(civicus.org) — Under a draft law, Ethiopia could see severe restrictions on civil society and even closures of organisations working on contentious issues, such as human rights and governance, cautions CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation in a recent analysis.
“We appeal to the government to stop the introduction of the bill in its current form. If enacted, many organisations will be forced to choose between stopping their work on vital issues or facing closure and possible imprisonment,” said Ingrid Srinath, CIVICUS Secretary General.
The government has released three consecutive drafts of the Charities and Societies Proclamation over the last few months. While the recent draft, due to be introduced to Parliament in October, makes some improvement on the last two, it retains many draconian provisions.
The government has stated that the intention of the bill is to increase civil society organisations’ (CSOs) transparency and accountability to stakeholders, but local and international groups have expressed concern that it will instead serve to silence dissent.
CIVICUS’ report lists a number of concerns regarding the law, including:
· The Proclamation prevents CSOs that receive more than 10% of their income from foreign sources from working on issues of public importance, including human rights, gender and religious equality, children’s rights, the rights of the disabled, conflict resolution and judicial reform. Given the lack of domestic fundraising opportunities, most organisations rely on funds from abroad.
· The Proclamation permits excessive government interference in the functioning of CSOs, through the power to carry out random investigations at will. Among other requirements, CSOs must provide the government with seven days notice of any general meeting.
· By creating a web of exhaustive reporting procedures, the Proclamation gives the government a convenient way to intimidate CSOs. Mandatory annual reporting, requirements to keep meticulous financial records as well as re-registration every three years, leaves ample room for possible procedural delays and intimidation by the authorities.
· Once a CSO is denied registration, or fails to apply, the organisation is then declared unlawful. If members and supporters continue their involvement with the CSO, they risk severe punishments, including three to fifteen years in prison. According to international standards, the decision to officially register should be voluntary not imposed by the government. Such harsh repercussions for breaching the provisions of the law could deter the free participation of individuals in civil society activities.
· CSOs have limited rights to appeal against decisions taken under the Proclamation. For example, if a CSO is denied registration, it will not be able to ask for a judicial review of the facts on which the government has based its assessment. Aside from amounting to a denial of justice, it could also allow authorities to arbitrarily silence independent groups and individuals.
If the current draft of the Proclamation is passed, the already narrow space for civil society in Ethiopia could be even further restricted. In recent years, political opposition, media and civil society activists have been systematically harassed and even imprisoned because of their criticism of the government.
“The government must listen to the concerns of the country’s civil society. Their activities contribute immensely to the people of Ethiopia. But, sadly, rather than promote this vital work, this bill threatens to criminalise it,” says Srinath.
The Proclamation, if permitted to pass, would violate Ethiopia’s commitments to international and regional human rights agreements, as well as its own constitution. Article 31 of the Constitution specifically guarantees, “Every person has the right to freedom of association for any cause or purpose”.
An analysis of the Proclamation is available here.
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For more information, visit www.civicus.org or contact Julie Middleton at +27 82 403 6040 or [email protected].
Julie Middleton, Acting Manager, Civil Society Watch
Tel: 27 11 833-5959, ext. 139
Skype: juliejmiddleton
[email protected]
CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation
PO BOX 933, Southdale, 2135, Johannesburg, South Africa
www.civicus.org
BEIJING (Reuters) — Defending champion Meseret Defar, 10,000 metres winner Tirunesh Dibaba and African champion Meselech Melkamu are bidding for an Ethiopian sweep of the medals in the Olympic women’s 5000 final tomorrow.
”We’ve done good preparation and we came to win,” Melkamu told Reuters.
The trio were part of Ethiopia’s sweep of the first four places at the 2005 world championships in Helsinki, where Dibaba, her elder sister Ejegayehu and Defar earned medals, and Melkamu fell just short.
World 10,000 champion Dibaba won the Olympic 10,000 tomorrow in 29:54.66, the second-fastest time ever.
”It was really very tough,” said Dibaba, who was pushed hard by Ethiopian-born Turk Elvan Abeylegesse who is also running the 5000.
In Helsinki, Dibaba led Ethiopian sweeps in both distance races when she became the first woman to take double gold in the events at the world championships.
”We have trained hard as a team and we expect to record good results for our country,” she said.
She slashed Defar’s world 5000 record by over five seconds in Oslo in June, running 14:11.15, and is well set to repeat the double, a feat also being attempted by compatriot and fellow 10,000 gold medallist Kenenisa Bekele in the men’s events.
Defar, 5000 world champion, lost her African title to Melkamu in May, but ran 14:12.88 in Stockholm last month.
