A panel in Washington has discussed viral videos, empowering local activists and setting international moral values as means to prevent future mass atrocities against civilians.
Photo: AP
A box full to the brim with KONY 2012 campaign posters are shown Thursday March 8, 2012 at the Invisible Children Movement offices in San Diego.
The panel called "The Responsibility to Protect" was organized during the two-day Clinton Global Initiative University Meeting, and attended by dozens of students from across the United States, many of them foreigners. Former President Bill Clinton launched these programs in 2007 to engage the next generation of leaders.
Drawing on current violence taking place against civilians in Syria, international relations professor Amitai Etzioni called for urgent action when what he called a moral minimum is under threat.
"If you stand by and allow a government to take its tanks and shell civilians and then go and pull people out of hospital beds and knife them, then what are we standing for? So there I would say all pragmatic considerations have to be set aside, and I don't think we always have to have a national interest. I think we have some moral duties which even if they conflict with our national interests, there is a level, a Holocaust, where we cannot just stand by," he said.
Etzioni called on the international community to have standby troops to quickly intervene in such situations.
But Michael Gerson, who works for the One Campaign which aims to improve international aid, warned that any multilateral solution, even if essential, can quickly get bogged down.
"It is not possible just for one country to come in and take care of all these problems, but multilateral institutions are not designed for speed. And we find that again and again and again, when it comes to the United Nations Security Council, which we have seen with the role of Russia and China, when it comes to organizations like NATO which we tried to get involved in Darfur," he said.
Despite massive attention to the problems in Sudan's Darfur region, the violence there, which began nine years ago, continues.
In such situations, Juliana Rotich, the executive director of Ushahidi, a non-profit technology company managing crisis information, recommended empowering local activists.
"It takes the involvement of the local activists who know the situation best to make the recommendations that fit the issue. Our part as a technology provider is to provide the skeleton on which they can flesh out the issue that they care about, and they can put in place the processes that fit that particular issue," she said.
Also on the panel was U.S. film actress Kristen Bell, who defended her involvement with the controversial but hugely successful online video against the roving Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) leader Joseph Kony by the U.S. group Invisible Children.
The LRA has been maiming and abducting children across Central Africa, as well as killing civilians for over two decades, something Bell said she wanted to use her fame to fight against. "Listen, I am not a foreign policy expert. I do not know a ton about government. But I do know that I care about people, and I do not really care what country they live in because technology has given me the ability to look into someone's face and see them across the world," she said. "And I just want to be able to say, 'hope you are doing well. I am here if you need me.'"
The video was again criticized by panel members, as it has been previously for being too simple and aimed too much at a U.S. audience. But since being viewed tens of millions of times, the "Kony 2012" video has been followed by a new U.S. Congressional resolution backing U.S. military efforts to help eradicate the LRA, as well as a decision by the African Union to send 5,000 troops to find Kony. The elusive LRA leader is wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of crimes against humanity.
This week"s strong earthquake that shook Japan, one of the best prepared Asian countries for natural disasters, was a stark reminder of the value of readiness in a region disproportionately targeted by the forces of nature.
Photo: Reuters
Students cover their heads after they ran out of the school building during an earthquake drill at the Baclaran Elementary School Unit-1 in Paranaque city, metro Manila, the Philippines, February 7, 2012
While Japan continues to dig out from last year's triple disaster, Thailand is scrambling to avert a repeat of last year's historic floods.
Since then, Thai authorities have set aside billions of dollars for a long-term water resource management plan that they say will ensure that the disaster will not be repeated.
Bangkok resident Suthi Sun remembered the floods like a bad dream. When the waters reached his residence, he said in an e-mail interview that "this was the first time I found the high level of flooding. The highest level was 1.5 meter[s]. Meanwhile my ceiling is about 2.2 to 2.5 meters."
Sun said the Thai government tried to do its best but had no "clear or certain policy." Ruengrawee Pichaikul , Senior Program Coordinator for the Asia Foundation in Thailand, agreed, saying in an e-mail interview that some believed the scale of the flooding was beyond the government's capacity.
When responding to similar charges leveled against the government during the flood, Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra said, "I tell you the truth, we have done everything to the best of our ability."
"We are facing the most severe flooding ever. We need encouragement, support and cooperation from all sectors and from all the people as well," she said.
Thai authorities have also set up a disaster fund to compensate victims and are struggling to provide affordable insurance to vulnerable citizens. Similar efforts are underway in the Philippines to provide victims of a recent earthquake with insurance and compensation.
