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.

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.

Aid Frustration: ‘We’re racing against the clock’: Thousands waiting for food, water, medical care

By Marisol Bello and Donna Leinwand
PETIONVILLE, Haiti — Haitian physician Reginald Lubin wanted to help earthquake victims at a hospital in this suburb of Port-au-Prince on Sunday, but medical supplies and equipment were scarce.

“What would I say to the patient?” Lubin lamented. “Look at them and say, ‘You are hurt?’ “

“The government is decapitated,” Lubin said. “People come here to help, and they do not know what to do or where to go. This is terrible.”

The worldwide effort to rescue battered Haiti entered its second week today with thousands of frustrated Haitians saying they are still waiting for food, water and medical care and are worried about violence.

As the United States and other nations stepped up their efforts Sunday to get aid to millions of people in need, some aid groups said the effort was in disarray.

“I’m satisfied that we’re doing everything we can,” said Army Lt. Gen. Ken Keen, who heads the military effort and was at an outpost with the 82nd Airborne. “Is there frustration? Absolutely. We see it. We feel it. We understand it. … We need to do more, and we’re going to do more.”

In one example of the logjam occurring in Haiti, Doctors Without Borders said one of its cargo planes carrying an inflatable surgical hospital was blocked from landing Saturday at Port-au-Prince and diverted to the Dominican Republic, causing a 24-hour delay. A second plane landed Sunday.

Aircraft have been barred from landing if they can’t take off with the fuel they have on board, said George Hood of the Salvation Army.

“You have to fly in with enough fuel to get out,” he said. His group has 1 million meals waiting in Miami to be shipped once transit can be arranged.

Throughout the country, injured victims still await the arrival of doctors and medical supplies. Doctors Without Borders teams are working in five Port-au-Prince hospitals, but only two are fully functional. A third “operating theater” has been created for minor surgeries only.

Those lucky enough to escape injury face the rising threat of disease and death while awaiting food, water and medicine. Sunday, a makeshift camp in Petionville with 450 displaced people received its first aid since the earthquake: packets of crackers and bottles of water.

Clemente Dirre, 29, a mechanic, said aid has yet to reach his neighborhood. “People are dying. They are thirsty. They are hungry.”

In Dirre’s neighborhood and others, people asked the same question: When would aid arrive? Handwritten signs hung at the entrance to tent camps announced the obvious: “We need help.”

“The kids are barefoot. They are poor. They don’t have anyone to direct the aid people their way,” he said. “The problems are from the top.”

Obama administration officials in charge of the relief effort defended the decisions, noting the airport is the only major hub in Haiti.

“It’s a challenging, challenging situation,” U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) administrator Rajiv Shah said. “We’re aware that we’re racing against the clock.”

U.S. forces arrived over the weekend with more than 600,000 humanitarian rations. Keen said paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne delivered more than 70,000 bottles of water and 130,000 rations Saturday, a pace that should accelerate each day. More supplies are arriving at the airport than can be delivered because of transportation issues.

“As we move other equipment in here, we’ll be able to get more ground transportation to increase our tentacles out into the countryside,” Keen said.

U.S. officials also began distributing 250,000 liters of water to 52 distribution sites over the weekend. On Sunday, six water purification units arrived from Dubai, for a total of 10 since the earthquake hit.

Some relief agency officials say the first days of a disaster are always tough, particularly when aid workers have been affected by the disaster.

“Everybody here went through the earthquake,” said David Toycen, president of World Vision Canada, which has Haitian staffers who lost relatives and homes. “They are traumatized at some level. I’m reluctant to be overly critical.”

Caryl Stern, president of the U.S. Fund for UNICEF, said Haiti’s density presents the opposite problem posed by the 2004 tsunami, spread among 14 countries. Unlike Hurricane Katrina in 2005, there are no nearby airports, hospitals or stores to use.

“None of that exists in Haiti,” Stern said. “I think they’re doing the absolute best they can with what they have to work with.”

Veterans of relief efforts and experts on the process say there’s a disconnect between an operation’s effectiveness and what people see on TV.

“You can’t mobilize that fast,” said Andrew Natsios, who headed the U.S. Agency for International Development in 2004 when the Indian Ocean tsunami killed nearly 230,000 people. “That does not mean the relief effort is not working. It simply means it takes time to put everything in place.”

Shah, the USAID administrator, told USA TODAY during a visit Saturday that he shares people’s frustrations, but he defended the response so far.

“We went ahead and identified what is needed and are working with the president of Haiti and with the United Nations to provide it,” Shah said.

Some private relief groups sympathize with U.S. officials and say everything possible is being done to reach victims. The problem, said Joy Portella of Mercy Corps, is that “no one can get in or out or move around” because of logistical problems.

“It’s hard to reach people,” said Henrietta Fore, USAID administrator in 2007-09. “The transportation is an enormous limitation.”

Jack Harrald, a Virginia Tech professor and expert in disaster management, said the problems begin with Haiti’s geography. “First of all, it’s an island,” he said. “It’s not like we can drive a bunch of 18-wheelers down there.”

