Posted on

Gaddafi -The Murderous Western Touch

Reason Wafawarova

So now Muammar Gaddafi has died; apparently after being incapacitated by the fire power of US drones and French gunship bombers, and left to face a very primitively ruthless death at the hands of the NATO led rebels.

Jurist Special Guest Columnist and international lawyer Curtis Doebbler has indicated that the killing of Gaddafi was a violation of The Third Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War, was a crime of aggression and also constituted the use of excessive force; in as much as it was a clear violation to the right to life, besides being in violation of Resolution 1973 which sought to protect civilians; not to bomb fleeing people as what happened to Gaddafi’s convoy.

To some Barack Obama has emerged as the number one champion of the West’s anti-terrorism war. Ironically Obama has teamed up with Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda to take over Libya, leading to his drones incapacitating Gaddafi from the air so that his Al-Qaeda allies could summarily execute the defenceless and unarmed Gaddafi and his son, among others.

Obama now commands a remarkably bloody record – killing thousands of civilians in Afghanistan, killing Arch Terrorist Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, arming and backing Al-Qaeda-affiliated Libyan rebels all the way from Benghazi to Sirte, via Tripoli; killing over 50 000 Libyan civilians in the process, grazing down Sirte and Bani Walid so they submit to the Al-Qaeda thugs calling themselves the National Transitional Council; and subsequently getting himself the trophy of Gaddafi’s battered body.

Now the global witch-hunt for terrorists has reached remarkably impressive levels, with Gaddafi’s death eliciting cheers for Obama and his sidekicks from brainwashed and hapless global citizens. It is somehow hard not to cheer the smart and fast speaking Obama even when he is announcing a murder act under his command. The man comes across like a genius.

The brainwashing of the global masses is so deep that a heartless and hell-hailing monster like France’s Nicolas Sarkozy can also boast of admirers. This writer treats the barbaric murder of Gaddafi and all other callous and murderous Western schemes as purely satanic; apparently exposing the maggoty and inherently evil forces behind Western imperialism and white supremacy. No apologies.

The manhunt for Gaddafi was clearly not part of effecting a no fly zone, the pretext by which Western powers entered Libya, ostensibly to protect civilians they baselessly said were about to be wiped out by Gaddafi. The manhunt was undoubtedly orchestrated by the same people who founded and executed slavery on us Africans, the very people who occupied our continent by the power of colonial conquest, the people who brought to humanity two world wars, the people who helped create a murderous Zionist Israel, and the very people who today preside over a predatory imperialistic system.

The whole NATO operation in Libya cannot be separated from the work of those who founded the American constitution, and the so-called American exceptionalism. This is why Hillary Clinton brazenly bragged about her role in ordering the murdering of Gaddafi, declaring with a cruel laugh “We came, we saw, and he died.”

The she-devil could have aptly put it like “We came, we bombed, and he died.” Dear reader, you have to understand the language of this piece in the context of the invasion of a sovereign country that has suffered so much loss of civilian lives at the hands of foreigner aggressors reputed with a murderous history based on racial supremacy.

There are a number of reasons that makes it impossible for this writer to join the celebration over the death of Col Gaddafi, and supporting the man himself is not one of them. Col Gaddafi courted Westerners in the last years of his reign, and the revolution of Zimbabwe was not served well by this rather treacherous behaviour. In fact Gaddafi had as many admirable traits as he had deplorable ones, like supporting liberation movements, while trying the Arabisation scheme in Sudan, or supporting the British-sponsored Idi Amin in Uganda, even when the dictator was waging a war against Tanzania.

He is the same Gaddafi who helped train our own freedom fighters during Zimbabwe’s war for independence, and the same Gaddafi who turned Libya into one of the richest countries on this planet from the second poorest country when he took over power. Talk of 42 years of massive economic progression and tightly controlled political monopoly of power.

The first reason I cannot and will not celebrate the death of Gaddafi is perhaps the fact that I am a cynic and somewhat a political pessimist by nature. Secondly, I hail from an international relations training background, and also from a media background. As such I am what you would charitably call an expert in the knowledge of how brainwashed this world is.

It is not easy to make someone like this writer an easy target of mass deception tactics; often sugar coated in humanitarianism; the rhetoric on democracy, liberties and freedoms; or any of the hoopla around which rivals and enemies of Western politicians are derided and denounced. This writer is a discerner and not only a listener to Western political voices.

The third reason is I am an ideological creation that is allergic to imperialistic values and whatever they are meant to stand for. No sane person from the African continent can admire imperialism. Simply put, I believe monopoly capitalism practised at the expense of weaker nations is a program designed from the depths of hell, and by its very nature it is the number one crime against humanity.

It is imperialism that breeds devil incarnates like Nicolas Sarkozy, and it is imperialism that deceives humanity to the point of elevating such a heartless murderer to the level of a liberator. Dear reader, if your idea of democracy has got anything to do with the actions of NATO in Libya over the last eight months, then this writer has got bad news for you. You are simply confusing sugar-coated imperialistic aggression for democracy and such an error is fatalistic by definition.