USAID 's Principle Regional Advisor William Berger underscored the importance of disaster preparedness, particularly building resilient infrastructure, which can be costly. "It pays to invest in disaster risk reduction. Having...buildings built to a code that meets the threats that the country is facing is absolutely critical."
Reuters
An aerial view of Namche Bazaar, the last town before the Everest region in Nepal, December 2009 file photo.
Nepal sits on the collision point of the Eurasian and Indian tectonic plates that created the Himalayas. Cornell University 's Professor of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Larry Douglas Brown said major earthquakes will re-occur there "because the two plates are continuing to come together."
"The fact that they occur close to the population centers puts them at risk," he said. "And I say that also the complicating factor is that the resources are either not available or have not been applied to protect the infrastructure that exists there against these large earthquakes.
One possibility, said Steven Rood , the Asia Foundation Country Representative for the Philippines and the Pacific Island Nations, is to turn Nepal's historical structures into tourist attractions and use those revenues to retrofit them to withstand seismic activity. That is the approach USAID has used since 1995. The U.S. agency has helped build government and community capacity to reduce disaster risk and foster public partnerships to reconstruct old buildings and turn them into tourist attractions.
Japan, meanwhile, has invested heavily in being ready for the worst that nature can offer up. Berger was in Tokyo 24 hours after the March 2011 magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck.
"I sat in those buildings in Japan. And they swayed and they rocked, but they didn't fall down. A lot of other countries in Asia, if you were in a building, it would have fallen down," Berger said. "So Japan is invested and understands that these things are important. And … they're wealthy enough that they can construct buildings in a seismic-resistant fashion."
But public awareness is also key to limiting casualties. "Part of the reason why the Japanese came through it so often is they all know what to do when an earthquake happens," Rood said.
Reuters
Officers of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department take part in an earthquake disaster drill in Tokyo, Japan, September 1, 2011
Brown added that Japan's response earthquakes was good, keeping casualties and damage to a minimum. He said its state-of-the-art warning systems worked very well. Until the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.
Brown said Japan knew there was a tsunami risk, but did not know it was going to be as bad as it was. That information had "simply not worked its way through the system from scientific observations into practice early enough," he said.
That learning process cost thousands of lives in the case of Indonesia, which was the hardest-hit by the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami .
Hawaii's Pacific Tsunami Warning Center sent an early tsunami warning to Indonesia, which was then passed it down the official channels. But the entire region, according to the center, did not have warning systems in place that might have spared some of the more than 200,000 lives lost to the disaster.
"Indonesia is a little more prepared for a repeat because they have set up an early warning system," said Rood. "Now that early warning system doesn't work all the time...but other times it has actually produced a good warning so that when the earthquake happens and a tsunami threatens, the people are getting some warning."
Arshinta , the Director of YAKKUM Emergency Unit in Yogyakarta, Indonesia said in an email interview that the trend shows a decreased casualty rate since 2004. In 2006, about 6,000 people died in a magnitude 6.3 earthquake compared to 704 deaths in a 2009 magnitude 7.6 tremor, she said. And according to an Indonesian National Disaster Management Agency report, 1,711people died in 2010 due to natural disasters, compared to 2,620 deaths in 2009.
While much has been done to empower communities, Arshinta said the capacity of Indonesian disaster agencies remains low.
But some problems "require long-term systematic changes to the way society is configured and the way it uses the landscape," said Brown. "If you don't build to reduce the casualties, you lose lives. If you do build to reduce the casualties, you lose money because all of that investment and infrastructure is lost to the disaster," he said.
The point, according to Tom Murphy , Senior Research Fellow at the Urban Land Institute , is "to understand that you need to not act like it's never going to happen again."
Murphy, a former Pittsburgh mayor who coordinated rebuilding efforts in U.S. states ravaged by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, said people in parts of New Orleans built 15 feet below sea level. "So you could stand in your front yard and watch a ship go by 15 feet above you in the Industrial Canal." He said the lesson there is that "countries and regions need to be very careful about how they permit people to develop in the areas that are at risk of disaster."
Reuters
A May 2008 file photo shows an aerial view of a flooded village near an airport in Rangoon after Cyclone Nargis slammed into Burma's main city, ripping off roofs, felling trees and raising fears of major casualties
This is also true of Bangladesh, a South Asian country typically vulnerable to storms and floods by virtue of being situated on the Ganges Delta and its tributaries.
When a cyclone struck the country in 1991 , nearly 139,000 people perished, mostly by drowning. But the next same-size cyclone in 2007 claimed 4,000 lives - a significantly lower number of casualties. In contrast, Burger said Burma lost over 100,000 people to Cyclone Nargis the following year, even though both storms were of the same size.
