American NGO workers prevented from leaving Egypt
Son of US transportation secretary among several election monitors placed on 'no-fly list' as tension with Cairo escalates
Tension between the US government and the Egyptian military authorities has reached a new peak after it emerged that several American non-governmental workers, including the son of a member of President Obama's administration, are being prevented from leaving the country in an ongoing spat over Egypt's recent parliamentary elections.
Sam LaHood, the son of the US transportation secretary Ray LaHood, was turned back at the airport in Cairo on Saturday in a significant escalation of the diplomatic stand-off between the two countries. LaHood heads the Egyptian outpost of the International Republican Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank that had been monitoring the elections held in recent weeks in the wake of the toppling of President Hosni Mubarak.
According to Politico he was placed on a "no-fly list", without explanation, after he tried to board a plane in an attempt to escape rising hostility towards his and other foreign NGOs. LaHood had previously been named in the state-run press in Cairo.
Lorne Craner, president of IRI, said that Egyptian officials quizzed about the no-fly policy had told the institute that they were still completing their investigations following the December raids and that they might "go to trial soon".
"That's pretty disquieting – to have that kind of thing raised by an ally that's receiving a billion and a half dollars in US aid each year," Craner said.
He added that the Obama administration was working very hard to ameliorate the crisis. All five IRI workers in Cairo who have been put on the no-fly list, three of whom are American, are still free to move around the country and have their passports.
Craner said that at first the military generals had responded to the raids as though they were utterly unaware of what had happened. "But it's been nearly a month since then and the generals have been approached on a number of occasions and yet things have only got worse. So you have to wonder what's going on," he said.
The move follows a raid conducted on 29 December against 17 NGOs by Egyptian security forces in which computers, money and documents were seized. President Obama raised the harassment of US and other foreign NGOs in a phone conversation with the Egyptian military chief Field Marshal Tantawi on 20 January.
It is understood that six workers in the Cairo office of the National Democratic Institute, three of them American, have also been told they may not leave the country. NDI was among several groups involved in election monitoring.
News of the no-fly lists prompted a rash of diplomatic activity and public condemnation against the actions of the Egyptian authorities. John McCain, the US senator for Arizona, said that he had watched events in Egypt with "growing alarm and outrage. It's outrageous that these individuals would be held against their will by Egyptian authorities and prohibited from leaving the country."
The escalation poses a sensitive diplomatic challenge for the Obama administration. The US government is coming under mounting pressure from Congress to suspend the $2bn in aid it gives Cairo every year, largely in the form of military assistance.
While needing to be seen to protest against the Egyptian military junta's resistance to democratic change and ongoing human rights violations, the administration is also keen not to destabilise its relationship with one of its key allies in the region.
The timing of the move against the foreign workers comes as a further blow to the reform movement in Egypt that has been pushing for real democratic change in the wake of last year's popular uprising against Mubarak. The first democratically-elected parliament to sit in Egypt in 60 years convened on Monday, raising hopes that the junta would honour its promise to cede power in June.
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NGOs talk of collapse as their funding dries up
Government rejects allegations of biased grants.
CAPE TOWN - Welfare organisations who haven’t received lottery funding this year have spoken about their plight, saying they may be forced to close down or drastically cut their services to the poor.
“We’re in a desperate situation. The people we support with food parcels twice a month were crying when we told them we would probably not be able to help them anymore. They have nowhere else to go for help,” the chairperson of the Port Alfred Benevolent Society, Joy Altson, told Moneyweb.
After years of support from the National Lotteries Board, Alston was informed that her application had been turned down because of “insufficient funds” and a decision “to fund only first-time applicants”.
She says this came as a shock.
“I put in a huge appeal. I said: ‘If you have to give me less, then you have to do it. But don’t cut me out completely. I can’t turn around to 1 500 people and say: ‘I can’t give you anything.’”
But the NLB hasn’t responded. “If we don’t get money from the lottery, we’re going to have to close down.”
The society’s community gardens and skills programmes are also at stake.
Alston’s story is one of many that have emerged this week, a week in which there’s been a flurry of criticism about the way in which the lottery money is distributed.
On Friday morning, about 400 protestors, mostly from NGOs, marched on the offices of the National Lottery Fund in Pretoria.
“It’s time we made our voices heard,” said NGO trainer, Sandra Miller, who convened the protest. She said non-profits have been wary of protesting in the past as they don’t want to jeopardise their applications to the NLB.
Civic leaders, NGOs and the Democratic Alliance have all spoken out about the lottery funds this week, with the DA’s spokesperson on Trade and Industry Jacques Smalle alleging that it had seen “a growing trend of NGOs being overlooked in favour of ANC-affiliated organizations.
“As a result, poor people suffer while party elites benefit”, the DA has charged.
But the Department of Trade and Industry’s spokesperson, Sidwell Medupe, says the process of adjudication is performed by independent distributing agencies “with no room for any political organisation to influence.
“These committees act without fear or prejudice in the interest of all South Africans”, he told Moneyweb.
Alarm bells were sounded just over a year ago when R40m in lottery funds was given to the ANC-affiliated National Youth Development Agency (NYDA).
More recently, Shelagh Gastrow, the founder of Inyathelo, the South African Institute of Advancement, which assists NGOs, raised what she alleges was “an extremely dubious payment” to Makhaya, an organisation based in Serbia that says on its website that it promotes the arts and tourism to South Africa.
“It’s a for-profit company masquerading as a non-profit. When we looked it up, we discovered they supply services to the South African diplomatic corps and run events for them. Many staff members live in Serbia, yet they walk off with R50m from lottery funds,” she told Moneyweb.
The DA claims that the NGO employs the daughter of the National Lotteries Board chairperson, Alfred Nevhutanda.
Administrative glitches can also lead to funding cuts.
CEO of Sparrow Ministries, Rose Letwaba, says it appears an administrative error put an end to its funding for this year.
“The NLB’s excuse was that we sent our application with the number on the envelope instead of on the document. We had applied for R29m. But we got nothing. We’re just waiting for the end of the financial year. But we’ve already called in the staff to say we’ll have to retrench people.”
For the past few years, the NLB was the key funder for the Sparrow Ministries hospice and children’s home looking after 225 children and 80 adults.
NGOs applying for funding have to fax their documents to the NLB. If small administrative mistakes are made or papers lost, claims are often rejected – and there’s no appeals process. They say it’s devastating when they rely so much on lotto funding.
“We’re just hoping that someone at Lotto will see things from a grassroots level. We don’t do our work for the money. We do it for humanity,” says Letwaba.
Miller says haphazard and ‘biased’ dispensing tactics have come at a particularly bad time for welfare agencies and NGOs.
“It couldn’t come at a worse time when corporate South Africa is broke. The recession has taken its toll.”
Gastrow believes the distribution system is “fatally flawed and unworkable”.
“There’s no process by which people can object to a decision. There’s no clarity about what the lottery is for. Even municipalities can apply for funding.
Gastrow believes the system needs to be urgently overhauled.
Amendments to the Lotteries Act are already on the Parliamentary programme of the Portfolio Committee on Trade and Industry.
But Gastrow says tinkering alone will fall far short of what’s needed.
Both Gastrow and the DA have called for board members on the NLB’s distribution agencies to serve full-time. Currently, they only serve 1.5 days a month. “This means grants don’t get processed and money goes unallocated,” says Smalle.
Medupe says he’s aware of the backlog. “The minister has impressed on the NLB that it must implement measures to improve turnaround times. These are being monitored closely.”
During a press conference in Pretoria on Friday, Nevhutanda, conceded that they needed to find new ways to deal with the backlogs.
“We take allegations made in the media seriously – claims of requests for bribes, losing information and irregular grants. Remedial action will be taken where needed,” he told journalists.
But, for now, his words hold cold comfort for people like Letwaba and Altson.
*Kim Cloete is an experienced journalist with a keen interest in the political economy. Before pursuing a career as an independent journalist, she spent time as a television journalist and later Parliamentary Editor for SABC Radio and TV News. Kim was awarded a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University in 2005/06 and has received several national and international awards for her work.
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Should NGOs take the corporate bait?
This is the third of a four-part series on innovative ways to deliver aid in our conflicted world.
Every economic slump ushers in predictable, if not propagandistic, debates about Official Development Assistance, otherwise known as foreign aid. While Stephen Harper’s government has frozen aid spending through to 2015, the real anti-aid evangelicals can be found to the south, at the Republican primaries. Ron Paul, whose greatest accomplishment is that the press is still willing to hand him a microphone, has pledged to cancel American foreign aid altogether. There are, therefore, compelling reasons to consider where aid is now and where it might be headed.
The recession has been brutal to those who are reliant on humanitarian assistance for their very survival. European governments have, not surprisingly, made drastic cuts to their aid spending. So has the U.S. Congress, and many foundations are operating on reduced budgets. The effect has been that non-governmental organizations around the world are swimming in a rapidly evaporating pool of funding, raising the competitive stakes alongside a host of ethical questions.
On this point, several of the world’s leading international charities are now keeping some rather curious company, which could either represent the future of aid – a progressive merger of economic interests and social development – or its fire sale. In September, the Canadian International Development Agency announced a controversial multimillion-dollar grant to three leading international charities who will partner with major Canadian mining firms on development initiatives in African and Latin American countries in which these companies operate.
Under the deal, World University Services Canada, Plan Canada and World Vision Canada will receive CIDA funding totalling $6.7-million for projects with Rio Tinto Alcan, Iamgold and Barrick Gold, respectively. The largest share was for the Plan Canada-Iamgold project, which will take all but $1-million of the CIDA funding over the next five years. For their part, the three mining companies will contribute additional support just shy of $2-million. The combined annual net profit for these firms is more than $4-billion.
Now, on any given day that CIDA makes a funding announcement, the sanctimony served up by those who were overlooked is best cut with the knives sticking out of the backs of those who emerged as big winners. But this one struck at the very heart of the NGO community, leading many to shudder and ask of their colleagues, “How could you?”
Two of the participating mining firms have recently been involved in labour and human-rights disputes related to their operations abroad.
The central tension is whether these NGOs are serving as bagmen, advancing Canadian mining interests with taxpayer funding by appeasing local communities with gifts of health care and education, or whether they are simply piloting a new model of co-operation that might positively influence corporate behaviour overseas while simultaneously addressing development gaps.
Certainly the latter is what the executive director of WUSC, Chris Eaton, is hoping for. He was quoted in The Dominion newspaper expressing his sincere desire that such partnerships will “nudge along good practice.” Perhaps, but they can also buy silence in the case of bad practice, which is inherently more dangerous. And why would CIDA pick up any of the tab to improve the reputation of Canada’s mining sector abroad, if not to cement Mr. Harper’s vision for an aid policy that serves Canada’s trade and economic interests first, officially clearing the belfry of all Pearsonian bats?
Welcome to the new humanitarianism, where government funding is scarce, traditional donors are aging and more organizations are turning to corporate alliances that would once have been viewed as heresy. Yet as the aid sector goes in search of new funding models, we might do well to remember a line from the 17th-century English poet John Dryden: “Better shun the bait than struggle in the snare.”
Samantha Nutt is a founder of the NGO War Child and the author of Damned Nations: Greed, Guns, Armies and Aid. To see a video conversation with Dr. Nutt, visit the Canadian International Council’s website at www.opencanada.org/newhumanitarians.
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D.C. lobbyists cut ties with Egyptian government as raid controversy deepens
Several Washington lobbyists announced Saturday that they are ending their contract with the Egyptian government, as the controversy deepens over raids conducted on the offices of American advocacy groups.
Since the late December raids on nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) based in the U.S. and other countries, the Egyptian government has intensified its crackdown. Most recently, the government has prevented several Americans, including the son of U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, from leaving the country.
As the State Department intervened, the D.C. lobbying firm that represented the Egyptian government for years -- even before Hosni Mubarak was overthrown -- came under fire. Though one of the principals has argued that the lobbyists told Cairo the raids were a bad idea, the firm did send out a memo after the crackdown that appeared to justify the government's actions.
In a written statement Saturday, the PLM Group announced it was "immediately ending their relationship after a four-year engagement."
"We hope that Egyptians continue to enjoy the deepening of democracy in their country, and that Egypt remains a strong, stable and vital ally of the United States," the lobbyists said.
The principals in the group are former U.S. Reps. Toby Moffett and Bob Livingston, as well as Tony Podesta. All three have their own separate lobbying firms in D.C.
The statement did not offer any explanation, but it comes after U.S. lawmakers put pressure on the lobbyists.
Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., earlier in the week claimed "their influence-peddling undermines American values."
"Is there no shame in this town?" Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., said in an interview with FoxNews.com on Wednesday when asked about the lobbying work.
Livingston told FoxNews.com, though, that his group was not defending the raids, and in fact told the government that they were a "mistake."
Meanwhile, the U.S. government and the NGOs are struggling to get the Egyptian government to ease off.
State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said Friday that the Obama administration had not made progress with the Egyptians on the NGO issue.
Sam LaHood, one of at least six Americans currently barred from leaving Egypt, told Fox News the workers are "kind of expecting the worst."
"There hasn't been a lot of movement -- nothing has really changed," he said.
Though the workers have not been arrested, they are concerned about the possibility. LaHood said if the case did go to trial, the penalty could be up to five years in jail.
LaHood runs the Egypt program for the International Republican Institute. The offices of the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House, other U.S.-based groups, were also raided last month, in addition to the offices of other non-American groups.
"It's a little bit scary for us to be facing these very serious allegations but, you know, also for the Egyptian employees who work for these organizations," LaHood told Fox News.
The Egyptian government closed the NGOs' offices and confiscated equipment during the raids -- the groups claim the government so far has not returned the material. They were accused of operating without the proper registration and using foreign money.
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NGOs upbeat over China's environmental transparency progress
Green activists applauded steady progress on environmental transparency in China after public campaigns forced major players, including Apple and the Beijing government, to release sensitive information on pollution and its origins.
A survey on openness and accountability released Monday showed that, while the overall situation remains poor, an increasingly informed public is putting greater pressure on companies and local authorities to clean up.
The upbeat assessment was made in the third annual report on Pollution Information Transparency by Chinese NGOs and the US-based Natural Resources Defence Council, just days after two major steps in the campaign to improve environmental transparency in China.
This month, the Beijing government started releasing real-time data on the most toxic form of air pollution. On Friday, Apple published a previously secret list of its suppliers and outlined the steps it has taken to deal with illegal discharges of hazardous waste.
The latest transparency report shows patchy progress in releasing data and responding to requests for information, although these are legally mandated.
In a survey of 113 cities, the authors note gradual improvement among municipal governments in economically advanced regions, such as the Pearl River delta and the Yangtze basin. However, in other areas, such as Shandong and Inner Mongolia, the authorities were less responsive than a year earlier.
But the overall trend was positive, marking the third year of gains. Recent scandals and growing public pressure have forced a rethink. Last year, the company's senior executives opened communications with Chinese environmental organisations represented by Ma Jun of the Institute for Public and Environmental Affairs.
"We can draw the conclusion that a system for environmental information transparency has been established at an initial stage in China," said Ma.
There were also advances in the corporate sector. The report noted that more than 500 enterprises are now communicating with environmental NGOs about their monitoring and disclosure systems. This is up from almost none five years ago, but there are many thousands that have yet to engage with civil society in such a constructive manner.
