18/02/2012
By Johan Galtung* – TRANSCEND – The state system at its worst: trading insults and threats, sanctions, readiness to use extreme violence, forward deployment of US troops in Israel as hostages to guarantee US involvement, disregard for common people and the effects of warfare in the Middle East and the world.
**Obama, 2006. Author: Ari Levinson (Autumnfire) | Wikimedia Commons
The options are harder sanctions, or war. The far better option, sitting down, with mediators, talking and searching for solutions, is absent.
Polarization, escalation, the material of which wars are made fill the media. What a shame.
Indeed, there are multiple underlying conflicts. Take the nuclear issue: two haves against one have-not. But the USA lived with Soviet and Chinese nuclear bombs for a long time before they learnt to talk. Israel has lived with Pakistani nuclear options, referred to as “Islamic”, even with the bomb. Of course, the real, longer term goal could be that Pakistani bomb.
But then, with no proof of an Iranian nuclear arms capability, why Iran?
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18/02/2012
By Ramesh Jaura – IDN-InDepth News*, Berlin/Tokyo – In a variation of the legendary slogan “make love, not war”, an eminent Buddhist philosopher is calling for a nuclear-free world in which genuine human security, sustainable development and unwavering respect for the dignity of life do not only comprise an ideal but constitute an entrenched reality.
**Image: BANG (Ban All-Nukes Generation) | Credit: enact.org.nz
In a 23-page peace proposal titled ‘Human Security and Sustainability: Sharing Reverence for the Dignity of Life,’ Buddhist leader Daisaku Ikeda pleads for a nuclear abolition summit in 2015 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombings of the two cities so that the growing momentum toward elimination of nuclear weapons becomes irreversible.
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17/02/2012
With 60 percent of the world’s population, Asia has one of the largest concentrations globally of aging persons, creating a host of potential challenges, experts warn*. Over 65 percent of Asia’s elderly population will be women.
Credit:UN
“Asian countries, besides Japan perhaps, need to plan now. These countries have grown older before they have grown rich,” said Somnath Chatterji with the World Health Organization (WHO) office in New Delhi.
“One in four people in Asia will be 60 or older by the year 2050, rising from one in 10 in 2010, according to the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific.”
“China and India clearly will be the countries with the largest population of older adults in absolute terms. However, China is aging more rapidly than India because of its one child policy,” Chatterji added.
The over-60 population will rise from 165 million to 439 million in China and from 93 million to 323 million in India from 2010 to 2050, according to government projections reported to the UN.
India’s overall population is expected to exceed China’s in the same period.
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17/02/2012
The UN General Assembly strongly condemned the continued “widespread and systematic” human rights violations by the Syrian authorities and demanded that the Government immediately cease all violence and protect its people.
**Image: Syria-Frames-Of-Freedom. Source | Wikimedia Commons
The 193-member body adopted on 16 Feb. a resolution backing Arab League efforts to resolve the crisis in Syria, where UN officials estimate that “security forces have killed well over 5,400 people since the popular uprising began last March,” the UN reports.
“Thousands of people are also believed to be missing, some 70,000 people are internally displaced and 25,000 have fled the country to avoid the violence.”
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17/02/2012
An estimated 10 million people or more are struggling to get enough to eat across the Sahel region, including 5.4 million in Niger alone, representing over one third of its total population. More than a million children under the age of five risk severe acute malnutrition in the region, up from 300,000 last year.
*Image: Mothers waiting to have their children assessed and weighed at the Bargadja therapeutic feeding centre in Niger's Maradai Region. Photo: WFP/Phil Behan
The UN has been sounding the alarm since last September that the situation in the Sahel region was likely to become “a major humanitarian situation” this year unless something was done to reverse the trend.
“We are extremely concerned that millions of people will be affected by a combination of drought, poverty and high grain prices, which, coupled with environmental degradation and chronic underdevelopment, is expected to result in a new food and nutrition crisis,” Assistant Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Catherine Bragg stated in New York, the UN reports.
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15/02/2012
By Bill Van Auken – WSWS* – The US-backed monarchy in the island Gulf state of Bahrain unleashed intense repression on Monday [Feb.13] and Tuesday [Feb.14] to break up demonstrations by thousands of workers and youth marking the first anniversary of the brutally crushed pro-democracy protests that began on February 14, 2011.
**Image: Bahrain in pictures | Wikimedia Commons
The Bahraini protesters have demanded an end to the dictatorial rule of the al-Khalifa a regime, a Sunni monarchy, as well as jobs and equal rights for the country’s Shia majority, 70 percent of the population, which is subject to systematic discrimination.
