LONDON (Financial Times) – Two days after Dominique Strauss-Kahn, IMF managing director, told a conference on the global economic crisis in Dar es Salaam that he could be Africa’s “voice” at next month’s G20 summit, Mr Kikwete told the Financial Times: “Of course that’s okay with us.”
But whereas no African leaders attended the previous G20 meeting in Washington in November, he said Gordon Brown, the UK prime minister, had invited Meles Zenawi, his Ethiopian counterpart, to participate in the London meeting next month.
“We will be represented, but if we can have somebody else amplifying our message, then especially after this conference it’s the right thing for the IMF to do, because now they have our views, our opinions,” Mr Kikwete said in at interview at State House in Dar es Salaam.
Africa has not experienced a systemic banking crisis but the global downturn is threatening to undo a decade of economic progress by depressing exports, commodity prices, foreign investment and remittances. Growth in sub-Saharan Africa this year is likely to halve to just over 3 per cent, the fund predicts.
At the IMF-organised conference, African finance ministers and central bank governors released a joint declaration calling on G20 countries to help cushion the impact of the crisis by raising aid to Africa and giving the continent a place in global stimulus plans.
The fund’s relevance had been called into question during the recent run of global growth, during which China made in-roads into Africa with a series of multi-billion dollar investment deals.
But the IMF has been revived by the financial crisis and in Tanzania Mr Strauss-Kahn and African policy makers declared their intent to build a “stronger partnership” based on more financing, greater flexibility and reforms to IMF governance to enhance Africa’s say.
Mr Kikwete won a spontaneous round of applause when he told the conference this week: “If an African country was responsible for the current financial crisis the IMF would have jumped on us without invitation, with conditionality, roadmaps and benchmarks.”
Trevor Manuel, South Africa’s finance minister, said the world’s model of capitalism was broken and “some of those who proselytised this model are employed by the IMF”.
“It is certainly time for advanced economies to be less arrogant,” Mr Strauss-Kahn said. “The way leaders of advanced economies address leaders of the rest of the world has to change and it is in the process of changing.”
Endorsing Mr Kikwete’s stance, Donald Kaberuka, president of the African Development Bank, said: “Africa does not need a spokesman at G20 who is not African.”
He said the IMF was more relevant than ever today and that it had changed since the painful era of “structural adjustment” reform programmes. But he added: “There are serious legacy issues.”
Speaking after Mr Strauss-Kahn addressed the conference, Francois Kanimba, governor of Rwanda’s central bank, said “that’s a great speech, but so far I don’t know what he means” in terms of new financing and flexibility.
“Sometimes we get contradictions between the statements from the top leader and the behaviour of staff on the ground. You can get confused,” he added.
This video is one of the most shocking things I have seen in a long time. It is about animal suffering and abuse in Ethiopia. Our society should not allow this kind of suffering to go on any longer. Some people may ask why I should be concerned when people are suffering equally or more than the animals in Ethiopia. First, unlike people, these animals are completely helpless and have no voice to complain. Secondly, their suffering is a stain on our society. It degrades our moral value as a society. Please let us try to stop animal abuse in our country by educating each other. – Ayda Million
WASHINGTON (AP) – Advocates fear the Obama administration may be putting the human rights issue on the back burner to focus instead on coping with the global economic crisis and national security.
President Barack Obama sought the moral high ground on human rights with his early order to close the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and declaration that the United States would never again torture prisoners.
Those moves — which won nearly unanimous international praise — were made soon after Obama took office. He sought to repair the U.S. image abroad, correcting what he believed were mistaken Bush administration policies that had left the United States on the diplomatic outs with much of the world, even with some traditional allies.
But Secretary of State Hillary Clinton dulled the luster, rights advocates say, when she said during a trip to Asia that the administration — while still deeply concerned about human rights in China — could not let that interfere with cooperation with Beijing on the worldwide economic crisis and the fight to ease global climate change.
“We fear she may be setting this tone as a signal to the rest of the world that human rights are not going to be one of the main issues for the administration,” said T. Kumar, Amnesty International advocacy director for Asia. “Trade and security should not be promoted at the expense of human rights.” [Hillary Clinton will turn out to be worse than Jendayi Frazer for Africa. Let’s not forget that the Rwanda genocide occurred under her husband’s watch.]
Clinton pushed back Thursday after a Washington meeting with China’s foreign minister, noting she and Yang Jiechi had a significant engagement on human rights and the situation in Tibet.