"A lot of contributions and investments have been made by the international community and the government of Bangladesh in improving their response. And unfortunately, that hadn't been done in Burma," said Berger.
Even countries typically in the path of storms are caught unprepared. That was the case with the Philippine's Mindanao region, an area unaccustomed to typhoons, which recently encountered Typhoon Sendong .
Reuters
A resident carries items he salvaged from his damaged shanty after flash floods brought by Typhoon Washi (Sendong) hit Iligan city, southern Philippines, December 18, 2011.
When the storm struck, for example, Rood said tree logs that were stacked came down with the flood and battered houses. "And because they were so unprepared, more than a 1,000 people died," he said.
Rood said there is a tendency in disasters - not just in Asia – to respond rather than prepare. But as natural disasters increase in frequency, he said many people are beginning to understand that disaster risk reduction is a long-term concern. "Even the current levels of…natural disasters leave a terrible human toll," said Rood. "And as the world gets more crowded with people, that human toll will only increase," said Rood.
"You can't put a price on the lives saved when we invest in disaster risk reduction," Berger said.
The United Nations and the African Union are reducing the size of their hybrid peacekeeping mission in Darfur, known as UNAMID. Conditions in the western Sudanese region are said to be improving, even as tensions flare along the Sudan/South Sudan border.
Photo: AP
Jordanian peacekeepers of the United Nations African Mission In Darfur, UNAMID, patrol the refugee camp of Abou Shouk at the outskirts of the Darfur town of el Fasher, Sudan (File Photo)
Sudan, the African Union and the United Nations Wednesday agreed to reduce the UNAMID force. With its authorized force of 28,000, the Darfur mission is currently the largest peacekeeping operation in the world.
It was not immediately clear how large the cutback will be. Officials say that decision will be made by the UN Security Council over the next few weeks.
AU Political Commissioner Julia Dolly Joiner said the cuts reflect improved security conditions that are prompting Darfur's refugees and internally displaced people to return home.
"There has been significant progress in the peace process in Darfur, which is evident in an increase in voluntary returns of IDPs and refugees back to their places of origin," said Joiner.
UN peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous noted a marked decrease in the organized violence that raged in Darfur from the outbreak of civil war in 2003 through early 2005. But he said rising crime rates in the region had increased the need for a new type of force capable of rapid reaction.
"Certainly there is an increase in common criminality and that is a threat to the safety of civilians, which is one of the main concerns, but much less organized violence, and we have to account of this new situation and we will do that by making it so that UNAMID will be made more agile, more responsive, more mobile," said Ladsous.
Ladsous said the force reduction would be accomplished over an 18 month period.
News of the improvement in Darfur came as officials from Sudan and South Sudan are due to meet in Addis Ababa to avert an all out war following days of airstrikes and border clashes. The African Union expressed deep concern Wednesday at what it called an "escalating security situation" along the border, and called on both sides to pull back 10 kilometers from the disputed frontier.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton this week said the Khartoum government bore the brunt of the responsibility for the renewed hostilities.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy says more suspected Muslim extremists will be rounded up, following a series of arrests Friday in operations around the country. The arrests are part of a larger crackdown against radical Islam following a string of killings by an al-Qaida-inspired gunman.
Photo: AFP
Policemen (GIPN) take part in a search in Coueron, western France as part of dawn raids in several French cities, March 30, 2012.
Interviewed on France's Europe 1 radio Friday, President Nicolas Sarkozy confirmed police commandos had staged a series of early morning raids around the country, rounding up 19 suspected Muslim radicals.
Mr. Sarkozy said police had seized a number of weapons, notably Kalashnikov rifles. He said more operations will continue and some people will be expelled from the country.
Mr. Sarkozy's interior minister, Claude Gueant, provided more details, saying those arrested embraced an extremely violent, jihadist and combat ideology.
Speaking to reporters following a meeting with Muslim associations, Gueant says the government and the Muslim groups are united in fighting against radical Islam. He says the laws of the French Republic must protect Islam, which is the faith of about 5 million people living in the country.
Gueant says those arrested include the head of a banned Muslim group called Forsane Alizza, or "Knights of Pride." The group is known for having called for a boycott of McDonald's in the French city of Limoges, on grounds of serving Israel.
In a radio interview, French journalist Mohammed Sifaoui, who has penetrated the group, describes Forsane Alizza as an activist organization that has harassed a number of secular personalities in France. He says they could just be considered bearded people trying to disrupt things - but he says this also fits the background of terrorist groups.
