According to news reports Russian and Georgian armed forces are in a pitched battle over South Ossetia, the majority ethnic-Russian breakaway province in Georgia. The Secretary General is urging restraint. And so far, over 1,000 civilians have fled South Ossetia to Russian territory. Global Voices Online offers a grounds eye view from bloggers in the region.
Also via Global Voices, this Russia Today clip (posted on Aid Worker Daily) gives an update from the front lines.
...introducing "Rattus Holmes in the Case of the Spoilsports," in which a rat detective and his feline sidekick help restore honor and integrity to the summer games by investigating doping and steroid use.
UNESCO launched the cartoon this week, in advance of today's opening ceremony, to help garner support for the International Convention Against Doping in Sport.
Piracy is a big problem off of the Somali coast. World Food Program shipments have been held up, threatening the food security of an already vulnerable population. But, thanks to Canada, it looks like the WFP is about to get some relief. The Royal Canadian Navy is sending a frigate to the Horn of Africa to protect World Food Program Vessels. From the UN News Center:
Some 90 per cent of WFP food aid for Somalia arrives by sea. Since a naval escort system began last November, no escorted ships carrying WFP food have been attacked. The last escorted ship loaded with WFP food arrived in Mogadishu in late June. There were a total of 31 incidents off Somalia in 2007 - the worst year on record for Somali piracy. Without escorts, WFP's whole maritime supply route is under threat, according to the agency, which noted that since the escorts ended in late June some shippers have refused to load WFP food for Somalia. WFP urgently needs to double the amount of food it delivers to Somalia - which is facing a dire humanitarian crisis owing to drought, insecurity, failed harvests, the weakness of the Somali shilling and rising food and fuel prices - through the coming months so it can feed 2.4 million people by December.Read more. (Image: a Canadian Naval Vessel at flag lowering from Flickr user MiguelB)
In a Washington Post op-ed the undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs reflects on a recent visit Myanmar, three months after Cyclone Nargis killed an estimated 140,000 people and displaced millions more. He reports that progress is being made.
The international response has helped save lives and reduce suffering. While it is impossible to be sure all survivors have been reached, I am confident that the overwhelming majority have received help, even if many still need a good deal more. Crucially, a much-feared second wave of deaths from starvation or disease has not happened -- no small achievement, given that 75 percent of hospitals and clinics in the affected areas were destroyed. The people's resilience has been remarkable, as was the degree of help and solidarity from individual citizens and organizations in Myanmar.So what does this mean? For one, it shows that pundits who said that only forced intervention could help the people of Burma were wrong:
[t]he aid operation in Myanmar -- as is true everywhere we work -- had to be about helping vulnerable people in need, not about politics. In this post-Iraq age, I am concerned that humanitarians are often pressured to choose between the hammer of forced intervention and the anvil of perceived inaction. Was there a realistic alternative to the approach of persistent negotiation and dialogue that we pursued? I do not believe so. Nor have I met anyone engaged in the operations who believes that a different approach would have brought more aid to more people more quickly. (Emphasis added)John Holmes does not name names. I will. Here in the United States, those who conflated toppling the odious Burmese junta and delivering aid to the vulnerable Burmese people included Robert Kaplan. This Washington Post editorial made basically the same point. Three months later it's clear that they were wrong. We never had to choose between forced intervention and doing nothing. Fortunately, they were ignored. And in the meantime, lives were saved.
I just made it home after a whirlwind day of travel from Rwanda to Liberia to Senegal to Mexico. One of the most fascinating stops was in Liberia, where the United Nations Peacekeeping presence is very, very heavy.
More UNMIL after the jump.
Mark is traveling with President Clinton, who is visiting his Clinton Foundation Projects on the continent.
Monrovia, Liberia: The United Nations is everywhere. As we touched down at the Roberts International Airport here a half dozen UN helicopters rested on the tarmac next to two small UN Humanitarian Air Service Planes. We were picked up in UN-marked shuttle buses, and hundreds of peacekeepers and UN police from the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) lined the road from the airport to the city.
En route we passed the headquarters of the Ghanaian, Indian, and Nigerian battalions. We also saw a number of signs designating UNMIL "Quick Impact Projects." As the name would suggest, these are UNMIL-sponsored construction jobs meant to garner good will and show some positive results for the peacekeeping mission, which numbers around 15,000.
The majority of UNMIL's uniformed personnel are police. At a small market in town, I had the chance to meet the operational commander of the famous Indian Female Formed Police Unit. (Pictured here meeting President Clinton.) We've reported on this experimental unit on Dispatch before, and seeing them operate in person, I can say that they stand shoulder-to-shoulder -- and AK-47 to AK-47 -- with their male counterparts.
Debra Zeit, Oromia, Ethiopia --- These young women save lives for a living. They are not nurses. They don't even have a high school education. Yet, they are professional lifesavers. How? These young women are community liaisons between the Godina Health Clinic (pictured in the background) and the rural community of Debra Zeit. In doing so, they are critical players in a new trend in global health.
In developing countries like Ethiopia, the global health community's focus is starting to turn from initiatives to take on specific diseases like HIV/AIDS, Malaria and Tuberculosis to programs that strengthen public health infrastructures as a whole. The so-called "Health Extension Workers" that I met are at the cutting edge of this trend.
As I travel throughout Africa and Mexico with President Clinton this week I'll document how the donor community (including the Clinton Foundation and the United Nations Foundation), UN agencies like UNICEF and the World Health Organization, and governments are shifting from disease-specific initiatives to strengthening public health systems.
The story of the young Health Extension Workers helps explain why this shift is so important--and why tackling the scourge of HIV/AIDS, Malaria and other public health emergencies in the developing world depends on recruiting more women like these.
From the UN News Center:
A new United Nations assessment has found that millions of people in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) are experiencing the worst food crisis in almost a decade, owing to successive poor harvests coupled with soaring food prices. "Millions of vulnerable North Koreans are at risk of slipping towards precarious hunger levels," Jean-Pierre de Margerie, Country Director for the UN World Food Programme (WFP) tolda news conference in Beijing today. "The last time hunger was so deep and so widespread in parts of the country was in the late 1990s," he added.Read more. (Image from UN News Center)
Apologies to all for the late dive in, but I'd like to pick it up from this deceptively simple and much underestimated fact pointed out by Alistair Millar: "No matter how much the US spends militarily or otherwise, America cannot be everywhere at once". Thus, one priority for the new president, as far as I can see from the other side, will be to acknowledge the major mistakes of the Bush admin's approach to the "war on terror", starting perhaps with this very title. Two major issues will have to be examined without delay: First, how to retrieve some of the moral high-ground that America has lost miserably and UNNECESSARILY, and second, how to devise a smarter strategy through which we can (seriously this time) isolate terrorists from the rest of a given society and contain wannabees.