If your source of information over Libya has been the BBC “world service” or any of the mainstream Western media, again this writer has bad news for you. You have been lied to, misled, deceived, manipulated, cheated, brainwashed; and you have to work extremely hard to sieve the information so as to differentiate grain from chaff.

As a matter of principle and by the definition of personality this writer did not cheer American forces when they announced they had killed Osama bin Laden, and neither does he cheer them for ending the life of Muammar Gaddafi.

This writer does not count Obama a hero of whatever magnitude, just like it is increasingly becoming hard to keep counting Nicolas Sarkozy among humans.

The man is proving to be simply a heartless beast walking on two legs. His British sidekick David Cameron comes along as a beautiful looking angel from the Devil’s kingdom. Libyan atrocities committed by NATO and its Al-Qaeda allies stink to high heavens, and they speak strongly on the characters of Sarkozy and Cameron. Displaying dead bodies in a shopping centre is something that infuriates the Devil himself, yet these

Allah preaching goons reckon its laudable conduct.

These views are figurative descriptions purely based on intellectual opinion from an angered writer. Let us start with Barack Obama, a man fitting so well into Malcolm X’s “house nigger” description, dutifully doing

Uncle Sam’s dirty work at home and abroad.

It is a fact that Obama has not used his eloquence and oratory skills to say anything tangible about racism in the United States, or about the deplorable conditions of the African American. Africa we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!

Reason Wafawarova is a political writer based in SYDNEY, Australia.

This is because he is smart enough to know that if he did, the white system he pretends to lead from the White House would bump him off or invent scandals that would make him fall from grace.

As once said by one Rap Brown, violence is as American as cherry pie; just like crime against humanity is as Western as the white skin; only shared by a few others on this planet.

The brutal West that once enslaved, colonised and eliminated entire races in the past has not really changed much. Today we see the same people who enslaved our ancestors, colonised our nations, and nearly eliminated Aboriginal people in Australia and the Amerindians in the United States reincarnated with other forms of racism.

If captured alive, Gaddafi would have been the 14th African person to be charged at the ICC, apart from the Kenyan crew currently under trial. Everyone ever interdicted at this criminal court has been from Africa and this is purely by racial profiling; otherwise Tony Blair, George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and Dickey Cheney would be on trial as well, together with the Israeli brutes that routinely order the killing of Palestinians. It is either the omissions are based on racial profiling or the interdictions themselves are. There is really not much difference either way.

One can only explain Hillary Clinton’s bragging about the barbaric summary execution of Gaddafi as something influenced by the colour bar. It is hard to believe that Clinton would ever celebrate the summary execution of a Caucasian person, however condemned. She would not be the US Secretary of State if American voters thought she could.

It is sad that the same people who created a colour bar in the past have now been reborn as fighters for democracy and liberties – the convenient pretext employed to justify Western military aggression on weaker peoples today.

We are told the whole Libya episode is some noble cause in defence and protection of hapless Libyan civilians threatened by a fleeing Gaddafi; and we are labelled foolish if we choose not believe this kind of nonsense.

NATO bombs Sirte civilians in their thousands in the name of liberating them from Gaddafi, a man they are accused of supporting in blissful ignorance and primitiveness. Sirte has defined for the world how NTC leaders will treat their political opponents – not really different from what they accuse Gaddafi of.

We can safely confirm now that Obama is nothing more than the elevation of a partially black guy in a bid to reverse the waning popularity of the United States. He did not start bombing Libya by choice.

Maybe Sarkozy did. Obama is simply a mannequin in a suit shop. He is a thing being manipulated by men of tested criminality – men with no problems whatsoever when it comes to killing.

This essay would be incomplete without mentioning Jacob Zuma’s culpability in the spilling of Gaddafi’s blood. Zuma voted for the bombing of Libya and he cannot sugar-coat this one in any other way.

It was just a murderous vote. South Africa and the two other African countries that voted for Resolution 1973 could have prevented the required simple majority needed to pass this resolution had they abstained or voted against this resolution. Libya could have been saved.

Now Zuma has the temerity, or is it stupidity to tell the world that he wanted a captured Gaddafi and not a dead one.

Teodoro Obiang Nguema must have his head examined. The man tells us that an African Court would have helped prevent the bombing of Libya, and he says the AU is nothing but a negotiating forum with no power whatsoever to change anything in Africa. What a boofhead for a chairman of the African Union!

The AU could refuse to accommodate the NTC in its structures like is the case with Madagascar right now. The AU could have all voted against the NTC’s attendance at the UN General Assembly and that would have made it very hard for this murderous lot to legitimately take over Libya.

The AU could have condemned the NATO attacks on Libya, called for withdrawal of Western war planes, and with spirited such calls the course of events could have been different.

