Refugees worldwide suffered the repercussions of the tragic events of September 11, says the World Refugee Survey 2002, published today by the U.S. Committee for Refugees (USCR). The United States, preoccupied by security concerns in the wake of the attacks on New York and Washington, temporarily shut down the refugee resettlement program on October 1. As a result, the United States admitted fewer refugees in 2001 than in any year since 1987. Thousands of refugees in Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and elsewhere who expected to go to the United States became stuck where they were, often in places where they were at risk. "At a time when freedom is under attack, the world is turning its back on people fleeing war, persecution, and terror in search of freedom," said USCR executive director Lavinia Limón. "This indifference towards refugees undermines our stated values."

This posting contains a sign-on letter on Africa policy to be sent to G7 finance ministers. The letter is initiated by ActionAid USA, Africa Action, the 50 Years Is Enough Network; and TransAfrica Forum.

Does Nepad simply represent an extension of neo-colonial globalisation? Forty years ago in his book The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon warned of partnerships that are forged by an African leadership which identifies "with the decadence of the bourgeoisie of the West. We need not think that it is jumping ahead; it is in fact beginning at the end. It is already senile before it has come to know the petulance, the fearlessness, or the will to succeed of youth." This book reproduces commentary on Nepad from major social movements, trade unions, progressive intellectuals and other community leaders. It includes the original Nepad and a paragraph-by-paragraph annotated critique.

The Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) has asked ICAD for assistance in promoting discussion on a paper they have recently prepared entitled: CIDA Discussion Paper: Building Comprehensive Approaches to HIV/AIDS Care, Treatment & Support in Resource Limited Settings. This paper will inform the development of program guidelines being prepared for CIDA staff for use in the design, assessment, monitoring and evaluation of programs and projects. The guidelines are designed to facilitate the operationalization of international commitments in the area of care, treatment and support for people living with HIV/AIDS in resource limited settings. Comments made on the forum by Monday June 17, 2002 will be reported at an experts' consultation to be held in Ottawa June 19-20, 2002. Thirty national and international experts from CIDA, Health Canada, International Labour Organization (ILO), the World Health Organization (WHO) and Canadian organizations working in care, treatment and support programming and advocacy in developing countries will attend the meeting to provide feedback on the discussion paper.

Thousands of residents were forced to flee into a nearby forest when Rwandan-backed Rassemblement congolais pour la democratie (RCD-Goma) forces attacked the town of Kampene, eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, Missionary Service News Agency (Misna) reported on Saturday.

The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) in Eritrea has warned that it is facing a serious shortfall in funding for this year, putting vital work with vulnerable women and children at risk.

Four international organisations have called for a more integrated approach to control the tsetse fly, which transmits sleeping sickness to human beings and causes Nagana in livestock. These diseases, found in 37 sub-Saharan countries, threaten 50 million people and 48 million head of cattle.

Sanctions against Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe and his regime must be stepped up, Labour MEP Glenys Kinnock has told the European Union. As Mr Mugabe attended a United Nations conference in Italy, despite an EU visa ban, Mrs Kinnock called on European nations to increase the pressure for change in his country. She said: "Mugabe is using these UN meetings to parade himself in Europe in defiance of our ban, while the people in his country suffer because of his policies."

I think you are doing a good job.

The Canadian opinion in the article on demining in Mozambique(MOZAMBIQUE LEADS THE WORLD - IN CLEARING LAND MINES: Pambazuka News Issue 66)can only be believed by average people, lacking the basic knowledge of what demining is all about. The amount of mines is irrelevant, the area covered in m2 and the area freed from these objects, that is what is relevant!
Maria Pons
[email protected]

While the national Health Department is hailing the latest Aids figures as proof of the start of a turnabout in South Africa's pandemic, activists remain cautious, warning that this is no time for complacency. They say that without the release of full statistics, down to the detail of clinic-to-clinic, the numbers cannot be properly assessed for their accuracy.

Although South Africa must train 30 000 new teachers every year to ensure education for all children, it is training less than half this number.

The Cambridge City Council – where World Bank president James Wolfensohn was due to speak last week at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – has joined the anti-globalisation movement by voting to boycott the bank’s bonds. Not wasting words about the terms the World Bank imposes on the developing world in exchange for access to development funding, the city government accused the bank of being "the principal architect and enforcer of corporate globalization."

Given that there has not been any democratic debate and given that NEPAD contains serious threats to our people, we call on the Mauritian government not to go ahead with the presentation of NEPAD in the coming G8 meeting and its launch in July 2002.

