The New Nation - Internet Edition

Nargis : Manmade disaster, says CSE

Nargis not just a natural disaster, but a human-made disaster because of climate change. Deaths of over 20,000 people and reports of over 40,000 missing is a sad reminder to the world that it has done little to contain greenhouse gas emissions-says CSE, the New Delhi based environmental watchdog.

Climate change is urgent, real and happening. We know that large parts of the sub-continent will be worst impacted. We know that we are climate victims.

But we do not connect the dots to recognise the fact that the tropical cyclone Nargis, which has led to such enormous devastation in Myanmar, is also because of changing climate. It is not just a natural disaster.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has established that climate change will intensify cyclones.

Is Nargis then the beginning of the change? If so, why is the rich industrialised world doing so little to contain its emissions? Why are we not recognising that these are victims of climate change? Why are we not beginning to penalise the polluters, so that emissions are reduced?

New Delhi, May 7, 2008: Tropical cyclone Nargis, which has killed over 20,000 people and reportedly left 40,000 missing in its wake, is not just a natural disaster, says Centre for Science and Environment (CSE). "While we can never pinpoint one disaster as the result of climate change, there is enough scientific evidence that climate change will lead to intensification of tropical cyclones," says Sunita Narain, director, CSE.

"Nargis is a sign of things to come. Last year, Bangladesh was devastated by the tropical cyclone Sidr. The victims of these cyclones are climate change victims and their plight should remind the rich world that it is doing too little to contain its greenhouse gas emissions," Narain added.

What the IPCC says

The 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had clearly observed that cyclones will increase in their intensity as a result of global warming. According to the IPCC: "There is observational evidence of an increase of intense tropical cyclone activity in the North Atlantic since about 1970, correlated with increases of tropical sea surface temperatures".

The IPCC also notes that "based on a range of models, it is likely that future tropical cyclones (typhoons and hurricanes) will become more intense, with larger peak wind speeds and more heavy precipitation associated with ongoing increases of tropical sea surface temperatures".

Big polluters responsible for these deaths and devastation

Says Mario D'Souza, CSE's climate change researcher: "The voices of the victims of climate change must be heard. Like the tropical cyclone Sidr, which ripped through Bangladesh in 2007, the Nargis has also left thousands dead and homeless. This devastation happened because the rich failed to contain emissions necessary for their growth."

Points out Narain: "This is the challenge of climate science. It is clear that while we will never be able to make absolute predictions or direct correlations between events that we see around us and the warming that is now inevitable, there is enough evidence to make connections. For instance, we know that rainfall in our world will become more variable - devastating for people dependent on rain-fed agriculture. And now we can see the intensification of tropical cyclones, another prediction of climate science."

Climate change is related to economic growth and wealth creation. The bulk of greenhouse emissions are related to burning of fossil fuels, for the energy that drives the world. It is no wonder then that the rich industrialised world, responsible for the bulk of the emissions in the atmosphere, has found it difficult to cut its emissions. After all, "its lifestyle is not negotiable", as a former American president has said.

In this growth path, 'more' is the mantra. While science tells us that drastic reductions are needed, no country is talking about limiting consumption.

But these emissions and lifestyles are now spelling doom for countries like Myanmar and Bangladesh - and the big polluters of the world, such as the US, cannot escape their responsibility and role in the 'dance of death' of tropical cyclones like Nargis. "The question that the world needs to answer now," says Narain, "is how to make these countries pay for the victims of climate change."

The only way it can be done is by making them reduce their emissions drastically - 30 per cent by 2020 and 80 per cent by 2050. There is no comparison between the emissions of countries like India or even China and rich big emitters of the world. There is a stock of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, built up over centuries in the process of creating nations' wealth. "This is the natural debt of nations, and they must pay up," says D'Souza.

The fact is that these countries are doing too little to cut their emissions. While the Kyoto Protocol agreed to meager emission reduction targets of 5 per cent by 2012, between 1990 and 2005, emissions have increased. In fact, emissions of countries like the US have increased by a whopping 20 per cent during that period. This is unacceptable.

