activists who coalesce into a larger group, can play in an issue, no matter how big or small or how far away it may be.

One person can make a difference. Nate Henn made a difference. My condolences to his family.

Your computers' bloody contents

The Enough Project has produced this great spoof of the Mac-PC commercials to educate the public about how computers, yes, the ones in our homes and offices, are made with conflict minerals from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Militias do the mining and then use the considerable profits to finance the continued fighting in DRC that has been going on since 1998. It’s a helluva good, worthy public-awareness campaign — let’s even call it a public health campaign, since the violence there has hurt and killed so many. Kudos to Enough for the idea and the creative execution of it.  As, Nickolas Kristof mentioned in his Sunday column on the topic, these minerals also are used in the fabrication of cell phones and digital cameras. Western consumers especially, since we are the ones who consume so much, need to be aware of this and demand that manufacturers of these products use resources that can be verified as coming from clean, legitimate sources, not bloody ones such as Congo’s. For more information on the topic and the campaign visit the Enough Project. Read Steve Job’ response on WIRED’s Gadget Lab blog.

Here’s part of a great story from IRIN that raises the same question: How can such a small group of rebels endure and cause such havoc in so many countries, including in the Democratic Republic of Congo as examined by IRIN. The story doesn’t give many satisfying answers, except to say that the LRA uses such brutal tactics that it instantly terrifies its victims into submission. It’s more complicated than that — let us never forget the influence of money (which reminds me, I’ll be posting a story soon in which the Ugandan Army is asking Kampala for more money to track down the LRA) in starting and perpetuating wars. But even if that brutality plays a small role, well, God help us all. Here’s the beginning of the IRIN story. The full version on the IRIN Web site is here.

Photo: Anthony Morland/IRIN

Sense of security… but the LRA has even infiltrated towns where UN and Congolese forces are based

NIANGARA, 5 May 2010 (IRIN) - They may number as few as 100 men, women and adolescents, but Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) units scattered across the forests of northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo’s Orientale Province have sown sufficient terror to make some 318,000 people take flight, abandoning their homes and fields, in many cases to the uncertain sanctuary of urban centres.

Their fear is far from misplaced, for extreme brutality is a tactic in the survival strategy of the northern Ugandan rebel group, which has killed almost 2,000 people in Orientale since December 2007, mostly in the districts of Haut- and Bas-Uele.

Lacking supply lines and widely dispersed since a botched air raid in December 2008, the small groups of LRA fighters operate independently of each other and live off the land; that is to say, off the local population’s produce and livestock. Since this population has no desire to share what little they have with a rebellion in which they have no stake at all, they are made to leave.

“The violence of its attacks and the suffering it causes are intended to frighten villagers into not giving its pursuers the information they need to wage a counter-insurgency campaign and to frighten civilians away so they can move with less chance of being spotted,” the International Crisis Group said in a recent report on the LRA.

Such calculatedly brutal logic is hard to explain to the victims of violence.

“What can you tell a woman who’s had her lips and ears cut off for nothing?” UN humanitarian chief John Holmes said after visiting the Haute-Uele town of Niangara, the geographical centre of Africa, during a tour of DRC’s most troubled areas.

It’s the NGO’s annual State of the World’s Mothers report and it’s just out and available here from Save the Children. A cause being important and worthy, and a product about it, such as this report, coming from a well-regarded organization, doesn’t mean journalists and others will automatically give them attention. Advocates who want attention for their issues are smart to find news pegs for them, such as Save the Children releasing this report near Mother’s Day. Smart stuff, effective advocacy.

AlertNet has posted a blog article today written by a Myanmar Red Cross worker and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent on how some Myanmarese are doing two years this month after Cyclone Nargis struck the already-troubled Southeast Asian nation. It by no means gives a complete picture of the situation there, but highlights some of activities Red Cross/Red Crescent are doing. Most importantly, it serves as a reminder that the impact of Nargis is still being felt, and efforts still are being made, long after the media has turned away from it. If I find other reports online regarding Nargis, I’ll post links to them here.