Globalisation has failed to create jobs, effectively fuelling mass economic migration worldwide, the director-general of the International Labour Organisation (ILO), Juan Somavia, said on Monday. Speaking to the ILO's annual assembly, Somavia said more than one billion people were unemployed, prompting 120 million migrant workers to leave their families and home countries in the hope of finding a job elsewhere.

For several years now, a fractious debate about the role of the big financial institutions in the globalized economy has encircled the world's policy makers, moving from the initial grumblings of the often-unheeded developing world through the street protests of Seattle and elsewhere and on to a much broader agenda. With "Globalization and Its Discontents" (W. W. Norton, $24.95), Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economic science in 2001, has taken the discussion a step further. He shows just how much the protesters' misgivings about and outright hostility toward some of those institutions have moved from the fringes into influential, mainstream thinking.

The Media Monitoring Project views with grave concern the recent appointment of commissioners to the Media and Information Commission as provided for in the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act. MMPZ notes that firstly, the Commission itself is not an independent body since it is appointed by a government minister and is directly accountable to him. Secondly, that while the Commission purports to encourage and enforce ethical and professional journalistic practice; the functions of the Commission serve to restrict the public’s constitutional rights to freedom of expression and limits those wishing to exercise these rights. Thirdly, the composition of the Commission is not representative of Zimbabwean society. And finally, the Commission has been constituted within an Act that is in fact designed to restrict the free flow of information and opinion, and the people’s rights to these fundamental freedoms.

The Minister of Information and Publicity, Professor Jonathan Moyo, seems to have kept his word that the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act will put to silence what he termed “gutter and trash journalism”. The Act has indeed been invoked over 12 (twelve) times to date, however not against gutter and trash journalism, but on the contrary, to silence the Zimbabwe private media from performing its constitutionally guaranteed duty of informing the public. The Act hovers over the operations of each man and women working in the private media in Zimbabwe, as literally anything written or published can be “criminal”. The coming of the Act has seen the arrests of journalists at a frequency that has never been experienced in independent Zimbabwe. And the arrests are for virtually anything one’s mind can fathom.

UN agencies in the Republic of Congo (ROC) say that at least 20,000 people in urgent need of humanitarian aid remain in inaccessible areas of the troubled Pool region. "At present, the UN has access to the towns of Djamballa, Kinkala, Madzia, Kibouende, the east part of the railway line (on the south side only), Kindamba and Bouenza region (west of Pool region)," the Office of the UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator reported on Tuesday.

In an unprecedented show of unity, African leaders this week launched a broadside against market protection in the world's wealthiest nations. "We are not asking for alms," was their message. "Open your markets and we will help ourselves."

A direct telephone line was reinstalled on Wednesday between the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and neighbouring Republic of Congo (ROC) after a 15-year hiatus, the director of the National Telecommunications and Post Office, Rene-Serge Blanchard Oba, said in the ROC capital, Brazzaville.

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has slammed the response of international aid agencies to the crisis in Angola, where the organisation says thousands of people are dying of hunger.

A Durban scriptwriter has won an interim interdict against the distribution or sale of Mbongeni Ngema's controversial song Amandiya. The interdict application said the song, which appears on a CD entitled Jive MaDlokovu, was "rabidly racist and anti- Indian" and that it breached the South African constitution by promoting hate speech.

Last week, a little-known committee quietly released a report calling for major changes in the governing of the organization that manages the Internet.

This article about providing a low-cost solution to getting connected may inspire others who are in a similar situation. Enjoy.

Adult mortality is increasing in many parts of Africa. Is this due to AIDS? Can existing data answer this question? What other statistics are needed to document the spread of the AIDS epidemic in Africa? Research from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine examines the impact of HIV/AIDS on adult mortality in five African countries. It shows that increases in adult mortality correspond to high levels of HIV infection. However, there is a pressing need to collect more data on adult mortality in Africa, and to exploit more fully existing data sources.

Grandparents often have to care for AIDS orphans in developing countries. But what other problems do they face due to the epidemic? Researchers from the MRC Programme on AIDS in Uganda talked to elderly people in a rural village in south west Uganda, where half of all deaths among adults aged 13 to 44 are HIV-related.

How has AIDS affected development in the world's poorest regions? How can we reduce the devastation caused by the epidemic? The Zimbabwe-based NGO, SAfAIDS, examined the impact of HIV in southern Africa where the disease affects a quarter of the adult population.