It is time the voices of the victims of climate change are raised to demand tougher action from the rich world to reduce emissions. It is time that the victims are compensated and the climate polluters penalised.

New kind of counter-terrorist policing

When Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, finally took the reigns of power, he was warmly applauded for the new tone he set for politics in general and his seemingly more calculated and cautious approach to tackling the scourge of terrorism. This included a much cooler relationship with US President, George W Bush, than that of his predecessor Tony Blair.

This month, Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, launched a much-needed fresh approach to the Prevent component in the Government counter-terrorism strategy. With resources allocated, she said this will "enable us to develop a new kind of counter terrorist policing." To a chorus of charges from both the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats of breaching rules so close to the May 1 local and mayoral elections, she announced that she would be providing "more than three hundred new police posts across the country over the next three years." Their job in the Prevent strategies would be to target radicalisation in Muslim areas and therefore put a curb on potential terrorists. The new roles included training others, briefing on where radicalism might be happening, identifying people at risk of radicalisation, working with colleges, prisons and schools and building links with mosques.

In a speech to Basic Command Unit Commanders, Smith referred to her visits to Pakistan and Bangladesh, where she said their two governments had also seen the need to develop their own Prevent strategy. The new government in Islamabad is "determined to tackle the social and economic issues that it believes can create a climate for radicalisation." It wants to take on unregulated madrasahs, to challenge the world view of the terrorists, and communicate a credible counter narrative that will have an impact on communities in both Pakistan and the UK. As part of this, she said she wanted to explore "inviting moderate imams from South Asia to support their counterparts in communities in Britain."

As with the recent initiative to empower women, all attempts to address some of the inequalities, prejudice and alienation suffered by the Muslim community should be welcomed. But why are they only being launched as part of the counter terrorism strategy, which Smith implicitly acknowledged in an interview with the News of the World was not succeeding? She said that the threat was actually increasing with still 30 active plots, 200 networks of terrorist cells and 2,000 individuals being monitored. The Home Secretary admitted that it was not possible to "arrest our way" out of the terrorist threat and what was needed was a long-term approach. But singling out and targeting Muslims, however it may be couched, only serves to further stigmatise the community and can lead to the further alienation of Muslim youths, who feel like they are under siege.

In reassessing the Prevent component, Smith spelled out the need to address key challenges that drive radicalisation. But nowhere in her speech was there any mention of tackling some of the root political causes in this country. She said that what was needed first was to challenge both an ideology and an image of terrorism. The ideology promoted by terrorists "misreads a great religion, and wilfully distorts history and politics for its own purposes." It is inexcusable to glorify terrorism and call the indiscriminate killing of civilians heroic. But it is hard to ignore the fact that every terrorist video message speaks of the untold suffering caused by the disastrous 2003 Iraqi invasion and the dismal plight of the Palestinians while the world sits in silence.

The Government has continually pledged to put the creation of a viable Palestinian state at the top of its agenda, but increasingly stops short of even condemning the latest Israeli massacres. There can be no so-called neutral policy towards a belligerent aggressor which has occupied another territory for 60 years and has flagrantly breached international law with impunity. The Government has shown a vestige of regret for some of its mistakes over Iraq, but has fallen short of any real apology for the war that was based on false premises.

There are domestic issues that also need to be addressed: not just the rising tide of Islamophobia but the virtually annual bouts of anti-terrorism legislation that makes Muslims feel more and more like fifth columnists.

The need for more draconian laws is highly questionable when you take into account official figures which show that counter-terrorism legislation has led to so few extra convictions in the last seven years. Statistics compiled from police records by the offices of the National Coordinator for Terrorist Investigations lists only 41 Terrorism Act convictions up until the end of March last year, out of 1,165 arrests since 2001: less than three per cent. In contrast, offences under other laws including murder and explosives offences, conspiracies, firearms, grievous bodily harm and other related offences have resulted in 183 convictions for terrorist suspects.

