'Girl': Is the New MSF Video Good Social Advertising?

by Una Vera

Published November 20, 2009 @ 12:03PM PT

Back in August, the humanitarian and international development blogosphere slogged it out over a controversial video from Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) UK. The video, titled 'Boy,' featured a stark image of a small, clay house in an unnamed warzone, with audio of a child's pained screams. It was never aired. MSF deliberately released the video online to provoke responses. And provoke it did, from overwhelmed sadness, to outrage, to furious accusations of sensationalism and exploitation, to passionate defenses of MSF's endorsement of the video --and, in the case of one blogger roundtable discussion, all of those reactions.

MSF communications head Avril Benoit handled the deluge with the skill of a true social media pro. She engaged her critics, and even linked to them.

For my part in the melee, I argued that MSF does emergency medical relief, so it is entirely appropriate for its ads to highlight that. MSF is not CARE, or even the IRC. Even outside active conflict zones, MSF employees work with blood and guts and human goo all day, treating badly injured, ill, and malnourished people during what are surely among the most desperate moments of those patients’ lives. On the operating table, no one is empowered. And we're all made of the same breakable stuff.  A campaign featuring nothing but resilient, empowered beneficiaries (such as CARE's  “I Am Powerful”) does not make sense in this context, while a disturbing one that shocks the viewer’s conscience does.

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Take Action: Call on UN to Prevent Civilian Killings in Eastern Congo

by Daniel J Gerstle

Published November 20, 2009 @ 08:00AM PT

Our esteemed Humanitarian Relief (now War and Peace) blogger, Michael Kleinman, who's on break, introduced us to Oisteen Thorsen, a humanitarian campaigner with Oxfam. Led by Oxfam, one of the most respected and trusted names in the aid biz, partners are working to advise positive change to policy on Congo at the UN. Ten years of UN peacekeeping so far. Please see the video and sign the petition this week. Here's Oisteen's intro:

"...Oxfam with partners are currently running a petition calling on the UN Security Council to stop the killings of civilians in Eastern Congo by the UN-supported Congolese army operation Kimia II. We will be handing over the petition to the Security Council next week (Nov 24th) so this is the last push to get more people to sign on... http://apps.facebook.com/causes/petitions/306 or http://www.oxfam.org/en/emergencies/congo/stop-killing-in-congo. please also see this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3cJbJcd104."

[Photo: UN Peacekeepers on patrol in Congo DR, UN Photo.]

Alex de Waal is Wrong on Afghanistan

by Una Vera

Published November 19, 2009 @ 10:27AM PT

In an essay for Prospect magazine (UK), Africa expert Alex de Waal offers his solution to Afghanistan's governance and security problems: more corruption.

"NATO has crippled Karzai’s ability to bargain properly," writes the contrarian researcher best known for his work on Sudan. "Foreign firepower and funds give him the strongest hand in the souk, but western demands to stamp out corruption and defeat the Taliban stop him playing his best cards."

It reads like sarcasm, but that is de Waal's actual thesis --the state-building project has failed because it has not involved enough payoffs to the country's various powerbrokers, and the remedy now is to help Hamid Karzai bribe his rivals, from opposition politicians to the Taliban, into passivity. De Waal argues that only money talks in failed states, and "a well-managed, inclusive patronage system is often the only way of running such countries." So, naturally, "it would be more cost-effective to ditch the extra troops and revert to funding patronage."

De Waal could not be more wrong.

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Somalia's Judiciary Attacked but Not Defeated

by Daniel J Gerstle

Published November 18, 2009 @ 12:48PM PT

Gunmen killed Judge Sheikh Mohamad Abdi Aware outside of his mosque last week in Bossaso, a scorching Aden Gulf port on the northeastern coast of Somalia. Judge Aware, despite whatever debate he may have stoked in Somalia, devoted his life not only to the rule of law but to the pursuit of justice according to the sometimes conflicting state, Islamic, and Somali customary law systems in an incredibly volatile political environment.

Back in 2007, a group of local rights workers and I carried out the UN Rule of Law and Security Programme's first child justice survey across the entire north half of Somalia. What tears me up personally about Judge Aware's death is that I believe I met him and yet I cannot remember his face. There were so many times when the imagination became so obsessed with who the bad guys were that it was hard to really focus on the good guys. The painful truth here, which I believe illuminates why foreign interventions often stumble, is that once murdered the dead's lifetime of positive accomplishments, like those of Somalis as a whole, were forever obscured beneath the headline, "Shot dead." Aware accomplished and represented much more than an early death. Although this is a blog format, I believe this topic is so important and so often misunderstood that I'm compelled to write a personal editorial essay.