“Human rights is part of our comprehensive dialogue” with China, she said. “It doesn’t take a front seat, a back seat or a middle seat. It is part of the broad range of issues that we are discussing.”
Beyond China, however, there is a considerable list of Obama positions that have raised doubts about how far the new president will shift from the policies of his predecessor.
_The administration has filed a legal brief that echoed Bush in maintaining that detainees in Afghanistan have no constitutional rights and arguing that enemy combatants held at Bagram Airfield cannot use U.S. courts to challenge their detention.
_Government lawyers continued to invoke the state secrets law in a federal court case that involves the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program, in which U.S. operatives seized foreign suspects and handed them over to other countries for questioning. The law blocks the release of evidence the government deems secret and potentially harmful to U.S. security.
_The administration is feeling out Uzbekistan, which has one of the worst human rights records among the former Soviet republics, about using an air base to provide supplies and troops to Afghanistan. The move became necessary after neighboring Kyrgyzstan declared it was canceling the U.S. lease for a base in that Central Asian country.
_Defense Secretary Robert Gates recently greatly scaled back expectations in Afghanistan, declaring the United States was not going to be able to leave behind anything close to a western-style democracy. The U.S. rationale for its seven-year engagement in the country rested partly on having driven the Taliban from power. The Islamic fundamentalists ran a brutal regime that was particularly harsh in its treatment of women. The administration has recently said it was ready to reach out to Taliban members who are willing to work with the U.S.-backed government of President Hamid Karzai.
Those and other human rights issues trouble advocates, but they emphasize Clinton’s very public remarks regarding China.
“Part of her challenge diplomatically is going to be able to work on many fronts,” said Amnesty International’s Curt Goering. “The United States cannot be credible on any issue unless it remains credible on human rights.”
He said Amnesty does not deny the need for pragmatism, but insists the United States must at the same time “signal it is serious about human rights.”
Kumar, likewise, acknowledged the pragmatism argument but said Clinton could have delivered her message in closed-door meetings with the Chinese. He said her public comments on human rights were bound to inspire serious questions about U.S. intentions under Obama.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs was asked this week about comments by the Dalai Lama, the revered leader of Tibetan Buddhists who fled to exile as Tibet’s 1959 uprising against Chinese rule collapsed. The Dalai Lama said Tibetans were living in “hell on earth” because of Chinese repression.
“The United States respects the territorial integrity of China and considers Tibet to be part of China,” Gibbs said. “At the same time, we’re concerned about the human rights situation in Tibet.”
Gibbs noted that Washington believes the Chinese government increased cultural and religious repression in Tibetan areas last year, and urged Beijing to engage in further negotiations with the exiled leader.
“We believe that substantive dialogue with the Dalai Lama’s representatives that makes progress and brings about solutions to long standing issues is the best way to achieve true and lasting stability in Tibet,” Gibbs said, in a muted response to the perennial and fundamental human rights sore point.
State Department spokesman Robert Wood also rebutted the criticism in response to a Washington Post editorial that said Clinton “continues to devalue and undermine the U.S. diplomatic tradition of human rights advocacy.”
Wood said: “She realizes you have to sit down with, for example, her Chinese counterpart and make these points on human rights. But she also knows that’s not necessarily going to get you what you want at the end of the day, so you’ve got to find new and creative ways to influence the human rights situation in China and that’s what she’s trying to do.”
Obama and Clinton will likely face even stiffer criticism as they move forward with a policy designed to repair U.S. standing globally. They are trying to show world leaders that Washington is once again determined to engage the world through diplomacy rather than what critics saw as the Bush administration’s tendency to rely on diktat.
The mission appears to be especially delicate when it comes to human rights, an issue that stands to block linkage with a number of countries unless the administration finds a way to finesse it by maintaining Washington’s historic standards while not using them as a blunt instrument.
UNION COLLEGE, NEW YORK – A group of mechanical engineering students, led by professor Ron Bucinell, will spend their spring break in Boru, Ethiopia, hoping to tap a clean water source for the village’s 5,000 residents.
This will be the first official trip for the College’s chapter of Engineers Without Borders, a non-profit international humanitarian organization that partners with developing communities to improve their quality of life, primarily through the work of engineers and engineering students.
Rebecca Damberg-Mauser ’08 was instrumental in starting Union’s chapter in 2007-08. The group, which spent most of the year getting up and running, now numbers about 19 students.
The idea for the water project sprung from Tehtena Tenaw ’09, who was born in Ethiopia. When Tenaw, the president of Union’s EWB chapter, returned home for a wedding last summer to the town of Dese, about an hour from Boru, she met with the Ethiopian Water Authority and the elders of Boru.