Bahrain’s capital of Manama and its surrounding suburbs were placed under a tightened de facto state of siege with armored anti-riot cars lining the streets, thousands of police and troops deployed and barbed wire strung around the iconic Pearl Roundabout, the equivalent of Cairo’s Tahrir Square.
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15/02/2012
By Zach Zill – Socialist Worker* – The small island nation of Bahrain sits in the Persian Gulf, between Saudi Arabia and Qatar. When the Tunisian and Egyptian uprising toppled U.S.-backed dictators last year, all of the region’s dictatorships trembled, including Bahrain. The winds of change inspired Bahrain’s downtrodden, and the country’s monarchy barely managed to maintain its grip on power.
**Image: A protester wounded during a Bahraini military assault against protesters in Feb. 2011
Ahmed Mohammed, a Bahraini activist visiting the U.S., spoke with Zach Zill about Bahrain’s rebellion, and what the future holds.
Can you talk about how the movement in Bahrain unfolded last February? Why did thousands of people come out to Pearl Square in Bahrain’s capital of Manama?
The protests had originally aimed to make the government fulfill the promises of the king. These promises were made in a referendum the king put to the people in 2001.
The referendum offered us a bargain–turn Bahrain into a kingdom and the emir into a king, and in return, the dreaded state of emergency law would be ended, and a parliament with full legislative powers set up. He basically offered what the opposition had been demanding throughout the uprising of the 1990s. The referendum was widely welcomed and approved.
Then the king reneged on his promise. On February 14, 2002, the king announced a new constitution in which he concentrated power in his own hands. The parliament has virtually no legislative powers.
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13/02/2012
New York, 13 February – The UN General Assembly began meeting on 13 Feb. to discuss the situation inside Syria, where thousands of people have been killed as a result of the Government’s ongoing crackdown against a pro-democracy uprising.
UN General Assembly | Credit: UN
The General Assembly meeting takes place only few days after the UN Security Council failure to adopt specific actions against the dictatorial regime in Syria and aimed at halting its brutal repression against civilian population. Navi Pillay, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, will brief Member States on the latest developments, while representatives of more than a dozen countries are also scheduled to address the meeting, the UN reports.
The 193-member General Assembly will also discuss the report of the UN Human Rights Council from December last year in which that body strongly condemned abuses by Syrian authorities carried out as part of the crackdown.
More than 5,000 people have been killed since the uprising – part of the broader Arab Spring movement across North Africa and the Middle East – began in March last year, and senior UN officials have repeatedly urged the Government to stop the violence and hold dialogue with opposition groups.
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13/02/2012
Libyan civil society organzations (CSOs) are now faced with three key challenges: internal development of knowledge; focus on holding new authorities accountable, and conversion from emergency-driven organizations to development-driven ones, according to a survey.
**Credit:Bernd.Brincken | Wikimedia Commons
Conducted by the Amman-based Foundation for the Future* (FFF), the survey “Assessing the Needs of Civil Society in Libya” recalls that in February 2011 was initiated in Libya an uprising which progressively opened and transformed the country’s political and societal spectrum.
Namely, the removal of the 42-years-long dictatorship undid an extremely restrictive legal and political framework which was prohibiting, among other, any sort of gathering of the civil society.
“It is impressive to note that as soon as the field of possibilities expanded, that is to say as soon as Benghazi fell under the control of the opposition, CSOs started mushrooming, accounting for a genuine craze of the population to take part in the reconstruction and development process needed in Benghazi and more generally in the country,” says FFF.
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12/02/2012
New York – The climate for free expression in Egypt “has worsened since Hosni Mubarak was ousted a year ago,” Human Rights Watch (HRW) reports. “Egypt’s ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) should act to end assaults on journalists by security forces. It should cease prosecutions based on laws violating media freedoms, and the country’s newly elected parliament should promptly repeal those laws.”
**Credit:Carlos Latuff – Source | Public Domain
In one recent example, a Cairo misdemeanor court on December 26, 2011, sentenced a democracy activist, Gaber Elsayed Gaber, to a year in prison for handing out leaflets at a public rally in Cairo, notes HRW in its report* on 11 Feb.
“Security forces have engaged in brutal beatings and used excessive force against demonstrators in Cairo and tried to stop journalists from reporting on them. Actions like these were hallmarks of Mubarak’s 30-year rule, but they also have been used repeatedly in the year since the SCAF assumed control on February 11, 2011,” it said.
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HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 