Unfortunately, the Prime Minister appears to be retracting towards the discredited policies of his predecessor instead of being firmer in setting out his own vision. A complete break with the past is required and Brown needs to be more forceful in biting the bullet and calling for an inquiry into the Iraq war now and not waiting to follow on the coat-tails of the US again. As has been often repeated, any hopes of learning lessons from the threat of terrorism can only start with an independent judicial inquiry into the 2005 London bombings as is being called for by many of the survivors and families of the victims. Certainly, they do not want to wait for new legislation that will allow the overdue inquests to be held in secret.

A new long-term Prevent strategy for a different kind of counter-terrorist policing is certainly welcome as is this Government's call for a partnership with all the necessary players. These include all sections of the community and not just those selected by the Government. The deal Smith apparently struck with Pakistan, which has its own severe problems, to allow respected Islamic scholars to be brought over to Britain to combat extremism also appears to be a reverse of the Government's commitment to having more domestically-trained imams.

It also contrasts with what Communities Secretary, Hazel Blears, talked of in her speech to police commanders regarding the priority of strengthening leadership in Muslim communities by "increasing the number of home-grown imams." Of concern is the delay in establishing the Mosques and Imams National Advisory Board (MINAB), which has been subjected to Government interference and hampered by the refusal by many mosques and Islamic organisations to give it support. In regards to this, it is important to note that research carried out by Chester University last year contradicted the Government's approach of blaming Imams for radicalising young British Muslims, claiming there was no evidence for this.

If the Government wants its anti-terrorism policy to succeed, it should look afresh at its failed strategy.

(Source: The Muslim News, UK)

Iraq wracked by death and despair 5 years after invasion

Fatema G Valji

In 2003, allegedly to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, the US and Coalition forces launched a war to bomb Saddam Hussein into oblivion, topple the Ba'athist regime and instate a new era of "liberty and peace." By late April, down plonked Saddam's statues (the man himself remained underground) and tanks rolled into Baghdad flying the US victory flag. Five years, 3 980 US military deaths and in the calculation of Nobel laureate and former World Bank economist, Joseph Stilgitz, $3 trillion later, no WMD have been found, while Iraq overflows with blood and despair. Even by Iraq Body Count's conservative estimate, between 81,000 and 89,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed since the 2003 invasion. The World Health Organisation estimates that from 2003-2006, the US-led Multi-National Forces (MNF) and sectarian fighters have been responsible for the deaths of 151,000 Iraqi civilians. According to the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI), approximately 34,452 people were killed in 2006 alone, while the group Just Foreign Policy places the figure of civilian casualties in the last 5 years at a colossal 1 million.

The massive post-invasion death toll in Iraq has left tens of thousands of children orphaned and women widowed. In 2006, studies by the Ministry of Women's Affairs concluded there were approximately 300,000 widows in Iraq's capital city alone. In 2007, Iraq's anti-corruption board estimated there were 5 million orphans in Iraq. The widows, orphans and other survivors in Iraq's enduring conflict are steeped in a miserable marinade of insecurity and displacement. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, 4 million Iraqis are displaced, with approximately 2 million refugees in neighbouring Syria and Jordan.

In Baghdad, one of the world's most dangerous cities, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) estimates a quarter of the city's 6 million residents have been displaced from their homes. March figures indicate that in spite of the recent US troop surge in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad still suffers a reduced murder rate of 29 violent deaths a day.

With unemployment levels between 25 and 40 percent, and over 50% in some areas, food insecurity and deprivation is also rife. Before the 2003 invasion, twelve crippling years of US-led economic sanctions, resulted in the death by malnourishment and lack of medical care of 1 million Iraqis. Last July, Oxfam revealed that 43 percent of Iraqis were earning less than 1 dollar a day while 4 million Iraqis depended on emergency assistance for survival.

Millions of Iraqis are also deprived of clean water and medical care. According to the ICRC, "the humanitarian situation in most of the country remains amongst the most critical in the world." With water and sanitation systems in utter disrepair, 70 percent of Iraqis do not have access to safe drinking water.

While in the 1980s Iraq boasted one of the best healthcare systems in the Middle East, in the volatility of recent years, thousands of doctors have fled, hospitals are failing and children's healthcare now ranks amongst the world's bottom three. The ICRC declares that Iraq's healthcare system is now "in worse shape than ever."