The arrests are part of a larger crackdown against radical Islam following a string of killings this month by Islamist Mohammed Merah.
Separately, the government has banned six Islamic preachers from entering the country to participate in a Muslim conference in Paris next week. It said some had called for hate and violence and risked upsetting public order. Those barred include prominent Egyptian preacher Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawi.
Merah was buried Thursday in Toulouse a week after he died in a firefight with French police following a shooting spree in which he shot dead seven people, including two Muslims and four Jews. Just what kind of terrorist ties he has remains unclear, but his older brother, Abdelkader, has been charged with complicity in the attacks.
The Toulouse killings have shaken the nation. Muslim and Jewish leaders organized a joint march to commemorate the victims last Sunday.
MIAMI — Angela B. Corey, a Republican state attorney with a reputation for toughness, has decided not to seek a grand jury review of the Trayvon Martin shooting, keeping the resolution of a case that has transfixed the nation solely in her hands.
Ed Linsmier/Reuters
A protest over the Trayvon Martin shooting in Miami on April 1. Many people are angry that no charges have been filed yet.
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ and JOHN SCHWARTZ
Published: April 9, 2012
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Bruce Lipsky/Florida Times-Union, via Associated Press
Angela B. Corey, the prosecutor, has taken more cases to trial and won more convictions than her predecessor, a study found.
Ms. Corey, 57, who was appointed special prosecutor in the case by Florida's governor and attorney general, must decide herself how to proceed with the particularly difficult case, in which many facts are in dispute and no witnesses have come forward publicly. She alone must determine whether to file charges against George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch coordinator who shot and killed the unarmed Mr. Martin, or to drop the case.
The decision on Monday about how to proceed puts Ms. Corey not only at the center of a national discussion of race and violence — Mr. Zimmerman, 28, is Hispanic; Mr. Martin, 17, was black — but also of the finer points of law. The fact that no arrest has been made nor legal action taken in the Feb. 26 shooting has enraged many people across the country and has led to angry marches and protests.
The pressure to bring charges is "unbelievable," said Tor J. Friedman, a criminal defense lawyer in Tallahassee. "We always talk about a rush to judgment in other cases," he said, but in this case the question is more like, "Why wasn't this person taken to the town square and flogged in front of everybody?' "
But legal experts say the need for caution over speed is especially great in a case like this one. Mr. Zimmerman said he acted in self-defense, and law enforcement officials chose not to charge him under Florida's lenient self-defense law, known as Stand Your Ground. Under the law, anyone person who perceives a threat to his life is not required to attempt a retreat and has a right to use a weapon. It requires law enforcement officials to prove that a suspect did not act in self-defense, and sets the case on a slow track.
Unless investigators find witnesses or direct evidence of the confrontation preceding Mr. Martin's death, such as signs of a struggle, prosecutors would have to build a circumstantial case, often the hardest to make. In high-profile cases, the constitutional principle of the presumption of innocence can be especially strong — another reason to proceed with care, according to legal experts.
Florida criminal law, like most states, does not require a rush to file charges in such a case, Mr. Friedman said; the statute of limitations in manslaughter cases is measured in years, not weeks. Mr. Friedman, a former prosecutor, said that it served no one to take a defendant to trial before the evidence for a conviction could be collected; a prosecutor, he said, has "an ethical obligation" to build and believe in a case that can be proved beyond a reasonable doubt.
Once the evidence is in hand, Ms. Corey will have to determine not just whether to file charges but if so, which ones. By stating that she will not be using the grand jury, she has signaled that charges of first-degree murder are not on the table. In Florida, those charges can be issued only by a grand jury, and require a finding that the act was premeditated. A more likely charge under Florida law is manslaughter, but lesser charges like aggravated battery with a firearm are also a possibility, Mr. Friedman said.
Ms. Corey's decision to forgo a grand jury is not unusual. Like other chief prosecutors in Florida, she typically steers clear of grand juries, unless required as in requests to try juveniles as adults.
Jeffrey S. Weiner, a criminal defense lawyer in Miami, said, "This is a courageous decision, no matter what she decides to do. A grand jury would have been a cop-out."
While Ms. Corey's office cautioned that bypassing the grand jury should not be interpreted as an indication of how she would decide to handle the case, she is widely considered one of Florida's most aggressive prosecutors. When she first ran for state attorney in 2008 , she joked that she was so tough on crime that she would throw her own mother in jail if she broke the law.
"I don't play," she said, "even when it's people in my own family."
