IDN-InDepthNews – Page 687 – News for a Sustainable World, Peace and Security

OPINION2016-12-212023-07-10

Sri Lanka News Story International Media Was Blind To

By Dayan Jayatilleka*

COLOMBO (IDN) – It was perhaps the biggest Sri Lanka related news story of the year that is about to end. It should have been picked up by the international media but unsurprisingly it wasn’t. More shocking however is that it made to the local media but the biggest news was not focused on. There has not been, for instance, a single editorial on it or feature spun off from it.

Let me back up a bit. It was the doyen of foreign correspondents in Sri Lanka, a true Sri Lankan hand of the old school, PK Balachandran of the New Indian Express, who surfaced it, and it was Sri Lanka’s Daily Mirror that ran it first in Sri Lanka and it was the best reporter-cum-journalistic commentator on Sri Lankan affairs, DBS Jeyaraj, who gave the story the treatment it deserved.

UN INSIDER2016-12-212023-07-10

Security Council Resolves to Halt Human Trafficking

By Santo D Banerjee

NEW YORK | VIENNA (IDN) – Human trafficking is a global problem particularly affecting people fleeing armed conflict, including women, children, internally displaced persons and refugees who are forced into modern slavery that fetches its perpetrators some $150 billion.

The UN Security Council is determined to put an end to this serious crime and violation of human rights, and has passed a resolution, which the Executive Director of the Vienna-based United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Yury Fedotov, describes as “historic”.

“The resolution offers a powerful recognition by the international community that persons desperately fleeing armed conflict are especially vulnerable to trafficking in persons and to other forms of exploitation,” said the UNODC Chief, according to UN Information Service (UNIS) in Vienna.

UN INSIDER2016-12-202023-07-10

DR Congo President Ignores UN and Citizen Protests

By Global Information Network

NEW YORK | KINSHASA (IDN) – Considering that the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the world’s largest producer of cobalt ore, and a major producer of copper and diamonds, has never had a peaceful transfer of power since independence from Belgium in 1960, the current political crisis does not come as a surprise.

But the killing of a peacekeeper from South Africa deployed with the United Nations Stabilisation Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO) in North Kivu on December 19 has precipitated the situation.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has condemned the killing and called on the country’s “authorities to ensure that this attack is investigated and its perpetrators are brought to justice”. Attacks against UN peacekeepers are unacceptable,” according to a statement issued by Ban’s spokesperson.

OPINION2016-12-202023-07-10

Do Not Fear Islam But Fear Itself

By Jonathan Power

LUND, Sweden (IDN-INPS) – An abiding fear for Donald Trump is that the Middle East dictators’ successors in power will be militant Islamists who once elected will stop at nothing. At one time in the presidential campaign he threatened to “nuke” them. Even though the secular-minded President Bashar al-Assad appears to be winning the civil war in Syria the Islamists will sit on his tail.

Violent-inclined Islamists point to the Koran and the Hadith to justify their violence. Indeed, there are sentences in both that are close to their interpretation. Even though they may hype up these passages and ignore other more peaceful ones the truth is that Islam does have a tradition of the hard school. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of Muslims today don’t subscribe to it.

UN INSIDER2016-12-202023-07-10

SDGs in Asia Risk Hijacking by Western Activists

By Kalinga Seneviratne

BANGKOK (IDN) – Early December three UN agencies UNDP, UNESCO and UNFPA organized a three-day youth mobilizing program at the UNESCAP building here called ‘Case for Space’ (C4S) touted as a campaign led by over 60 partners in the region to raise awareness and advocate for the promotion of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the Asia-Pacific region.

Yet, it was dominated by mainly European and American speakers and consultants, with the project being led by a UK-based activist group Restless Development, which made many participants from the region to wonder whether the SDG agenda is being hijacked by westerner activists.

Asia-Pacific2016-12-192023-07-10

South Pacific: Climatic Disaster Recovery a Rights Issue

By Neelam Prasad

This is the third in a series of features on the South Pacific produced in collaboration with Wansolwara, an independent student newspaper of the University of the South Pacific.

SUVA, Fiji (IDN) – Climatic change disasters are hitting Pacific Island nations at regular intervals in recent years, devastating communities and forcing people to move out to other areas, islands and even far away countries.

As such, there is a strong case for the peoples’ rights to recover from such climatic disasters to be included in the international human rights agenda, argue people and experts from the Pacific.

UN INSIDER2016-12-182023-07-10

Ban Asks Israel and Palestinians To Make Peace

By J Nastranis

NEW YORK (IDN) – Among several unresolved issues the outgoing UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon leaves behind is the Middle East, including the Palestinian question. In his final report to the Security Council on December 16, he said it saddened him that his last such briefing brought no sense of optimism for the future.

While the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was not the cause of the wars in the Middle East, resolving it could help to create momentum for peace throughout the region. He recalled that in 1947, acting on the basis of General Assembly resolution 181, the world had recognized the need for a two-State solution and had called for the emergence of “independent Arab and Jewish States”.

Asia-Pacific2016-12-182023-07-10

Two US Veterans Find a Growing Antiwar Movement in Japan

By Rory Fanning

The writer is a former US Army Ranger who is now a member of Veterans For Peace (VFP) and an activist. He and Mike Hanes, former US Marine and VFP activist, both recently completed a speaking tour in Japan. Titled ‘The Antiwar Tour‘, this article first appeared in the quarterly magazine Jacobin, and is being published by arrangement with VFP.

CHICAGO (IDN) – A vibrant antiwar movement is blooming in Japan right now. Trade unions, civic groups, and an overwhelming number of young people are galvanizing the country around Article 9 of the Japanese constitution – the article that has kept Japan out of war for the last seventy years.

Africa2016-12-172023-07-10

Tanzania Adopts New Policy to Curb Land Grabbing

By Kizito Makoye Shigela

DAR ES SALAAM (ACP-IDN) – Tanzania has adopted a new national land policy which, among others, lowers the ceiling under which foreign investors can lease land from the current 99 to 33 years.

The new policy comes barely months after the East African nation embarked on a campaign to seize “idle” land and deter “rogue investors” from using it for speculative purposes.

The government has repeatedly accused some investors of hoarding swathes of land without developing it, while using the land as collateral for securing bank loans or selling it later at a higher price.

Global Partnerships2016-12-162023-07-10

Between Tackling Fragility and Financing Development

By Robert Kibet

NAIROBI (IDN) – Providing financial resources to the more developed among the developing countries is a very difficult bias to overcome, according to Angel GurrIa, Secretary-General of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Gurria was speaking to IDN during the Second High-Level Meeting of the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation (GPEDC) which ran from November 28 to December 1 in the Kenyan capital.

“There is a problem with the flows of money that include aid,” said Gurria. “Who’s better to spend it? A country like Kenya that has expertise and larger companies or a country that is very poor and underdeveloped? Those countries with a higher level of GDP per capita tend to attract more because they can have large projects and a greater spending capacity.”