”The race in Stockholm was one in which I demonstrated my form and it gave me a wonderful vision for Beijing,” Defar said.
She has been pleasantly surprised by the climate of China’s capital, which had been expected to be oppressively hot and humid.
”The weather is fine,” she said before the 5000 heats in which the trio sailed through comfortably.
”It’s not like what we had heard.”
MOGADISHU, Somalia (CNN) — Heavy shelling struck Somalia’s capital city on Thursday, leaving pools of blood around a neighborhood mosque, a devastated market and 11 civilians dead, according to witnesses and a local journalist.
Many of the dead were preparing for prayers at the Abu Hureyra mosque, which was packed with worshippers, according to Sheikh Abdullahi Omar, whose leg was wounded by shrapnel.
“Body parts of the worshippers are scattered all over,” he said.
Local photojournalist Hassan Ahmed Haji rushed to the the mosque after the apparent mortar shell blast and saw six bodies. He said it was a frightening scene.
Mogadishu’smain market also came under attack, as vendors fled for their lives amid a continuous barrage of shelling that left five dead, witnesses told Haji.
“Bakaraha market has turned into a human butcher house today,” said Hawa Hamud Abdi, a meat trader who survived the attack. She said a mother and child were among those killed. She spoke as mortar shells and artillery fire rained down on the market.
Clashes between Islamic insurgents and Somali and Ethiopian Woyanne soldiers also raged around Suuqa Holaha, a neighborhood in northeast Mogadishu. Fighting also continued in Folarensa junction, an intersection near the presidential palace.
Wounded civilians are pouring into Mogadishu’s Madina Hospital, which is already struggling to cope with other war-wounded patients, a nurse said.
The latest fighting comes after a major United Nations-brokered peace deal was signed in the neighboring country of Djibouti by Somalia’s transitional government and an alliance of armed opposition forces.
The agreement calls on the Alliance to disassociate itself from any armed groups still fighting the government and for all sides to allow “unhindered humanitarian access and assistance” to all Somalis. A joint committee led by U.N. officials will monitor the agreement’s implementation.
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… more from BBC
Bakara market in Mogadishu bombed
(BBC) — At least 50 people have reportedly been killed in clashes in the Somali capital Mogadishu and the port of Kismayo.
Some 30 people have been killed in two days of fierce fighting between Islamists and a clan militia in Kismayo, a BBC reporter says.
Some mortars landed near the compound of President Abdullahi Yusuf, who is currently out of the country.
Another landed near a mosque in the busy Bakara market, killing at least six people, a witness told the BBC.
At least 3,000 people are reported to have fled the fighting around Kismayo.
Witnesses say that after the mortars landed in Bakara and near the president’s compound, government troops and their Ethiopian Woyanne allies opened fire, killing several civilians.
One witness told the BBC that the mortar landed outside the mosque as people were preparing for prayers.
He said that the wounded could not be evacuated for some time because of the horrific scenes.
The UN’s World Food Programme is expanding its programme to feed 2.4 million people in Somalia by the end of the year.
Meles Zenawi, the prime minister of Ethiopia the butcher of East Africa, is also enthusiastic. After welcoming a Saudi agriculture delegation two weeks ago, he said: “We told them [the Saudis] that we would be very eager to provide hundreds of thousands of hectares of agricultural land for investment.”
By Javier Blas and Andrew England, Financial Times
Saudi Arabia has no permanent rivers or lakes. Rainfall is low and unreliable. Cereals can be cultivated only through expensive projects that deplete underground reservoirs. Dairy cattle must be cooled with fans and machines that spray them with water mists. This is not, in short, a nation that would normally be associated with large-scale agriculture.
But that could be about to change. Boosted by revenues from the oil boom and concerned about food security, the kingdom is scouring the globe for fertile lands in a search that has taken Saudi officials to Sudan, Ukraine, Pakistan and Thailand.
Their plan is to set up large-scale projects overseas that will later involve the private sector in growing crops such as corn, wheat and rice. Once a country has been selected, each project could be in excess of 100,000 hectares – about 10 times the size of Manhattan island – and the majority of the crop would be exported back, officials say.
While Saudi Arabia’s plans are among the grandest, they reflect growing interest in such projects among capital-rich countries that import most of their food. The United Arab Emirates is looking into Kazakhstan and Sudan, Libya is hoping to lease farms in Ukraine and South Korea has hinted at plans in Mongolia. Even China – with plenty of cultivable land but not a lot of water – is exploring investments in south-east Asia.
“This is a new trend within the global food crisis,” says Joachim von Braun, director of the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute. “The dominant force today is security of food supplies.”