Until recently Apple was one of them. The US firm had been accused of being as secretive and unresponsive as the Chinese authorities when its suppliers were implicated in labour disputes and pollution scandals.
Last week, however, the company responded to critics of its environmental, labour and transparency standards by detailing how it has dealt with problems ranging from illegal pollution discharges to falsified account books.
The US firm said it expanded the number of audits by 80 percent last year and, in addition, launched a specialised program in China to address environmental concerns.
The measures were detailed in the latest Progress Report on Apple Supplier Responsibility, which was released on Friday. For the first time, the annual report included the names of 156 companies that together account for 97 percent of Apple's outsourced manufacturing business.
The company found facilities that had been breaking air emission and wastewater discharge limits, using factories that were releasing industrial effluent via unapproved outflow pipes and failing to register pollution. In the most egregious cases, Apple said it had suspended business with the violators until improvements were in place.
Management of hazardous waste and air pollution appeared to be a particular worry. The compliance rate with Apple's standards in these category was just 68%, suggesting a widespread failure to implements the necessary safety and monitoring procedures. The company said 69 facilities were not recycling or disposing of hazardous waste as required by law.
However, it remains unclear how far down the supply chain the company's audits have reached. Many foreign businesses acknowledge difficulty in monitoring their supplier's suppliers, although it is often at the lower levels – where the profit margins are tightest – that the worst transgressions take place. Other firms are also considering more positive steps, including European telecoms operators who last week held a workshop on improving transparency in their supply chains.
To improve the system, environmentalists are calling for a national registry where companies can publicly report their pollution data, which would accelerate, simplify and improve public supervision. This has been effective in other nations.
"There is plenty of room to improve but we are seeing progress every year," said Bernadette Brennan of the National Resources Defence Council. "On the whole the trend is towards open information. More people realise this is good for society and good for business."
State planners are aware that transparency was a key element in the clear-up of other polluted countries, but it has struggled to enforce compliance and lacks the tools of an independent judiciary and free media that were also key elements in spreading and using data to put pressure on polluters.
The ministry of environment previously warned that polluters were operating in a "black box" but the latest report suggests progress is possible.
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NGOs seek tit-for-tat rules on visas
BEIRUT: More than 20 civil society groups called on the government Wednesday to treat foreign nationals who wish to visit Lebanon the same way their countries treat Lebanese when they apply for visas, expressing frustration that Lebanese are treated as “inferior” by many countries.
The groups also called on the government to pressure states to treat Lebanese decently.
“We call on the Lebanese state to force states with which it maintains diplomatic ties to treat the Lebanese the same way Lebanon treats the nationals from these states,” activist Hayat Arslan told a news conference at her residence in Aley which was attended by representatives of nearly two dozen associations.
“We are treated as inferior when we seek a visa to most countries, whether for work, tourism or medical treatment, as if we are second class people,” she added.
Arslan called on the government to enforce certain rules governing how embassies treat Lebanese.
According to Arslan, Lebanon should force foreign embassies to set dates for appointments for Lebanese seeking visas within a “specified and plausible period of hours or days, rather than weeks or months.”
The civil society groups also requested that Lebanese applying for a visa be treated decently, be given explanations if their request for an appointment is rejected, be notified if any necessary documents for a visa application are missing and have fees returned to them by consulates or embassies if they are denied a visa.
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NGOs probed over N-funds
An official team from the ministry of Union home affairs resumed its inspection Wednesday, after the Pongal holidays, of non-governmental organisations affiliated to the Thoothukudi Roman Catholic diocese.
The 2-member team of Mr Johinder Prasad, under secretary (audit), ministry of home affairs, and Mr Sujith Kumar Singh, that was said to have begun its auditing on January 10 on a complaint that foreign funding received by NGOs affiliated to the Thoothukudi Roman Catholic diocese misused the funds to instigate the anti-KKNPP movement, suspended its inspection for three days beginning January 15 in view of the Pongal festival.
The team also inspected the Thalamuthunagar refugee camp, near Thoothukudi, where the Thoothukudi multi-purpose social service society (TMSSS) of the diocese was doing welfare activities using foreign funds.
The prime minister’s office minister V. Naray-anasamy had recently stated that some of the NGOs in Thoothukudi were instigating the anti-KKNPP struggle using foreign funds.
He also warned that their FCRA registration would be cancelled. Reacting to this audit, Thoothukudi Roman Catholic bishop Yvon Ambroise said it was only a usual audit of the ministry.
He also threatened legal action against a section of the media that continues to publish false news to tarnish their image.
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Waiting on the pavement and pining for their loved ones
Labourers, many from different parts of India, are seated on the pavement. Every time a vehicle goes past them toward the compound, they stand up, pinning their hopes on the arrival of an officer. The wait is for their child under the custody of the Child Welfare Committee (CWC), and their hope is that their child will be returned.
At a time when Norway's child welfare system is in the news for its contentious decision to take two Indian children into custody, a look at the process adopted by the Child Welfare Committee (CWC), a similar government agency here, to identify the rightful custodian of “neglected” or “abandoned” children in the city shows how painfully insensitive it is to the needs of the child or the parents.
The scene witnessed recently, along the lane leading to the CWC premises in Purasawalkam in Chennai, simply reflects the agony of migrant labourers trying to obtain their children who had gone missing.
Santoshi and Gabbar, migrant workers from Bilaspur in Chhattisgarh, were waiting with their two sons. “Our daughter Lakshmi (8) was taken by the police on Pongal day last week. We were buying sweets near the Marina beach and suddenly, three police officers took her away,” said Santoshi on Friday, breaking down as she explained that they had been coming there every other day during that week.
Buying sweets or begging?
Luckily for her, the CWC concluded its proceedings later that evening and returned the couple's daughter. According to P. Manorama, Chairperson, CWC, the child was brought to the committee since she was found begging on the day before Pongal. “We even found the child with money.” However, the couple had told The Hindu that the girl was buying sweets at a stall near the Marina with her mother standing nearby.
The CWC also said its enquiry revealed that the family came to Chennai and was living here for more than two years, but the child had never been to school. Santoshi and Gabbar, however, had told The Hindu that they had been in Chennai for less than two months.
Explaining the delay in handing over the girl to her parents, Ms. Manorama said: “Cases are posted for hearing 15 days after the child is brought, which gives us sufficient time to collect details about the whereabouts of the parents. And after Pongal holidays, the Purasawalkam unit of the CWC could meet only on Friday.”
The parents of the girl agreed before the committee to go back to their hometown, and produced train tickets as the proof of intent. “But it is not in our hands to ensure that the child does not go back to begging in her hometown,” she added.
The child was away from her parents for about a week, but the period was rather tormenting for Santoshi and Gabbar. According to the couple, the CWC, as part of its procedure to establish the parents' identity, asked for their ration card. “Our ration card is in Hindi, and they wanted it translated to English,” said Gabbar. The CWC denied that it had asked for a translated copy of the family's ration card. However, Santoshi and Gabbar told The Hindu that they were asked for a translated copy, and they tried in many shops, even big ones, but didn't succeed in getting the translation done.
The CWC, functioning under the Department of Social Defence, has the primary function of caring for “neglected” or “abandoned” children. Personnel from the Juvenile Aid Protection Unit rescue such children and bring them to the CWC, in addition to NGOs and other citizens contacting the child helpline. Sources in the unit said as many as 318 children were rescued in 2011 and in 2012 so far, 49 children have been rescued.
Every day about three to four beats (teams of two members of the unit) set out on “rounds” at different spots, such as railway stations, bus terminuses, or busy market areas. “We look for children without slippers, dressed in rags or those who look helpless. I have been motivating my teams to rescue at least one child every day,” said an official.
“Efficient process needed”
Following the rescue, the CWC follows a detailed procedure, involving enquiries on the child's parents and background and whether he/she was going to school. The CWC may be justified in adopting a thorough procedure to verify the identity of parents to ensure the child, when returned, would be taken care of well and provided education, but the process of this verification is not only slow, but also ambiguous in some parents' view. Indefinite waits on the premises, inadequate information and language barriers only make their situation worse.
Pullamma and Venkateswarulu, a couple from Machilipatnam, Krishna District, Andhra Pradesh, were waiting for an update on their 10-year-old-daughter Sandya Priyanka. As construction labourers, Venkateswarulu makes Rs.300 every day, while Pullamma gets a daily wage of Rs.200. “We were near Anna Salai and she went to buy a bun. Suddenly, we found her missing … we were later directed to this place. In addition to our ration card, they asked for her school certificate and we have brought it today,” says Pullamma, showing a letter attested by their District Educational Officer. Some parents say they are happy with the care given at the CWC's reception home, but the separation can be painful. “The food and place is okay, but the child misses us a lot,” says another mother, waiting for her son.
A more systematic and efficient process, which is also transparent, can help prevent further victimisation of parents or migrant labourers, who are often in a disadvantageous position already, say activists working in the area of child rights and protection.
Vidya Reddy of Tulir - Centre for the Prevention and Healing Child Sexual Abuse, says no documentation that substantiates the orders is provided to the family or the complainant. “What can a migrant workers' family make of an order? There is no advice available on the next possible recourse. Sadly, the Juvenile Justice system is designed as one that addresses issues of those in a socio-economically disadvantaged position. We see that the delivery of services to this section is always poor.”
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Braving Burundi: extract from Crazy River
Following in the footsteps of the great 19th-century explorers for his new book, Crazy River, Richard Grant travelled to Burundi to experience life in the poorest, most corrupt country in the world
At an internet place called Baby Come and Call in Kigoma, the biggest town on the Tanzanian stretch of Lake Tanganyika, I checked the latest news coming out of Burundi.
Some demobilised child soldiers had rioted in their rehabilitation centre and spilled out into the streets, saying they were hungry and demanding that sardines be added to their daily food rations. Grenades were still going off with alarming regularity. An overcrowded boat had capsized on the lake, drowning 28, and the president, Pierre Nkurunziza, was holding ecstatic rallies in packed football stadiums to celebrate his four years in office.
Bujumbura, the capital city of Burundi, was my next port of call. It lay at the top end of Lake Tanganyika, 100 miles north of Kigoma, and a young man working in my hotel took it upon himself to arrange the next stage of my journey.
His name was Juma Shabani, he was well-educated and ambitious, spoke very good English, and followed global news and policy debates in great detail on the internet. Juma had worked in the refugee camps around Kigoma, and he made some more entries in my file of African prejudices and stereotypes. 'The Congolese are obsessed with clothes,’ he said. 'You would see them in the camps wearing designer suits, with high-waisted trousers, but no shoes. Or they have a silk tie from Paris, but their shirt has a big hole in the back. The Congolese, they don’t want to work. They prefer to hustle and steal. The Burundians are hard-working, but they have too many guns and grenades and terrible politicians.’
Juma wanted to be a lawyer. He had a place waiting for him at Dodoma University, but he couldn’t get a student loan sufficient to cover his tuition costs. I waited for him to ask me for help, but it never came.
He seemed satisfied to have my friendship, and he earned my deep gratitude for his help and advice. I wanted to take a lake ferry boat up to Bujumbura but Juma insisted it was too dangerous: 'The rains and storms are here, the boats are overcrowded, people are capsizing and drowning all the time. Also, when the boatmen see you, they see a rich man, so they call on their phone to the robber boat, and they come and rob you. They want your money and belongings. Very rarely do they kill. If someone kills here, we think they are crazy. Or from Burundi. But Richard, you must not take a lake taxi. Please. The way to Bujumbura is on the bus.’
That night he took me to a muddy yard full of stones, chickens, trash, loiterers and Toyota Hiace minivans. He made inquiries about going to Bujumbura, asking prices, giving the impression it was for him not me, and this was an easy impression to give, because white people did not go to Burundi on the bus. Then he said, 'OK. You meet me here at 6am, and don’t be late. They say crossing the border is no problem. It is quiet there. You have to catch another bus on the other side. I will arrange everything.’
I arrived at quarter to six with my backpack, and Juma was already there. He bought the ticket so I wouldn’t get a special price. He made sure my backpack was stowed in a place where it was hard to steal. He said I would have to walk across the border and then catch a taxi to the nearest town, and get a bus to Bujumbura from there. We shook hands goodbye in a sudden rainstorm, and then I sat down inside the Hiace and waited for it to fill up. max capacity 13 said the writing on the back of the vehicle. The driver and his assistant managed to get in 20, but that wasn’t good enough. We sat there squeezed in for 45 minutes until two more passengers arrived and then two more.
Then the driver roared out into the muddy streets, skidded, lost control, fishtailed and almost flipped. The passengers were angry, especially the women, and they gave the young man at the wheel a barrage of scolding. He responded by turning up the radio to its maximum distorted volume and roaring off again at the same idiotic speed. Whenever the Hiace went over a large bump, which was every few minutes, I cracked skulls with the young man to my left and learnt to appreciate the fact that his hair was long enough to cushion the blow slightly. But his body odour made my eyes water.
To my right, I was jammed up against a serene-looking Muslim with a white beard, a white prayer cap and a kind smile. He spoke some English, and over the racket of the music I determined that his name was Sudi, and he had been visiting his wife in Kigoma, where she was pregnant with his fifth child and staying with her family. Now he was returning home to Bujumbura, where he drove a taxi. When I said I was going there too, he said we should travel together. I trusted him immediately and completely, and I felt greatly relieved to have an ally in negotiating the border crossing and the Burundian bus system.
Alongside our muddy, potholed road, the Chinese were building a paved highway. It seemed odd to see Chinese faces under the hard hats on that rainy African morning and Chinese drivers in the cabs of muddy Chinese earthmovers, but it’s a normal sight in Africa these days. China is the biggest foreign player on the continent now, with a presence in all 53 countries. Unlike the West, which feels a moral obligation to reduce suffering and improve African lives, China looks at Africa purely as an economic opportunity. Its basic strategy is twofold: strip out the natural resources, and sell Chinese-made goods to Africans, everything from fighter jets and tanks down to flip-flops and combs.
Starting with the missionaries, the West has always had this idea that Africans need to change their ways and live more like us, but the Chinese, who started trading here in the seventh century, do not feel this impulse. Chinese officials don’t upbraid African leaders about human rights or democratic governance. Nor do they have any objection to bribery and corruption, if it helps business get done.
While the West concentrates on partnering with Africans in the areas of education, health, environmental issues, gender issues and community development projects, and bends over backwards to be culturally sensitive and politically correct, China comes in with Chinese workers, hiring Africans only for the most menial tasks, and builds roads, factories, ports, dams, airports and presidential palaces, all with the aim of boosting its trade. In 1996 China’s trade in Africa was $5.6 billion. In 2010 it was over $100 billion, with more than a million Chinese living in Africa.
The Hiace stopped in a small village in forested highlands with mist drifting through the trees. It was immediately surrounded by shouting young men, getting off their bicycles, shoving and shouldering each other aside to wrench the back door open and start grabbing at our bags. Sudi stood there, gentle and beatific, as five men began yelling and gesturing in his face, then he spoke some words, more yelling, more soft words from Sudi. 'These are bicycle taxi men,’ he explained. 'They will take us to the border. They want 10,000 [Tanzanian shillings; about £4] for the two of us, and another five for your bag. It is a fair price.’