The suffering of Iraq's children is particularly harrowing. There are more starving children in Iraq now than during the black decade of West's economic sanctions, during which half a million children died due to severe malnourishment and the breakdown of sanitation and healthcare (UNICEF). Child malnutrition rates, Oxfam reveals, have increased from 19 percent during the 1991-2003 embargo, to 28 percent currently.

The scars of child trauma associated with sustained violence and insecurity also run deep in Iraq. Many children pass dead bodies on their way to school, wake up to the sound of gunshots and have seen one or more relatives die in mortar or bomb attacks. Studies by Iraq's Ministry of Health show 70 percent of children in Baghdad suffer trauma symptoms such as stress related bed-wetting or stuttering.

The millions of children ensnared by the gripping fear and distress of living in a war zone, cope with limited support - hospitals are too overstretched to deal with psychological trauma, many of the best psychologists have fled and international organisations such as Save the Children and the Iraqi Red Crescent Society have suspended work with child victims due to insecurity or limited funding.

Yet the incessant carnage fuelling terror and trauma, persists. While President George Bush claims that last year's 30,000 US troop surge is allowing "normalcy" to return to Iraq, Iraq's official March death toll, higher than any other month since August 2007, indicates otherwise. Heavy fighting in Baghdad and Basra and a scourge of deadly bomb attacks killed 1,082 Iraqis in March alone, including 952 civilians.

It seems that for Iraqis daily battling death and indigence in an imploding country, the devastating legacy of Iraq's plunge into war 5 years ago, will be stoically suffered for years to come.

Israel weaknesses surface

Ayman El-Amir

Next week Israel will celebrate the 60th anniversary of its declaration of independence in the presence of an enviable number of dignitaries and heads of state. One week later, on 15 May, the Palestinians will commiserate their Nakba -- the day they were driven from their homeland by Jewish paramilitary settlers who established the state of Israel. While Israel will be showered with words of admiration and congratulation, principally by those countries that helped create it, the Palestinians will be huddled together in exile or under military occupation, encircled by the Israeli wall of shame that was probably inspired by the Nazi wall that enclosed the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw in 1940. The only statements making reference to them will be the empty rhetoric of Arab officials calling for peace and the establishment of a Palestinian state, and probably maligning Hamas. Victors will continue writing history, at least as long as they remain powerful.

At 60, Israel appears solid, focussed, constantly expanding and basking in the adulation of its powerful supporters and the resignation of its intimidated neighbours. By contrast, the Palestinians, evicted from their homeland, appear weak, divided, starved, vulnerable and spurned by most Arab leaders. Israel, a warrior state armed to the teeth with conventional and nuclear weapons, represents a success for the great powers in more ways than one. Their most important achievement was offloading the centuries old "Jewish question" on the Arabs. Ever since, Israel has proved a belligerent state bent on aggression and expansion, which was also useful to the powers that nurtured it. However, Israel's atrocities against the Palestinians and other Arabs, and its extensive settlement under occupation of their land, makes it appear more like a giant on stilts than a peace-loving nation that lives by the norms of international law.

In spite of the glow of success, two historical factors are corroding the underpinnings of Israel as a state. First, Israel was founded on the 17th century doctrine of settler colonialism -- the New World migration model of which the United States is the unique surviving example. As European settlers arrived in droves to the New World that Christopher Columbus discovered in 1492, the land was ethnically cleansed of its indigenous population, especially North American Indians. Hundreds of tribes and ethnic communities were systematically devastated or driven west of the Mississippi river to make room for European colonists. In 1778, even before becoming the nation, new Americans signed a treaty with the Indian Delawares -- the first of what would become a body of more than 380 treaties that never held in the face of the desire to expand. Under those treaties, the nascent US gained more than one billion acres of Indian land in North America, mostly by force, coercion and outright war, with some bought for as little as 10 cents an acre. Consciously or otherwise, this was the model adopted by the Zionist movement to seize Palestine under the fallacy of "a land without a people for a people without a land", with the support of the British via the Balfour Declaration. This shared model of ethnic cleansing and land expropriation is the strongest bond between Israel and the US.