“This is a new trend within the global food crisis,” says Joachim von Braun, director of the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute. “The dominant force today is security of food supplies.”
World food pricesAlarmed by exporting countries’ trade restrictions – such as India’s curbs on exports of rice, Ukraine’s halt to wheat shipments and Argentina’s imposition of heavy taxes on overseas sales of soya – importing countries have realised that their dependence on the international food market makes them vulnerable not only to an abrupt surge in prices but, more crucially, to an interruption in supplies.
As a result, food security is at the top of the political agenda for the first time since the 1970s. “The food crisis gave alarms for all countries to look for places to secure supplies of agricultural goods,” says Abdullah al-Obaid, the deputy minister of agriculture in Saudi Arabia.
Mr von Braun, echoing the opinion of dozens of other officials interviewed by the Financial Times, says that faith in the international food market is waning. For the first time since the early 1990s, when trade in farm products rose sharply, many are starting to doubt the wisdom of depending on agricultural imports. “The importers are nervous and they have realised that they [had] better have a stake in countries with potential for agriculture exports,” he says.
With global food consumption rising, largely due to demand for a meat-rich diet in emerging economies, the challenge of feeding booming populations in countries such as Saudi Arabia is growing by the year. Cereal prices have come off their highs of earlier this year but are still more than three times their average over the past decade.
Food security is firmly behind every plan to invest in agriculture overseas. During a recent tour of central Asia, Khalifa bin Zayed, the UAE president, pointed to the need to lock in supplies. “The UAE is looking at implementing some agricultural projects in Kazakhstan as part of its efforts to develop stable food sources for its needs,” he said.
For countries rich in cultivable land and water but short of capital, such plans could also make a lot of sense. Wheat fields in Ukraine, for example, yield less than 3,000kg a hectare in spite of some of the world’s most fertile soils and abundant rain. That is well below the US’s yield of about 6,500kg a hectare, achieved in less optimal conditions. But more tractors, a lot more fertiliser, better techniques and higher-yielding seeds could change the situation.
Lennart Båge, president of the United Nations’ International Fund for Agriculture Development in Rome, says that land was long thought less important than oil or mineral deposits. “But now fertile land with access to water has become a strategic asset,” he says.
Some countries have grasped the potential of this resource. Sudan, for example, is seeking to attract at least $1bn (€680m, £540m) of capital for its agricultural sector from Arab and Asian investment groups. The investment ministry is marketing 17 large-scale projects that would cover an area of 880,000 hectares.
Meles Zenawi, the prime minister of Ethiopia, is also enthusiastic. After welcoming a Saudi agriculture delegation a fortnight ago, he said: “We told them [the Saudis] that we would be very eager to provide hundreds of thousands of hectares of agricultural land for investment.”
Yet such deals are likely to come at a heavy price for food-producing countries. Through secretive bilateral agreements, the investors hope to be able to bypass any potential trade restriction that the host country might impose during a crisis.
For some policymakers, this evokes the nightmare scenario of crops being transported out of fortified farms as hungry locals look on – although whether vast tracts could be defended in the manner of, say, oil installations, is open to question. Others point out that the scramble for land is taking place in countries with weak legal environments, where most farmers lack formal tenure rights or access to compensation mechanisms.
Supporters of free trade in agriculture are also worried by what they consider to be attempts to build ownership of food production rather than increase supply to the international market. Ed Schafer, US agriculture secretary, says he would be concerned if the investments were simply a means to “bypass the international market and global trade agreements”.
European agriculture officials add that the poorest food-deficit countries, such as those in west Africa, would suffer most: unable to invest overseas, they would also be most vulnerable to rising prices in a diminished international market.
Multilateral institutions such as the World Bank and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, which initially encouraged foreign investment in agriculture as a way to boost global output, are moderating their previous support.
The change is clearly seen in the posture of Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, who initially described state-led foreign investment as a “win-win venture” ’. Now a spokesperson for the bank says: “This is a situation that could bring real benefits to people in some developing countries, but to be sustainable, land purchase or lease arrangements must benefit, and be seen to benefit, all parties including citizens of the host country, local communities and investors.”
A similar shift can be observed in Jacques Diouf, director-general at the FAO. He initially called for “joint-venture agreements between, on the one hand, those countries that have the financial resources and, on the other, those that possess land, water and human resources”.
Jacques Diouf
But now he is warning of the risk of a “neo-colonial” agricultural system. “Some negotiations [between host countries and the investors] have led to unequal international relations and short-term mercantilist agriculture,” says Mr Diouf.
Mr Båge also agrees there could be problems. “We are talking about some host countries where there is widespread poverty and hunger, and we must ensure that the local populations share fully in the benefits of these initiatives.”