I didn’t understand why the bus didn’t go to the border, but it was a pleasant relief to ride on the back of a bicycle in the cool, fresh highland air. Sudi was on the bicycle next to me, smiling happily, and my backpack was on a third bicycle.
The road curved along a high saddle separating the two countries, and we caught glimpses below of misty valleys with small patchwork fields. At the border itself, there was none of the usual commotion and opportunism that you find when crossing from one poor country into another. This was a remote area with no town either side. There were two small buildings in a quiet forest, a handful of people crossing, and no one else around. A friendly Tanzanian official stamped our passports and wished us well, and then we walked across a patch of no-man’s-land to his Burundian counterpart, a big, sullen, muscular man turning to fat, who glowered at me for a good 20 seconds without saying anything, then stamped my passport for three days. I was relieved to get out of there.
Seven of us got into a taxi, an old Toyota Corolla with a spiderweb crack across the windscreen, upholstery spilling out of the seats, loose silencer rattling on the ground. We drove down through the quiet forest into Mabanda, a highland town heaving with people and strewn with rubbish. Hard challenging glances and mad-dog stares came at me from out of the crowd, then jeering catcalls and sharp whistles, 'Eh, muzungu – white man!’ A dog was shaking on the ground with malaria or some other fever. There were soldiers and police with machine guns, teenage boys with thousand-yard stares, presumably from their years as child soldiers in the war, malnourished children with muddy rags and white hair like little old men.
Women were selling cassava and tomatoes, bananas and flip-flops, cans of USAID cooking oil and donated Louisiana rice, various medicines marked not for sale and donated by… The earth was a dark brick red, almost a wine-stained colour, where it wasn’t black with charcoal dust.
Sudi asked for my backpack and stowed it on the front seat of a Hiace. 'Come,’ he said. 'We will eat now. We leave the bag here. There is no problem. The driver is my friend.’
We walked through the market and ducked into a four-table restaurant that served only rice and beans. Stacked against the back wall were sacks of uncooked rice and beans stamped with the logos of Unicef and other aid agencies. The donated food had found its way into the local economy, and now it was being consumed by people who could afford to pay for it and not the hungry malnourished children begging outside. The tired-looking women cooking this food and running this little restaurant were using their tiny profits to feed and clothe their own children and buy them donated medicine. The morality of the situation was messy and complicated, but one thing was certain. None of this would be mentioned in the NGO press releases or fundraising literature. There would be a glowing report, listing an impressive quantity of food and medicine successfully delivered to a needy area, and that would be it. Maybe that was all that could be hoped for.
Or maybe it was teaching people that food arrived on aid trucks, and they didn’t need to grow it. Maybe if Médecins Sans Frontières and other medical charities were to pull out of Burundi, the government health department would be under more pressure to actually do something with its budget. But it was so hard to say. In a region where hungry people watched their cattle starve to death without selling or eating them, where people took donated food away from starving children and sold it instead, how could I trust my muzungu thought patterns?
I could never know what it was like to stand in rags and Chinese flip-flops, having lived through 13 years of ethnic warfare, with all the chopping, hacking, raping and mutilating that went out of European warfare a long time ago, and watch squeaky-clean, super-polite white people step out of their $60,000 Land Cruisers with a plan to make poverty history, to enrol you in a gender sensitivity workshop, to reconsider the environmental implications of your hunting and farming practices, to change the way you have sex, take a crap in the morning, gather water, plant crops, graze livestock, raise your children, treat your wife, manage your anger issues. Would I feel intruded upon, grateful, puzzled, angry, shy, resentful, uninterested? Would it encourage me to fix problems or depend on others to fix problems? Would I think: they have so much, I have nothing, so give me, give me, give me? I had no idea.
Driving out of Mabanda, in the front seat of an otherwise horrendously overcrowded Hiace, hurtling at a lunatic speed through the descending mountain curves on the way to Bujumbura, every town and village was preceded by a big white sign proclaiming an NGO project under way or completed and listing its funders and partners. Water projects were popular, at least among NGOs and their donors. It was easy to get funding for a water project, because in the West access to clean running water from a tap is considered an inalienable human right, and a universal human desire.
On an earlier visit to Tanzania, I went to a village by Lake Eyasi where a Spanish NGO had built a water project. The villagers had tried to stop it, but this made no sense to the NGO. Why would anyone willingly gather water by hand when they could have a tap? Also, it was an oppressive system for the young women and the girls who did most of the water gathering, and since the NGO had already raised the funding, its engineers went ahead and built the project. Now the villagers had taps outside their huts, and they were not happy about it. Why? Because for as long as anyone could remember, walking through the village to fetch water was how the marriageable girls had caught the eyes of marriageable boys. The NGO had wrecked their courtship system.
In Kigoma, I heard another water project story from a nearby village. NGOs are always trying to learn from their mistakes, and they know all too well that development projects tend to fall into disrepair after they leave. So the NGO in question was careful to involve the villagers at every stage of the water project, so their labour and ideas would be 'invested’ in the project and they would think of it as their own, rather than something that foreigners came and built for them. The NGO trained up villagers as maintenance engineers and set up a fund and delivery system to pay for future spare parts. All this was time-consuming, and the project took nearly three years to complete. A week later, the villagers tore the whole thing apart. Why? Because they wanted to sell the pipes; it was easy money.
Stories like these are a dime a dozen when NGO people get together and drink, but they don’t like them getting into the media, because they think it damages their fundraising abilities. I have my doubts about this. Most people give money to NGOs because it makes them feel better. It’s a kind of tithe, or guilt tax, and they show remarkably little interest in finding out how effectively their money is spent. Good intentions are good enough for both donor and NGO. The many well-documented failures of the aid industry and its overall ineffectiveness – the more aid a country has received, the more likely it is to be getting poorer – hasn’t hurt its fundraising abilities in the slightest.
It was a four-hour drive to Bujumbura and the driver drove as if he were in a video game, passing every car on the road, using the horn to clear the road in front of him of cyclists, goats, scurrying pedestrians, hitting 80mph on the straights, honking his way impatiently through the crowded villages and towns, which came one after the other as we descended into the foothills and flatlands. Burundi is the size of Belgium. It’s a green and well-watered country, but with eight million people, an agricultural economy, and over 90 per cent of the population living in rural areas, there was serious pressure on the available land. In some provinces there were 700 people per square mile, and Burundian women were averaging six children apiece. Burundi and Rwanda, the two Hutu-Tutsi countries, are the most overpopulated in Africa, and this fact cannot be separated out from either the chronic poverty or the ethnic violence.
As we entered the villages and towns, the driver made frequent stops to haggle with fruit vendors, flirt with young women who caught his eye by the side of the road, and exchange greetings with various young men of his acquaintance. He got out several times to inspect barrels of palm oil for sale, and when he found one that met with his satisfaction, the passengers in the back had to squeeze up further to make room for it. Then he took off at top speed again, scattering the goats, cyclists and pedestrians in his path.
'Sudi,’ I asked. 'Do you drive like your friend here?’
'No, no,’ he laughed. 'I am a careful driver.’
'Thank you again for helping me. You are a good man.’
'Welcome to my country,’ he said. 'When we arrive at Bujumbura, you no go hotel. You stay at my house. You see African house, stay with African family, learn more.’
Lake Tanganyika came into view, rippling with white-capped waves in the wind. The road ran along the lake shore, past fishing boats, the occasional lone hippo that had somehow managed to survive amid all this hunger, and many roadside kilns where people were baking mud into bricks. Then we entered the outlying sprawl of Bujumbura – brick buildings with tin roofs, crankshaft repair shops, brightly painted storefronts, bustling roadside stalls, a traffic jam of motorbikes, taxis and Hiaces mixing their vapours with charcoal smoke from grilled meat vendors in the heat, noise, commotion and humidity.
There were electricity poles, cables and transformers but no electricity. Bujumbura was currently getting its power from Congo, but it had been delinquent in paying its bills, and the Congolese were restricting the supply to teach them a lesson. Normally Bujumbura got its electricity from a donor-built hydro project, but the reservoirs were dry. The managers had run all the water through the turbines already, or the main dam had sprung a leak and no one had done anything about it. No one was quite sure. Later, I would meet a World Bank water expert who attended a meeting of the Burundian government to address this situation. The officials began the meeting by asking him to join them in a prayer for rain to fill up the reservoirs. He turned them down politely, saying, 'I’m with the World Bank. We don’t believe in that sort of thing. If my bosses find out I’ve been praying for rain, I’ll get fired.’
Central Bujumbura, the old Belgian colonial city on the lake shore, with its sandy beaches, hillside villas, art deco buildings, elegant Francophone restaurants and lively nightclubs, had been a haven of cosmopolitan sophistication in the middle of Africa, a choice posting for diplomats and NGO workers in the 1980s and early 1990s. Now, having endured wave after wave of ethnic cleansing and gangsterised ethnic war, conducted with phenomenal cruelty by all the groups involved, the city was pockmarked, grimy and traumatised, with packs of half-feral children roaming the streets, but the aid money was flowing again, the NGO people were back in greater numbers than ever, and there was a vibrant illegal economy in smuggled gemstones and minerals from Congo. Cafes, restaurants and nightclubs were open again, and Sudi said there was a good spirit in the city these days, a feeling that despite all the problems – the terrible poverty, lack of jobs and the worst corruption in the world, according to Transparency International – things were now getting better and maybe this time the violence was gone for good.
We got off the bus in the crowded streets near the central market. People were speaking French, Swahili and Kirundi, the subtle, allusive language of Burundi, switching back and forth fluently between the languages, and many of them also spoke some English. Sudi told me to be careful of pickpockets, and there were plenty of beggars, including glue-sniffing children with one hand outstretched and the other holding a bag of glue, but the streets felt less dangerous and threatening than Mabanda, or Bagamoyo, or a bad neighbourhood in an American city. Sudi lived in the Nyakabiga quarter, a majority Tutsi area. During the war, the city had been strictly divided on ethnic lines, and anyone trying to cross from one area to another ran a high risk of being killed. Soldiers, militias, ethnic street gangs would all enforce these boundaries by dragging people out of vehicles and beating, stabbing or necklacing them with a burning tyre by the side of the road. Sudi, being of mixed Hutu-Tutsi parentage, was able to cross these lines in his taxi, because both Hutus and Tutsis thought that despite his mixed blood he was really one of them.
It’s important to understand that Hutus and Tutsis are not separate tribes, although many Hutus believe they are. They are more like ethnic castes. They both speak the same language, and for many centuries, in Burundi and Rwanda, they lived together as part of a unified society ruled over by kings and princes. For the Belgian colonial authorities, however, this was too untidy. They classified the Hutu and Tutsi as two separate races, and anyone who had a long nose or lighter skin was marked down as Tutsi. Colonial patronage went to the Tutsis, and the grievances of the Hutu majority sharpened and intensified. By the time the Belgians left in 1962, both Hutus and Tutsis were thinking of themselves as separate races, violence followed swiftly in both countries, culminating in the Rwandan genocide and the ethnic civil war in Burundi. In both countries, the ethnic tensions were whipped up by politicians seeking power and wealth, and the violence fuelled by an atmosphere of swirling rumours, deep paranoia, escalating hatred and vengefulness.
In Sudi’s neighbourhood, there were now some Hutus living peaceably among the Tutsis, although I couldn’t tell the two groups apart. All I could see was lots of Africans in a wide variety of shapes, sizes and skin tones, and all they could see was 'Muzungu! Muzungu! Muzungu!’ The children were wildly excited to have a real live white man on their block, the adults were gently amused on the whole, and only the drunks harassed me for money. One of Sudi’s neighbours shook her head and laughed and laughed when she saw me. 'Oh Sudi,’ she said. 'Did he get lost from his safari? Is he looking for elephants?’
He led me down a narrow alleyway that was also an open drain and into a small, shabby courtyard shared by three houses. There were laundry lines strung across it and a communal bathroom consisting of a bucket of water and a hole in the ground. 'Welcome, welcome,’ said Sudi, leading me through the doorway of his small house and proud to show it to me. The floors and walls were concrete. The walls were painted royal blue and growing mould, and the ceiling was a woven-reed matting. Sudi knew that muzungus had delicate stomachs and could not drink the lake water like normal people, so he sent out one of his headscarved teenage daughters to buy bottled water. When she returned, he sat me down in his best armchair and turned on the television. 'I must go to the mosque and pray,’ he said. 'You stay here. Relax.’
There was a gold-threaded velvet painting of Mecca on one wall, plastic flowers on a plastic tablecloth on the coffee table, a large plastic thermos on a sideboard with a glass tea set. On the small colour television, President Nkurunziza, wearing a blue Adidas tracksuit and a white bush hat, was passing bricks along a line of people volunteering to build a new hospital. He was making a dance out of it, dipping his knees and twisting his hips to a rhythm and exhorting the others in the line to do the same. There was a kind of blank, glowing, happy spaciness in the president’s eyes that I couldn’t quite pin down. Was he just bugged out on Jesus? Was there some war trauma mixed in? Did he seriously believe, as he kept stating in public, that physical exercise and born-again Christianity were the keys to rebuilding the world’s poorest and most corrupt country?
When Sudi returned from the mosque, we ate rice and beans with his sister, aunt and two teenage daughters and then settled down to watch hip-hop videos on television. One of his daughters tried out a few flirting moves on me, much to the amusement of her sister, and in general the women were more confident, outgoing and in charge than one might expect in a Muslim household. Sudi was a gentle, yielding patriarch. With all the fearful angry barking about Muslims in America and Europe these days, it’s easy to lose track of the fundamental decency of Islam, its emphasis on compassion, humility and hospitality to strangers. During the war in Burundi and the genocide in Rwanda, Muslims had generally stayed neutral and pacifist, while the majority Catholic population hacked away at each other.
When the time came to sleep, I unrolled my sleeping pad on the floor and covered myself in insect repellent against the house mosquitoes. Sudi rolled himself up like a sarcophagus in an embroidered white cotton sheet, pulling it over his head, tucking it in round the sides. That was his protection against the mosquitoes and the malaria and other diseases they carried. His brother slept outside in the taxi every night to make sure no one stole it.
The next morning, I bought Sudi a phone at the Obama Shop. It sold mobile phones and computers, and the employees wore T-shirts with Obama’s picture on the back, and all the different models of phone had been renamed and repackaged on the Obama theme. While a reggae song called Barack Obama played on the stereo, Sudi looked at the Yes We Can phone, but settled on the Living the Dream model. 'This will be good for my business,’ Sudi said.
I bought myself a Burundian sim card, and loaded up both our phones with credit. I was starting to like this city, with its crumbling art deco buildings, its sense of fragile peace, a spirit that seemed traumatised but vigorous and undefeated. I wanted to know more about this beleaguered, corrupt little country and its efforts to heal and repair itself after so many years of war and hatred. Was this the beginning of a lasting peace or an interlude in the cycle of violence? What could be done about ethnic hatred? Who were these people and how did their society fit together? Were they doomed or was there hope?