With such absolute weaklings like Nguema leading African countries, who needs enemies?

And to think the ANC that Zuma leads counts Gaddafi as a martyred hero? And to think this Nguema is in power strictly because Zimbabwe thwarted a coup that would have made him face the fate now faced by Gaddafi. Some people!

Africa we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!

The views are those of the author and not of TalkAfrique.com

Posted on

Uganda/Africa: In the Land of Human Sacrifice

Comments: Essay

In and out of Kampala, Uganda’s capital, the City, supposed to radiate enlightenment to some of Uganda’s dark ancient cultural practices, has failed to do so. The City is entrapped in obscurity. “The villages and farming communities that surround Uganda’s capital, Kampala, are gripped by fear.” Human sacrifices, the BBC World TV reports, are on the prowl.  For some time, Kampala is darkened by the denial of child sacrifices. Modern technology, as the BBC investigation aptly used, is helping to track Uganda’s and Africa’s malignity and putting the refutation to shame. Some part of Kampala’s mind has gone into denial and avoidance.
The long evasion has enhanced certain cultural inhibitions that have been stifling Uganda’s and Africa’s progress. This has occurred because Uganda/African elites are intellectually lazy, do not understand themselves, and find it difficult to comprehend their cultural values for answers to their developmental challenges. Where they are supposed to refine cultural issues such as human sacrifices, they are found wanting. Where they are supposed to appropriate the enabling aspects of the culture for progress, they cannot think through.
Dabblers will rather tell you human sacrifices will bring “progress.” That’s wealth and power. What sort of “progress”? If human sacrifices could bring progress, then the elites and their funky associates, with their egomaniacal Big Men swaggers, can grab one million of Africa’s one billion people, mass sacrifice them with juju rituals, and hoo la la, Africa will be the most developed place on earth – with fantastic thinking and reasoning, long life expectancies, superb sanitation and health, sound education, free food and drinks, greater peace, and so on.
The twisted African Big Men involved in human sacrifices see human rights, the rule of law, freedoms, human dignity and enlightenment as not progress. They are allergic to such human advancement; and that make them demean their victims. The children killed for traditional juju rituals are seen as sub-human. But ironically their blood are deemed powerful enough potent to bring power (an African Big Man’s obsession). What a contradiction!
Despite the human sacrifices, Africa is still the poorest region in the world. We talk about this in an age of rising enlightenment, science and technological feats. The attempts by African Big Men to engage in human sacrifices reveal their inability to think well. As key appropriators of this primordial craft, they are still stuck in cavernously dark primeval practices that are counter-productive. This has muddled the African Big Men’s thinking, the notorious “African mentality” unfathomably at work.
Some important part of the African elites’ mind has gone into perennial denial. It shrinks back the African progress. It makes Africa at the mercy of dark forcing. How does a society deal with its leaders who think of killing children for rituals? How can such leaders think well and deal with very challenging developmental issues that need higher thoughts? If the leaders are engaged in murdering children for power, how can they have feelings for the poor, the hungry, the weak, and the marginalized? The leaders loose empathy, a key basis for progress, and for that, they also loose compassion for Africans.
In such a heartless atmosphere, the African Big Men look down upon ordinary Africans; they do not really care about them! Normal Africans are thought of as lambs that can be easily slaughtered for rituals. The African Big Men’s human sacrifices began as an extravagance and ends as a filthy necessity, glued to the murdering of children, other people’s children, and not their children.
In ritually sacrificing Africans, the rot in the African Big Men’s private minds eat away at their public responsibilities. They become ritual murderers for nothing. How can you have leaders who whose private thoughts are dark, evil? If real development is measured by the nature of private thoughts of a society’s leaders, then do not be surprised by what you see in Africa’s development terrain. The leaders’ thoughts aren’t good. The thinking is destructive.

Liberia President Samuel Doe was known to engage in human sacrifices; he projected such dim thinking unto the entire Liberia society, and boom!!! Doe blew Liberia into pieces. Equatorial Guinea’s Francisco Macias Nguema was engaged in human sacrifices of all sorts including burying some of his victims alive with juju rituals. Macias used the knowledge of witchcraft he inherited from his sorcerer father and built a huge collection of human skulls (from the people he has killed) at his farmhouse. Marcia paralyzed his country as a result.

In all these the average African will tell you that surely retribution will occur, and the fate of the African Big Man involved in human sacrifices is disastrous. Doe was short, stripped naked in public, his ears cut off and then brutalized to death, and his dead body thrown into an unmarked grave. Marcia was killed by firing squad.