During its so-called "war of liberation", Israel committed 70 massacres and atrocities against the Palestinian people as part of a methodical campaign of ethnic cleansing. It terrorised and expelled 85 per cent of the population from 747 Palestinian towns and villages. Most of these were either obliterated to prevent the return of Palestinian inhabitants or given to immigrant Jewish settlers. At the time, this created a population of 900,000 refugees who were "temporarily" relocated to neighbouring Arab countries. Palestinian refugees are now estimated at 4.5 million, half of them in host Arab countries. According to Salman Abu Setta, general coordinator of the Right of Return Congress, 80 per cent of the Jewish population of Israel live in about 10 per cent of the historic land of Palestine under the British mandate. Most of the territories extending from Beersheba in the south to the northern swathe of the Upper Galilee are scarcely populated. The density of the Palestinian population in Gaza is 6,000 individuals per one square kilometre -- a total of 1.5 million Palestinians heaped upon each other under inhuman blockade conditions. Israel rejects the Palestinians' right of return even to these vacant areas, justified by what amounts to a racist policy of maintaining the "Jewish" nature of the state -- another echo of Nazi Germany under Hitler.

Immigration to Israel has become a matter of economic opportunity, not the claimed pseudo-religious Zionist ideology of "return to the Promised Land". The population of Israel is 5.2 million out of a world Jewry population of 13 million, with about five million living in the US. Immigration to Israel is declining; the fertility rate among the Jewish population is 0.5 per cent, far below the population replacement value, while the Palestinian fertility rate is nearly three per cent. Israeli politicians regard this as a bomb ready to explode. Israeli concerns have prompted rising calls to declare Israel an exclusively Jewish state where only Jews are eligible for citizenship. The rest -- that is, the Palestinians who have lived on that land since the time of the Canaanites -- are regarded as a nuisance to be evicted when circumstances are favourable.

Israel's main problem, however, is that unlike the American Indians or indigenous populations in other colonised lands, the Palestinians refuse to disappear or melt away. Despite the brutal occupation, genocide, mass detentions, numberless checkpoints, the economic blockade, daily humiliation and starvation, and the powerful support afforded to Israel by the US administration, Palestinians refuse to be amassed together in a reservation under the title of a Palestinian state. Palestinian elders keep the keys to their original houses, the deeds to their property, and teach their children about the horrors they had to endure at the hands of those they once embraced as neighbours in the historic land of Palestine.

Sixty years after its "independence", Israel has lost its moral compass. Aggression, occupation and expansion have become its most vaunted practices. Hence it has no sense of security. It seeks regional recognition and cooperation but enforces a system of apartheid against the Palestinians. It forces a stop at Yad Vashim on the schedule of every visiting dignitary but kills Palestinian men, women and children, bulldozes their houses and orchards, confiscates their land, pumps out their water, arrests and detains thousands of them indefinitely, violates every human dignity under the sun, and denies the nation it subsumed its legitimate rights. Israel is not planning on any just and lasting settlement with the Palestinians. Like its master, the US, it only believes in the force of arms -- the ability to subjugate by destruction. That is what the Nazis did to the Jews and other minorities in Europe; and that is what the Jews of Israel are doing to the Palestinians. What Israel and the Western alliance call "acts of terrorism" by fundamentalists are the same acts they cheered as heroic by the resistance to Nazi occupation in Europe.

When the White Star Line launched the Titanic ocean liner on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York in February 1912, it was widely promoted as a passenger ship "designed to be unsinkable". It was equipped with the most sophisticated available technology and the best crew of the time. While en route to New York the Titanic hit an iceberg on 14 February and sank to the bottom of the Atlantic, to the shock of the world and the maritime industry. How long can Israel afford to behave as the unsinkable ship of the Middle East?

(The writer is former Al-Ahram correspondent in Washington, DC. He also served as director of United Nations Radio and Television in New York.)