One morning, Sudi drove me to Buterere, a poor area near the airport. He wanted to show me what happened to the rubbish collected from the embassies, the UN buildings and the rich neighbourhood on the hill where the foreign NGO people lived. They all paid to have their rubbish collected by a private company, whose trucks came around once a week and dumped the foreigners’ rubbish by the side of a long dirt road paralleling a filthy stream.
Naked boys were swimming and fishing in the stream. On the other side of the road, amid thick buzzing clouds of flies, skeletal men in rags were scavenging through the broken glass and filth for scraps of food. They were Twa pygmies, displaced from the forest and now living in a small shantytown. Sudi gave one some money to talk. He took the money and ran away. Sudi held up another banknote, called him, and he came running back.
The man said the Twa wanted to be left alone to hunt in the forest, but the forest was gone now, cut down for charcoal, and all the animals had disappeared. He was holding a plastic bag, and Sudi asked him to show us its contents. He had some rotting fruit covered in black filth, some fishheads, a plastic water bottle and a sooty grey object that I thought was a chunk of dried mud. He wiped away the dirt on the object to show us it was a packet of American instant mashed potato. 'Today is the best day,’ he said. 'This is when we get the good things to eat.’ He held up his instant mashed potato like a prize and smiled.
'Oh God, I wish you hadn’t told me that,’ said T that evening over glasses of wine at a large open-air bar with manicured lawns. She was a lively, intelligent American woman, very fit, clean and healthylooking, and she had been in Burundi for two years working on women’s issues with an American NGO. She had no authorisation to talk on the record to journalists (hence the initial T). She lived in a gated villa on the hill with four servants, two vehicles and a swimming-pool, and like so many of her tribe, she felt guilty and awkward about having these luxuries in such a poor country. She justified it by saying the house was bequeathed to her by her predecessor at the NGO, that she was in Burundi for the long haul, and to be at her most effective she needed a quiet, safe, comfortable refuge. I found her argument faultless. Sleeping on Sudi’s floor with the whining mosquitoes and 4am muezzin calls from the nearby mosque was wearing me out.
Why, I asked, with all the aid flowing into Burundi and the dozens of NGOs headquartered in Bujumbura, were people excited about eating her rubbish? Couldn’t someone go down to Buterere with some food aid? 'I know, I know,’ she said. 'The trouble is that no one is doing projects for the urban poor in Bujumbura. The funding isn’t there. We’re all so focused on truth, reconciliation and justice. Underdevelopment in the rural areas. Democratic governance. Human rights.’
'What about the government?’ I asked. 'What is it doing?’
'Well, the international community supplies more than 60 per cent of the government’s budget, and supposedly there are strings attached. They’re supposed to show evidence of democratisation and improved human rights before getting the money. In reality they got another $35 million, with no strings attached, because they threatened to resume the civil war if we didn’t give them the money. And of course most of that money ends up in private bank accounts.’
I told her I was going to Rwanda, and asked what she thought of President Kagame. 'I think he’s fantastic,’ she said. 'I wish Burundi had one like him. Kagame is a dictator, but he has a vision, and he’s dragging that country towards it by the scruff of its neck, and development is actually happening. It’s the only way. Here we’re trying to have a democracy, and we have a shambles. All it takes is one leader with vision and power. Unfortunately I don’t see anyone here like that at the moment. The only ones with vision have no power. And the ones with power are only interested in getting rich. They really are a bunch of thugs, Neanderthals. Oh God, did I just say that?’
Meanwhile, Kenny Rogers was playing through the speakers, as Kenny so often does in Bujumbura. It’s a minor curiosity of Burundian life that I feel compelled to record. There are a surprising number of country and western fans in this part of Africa, and Kenny Rogers is their stone favourite. As we sat there discussing Burundian politics and the dilemmas of aid, Kenny crooned, 'Know when to hold ’em / Know when to fold ’em…’
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Questions raised about foreign aid link with resource development
The Conservative government is fundamentally realigning the way Canada delivers foreign aid, using private-sector partners in the mining and agricultural sectors. In some instances the government's aid agency is even helping write legislation regulating the mining industry in developing countries.
But if the policy direction at the Canadian International Aid Agency seems to blur the line between Canada's economic interests and international development goals, it is not something that worries International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda. When asked, during an interview with the Citizen, how she separates Canada's trade and foreign policy interests from Canadian development goals, she replied: "I really don't separate them."
"I think if we can increase the capacity of any country to become a global trading partner, if they've got products Canadians need, we can import them, and if Canada has products they would like, Canada can export them."
And Oda says she wants to see more partnerships between aid agencies and companies to help deliver Canadian aid around the world.
"Our government is very much looking to increase its relationships with the private sector," she said, adding that she would like to see such relationships between NGOs and corporations in manufacturing, agriculture and tourism, in addition to the extractive industry.
Oda said Canada's expertise in the mining and extraction industries — Canada is a global leader in mining — provides "added value" when it comes to international development. "It's another way of improving the effectiveness of CIDA's work," she said.
It is a direction that has divided the foreign aid community and has critics asking whether Canada's international aid strategy has been overtaken by the country's economic interests.
Liberal MP John McKay, who has pushed for more accountability for Canadian mining companies working overseas, calls the policy direction regrettable. "I don't think that poor peoples' money should be, first and foremost, used to benefit our economic interests."
Many of the countries CIDA works in have burgeoning resource development industries and, in many cases, Canadian companies are already there and would like to expand. Oda said helping these countries develop their resources and establish stable economic foundations is the best way to reduce poverty over the long term. CIDA will even help developing countries draft mining legislation to better attract foreign investment, she said. Such investment, she said, builds the economy and reduces poverty.
She pointed to a recently announced CIDA-funded project in which Canadian NGO Plan International Canada is working with the mining company Iamgold Corp. to train young people "in occupations directly related to the mining sector or other sectors surrounding this industry."
"These are all skills that can be left behind, that these people can take to other areas," Oda said. When mining companies from other countries, such as China, go into developing nations, she noted, they bring their own workforce.
The policy direction takes place against the backdrop of the federal government's corporate social responsibility strategy which, according to CIDA documents, is aimed at "improving the competitive advantage of Canadian international extractive sector companies by enhancing their ability to manage social and environmental risk." CIDA's role in the strategy is to help developing countries manage their minerals, oil and gas "and to benefit from these resources to reduce poverty."
The very title of the federal government's CSR strategy, Building the Canadian Advantage: A Corporate Social Responsibility Strategy for the Canadian International Extractive Sector, "suggests that it is corporations that are intended as the real beneficiaries of CSR initiatives," said Catherine Coumans of the group MiningWatch, "with collaborating NGOs following in second place."
The foreign aid link with resource development is likely to be controversial because of the obvious self-interest for Canada. As home to about 75 per cent of global mining companies, any policy that helps open up mining markets around the world or smooths the way for companies already there, will benefit Canada. And it raises legitimate questions about what happens when the government's foreign aid direction clashes with Canada's economic interests.
In recent years some Canadian mining companies have worked to overcome growing concern about the environmental and social impacts of mining around the world — concerns heightened by specific cases in which mining companies were accused of human rights abuses and environmental damage. Many companies have recognized they need a social licence to operate and have adopted corporate social responsibility policies. Partnerships with NGOs, supported by the federal government, are part of this direction.
But linking development assistance to resource development results in mixed motives for CIDA, according to McKay. "Is this for alleviation of poverty, to further our economic and corporate interests, or for gaining influence in particular industries? That has been the problem with CIDA all along: We have mixed motives."
"Why not just wind up CIDA and put it into the international trade portfolio if that is what it is being used for?"
The Canadian aid agencies that are working with mining companies on the pilot projects announced by Oda last fall defend the initiatives as worthwhile and beneficial.
"When NGOS are working in these countries, should we do nothing, or should we roll up our sleeves and push these companies to do better. It is easy to stand on the sidelines and be sanctimonious," said Plan Canada CEO Rosemary McCarney, a founding member of the Devonshire Initiative, which is based on the belief that the Canadian mining and NGO presence in emerging markets can be a force for positive change.
McCarney dismisses critics who say working with mining companies compromises NGOs.
"This is not going to compromise our perspective or our ability to speak out on development practices," she added. Plan Canada is working with Iamgold on a $5.7-million CIDA-funded skills-training project in Burkina Faso. The company contributed $1 million to the project.
McCarney said Plan thought long and hard before getting involved in the project and made sure it was comfortable working with the company and with the project.
"It took a lot of courage, it also took a lot of homework for us. Our reputation is everything for an NGO. You have to partner carefully and purposefully and have your eyes wide open."
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Yudhoyono slams NGOs over Papua
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono reprimanded on Friday nongovernmental organizations that have regularly criticized how the Indonesian Military (TNI) handles security in Papua, saying that they have implied that the law should not be enforced in the country’s two easternmost provinces.
“Papua is part of Indonesia. It doesn’t make sense that NGOs say things that imply that we can’t enforce the law in Papua,” he said at a TNI and National Police leaders meeting in Jakarta.
Yudhoyono said the military presence in Papua was not without justified.
“They are there because there is still an armed separatist movement, which we should be aware of,” he said, emphasizing that there was only a small military presence that did not conduct aggressive military operations.
The President stressed that the government was eager to improve welfare in Papua by implementing programs to accelerate Papua’s economic development.
“That is not just lip service — the average development expenditure per capita in Papua is the highest in the country,” Yudhoyono pointed out.
He added that he had conveyed the government’s policy on Papua to his counterparts across the globe as news regarding military activities in Papua had spread quickly to world leaders.
“Many have asked me about what happened in Papua. I should explain that the military presence in Papua is not without justification,” he said.
To respond to grievances from Papuans who deemed themselves unfairly treated by the central government, Yudhoyono set up in Sept. 20, last year, the government-sanctioned Presidential Unit for the Acceleration of Development in Papua and West Papua (UP4B).
Lt. Gen. Bambang Darmono, the commanding officer in Aceh from 2002 to 2005, was appointed the chief of the program.
Last week, the partnership for governance reform (Kemitraan) and the Legal Aid Institute (LBH) released a survey from 2011 that found that torture was commonly carried out by members of the police to extract information from suspects.
More than 205 respondents including suspects, police personnel, prosecutors, correctional officers, human rights activists, academics and local tribal chiefs, testified that torture was committed by police officers against suspects during arrests, investigations, detention and in jail.
Earlier, Vice President Boediono brushed aside fears of “foreign intervention” in the event of donor development funds being more accessible in Papua.
“Don’t seek ghosts in broad daylight,” Boediono said on Wednesday.
“The most important thing is for us to filter, be selective. Let’s not close ourselves off [unnecessarily],” he remarked.
He stressed that there were many donors — bilateral and multilateral – with good intentions in Papua.
He dismissed undue fears that countries like Australia and the United States had ulterior motives, referring to treaties and statements made by the two countries stating their support for Indonesia’s territorial integrity.
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Egyptians march to honour 'Friday of Rage'
Thousands gather in Cairo one year after uprising, as US urges military rulers to lift travel ban for NGO workers.
Tens of thousands of protesters have rallied across the Egyptian capital, Cairo, to mark the first anniversary of the "Friday of Rage", a key day in the uprising that toppled former President Hosni Mubarak last year.
Demonstrators began to converge in the capital's Tahrir Square, the focal point of protests, after Muslim noon prayers, on a day dubbed the "Friday of Pride and Dignity" by the dozens of pro-democracy groups organising the rallies.
"Down with military rule!", shouted demonstrators, who waved flags and banners and chanted slogans against the ruling Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF).
Tensions erupted at one point when one march of hundreds of protesters headed towards the ministry of defence building. It was later met by dozens of supporters of the military.
The pro-military protesters formed a human chain across an intersection, but the marchers pushed through them, shouting "down with military rule", The Associated Press news agency reported.
On last year's "Friday of Rage", Mubarak's security forces fired on protesters who marched into Tahrir, killing and wounding hundreds. Mubarak is currently on trial in Cairo, facing charges of involvement in the killing of protesters.
In Tahrir on Friday, Sheikh Mazhar Shahin, the imam of the Omar Makram mosque located within the square, called for faster retribution for the deaths of protesters last year.
"People came out on January 25, 2011, to call for freedom, justice, dignity and the end of a regime that spread all forms of corruption," Shahin told the crowd, referencing the date of the start of the uprising.
"We demanded the resignation of the regime, but after a year passed on the revolution, I'm asking; did the regime
actually resign?" Shahin said.
"The revolution is continuous, we need a swifter purge of media and political trials for those who killed the protesters. I'm supporting you."
Divided on message
However, Islamists and liberal, secular-leaning protesters appeared to be divided over the message they were trying to send on Friday.
The powerful Muslim Brotherhood, which swept the majority of seats in recently concluded elections for the new lower house of parliament with its Freedom and Justice Party, occupied a part of the square where the mood was celebratory.
Muslim Brotherhood supporters and others note that the military council, which took over after Mubarak stepped down, has pledged to hand over power to civilian rule after presidential elections by late June.
On the other side of Tahrir, the chants were strongly anti-military and some shouted against the Brotherhood, yelling "Get off the stage" to Brotherhood supporters who set up a platform in the square.
The Brotherhood supporters attempted to drown out the chants by blaring the national anthem and religious recordings from loudspeakers.
The tensions erupted into scuffles between Brotherhood supporters and liberal protesters at one point, the AP reported, with each side hurling rocks and bottles at each other in the square. There were no immediate reports of injury.
Travel restrictions
As the events to mark the anniversary of the 18-day uprising continued, the US state department called on Egypt to lift travel restrictions on several Americans working for non-governmental organisations (NGO), many of whom were in Egypt to monitor recent elections.
Washington asked SCAF to stop "endangering American lives" after six Americans working for publicly funded US organisations were barred from leaving the country.
"We are urging the government of Egypt to lift these restrictions immediately and allow these folks to come home as soon as possible," Victoria Nuland, a state department spokeswoman, said on Thursday.
"We are trying to get them free to travel as soon as possible, and we're hopeful that we can resolve this in coming days," she said.
Al Jazeera's Sherine Tadros, reporting from Cairo, said: "Relations between Cairo and Washington have been strained, to say the least, since last month’s raid on a number of foreign-funded, including American-funded, NGOs, when their offices were ransacked and computers and data taken," she said.
"Now it seems a number of those NGO employees are under investigation, and that is where travel bans come in."
'Dire economic situation'
Among those hit by travel bans is Sam LaHood, a son of US Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, as well as other foreign staffers of the US-funded NGOs, International Republican Institute and National Democratic Institute, officials at the two organisations said.
The travel ban was part of an Egyptian criminal investigation into foreign-funded democracy organisations after soldiers raided the offices of 10 such groups last month, including those of two American groups.
Washington has indicated it may review the $1.3bn it gives the Egyptian military each year if the probe into alleged breaches of local regulations went on.
"Egypt is in dire economic situation and is really in need of the $1.3bn aid that is usually provided on a yearly base," our correspondent said.
"All of this comes at a time when the US Congress is debating $1.3bn aid deal and putting a lot of pressure through legislation on the state department to make sure that Egypt’s transition to democracy is going in right direction," she said.
"It doesn’t come as good news for relations [US-Egypt] and even domestically, because what it shows is the growing xenophobia of military rulers here who have blamed any event they don’t like on the ground on these "foreign hands" or so-called foreign elements much like the regime before them did."