The African Big Men’s mentality of human sacrifices prevails in zones. Almost all the zones are inhuman. Marcias and Doe were insane. The African Big Men addicted to human sacrifices find it difficult to extricate themselves from. Once involved, there is no turning back. In some parts of Africa, such as Uganda, this has become a mania, driven more by the primitive attempts to play supernatural being. In engaging in human sacrifices for the quick fix of their problems, the African Big Man  want to live a painless life, where all the good stuffs in life are automatically brought by the blood of the children he has ritually sacrificed.
At the centre of the human sacrifices is the clash between irrationality and rationality. The irrational forces are ancient and think more with the superstition part of their brain. The rational forces think more with the objective part of their brain. The “irrationalists,” who look at human sacrifice from within the soul of the African culture, are in the majority. The “rationalists” (or the realists), who gawk at human sacrifices within high morality, humanity, the criminal justice system and locate human sacrifices in the conditions of peoples’ lives, are in minority. The irrational forces win because they have power. As the Uganda human sacrifices issues revealed, African Big Men arm-twist the objectivists (the police, the criminal justice system), hoodwink the justice system and terribly weaken the prosecuting of the perpetrators of human sacrifices to serve as a deterrent to others.
The anti-dote to Africa’s worrying human sacrifices is greater democracy! With its tenets such as the rule of law, human rights, social justice, freedoms, and liberty, democracy will throw greater light into the dark recesses of the African culture and free the African from the predatory Big Man.

Posted on

Celebrities Who Took Gaddafi’s Money

He may have been feared and loathed by some of his own citizens and leaders from the developed world, but there was a group of people who loved Col Muammar Gaddafi and his money.

Gaddafi, who was murdered on Thursday in his birth town of Sirte, lived large and when he wanted to be entertained, he did not turn on the radio or his TV, he got some of the biggest names in the world of music to do the job.

Beyonce, 50 Cent, Enrique Iglesias, Lionel Richie, Mariah Carey, Nelly Furtado, Timbaland and Usher are some of the prominent names who made millions of dollars from entertaining Gaddafi and his family.

Other celebrities like Jay-Z, Jon Bon Jovi, Bob Johnson and Russell Simmons are also said to have attended the private performances.

A memo released by the whistle-blowing site Wikileaks described lavish parties thrown by one of Gaddafi’s sons on the Caribbean island of Saint Bart’s where singers Beyonce and Usher were paid large sums to perform at the gathering.

As expected, these celebrities don’t come cheap and Gaddafi didn’t mind paying for their services.

Beyonce received $2m (Sh200 million current rate) to perform for the Gaddafi family in 2009 New Year’s bash reportedly for Gaddafi’s fourth son Muastassim, who was also killed with his father on Thursday.

She revealed in March that she was donating the money to to the Haitian earthquake relief fund.

“All monies paid to Beyoncé for her performance at a private party at Nikki Beach St Barts on New Year’s Eve 2009, including the commissions paid to her booking agency, were donated to the earthquake relief efforts for Haiti over a year ago,” the “Put a ring on it” singer’s publicist said in a statement to The Huffington Post.

Mariah Carey followed, saying she felt “horrible and embarrassed” for being paid $1 million (Sh100 million) to sing four songs at the New Year party in 2008.

Held accountable

“Going forward, this is a lesson for all artists to learn from,” said Carey. “We need to be more aware and take more responsibility regardless of who books our shows. Ultimately we as artists are to be held accountable.”

Singer Usher, who was paid not to perform but to do the midnight countdown at the same New Years party, said he was “sincerely troubled” by the origin of the money and would give his earnings “to various human rights organisations.”

Nelly Furtado, who performed for the Gaddafis for 45 minutes at an Italian hotel in 2007 received $1 million (Sh100 million), announced she would also donate the money to charity.

Rapper 50 Cent was also forced to donate the money he made after performing at a private gig for Mutassim Gaddafi, in Venice in 2005.

A statement from a representative for 50 Cent said: “In light of the ongoing events in Libya, 50 Cent will be making a donation to Unicef, which is providing vital relief supplies to meet the needs of women and children at risk during this crisis.”

Celebrities and dictators have a weird connection and have always been linked together. The dictators want to be entertained and the celebrities want their dollars.

Last week, Hollywood actors Hilary Swank, Jean-Claude van Damme and soul singer Seal were in trouble after they entertained Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov at his multimillion-dollar 35th birthday party in early October. Chechen is said to have an “atrocious human-rights record”.

Kadyrov is accused of being one of the world’s most notorious human rights violators, with an alleged history of arson, abductions and torture against people who aren’t hot celebrities.

“I deeply regret attending this event, which has thrown into question my long and deeply-held commitment to the protection of human rights,” Swank said in the statement.

Michael Jackson fled to Bahrain after he was acquitted of molesting young boys and was hosted by Bahrain’s Prince Abdullah al-Khalifa.

British supermodel Naomi Campbell is alleged to have received a huge “blood diamond” from ousted Liberian dictator Charles Taylor. She denied the allegations before the ICC.

Mobutu Sese Seko

One of Africa’s most brutal dictators, Mobutu Sese Seko hosted the famous “Rumble in the Jungle” fight and a concert as part of the “authenticity campaign” for the new country, Zaire.

