Showing posts from category Pakistan.
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Portraits of Women From Afghanistan to the DRC
A Conversation on Art and Social Change
›“At the core of human rights and artistic behavior is respect for human dignity. It is this that unites art and justice,” said Jane M. Saks, executive director of the Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media, speaking at an event cosponsored by the Environmental Change and Security Program and the Africa Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center. Lynsey Addario, MacArthur-winning photographer and former Institute fellow, joined Saks to share striking photographs highlighting the effects of conflict on women and girls around the world. [Video Below]
The Power of Art
“Art is inherently political because it has the power to really engage in social justice,” Saks said. The Institute that she helped found promotes art that pushes boundaries and creates conversations about peace and war, so as to “add to the accepted canon of understanding of conflict.” As part of this effort, the Institute created the exhibition, “Congo Women: Portraits of War,” composed of photographs by Addario and others about violence against women in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
Saks hopes that these “photographs saturated with human dignity” will create awareness and, ultimately, influence policy about the conflict in the DRC. The exhibition has traveled to more than 20 locations since its opening. In May 2009 it was installed at the Senate Rotunda during the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on violence against women in conflict.
Addario, who said her work is drive by a desire to “give the people a voice,” has spent 15 years traveling deep into conflict zones all over the world, including Iraq, Sudan, and Afghanistan.
Women and Childbirth
Addario’s images reveal the often shocking conditions in which women around the world give birth. In Sierra Leone, she documented 18-year old Mamma Seesay, “one of thousands of women who die in childbirth.” Due to a shortage of doctors, lack of transportation, and high rates of child marriage, one in eight women in Sierra Leone die in childbirth. Afghanistan has the second highest rate of maternal mortality in the world, partly because “an Afghan woman will be pregnant up to 15 times in her life,” she said. “When you watch someone who in most other developed nations would survive without question, it’s just not fair.”
Throughout a decade of covering women in Afghanistan, Addario has sought to provide a “balanced picture” of their lives to American audiences. Her photographs show the milestones women have achieved since the fall of the Taliban: graduating college; driving cars; becoming actors, producers, or police officers; getting married; and giving birth.But her coverage of Afghanistan also contains stories like that of Fariba, an 11-year-old girl who doused herself with petrol and set herself on fire after being abused by her parents. The burn ward at the hospital in Kabul is full of such women who commit self-immolation “to escape their lives,” said Addario. An Afghan woman’s life “is worse than a donkey…there is no release for these women.”
“Give Us Your Guns”
In 2009, she went to the tribal areas of Pakistan to meet the Taliban. “Wrapped up like a cigar,” she posed as the wife of former New York Times correspondent Dexter Filkins and went into a room of 30 Taliban fighters “armed to the teeth.” The two spent the day with the Taliban and “by the end, they loved us,” she said. “The whole time they just laughed at us: ‘You Americans, you give money to the Pakistani government and they give it to us!”
While covering the conflict in Darfur, Addario had to convince UN peacekeepers to drive into a Janjaweed-occupied village so that she could verify how many people had been killed. “Every time we would go towards the village, the Janjaweed would shoot at us and so [the peacekeepers] would turn the cars around and go,” Addario said. To convince the peacekeepers to go in anyway, she said to the commander: “Just give us your guns. We’re gonna go in ourselves if you don’t.” When they finally drove towards the village, “the Janjaweed set it on fire right in front of us, and we just kept driving, and when we got there they had left,” she said.
Addario has spent years as a single woman traveling around the world and throughout conflict zones. “Women in Afghanistan think I’m insane,” she said. “They think I have a lonely, miserable life.” But she believes that as a woman working in conflict zones, she has a unique ability to access places that a man could not and a mission to tell the stories that she hears. “For me it’s about showing the greater American public what’s happening.”
Sources: Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media, National Geographic, The New York Times, Public Radio International, Slate, UNICEF, and the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.
Photo Credit: Woman in labor with her mother on the way to the hospital in Afghanistan and a U.S. Marine in Afghanistan, used with permission courtesy of Lynsey Addario and the VII Network. -
Is the Glass Half Full or Half Empty?
›The much-anticipated Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review(QDDR) demands to be taken seriously. Its hefty 250 pages present a major rethink of both American development policy and American diplomacy. Much of it is to be commended:
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Elizabeth Malone on Climate Change and Glacial Melt in High Asia
›“There’s nothing more iconic, I think, about the climate change issue than glaciers,” says Elizabeth Malone, senior research scientist at the Joint Global Change Research Institute and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Malone served as the technical lead on “Changing Glaciers and Hydrology in Asia: Addressing Vulnerability to Glacier Melt Impacts,” a USAID report released in late 2010 that explores the linkages between climate change, demographic change, and glacier melt in the Himalayas and other nearby mountain systems.