Son of US transportation secretary among several election monitors placed on 'no-fly list' as tension with Cairo escalates
Tension between the US government and the Egyptian military authorities has reached a new peak after it emerged that several American non-governmental workers, including the son of a member of President Obama's administration, are being prevented from leaving the country in an ongoing spat over Egypt's recent parliamentary elections.
Sam LaHood, the son of the US transportation secretary Ray LaHood, was turned back at the airport in Cairo on Saturday in a significant escalation of the diplomatic stand-off between the two countries. LaHood heads the Egyptian outpost of the International Republican Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank that had been monitoring the elections held in recent weeks in the wake of the toppling of President Hosni Mubarak.
According to Politico he was placed on a "no-fly list", without explanation, after he tried to board a plane in an attempt to escape rising hostility towards his and other foreign NGOs. LaHood had previously been named in the state-run press in Cairo.
Lorne Craner, president of IRI, said that Egyptian officials quizzed about the no-fly policy had told the institute that they were still completing their investigations following the December raids and that they might "go to trial soon".
"That's pretty disquieting – to have that kind of thing raised by an ally that's receiving a billion and a half dollars in US aid each year," Craner said.
He added that the Obama administration was working very hard to ameliorate the crisis. All five IRI workers in Cairo who have been put on the no-fly list, three of whom are American, are still free to move around the country and have their passports.
Craner said that at first the military generals had responded to the raids as though they were utterly unaware of what had happened. "But it's been nearly a month since then and the generals have been approached on a number of occasions and yet things have only got worse. So you have to wonder what's going on," he said.
The move follows a raid conducted on 29 December against 17 NGOs by Egyptian security forces in which computers, money and documents were seized. President Obama raised the harassment of US and other foreign NGOs in a phone conversation with the Egyptian military chief Field Marshal Tantawi on 20 January.
It is understood that six workers in the Cairo office of the National Democratic Institute, three of them American, have also been told they may not leave the country. NDI was among several groups involved in election monitoring.
News of the no-fly lists prompted a rash of diplomatic activity and public condemnation against the actions of the Egyptian authorities. John McCain, the US senator for Arizona, said that he had watched events in Egypt with "growing alarm and outrage. It's outrageous that these individuals would be held against their will by Egyptian authorities and prohibited from leaving the country."
The escalation poses a sensitive diplomatic challenge for the Obama administration. The US government is coming under mounting pressure from Congress to suspend the $2bn in aid it gives Cairo every year, largely in the form of military assistance.
While needing to be seen to protest against the Egyptian military junta's resistance to democratic change and ongoing human rights violations, the administration is also keen not to destabilise its relationship with one of its key allies in the region.
The timing of the move against the foreign workers comes as a further blow to the reform movement in Egypt that has been pushing for real democratic change in the wake of last year's popular uprising against Mubarak. The first democratically-elected parliament to sit in Egypt in 60 years convened on Monday, raising hopes that the junta would honour its promise to cede power in June.
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NGOs talk of collapse as their funding dries up
Government rejects allegations of biased grants.
CAPE TOWN - Welfare organisations who haven’t received lottery funding this year have spoken about their plight, saying they may be forced to close down or drastically cut their services to the poor.
“We’re in a desperate situation. The people we support with food parcels twice a month were crying when we told them we would probably not be able to help them anymore. They have nowhere else to go for help,” the chairperson of the Port Alfred Benevolent Society, Joy Altson, told Moneyweb.
After years of support from the National Lotteries Board, Alston was informed that her application had been turned down because of “insufficient funds” and a decision “to fund only first-time applicants”.
She says this came as a shock.
“I put in a huge appeal. I said: ‘If you have to give me less, then you have to do it. But don’t cut me out completely. I can’t turn around to 1 500 people and say: ‘I can’t give you anything.’”
But the NLB hasn’t responded. “If we don’t get money from the lottery, we’re going to have to close down.”
The society’s community gardens and skills programmes are also at stake.
Alston’s story is one of many that have emerged this week, a week in which there’s been a flurry of criticism about the way in which the lottery money is distributed.
On Friday morning, about 400 protestors, mostly from NGOs, marched on the offices of the National Lottery Fund in Pretoria.
“It’s time we made our voices heard,” said NGO trainer, Sandra Miller, who convened the protest. She said non-profits have been wary of protesting in the past as they don’t want to jeopardise their applications to the NLB.
Civic leaders, NGOs and the Democratic Alliance have all spoken out about the lottery funds this week, with the DA’s spokesperson on Trade and Industry Jacques Smalle alleging that it had seen “a growing trend of NGOs being overlooked in favour of ANC-affiliated organizations.
“As a result, poor people suffer while party elites benefit”, the DA has charged.
But the Department of Trade and Industry’s spokesperson, Sidwell Medupe, says the process of adjudication is performed by independent distributing agencies “with no room for any political organisation to influence.
“These committees act without fear or prejudice in the interest of all South Africans”, he told Moneyweb.
Alarm bells were sounded just over a year ago when R40m in lottery funds was given to the ANC-affiliated National Youth Development Agency (NYDA).
More recently, Shelagh Gastrow, the founder of Inyathelo, the South African Institute of Advancement, which assists NGOs, raised what she alleges was “an extremely dubious payment” to Makhaya, an organisation based in Serbia that says on its website that it promotes the arts and tourism to South Africa.
“It’s a for-profit company masquerading as a non-profit. When we looked it up, we discovered they supply services to the South African diplomatic corps and run events for them. Many staff members live in Serbia, yet they walk off with R50m from lottery funds,” she told Moneyweb.
The DA claims that the NGO employs the daughter of the National Lotteries Board chairperson, Alfred Nevhutanda.
Administrative glitches can also lead to funding cuts.
CEO of Sparrow Ministries, Rose Letwaba, says it appears an administrative error put an end to its funding for this year.
“The NLB’s excuse was that we sent our application with the number on the envelope instead of on the document. We had applied for R29m. But we got nothing. We’re just waiting for the end of the financial year. But we’ve already called in the staff to say we’ll have to retrench people.”
For the past few years, the NLB was the key funder for the Sparrow Ministries hospice and children’s home looking after 225 children and 80 adults.
NGOs applying for funding have to fax their documents to the NLB. If small administrative mistakes are made or papers lost, claims are often rejected – and there’s no appeals process. They say it’s devastating when they rely so much on lotto funding.
“We’re just hoping that someone at Lotto will see things from a grassroots level. We don’t do our work for the money. We do it for humanity,” says Letwaba.
Miller says haphazard and ‘biased’ dispensing tactics have come at a particularly bad time for welfare agencies and NGOs.
“It couldn’t come at a worse time when corporate South Africa is broke. The recession has taken its toll.”
Gastrow believes the distribution system is “fatally flawed and unworkable”.
“There’s no process by which people can object to a decision. There’s no clarity about what the lottery is for. Even municipalities can apply for funding.
Gastrow believes the system needs to be urgently overhauled.
Amendments to the Lotteries Act are already on the Parliamentary programme of the Portfolio Committee on Trade and Industry.
But Gastrow says tinkering alone will fall far short of what’s needed.
Both Gastrow and the DA have called for board members on the NLB’s distribution agencies to serve full-time. Currently, they only serve 1.5 days a month. “This means grants don’t get processed and money goes unallocated,” says Smalle.
Medupe says he’s aware of the backlog. “The minister has impressed on the NLB that it must implement measures to improve turnaround times. These are being monitored closely.”
During a press conference in Pretoria on Friday, Nevhutanda, conceded that they needed to find new ways to deal with the backlogs.
“We take allegations made in the media seriously – claims of requests for bribes, losing information and irregular grants. Remedial action will be taken where needed,” he told journalists.
But, for now, his words hold cold comfort for people like Letwaba and Altson.
*Kim Cloete is an experienced journalist with a keen interest in the political economy. Before pursuing a career as an independent journalist, she spent time as a television journalist and later Parliamentary Editor for SABC Radio and TV News. Kim was awarded a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University in 2005/06 and has received several national and international awards for her work.
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Should NGOs take the corporate bait?
This is the third of a four-part series on innovative ways to deliver aid in our conflicted world.
Every economic slump ushers in predictable, if not propagandistic, debates about Official Development Assistance, otherwise known as foreign aid. While Stephen Harper’s government has frozen aid spending through to 2015, the real anti-aid evangelicals can be found to the south, at the Republican primaries. Ron Paul, whose greatest accomplishment is that the press is still willing to hand him a microphone, has pledged to cancel American foreign aid altogether. There are, therefore, compelling reasons to consider where aid is now and where it might be headed.
The recession has been brutal to those who are reliant on humanitarian assistance for their very survival. European governments have, not surprisingly, made drastic cuts to their aid spending. So has the U.S. Congress, and many foundations are operating on reduced budgets. The effect has been that non-governmental organizations around the world are swimming in a rapidly evaporating pool of funding, raising the competitive stakes alongside a host of ethical questions.
On this point, several of the world’s leading international charities are now keeping some rather curious company, which could either represent the future of aid – a progressive merger of economic interests and social development – or its fire sale. In September, the Canadian International Development Agency announced a controversial multimillion-dollar grant to three leading international charities who will partner with major Canadian mining firms on development initiatives in African and Latin American countries in which these companies operate.
Under the deal, World University Services Canada, Plan Canada and World Vision Canada will receive CIDA funding totalling $6.7-million for projects with Rio Tinto Alcan, Iamgold and Barrick Gold, respectively. The largest share was for the Plan Canada-Iamgold project, which will take all but $1-million of the CIDA funding over the next five years. For their part, the three mining companies will contribute additional support just shy of $2-million. The combined annual net profit for these firms is more than $4-billion.
Now, on any given day that CIDA makes a funding announcement, the sanctimony served up by those who were overlooked is best cut with the knives sticking out of the backs of those who emerged as big winners. But this one struck at the very heart of the NGO community, leading many to shudder and ask of their colleagues, “How could you?”
Two of the participating mining firms have recently been involved in labour and human-rights disputes related to their operations abroad.
The central tension is whether these NGOs are serving as bagmen, advancing Canadian mining interests with taxpayer funding by appeasing local communities with gifts of health care and education, or whether they are simply piloting a new model of co-operation that might positively influence corporate behaviour overseas while simultaneously addressing development gaps.
Certainly the latter is what the executive director of WUSC, Chris Eaton, is hoping for. He was quoted in The Dominion newspaper expressing his sincere desire that such partnerships will “nudge along good practice.” Perhaps, but they can also buy silence in the case of bad practice, which is inherently more dangerous. And why would CIDA pick up any of the tab to improve the reputation of Canada’s mining sector abroad, if not to cement Mr. Harper’s vision for an aid policy that serves Canada’s trade and economic interests first, officially clearing the belfry of all Pearsonian bats?
Welcome to the new humanitarianism, where government funding is scarce, traditional donors are aging and more organizations are turning to corporate alliances that would once have been viewed as heresy. Yet as the aid sector goes in search of new funding models, we might do well to remember a line from the 17th-century English poet John Dryden: “Better shun the bait than struggle in the snare.”
Samantha Nutt is a founder of the NGO War Child and the author of Damned Nations: Greed, Guns, Armies and Aid. To see a video conversation with Dr. Nutt, visit the Canadian International Council’s website at www.opencanada.org/newhumanitarians.
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D.C. lobbyists cut ties with Egyptian government as raid controversy deepens
Several Washington lobbyists announced Saturday that they are ending their contract with the Egyptian government, as the controversy deepens over raids conducted on the offices of American advocacy groups.
Since the late December raids on nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) based in the U.S. and other countries, the Egyptian government has intensified its crackdown. Most recently, the government has prevented several Americans, including the son of U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, from leaving the country.
As the State Department intervened, the D.C. lobbying firm that represented the Egyptian government for years -- even before Hosni Mubarak was overthrown -- came under fire. Though one of the principals has argued that the lobbyists told Cairo the raids were a bad idea, the firm did send out a memo after the crackdown that appeared to justify the government's actions.
In a written statement Saturday, the PLM Group announced it was "immediately ending their relationship after a four-year engagement."
"We hope that Egyptians continue to enjoy the deepening of democracy in their country, and that Egypt remains a strong, stable and vital ally of the United States," the lobbyists said.
The principals in the group are former U.S. Reps. Toby Moffett and Bob Livingston, as well as Tony Podesta. All three have their own separate lobbying firms in D.C.
The statement did not offer any explanation, but it comes after U.S. lawmakers put pressure on the lobbyists.
Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., earlier in the week claimed "their influence-peddling undermines American values."
"Is there no shame in this town?" Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., said in an interview with FoxNews.com on Wednesday when asked about the lobbying work.
Livingston told FoxNews.com, though, that his group was not defending the raids, and in fact told the government that they were a "mistake."
Meanwhile, the U.S. government and the NGOs are struggling to get the Egyptian government to ease off.
State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said Friday that the Obama administration had not made progress with the Egyptians on the NGO issue.
Sam LaHood, one of at least six Americans currently barred from leaving Egypt, told Fox News the workers are "kind of expecting the worst."
"There hasn't been a lot of movement -- nothing has really changed," he said.
Though the workers have not been arrested, they are concerned about the possibility. LaHood said if the case did go to trial, the penalty could be up to five years in jail.
LaHood runs the Egypt program for the International Republican Institute. The offices of the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House, other U.S.-based groups, were also raided last month, in addition to the offices of other non-American groups.
"It's a little bit scary for us to be facing these very serious allegations but, you know, also for the Egyptian employees who work for these organizations," LaHood told Fox News.
The Egyptian government closed the NGOs' offices and confiscated equipment during the raids -- the groups claim the government so far has not returned the material. They were accused of operating without the proper registration and using foreign money.
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NGOs upbeat over China's environmental transparency progress
Green activists applauded steady progress on environmental transparency in China after public campaigns forced major players, including Apple and the Beijing government, to release sensitive information on pollution and its origins.
A survey on openness and accountability released Monday showed that, while the overall situation remains poor, an increasingly informed public is putting greater pressure on companies and local authorities to clean up.
The upbeat assessment was made in the third annual report on Pollution Information Transparency by Chinese NGOs and the US-based Natural Resources Defence Council, just days after two major steps in the campaign to improve environmental transparency in China.
This month, the Beijing government started releasing real-time data on the most toxic form of air pollution. On Friday, Apple published a previously secret list of its suppliers and outlined the steps it has taken to deal with illegal discharges of hazardous waste.
The latest transparency report shows patchy progress in releasing data and responding to requests for information, although these are legally mandated.
In a survey of 113 cities, the authors note gradual improvement among municipal governments in economically advanced regions, such as the Pearl River delta and the Yangtze basin. However, in other areas, such as Shandong and Inner Mongolia, the authorities were less responsive than a year earlier.
But the overall trend was positive, marking the third year of gains. Recent scandals and growing public pressure have forced a rethink. Last year, the company's senior executives opened communications with Chinese environmental organisations represented by Ma Jun of the Institute for Public and Environmental Affairs.
"We can draw the conclusion that a system for environmental information transparency has been established at an initial stage in China," said Ma.
There were also advances in the corporate sector. The report noted that more than 500 enterprises are now communicating with environmental NGOs about their monitoring and disclosure systems. This is up from almost none five years ago, but there are many thousands that have yet to engage with civil society in such a constructive manner.