The concert, dubbed Zaire 74, was held six weeks before the fight was attended by legends James Brown, Celia Cruz and the Fania All-Stars, B.B. King, Miriam Makeba, the Spinners, and Bill Withers.

It was originally intended to be the same weekend as the fight, but Foreman suffered an injury that pushed the concert back six weeks.

Mobutu paid $5 million (Sh500 million) each to Muhammad Ali and George Foreman to bring their famous boxing feud to Zaire’s capital.

Daily Nation

Posted on

Republican Rick Perry Doesn’t Have a ‘Definitive Answer’ Whether Barack Obama is a US Citizen

Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry walked a fine line when presented with questions about President Barack Obama’s birth certificate — which was released by the White House earlier this year — in a new interview with Parade magazine published online.

When asked if he believes the president was born in the United States, the Texas governor said, “I have no reason to think otherwise.” Pressed on the nature of his answer, Perry added, “Well, I don’t have a definitive answer, because he’s never seen my birth certificate.”

Here’s an excerpt of the subsequent exchange that went down on the birth certificate issue:

But you’ve seen his. I don’t know. Have I?

You don’t believe what’s been released?
I don’t know. I had dinner with Donald Trump the other night.

And?
That came up.

Perry said that Trump doesn’t believe the document released by the White House is “real.” Asked if he agrees with the sentiment, the Lone Star State Republican said, “I don’t have any idea. It doesn’t matter. He’s the president of the United States. He’s elected. It’s a distractive issue.”

Leading up to the release of Obama’s “long form” birth certificate in April, Trump captured headlines and sparked controversy with his persistence in raising doubt over the president’s birthplace.

Trump went as far to release his own official birth certificate. Upon the release of the president’s birth certificate, Trump said that he was very “proud” of himself.

Posted on

Exercise May Not Limit Weight Gain by Pregnant Moms

Exercise and weight gain unrelated

Exercising during pregnancy was safe for both moms and babies in a new study of heavy women in Brazil, but fitness classes and at-home exercises didn’t keep moms-to-be from gaining too much weight.

The finding is “not surprising,” according to Dr. Patrick Catalano, a maternal-fetal medicine researcher from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland.

“Lots of studies have not shown any benefits relative to weight gain in pregnancy using either diet or exercise,” said Catalano, who didn’t participate in the new research.

The U.S.-based Institute of Medicine recommends that overweight women should gain between 15 and 25 pounds during pregnancy, and obese women 11 to 20 — less than the amount recommended for normal-weight women.

Being overweight or obese while pregnant, or gaining too much weight during pregnancy, increases the chance of having a large baby and needing a Cesarean section. It also ups the risk that babies will have birth defects or grow up to be obese, researchers said.

Plus, women who gain a lot of weight during pregnancy tend to keep in on afterwards, Catalano told Reuters Health.

He said that starting an exercise or diet program mid-way through pregnancy probably isn’t as useful as intervening very early in pregnancy — or better yet, before.

‘MODERATE EXERCISE IS VERY GOOD’

In the current study, researchers led by Simony Nascimento from UNICAMP Medical School in Campinas recruited 82 heavy women who were already between three and five and a half months into their pregnancies.

They split those women into two groups. Half went to weekly exercise classes and got counseled on nutrition, weight gain and home exercises or walking they could do daily. The other women received standard prenatal care advice, but no extra information on exercise.

Regardless of whether they were assigned to do group and at-home exercise, about half of the women gained more weight than recommended upper limits.

On average, obese women gained 23 to 24 pounds in both groups. Overweight women gained an average of 22 pounds when they exercised and 36 when they didn’t, but the researchers caution that those findings were based on a small group of only 14 women.

The majority of all babies were born by c-section, but there was no difference in their health at birth based on whether or not moms exercised, Nascimento and colleagues report in BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology.

Catalano said the findings don’t take away from the fact that, “moderate exercise is very good, no question about it.” But he said that the farther women get into pregnancy, the harder it is for them to stick to an exercise program. That’s why starting with exercising and diet improvement early is so important.

One of the problems is that historically, women have been given the wrong message about eating and physical activity in pregnancy, said Dr. Raul Artal, head of obstetrics, gynecology and women’s health at Saint Louis University School of Medicine.

“Pregnancy is not a state of confinement and indulgence. It’s an ideal time for behavioral modification for the benefit of both mother and the baby,” Artal, who wasn’t involved in the new research, told Reuters Health.

He considers pregnancy an opportunity to address unhealthy behaviors in patients. “In general women are more prone to adopt healthy lifestyles in pregnancy because of the concern for the unborn child.”

Nascimento’s team also pointed out that women typically have more contact with health providers when they’re pregnant.

But, Artal added, “The sad thing is that as a society we have become more sedentary and more overweight and obese. This is not confined to pregnant women.”

In an email to Reuters Health, the researchers recommended 30 minutes of moderate exercise each day for overweight and obese pregnant women, along with stretching and nutrition counseling.