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I got the following press release this morning from the International Crisis Group, which points out the continued, bloody existence of the Lord’s Resistance Army. As much as I respect the crisis group, the conclusions in its new report aren’t new at all. The LRA has been a regional menace for years. Think tanks and humanitarian groups need to go deeper and answer these questions: How, really how, has the LRA stayed alive for so long? And, what in the world will it take to end this group and its hideous ways? The military approach clearly hasn’t worked. Western governments, including the United States and Britain (and Canada, just because it’s a country that cares about these issues and has worked on the terror that once gripped northern Uganda) need to look at ending the LRA and its attacks on civilians through a counterinsurgency strategy that includes winning the hearts and minds of the LRA’s rank-and-file. Nations need to put as much time and energy into that as they have into trying to squash the LRA militarily. 

Though the crisis group’s press release doesn’t say it, it is always important — and accurate — to emphasize the enormous damage the LRA always, always wreaks upon kids. Children are LRA chief Joseph Kony’s favorite target because they are so vulnerable and, therefore, more easily manipulated. Ending the LRA is a children’s rights issue foremost. Here’s the press release.

INTERNATIONAL CRISIS GROUP - NEW REPORT

Nairobi/Brussels, 28 April 2010: To make an end of the brutal Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) once and for all, national armies, the UN and civilians need to pool intelligence and coordinate their efforts in new and creative ways.

LRA: A Regional Strategy beyond Killing Kony, the latest report from the International Crisis Group, examines how what was once an insurgency in northern Uganda has become a regional humanitarian and security problem that requires a regional solution. Operation Lightning Thunder, the Ugandan army’s latest attempt to crush the LRA, has been a military fiasco. After the initial attack on their hideout in a Congolese national park in December 2008, small groups of fighters dispersed more widely in the Congo (Democratic Republic), South Sudan and the Central African Republic (CAR). They immediately committed a series of massacres of villagers to show they retained their power and continue to survive by preying on civilians.

“National security forces are too weak to protect their own people, while the Ugandan army, with U.S. support, is focused on hunting Joseph Kony, the group’s leader”, says Edward Dalby, Crisis Group’s Central Africa Analyst. “The Ugandans have eroded the LRA’s numbers and made it difficult for scattered groups to communicate. But, even if they eventually kill or capture Kony, LRA fighters will remain a terrible danger to civilians in this mostly ungoverned frontier zone”.

The LRA has exploited the inability of the Congo, South Sudan and the CAR to control their border areas and benefited from insufficient coordination between their armies. Small, fast-moving groups of fighters attack unprotected villages to resupply with food and clothes and abduct new recruits before heading back to the cover of the forest. Killing and mutilating are part of a strategy of terror to dissuade survivors from cooperating with the Ugandan and other armies. The weakness of all three state security forces where the LRA now operates and the limited capacity of the UN missions in the Congo and South Sudan have left civilians no choice but to fend for themselves. The UN Security Council must ensure that the planned and gradual drawdown of MONUC (UN Mission Congo) leaves sufficient forces in the LRA-affected areas in the Congo.

“To put an end to what has become a causeless and homeless rebellion, a new strategy is required that prioritises civilian protection, as well as a united effort among military and civilian actors within and across national boundaries”, says Thierry Vircoulon, Crisis Group’s Central Africa Project Director. “Because the need for security is urgent, flexible and innovative forms of cooperation between international, state and non-state actors are needed to counter the threat that operates in and exploits this semi-stateless zone”.

But not even a complete military victory over the LRA would guarantee an end to insecurity in northern Uganda. To do that, the Kampala government must treat the root causes of trouble in the area from which the LRA sprang more than twenty years ago, namely northern perceptions of economic and political marginalisation, and ensure the social rehabilitation of the north.