Describing glaciers as “transboundary in the largest sense,” Malone points out that meltwater from High Asian glaciers feeds many of the region’s largest rivers, including the Indus, Ganges, Tsangpo-Brahmaputra, and Mekong. While glacial melt does not necessarily constitute a large percentage of those rivers’ downstream flow volume, concern persists that continued rapid glacial melt induced by climate change could eventually impact water availability and food security in densely populated areas of South and East Asia.
Rapid demographic change has potentially factored into accelerated glacial melt, even though the connection may not be a direct one, Malone adds.
Atmospheric pollution generated by growing populations contributes to global warming, while black carbon emissions from cooking and home heating can eventually settle on glacial ice fields, accelerating melt rates. Given such cause-and-effect relationships, Malone says that rapid population growth and the continued retreat of High Asian glaciers are “two problems that seem distant,” yet “are indeed very related.”
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The Cholera Quandary
›The original version of this article first appeared in the Stimson Center Spotlight series, November 19, 2010.
Cholera is usually seen as one of the most devastating infections of the 19th century. Trade routes carried cholera from India to the great cities of Europe and the United States. Disease, fear, and political unrest spread in great waves that cost millions of lives. After much destruction, it was only with science and resources that certain populations were able to curb the epidemic.One of the most celebrated lessons in the history of public health involves a cholera outbreak in London in 1854 and efforts by John Snow – celebrated as the father of epidemiology – to control it. At the time, it was not clear that cholera was a waterborne bacterial infection that caused severe diarrhea and vomiting, and sometimes fatal dehydration. Snow proved that the outbreaks decimating communities spread from contaminated water. Water and sanitation services had virtually eliminated cholera epidemics in the developed world by the early 1900s.
Today, cholera has been nearly eradicated in the developed world, but continues to be endemic in poorer countries. Risks seem to be rising as larger populations are crowded into unsanitary conditions. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates three to five million illnesses and 100,000-200,000 deaths from cholera each year. If caught early, infections are treatable with inexpensive oral rehydration solutions. For much of the world, these options are unavailable or underused – the mere presence of cholera serves as an indicator of a country’s socioeconomic status and health system capabilities.
The cholera epidemics that are currently menacing countries on three different continents – Asia, Africa, and North America – raise tough questions about what is required to protect the world’s vulnerable populations. We know how to predict the crisis of cholera, prevent outbreaks, and contain them when they occur. To control cholera, what is needed is not cutting-edge technologies, but will, transparency, and resources – and where cholera appears, at least one of these three factors has failed.
Currently, cholera outbreaks in Pakistan, Haiti, and Nigeria are piling misery upon misery. Cholera in post-flood Pakistan comes as no surprise. When floodwaters left millions homeless and without access to clean drinking water in a region where cholera remains endemic, health officials could have reasonably assumed infected human waste would seep into water supplies and spread disease. The inability of health networks on the ground to prevent and then detect cholera demonstrates cracks in the country’s health system. What is apparent here is a lack of will and resources. Disease surveillance is especially vital in a post-disaster scenario where steps can be taken, such as treating water with chlorine, to prevent an outbreak.
Haiti had been free of cholera for at least 50 years, but the disease struck and spread rapidly 10 months after the devastating January 2010 earthquake. It reached Haiti’s capital and spread to its neighbor, the Dominican Republic. Since October, more than 114,000 people have become ill and more than 2,500 have died (Editor’s note: updated since original publication).
Haiti lacked resources for basic infrastructure even prior to the earthquake; the cholera crisis is not only costing lives, but also diverting aid from “building back better.” But regardless of the source of the cholera strain, if basic infrastructure and resources to protect Haiti’s vulnerable populations had been in place, cholera’s re-emergence would have been far less devastating.
This particular outbreak draws attention to the practical and political challenges of identifying health risks in humanitarian workers and peacekeepers, many of whom come from developing countries themselves. Evidence suggests that peacekeepers from Nepal, housed at a UN base, may have been the source of the outbreak clustered around the Artibonite River. Cholera outbreaks frequently exacerbate frictions between communities and aid workers – suspicions that have led to riots and murder more than once in recent years. At least two people were killed in Haiti in riots with peacekeepers during November.The delayed decision by the UN to investigate whether the outbreak originated with peacekeepers may have conserved resources for the race to stave off more cases, but did little to build trust between communities and foreign workers. Further violence and protests surrounding the recent disputed presidential election in Haiti do little to ease the devastation and in fact, threaten the relief effort. There has been discussion in Congress of cutting direct aid and suspending visas for Haitian officials until the dispute as been resolved. The Organization of American States is now reviewing the results.