Source: Reuters Health

Posted on

Reaching Out to ‘Emerging Donors’ for Africa

Analysis

Dakar — Guyana, Thailand, Botswana, South Africa, Poland and Sudan share something in common: they all committed to the Horn of Africa drought appeal.

Higher up the scale, with multi-million dollar pledges, were China (US$63 million); Saudi Arabia ($60 million); Brazil ($32 million); United Arab Emirates ($17 million) and Qatar ($5.6 million).

Non-DAC donors – countries that are not members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Development Assistance Committee – reported $622 million worth of humanitarian assistance in 2010 and contributed 6 percent of total reported humanitarian aid between 2000 and 2008, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) Financial Tracking Service.

When it comes to all types of foreign assistance, non-DAC donors are collectively estimated to have given $60 billion in 2010, according to aid watchdog Development Initiatives; and the UN estimates non-western donors provided almost 10 percent of overall aid in 2008. South-south trade meanwhile, accounted for more than a quarter of global trade in 2008.

Growing influence

Though many non-DAC donors’ aid pots are still relatively small (India reported just $36.5 million in humanitarian aid in 2010), amounts grow annually (in 2000 it gave $200,000); their economic clout is growing (India is tipped to be the third-largest global economy in 2020), and many are shunning the stigma of “recipient-only-status”, says Shoko Arakaki, chief of funding coordination at OCHA.

But the power of these new donors extends beyond money. As well as being a significant donor to Haiti in 2010, Brazil wielded influence by leading the UN Stabilization Mission for Haiti (MINUSTAH). The government plays an active role in global disaster preparedness, such as the International Strategy for Disaster Reduction and Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GRDRR), according to Germany-based Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi).

The influence of these donors is likely to grow further, says Claudia Meier, public research associate at GPPi, and could reshape coordination and accountability bodies, such as the DAC, which have to date remained relatively “closed”. Of the emerging donors only South Korea has joined DAC. It has also joined the Good Humanitarian Donorship Initiative alongside Poland, Brazil, Estonia and Lithuania – the GHD is reaching out to Turkey, Croatia, United Arab Emirates and Singapore to join.

Some emerging donors shun membership of these structures as they have not been part of their establishment, said Meier, who wrote Humanitarian Assistance: Truly Universal?, which analyzes entry points for collaboration with non-western humanitarian donors.

Brazil cited this as a reason for not joining the DAC. Many prefer regional coordination bodies, says GPPi, such as the Association of Southeast Asian nations (ASEAN), the Organisation of the Islamic Conference or the League of Arab States, which are “taking a more active role in [humanitarian] coordination”.

As Karin Christiansen, head of Publish What You Fund (PWYF), told IRIN: “Both the system and the donors need to change… Emerging donors might drive this reform… Ultimately, the more people in the tent, the language will have to change.”

Other likely changes are the growing influence of consortia and pooled funds, into which donors – both traditional and not – are putting increasingly large amounts, says deputy funding director at Oxfam, Suzi Faye.

Relief organizations from emerging economies are also likely to develop more of an international humanitarian role, said Meier. “Maybe an Indian NGO, the Chinese Red Cross, the Red Crescents of the Gulf States [will emerge]… they are not fully there yet, but there are lots of signs of their professionalization,” she said.

Opportunities

Opportunities arise with donor diversification, said Kerry Smith, researcher with aid watchdog Development Initiatives. Emerging donors often tend to be recipients and providers of aid, and thus have a better understanding of the needs and constraints facing developing countries in emergency response. India has sophisticated disaster management systems after decades of disaster response, and has helped shape those of Pakistan and Afghanistan – two of its largest aid recipients.

These donors often tend to stress a more equal, solidarity-based relationship, rather than the traditional top-down donor-recipient dynamic, said Smith. As Brazil said: “[The Brazilian government believes that] development cooperation is not limited to the interaction between donors and recipients [and] understand[s] it as an exchange between peers, with mutual benefits and responsibilities.”

Many non-western donors do not distinguish short-term humanitarian aid from longer-term “development aid” – perhaps because they know the distinction to be blurred – which could help plug the gaps in the usually under-funded relief-to-development continuum.

Further, tapping into aid from “new” sources can in some circumstances increase aid agencies’ access to those in need – most aid workers agree that humanitarian space has shrunk over the past two decades.

For example, India is one of the few humanitarian donors in Afghanistan that is not involved in the conflict; in Myanmar, many western-backed NGOs found it hard to respond to Cyclone Nargis but those working with ASEAN donors were able to intervene more quickly, partly because of its long-term relationship with the Burmese authorities.

Non-western donors may also take a more sensitive approach to respecting a country’s sovereignty, say analysts. India puts sovereignty at the heart of its humanitarian response policy, having refused an onslaught of aid after the 2004 tsunami. In future, aid agencies will need to pay greater attention to “non-intrusive support”, wrote Randolph Kent of the humanitarian futures project, in Death of Hegemony.