The Spanish airline Iberia grounded 150 flights Monday as pilots struck to protest the start-up of the low-cost carrier Iberia Express.
Photo: AFP
Planes of Spanish airline Iberia are parked at the Madrid's Barajas airport, at the start of a series of one-day strike by Iberia pilots, April 9, 2012.
The Iberia pilots say they plan to strike 30 times - every Monday and Friday between now and July 20. The pilots said the start of the new airline is a threat to their jobs and working conditions, and violates labor agreements forged when Iberia merged with British Airways.
Low-cost Iberia Express started operations late last month. Its shorter routes to Spanish cities and some European destinations are designed to supplement Iberia's longer flights to other locations.
The owner of the airlines, International Consolidated Airlines Group, said it had to create the low-cost carrier to increase its profitability.
Some information for this report was provided by AFP and Reuters.
The Amazon region of South America, the largest tropical rainforest and river basin on Earth, is disappearing at a rate of around 800,000 hectares a year, but a new study finds one possible strategy for reversing this trend in ancient Amazonian farming methods.
Photo: Stephen Rostain
Unaltered agricultural raised fields in French Guyana that remain much as ancient Amazon farmers left them. The simulated background flames represent the European slash-and-burn agriculture that came afterward.
Analysis of a 1,000-year-old ecological record in the Amazon provides a rare glimpse at early farming practices before European explorers began arriving in the Americas more than 500 years ago.
The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , finds the ancient farming methods could slow the destruction of the Amazon rainforest.
The rapid expansion of agriculture and cattle ranching, road and dam construction, and illegal logging are the biggest drivers of this massive deforestation.
Lead author Jose Iriarte , a paleoethnobotonist at the University of Exeter in England, focused on a coastal wetland savanna in present-day French Guyana, on South America's northeastern coast, where ancient farm beds and canals remain, unaltered, on the landscape. In pre-colonial history, Iriarte says, this was a period when farmers "reclaimed these seasonally flooded savannas into raised-field agricultural landscapes."
A sediment core from the site provided the team with an unusually intact archive of how farmers farmed these fields. It shows pollen, plant species and charcoal before and after the European colonization in the late 15th and 16th centuries.
Geographer Mitchell Power , curator of the Natural History Museum at the University of Utah, studied charcoal in the core. He says while evidence shows that naturally-occurring fires began decreasing globally around 1500 - a period of documented climate cooling - that's not what they saw in the Amazonian record.
"When we went to the French Guyana site to try to understand the record, the most surprising thing to me was that it was the opposite trend. Fire was very low and then after 1500, fire increased," he said. "That was contrary to what 90 percent of the rest of the records around the world are telling us."
Stephen Rostain
Before European settlers arrived, farmers on the rainforest savanna grew crops in raised beds, a practice which would be forgotten for 500 years.
Iriarte says the farmers understood how fire could harm the land and agricultural production.
"We know that fire results in the loss of crucial nutrients for crops, [and that] fallows without fires are most effective in restoring soil organic matter and preserving soil structure," he said. "So we interpreted that they were limiting fires because it was better to grow crops in these raised field systems."
Iriarte says use of this fire-free method by the pre-Columbian farmers helped them transform the seasonally-flooded savanna into productive cropland.
"Raised fields provided better drainage, soil aeration, and also moisture retention during the dry season. These raised fields were constructed mainly with the muck from these seasonally flooded savannahs," he said. "So they are really fertile and they can be recycled every season."
Mitchell Power says this labor-intensive approach ended abruptly when as much as 95 percent of the indigenous population died from a variety of Old-World diseases brought by the European settlers.
"Once the Columbian encounter happens we don't see that type of agriculture any more," he said. "We start to see increased burning and a shift toward dry land farming. So people were then clearing forests and making their raised beds in the forests. And what we think is happening was a huge demographic collapse in this region."
Slash-and-burn agriculture - introduced to the Amazon not by the native farmers but by European colonizers - remains today a major threat to the rainforest. Experts say if such practices continue at the current rate, more than half of the Amazon's tropical rainforest could be gone by 2030.
Iriarte says pre-Columbian farming methods offer a tried-and-true alternative.
"It has the capability to help curb carbon emissions and at the same time provide food security for the more vulnerable and poorest rural populations of rural Amazonia," he said.
The authors say bringing back these labor-intensive but productive farming systems to serve today's - and tomorrow's - food needs will require extensive farmer re-training - and the political will of the region's governments. And they believe that if the Amazon's current stewards can reclaim the wisdom of their ancestors, the damage to the world's greatest rainforest can be slowed.