Until about two years ago, the village, which consists primarily of farmers and institution workers earning a maximum of $50 a month, had been getting its water from the Momay Spring. But a construction project accidentally caused the spring, which is located under a school, to close.
To assist with the project, Union enlisted the expertise of CDM, a national engineering firm with an office in Latham, N.Y. Two engineers there, Paul Cabral and Roy Richardson, met regularly with students to discuss technical issues and provide training.
In Boru, Union’s team will dig test wells, examine water distribution possibilities and perform a health survey of the area. The group leaves Saturday, March 14, and returns two weeks later. Another trip is planned for December.
“Restoring the well will mean that children will no longer have to carry five gallon containers filled with water back to their village on a daily basis,” Bucinell said.
Joining Bucinell and Tenaw in Boru will be Julie Fehlmann ’12, Philip Lambert ’ll and Max Becton ’ll. Cabral, from CDM, also will accompany the group.
Students held a series of fundraisers to help pay for the cost of the trip, which is approximately $8,000; the College also contributed funds.
“This trip exposes students to the human side of engineering,” Bucinell said. “It helps college students see that they can make a difference globally.”
(BBC) – Some 70,000 people have fled their homes in a remote part of southern Ethiopia, after a deadly conflict broke out between rival groups – apparently triggered by the construction of a new borehole. The BBC’s Elizabeth Blunt has been to visit the affected areas.
Wamo Boru and his family used to live in Kafa, one of the many small ethnic Borana communities scattered across the arid borderlands of southern Ethiopia and northern Kenya.
The hard red earth shows through the thin grass of the sun-baked landscape, a wide expanse of thorny scrub, flat-topped thorn-trees and tall red anthills.
The Borana lead a hard life, especially in the past year or two, when rains have been poor.
But the community had its livestock – cattle and camels and goats – and was expecting to have a better water supply when the Oromia regional government finished work on a new borehole in the area.
But at the beginning of February they had – quite literally – a rude awakening.
“It was nine o’clock at night, we were sleeping when we were fired at,” said Wamo.
“We just had to jump from our sleep and protect ourselves. Because it was night, we didn’t see who was attacking us, but we think they were the people called Gherri from Somali regional state.
“They came on foot, without vehicles, but they had bombs and missile launchers, and at that time we didn’t have guns, only sticks to defend ourselves.”
Wamo, his family and neighbours fled with just the clothes they stood up in.
They managed to bring some of their stronger livestock with them, but they had to leave the weaker ones behind to be taken by the raiders.
Now they are camped close to the dirt road that runs east from Yabelo, the administrative headquarters of Ethiopia’s Borana zone.
Wareba, the village teacher, is there too; he lost one of his in-laws in the raid.
“This was a war no-one was prepared for,” he says.
“That was how the Somalis could come and destroy so much.”
The children he used to teach are scattered across the area, and, he says, “not in good condition”.
Wamo says three members of their community died during the attack, another seven were badly injured.
Their community is now just another group of displaced people – 2,000 of them among nearly 70,000 estimated to have been driven from their homes by the fighting.
Jealousy
This part of Ethiopia has a long history of conflict, cattle raiding and fights over water and grazing among its various pastoral communities.
But this, says Wamo, was different from other wars.
“They came and fought us at night,” he says. “It was not a warrior-like war.”
He attributes the attack to jealousy over the scheme to dig a new borehole.
“They didn’t want us to live well, and water is very important to us, so they attacked our water source.”
The emergency-response officer from the local administration, Mohamed Nur, agrees that it was an unusual conflict.
“This went to a very large scale,” he said.
“It affected a huge number of people from both sides. In past conflicts, communities would fight, but they wouldn’t destroy government property, like the drilling rig.”
An attack on the new borehole may have started the fighting, but the causes are deep rooted.
The water scheme was close to the dividing line between two of Ethiopia’s ethnically-based regional states – Oromia and Somali regions – a boundary which has never been properly demarcated.
The Oromo regional government thought it was drilling the borehole on its own territory; people in Somali region thought it was on their side of the boundary.
When Somalis destroyed the rig, the Borana mobilised to take revenge, angry at what they saw as years of Somali encroachment.
“The Somalis are problematic people,” said one Borana politician from the Moyale area, Guyo Halake Liban.
“They are always pushing us. It’s as if I give you a place to pitch your tent and the following morning you are telling me to leave; the Borana are not accepting that.
“These people have pushed the Borana from very, very far places. I don’t think the Borana are willing to move an inch from where they are any more.”