“When western agencies rolled up after the Sichuan earthquake in China, the Chinese told them flatly they were not needed. Generally, greater sensitivity to regional culture, gaining real knowledge of what is wanted by governments and communities in disaster-prone regions and building contacts in those regions well before another humanitarian disaster, is the way in which the west can continue to play an international humanitarian role – rather than the presumption that it is wanted and needed.”

Reaching out

As the donor picture shifts, aid agencies are starting to build new relationships, but too slowly, said Meier. “Not enough dialogue is going on yet.”

One exception at a policy level is the UN-based humanitarian dialogue platform, chaired by Sweden and Brazil, which tries to “bridge the artificial donor-affected population gap and to discuss humanitarian assistance among all states on a consistent basis”, said Meier.

Some UN agencies have also been fairly active at forging relationships with new donors, say analysts, including World Food Programme, the UN Children’s Fund, and the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which respectively received 2.5 percent, 1.7 percent and 3.6 percent of their humanitarian funding from non-DAC donors in 2008, after significant reach-out – particularly to Gulf donors.

OCHA, which coordinates the Emergency Response Fund, Country Humanitarian Fund and the Central Emergency Response Fund, has made a big effort to reach out to new donors, said Arakaki – and the results are starting to show.

The ERF and CHF have increased their donor bases in the past 15 years, with 40 donors, including Brazil, UAE and Mexico, Nigeria and Gabon among the top 10 contributors to the Haiti emergency Response Fund, she said.

The CERF is even more diverse, with 140 donors in 2010. Unique to the fund is that 40 of its donors are also recipients. “The more new members that come on board, the more of an example it sets… Donors also realized today’s donor can be tomorrow’s victim,” said Arakaki.

The draw of such pooled funds to some emerging donors is ease: they can write a cheque and OCHA does the rest. “Many of them want to identify the simplest mechanism to give money as quickly as possible,” said Arakaki.

This is particularly true for governments that do not have the legal set-up to administer and track foreign funding. The law in Poland, for instance, means it can take up to three months to disburse money to a national or international NGO; thus the government finds it much easier to give to pooled funds or UN agencies and the International Federation of the Red Cross, according to Development Initiatives’ Smith.

The amounts are still small, however: 90 percent of CERF funding in 2010 still came from the same “traditional” 10-12 donors.

NGOs catching up

Whether it is murky entry points for dialogue, emerging donors’ penchant for pooled funds, or a host of other reasons, NGOs appear to be behind UN agencies in reaching out to new donors. Most of the big international NGOs are building relationships: World Vision for instance, fund-raises in Thailand, the Philippines, India, Malaysia, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia and Chile through its country offices, according to spokesman Christopher Weeks, and the South Korea and Taiwan offices now donate funds, rather than receive funds, he said. But the numbers remain small.

Gulf donors contributed just $1.5 million to Oxfam’s $473 million annual budget, according to Faye. But building relationships with these donors is still important. “Rather than just going after money, we are trying to build real partnerships, as well as seeing how Oxfam can influence them on a policy level.”

GPPi acknowledges the challenges involved in finding “entry points for dialogue”: many emerging donors – such as South Africa – do not have separate development ministries to administer aid; Brazil has a fragmented aid system, with no legal framework to regulate, monitor or evaluate aid, according to the Overseas Development Institute, while the aid motivations of India remain largely unknown.

There is “great variance” in donor transparency, according to PWYF’s Christiansen: Estonia is “extremely transparent” at one end of the scale, while China is “not as murky as everyone thinks”, she said. PWYF will be releasing a report on emerging donor transparency in November. For those donors still honing their humanitarian and development financing systems: “There are benefits to setting up good transparent systems from the beginning… If you have to retrofit, then it is much harder,” Christiansen says.

For relationships to work, emerging donors need more respect, a representative from one emerging donor’s foreign aid ministry told IRIN in Dakar: many of them have been giving aid for decades without being noticed, he said. Meier added: “They all of a sudden have been discovered as cash cows, while still not getting a say in international governance.”

The DAC still does not include China, Russia, Saudi Arabia or Brazil, and no meeting ground exists for all donors to discuss humanitarian assistance other than the annual UN General Assembly and the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). “This reinforces the idea of aid being part of the western agenda,” said Antonio Donini, researcher at Tufts University’s Feinstein institute.

An NGO, One.org, has called on emerging donors to join existing coordination structures. But Christiansen says these structures themselves need to change to be more welcoming to new members. She hopes forging a mutually respectful dialogue between aid agencies, new and established donors, will be on the agenda at the aid effectiveness conference in Busan, South Korea in November.

“Things may get messier before they become clearer, but it is already incredibly messy – we need a bit less hubris, and a bit more action,” she said.

This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations

Copyright © 2011 UN Integrated Regional Information Networks.