Until recently Apple was one of them. The US firm had been accused of being as secretive and unresponsive as the Chinese authorities when its suppliers were implicated in labour disputes and pollution scandals.
Last week, however, the company responded to critics of its environmental, labour and transparency standards by detailing how it has dealt with problems ranging from illegal pollution discharges to falsified account books.
The US firm said it expanded the number of audits by 80 percent last year and, in addition, launched a specialised program in China to address environmental concerns.
The measures were detailed in the latest Progress Report on Apple Supplier Responsibility, which was released on Friday. For the first time, the annual report included the names of 156 companies that together account for 97 percent of Apple's outsourced manufacturing business.
The company found facilities that had been breaking air emission and wastewater discharge limits, using factories that were releasing industrial effluent via unapproved outflow pipes and failing to register pollution. In the most egregious cases, Apple said it had suspended business with the violators until improvements were in place.
Management of hazardous waste and air pollution appeared to be a particular worry. The compliance rate with Apple's standards in these category was just 68%, suggesting a widespread failure to implements the necessary safety and monitoring procedures. The company said 69 facilities were not recycling or disposing of hazardous waste as required by law.
However, it remains unclear how far down the supply chain the company's audits have reached. Many foreign businesses acknowledge difficulty in monitoring their supplier's suppliers, although it is often at the lower levels – where the profit margins are tightest – that the worst transgressions take place. Other firms are also considering more positive steps, including European telecoms operators who last week held a workshop on improving transparency in their supply chains.
To improve the system, environmentalists are calling for a national registry where companies can publicly report their pollution data, which would accelerate, simplify and improve public supervision. This has been effective in other nations.
"There is plenty of room to improve but we are seeing progress every year," said Bernadette Brennan of the National Resources Defence Council. "On the whole the trend is towards open information. More people realise this is good for society and good for business."
State planners are aware that transparency was a key element in the clear-up of other polluted countries, but it has struggled to enforce compliance and lacks the tools of an independent judiciary and free media that were also key elements in spreading and using data to put pressure on polluters.
The ministry of environment previously warned that polluters were operating in a "black box" but the latest report suggests progress is possible.
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NGOs seek tit-for-tat rules on visas
BEIRUT: More than 20 civil society groups called on the government Wednesday to treat foreign nationals who wish to visit Lebanon the same way their countries treat Lebanese when they apply for visas, expressing frustration that Lebanese are treated as “inferior” by many countries.
The groups also called on the government to pressure states to treat Lebanese decently.
“We call on the Lebanese state to force states with which it maintains diplomatic ties to treat the Lebanese the same way Lebanon treats the nationals from these states,” activist Hayat Arslan told a news conference at her residence in Aley which was attended by representatives of nearly two dozen associations.
“We are treated as inferior when we seek a visa to most countries, whether for work, tourism or medical treatment, as if we are second class people,” she added.
Arslan called on the government to enforce certain rules governing how embassies treat Lebanese.
According to Arslan, Lebanon should force foreign embassies to set dates for appointments for Lebanese seeking visas within a “specified and plausible period of hours or days, rather than weeks or months.”
The civil society groups also requested that Lebanese applying for a visa be treated decently, be given explanations if their request for an appointment is rejected, be notified if any necessary documents for a visa application are missing and have fees returned to them by consulates or embassies if they are denied a visa.
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NGOs probed over N-funds
An official team from the ministry of Union home affairs resumed its inspection Wednesday, after the Pongal holidays, of non-governmental organisations affiliated to the Thoothukudi Roman Catholic diocese.
The 2-member team of Mr Johinder Prasad, under secretary (audit), ministry of home affairs, and Mr Sujith Kumar Singh, that was said to have begun its auditing on January 10 on a complaint that foreign funding received by NGOs affiliated to the Thoothukudi Roman Catholic diocese misused the funds to instigate the anti-KKNPP movement, suspended its inspection for three days beginning January 15 in view of the Pongal festival.
The team also inspected the Thalamuthunagar refugee camp, near Thoothukudi, where the Thoothukudi multi-purpose social service society (TMSSS) of the diocese was doing welfare activities using foreign funds.
The prime minister’s office minister V. Naray-anasamy had recently stated that some of the NGOs in Thoothukudi were instigating the anti-KKNPP struggle using foreign funds.
He also warned that their FCRA registration would be cancelled. Reacting to this audit, Thoothukudi Roman Catholic bishop Yvon Ambroise said it was only a usual audit of the ministry.
He also threatened legal action against a section of the media that continues to publish false news to tarnish their image.
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Waiting on the pavement and pining for their loved ones
Labourers, many from different parts of India, are seated on the pavement. Every time a vehicle goes past them toward the compound, they stand up, pinning their hopes on the arrival of an officer. The wait is for their child under the custody of the Child Welfare Committee (CWC), and their hope is that their child will be returned.
At a time when Norway's child welfare system is in the news for its contentious decision to take two Indian children into custody, a look at the process adopted by the Child Welfare Committee (CWC), a similar government agency here, to identify the rightful custodian of “neglected” or “abandoned” children in the city shows how painfully insensitive it is to the needs of the child or the parents.
The scene witnessed recently, along the lane leading to the CWC premises in Purasawalkam in Chennai, simply reflects the agony of migrant labourers trying to obtain their children who had gone missing.
Santoshi and Gabbar, migrant workers from Bilaspur in Chhattisgarh, were waiting with their two sons. “Our daughter Lakshmi (8) was taken by the police on Pongal day last week. We were buying sweets near the Marina beach and suddenly, three police officers took her away,” said Santoshi on Friday, breaking down as she explained that they had been coming there every other day during that week.
Buying sweets or begging?
Luckily for her, the CWC concluded its proceedings later that evening and returned the couple's daughter. According to P. Manorama, Chairperson, CWC, the child was brought to the committee since she was found begging on the day before Pongal. “We even found the child with money.” However, the couple had told The Hindu that the girl was buying sweets at a stall near the Marina with her mother standing nearby.
The CWC also said its enquiry revealed that the family came to Chennai and was living here for more than two years, but the child had never been to school. Santoshi and Gabbar, however, had told The Hindu that they had been in Chennai for less than two months.
Explaining the delay in handing over the girl to her parents, Ms. Manorama said: “Cases are posted for hearing 15 days after the child is brought, which gives us sufficient time to collect details about the whereabouts of the parents. And after Pongal holidays, the Purasawalkam unit of the CWC could meet only on Friday.”
The parents of the girl agreed before the committee to go back to their hometown, and produced train tickets as the proof of intent. “But it is not in our hands to ensure that the child does not go back to begging in her hometown,” she added.
The child was away from her parents for about a week, but the period was rather tormenting for Santoshi and Gabbar. According to the couple, the CWC, as part of its procedure to establish the parents' identity, asked for their ration card. “Our ration card is in Hindi, and they wanted it translated to English,” said Gabbar. The CWC denied that it had asked for a translated copy of the family's ration card. However, Santoshi and Gabbar told The Hindu that they were asked for a translated copy, and they tried in many shops, even big ones, but didn't succeed in getting the translation done.
The CWC, functioning under the Department of Social Defence, has the primary function of caring for “neglected” or “abandoned” children. Personnel from the Juvenile Aid Protection Unit rescue such children and bring them to the CWC, in addition to NGOs and other citizens contacting the child helpline. Sources in the unit said as many as 318 children were rescued in 2011 and in 2012 so far, 49 children have been rescued.
Every day about three to four beats (teams of two members of the unit) set out on “rounds” at different spots, such as railway stations, bus terminuses, or busy market areas. “We look for children without slippers, dressed in rags or those who look helpless. I have been motivating my teams to rescue at least one child every day,” said an official.
“Efficient process needed”
Following the rescue, the CWC follows a detailed procedure, involving enquiries on the child's parents and background and whether he/she was going to school. The CWC may be justified in adopting a thorough procedure to verify the identity of parents to ensure the child, when returned, would be taken care of well and provided education, but the process of this verification is not only slow, but also ambiguous in some parents' view. Indefinite waits on the premises, inadequate information and language barriers only make their situation worse.
Pullamma and Venkateswarulu, a couple from Machilipatnam, Krishna District, Andhra Pradesh, were waiting for an update on their 10-year-old-daughter Sandya Priyanka. As construction labourers, Venkateswarulu makes Rs.300 every day, while Pullamma gets a daily wage of Rs.200. “We were near Anna Salai and she went to buy a bun. Suddenly, we found her missing … we were later directed to this place. In addition to our ration card, they asked for her school certificate and we have brought it today,” says Pullamma, showing a letter attested by their District Educational Officer. Some parents say they are happy with the care given at the CWC's reception home, but the separation can be painful. “The food and place is okay, but the child misses us a lot,” says another mother, waiting for her son.
A more systematic and efficient process, which is also transparent, can help prevent further victimisation of parents or migrant labourers, who are often in a disadvantageous position already, say activists working in the area of child rights and protection.
Vidya Reddy of Tulir - Centre for the Prevention and Healing Child Sexual Abuse, says no documentation that substantiates the orders is provided to the family or the complainant. “What can a migrant workers' family make of an order? There is no advice available on the next possible recourse. Sadly, the Juvenile Justice system is designed as one that addresses issues of those in a socio-economically disadvantaged position. We see that the delivery of services to this section is always poor.”
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Braving Burundi: extract from Crazy River
Following in the footsteps of the great 19th-century explorers for his new book, Crazy River, Richard Grant travelled to Burundi to experience life in the poorest, most corrupt country in the world
At an internet place called Baby Come and Call in Kigoma, the biggest town on the Tanzanian stretch of Lake Tanganyika, I checked the latest news coming out of Burundi.
Some demobilised child soldiers had rioted in their rehabilitation centre and spilled out into the streets, saying they were hungry and demanding that sardines be added to their daily food rations. Grenades were still going off with alarming regularity. An overcrowded boat had capsized on the lake, drowning 28, and the president, Pierre Nkurunziza, was holding ecstatic rallies in packed football stadiums to celebrate his four years in office.
Bujumbura, the capital city of Burundi, was my next port of call. It lay at the top end of Lake Tanganyika, 100 miles north of Kigoma, and a young man working in my hotel took it upon himself to arrange the next stage of my journey.
His name was Juma Shabani, he was well-educated and ambitious, spoke very good English, and followed global news and policy debates in great detail on the internet. Juma had worked in the refugee camps around Kigoma, and he made some more entries in my file of African prejudices and stereotypes. 'The Congolese are obsessed with clothes,’ he said. 'You would see them in the camps wearing designer suits, with high-waisted trousers, but no shoes. Or they have a silk tie from Paris, but their shirt has a big hole in the back. The Congolese, they don’t want to work. They prefer to hustle and steal. The Burundians are hard-working, but they have too many guns and grenades and terrible politicians.’
Juma wanted to be a lawyer. He had a place waiting for him at Dodoma University, but he couldn’t get a student loan sufficient to cover his tuition costs. I waited for him to ask me for help, but it never came.
He seemed satisfied to have my friendship, and he earned my deep gratitude for his help and advice. I wanted to take a lake ferry boat up to Bujumbura but Juma insisted it was too dangerous: 'The rains and storms are here, the boats are overcrowded, people are capsizing and drowning all the time. Also, when the boatmen see you, they see a rich man, so they call on their phone to the robber boat, and they come and rob you. They want your money and belongings. Very rarely do they kill. If someone kills here, we think they are crazy. Or from Burundi. But Richard, you must not take a lake taxi. Please. The way to Bujumbura is on the bus.’
That night he took me to a muddy yard full of stones, chickens, trash, loiterers and Toyota Hiace minivans. He made inquiries about going to Bujumbura, asking prices, giving the impression it was for him not me, and this was an easy impression to give, because white people did not go to Burundi on the bus. Then he said, 'OK. You meet me here at 6am, and don’t be late. They say crossing the border is no problem. It is quiet there. You have to catch another bus on the other side. I will arrange everything.’
I arrived at quarter to six with my backpack, and Juma was already there. He bought the ticket so I wouldn’t get a special price. He made sure my backpack was stowed in a place where it was hard to steal. He said I would have to walk across the border and then catch a taxi to the nearest town, and get a bus to Bujumbura from there. We shook hands goodbye in a sudden rainstorm, and then I sat down inside the Hiace and waited for it to fill up. max capacity 13 said the writing on the back of the vehicle. The driver and his assistant managed to get in 20, but that wasn’t good enough. We sat there squeezed in for 45 minutes until two more passengers arrived and then two more.
Then the driver roared out into the muddy streets, skidded, lost control, fishtailed and almost flipped. The passengers were angry, especially the women, and they gave the young man at the wheel a barrage of scolding. He responded by turning up the radio to its maximum distorted volume and roaring off again at the same idiotic speed. Whenever the Hiace went over a large bump, which was every few minutes, I cracked skulls with the young man to my left and learnt to appreciate the fact that his hair was long enough to cushion the blow slightly. But his body odour made my eyes water.
To my right, I was jammed up against a serene-looking Muslim with a white beard, a white prayer cap and a kind smile. He spoke some English, and over the racket of the music I determined that his name was Sudi, and he had been visiting his wife in Kigoma, where she was pregnant with his fifth child and staying with her family. Now he was returning home to Bujumbura, where he drove a taxi. When I said I was going there too, he said we should travel together. I trusted him immediately and completely, and I felt greatly relieved to have an ally in negotiating the border crossing and the Burundian bus system.
Alongside our muddy, potholed road, the Chinese were building a paved highway. It seemed odd to see Chinese faces under the hard hats on that rainy African morning and Chinese drivers in the cabs of muddy Chinese earthmovers, but it’s a normal sight in Africa these days. China is the biggest foreign player on the continent now, with a presence in all 53 countries. Unlike the West, which feels a moral obligation to reduce suffering and improve African lives, China looks at Africa purely as an economic opportunity. Its basic strategy is twofold: strip out the natural resources, and sell Chinese-made goods to Africans, everything from fighter jets and tanks down to flip-flops and combs.
Starting with the missionaries, the West has always had this idea that Africans need to change their ways and live more like us, but the Chinese, who started trading here in the seventh century, do not feel this impulse. Chinese officials don’t upbraid African leaders about human rights or democratic governance. Nor do they have any objection to bribery and corruption, if it helps business get done.
While the West concentrates on partnering with Africans in the areas of education, health, environmental issues, gender issues and community development projects, and bends over backwards to be culturally sensitive and politically correct, China comes in with Chinese workers, hiring Africans only for the most menial tasks, and builds roads, factories, ports, dams, airports and presidential palaces, all with the aim of boosting its trade. In 1996 China’s trade in Africa was $5.6 billion. In 2010 it was over $100 billion, with more than a million Chinese living in Africa.
The Hiace stopped in a small village in forested highlands with mist drifting through the trees. It was immediately surrounded by shouting young men, getting off their bicycles, shoving and shouldering each other aside to wrench the back door open and start grabbing at our bags. Sudi stood there, gentle and beatific, as five men began yelling and gesturing in his face, then he spoke some words, more yelling, more soft words from Sudi. 'These are bicycle taxi men,’ he explained. 'They will take us to the border. They want 10,000 [Tanzanian shillings; about £4] for the two of us, and another five for your bag. It is a fair price.’