In Africa, Nigeria is experiencing its worst cholera outbreak since 1991, and the disease is crossing borders. An onslaught of cases raised the 2010 death toll to more than 1,500 fatalities out of 40,000 cases. This mortality rate is three times higher than the seasonal cholera outbreaks of 2009, and seven times higher than 2008. Despite Nigeria’s oil wealth, most of the population is impoverished. Two-thirds of rural Nigerians lack access to safe drinking water and fewer than 40 percent of people in cholera-affected areas have access to toilet facilities, according to the Nigerian Health Ministry. A combined lack of will, transparency, and resources mean that cholera epidemics occur annually, and in clusters throughout sub-Saharan Africa.
A century and a half after John Snow’s discovery, we know how to control cholera. Globally, the resources exist, but the question of a collective will remains. For those who lack clean water to drink, to wash, or even proper toilets, the gap between knowing and doing is not easily closed. The international community has shown repeatedly that it can confront cholera outbreaks like those in Haiti, Pakistan, and Nigeria in the midst of crisis. The question remains as to how those efforts can eliminate the conditions that fostered outbreaks in the first place. The answer is not as riveting as the causes that often receive funding: basic infrastructure and resources. Roads, wells, clean water, toilets, education, and the willingness to recognize that if the foundation is not sound, nothing will be able to stand. Sometimes the simplest problems are the most difficult to solve.
Sarah Kornblet is a research fellow at the Global Health Security Program at the Stimson Center. Her research focuses on the International Health Regulations, health systems strengthening, global health diplomacy, the intersection of public health and security, and the potential for innovative and dynamic health policy solutions in developing countries.
Sources: Agence France-Presse, BBC, Washington Post, World Health Organization.
Photo Credit: “UN Peacekeepers Provide Security During Port-au-Prince Food Distribution,” courtesy of flickr user United Nations Photo. -
International Responses to Pakistan’s Water Crisis
›December 6, 2010 // By Michael KugelmanExcerpt from the executive summary of the NOREF Policy Brief, via the Norwegian Peacebuilding Centre:
Pakistan faces a multidimensional water crisis that claims hundreds of thousands of lives every year. The root causes of the crisis are twofold:- Circumstantial, which are linked to poor water-resource management policies (including water-wasting flood irrigation);
- Structural, tied to factors deeply ingrained in politics and society such as the obsession with India, inequitable rural land-ownership and endemic water misgovernance (for example, exploitation of the rotational irrigation system to the detriment of the poor).
However, international responses must be measured. They should actively target the circumstantial causes but, at the same time, recognize that their ability to take on the structural ones is limited. While the international community can help mitigate the effects of the underlying structural drivers, Pakistan itself must take the ultimate steps to eliminate them.
Circumstantial causes can be addressed through international aid provision and international exchanges. Aid provision must be generous enough to meet Pakistan’s prodigious needs but modest enough to respect the country’s limited absorptive capacities. It should emphasize the restoration of infrastructure and distribution systems, be more responsive to the needs of Sindh and Baluchistan provinces, and be channeled through both government agencies and civil society.
Despite the challenges the international community faces in addressing the structural causes, opportunities do abound. These include embarking on back-channel diplomacy to bring Pakistan and India closer together and cooperative projects with Pakistanis to make water distribution more equitable. To be effective, international responses must target all affected parties and be sensitive to ground realities. They should also be mindful of indigenous success stories and the factors that bring about that success.
The full report, “International Responses to Pakistan’s Water Crisis: Opportunities and Challenges,” is available through the Norwegian Peacebuilding Centre.
Michael Kugelman is program associate with the Asia Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Image Credit: Adapted from “USG Humanitarian Assistance to Pakistan for Floods in FY 2010 and FY 2011 (as of 30 Nov 2010),” courtesy of USAID and ReliefWeb. -
Admiral Mullen and the “Strategic Imperative” of Energy Security
›October 13, 2010 // By Geoffrey D. DabelkoTop American military brass weighed in this morning on energy security with an emphasis on conservation, efficiency, and alternatives. A little climate change even crept into the discussion as well.