With the main port decimated by the earthquake and the main airport slowly returning to life, all relief materials are “going through a very small pipeline,” Harrald said.

That would be the airport, which is operating without a tower and terminal that have been condemned. It has one runway. Despite that, U.S. military forces have supervised more than 600 takeoffs and landings in five days, said Col. Buck Elton, who arrived Wednesday to take charge of the airport. “As soon as one aircraft departs, we have another one arrive,” he said.

Roads are slowing aid down as well. Along Haiti’s eastern border with the Dominican Republic, only two roads are passable, said Ben Hemingway, director of international operations for the International Medical Corps. A bottleneck is forming as refugees stream toward the border. Dominican authorities, fearing an influx of refugees, have clamped down on border crossings.

“All of these things are slowing down their ability to process large convoys,” Hemingway said.

‘Going to get more difficult’

Government officials past and present agree on one thing: The problems will only mount. With the Haitian government severely hampered, a central question must be answered: Who’s in charge?

The Obama administration refuses to step forward, insisting it is helping Haiti and the United Nations, along with other international partners. But there’s little question it is playing the dominant role.

The United States has “very appropriately taken the lead internationally,” said Tom Ridge, the nation’s first secretary of Homeland Security. “There’s no country better positioned to help orchestrate it or lead it than the United States.”

With Port-au-Prince prisoners on the loose and residents desperate for food and water, safety is becoming an ever-present concern.

Just outside the Port-au-Prince cemetery’s gates Sunday, a young man shot three times lay dying on the sidewalk. Residents said he and three others had been shot by police for stealing. Three of the men died.

“They lined up all four and shot them. This one took three shots,” said Clifford Cadet, 15, who watched from across the street.

Lubin, the doctor in Petionville, said people are attacking others on streets and in parks that have become temporary homes.

“People are getting mad and worried,” he said. “Things are going to get out of hand. … It’s starting already. You will not give it to them? Fine, then they will come and take it.”

After Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, hundreds of thousands of residents fled to Houston, Atlanta and other cities for shelter and services. In Haiti, there’s nowhere to go.

Former FEMA official Mark Ghilarducci, who responded to an earthquake in Kobe, Japan, in 1995, said military-style tent cities may be needed first.

“This is a very complicated situation because of the fact that Haiti’s so isolated,” he said. “There may be a segment that needs to be moved to another place in the world.”

Faced with all those problems, Kerline Auguste, 16, sees no hope for Haiti. She survived two days under the rubble of her house with her 18-month-old son; her parents and her son’s father perished.

“The only thing I dream about is leaving this country, because I have no hope in the future,” she said. “Even God can’t help us. The situation is too bad.”

Contributing: Jim Michaels and Ken Dilanian in Port-au-Prince; Mimi Hall in Washington; Richard Wolf and Oren Dorell in McLean, Va.

The question in Haiti right now is whether the military is respecting NGOs and cooperating with them. Some NGOs are saying they are having trouble getting equipment in because the US military, which is in charge at the Port-au-Prince airport, is keeping civilian relief planes from landing to make way for military aircraft. Military leaders need not only to acknowledge that NGOs have the most and best experience at providing direct relief to victims, there also should be regular coordination between militaries, NGOs and UN groups working in Haiti.

Haitian President Rene Preval needs to ask the UN to serve as the coordinator and then announce that act on behalf of the struggling government, which essentially was obliterated when the earthquake ruined most of Haiti’s capital of Port-Au-Prince. That would help quell criticisms that no one is in charge of the relief operation, a dangerous gap. Preval’s request for UN leadership would confer a legitimacy on one of the international organization’s agency, perhaps OCHA (Organization for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs), taking charge.

One other quick note. The criticism that the US military was favoring departures flying Americans back to the US seems warranted. To me, it’s one of the ways race is a factor in various aspects of this crisis.

Photo of Pakistani IDPs by Abdul Majeed Goraya/IRIN

A report on civilians impacted by the fighting comes from Refugees International.

Secretary of State Clinton will always be a lightning rod for people who are at odds with her or her husband, former President Bill Clinton. I remember back when Bill Clinton was making his first run for president, and there were wild stories out there that said Secretary of State Clinton’s legal writings urged children to rule over their parents, I looked up her writings. They were good, solid pieces that made strong arguments on children having rights, not becoming their own parents in terms of decisionmaking. Her positions had been totally skewed.

Now she is secretary of state and few people have talked about how she has buckled down and gotten off to an excellent start. (Ironically, I think one person who did note that was Pat Buchanan). She has done what she did as a freshman senator: quietly worked hard. Her voice was loudest in Africa, and I suspect that was so because she is passionate about the issues many Africans face, and she is especially passionate about the issues African women face and the roles they could be playing in making their communities and countries better.  

And thank goodness for that, too.