For example, in Sudan – one country targeted by almost all Gulf investors – the World Food Programme, the UN agency that deals with food emergencies, is feeding 5.6m people. If the investment plans go ahead, Sudan, perversely, could be exporting to rich nations while its own population suffers.
Chinese officials, who supported Beijing’s expansive policy to secure commodities such as oil and metals in Africa, seem aware of the potential dangers. Although Beijing has explored deals in the Philippines and Laos, and has also developed some small projects in Africa – mostly “demonstration” farms that educate locals in farming techniques – it appears to have little appetite for large-scale investment in agriculture overseas.
“There are so many people starving in Africa,” says Xie Guoli, a trade official at the Chinese ministry of agriculture. “Can you ship the grain back to China? The cost will be very high, as well as the risk.”
Nevertheless, some Chinese private-sector companies are looking at investing in farmland, although officials say that they are focusing on central Asia rather than Africa. Beijing seems more relaxed about the potential for conflict in countries such as Kazakhstan, where the transportation costs would also be lower.
United Nations agriculture and food aid officials are also worried about the potential for corruption, given the weakness of governance in many African and central Asian countries.
They suggest the investments should be governed by a framework similar in scope to the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, a scheme that obliges resource-rich countries to publish company payments and government revenues from oil, gas and mining.
The EITI has helped to tackle corruption in the oil and minerals sector, officials say. But a similar scheme for agriculture could take months of negotiations – and food-deficit countries are in a hurry. As western officials discuss risks and safeguards, Saudi Arabia and others appear to want to lease land ahead of the next planting season.
Additional reporting by Barney Jopson in Addis Ababa
Past failures temper hopes for Sudan
As oil-rich Gulf states hunt for overseas land to set up agricultural projects it should come as no surprise that their attention turns towards Sudan, writes Andrew England.
As Africa’s largest country, it has vast tracts of land. The White Nile and the Blue Nile, which cross into Sudan from Uganda and Ethiopia respectively – before joining in Khartoum to form the Nile proper – provide plentiful water for irrigation. Sudan is a member of the 22-nation Arab League, Arabic is its lingua franca, and the country sits just across the Red Sea from Saudi Arabia, the Gulf’s most populous state.
But putting any plans into practice will throw up a host of hurdles. In spite of being an oil producer since 1999, Sudan is impoverished and hugely underdeveloped, the result of decades of conflict and government mismanagement.
The quality of roads, for example, will determine how easily producers can transport their harvests from rural areas to ports. In 2003, the World Bank estimated that just 6,240km of Sudan’s 55,000km of roads were tarmacked. And in Sudan and other countries on Gulf states’ radar, investors will have to take on the risks of political instability, corruption and dealing with inefficient bureaucracies.
Previous attempts by Arab states to involve Sudan in solving their food problems have shown just how easily the grandest of visions can end in failure.
During the oil boom of the 1970s, governments joined forces to set up the Arab Authority for Agriculture Investment and Development, with headquarters in Khartoum. The agency’s objectives included contributing to Arab food security.
Most of its projects were to be focused in Sudan, but officials say they achieved little because of a combination of poor management, insufficient financing and regional politics.
“[The AAAID] was sitting here doing nothing,” says Abdul-Rahim Hamdi, a former Sudanese finance minister. “The history of the AAAID was the history of bureaucracy, general managers who didn’t want to do anything or [who wanted] to keep their offices outside of Sudan, and so it did very little.”
Sudan’s relations with its Arab neighbours deteriorated in the 1990s because of the Islamic regime’s support for Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, its willingness to host Osama bin Laden and his followers and accusations that it was involved in the 1995 assassination attempt on Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian president.
Relations have since improved, but the Darfur conflict continues to destablise Sudan, while Omar al-Bashir, the country’s president, is the first sitting head of state to be indicted for genocide by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.
Still, Mr Hamdi is optimistic, arguing that the needs of food importers will outweigh any political considerations.
He adds that projects currently being discussed will differ from those of the 1970s and 1980s because they will involve bilateral government agreements and greater input from the private sector.
Under Saudi Arabia’s plans, for example, Riyadh hopes it will act as a facilitator for overseas projects, with bilateral agreements to protect investments and to agree on what percentage of produce would be exported back to the kingdom. But it will be looking to the Saudi private sector to invest in and run any schemes. That could create its own set of problems.
“Convincing the private sector is not going to be easy,” says an analyst based in Saudi Arabia. “Some of these countries are extremely corrupt … and will they have the political will to improve their infrastructures?”
“It’s not easy to tell another country to build roads because we want to export things.”
