Posts by Una Vera
'Girl': Is the New MSF Video Good Social Advertising?
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 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 International Rescue Committee. 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 widely-praised “I Am Powerful”) does not make sense in this context, while a disturbing one that shocks the viewer’s conscience does.
Alex de Waal is Wrong on Afghanistan
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.
Is the Afghan Government Serious about Fighting Corruption? Are We?
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."
The Great Afghan Corruption Crackdown?
Published November 17, 2009 @ 01:47AM PT
In recent months, the Afghan government has faced steadily intensifying pressure from its own public and from NATO governments to take meaningful action to curb official corruption. With the announcement on Monday of a new anti-corruption unit under the Interior Ministry, it may finally be about to do just that.
According to Afghan Attorney General Eshaq Aleko, a major investigation is already underway into corruption at the highest levels of the Afghan government. The individuals under investigation reportedly may include some members of president Hamid Karzai's cabinet.
"Big mistakes have been made in signing contracts, procurements, and providing logistics and other supplies for the government," Aleko told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. "According to the law, I can not name them, because they are still considered to be suspects and we've not received the ruling of the court yet."
Ershad Ahmadi, the deputy head of the newly established High Office of Oversight & Anti-Corruption in Afghanistan, said his agency is ready to get tough on corrupt officials.
Re-arming Afghanistan's Militias
Published November 14, 2009 @ 03:31PM PT
In an attempt to recreate the movement that peeled Iraqi Sunnis away from the insurgency in the most embattled areas that country, the United States is arming and paying local militias in Afghanistan in the hope these groups will keep the Taliban at bay where Afghan security forces cannot. No one is sure exactly how many militias have formed or regenerated over the last year, but the number is at least in the hundreds. The official name for the support-the-militias program is the Community Defense Initiative, and it is being touted by NATO as a way to, "assist the local population to provide their own security with defensive 'neighborhood watch'-type programs." You know, just with fewer nosy grandmothers and more bossy guys with Kalashnikovs.
Militias have a long and bloody history in Afghanistan, and were responsible for tens of thousands of deaths during the long-running civil war. A major survey conducted in 2004, ahead of the first parliamentary elections, showed that a large majority of Afghans wanted local militias disarmed and local commanders sidelined politically.
A Chechen Girl's War Diary: A Glimpse of the Past, and Maybe the Future
Published November 14, 2009 @ 01:50PM PT
With violence rising in the North Caucasus, and Ingushetia poised, tragically and preventably, to become the next Caucasian hot zone, I've been thinking about Chechnya's two recent wars more. Between 1994 and 2009, at least 100 thousand Chechens died as Chechen separatists and militant Islamists fought the Russian army in the tiny republic. The violence leveled Chechnya's towns and cities, and triggered refugee outflows to other parts of southern Russia and into Caucasian former Soviet republics.
In April 2009, Russia declared the war in Chechnya won, but violence had already spilled over into neighboring Dagestan and Ingushetia, and Chechnya's insurgency is growing once again, largely in response to the repressive tactics used by the government of Moscow-backed former warlord Ramzan Kadyrov. Chechnya never grabbed headlines the way the wars of the former Yugoslavia did. A million Chechens suffered out of the spotlight because Chechnya's conflict was seen as far away and inconsequential, unlike the very European Balkan wars, and the Russian government severely curtailed media access to areas affected by fighting.
Today, as the Caucasus region braces for the possibility of renewed large-scale conflict, more and more narratives of the Chechen wars are appearing in the media. One such narrative comes from Polina Zherebtsova, a teenager who kept a diary of her life in Grozny, Chechnya's capital, through the second Chechen war. Polina's diary entries, published by a Russian literary journal and translated in pieces by the blog Tangentialia, lend a child's words to the shattering of civilian life under a rain of bombs. In one entry, dated 27 Sept. 1999, Zherebtsova writes:
Women, the Afghanistan War, and the Malalai Joya Problem
Published November 13, 2009 @ 08:43PM PT
On my co-blogger Daniel's first controversial post on Afghanistan, one commenter posted a link to a speech by Afghan peace activist and suspended member of parliament Malalai Joya, who argues all foreign forces should leave Afghanistan immediately. Another commenter quickly added, "I won't comment again, I will just put up Malalai Joya's words! Her knowledge is greater than anyone's." To which I say, wait a minute. Joya is a committed democrat in a tough situation, but that does not make her knowledge "greater than anyone's."
Since her suspension from the parliament two years ago, Joya has traveled the world and delivered her message to thousands of people, in intimate activist gatherings, packed lecture halls, and dozens of opinion pieces in national newspapers. No other Afghan woman has received as much international attention since the toppling of the Taliban eight years ago. In the Western press, Joya has become more than a cause célèbre --she's become a stand-in for Afghanistan's entire female population. Even the UK cover for her recently-released autobiography calls her "the Afghan woman who dared to speak out" as opposed to "an Afghan woman who dared to speak out." There is something deeply troubling about this framing.
Joya is far from the only outspoken Afghan woman in public life, and no one woman should be used as a representation of all women from her country or her culture. When she ran for parliament four years ago, Joya never asked her foreign supporters to appoint her Voice of All Afghan Women, a position made even more problematic by the stark fact that her view on the international military presence is actually in the minority in Afghan civil society.