Highlighting women’s abilities and the constraints in many African countries that bar them from using their talents, isn’t just some sort of kooky feminist show, as some critics make it seem. Hillary is exactly right — and those involved in serious development work know it — that women hold the key in their countries to economic progress and improved family health and life. Many of the most effective social and economic programs were started and are run by women, who then put the money they earn to use for the betterment of their children, families and their communities.

Certainly not all poor men are wasteful and women are upstanding. I help support a young lady in Uganda and her mother has drunk away some of the money I have given her to support their family. But go to any poor twon, any poor village or displacement camp, and you’ll see many men simply nto contributing their share to their families’ well-being. Women need to be given as many opportunities and as much support as possible to step up amd contribute when men cannot or will not.     

Women in Africa are an untapped economic engine that can help lift their countries. 

Thank goodness Hillary understands that.

This news report from Agence France-Presse sounds a hell of a lot like the violence in 2006 that led up to the Islamic Courts winning power in Somalia from the transitional government. That government was created by Western powers from among Somalis outside the country, and had zero public support within Somalia. And it was toppled when the US convinced Ethiopia to invade, which only caused more violence and has led to this repeat of history.

So can someone tell me what exactly the administration of President Bush accomplished with its policy in Somalia? And will someone tell me how President Obama’s approach will be different so that it actually may help lead to something good and peaceful for Somalis? 

]]> http://muddynotebook.com/?feed=rss2&p=219 http://muddynotebook.com/?p=186 http://muddynotebook.com/?p=186#comments Sun, 19 Apr 2009 19:56:35 +0000 carolynthewriter http://muddynotebook.com/?p=186

By Brian Steidle

Current events also fit under the umbrella of “not forgetting.”  It seems these days that we barely hear a word about the ongoing convulsions in Myanmar, the Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Somalia (except for the pirates). Where has the news coverage on these humanitarian crises gone? Where has international interest gone, including among diplomats? There may well be new pushes on some of these topics, but we aren’t hearing much about them  — and that’s a shame. Because they are all remote places and voiceless people whose plight includes struggling against international inattention and “other crises first.” I have long said that the world community — and that includes the global media — needs to be able to multi-task, and not tell the people of Myanmar that they will just have to wait until other crises are cleaned up first.

The Obama administration and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have gotten off to a strong start on repairing U.S. foreign relations and recasting the United States as a leader in human rights. But i’d like to hear more from them - and hear it loudly - on what they are doing in locales that are much easier to forget about even as great suffering goes on so many years after we should have learned our lesson from the Holocaust. 

Detained democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi

Sen. Judd Gregg had an op-ed in today’s Boston Globe that makes some important points on how the Obama administration should proceed with its policy toward the military regime in Myanmar. He’s exactly right in his point that the US must continue to demand that the National League for Democracy, led by the detained democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi, must be part of the politics in that country. Really, it should be the leader in that country, considering that the NLD won parliamentary elections in 1990 that the junta rejected. The U.S. may well have to strike a deal with the junta, but that only should take place if NLD is part of an open political system that includes internationally observed, fair and free elections.

 http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2009/04/01/standing_firm_on_burma/

According to Population Action International: “The policy disqualifies foreign non-governmental organizations (NGOs) from receiving U.S. family planning funds if they provide legal abortion services in cases other than a threat to the life of the woman, rape, or incest; if they provide counseling and referral for abortion; or if they lobby to make abortion legal or more available in their own country.”

Photo Credit: Barbara Kinzie, Jhpiego

It also wasted precious U.S. aid money by impeding the improvement of women’s health care in desperately poor nations. Studies repeatedly have shown that one of the main engines of development is the improved status — physical and material — of women. To deny women a full range of medical information and treatment (and I’m not talking about abortion here) is to construct obstacles to economic progress for entire families in struggling parts of the world where women not only care for the children and the home, but often do the farming or other income-generating activities. It’s putting ideology above people and pragmatism.

The policy was first instituted in 1984 by President Reagan. It h been on a yo-yo ever since, with Democratic President Bill Clinton lifting it in 1993 and Republican President Bush reviving it in 2001. So Obama doesn’t need simply to claim his date on the calendar when he rescinded the policy. He needs to figure out how to prevent the policy from being reinstated.  

The obvious solution is a legislative one. That route was attempted in September 2007, when U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.) and U.S. Rep. Nita Lowey (D., N.Y.) introduced an amendment to a State Department funding bill that would have lifted those restrictions to U.S. aid as set out in Mexico City policy.  President Bush scuttled their effort by signing an executive order, which modified the rule, but still hamstrung women’s health groups.

There needs to be another legislative effort that rescinds the restrictions on U.S. aid for family planning and women’s health and funds an aggressive education campaign to promote abortion only in the cases of incest, rape and the life of the mother. Abortion should not be used as contraception in other cases. 

One of the other big problems with he global gag rule is that it showed U.S. ignorance about the status and rights of women in many developing countries. A nuanced, pragmantic policy that uses education to address the problem that comes with abusive practices against women will have a far more enduring impact on reducing the incidence of unnecessary abortions while providing women with a full range of health care.