I didn’t understand why the bus didn’t go to the border, but it was a pleasant relief to ride on the back of a bicycle in the cool, fresh highland air. Sudi was on the bicycle next to me, smiling happily, and my backpack was on a third bicycle.
The road curved along a high saddle separating the two countries, and we caught glimpses below of misty valleys with small patchwork fields. At the border itself, there was none of the usual commotion and opportunism that you find when crossing from one poor country into another. This was a remote area with no town either side. There were two small buildings in a quiet forest, a handful of people crossing, and no one else around. A friendly Tanzanian official stamped our passports and wished us well, and then we walked across a patch of no-man’s-land to his Burundian counterpart, a big, sullen, muscular man turning to fat, who glowered at me for a good 20 seconds without saying anything, then stamped my passport for three days. I was relieved to get out of there.
Seven of us got into a taxi, an old Toyota Corolla with a spiderweb crack across the windscreen, upholstery spilling out of the seats, loose silencer rattling on the ground. We drove down through the quiet forest into Mabanda, a highland town heaving with people and strewn with rubbish. Hard challenging glances and mad-dog stares came at me from out of the crowd, then jeering catcalls and sharp whistles, 'Eh, muzungu – white man!’ A dog was shaking on the ground with malaria or some other fever. There were soldiers and police with machine guns, teenage boys with thousand-yard stares, presumably from their years as child soldiers in the war, malnourished children with muddy rags and white hair like little old men.
Women were selling cassava and tomatoes, bananas and flip-flops, cans of USAID cooking oil and donated Louisiana rice, various medicines marked not for sale and donated by… The earth was a dark brick red, almost a wine-stained colour, where it wasn’t black with charcoal dust.
Sudi asked for my backpack and stowed it on the front seat of a Hiace. 'Come,’ he said. 'We will eat now. We leave the bag here. There is no problem. The driver is my friend.’
We walked through the market and ducked into a four-table restaurant that served only rice and beans. Stacked against the back wall were sacks of uncooked rice and beans stamped with the logos of Unicef and other aid agencies. The donated food had found its way into the local economy, and now it was being consumed by people who could afford to pay for it and not the hungry malnourished children begging outside. The tired-looking women cooking this food and running this little restaurant were using their tiny profits to feed and clothe their own children and buy them donated medicine. The morality of the situation was messy and complicated, but one thing was certain. None of this would be mentioned in the NGO press releases or fundraising literature. There would be a glowing report, listing an impressive quantity of food and medicine successfully delivered to a needy area, and that would be it. Maybe that was all that could be hoped for.
Or maybe it was teaching people that food arrived on aid trucks, and they didn’t need to grow it. Maybe if Médecins Sans Frontières and other medical charities were to pull out of Burundi, the government health department would be under more pressure to actually do something with its budget. But it was so hard to say. In a region where hungry people watched their cattle starve to death without selling or eating them, where people took donated food away from starving children and sold it instead, how could I trust my muzungu thought patterns?
I could never know what it was like to stand in rags and Chinese flip-flops, having lived through 13 years of ethnic warfare, with all the chopping, hacking, raping and mutilating that went out of European warfare a long time ago, and watch squeaky-clean, super-polite white people step out of their $60,000 Land Cruisers with a plan to make poverty history, to enrol you in a gender sensitivity workshop, to reconsider the environmental implications of your hunting and farming practices, to change the way you have sex, take a crap in the morning, gather water, plant crops, graze livestock, raise your children, treat your wife, manage your anger issues. Would I feel intruded upon, grateful, puzzled, angry, shy, resentful, uninterested? Would it encourage me to fix problems or depend on others to fix problems? Would I think: they have so much, I have nothing, so give me, give me, give me? I had no idea.
Driving out of Mabanda, in the front seat of an otherwise horrendously overcrowded Hiace, hurtling at a lunatic speed through the descending mountain curves on the way to Bujumbura, every town and village was preceded by a big white sign proclaiming an NGO project under way or completed and listing its funders and partners. Water projects were popular, at least among NGOs and their donors. It was easy to get funding for a water project, because in the West access to clean running water from a tap is considered an inalienable human right, and a universal human desire.
On an earlier visit to Tanzania, I went to a village by Lake Eyasi where a Spanish NGO had built a water project. The villagers had tried to stop it, but this made no sense to the NGO. Why would anyone willingly gather water by hand when they could have a tap? Also, it was an oppressive system for the young women and the girls who did most of the water gathering, and since the NGO had already raised the funding, its engineers went ahead and built the project. Now the villagers had taps outside their huts, and they were not happy about it. Why? Because for as long as anyone could remember, walking through the village to fetch water was how the marriageable girls had caught the eyes of marriageable boys. The NGO had wrecked their courtship system.
In Kigoma, I heard another water project story from a nearby village. NGOs are always trying to learn from their mistakes, and they know all too well that development projects tend to fall into disrepair after they leave. So the NGO in question was careful to involve the villagers at every stage of the water project, so their labour and ideas would be 'invested’ in the project and they would think of it as their own, rather than something that foreigners came and built for them. The NGO trained up villagers as maintenance engineers and set up a fund and delivery system to pay for future spare parts. All this was time-consuming, and the project took nearly three years to complete. A week later, the villagers tore the whole thing apart. Why? Because they wanted to sell the pipes; it was easy money.
Stories like these are a dime a dozen when NGO people get together and drink, but they don’t like them getting into the media, because they think it damages their fundraising abilities. I have my doubts about this. Most people give money to NGOs because it makes them feel better. It’s a kind of tithe, or guilt tax, and they show remarkably little interest in finding out how effectively their money is spent. Good intentions are good enough for both donor and NGO. The many well-documented failures of the aid industry and its overall ineffectiveness – the more aid a country has received, the more likely it is to be getting poorer – hasn’t hurt its fundraising abilities in the slightest.
It was a four-hour drive to Bujumbura and the driver drove as if he were in a video game, passing every car on the road, using the horn to clear the road in front of him of cyclists, goats, scurrying pedestrians, hitting 80mph on the straights, honking his way impatiently through the crowded villages and towns, which came one after the other as we descended into the foothills and flatlands. Burundi is the size of Belgium. It’s a green and well-watered country, but with eight million people, an agricultural economy, and over 90 per cent of the population living in rural areas, there was serious pressure on the available land. In some provinces there were 700 people per square mile, and Burundian women were averaging six children apiece. Burundi and Rwanda, the two Hutu-Tutsi countries, are the most overpopulated in Africa, and this fact cannot be separated out from either the chronic poverty or the ethnic violence.
As we entered the villages and towns, the driver made frequent stops to haggle with fruit vendors, flirt with young women who caught his eye by the side of the road, and exchange greetings with various young men of his acquaintance. He got out several times to inspect barrels of palm oil for sale, and when he found one that met with his satisfaction, the passengers in the back had to squeeze up further to make room for it. Then he took off at top speed again, scattering the goats, cyclists and pedestrians in his path.
'Sudi,’ I asked. 'Do you drive like your friend here?’
'No, no,’ he laughed. 'I am a careful driver.’
'Thank you again for helping me. You are a good man.’
'Welcome to my country,’ he said. 'When we arrive at Bujumbura, you no go hotel. You stay at my house. You see African house, stay with African family, learn more.’
Lake Tanganyika came into view, rippling with white-capped waves in the wind. The road ran along the lake shore, past fishing boats, the occasional lone hippo that had somehow managed to survive amid all this hunger, and many roadside kilns where people were baking mud into bricks. Then we entered the outlying sprawl of Bujumbura – brick buildings with tin roofs, crankshaft repair shops, brightly painted storefronts, bustling roadside stalls, a traffic jam of motorbikes, taxis and Hiaces mixing their vapours with charcoal smoke from grilled meat vendors in the heat, noise, commotion and humidity.
There were electricity poles, cables and transformers but no electricity. Bujumbura was currently getting its power from Congo, but it had been delinquent in paying its bills, and the Congolese were restricting the supply to teach them a lesson. Normally Bujumbura got its electricity from a donor-built hydro project, but the reservoirs were dry. The managers had run all the water through the turbines already, or the main dam had sprung a leak and no one had done anything about it. No one was quite sure. Later, I would meet a World Bank water expert who attended a meeting of the Burundian government to address this situation. The officials began the meeting by asking him to join them in a prayer for rain to fill up the reservoirs. He turned them down politely, saying, 'I’m with the World Bank. We don’t believe in that sort of thing. If my bosses find out I’ve been praying for rain, I’ll get fired.’
Central Bujumbura, the old Belgian colonial city on the lake shore, with its sandy beaches, hillside villas, art deco buildings, elegant Francophone restaurants and lively nightclubs, had been a haven of cosmopolitan sophistication in the middle of Africa, a choice posting for diplomats and NGO workers in the 1980s and early 1990s. Now, having endured wave after wave of ethnic cleansing and gangsterised ethnic war, conducted with phenomenal cruelty by all the groups involved, the city was pockmarked, grimy and traumatised, with packs of half-feral children roaming the streets, but the aid money was flowing again, the NGO people were back in greater numbers than ever, and there was a vibrant illegal economy in smuggled gemstones and minerals from Congo. Cafes, restaurants and nightclubs were open again, and Sudi said there was a good spirit in the city these days, a feeling that despite all the problems – the terrible poverty, lack of jobs and the worst corruption in the world, according to Transparency International – things were now getting better and maybe this time the violence was gone for good.
We got off the bus in the crowded streets near the central market. People were speaking French, Swahili and Kirundi, the subtle, allusive language of Burundi, switching back and forth fluently between the languages, and many of them also spoke some English. Sudi told me to be careful of pickpockets, and there were plenty of beggars, including glue-sniffing children with one hand outstretched and the other holding a bag of glue, but the streets felt less dangerous and threatening than Mabanda, or Bagamoyo, or a bad neighbourhood in an American city. Sudi lived in the Nyakabiga quarter, a majority Tutsi area. During the war, the city had been strictly divided on ethnic lines, and anyone trying to cross from one area to another ran a high risk of being killed. Soldiers, militias, ethnic street gangs would all enforce these boundaries by dragging people out of vehicles and beating, stabbing or necklacing them with a burning tyre by the side of the road. Sudi, being of mixed Hutu-Tutsi parentage, was able to cross these lines in his taxi, because both Hutus and Tutsis thought that despite his mixed blood he was really one of them.
It’s important to understand that Hutus and Tutsis are not separate tribes, although many Hutus believe they are. They are more like ethnic castes. They both speak the same language, and for many centuries, in Burundi and Rwanda, they lived together as part of a unified society ruled over by kings and princes. For the Belgian colonial authorities, however, this was too untidy. They classified the Hutu and Tutsi as two separate races, and anyone who had a long nose or lighter skin was marked down as Tutsi. Colonial patronage went to the Tutsis, and the grievances of the Hutu majority sharpened and intensified. By the time the Belgians left in 1962, both Hutus and Tutsis were thinking of themselves as separate races, violence followed swiftly in both countries, culminating in the Rwandan genocide and the ethnic civil war in Burundi. In both countries, the ethnic tensions were whipped up by politicians seeking power and wealth, and the violence fuelled by an atmosphere of swirling rumours, deep paranoia, escalating hatred and vengefulness.
In Sudi’s neighbourhood, there were now some Hutus living peaceably among the Tutsis, although I couldn’t tell the two groups apart. All I could see was lots of Africans in a wide variety of shapes, sizes and skin tones, and all they could see was 'Muzungu! Muzungu! Muzungu!’ The children were wildly excited to have a real live white man on their block, the adults were gently amused on the whole, and only the drunks harassed me for money. One of Sudi’s neighbours shook her head and laughed and laughed when she saw me. 'Oh Sudi,’ she said. 'Did he get lost from his safari? Is he looking for elephants?’
He led me down a narrow alleyway that was also an open drain and into a small, shabby courtyard shared by three houses. There were laundry lines strung across it and a communal bathroom consisting of a bucket of water and a hole in the ground. 'Welcome, welcome,’ said Sudi, leading me through the doorway of his small house and proud to show it to me. The floors and walls were concrete. The walls were painted royal blue and growing mould, and the ceiling was a woven-reed matting. Sudi knew that muzungus had delicate stomachs and could not drink the lake water like normal people, so he sent out one of his headscarved teenage daughters to buy bottled water. When she returned, he sat me down in his best armchair and turned on the television. 'I must go to the mosque and pray,’ he said. 'You stay here. Relax.’
There was a gold-threaded velvet painting of Mecca on one wall, plastic flowers on a plastic tablecloth on the coffee table, a large plastic thermos on a sideboard with a glass tea set. On the small colour television, President Nkurunziza, wearing a blue Adidas tracksuit and a white bush hat, was passing bricks along a line of people volunteering to build a new hospital. He was making a dance out of it, dipping his knees and twisting his hips to a rhythm and exhorting the others in the line to do the same. There was a kind of blank, glowing, happy spaciness in the president’s eyes that I couldn’t quite pin down. Was he just bugged out on Jesus? Was there some war trauma mixed in? Did he seriously believe, as he kept stating in public, that physical exercise and born-again Christianity were the keys to rebuilding the world’s poorest and most corrupt country?
When Sudi returned from the mosque, we ate rice and beans with his sister, aunt and two teenage daughters and then settled down to watch hip-hop videos on television. One of his daughters tried out a few flirting moves on me, much to the amusement of her sister, and in general the women were more confident, outgoing and in charge than one might expect in a Muslim household. Sudi was a gentle, yielding patriarch. With all the fearful angry barking about Muslims in America and Europe these days, it’s easy to lose track of the fundamental decency of Islam, its emphasis on compassion, humility and hospitality to strangers. During the war in Burundi and the genocide in Rwanda, Muslims had generally stayed neutral and pacifist, while the majority Catholic population hacked away at each other.
When the time came to sleep, I unrolled my sleeping pad on the floor and covered myself in insect repellent against the house mosquitoes. Sudi rolled himself up like a sarcophagus in an embroidered white cotton sheet, pulling it over his head, tucking it in round the sides. That was his protection against the mosquitoes and the malaria and other diseases they carried. His brother slept outside in the taxi every night to make sure no one stole it.
The next morning, I bought Sudi a phone at the Obama Shop. It sold mobile phones and computers, and the employees wore T-shirts with Obama’s picture on the back, and all the different models of phone had been renamed and repackaged on the Obama theme. While a reggae song called Barack Obama played on the stereo, Sudi looked at the Yes We Can phone, but settled on the Living the Dream model. 'This will be good for my business,’ Sudi said.
I bought myself a Burundian sim card, and loaded up both our phones with credit. I was starting to like this city, with its crumbling art deco buildings, its sense of fragile peace, a spirit that seemed traumatised but vigorous and undefeated. I wanted to know more about this beleaguered, corrupt little country and its efforts to heal and repair itself after so many years of war and hatred. Was this the beginning of a lasting peace or an interlude in the cycle of violence? What could be done about ethnic hatred? Who were these people and how did their society fit together? Were they doomed or was there hope?