Stockpiling weapons
Like all pastoralists in this part of the world, Borana men habitually go armed to defend their flocks.
When they fought back, there were pitched battles in the area. More than 300 people are thought to have died.
Humanitarian workers like Mohamed Nur are now dealing with the consequences.
Presidents throughout history have kept lists of political foes. But the Obama White House is the first I am aware of to pick targets based on polls. Even Richard Nixon didn’t focus-group his enemies list.
Team Obama — aided by Clintonistas Paul Begala, James Carville and Stanley Greenberg — decided to attack Rush Limbaugh after poring over opinion research. White House senior adviser David Axelrod explicitly authorized the assault. Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel assigned a White House official to coordinate the push. And Press Secretary Robert Gibbs gleefully punched the launch button at his podium, suckering the White House press corps into dropping what they were doing to get Mr. Limbaugh.
Was it smart politics and good policy? No. For one thing, it gave the lie to Barack Obama’s talk about ending “the political strategy that’s been all about division” and “the score-keeping and the name-calling.” The West Wing looked populated by petulant teenagers intent on taking down a popular rival. Such talk also shortens the president’s honeymoon by making him look like a street-fighting Chicago pol instead of an inspirational, unifying figure. The upward spike in ratings for Rush and other conservative radio commentators shows how the White House’s attempt at a smackdown instead energized the opposition.
Did it do any good with voters not strongly tied to either party? I suspect not. With stock markets down, unemployment growing, banks tottering, consumers anxious, business leaders nervous, and the economy shrinking, the Obama administration’s attacks on a radio talk show host made it seem concerned with the trivial.
Why did the White House do it? It was a diversionary tactic. Clues might be found in the revelation that senior White House staff meet for two hours each Wednesday evening to digest their latest polling and focus-group research. I would bet a steak dinner at Morton’s in Chicago these Wednesday Night Meetings discussed growing public opposition to spending, omnibus pork, more bailout money for banks and car companies, and new taxes on energy, work and capital.
What better way to divert public attention from these more consequential if problematic issues than to start a fight with a celebrity conservative? Cable TV, newspapers and newsweeklies would find the conflict irresistible. Something has to be set aside to provide more space and time to the War on Rush; why not the bad economic news?
Here’s the problem: Misdirection never lasts long. Team Obama can at best only temporarily distract the public; within days, attention will return to issues that clearly should worry the White House.
Not even Team Obama can forestall unpleasant reality. And among those America now faces is Mr. Obama adding $3.2 trillion to the national debt in his first 20 months and 11 days in office, eclipsing the $2.9 trillion added during the Bush presidency’s entire eight years.
Another reality is that Mr. Obama’s fiscal house is built on gimmicks. For example, it assumes the cost of the surge in Iraq will extend for a decade. This brazenly dishonest trick was done to create phony savings down the line.
Mr. Obama’s budget downplays some programs’ true cost. For example, his vaunted new college access program is funded for five years and then disappears (on paper); the children’s health insurance program drops (on paper) from $12.4 billion in 2013 to $700 million the next year. Neither will happen; the costs of both will be much higher and so will the deficits.
Mr. Obama’s budget also assumes the economy declines 41% less this year and grows 52% more next year and 38% more the year after than is estimated by the Blue Chip consensus (a collection of estimates by leading economists traditionally used by federal budget crunchers). If Mr. Obama used the consensus forecasts for growth rather than his own rosy scenarios, his budget would be $758 billion more in the red over the next five years.
Then there’s discretionary domestic spending, which grows over the next two years by $238 billion, the fastest increase ever recorded. Mr. Obama pledges it will then be cut in real terms for the next nine years. That’s simply not credible.
Then there’s his omnibus spending bill to fund the government for the next six months, laden with 8,500 earmarks and tens of billions in additional spending above the current budget. What happened to pledges for earmark reform and making “meaningful cuts?”
In the face of our enormous economic challenges, top White House aides decided to pee on Mr. Limbaugh’s leg. This is a political luxury the country cannot afford, and which Mr. Obama would be wise to forbid. Or did he not mean it when he ran promising to “turn the page” on the “old” politics?
(Mr. Rove is the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.)
This will be the first official trip for the College’s chapter of Engineers Without Borders, a non-profit international humanitarian organization that partners with developing communities to improve their quality of life, primarily through the work of engineers and engineering students.
Wamo Boru and his family used to live in Kafa, one of the many small ethnic Borana communities scattered across the arid borderlands of southern Ethiopia and northern Kenya.