The occasion was a Department of Defense conference titled “Empowering Defense Through Energy Security” sponsored by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology & Logistics and the United States Air Force, Army, Navy and Marine Corps leadership. The new Office of Operational Energy Plans and Programs was on point.
Starting at the top, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen set the tone:My friend and columnist Tom Friedman has spoken eloquently of the growing need – and awareness – to rethink our views on energy – and minimize our dependence on overseas energy sources that fuel regimes that do not always share our interests and values, while not further damaging a world that is already becoming overheated, overpolluted, and overstretched.
The wider context of climate change and its security implications also found a place in Admiral Mullen’s remarks:
We in the Defense Department have a role to play here – not solely because we should be good stewards of our environment and our scarce resources but also because there is a strategic imperative for us to reduce risk, improve efficiencies, and preserve our freedom of action whenever we can. …
So, to start with, let’s agree that our concept of energy must change. Rather than look at energy as a commodity or a means to an end, we need to see it as an integral part of a system … a system that recognizes the linkages between consumption and our ability to pursue enduring interests.
When we find reliable and renewable sources of energy, we will see benefit to our infrastructure, our environment, our bottom line … and I believe most of all … our people. And the benefits from “sustainability” won’t just apply to the military.Beyond these immediate benefits, we may even be able to help stem the tide of strategic security issues related to climate change.
Admiral Mullen then gave way to General Norton A. Schwartz, chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force; General Peter W. Chiarelli, vice chief of the U.S. Army; Aneesh Chopra, the federal chief technology officer; and Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus, with Sharon Burke, director of operational energy plans and programs, running the show.
This is no small matter. In addition to the newly developing waterways near the polar icecaps, in 2008, the National Intelligence Council identified twenty of our bases that are physically at risk as a result of the rising level of the ocean.
And regardless of what the cause of these changes is – the impacts around the world could be sobering – and far-reaching.
As glaciers melt and shrink at a faster rate, water supplies have been diminishing in parts of Asia.
Rising sea levels could lead to mass migration and displacement similar to what we have seen in Pakistan’s flood … and climate shifts could drastically reduce the arable land needed to feed a burgeoning population as we have seen in Africa.
This scarcity of – and potential competition for – resources like water, food, and space – compounded by an influx of refugees if coastal lands are lost … could not only create a humanitarian crisis, but create conditions of hopelessness that could lead to failed states … and make populations vulnerable to radicalization.
These challenges highlight the systemic implications – and multiple-order effects – inherent in energy security and climate change.
And while the brass met inside, clean energy companies exhibited their wares in the Pentagon’s inside courtyard.
Photo Credit: “the Pentagon from above,” courtesy of flickr user susansimon. -
Wilson Center Scholar Huma Yusuf on Pakistan’s Population Policy: Will it Work?
›October 8, 2010 // By Wilson Center StaffExcerpt from op-ed by Huma Yusuf in Dawn:
The best news Pakistanis have received in the past week comes in the form of the National Population Policy 2010. The policy recognises that demographics are the key to promoting economic development and security in Pakistan. It also prioritises family planning — particularly in an effort to promote birth spacing — as the best strategy for achieving ambitious population targets (2.1 births per woman in 2025).
In many ways, the story of Pakistan is one of a failure of family planning. Although the Family Planning Association of Pakistan was set up as early as 1952, we have seen a five-fold increase in our population between 1951 and 2009, from 34 million to 171 million.
The urgent need for revamped family planning service delivery cannot be understated. Although 96 per cent of married Pakistani women are aware of at least one modern contraceptive method, only 22 per cent are currently using modern contraceptives, while another eight per cent use less effective traditional methods. One quarter of married women want to wait before having another child, or do not want more children, but are not using contraception. And 24 per cent of married women admit that their last child was mistimed or unwanted.
Many Pakistanis bemoan the prevalence of abortion here (a 2004 Population Council study estimates that there are 890,000 abortions annually), but this too should be understood as a shortcoming of our government’s family planning service delivery. According to the 2006-07 Pakistan Demographic Health Survey, 65 per cent of women who had an abortion were over the age of 30, while 80 per cent had more than three children. In this context, the population policy’s emphasis on family planning is a welcome paradigm shift.
Continue reading on Dawn.
Photo Credit: Adapted from “chitral photos,” courtesy of flickr user groundreporter. -
Pakistan After the Floods: A Continuing Disaster
›September 29, 2010 // By Hannah MarquseeA month after Pakistan’s worst flood in 80 years, millions remain without access to food, clean water, or health care.