One morning, Sudi drove me to Buterere, a poor area near the airport. He wanted to show me what happened to the rubbish collected from the embassies, the UN buildings and the rich neighbourhood on the hill where the foreign NGO people lived. They all paid to have their rubbish collected by a private company, whose trucks came around once a week and dumped the foreigners’ rubbish by the side of a long dirt road paralleling a filthy stream.
Naked boys were swimming and fishing in the stream. On the other side of the road, amid thick buzzing clouds of flies, skeletal men in rags were scavenging through the broken glass and filth for scraps of food. They were Twa pygmies, displaced from the forest and now living in a small shantytown. Sudi gave one some money to talk. He took the money and ran away. Sudi held up another banknote, called him, and he came running back.
The man said the Twa wanted to be left alone to hunt in the forest, but the forest was gone now, cut down for charcoal, and all the animals had disappeared. He was holding a plastic bag, and Sudi asked him to show us its contents. He had some rotting fruit covered in black filth, some fishheads, a plastic water bottle and a sooty grey object that I thought was a chunk of dried mud. He wiped away the dirt on the object to show us it was a packet of American instant mashed potato. 'Today is the best day,’ he said. 'This is when we get the good things to eat.’ He held up his instant mashed potato like a prize and smiled.
'Oh God, I wish you hadn’t told me that,’ said T that evening over glasses of wine at a large open-air bar with manicured lawns. She was a lively, intelligent American woman, very fit, clean and healthylooking, and she had been in Burundi for two years working on women’s issues with an American NGO. She had no authorisation to talk on the record to journalists (hence the initial T). She lived in a gated villa on the hill with four servants, two vehicles and a swimming-pool, and like so many of her tribe, she felt guilty and awkward about having these luxuries in such a poor country. She justified it by saying the house was bequeathed to her by her predecessor at the NGO, that she was in Burundi for the long haul, and to be at her most effective she needed a quiet, safe, comfortable refuge. I found her argument faultless. Sleeping on Sudi’s floor with the whining mosquitoes and 4am muezzin calls from the nearby mosque was wearing me out.
Why, I asked, with all the aid flowing into Burundi and the dozens of NGOs headquartered in Bujumbura, were people excited about eating her rubbish? Couldn’t someone go down to Buterere with some food aid? 'I know, I know,’ she said. 'The trouble is that no one is doing projects for the urban poor in Bujumbura. The funding isn’t there. We’re all so focused on truth, reconciliation and justice. Underdevelopment in the rural areas. Democratic governance. Human rights.’
'What about the government?’ I asked. 'What is it doing?’
'Well, the international community supplies more than 60 per cent of the government’s budget, and supposedly there are strings attached. They’re supposed to show evidence of democratisation and improved human rights before getting the money. In reality they got another $35 million, with no strings attached, because they threatened to resume the civil war if we didn’t give them the money. And of course most of that money ends up in private bank accounts.’
I told her I was going to Rwanda, and asked what she thought of President Kagame. 'I think he’s fantastic,’ she said. 'I wish Burundi had one like him. Kagame is a dictator, but he has a vision, and he’s dragging that country towards it by the scruff of its neck, and development is actually happening. It’s the only way. Here we’re trying to have a democracy, and we have a shambles. All it takes is one leader with vision and power. Unfortunately I don’t see anyone here like that at the moment. The only ones with vision have no power. And the ones with power are only interested in getting rich. They really are a bunch of thugs, Neanderthals. Oh God, did I just say that?’
Meanwhile, Kenny Rogers was playing through the speakers, as Kenny so often does in Bujumbura. It’s a minor curiosity of Burundian life that I feel compelled to record. There are a surprising number of country and western fans in this part of Africa, and Kenny Rogers is their stone favourite. As we sat there discussing Burundian politics and the dilemmas of aid, Kenny crooned, 'Know when to hold ’em / Know when to fold ’em…’
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Questions raised about foreign aid link with resource development
The Conservative government is fundamentally realigning the way Canada delivers foreign aid, using private-sector partners in the mining and agricultural sectors. In some instances the government's aid agency is even helping write legislation regulating the mining industry in developing countries.
But if the policy direction at the Canadian International Aid Agency seems to blur the line between Canada's economic interests and international development goals, it is not something that worries International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda. When asked, during an interview with the Citizen, how she separates Canada's trade and foreign policy interests from Canadian development goals, she replied: "I really don't separate them."
"I think if we can increase the capacity of any country to become a global trading partner, if they've got products Canadians need, we can import them, and if Canada has products they would like, Canada can export them."
And Oda says she wants to see more partnerships between aid agencies and companies to help deliver Canadian aid around the world.
"Our government is very much looking to increase its relationships with the private sector," she said, adding that she would like to see such relationships between NGOs and corporations in manufacturing, agriculture and tourism, in addition to the extractive industry.
Oda said Canada's expertise in the mining and extraction industries — Canada is a global leader in mining — provides "added value" when it comes to international development. "It's another way of improving the effectiveness of CIDA's work," she said.
It is a direction that has divided the foreign aid community and has critics asking whether Canada's international aid strategy has been overtaken by the country's economic interests.
Liberal MP John McKay, who has pushed for more accountability for Canadian mining companies working overseas, calls the policy direction regrettable. "I don't think that poor peoples' money should be, first and foremost, used to benefit our economic interests."
Many of the countries CIDA works in have burgeoning resource development industries and, in many cases, Canadian companies are already there and would like to expand. Oda said helping these countries develop their resources and establish stable economic foundations is the best way to reduce poverty over the long term. CIDA will even help developing countries draft mining legislation to better attract foreign investment, she said. Such investment, she said, builds the economy and reduces poverty.
She pointed to a recently announced CIDA-funded project in which Canadian NGO Plan International Canada is working with the mining company Iamgold Corp. to train young people "in occupations directly related to the mining sector or other sectors surrounding this industry."
"These are all skills that can be left behind, that these people can take to other areas," Oda said. When mining companies from other countries, such as China, go into developing nations, she noted, they bring their own workforce.
The policy direction takes place against the backdrop of the federal government's corporate social responsibility strategy which, according to CIDA documents, is aimed at "improving the competitive advantage of Canadian international extractive sector companies by enhancing their ability to manage social and environmental risk." CIDA's role in the strategy is to help developing countries manage their minerals, oil and gas "and to benefit from these resources to reduce poverty."
The very title of the federal government's CSR strategy, Building the Canadian Advantage: A Corporate Social Responsibility Strategy for the Canadian International Extractive Sector, "suggests that it is corporations that are intended as the real beneficiaries of CSR initiatives," said Catherine Coumans of the group MiningWatch, "with collaborating NGOs following in second place."
The foreign aid link with resource development is likely to be controversial because of the obvious self-interest for Canada. As home to about 75 per cent of global mining companies, any policy that helps open up mining markets around the world or smooths the way for companies already there, will benefit Canada. And it raises legitimate questions about what happens when the government's foreign aid direction clashes with Canada's economic interests.
In recent years some Canadian mining companies have worked to overcome growing concern about the environmental and social impacts of mining around the world — concerns heightened by specific cases in which mining companies were accused of human rights abuses and environmental damage. Many companies have recognized they need a social licence to operate and have adopted corporate social responsibility policies. Partnerships with NGOs, supported by the federal government, are part of this direction.
But linking development assistance to resource development results in mixed motives for CIDA, according to McKay. "Is this for alleviation of poverty, to further our economic and corporate interests, or for gaining influence in particular industries? That has been the problem with CIDA all along: We have mixed motives."
"Why not just wind up CIDA and put it into the international trade portfolio if that is what it is being used for?"
The Canadian aid agencies that are working with mining companies on the pilot projects announced by Oda last fall defend the initiatives as worthwhile and beneficial.
"When NGOS are working in these countries, should we do nothing, or should we roll up our sleeves and push these companies to do better. It is easy to stand on the sidelines and be sanctimonious," said Plan Canada CEO Rosemary McCarney, a founding member of the Devonshire Initiative, which is based on the belief that the Canadian mining and NGO presence in emerging markets can be a force for positive change.
McCarney dismisses critics who say working with mining companies compromises NGOs.
"This is not going to compromise our perspective or our ability to speak out on development practices," she added. Plan Canada is working with Iamgold on a $5.7-million CIDA-funded skills-training project in Burkina Faso. The company contributed $1 million to the project.
McCarney said Plan thought long and hard before getting involved in the project and made sure it was comfortable working with the company and with the project.
"It took a lot of courage, it also took a lot of homework for us. Our reputation is everything for an NGO. You have to partner carefully and purposefully and have your eyes wide open."
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Yudhoyono slams NGOs over Papua
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono reprimanded on Friday nongovernmental organizations that have regularly criticized how the Indonesian Military (TNI) handles security in Papua, saying that they have implied that the law should not be enforced in the country’s two easternmost provinces.
“Papua is part of Indonesia. It doesn’t make sense that NGOs say things that imply that we can’t enforce the law in Papua,” he said at a TNI and National Police leaders meeting in Jakarta.
Yudhoyono said the military presence in Papua was not without justified.
“They are there because there is still an armed separatist movement, which we should be aware of,” he said, emphasizing that there was only a small military presence that did not conduct aggressive military operations.
The President stressed that the government was eager to improve welfare in Papua by implementing programs to accelerate Papua’s economic development.
“That is not just lip service — the average development expenditure per capita in Papua is the highest in the country,” Yudhoyono pointed out.
He added that he had conveyed the government’s policy on Papua to his counterparts across the globe as news regarding military activities in Papua had spread quickly to world leaders.
“Many have asked me about what happened in Papua. I should explain that the military presence in Papua is not without justification,” he said.
To respond to grievances from Papuans who deemed themselves unfairly treated by the central government, Yudhoyono set up in Sept. 20, last year, the government-sanctioned Presidential Unit for the Acceleration of Development in Papua and West Papua (UP4B).
Lt. Gen. Bambang Darmono, the commanding officer in Aceh from 2002 to 2005, was appointed the chief of the program.
Last week, the partnership for governance reform (Kemitraan) and the Legal Aid Institute (LBH) released a survey from 2011 that found that torture was commonly carried out by members of the police to extract information from suspects.
More than 205 respondents including suspects, police personnel, prosecutors, correctional officers, human rights activists, academics and local tribal chiefs, testified that torture was committed by police officers against suspects during arrests, investigations, detention and in jail.
Earlier, Vice President Boediono brushed aside fears of “foreign intervention” in the event of donor development funds being more accessible in Papua.
“Don’t seek ghosts in broad daylight,” Boediono said on Wednesday.
“The most important thing is for us to filter, be selective. Let’s not close ourselves off [unnecessarily],” he remarked.
He stressed that there were many donors — bilateral and multilateral – with good intentions in Papua.
He dismissed undue fears that countries like Australia and the United States had ulterior motives, referring to treaties and statements made by the two countries stating their support for Indonesia’s territorial integrity.
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Egyptians march to honour 'Friday of Rage'
Thousands gather in Cairo one year after uprising, as US urges military rulers to lift travel ban for NGO workers.
Tens of thousands of protesters have rallied across the Egyptian capital, Cairo, to mark the first anniversary of the "Friday of Rage", a key day in the uprising that toppled former President Hosni Mubarak last year.
Demonstrators began to converge in the capital's Tahrir Square, the focal point of protests, after Muslim noon prayers, on a day dubbed the "Friday of Pride and Dignity" by the dozens of pro-democracy groups organising the rallies.
"Down with military rule!", shouted demonstrators, who waved flags and banners and chanted slogans against the ruling Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF).
Tensions erupted at one point when one march of hundreds of protesters headed towards the ministry of defence building. It was later met by dozens of supporters of the military.
The pro-military protesters formed a human chain across an intersection, but the marchers pushed through them, shouting "down with military rule", The Associated Press news agency reported.
On last year's "Friday of Rage", Mubarak's security forces fired on protesters who marched into Tahrir, killing and wounding hundreds. Mubarak is currently on trial in Cairo, facing charges of involvement in the killing of protesters.
In Tahrir on Friday, Sheikh Mazhar Shahin, the imam of the Omar Makram mosque located within the square, called for faster retribution for the deaths of protesters last year.
"People came out on January 25, 2011, to call for freedom, justice, dignity and the end of a regime that spread all forms of corruption," Shahin told the crowd, referencing the date of the start of the uprising.
"We demanded the resignation of the regime, but after a year passed on the revolution, I'm asking; did the regime
actually resign?" Shahin said.
"The revolution is continuous, we need a swifter purge of media and political trials for those who killed the protesters. I'm supporting you."
Divided on message
However, Islamists and liberal, secular-leaning protesters appeared to be divided over the message they were trying to send on Friday.
The powerful Muslim Brotherhood, which swept the majority of seats in recently concluded elections for the new lower house of parliament with its Freedom and Justice Party, occupied a part of the square where the mood was celebratory.
Muslim Brotherhood supporters and others note that the military council, which took over after Mubarak stepped down, has pledged to hand over power to civilian rule after presidential elections by late June.
On the other side of Tahrir, the chants were strongly anti-military and some shouted against the Brotherhood, yelling "Get off the stage" to Brotherhood supporters who set up a platform in the square.
The Brotherhood supporters attempted to drown out the chants by blaring the national anthem and religious recordings from loudspeakers.
The tensions erupted into scuffles between Brotherhood supporters and liberal protesters at one point, the AP reported, with each side hurling rocks and bottles at each other in the square. There were no immediate reports of injury.
Travel restrictions
As the events to mark the anniversary of the 18-day uprising continued, the US state department called on Egypt to lift travel restrictions on several Americans working for non-governmental organisations (NGO), many of whom were in Egypt to monitor recent elections.
Washington asked SCAF to stop "endangering American lives" after six Americans working for publicly funded US organisations were barred from leaving the country.
"We are urging the government of Egypt to lift these restrictions immediately and allow these folks to come home as soon as possible," Victoria Nuland, a state department spokeswoman, said on Thursday.
"We are trying to get them free to travel as soon as possible, and we're hopeful that we can resolve this in coming days," she said.
Al Jazeera's Sherine Tadros, reporting from Cairo, said: "Relations between Cairo and Washington have been strained, to say the least, since last month’s raid on a number of foreign-funded, including American-funded, NGOs, when their offices were ransacked and computers and data taken," she said.
"Now it seems a number of those NGO employees are under investigation, and that is where travel bans come in."
'Dire economic situation'
Among those hit by travel bans is Sam LaHood, a son of US Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, as well as other foreign staffers of the US-funded NGOs, International Republican Institute and National Democratic Institute, officials at the two organisations said.
The travel ban was part of an Egyptian criminal investigation into foreign-funded democracy organisations after soldiers raided the offices of 10 such groups last month, including those of two American groups.
Washington has indicated it may review the $1.3bn it gives the Egyptian military each year if the probe into alleged breaches of local regulations went on.
"Egypt is in dire economic situation and is really in need of the $1.3bn aid that is usually provided on a yearly base," our correspondent said.
"All of this comes at a time when the US Congress is debating $1.3bn aid deal and putting a lot of pressure through legislation on the state department to make sure that Egypt’s transition to democracy is going in right direction," she said.
"It doesn’t come as good news for relations [US-Egypt] and even domestically, because what it shows is the growing xenophobia of military rulers here who have blamed any event they don’t like on the ground on these "foreign hands" or so-called foreign elements much like the regime before them did."
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