The rights team and I met with kids detained in the ridiculously hot and uncomfortable prison in Bossaso where the accused from the court where Aware served were remanded and punished. All prisoners, thieves, murderers, rapists, hijackers, those awaiting trial, and children either accused of crimes or simply homeless and troublesome slept on the same floor together. Rumors abounded of men abusing the teenagers. Three girls accused of chronic pickpocketing and a pregnant woman resided in the largely empty women's wing. It was deeply disturbing to listen to some of the detained plea for a new trial, or even a first trial. But looking closely, we found that the trouble was not always coming from poor leadership or ill-will; it was usually the incredible lack of qualified legal officials and funds...

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Addressing Local Land and Herding Disputes is Pre-Requisite for Peace in Africa

by Daniel J Gerstle

Published November 18, 2009 @ 10:49AM PT

Twelve killed in violence in Lakes State, Southern Sudan. Eleven killed in a cattle raid in Kenya. Somalia, Ethiopia, Congo DR. There is something beneath the political battles we read about in the news. Feuds between ethnic rivals over land and rural groups over herding routes have rocked Africa's Sahel and Horn for a long time but some believe it has gotten worse recently.

As states crumble or leaders manipulate tribal animosity, the coping mechanisms which have held many groups together begin to fray. In fact, a great deal of traditional and Islamic law practiced outside the state focuses on land and herding dispute resolution. Given the combined benefits of having a traditional dispute resolution system when it is functional as well as the reality that many of these systems have been corrupted or broken by the broader political disputes, many international agencies, including traditionally health oriented agencies, are seeking to innovate further new hybrid peacebuilding methods to address local-level conflict.

Here's a great peacebuilding starter kit for donors and agencies considering broadening this front for peace. Perhaps this is one path toward addressing cattle raiding, and through it one of the associated factors in broader conflict. The efforts have been growing for a while, but funding has been lax until recently.

[Photo: Kenya cattle drive, Greg Westfall]

Is the Afghan Government Serious about Fighting Corruption? Are We?

by Una Vera

Published November 17, 2009 @ 01:43PM PT

Spencer Ackerman asks if I think the Afghan government's imminent crackdown on corruption, announced with much fanfare yesterday, will be serious. I added a question mark to the title of my previous post -The Great Afghan Corruption Crackdown?- precisely because I'm skeptical.

I believe Ershad Ahmadi and Eshaq Aleko are sincere when they say they want to stamp out the kind of official corruption that has undercut every effort to advance peace and development in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban, but they are in for quite a fight if they are. The history of post-2001 Afghanistan is filled with stories of civil servants who tried to do the right thing, and were crushed into the dust by corrupt and vastly more powerful forces within the state, and abandoned by an unreliable and divided international community when they could have steered their country away from today's treacherous waters with a little political support. Just look at the disarmament program. Or the elections. Or the transitional justice plan.

The past eight years are a wasteland of under-resourced and half-hearted reform attempts. As much blame as the Afghan government deserves for not keeping its promises, the international community has broken most of its own. Time and again, we bought, lied and stalled our way out of doing the hard work of actual state-building. Now, we see how dearly that has cost us and the Afghan people. One unnamed US official quoted in the Guardian put it bluntly, "Afghans see us [the International Security Assistance Force] as being the enforcement mechanism for the mafia."

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Save the Children Warns of New Displacement Along Israel's Divider Wall

by Daniel J Gerstle

Published November 17, 2009 @ 04:47AM PT

There is a growing channel of research exploring whether there's a relationship between border security and hunger. Nowhere is this question so critical as in Gaza and the West Bank where Israel constructed a security wall to separate Israeli Jewish communities from Palestinian Arab Muslim and Christian communities. Save the Children, a humanitarian aid agency with a strong record of political impartiality, has just released a new report showing how the divider wall, which was constructed not only along the dividing line, but in a winding meandering pattern often cutting off some Palestinian villages from markets, is directly related to food insecurity and unemployment for Palestinians living along its length. And this has forced some to leave their homes.

If you have not already, please open this Israeli divider wall map from the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories. Zoom in on the northwest part of the West Bank around Qalkiliya. You'll see the bluish areas are settled by Jewish families and the brownish areas are Palestinian. The bold green line is where the UN-brokered agreement stated that the dividing line should be. The bold red line is where Israel built the wall. Having traveled there or at least considered the economic, if not political, impact of this wall according to the map, the findings of the Save the Children report will make a lot of sense.

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