Forty thousand people - mainly children - in Zimbabwe's western Binga district will not receive their food aid after a food distribution programme run by the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace was closed by police on Wednesday. Father Tom McQuillen told IRIN that as trucks were being loaded with food in the morning, war veterans arrived and put a chain and a padlock around the gate of the church grounds and wouldn't let them leave.

Nearly half of Africa's population of 325 million people is threatened by desertification. When combined with extreme poverty and severe land degradation, the threat acutely affects millions of Africans, a panel of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) has reported.

GDN is recruiting a Project Coordinator/Coordination Unit to manage and provide intellectual leadership for the Bridging Research and Policy project. This 3-year, $3 million global project seeks to learn more about research-policy linkages, and promote better policy making world-wide. GDN welcomes applications from developing and transition country candidates as we seek to establish a broad-based team. Prospective candidates should consult the GDN website for detailed application instructions.

ICD is looking to recruit two development workers to work with a range of local
NGOs, LNGOs, in Somaliland assisting in building their capacity and specific
skills for community development activities.

The Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Asma Jahangir, will go to the Democratic Republic of the Congo from 16 to 22 June to gather information concerning extra-judicial killings alleged to have occurred in the city of Kisangani on 14 May 2002 and immediately thereafter.

Forum for Women in democracy (FOWODE) with the assistance from UNDP is organising a gender budget sub-regional conference. This conference is the last activity of our grassroots women leaders project. Other activities done under this project include a gender budget training workshop, gender advocacy training workshop and the gender budget advocacy campaign workshop. This is a five-day conference and is scheduled to take place in June 2002.

Andrew Meldrum, a foreign correspondent for the British paper, The Guardian, went on trial in Harare this week accused of publishing a false story in a test case for the state's restrictive media laws. Meldrum, 50, is US citizen and Zimbabwean permanent resident who has lived in the country since 1980. He pleaded not guilty.

The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) has expressed concern over the continued humanitarian access denial to the oil-rich region of western Upper Nile in southern Sudan, where constant insecurity, resulting from ongoing fighting between the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A), and the Sudan government, has caused the displacement of tens of thousands of civilians.

A boost for Mozambique came on Monday when Sweden pledged US $14 million for rural agricultural development over the next three years, AFP reported.

Interfund, a consortium of donors based in Scandinavia and Europe, has launched it's new website. The new website was launched in a fun-filled evening with cultural performances at the Civic Theatre.

Gun Free South Africa is committed to making a material contribution to building a safe and secure nation, free from fear, by reducing the number of firearms in society. It is looking for an information, communication and research officer.

Corruption has cost Africa at least US $140 billion, Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo revealed on Thursday. He said his country alone had spent millions of dollars trying to recover money illegally spirited away by corrupt former leaders. "Imagine what that can do for Africa today," he told a conference in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. "That is a lot of money."

An HIV/AIDS and education conference in Southern Africa will be held on July 18 in London. The objectives are not only to raise awareness on the issue of HIV/AIDS and its impact on Education in Southern Africa but also to encourage partnerships that facilitate the exchange of skills and resources between NGOs, trades unions, the private and public sectors in the UK and partners in Southern Africa.

Commonwealth Secretary-General Don McKinnon, in a statement issued on Wednesday, said: "There is a real danger that the 'World Food Summit: Five Years Later' taking place in Rome will not deliver results. Instead of generating money to feed the poor, it could just feed more summits. That must not be allowed to happen."

Africa's social, economic, and political relations urgently need to be transformed through a focused and determined international effort if Africa is to be lifted out of the poverty trap. The New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) presents itself as a visionary and dynamic initiative by a core group of new generation African leaders to reconstruct and develop the continent. But NEPAD's vision is blurred by fixing its sights on increased global integration and rapid private sector growth as the answer to overcoming poverty, and by its failure to engage with Africa's people to transform the continent. The remarkable political will generated by NEPAD must be focused into a participatory transformation of Africa through direct, immediate, and decisive action to overcome the causes of Africa's impoverishment.

An ActionAid Policy Brief

News of the famine in Malawi (like elsewhere in the world) developed as rural whispers slowly, too slowly finding their way to the ears of urban policymakers in Lilongwe and foreign capitals from October 2001. The Malawi Economic Justice Network (MEJN) and the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace had attempted unsuccessfully to mobilize activist groups to pressurize the Government to declare a “famine”. The data provided then by these organizations and others was dismissed as lacking credibility.