Posted on

The Rise of the ‘New’ Donors for Africa

Dakar — “It’s taken the world a while to notice they exist – and now we’re obsessed with them,” is how Karin Christiansen, head of Publish What You Fund, characterizes the west’s relationship with what people call “new”, “emerging” or “non-traditional” donors.

Many are not new at all – India, Brazil and China have been giving aid for decades – but what is new is that a group of non-western donors is giving more humanitarian and development aid year on year, and reporting it more consistently to official trackers, such as the UN’s Financial Tracking System (127 donors reported aid in 2010).

As they “emerge”, the traditional hegemony held by western donors over how and where aid is dispersed is starting to be dismantled.

“A hegemony or sense of tradition has developed over decades in the western humanitarian movement, that it should spearhead response to disasters because it has special experience and ability,” says Randolph Kent head of the Humanitarian Futures programme at King’s College, London.

“But increasingly we are seeing more and more humanitarian players from the east responding to disasters – India, China, Vietnam and Bangladesh for example – are more than capable of responding and managing crises in their own countries.”

These donors do not necessarily want to join the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Development Aid Committee – they are forming their own localized coordination groups instead.

Brazil and Spain signed an agreement in 2011 to jointly implement aid projects; Russia recently partnered with Venezuela on Haiti earthquake response; Brazil, India and South Africa set up a Poverty and Hunger Alleviation Fund in 2011.

Many are the same governments that have argued for years for a less top-down, more partnership-oriented approach when receiving aid. India, after all, was both the eighth-largest receiver of official development assistance in 2008 and is expected to be the third-largest economy by 2020.

Some governments are growing increasingly frustrated with the western domination of inter-governmental bodies such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Brazil, Russia, India and China issued a communiqué in April 2011 stating: “The governing structure of the international financial institutions should reflect the changes in the world economy, increasing the voice and representation of emerging economies and developing countries.”

Western powers are not showing themselves keen to shift too much, yet. But in due course, all donors will be forced to shift at least a little, say analysts. In light of these changes, IRIN discusses just how transparent is China’s aid programme; analyzes the rising influence of Muslim and Arab donors and aid agencies; and asks analysts whether aid agencies are preparing sufficiently for the future by reaching out to new donors such as Brazil and India.

Copyright © 2011 UN Integrated Regional Information Networks.

Posted on

Link Between Mobile Phones and Brain Cancer Rejected

By Nick Triggle Health correspondent, BBC News

Further research has been published suggesting there is no link between mobile phones and brain cancer.

The risk mobiles present has been much debated over the past 20 years as use of the phones has soared.

The latest study led by the Institute of Cancer Epidemiology in Denmark looked at more than 350,000 people with mobile phones over an 18-year period.

Researchers concluded users were at no greater risk than anyone else of developing brain cancer.

The findings, published on the British Medical Journal website, come after a series of studies have come to similar conclusions.

‘Reassuring’

But there has also been some research casting doubt on mobile phone safety, prompting the World Health Organization to warn that they could still be carcinogenic.

In doing so, the WHO put mobile phones in the same category as coffee, meaning a link could not be ruled out but could not be proved either.

The Department of Health continue to advise that anyone under the age of 16 should use mobile phones only for essential purposes and keep all calls short.

Continue reading the main story

“Start Quote

These results are the strongest evidence yet that using a mobile phone does not seem to increase the risk of cancers of the brain or central nervous system in adults”

Hazel Nunn Cancer Research UK

The Danish study, which built on previous research that has already been published by carrying out a longer follow-up, found there was no significant difference in rates of brain or central nervous system cancers among those who had mobiles and those that did not.

Of the 358,403 mobile phone owners looked at, 356 gliomas (a type of brain cancer) and 846 cancers of the central nervous system were seen – both in line with incidence rates among those who did not own a mobile.

Even among those who had had mobiles the longest – 13 years or more – the risk was no higher, the researchers concluded.

But they still said mobile phone use warranted continued follow up to ensure cancers were not developing over the longer term, and to see what the effect was in children.

Hazel Nunn, head of evidence and health information at Cancer Research UK, said: “These results are the strongest evidence yet that using a mobile phone does not seem to increase the risk of cancers of the brain or central nervous system in adults.”

Prof Anders Ahlbom, from Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, praised the way the study was conducted, adding the findings were “reassuring”.

Prof David Spiegelhalter, an expert specialising in the understanding of risk who is based at the University of Cambridge, said: “The mobile phone records only go up to 1995 and so the comparison is mainly between early and late adopters, but the lack of any effect on brain tumours is still very important evidence.”

And Prof Malcolm Sperrin, director of medical physics at Royal Berkshire Hospital, said: “The findings clearly reveal that there is no additional overall risk of developing a cancer in the brain although there does seem to be some minor, and not statistically significant, variations in the type of cancer.”

But the researchers themselves do accept there were some limitations to the study, including the exclusion of “corporate subscriptions”, thereby excluding people who used their phones for business purposes, who could be among the heaviest users