0n February 22nd 2002, MEJN released a press statement calling for Government and donor action and stating “The Government should acknowledge that there is hunger in Malawi; make the holding of maize a crime, subsidize the price of maize in Malawi; government and civil society should provide food supplies to vulnerable groups”. At this point, the mainstream international media started broadcasting reports of a famine emergency, desperation and critical food shortages.

By June 2002, the disaster had claimed up to a thousand African lives. Yet, in Washington DC, media coverage and policy treatment of the disaster has been confusing. Media coverage of the discourse between the Government of Malawi, bi-lateral donors or the International Monetary headlined alternately corruption abounded or criminal macroeconomic policy. Situated within this discourse and resourced by the public release of a comprehensive report by ActionAidMalawi this policy brief isolates one important factor for examination and public scrutiny namely, the failure of macro-economic and structural policy to safeguard against the famine in Malawi.

We remain conscious of the myriad of complex variables, both causal and correlative, often associated with famine situations. As with all famines, the causes fall into two categories: ‘trigger factors’ (livelihood shocks and response failures), and ‘underlying causes’ (factors that create vulnerability to livelihood shocks). As elaborated in the ActionAidMalawi report (June 2002), the disaster can be explained as the product of a combination of both ‘technical’ issues and political challenges. Issues of poor early warning systems, market failures, structural poverty and inadequate infrastructure are also parts of this crisis.

However unlike previous famines in Malawi, this one was preceded by over a decade of structural and agriculturally related policy reforms by successive Malawian Governments advised by the International Monetary Fund. While not ignoring the many domestic factors contained in the ActionAidMalawi report, this report singles out key international policy components for attention.

MAJOR FINDINGS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

The ActionAid Malawi report clarifies the broad array of causes for the famine.1998/99 and 1999/00 were two good production years. However, localised floods reduced the 2000/01 maize harvest and left a shortfall estimated at 237,000 metric tones in 2000-2001. In 2001-2002 the shortfall had almost tripled rising to 600,000 metric tones. Initial crop estimates suggested that the maize deficit would be partly offset by a 30% increase in roots and tubers production (especially cassava) over the previous year. This figure was wrong and generated misplaced complacency. Donors failed to react to signals of an impending food crisis, the Strategic Grain Reserve was sold, and senior members of government denied the existence of a famine until February 2002, when civil society and the media presented irrefutable evidence of hunger-related deaths.

The decision to sell the Strategic Grain Reserve (SGR) followed advice from the IMF to reduce the level of buffer stocks held from 165,000 MT to 60,000 MT. Instead, almost all of the reserve was sold, much of it on local markets, against IMF advice to export it in order to minimise disincentives to maize producers.

There is some evidence that much of the SGR was sold to local traders, who stockpiled it and profiteered from hunger. When the government attempted to cover the resulting food gap through imports, this proved extremely expensive, and a series of logistical problems caused fatal delays and an escalation of maize prices to unaffordable levels. Concern about various governance issues – including suspicions of corrupt practice around the SGR sale – caused donors to vacillate for several months before responding to signals of distress with food assistance.

Following stakeholder consultations across the Malawian Government, civil society and donor communities on a draft version of the report, ActionAid further calls on the International Monetary Fund to act quickly to institute the following measures;

1. A temporary moratorium on further structural reforms to formulate, set and meet the food security objectives of a national development strategy in conjunction with the Malawian Government, civil society and donors.

2. Review and propose legal and operational measures that support the Malawian Government to regulate various forms of manipulation, rent-seeking and un-competitive activities by sector agents.

3. Institute a tracking study that traces which sectors and interests have benefited from the dissolution of the Strategic Grain reserve and the reduction of institutional and structural regulatory and supervisory capacity. This is in line with the commitment to undertake Poverty and Social Impact Assessments.

Mauritius has become the latest country to jump on to the information technology bandwagon. Experts say that if the island-nation's daring plan is to end in cheers and not tears, the government must give its full backing. (Source: TAD Information Update May 2002 No. 5)

Despite initial denials that child soldiers are serving in the Burundi army, government and military leaders have now shown a new willingness to deal with the issue, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) reported on Monday.

Lucy Susa sits outside the Mayani Health centre with twins Sainabu and Chemalenga sucking at her emaciated breasts. She's one of several hundred women who walk to the health centre, in the impoverished Dedza district in the centre of the country, for the babies' regular check up.

The Malawi Censorship Board has ordered the removal of a controversial condom advertisement that it has declared offensive and pornographic.

IEARN, which joins 5,000 schools in 92 countries, will hold its ninth summit in Moscow on July 7. The meet will discuss the outcomes of its online project work and plans for the future.